I especially like the option in the auto-partitioner for a separate/home directory.
I assume you meant a separate partition for/home? Because Knoppix has a/home directory, and knx-hdinstall sets it up just nicely. That's where the user "Knoppix" goes. IIRC you have no choice but to set up at least one additional user other than root.
Regardless, on a desktop machine, what difference does it make? My personal data is far more important than the OS anyway, so the whole root/non-root thing is kind of a non-issue on a single-user machine.
I'm a relatively recent Debian convert, thanks to my friends raving about apt-get mostly. I shied away from Debian for a long time because I could never figure out the installer. It's just about the most user-unfriendly application I've ever used. Almost as if they went out of their way to have everything different than everything else (hint: if 99.9% of apps use the arrow keys and enter to select options in a menu, you may want to do the same. Random keys to choose things do not help the user).
Anyway, after struggling with dselect and whatever else is involved (quite frankly I always got lost about 1/4 of the way in), I discovered Knoppix. It's a non-guru's wet dream, really. Until the day I entered "apt-get upgrade". The next time I booted my machine, squid and apache were both running and were actually listening for connections. My machine tried to load ISDN drivers for some reason, along with something related to braille. I never really spent the time trying to figure out why a metric shitload of new services/modules were being loaded, because unfortunately I needed to use my computer in an unsecured environment. Oh, and I can't remove openoffice anymore either. Apt claims it's not installed, yet it runs fine. *shrug*
Installing software (and removing things other than openoffice) are a dream. Apt-get is godly. Knoppix itself has just the right amount of stuff in it for me, with some interesting extras I never would try if they weren't there. But I'll never again try an entire upgrade:)
I personally agree with the smoking ban as well.. even though I'm an ex-smoker.
You say that like it's a surprise, and I guess to many people it is. However, the most vocal and outspoken anti-smoking crowd is generally - you guessed it - ex-smokers. Non-smokers don't like the effects of smoking. EX-smokers don't like the effects, and also resent that others are still partaking in something they can no longer do. They have even more reason to be against other people enjoying it.
I'm not implying that this is the case for you, but it's something I've noticed becoming more prevalent over the years, as more and more people kick the old death sticks.
Personally, as an ex-smoker, I couldn't care less if other people want to kill themselves (like I almost did). But I do find it funny that people will go to a place where concentrated poison is served, music is blasted so loud that frequent patrons develop hearing problems after too long, fights between complete strangers often end up with someone in the hospital... and the big problem with these establishments is that "my clothes smell when I leave".:)
I dunno, I guess the concept of opening a non-smoking bar never occured to the 75% of the population that doesn't smoke.
If anything, the "Slashbot" (by which I assume you're trying to imply majority opinion here) would be bemoaning CG in movies. Lucas killed Star Wars by making it all CG, after all! Go back to how movies were done with model kits and silly putty, damnit!
Read any story here about a movie other than Jackson's LOTR, and more often than not the comments will overwelmingly be critical about CG.
antisocial P Pronunciation Key (nt-sshl, nt-) adj.
1. Shunning the society of others; not sociable.
2. Hostile to or disruptive of the established social order; marked by or engaging in behavior that violates accepted mores: gangs engaging in vandalism and other antisocial behavior.
3. Antagonistic toward or disrespectful of others; rude.
I'm working on a project course to create a team of soccer-playing robots. We're not even using local vision, just a camera and capture card that (usually) picks up the whole playfield. We're building the robots out of Lego Mindstorms, commanding them through IR, and doing the actual processing on decently powered (> 1ghz) laptops. When I try to explain the difficulty of something like this to people, even to my techie friends, they just don't understand the enormity of the problem. Most people envision a situation that consists of "well, the robot should go here, so just tell it to do that" - wrap some C++ around statements like that and boom! Instand soccer.
Sorry folks, our team of 4 has been pulling 30-40 hour weeks since early January, and we're just at the point where we can accurately and consistently navigate around obstacles towards our goals. These problems are INCREDIBLY hard, and computationaly complex. We've managed to stall the robots on more than one occasion simply because the field got too complex for it to calculate a path in real-time. This is in a completely controlled, known boundary, FLAT playfield.
After this experience I have nothing but the utmost respect for the CMU team (and any others who even qualify). While humans can do these sorts of things without thinking, machines have barely scratched the surface. You wonder where your autonomous cars are? Try writing one. Talk to people who do this for a living. Pretty much anything you can do, except math itself, is non-trivial for a computer.
