That's the branch where they have money, and if you fill out some paperwork, show ID and have an account that they will accept it or give it to you. Sure, you might say that's ridiculous, or that there's a fuckload of prior art on the concept, but just because you, dear/. reader and I, a mastermind/. poster with excellent karma know that doesn't mean that those Stupid F$%^ing S(*&heads at the USPTO know that.
I was wondering if anyone else had a good story about a retrofitted toy that they beefed up?
Well I had a story about a blow up doll that I had modified with a two horsepower wet/dry shopvac, but I've been too busy healing up from all of the skin grafts to post it.
How can I become a pundit like Cringely or Enderle? Unlike either one of them I've spec'd, built and maintained large, uptime critical systems in high intensity environments. The stuff I was responsible for came in on time, on budget and worked.
Of course the same could be said for thousands of/. readers who log in here every day. What do I have to do so I can stop working and start being a technopundit? Do I need to have an extra Chutpah organ inserted into my chest? Executive level hair? Immune system tolerance to high levels of bullshit? What damnit! What? I'm tired of working for a living!
Christ, the last fucking thing the city of San Francisco needs to do is encourage more homeless people to move to the city by handing out free WiFi access. Of course since most of the homeless are insane or fucked up on drugs the first thing that will happen to their PocketPC is that it will be stolen, lost or sold for a hit of meth or crack.
I generally don't think it's a good idea. It's additional clout that is pretty much unnecessary, seeing as how everybody is already used to/usr/bin,/lib, etc. If there were an advantage, I'd go for it, but there isn't: It's longer to write, you're mixing upper- & lower-case letters, and it's confusing sometimes. No real advantage.
Take OS X for instance. Here's a sample of what's in my root directory on my Powerbook:/Applications/Desktop DB/Desktop DF/Developer/Library/Network/System... etc.
It's confusing and convoluted as hell. There's not necessarily only one type of file in each directory. Not to mention the structuring: there are applications left and right, many of which are actually directories containing more varied data. Madness, I tell you.
How is the Macintosh directory structure "confusing and convoluted as hell"? You want confusing or convoluted as Hell? Try working on a Solaris or HP/UX system after someone has installed a bunch of third party packages, some GNU, some commercial, some written in-house and try figuring out where the library files or configuration files for each application are.
Sure, you can use symlinks to impose some structure on this sort of thing, but why should you have to? The UNIX filesystem layout sucks, it's confusing, it's not standardized in any meaningful sense other than having certain types of files located under certain broad hierarchies (/usr,/etc,/lib) and it's ugly. Bravo to Gobo for doing so and for striking a blow against the hordes of idiot UNIX sysadmins who are in favor of job security through OS obscurity.
There's a lot of porno that I wouldn't want to see at 7000x4000 with 22.2 channels of sound. Just imagine, an immersive environment that allows you to count the hairs and blemishes on Ed Powers' hairy, boppin man-ass in a 100 degree surround environment. Talk about traumatic!
mileage determination standards and go for something easier?
We take a dozen of the cars, load them up with four people and a bunch of stuff, fill the gasoline tanks with a measured quantity of fuel and then drive them on city roads, country roads, highways, in good weather and bad until they run out of gas. Record the mileage on the odometer. Fill the tank again, repeat. Do this for a month or so for each car, add up the mileages, do the appropriate math and use the number as the mileage figure for the car.
This would have its own set of inaccuracies, but would probably be a lot closer to what most people experience in real life than the EPA numbers are.
were that decided to take pictures of themselves committing war crimes. "Hey honey, let's put a bunch of naked Iraqis in a pig-pile and then have ourselves photographed behind it".
This is going to totally change the rules, when you have 5 megapixel digital cameras that will easily fit in a BDU jacket pocket and when everyone has one you're going to see a lot of pictures that the Pentagon would rather you didn't, which is probably a good thing.
I have owned two Denon DVD players that have an option for switching from NTSC to PAL output. Denons are a bit pricey, but they do make nice kit.
I'm confused as to what the regions do other than piss off fans. When I was living in Germany five years ago it took about eight weeks after a major movie was released in the US for it to be dubbed (Germans don't do subtitles) and released in Germany, also since DVD players are so damned cheap nowadays spending the money to get an extra player that you dedicate to R1 isn't too much of a burden.
What an absolute load of crap. That's like saying "about 80 percent of Germans come from the same country as Adolph Hitler."
