I know it wasn't meant to be offensive, I just said it rubbed me the wrong way. You're probably right that I'm just being over-sensitive and should have just gone to the next article.
Hmmm, I hadn't thought about that point. I suppose that is a valid point. I guess I would have been less quick to find fault if it had been an article on why geek girls may not really be what will make you happy. If he had cut out the last 1/2 I suppose I would have been perfectly happy reading it.
I know my wife is a luddite, she really doesn't like using them too much. When the talk among our friends turns to computers she often starts feigning death, which usually makes us turn the conversation elsewhere. But we have plenty of other interests/activities in common.
I usually like Roblimo stuff but, umm... no. I actually found this sort of offensive. Some of us don't have any problem with women, and even if we did, probably wouldn't want to take advice from random editors on/. Contrary to popular myth, some computer people are actually well socialized people who enjoy the company of other people.
I don't mean to be offensive, but I think the thing that stroked me the wrong way was it had a patronizing tone to it. I know it was not meant/written that way, but it felt like it.
Compupic is a nice viewer. I've found it has replaced my usage of ACDSee quite nicely. Though I can't speak how it runs on low-end HW. It runs nice and fast on mine (about equivalent to ACDSee), but I'm running dual 450's so YMMV.
It's in beta still, but it's very functional. It does crash occasionally, but hopefully they'll fix those kind of things soon. And it's free for use on Linux, with the addendum of 'buy me' banners popping up when you use gif's after the trial period is over. This is because of unisys issues.
YOU! Out of the Gene Pool NOW! This is the Gene police, your birth certificate has been revoked, please step up to the chipper-shredder. Bzzzuurrttt-splutch. Thank you for your cooperation.
I thought the current DVD-RAM were a catridge only format that can only be read by that drive? You're right about the capacities as far as I can remember, but I was talking about a drive where you can make a regular DVD and pop it into a DVD movie player right then.
I'm reasonably sure that DVD-RAM currently is only useful as a backup medium. At least I haven't seen anything about writers that will do what I want. Which is write a DVD, then take it over to a friends house, so they can read the disk on their crappy $80 IDE dvd-rom drive.
You can buy a DVD writer that will write DVD's you can play in anything just like a CD-R will (mostly) play any CD drive... If you have $18,000 dollars. At least that's how much the damn things cost last time I looked.
Re:Brin just a churner nowadays
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Oh well, so much for getting my mathetical logic homework done this week. Damn. Ah well at least I'll be entertained while I'm digging a hole in my GPA.:)
Ummm, the whole point is his grandfather is NOT a techno-geek by any stretch. If something goes wrong in any OS he's not going to be able to fix it. Linux at least won't corrupt itself like win95/8 tend to. I can't speak for the Mac or BeOS.
I'm setting up something like this for my mother. I'm trying to set it up so if something goes wrong she just types in one command that starts a shell script. The script will dial-up her ISP, and send me her ip address. Then I can login remotely and fix almost anything that way. Remote administration is a god send when you live 600 miles away from the person.
Re:Brin just a churner nowadays
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Bujold is the only author that I consistently laugh out loud while reading her books. I'm still waiting for the next book after komarr, it should be interesting.
But don't discount her non-SF, "The Spirit Ring" is definitely one of the best historical ficton/fantasy books I've ever read. There are some truly excellent parts in this book, and I highly recommend anyone who reads fantasy to read this book, though probably anyone would enjoy it.
I was actually just installing caldera 2.3 to do a review of it. Right now I'm running SuSE 6.2, which I am very happy with.
I managed to get a working SuSE install going in about 20 minutes on the second drive. Once I had that going it took me a couple days to completely recover my partition table. But now I have retrieved all my data, and am reasonably happy. The next time I install caldera will be on a completely separate system that is not a production system (yes I know I should have done it this way in the first place).
I'm planning on trying out mandrake sometime soon,in my copious spare time.
Well the IMDB says that it was "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum." Which sounds approximately right to me.