Ugh, there have been far far far too many MS-bashing linux-is-so-great posts on/. recently
You misspelled "since day one".
You might be new here, so I'll clue you in on our dirty little secret: Slashdot is, in general, very pro-Linux, and anti-Microsoft. It's always been this way. There has never been, nor will there ever be, a "balanced view" on this site. However, there are many pro-Microsoft websites out there, so if the Linux-is-good crowd scare you, there are always alternatives.
Ask yourself this: on a website dominated by geeks (ie: people who tend to know much more than the average person about computers), why is there such a slant in favour of Linux/OSS?:)
It would be a breach of the canadian charter of rights and freedoms to *tax* the sales of blank media on the off chance that the media might be used for an illegal use. That's like convicting anyone who ever buys blank media of a crime without any trial of any sort
with this concession against typical copyright law, comes a price. You have to pay a small tarrif on blank "audio recording media".
A rose by any other name...
Then again, this is the country that has managed to lessen the stigma of social assistance simply by referring to it as "employment insurance" as opposed to its original name "UNemployment insurance".
It's not a strike. It's a lockout. With average salaries well over $1,000,000, and players like Tie Domi making multiples of that, players don't have much to stike over.
The owners have realized that with the majority of teams (20 something out of 30, last I checked) losing millions of dollars per year, they just can't keep running this way. They're going to force salaries down a lot, or the league is going to implode.
The bad news is no hockey short term, the good news is Winnipeg might very well get a team back in the future. Well, once we get rid of that moron Bettman.
There. The most off-topic Slashdot post in history.
N64 games generally lacked FMV/prerendered CG sequences and lengthy sound samples (such as speech). So while the overall cost of games has remained pretty much a constant over the past ten years or so, the data-to-dollars ratio has swung wildly in the buyer's favor.
I'll give you the speech one. But data-to-dollars ratio? You really think a bunch of FMV clips are a bonus? I could fill a 40gb hard drive with random data (or any non-random data that's still useless), giving you a better data-to-dollars ratio than any modern console game, and it's still crap.
I have yet to see someone use WMP over Winamp for instance. I see a lot of Nero, CDex and Trillian as well.
You're kidding, right?
In a world where >90% of browser use is Internet Explorer? You really think it's because it's the best browser out there? Explains all the pop-up blocking software that people are installing as of late.
And if you've never seen anyone use WMP over Winamp, you're only hanging around geeks. Hell, half my Comp Sci classmates use WMP, because "it came with Windows".
Oh yeah, and I'm sure MSN overtook ICQ as an IM protocol because it was "better". Yup, years later and it STILL doesn't have features ICQ did in 1997 (like messages being stored when you're offline). Yeah, no one uses MSN simply because it's bundled. Not one:)
Re:What do...
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Real's Reality
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This thing installed data in unused portions of the boot sector. Even formatting and repartitioning the hard disk would not remove its data, which was primitive copy-protection/license data.
Isn't that what Intuit did not too long ago?
Yes, it's tax time, and I'm on my yearly anti-Quicktax crusade:)
You want to rid XP of remote exploits? I already know how. It's devilishly simple:
Turn off all listening ports. Done. Have fun exploiting my box when you can't connect to it. And no, this is not the same as unplugging the ethernet cable:)
For the vast majority of users, they don't need their computer listening unless they explicitly ask. For those that want to run a service, let them, but DON'T MAKE IT A DEFAULT OPTION.
In one fell swoop I've just prevented every remote XP exploit in existence. You're right about the email attachments, but you'll never be able to engineer around a user with superuser privledges running arbitrary executable code.
Re:A nerdy approach that certainly outweighs mine
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DIY HVAC
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· Score: 2, Informative
It has EVERYTHING to do with what you're used to. The simple fact is, there is no one correct temperature, and not everyone is comfortable living in extremes of either heat or cold.
I live in a climate known to have some of the greatest temperature variations on the planet. -40C in the winter, +40C (and humid) in the summer. Yes, Alaska is colder, and yes, Florida is much, much warmer (especially when it's humid out). But it doesn't drop to -40 in Florida that often. Up here (central Canada, for those curious), you can always tell when people have just moved here, and from where. Mostly we get people from warmer climes, and they're the ones wearing scarfs and mitts when we're walking around in a T-shirt (this is pretty much any temperature above freezing during the spring).