Actually that's not true. Perhaps 80 percent of Austrians come from the same country as Adolph Hitler, but not 80 percent of Germans. Hitler was born in Braunau, but for some wacky reason the Austrians don't like to take credit for him. Go figure.
on Microsoft if someone started releasing updates to their obsoleted operating systems. It seems that a lot of what MS does is to use newer OS releases (XP, Win2K) to fix problems that they had in earlier releases (an especially egregious example being the requirement to restart Windows any time you touched the fucking TCP stack in Win 3.x, 9x and NT 3.x and 4.0.). If someone had rewritten the TCP stack to fix this behavior and threw in some other nice fixes it would mean that a lot of people wouldn't have to buy new hardware to get new OS features. Or they squeeze a few more years out of their hardware by running Linux.
that I use as a computer monitor with my HTPC. The resolution is not high enough for dedicated work, it's OK for websurfing if I want to look something up on IMDB but the resolution is too low for any sustained work. It is however pretty good for playing Civ III or other PC games and as soon as I get some time I'm going to set it up to play upsampled DVDs. I never had any luck using the DVI inputs on the TV with my video cards, I'd end up with horribly low resolutions or weird looking stretched screens. I finally went out and got an ATI video card and one of ATI's VGA to component video converters and that worked pretty well with Powerstrip to give me a resolution of 1280 by 680. Again, it's not perfect, but it's not bad for light web surfing, playing games, etc.
Yeah, and Microsoft has enough cash and clout to tell WalMart to go fuck themselves if WalMart tried to play their usual "squeeze our suppliers to the bone tactic". Which would be kind of fun to watch, a WalMart v. Microsoft war, as long as you weren't in the crossfire that is.
I agree. Electronics are a fucking rip-off in the UK (well almost everything is a fucking rip-off in the UK). When I worked in Germany I could purchase electronics equipment for about the same price as I would in the United States plus 10 percent and then the 17.5 percent for the MWST (German VAT). That worked out to being not too bad of a deal when I decided to upgrade my video card. When I went to the UK I found that the resellers there fucked their customers in the ass, a 100 dollar video card in the states ended up costing about 100 pounds in the UK, which at the time was about $180 American. Figuring that 8.5 percent of that was VAT that means that the price difference, sans taxes, was around 64 dollars American or 35 British pounds.
Now, some might argue that things are more expensive in Britain because of health care and the like, but Germany has better roads, cleaner cities, better health care, better beer and better looking women than Britain does and I was only paying a price difference, sans taxes, of 10 percent in Germany compared to about 60 percent for the UK. Where did that extra money go? Well it went into the pockets of UK companies that fuck over their UK customers in ways that would be illegal in the United States.
Re:Nicest thing for me is the nanode
on
Cebit 2004 Coverage
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· Score: 2, Funny
You darn kids and your mini/nano ITX based HTPCs! In my day we had real HTPCs, the VAX 11/720 HTPC and the Sun 6/690 HTPC with IPI drives. None of this namby, pamby ITX stuff.
Sun's cash cow back in the day was the $10,000 pizza-box workstations that they sold to universities and companies. The market has completely vaporized expect in the minds of/. trolls.
If you paid anything close to list price on Sun equipment at a university you're probably retarded. Sun would quote us these horrendous list prices and then start giving us all sorts of discounts, "Oh, you're a university, take 30 percent off. What, your University has a Sun service contract, take another 8 percent off? You say your sister is a left handed lesbian pipefitter with two dogs who lives in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska but who doesn't like Ani DiFranco? Take another 3 percent." Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
I want to put one 70 thousand feet over Barbra Streisand's Malibu beach house with a live, telescopic webcam feed. Hey, the courts have ruled that it's legal to do that to Barbra Streisand and I say more power to them!
Just so somebody else doesn't have to look this up, geosynchronous orbit is at 19,323 nautical miles
See, I knew this as a child, a child! Why did I know this? Is it because I was a budding Isaac Newton who read Arthur C. Clarke's seminal 1945 paper on geostationary satellites? Well no, it was because I read Justice League of America and as any good comics fan knows the JLA used to have their headquarters in a satellite orbiting 22,300 miles above the Earth.
I find the timeline a bit aggressive. Supposedly set in 2030, the issues at hand seem more in line for maybe 2070 or beyond. Not to belittle the advances of the last 25 years (all hail the microwave) but twenty five years ago was not that *radically* different from today.
25 years ago is radically different than today. Let's look at some examples: 25 years ago in 1979 companies hired engineers who worked with draftsmen to produce drawings which were then sent to a machine shop for prototyping, now the draftsmen are gone, they've either retired or become engineers, their designs go directly to a machine shop for prototyping, in few years they might go straight into a three dimensional printer for prototyping.
25 years ago in 1979 you had secretaries typing corporate memos on their IBM Selectric typewriter, if you needed copies you used carbon paper or ran the document through a Xerox machine a few times. Now you type the memo yourself and if you need hard copy you just tell the printer to print n copies and that's it, or you use e-mail.
