DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be
made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled
o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but
I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing,
and I was never mine own man since. How now!
---
Ironically enough, I cut-and-pasted the preceding excerpt from a PDF of Shakespeare's complete works I got from... Adobe.
As do I, but I doubt anyone spells console "konsole" when they aren't talking about *the* "konsole". It's not fruit-cake-frenchies that named it Konsole... it's sorta a free software tradition (think recursive acronyms)
Most programs written for KDE start with the letter "K" (KWord, KBattleShip), whereas those written for Gnome mostly start with... "G" (e.g. GNumeric). Nothing to do with recursive acronyms, but I could be wrong.
Raymond
Re:Why SMS is so popular ...
on
SMS vs. E-mail?
·
· Score: 1
A friend of mine, father of three teenage daughters, had to put strict limitations on their SMS usage because they were racking up enormous bills which cut deep into his single parent budget. Stories of teenagers running themselves into debt with their cellphone bills can be read regularly in the newspapers here in Switzerland.
Threatening a teenager to take his/her cellphone away is not going to be a very popular measure, because this effectively cuts him off from the peer group and the dating scene. On my bus ride to work, almost everyone under 30 is constantly hacking away at their cellphone keyboards (probably one of the worst user interfaces for text input ever concieved), showing an intense concentration rarely seen outside of operating theaters. This SMS thing is a huge cultural phenomenon here, and I'm glad that I'm old enough to be able to ignore it.
By the way, the telcos are screwing their customers royally IMO. The price of an SMS over Swisscom is CHF 0.20 (about USD 0.11), which doesn't look like much. Assuming an average message length of 80 characters (160/2), this puts the price per megabyte of data at over CHF 2600 (about USD 1460) - and this for a messaging service without guaranteed delivery.
Just make sure you don't implement the MS Office spell checker (...)
Excellent suggestion. The follwing passes the MS Word spell check with flying colors:
Spell Checker Blue It
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I've run this poem threw it,
I'm sure your please to no,
Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
I have this one pasted to the wall next to my computer:
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy [...] says of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."
In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
(Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish)
Every real geek will know why I have to grin every time I read it.
I saw Douglas Adams on a reading tour here in Zurich, Switzerland, on March 14, 1995. Hearing him read from the Hitchhiker's Guide was an experience I'll never forget; he had me and the rest of the audience spellbound.
The organizers had announced that he would be signing books at the end of the show, so I bought a copy of HGTTG (I had left my battered old paperback at home, unfortunately) and got in line. Knowing that most fans are prone to asking the authors Really Stupid Questions they probably already answered at least a million times, I wisely decided to keep my mouth shut, get my book signed, and leave. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and as I stood before him and he was about to sign the book, the quotation above suddenly came to my mind and I asked him, in my really bad English (knowing that he was a Mac fan), if he had a particular company in mind when he wrote it, such as IBM or Microsoft?
He paused for a moment, smiled, and said "No, I wasn't thinking about any particular company when I wrote that." and signed the book. I thanked him, turned around and left.
Just wanted to share this with you. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have some reading to do. Don't need to be telling you what, do I?
Thanks for everything, Douglas, you were a really frood guy.
Raymond
From the Encyclopaedia Galactica:
frood: really amazingly together guy
The classic example, of course, is Watson and Cricke (sp?) celebrating the error of another Linus, Pauling in this case, when he announced that the structure of DNA was a triple helix. Pauling had made a simple calculation mistake, which thanks to Pauling's son they were aware of. Rather than notify Pauling prior to his publishing his information, they kept quiet and continued on their own researches.
Really? I have never heard this one. Got a reference?
Been a long time since I've read it, but I remember it was a close race between Pauling and his team at Caltech (IIRC). BTW, Watson and Crick relied on Rosalind Franklin's excellent x-ray crystallography work for their discovery - without her, the nobel prize would have probably gone to Pauling.
Been there, done that. Better have a good sized supply of spare harddisks ready, though:(
On a more serious note:
I would definitely worry about RF emissions from plexiglass cases. According to german computer magazine c't, even most of the conventional ATX cases (with metal shielding and finger-stock seals) exceed the CE regulation RF limits and thus are - at least in theory - not to be sold within the European Union. RF pollution is not really a problem if it's only your CB hobbyist neighbor complaining (well, as long as he's not the violent sociopath type), but if you take down some piece of critical equipment with your kewl transparent-case 1.4 GHz box - maybe in the doctor's office one floor up - you're in trouble.
Now, if only Coolermaster delivered those cool aluminum cases to Switzerland...