How's this relate to HVAC? Well, it's funny. We get roughly 2-3 months a year where the temperature is above "room" on average - that is, 20C/68F outside during the middle of the day. Yet, most new houses, and plenty of older ones, have central air. People who don't live here think we're crazy. There are really only a few weeks every summer where it's so hot that your house even warms up inside, and yet we spend a ton of cash on an A/C unit. Why?
Well, our electricity is CHEAP. Mostly (all?) hydro-electric. But the biggest reason is our bodies. Let me tell you, living in this climate, you *really* notice heat. When it gets close to 30C outside, it's unpleasant. Add in the 60-70% humidity, and I can hardly move outside. When it gets in the high 30s (100F and up for the yanks), it's intolerable. Our bodies simply aren't used to the heat. After a few days of this, most people just seem to laze around. It becomes difficult to concentrate at work, and sleeping is well nigh impossible. There's also the sweating factor. I just don't do it. It's never warm enough for me to perspire much here, unless I'm doing some strenuous activity. But for a couple of weeks every summer, people start to smell, and not in the roses kind of way.
I talk to people who live in places like Texas, Florida, Mexico.. and to them this is pretty much what it's like all the time (or at least most of the summer). They're used to it, and have adjusted. Of course, the thought of going for a walk at night when it's -25C outside is simply impossible to them:) All the talk in this story has been to the effect of "keep your thermostat at 85F and you'll save money". Sure, but I'd never sleep. I mean seriously. It doesn't cool down at night here like it does in dryer/higher places. If I'm not in a place with a basement, A/C is the only way to go.
If you're used to sleeping in 85F, fine, but not for me. If you enjoy sweating all the time, hey, that's your perogative. But I gotta tell you, I enjoy creature comforts. You could also save a lot of money by living in a tent, sleeping on the ground, or washing in a local lake/river (assuming that's legal where you live). Sometimes money isn't the only reason to do something.
To some of us, ALL TVs produce this. It's known as "CRT whine".
I've always been especially sensitive to it; it was always fun in elementary school when the teacher would spend 15 minutes trying to get the TV/VCR to work, everything seemed fine, yet no picture on the TV. I'd eventually pipe up "the TV isn't plugged in." Worked for TVs without power-on lights the best, of course, because other than the picture they have no indication of whether or not the TV is actually powered up. The teachers eventually learned to trust me on this one. I can hear CRT whine in other rooms, down the hall, you name it. I can tell blindfolded, and yes, friends and I have tested this, whether or not a TV or monitor is turned on. It freaks some people out, but a surprising number of people can hear it if it's pointed out to them.
And yes, I'm one of those people who uses LCD monitors exclusively, unless I have no choice. It's simply too irritating otherwise. Cube farms are a real treat - eventually you learn to tune it out, but it's always there in the background.
When a TV/monitor is on its last legs, it gets REALLY bad, although at that point everyone can hear it. It's fun to tell my friends when their monitor is on the fritz, I can usually pick it up months before the tube dies. I've also noticed, as have you, that newer tubes are even noisier. I notice this particularly on some models; RCA proscans are some of the worst. No idea why, other than to say welcome to my own personal hell:) When TV shopping I've actually gone to the trouble to ask if I can check out a TV in a manager's office (or some other quiet room), because it's simply too loud for me to hear if a particular set is going to bug me or not.
Oh, and walking past the wall-o-televisions at Best Buy is about as close to torture as I've experienced.:)
This has ZERO (0) effect on me. I'm never going to break the law this way.
With all due respect, that is quite possibly the stupidest argument for deciding the fairness of our judicial system.
I'm sure I can find *something* you do that can be construed as illegal. Ever speed by even as much as 5 mph? I don't. Ever spit on the sidewalk? I don't. There. I can come up with 2 laws where you should be put in jail for life. They have ZERO (0) effect on me, I'm never going to break them. By your reasoning, I should support laws like that, and not worry about any ramifications.
If you don't see a slippery slope with pretty much ANY law, you're just not thinking about it very deeply.
Sitting up in the Great White North (Canada), the general consensus up here is that OBL achieved his goals quite nicely. The terrorists have in fact won, at least as much as they attempted to win from 9/11.
The very existence of the Patriot Act, the hysteria that resulted from the anthrax scare, the massive delays going on with some flights, the incredibly annoying security checks, the fact that quite simply the life of the average American seems to have changed greatly...
You folks down there may not realize it, but what we see up here is that the US has changed, changed dramatically, changed permanently, and changed for the worse. The fact that the word "terrorism" even came up with this guy hacking WebTV is pretty much proof of that.