25 years ago in 1979 if you were in a foreign country it was a real experience, you were, to some extent isolated from what was going on at home. Six years ago when I was in Germany I got off the plane, pulled out my GSM cell phone and called my folks and my office to let them know that I had arrived safely. When I got my laptop set up the next morning the first thing I did was check my e-mail from the office in Seattle and then spent a few minutes reading the Seattle Times. Mind you this was in 1998. In 1999, I was able to ride across the German countryside on an ICE at 250KPH from Cologne to Berlin and with a somewhat better GSM phone than I had had the year before login with my laptop, check my e-mail and reboot a recalcitrant server. Now in 2004 I receive e-mail from my sister in Sweden that contains digital pictures of her recent trip to Italy.
25 years ago in 1979 if you went to the library to do research you started off with the Reader's Guide to Periodicals and spent a lot of time going through card catalogs, making notes of what books you needed, getting those books or magazines, making copies of the information you needed and then assembling them into a debate brief, term paper, whatever. Now you start your research on the Internet, libraries are getting rid of their card catalogs, Suzzallo library at the University of Washington just got rid of all of theirs.
25 years ago in 1979 you learned land navigation skills with a compass, a protractor and a map. You learned intersection, resection and how to determine 6 and 8 digit grid coordinates. Now you can use a GPS system to find your way.
25 years ago in 1979 if you wanted to make a phone call you either made one from home or found a pay phone. Now everyone has cell phones. Going back to my example above when I lived in Germany I could pick up my cell and call Seattle just like that, in fact I did so one night at Oktoberfest when I was really, really, really drunk, I called my boss and told him what a great time I was having and how much beer I had drank. Then my boss called up her boss, Jeff Bezos, and told Jeff what a great time she was having and how much beer she had drank.
OK, we don't have atomic powered flying cars, sassy robot maids or PanAm flights to orbit, but I think the examples above show that the world has changed radically (I will leave the determination of whether or not these changes are for the better to the reader) in the last 25 years.
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Well I had a story about a blow up doll that I had modified with a two horsepower wet/dry shopvac, but I've been too busy healing up from all of the skin grafts to post it.
Of course the same could be said for thousands of
Take OS X for instance. Here's a sample of what's in my root directory on my Powerbook:
etc.
It's confusing and convoluted as hell. There's not necessarily only one type of file in each directory. Not to mention the structuring: there are applications left and right, many of which are actually directories containing more varied data. Madness, I tell you.
How is the Macintosh directory structure "confusing and convoluted as hell"? You want confusing or convoluted as Hell? Try working on a Solaris or HP/UX system after someone has installed a bunch of third party packages, some GNU, some commercial, some written in-house and try figuring out where the library files or configuration files for each application are.
Sure, you can use symlinks to impose some structure on this sort of thing, but why should you have to? The UNIX filesystem layout sucks, it's confusing, it's not standardized in any meaningful sense other than having certain types of files located under certain broad hierarchies (/usr,
Really?
They're an answer to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft?
SION said power hungry devices not power hungry tools .
We take a dozen of the cars, load them up with four people and a bunch of stuff, fill the gasoline tanks with a measured quantity of fuel and then drive them on city roads, country roads, highways, in good weather and bad until they run out of gas. Record the mileage on the odometer. Fill the tank again, repeat. Do this for a month or so for each car, add up the mileages, do the appropriate math and use the number as the mileage figure for the car.
This would have its own set of inaccuracies, but would probably be a lot closer to what most people experience in real life than the EPA numbers are.
This is going to totally change the rules, when you have 5 megapixel digital cameras that will easily fit in a BDU jacket pocket and when everyone has one you're going to see a lot of pictures that the Pentagon would rather you didn't, which is probably a good thing.
I'm confused as to what the regions do other than piss off fans. When I was living in Germany five years ago it took about eight weeks after a major movie was released in the US for it to be dubbed (Germans don't do subtitles) and released in Germany, also since DVD players are so damned cheap nowadays spending the money to get an extra player that you dedicate to R1 isn't too much of a burden.
Hey, if they call it "pussy" they'll probably sell a lot of copies to people who don't even own Macs.
Actually that's not true. Perhaps 80 percent of Austrians come from the same country as Adolph Hitler, but not 80 percent of Germans. Hitler was born in Braunau, but for some wacky reason the Austrians don't like to take credit for him. Go figure.
that I use as a computer monitor with my HTPC. The resolution is not high enough for dedicated work, it's OK for websurfing if I want to look something up on IMDB but the resolution is too low for any sustained work. It is however pretty good for playing Civ III or other PC games and as soon as I get some time I'm going to set it up to play upsampled DVDs.