Er... neither NetBIOS nor NetBEUI are routable, as a quick query in Google will show (for example:
http://www.ossir.org/ftp/supports/96/netbios-2.htm l). Tools which use NetB* over WAN links must encapsulate the frames using a WAN transport such as TCP/IP and provide some means to get around the flat namespace deficiencies of NetB*, for example by using WINS or a similar kludge. IANANE (I am not a network engineer) etc.
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DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be
made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled
o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but
I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing,
and I was never mine own man since. How now!
---
Ironically enough, I cut-and-pasted the preceding excerpt from a PDF of Shakespeare's complete works I got from... Adobe.
Wasn't "We apologize for this inconvenience" God's last message to his creation in "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish"? Scary thought, I know.
Most programs written for KDE start with the letter "K" (KWord, KBattleShip), whereas those written for Gnome mostly start with... "G" (e.g. GNumeric). Nothing to do with recursive acronyms, but I could be wrong.
Raymond
Threatening a teenager to take his/her cellphone away is not going to be a very popular measure, because this effectively cuts him off from the peer group and the dating scene. On my bus ride to work, almost everyone under 30 is constantly hacking away at their cellphone keyboards (probably one of the worst user interfaces for text input ever concieved), showing an intense concentration rarely seen outside of operating theaters. This SMS thing is a huge cultural phenomenon here, and I'm glad that I'm old enough to be able to ignore it.
By the way, the telcos are screwing their customers royally IMO. The price of an SMS over Swisscom is CHF 0.20 (about USD 0.11), which doesn't look like much. Assuming an average message length of 80 characters (160/2), this puts the price per megabyte of data at over CHF 2600 (about USD 1460) - and this for a messaging service without guaranteed delivery.
Raymond
... on the other hand, it _would_ have caught the misspelling of "following" in my previous post. Oh well...
Excellent suggestion. The follwing passes the MS Word spell check with flying colors:
Spell Checker Blue It
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I've run this poem threw it,
I'm sure your please to no,
Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
(author unknown)
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy [...] says of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."
In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
(Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish)
Every real geek will know why I have to grin every time I read it.
I saw Douglas Adams on a reading tour here in Zurich, Switzerland, on March 14, 1995. Hearing him read from the Hitchhiker's Guide was an experience I'll never forget; he had me and the rest of the audience spellbound.
The organizers had announced that he would be signing books at the end of the show, so I bought a copy of HGTTG (I had left my battered old paperback at home, unfortunately) and got in line. Knowing that most fans are prone to asking the authors Really Stupid Questions they probably already answered at least a million times, I wisely decided to keep my mouth shut, get my book signed, and leave. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and as I stood before him and he was about to sign the book, the quotation above suddenly came to my mind and I asked him, in my really bad English (knowing that he was a Mac fan), if he had a particular company in mind when he wrote it, such as IBM or Microsoft?
He paused for a moment, smiled, and said "No, I wasn't thinking about any particular company when I wrote that." and signed the book. I thanked him, turned around and left.
Just wanted to share this with you. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have some reading to do. Don't need to be telling you what, do I?
Thanks for everything, Douglas, you were a really frood guy.
Raymond
From the Encyclopaedia Galactica:
frood: really amazingly together guy
Sometimes, though, it was a bit of a love/hate relationship, see this page.
other articles, for those who want to catch up, can be found here.
Thanks for everything, Douglas.
Raymond
Really? I have never heard this one. Got a reference?
Straigth from the horse's mouth: James Watson, The Double Helix : A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.
Been a long time since I've read it, but I remember it was a close race between Pauling and his team at Caltech (IIRC). BTW, Watson and Crick relied on Rosalind Franklin's excellent x-ray crystallography work for their discovery - without her, the nobel prize would have probably gone to Pauling.
Raymond
(p.s. see also this page)
Raymond
Been there, done that. Better have a good sized supply of spare harddisks ready, though :(
On a more serious note:
I would definitely worry about RF emissions from plexiglass cases. According to german computer magazine c't, even most of the conventional ATX cases (with metal shielding and finger-stock seals) exceed the CE regulation RF limits and thus are - at least in theory - not to be sold within the European Union. RF pollution is not really a problem if it's only your CB hobbyist neighbor complaining (well, as long as he's not the violent sociopath type), but if you take down some piece of critical equipment with your kewl transparent-case 1.4 GHz box - maybe in the doctor's office one floor up - you're in trouble.
Now, if only Coolermaster delivered those cool aluminum cases to Switzerland...
Raymond
Ray