Yup, you (and we, in the larger global community) let the terrorists win. Now it's up to us to try to reverse some of the damage before it's too late. And I have no idea how to do that, sadly. The best I can come up with is "stop being so damn scared of your own shadow". I think we'll be dealing with these issues for decades to come.
Nothing every works right and I spend a good half hour each day recovering from crashed programs, or whacked out states of all the software I used. None of it ever works right. I've even had Notepad crash my computer (I'm sure it was a symptom of another problem, but it's still shocking when it happens).
Call me crazy, but I'd say your browser worked just fine if you were able to post this message to Slashdot. In fact, I'd bet that your software "works right" most of the time - or else why would you be using it? I know mine works pretty much all the time, maybe you should use what I use.
I think what you mean is "software doesn't work 100% correctly ALL the time". If you get stressed about something not working ALL the time, you have much deeper issues than software-induced stress:) I'd also say your Gatorade machine works pretty well, too. If there's one bottle left, that means it worked for everyone else before you. Again, you're upset because something doesn't work ALL the time, but you phrase it as though it NEVER works. Slight difference.
Back in the original 95 release, MS had a neat little bug. If you shared a folder, it was shared to the outside world by default (as it still is today, but I digress). The only security offered from within Windows was to password-protect the share. Now, the exploit:
Windows 95, and also at least the original 98, both contained a bug in which only the first character of the password had to be guessed. So, if your password was "Slashdot", I could get into your share by simply using "s". Yup, 26 tries and I'm in (iirc windows passwords have to start with a letter, but even if not, the ascii character set isn't that big). Forget dictionary attacks on the password, you were basically in within a second - and of course denied logins didn't count against you.
The patch for this wasn't released until well after 98 was on the market, which meant it sat for at least 3 years unpatched. I know damn well that it was known and being exploited before then, because I used to play jokes on my friends by getting into their supposedly protected folders. This was back in 1996.
Opaserv, among other worms, used this hole to spread through a lot of systems, but I can't find the first date any of these were noticed. So I can't prove large-scale explotation of this hole, but I do know that at least I was using it well before it was patched.
the Sega Master System had 3 or 4 months on the NES
Why do people keep repeating this on Slashdot?
Nintendo took a very famous gamble releasing the NES in North America. At the time, the home console market had been almost dead for a couple of years, and most people were of the opinion that the videogame "fad" was over. When the NES was initially released, everyone thought Nintendo was crazy. Only once the NES had shown that home videogames could once again be profitable did Sega release their system. This was a year or more after the NES was on store shelves, depending on where you were.
As for the Saturn/PS1, you're right - in some areas the Saturn did come out a few months before. Sega dropped the ball (especially after the SegaCD+32X fiasco) and failed to grab any sort of decent market share. Sony had easy pickings, because the only real competition to the PS1 was the SNES, a distinctly non-3D unit, for one thing. A similar thing happened with the Dreamcast, except it was Sony's fanbase and marketing that stopped the Dreamcast from reaching a critical mass.
Lesson: get in the game early, grab a substantial chunk of the market, and you will dominate for years. Failing this, hope like hell that your competitors who beat you are really, really poor at the game. It's worked for Sony twice now:)
Slashdot Mirror
I especially like the option in the auto-partitioner for a separate /home directory.
/home? Because Knoppix has a /home directory, and knx-hdinstall sets it up just nicely. That's where the user "Knoppix" goes. IIRC you have no choice but to set up at least one additional user other than root.
I assume you meant a separate partition for
Regardless, on a desktop machine, what difference does it make? My personal data is far more important than the OS anyway, so the whole root/non-root thing is kind of a non-issue on a single-user machine.
I'm a relatively recent Debian convert, thanks to my friends raving about apt-get mostly. I shied away from Debian for a long time because I could never figure out the installer. It's just about the most user-unfriendly application I've ever used. Almost as if they went out of their way to have everything different than everything else (hint: if 99.9% of apps use the arrow keys and enter to select options in a menu, you may want to do the same. Random keys to choose things do not help the user).