I have mixed feelings on caldera 2.3. On one hand it is the easiest whiz-bangiest niftiest looking install I've seen. On the other hand, no other OS install wiped my partition table clean. I even made sure to use a separate HD to be extra safe so I wouldn't have to muck with my primary drives partitions.
Now before everyone calls me a loser and a moron. I've been installing Linux since v1.0, I've installed SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Caldera. I've installed dos 2.0-6.0, win3.1, win95, winNT (3.51 & 4.0). And I've never managed to wipe out the partition table before.
As near as I can figure it, it happened when I went into the expert/custom drive partitioning part. I don't remember (and neither does my friend) touching ANYTHING other than my table for my second HD, and yet when I rebooted my first HD's table was gone. Blah, oh well, thanks to gpart (thank you michael briztva!) I managed to recover my partition table. I haven't heard anyone else mention this, so maybe I'm just especially special.
Ah okay, I was not aware of that. I knew why grain silos explode (the same reason taco bell creamer will give you seven foot flames). I just had never heard of hay spontaneously combusting, wierd. The whole hay thing might be region specific , no clue. I'd just never seen heard of hay silos.
Mmmm, Matrix Soundtrack is pretty good. In fact most of your selections look really good. I've also taking to listening to Propellerheads, Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy, and some Einsturzende Neubauten. Basically anything the wife detests seems to be good coding music...
1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning. "move" should be the command to move a file, "copy" should be the command to copy a file, "delete" and "remove" should remove a file. Joe Blow doesn't care that when all we had was 6 letter commands, using "rm" for delete a good idea. We don't have those limits any more, we shouldn't be limited by them. (My suggestion is to call this DOS, for Dumb Old Shell, and make it work much like the MS-DOS command line.)
Alias commands could handle this fairly well .aliases contents -------------------- alias remove='rm' alias move='mv' alias copy='cp' alias delete='rm'
I don't think it's the limitations of the OS that restrict us to two or three letter commands. I think it's just faster to type 'rm' rather than 'remove'.
2. Plug and Play Everywhere! Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself, nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware. So make sure that Joe Blow doesn't have to deal with those things.
Supermount is the best solution I've seen to this problem. It allows you to dynamically mount removable media (this should be very nice). A bounty has been accepted to port it to the 2.2x series of kernels at cosource.
As to IRQ and other conflicts, the best solution to this I've heard is chucking ISA out the window. Everything becomes so much easier when you use PCI.
3. A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros. Joe Blow does not like command line interfaces and will avoid them wherever possible. So give him a GUI he can use easily and not be (too) confused by.
KDE isn't too bad, even my wife can use it. And she is a complete luddite. As to standardizing on one... I'm not too keen on the idea, but I would like it if the gnome/kde/whatever played nicer together.
4. Official suppourt from hardware vendors. If Joe Blow can't buy a new peice of hardware, plug it in, turn it on, install some drivers, and start using it; Joe Blow doesn't want it.
Soon grasshopper, soon this too shall come to pass. All my HW is supported (though my v770 stills trashes X at random (sigh)), it's a lot better than it uses to be in the 1.0 kernel days. Ugghh, I don't even want to talk about installing slackware from 3.5 disks (out of 40 disks, 1 or 2 was always bad).
The 29% you're talking about is using gallium arsenide (I do believe). Using amorphous silicon cells you achieve around about 10-12%(maybe higher) generally. The reason amorphous is so much more common is that amorphous is many times cheaper to make than the high purity gallium arsenide doped cells. I think it was something like x amount of silicon pure enough to be used in GaAs cells is $32, and x amount of silicon pure enough to use in amorphous is $1.
All the solar panel's for housing I've seen is of the amorphous variety.
Hmm, England would be a fairly poor country to do encryption work in. The most recent law they are thinking of passing is a good example of the kind of attitude they have towards it. They're almost as bad as the US.
From what I understand Canada would be a much better place to develop that sort of thing. I do believe that is one of the major reasons OpenBSD is developed there.