I never had any luck using the DVI inputs on the TV with my video cards, I'd end up with horribly low resolutions or weird looking stretched screens. I finally went out and got an ATI video card and one of ATI's VGA to component video converters and that worked pretty well with Powerstrip to give me a resolution of 1280 by 680.
Again, it's not perfect, but it's not bad for light web surfing, playing games, etc.
Yeah, and Microsoft has enough cash and clout to tell WalMart to go fuck themselves if WalMart tried to play their usual "squeeze our suppliers to the bone tactic". Which would be kind of fun to watch, a WalMart v. Microsoft war, as long as you weren't in the crossfire that is.
Now, some might argue that things are more expensive in Britain because of health care and the like, but Germany has better roads, cleaner cities, better health care, better beer and better looking women than Britain does and I was only paying a price difference, sans taxes, of 10 percent in Germany compared to about 60 percent for the UK. Where did that extra money go? Well it went into the pockets of UK companies that fuck over their UK customers in ways that would be illegal in the United States.
You darn kids and your mini/nano ITX based HTPCs! In my day we had real HTPCs, the VAX 11/720 HTPC and the Sun 6/690 HTPC with IPI drives. None of this namby, pamby ITX stuff.
If you paid anything close to list price on Sun equipment at a university you're probably retarded. Sun would quote us these horrendous list prices and then start giving us all sorts of discounts, "Oh, you're a university, take 30 percent off. What, your University has a Sun service contract, take another 8 percent off? You say your sister is a left handed lesbian pipefitter with two dogs who lives in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska but who doesn't like Ani DiFranco? Take another 3 percent." Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
See, I knew this as a child, a child! Why did I know this? Is it because I was a budding Isaac Newton who read Arthur C. Clarke's seminal 1945 paper on geostationary satellites? Well no, it was because I read Justice League of America and as any good comics fan knows the JLA used to have their headquarters in a satellite orbiting 22,300 miles above the Earth.
25 years ago is radically different than today. Let's look at some examples: 25 years ago in 1979 companies hired engineers who worked with draftsmen to produce drawings which were then sent to a machine shop for prototyping, now the draftsmen are gone, they've either retired or become engineers, their designs go directly to a machine shop for prototyping, in few years they might go straight into a three dimensional printer for prototyping.
25 years ago in 1979 you had secretaries typing corporate memos on their IBM Selectric typewriter, if you needed copies you used carbon paper or ran the document through a Xerox machine a few times. Now you type the memo yourself and if you need hard copy you just tell the printer to print n copies and that's it, or you use e-mail.
25 years ago in 1979 if you were in a foreign country it was a real experience, you were, to some extent isolated from what was going on at home. Six years ago when I was in Germany I got off the plane, pulled out my GSM cell phone and called my folks and my office to let them know that I had arrived safely. When I got my laptop set up the next morning the first thing I did was check my e-mail from the office in Seattle and then spent a few minutes reading the Seattle Times. Mind you this was in 1998. In 1999, I was able to ride across the German countryside on an ICE at 250KPH from Cologne to Berlin and with a somewhat better GSM phone than I had had the year before login with my laptop, check my e-mail and reboot a recalcitrant server. Now in 2004 I receive e-mail from my sister in Sweden that contains digital pictures of her recent trip to Italy.
25 years ago in 1979 if you went to the library to do research you started off with the Reader's Guide to Periodicals and spent a lot of time going through card catalogs, making notes of what books you needed, getting those books or magazines, making copies of the information you needed and then assembling them into a debate brief, term paper, whatever. Now you start your research on the Internet, libraries are getting rid of their card catalogs, Suzzallo library at the University of Washington just got rid of all of theirs.
25 years ago in 1979 you learned land navigation skills with a compass, a protractor and a map. You learned intersection, resection and how to determine 6 and 8 digit grid coordinates. Now you can use a GPS system to find your way.
25 years ago in 1979 if you wanted to make a phone call you either made one from home or found a pay phone. Now everyone has cell phones. Going back to my example above when I lived in Germany I could pick up my cell and call Seattle just like that, in fact I did so one night at Oktoberfest when I was really, really, really drunk, I called my boss and told him what a great time I was having and how much beer I had drank. Then my boss called up her boss, Jeff Bezos, and told Jeff what a great time she was having and how much beer she had drank.
OK, we don't have atomic powered flying cars, sassy robot maids or PanAm flights to orbit, but I think the examples above show that the world has changed radically (I will leave the determination of whether or not these changes are for the better to the reader) in the last 25 years.