:)
Anyway, after struggling with dselect and whatever else is involved (quite frankly I always got lost about 1/4 of the way in), I discovered Knoppix. It's a non-guru's wet dream, really. Until the day I entered "apt-get upgrade". The next time I booted my machine, squid and apache were both running and were actually listening for connections. My machine tried to load ISDN drivers for some reason, along with something related to braille. I never really spent the time trying to figure out why a metric shitload of new services/modules were being loaded, because unfortunately I needed to use my computer in an unsecured environment. Oh, and I can't remove openoffice anymore either. Apt claims it's not installed, yet it runs fine. *shrug*
Installing software (and removing things other than openoffice) are a dream. Apt-get is godly. Knoppix itself has just the right amount of stuff in it for me, with some interesting extras I never would try if they weren't there. But I'll never again try an entire upgrade
I personally agree with the smoking ban as well.. even though I'm an ex-smoker.
:)
You say that like it's a surprise, and I guess to many people it is. However, the most vocal and outspoken anti-smoking crowd is generally - you guessed it - ex-smokers. Non-smokers don't like the effects of smoking. EX-smokers don't like the effects, and also resent that others are still partaking in something they can no longer do. They have even more reason to be against other people enjoying it.
I'm not implying that this is the case for you, but it's something I've noticed becoming more prevalent over the years, as more and more people kick the old death sticks.
Personally, as an ex-smoker, I couldn't care less if other people want to kill themselves (like I almost did). But I do find it funny that people will go to a place where concentrated poison is served, music is blasted so loud that frequent patrons develop hearing problems after too long, fights between complete strangers often end up with someone in the hospital... and the big problem with these establishments is that "my clothes smell when I leave".
I dunno, I guess the concept of opening a non-smoking bar never occured to the 75% of the population that doesn't smoke.
You're kidding, right?
If anything, the "Slashbot" (by which I assume you're trying to imply majority opinion here) would be bemoaning CG in movies. Lucas killed Star Wars by making it all CG, after all! Go back to how movies were done with model kits and silly putty, damnit!
Read any story here about a movie other than Jackson's LOTR, and more often than not the comments will overwelmingly be critical about CG.
It's my pedantic obligation to say this:
antisocial P Pronunciation Key (nt-sshl, nt-)
adj.
1. Shunning the society of others; not sociable.
2. Hostile to or disruptive of the established social order; marked by or engaging in behavior that violates accepted mores: gangs engaging in vandalism and other antisocial behavior.
3. Antagonistic toward or disrespectful of others; rude.
Word often have different meanings.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. For a brief moment, I thought a movie version of Wild Cards had slipped under my own personal geek radar.
:)
Alas, not so. But I'll be cheering for Jetboy all the same
They don't give a fuck about what Internet users think about shows, they care about what paying customers think.
You make it sound like those are mutually exclusive concepts. I assure you, they aren't.
Yeah, I gotta agree with you here.
I'm working on a project course to create a team of soccer-playing robots. We're not even using local vision, just a camera and capture card that (usually) picks up the whole playfield. We're building the robots out of Lego Mindstorms, commanding them through IR, and doing the actual processing on decently powered (> 1ghz) laptops. When I try to explain the difficulty of something like this to people, even to my techie friends, they just don't understand the enormity of the problem. Most people envision a situation that consists of "well, the robot should go here, so just tell it to do that" - wrap some C++ around statements like that and boom! Instand soccer.
Sorry folks, our team of 4 has been pulling 30-40 hour weeks since early January, and we're just at the point where we can accurately and consistently navigate around obstacles towards our goals. These problems are INCREDIBLY hard, and computationaly complex. We've managed to stall the robots on more than one occasion simply because the field got too complex for it to calculate a path in real-time. This is in a completely controlled, known boundary, FLAT playfield.
After this experience I have nothing but the utmost respect for the CMU team (and any others who even qualify). While humans can do these sorts of things without thinking, machines have barely scratched the surface. You wonder where your autonomous cars are? Try writing one. Talk to people who do this for a living. Pretty much anything you can do, except math itself, is non-trivial for a computer.
Ugh, there have been far far far too many MS-bashing linux-is-so-great posts on /. recently
:)
You misspelled "since day one".
You might be new here, so I'll clue you in on our dirty little secret: Slashdot is, in general, very pro-Linux, and anti-Microsoft. It's always been this way. There has never been, nor will there ever be, a "balanced view" on this site. However, there are many pro-Microsoft websites out there, so if the Linux-is-good crowd scare you, there are always alternatives.
Ask yourself this: on a website dominated by geeks (ie: people who tend to know much more than the average person about computers), why is there such a slant in favour of Linux/OSS?
Ah, the new 1) 2)??? 3)Profit scheme.
Let's see if I have this straight.