I don't know. It's been so many years since I read it I couldn't tell you. The kitty-kitty-bang-bang is a reference to a really fun/interesting/questionable roleplaying game called Hole (Human Occupied Landfill).
2. Find out what the pets really do when you're not at home. Or what animals do when observers can't study them.
Also I could see this being used in a security fashion. "That's not a guard dog, it's a roving security camera." Of course you'd end up with a lot of footage of peoples crotches and what-not, but still an interesting application.
Also an implanted small dog could be used for rescue/recon work. Hmmm, I can only imagine the military would like some of these. Why send people into a sticky situation to get some intel when you could get a dog to go in and look about. You could direct it by using electrical or sound cues that it's been trained to respond to.
Of course an animal with explosives strapped to it could make an interesting terrorist weapon.
Could these same ideas be used to realize the dream of Christopher Reeves to walk again someday?
I'm not sure how well this type of technology would apply to spinal injury repair. I do know that more conventional treatments (chemical, forced tissue growth, some others) are starting to make decent advances in this direction. Scientific American had a very good article on precisely this about one issue back.
September 1999 issue
Repairing the Damaged Spinal Cord John W. McDonald and the Research Consortium of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation
Paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries has often been seen as irreversible, because disrupted areas of the cord do not regenerate. New treatments under study, however, aim to minimize or reverse the damage from trauma.
Unfortunately they don't have this one online, you'll have to pop down to the newstand to pick it up. I personally think sciam is definitely one of the mags everyone should have a subscription to.
But it looks like (probably) within our lifespan, or even in the next 15-20 years we might be able to correct spinal damage. It's all speculative of course, but still, at least there's some hope now.
Of course, but it still has a certain lower limit, and that lower limit is fairly large. It is always going to load things like the kernel, explorer, etc. If you don't have that much memory of course it swaps some of it out to disk.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I think the hangover's impairing my humour subroutine. I'll try and be a little slower with the reply button next time.
I know it wasn't meant to be offensive, I just said it rubbed me the wrong way. You're probably right that I'm just being over-sensitive and should have just gone to the next article.
Hmmm, I hadn't thought about that point. I suppose that is a valid point. I guess I would have been less quick to find fault if it had been an article on why geek girls may not really be what will make you happy. If he had cut out the last 1/2 I suppose I would have been perfectly happy reading it.
I know my wife is a luddite, she really doesn't like using them too much. When the talk among our friends turns to computers she often starts feigning death, which usually makes us turn the conversation elsewhere. But we have plenty of other interests/activities in common.
I usually like Roblimo stuff but, umm... no. I actually found this sort of offensive. Some of us don't have any problem with women, and even if we did, probably wouldn't want to take advice from random editors on /. Contrary to popular myth, some computer people are actually well socialized people who enjoy the company of other people.
I don't mean to be offensive, but I think the thing that stroked me the wrong way was it had a patronizing tone to it. I know it was not meant/written that way, but it felt like it.
Compupic is a nice viewer. I've found it has replaced my usage of ACDSee quite nicely. Though I can't speak how it runs on low-end HW. It runs nice and fast on mine (about equivalent to ACDSee), but I'm running dual 450's so YMMV.
It's in beta still, but it's very functional. It does crash occasionally, but hopefully they'll fix those kind of things soon. And it's free for use on Linux, with the addendum of 'buy me' banners popping up when you use gif's after the trial period is over. This is because of unisys issues.
All in all a nice program.
YOU! Out of the Gene Pool NOW! This is the Gene police, your birth certificate has been revoked, please step up to the chipper-shredder. Bzzzuurrttt-splutch. Thank you for your cooperation.
I thought the current DVD-RAM were a catridge only format that can only be read by that drive? You're right about the capacities as far as I can remember, but I was talking about a drive where you can make a regular DVD and pop it into a DVD movie player right then.
I'm reasonably sure that DVD-RAM currently is only useful as a backup medium. At least I haven't seen anything about writers that will do what I want. Which is write a DVD, then take it over to a friends house, so they can read the disk on their crappy $80 IDE dvd-rom drive.
You can buy a DVD writer that will write DVD's you can play in anything just like a CD-R will (mostly) play any CD drive... If you have $18,000 dollars. At least that's how much the damn things cost last time I looked.
Oh well, so much for getting my mathetical logic homework done this week. Damn. Ah well at least I'll be entertained while I'm digging a hole in my GPA. :)
Ummm, the whole point is his grandfather is NOT a techno-geek by any stretch. If something goes wrong in any OS he's not going to be able to fix it. Linux at least won't corrupt itself like win95/8 tend to. I can't speak for the Mac or BeOS.
I'm setting up something like this for my mother. I'm trying to set it up so if something goes wrong she just types in one command that starts a shell script. The script will dial-up her ISP, and send me her ip address. Then I can login remotely and fix almost anything that way. Remote administration is a god send when you live 600 miles away from the person.
Bujold is the only author that I consistently laugh out loud while reading her books. I'm still waiting for the next book after komarr, it should be interesting.
But don't discount her non-SF, "The Spirit Ring" is definitely one of the best historical ficton/fantasy books I've ever read. There are some truly excellent parts in this book, and I highly recommend anyone who reads fantasy to read this book, though probably anyone would enjoy it.
I was actually just installing caldera 2.3 to do a review of it. Right now I'm running SuSE 6.2, which I am very happy with.
,in my copious spare time.
I managed to get a working SuSE install going in about 20 minutes on the second drive. Once I had that going it took me a couple days to completely recover my partition table. But now I have retrieved all my data, and am reasonably happy. The next time I install caldera will be on a completely separate system that is not a production system (yes I know I should have done it this way in the first place).
I'm planning on trying out mandrake sometime soon
Well the IMDB says that it was "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum." Which sounds approximately right to me.
I have mixed feelings on caldera 2.3. On one hand it is the easiest whiz-bangiest niftiest looking install I've seen. On the other hand, no other OS install wiped my partition table clean. I even made sure to use a separate HD to be extra safe so I wouldn't have to muck with my primary drives partitions.
Now before everyone calls me a loser and a moron. I've been installing Linux since v1.0, I've installed SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Caldera. I've installed dos 2.0-6.0, win3.1, win95, winNT (3.51 & 4.0). And I've never managed to wipe out the partition table before.
As near as I can figure it, it happened when I went into the expert/custom drive partitioning part. I don't remember (and neither does my friend) touching ANYTHING other than my table for my second HD, and yet when I rebooted my first HD's table was gone. Blah, oh well, thanks to gpart (thank you michael briztva!) I managed to recover my partition table. I haven't heard anyone else mention this, so maybe I'm just especially special.
Ah okay, I was not aware of that. I knew why grain silos explode (the same reason taco bell creamer will give you seven foot flames). I just had never heard of hay spontaneously combusting, wierd.
The whole hay thing might be region specific , no clue. I'd just never seen heard of hay silos.
I thought it was dust that caused explosions et. all? Or is that just grain silos? Hmm.....
Of course Hay silo sounds kinda silly, Maybe hay barn? Or grain silo?
Mmmm, Matrix Soundtrack is pretty good. In fact most of your selections look really good. I've also taking to listening to Propellerheads, Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy, and some Einsturzende Neubauten. Basically anything the wife detests seems to be good coding music...
1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning. "move" should be the command to move a file, "copy" should be the command to copy a file, "delete" and "remove" should remove a file. Joe Blow doesn't care that when all we had was 6 letter commands, using "rm" for delete a good idea. We don't have those limits any more, we shouldn't be limited by them. (My suggestion is to call this DOS, for Dumb Old Shell, and make it work much like the MS-DOS command line.)
Alias commands could handle this fairly well
.aliases contents
--------------------
alias remove='rm'
alias move='mv'
alias copy='cp'
alias delete='rm'
I don't think it's the limitations of the OS that restrict us to two or three letter commands. I think it's just faster to type 'rm' rather than 'remove'.
2. Plug and Play Everywhere! Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself, nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware. So make sure that Joe Blow doesn't have to deal with those things.
Supermount is the best solution I've seen to this problem. It allows you to dynamically mount removable media (this should be very nice). A bounty has been accepted to port it to the 2.2x series of kernels at cosource.
As to IRQ and other conflicts, the best solution to this I've heard is chucking ISA out the window. Everything becomes so much easier when you use PCI.
3. A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros. Joe Blow does not like command line interfaces and will avoid them wherever possible. So give him a GUI he can use easily and not be (too) confused by.
KDE isn't too bad, even my wife can use it. And she is a complete luddite. As to standardizing on one... I'm not too keen on the idea, but I would like it if the gnome/kde/whatever played nicer together.
4. Official suppourt from hardware vendors. If Joe Blow can't buy a new peice of hardware, plug it in, turn it on, install some drivers, and start
using it; Joe Blow doesn't want it.
Soon grasshopper, soon this too shall come to pass. All my HW is supported (though my v770 stills trashes X at random (sigh)), it's a lot better than it uses to be in the 1.0 kernel days. Ugghh, I don't even want to talk about installing slackware from 3.5 disks (out of 40 disks, 1 or 2 was always bad).
The 29% you're talking about is using gallium arsenide (I do believe). Using amorphous silicon cells you achieve around about 10-12%(maybe higher) generally. The reason amorphous is so much more common is that amorphous is many times cheaper to make than the high purity gallium arsenide doped cells. I think it was something like x amount of silicon pure enough to be used in GaAs cells is $32, and x amount of silicon pure enough to use in amorphous is $1.
All the solar panel's for housing I've seen is of the amorphous variety.
Hmm, England would be a fairly poor country to do encryption work in. The most recent law they are thinking of passing is a good example of the kind of attitude they have towards it. They're almost as bad as the US.
From what I understand Canada would be a much better place to develop that sort of thing. I do believe that is one of the major reasons OpenBSD is developed there.
I don't know. It's been so many years since I read it I couldn't tell you. The kitty-kitty-bang-bang is a reference to a really fun/interesting/questionable roleplaying game called Hole (Human Occupied Landfill).
2. Find out what the pets really do when you're not at home. Or what animals do when observers can't study them.
Also I could see this being used in a security fashion. "That's not a guard dog, it's a roving security camera." Of course you'd end up with a lot of footage of peoples crotches and what-not, but still an interesting application.
Also an implanted small dog could be used for rescue/recon work. Hmmm, I can only imagine the military would like some of these. Why send people into a sticky situation to get some intel when you could get a dog to go in and look about. You could direct it by using electrical or sound cues that it's been trained to respond to.
Of course an animal with explosives strapped to it could make an interesting terrorist weapon.
Kitty-kitty-bang-bang
dream of Christopher Reeves to walk again someday?
I'm not sure how well this type of technology would apply to spinal injury repair. I do know that more conventional treatments (chemical, forced tissue growth, some others) are starting to make decent advances in this direction. Scientific American had a very good article on precisely this about one issue back.
September 1999 issue
Unfortunately they don't have this one online, you'll have to pop down to the newstand to pick it up. I personally think sciam is definitely one of the mags everyone should have a subscription to.
But it looks like (probably) within our lifespan, or even in the next 15-20 years we might be able to correct spinal damage. It's all speculative of course, but still, at least there's some hope now.
Of course, but it still has a certain lower limit, and that lower limit is fairly large. It is always going to load things like the kernel, explorer, etc. If you don't have that much memory of course it swaps some of it out to disk.
Dartmouth College is offering a $100,000 prize
to the first programmer that can pass the Turing Test.
Ummm, I sure hope I can pass the Turing test. I know some of you out there might have problems passing it, but I'm pretty confident I can pass.
Of course if he meant 'first program' it might make more sense.