1) Cheat on your taxes
2) ???? (something to do with hope like hell the IRS doesn't find out
3) Cheap MS software!!!
Mr. Sherlock, there is No Shit here.
if the GST was that bad, why is it still around?
:)
Because even our Lords of the past 2 decades, the Liberals, realized how goddamn GOOD this tax is.
Whether it's good for the bureacracy, or good for the taxpayers, is up for debate
It would be a breach of the canadian charter of rights and freedoms to *tax* the sales of blank media on the off chance that the media might be used for an illegal use. That's like convicting anyone who ever buys blank media of a crime without any trial of any sort
with this concession against typical copyright law, comes a price. You have to pay a small tarrif on blank "audio recording media".
A rose by any other name...
Then again, this is the country that has managed to lessen the stigma of social assistance simply by referring to it as "employment insurance" as opposed to its original name "UNemployment insurance".
It's not a strike. It's a lockout. With average salaries well over $1,000,000, and players like Tie Domi making multiples of that, players don't have much to stike over.
The owners have realized that with the majority of teams (20 something out of 30, last I checked) losing millions of dollars per year, they just can't keep running this way. They're going to force salaries down a lot, or the league is going to implode.
The bad news is no hockey short term, the good news is Winnipeg might very well get a team back in the future. Well, once we get rid of that moron Bettman.
There. The most off-topic Slashdot post in history.
N64 games generally lacked FMV/prerendered CG sequences and lengthy sound samples (such as speech). So while the overall cost of games has remained pretty much a constant over the past ten years or so, the data-to-dollars ratio has swung wildly in the buyer's favor.
I'll give you the speech one. But data-to-dollars ratio? You really think a bunch of FMV clips are a bonus? I could fill a 40gb hard drive with random data (or any non-random data that's still useless), giving you a better data-to-dollars ratio than any modern console game, and it's still crap.
I have yet to see someone use WMP over Winamp for instance. I see a lot of Nero, CDex and Trillian as well.
:)
You're kidding, right?
In a world where >90% of browser use is Internet Explorer? You really think it's because it's the best browser out there? Explains all the pop-up blocking software that people are installing as of late.
And if you've never seen anyone use WMP over Winamp, you're only hanging around geeks. Hell, half my Comp Sci classmates use WMP, because "it came with Windows".
Oh yeah, and I'm sure MSN overtook ICQ as an IM protocol because it was "better". Yup, years later and it STILL doesn't have features ICQ did in 1997 (like messages being stored when you're offline). Yeah, no one uses MSN simply because it's bundled. Not one
This thing installed data in unused portions of the boot sector. Even formatting and repartitioning the hard disk would not remove its data, which was primitive copy-protection/license data.
:)
Isn't that what Intuit did not too long ago?
Yes, it's tax time, and I'm on my yearly anti-Quicktax crusade
You want to rid XP of remote exploits? I already know how. It's devilishly simple:
:)
Turn off all listening ports. Done. Have fun exploiting my box when you can't connect to it. And no, this is not the same as unplugging the ethernet cable
For the vast majority of users, they don't need their computer listening unless they explicitly ask. For those that want to run a service, let them, but DON'T MAKE IT A DEFAULT OPTION.
In one fell swoop I've just prevented every remote XP exploit in existence. You're right about the email attachments, but you'll never be able to engineer around a user with superuser privledges running arbitrary executable code.
It has EVERYTHING to do with what you're used to. The simple fact is, there is no one correct temperature, and not everyone is comfortable living in extremes of either heat or cold.
:) All the talk in this story has been to the effect of "keep your thermostat at 85F and you'll save money". Sure, but I'd never sleep. I mean seriously. It doesn't cool down at night here like it does in dryer/higher places. If I'm not in a place with a basement, A/C is the only way to go.
I live in a climate known to have some of the greatest temperature variations on the planet. -40C in the winter, +40C (and humid) in the summer. Yes, Alaska is colder, and yes, Florida is much, much warmer (especially when it's humid out). But it doesn't drop to -40 in Florida that often. Up here (central Canada, for those curious), you can always tell when people have just moved here, and from where. Mostly we get people from warmer climes, and they're the ones wearing scarfs and mitts when we're walking around in a T-shirt (this is pretty much any temperature above freezing during the spring).
How's this relate to HVAC? Well, it's funny. We get roughly 2-3 months a year where the temperature is above "room" on average - that is, 20C/68F outside during the middle of the day. Yet, most new houses, and plenty of older ones, have central air. People who don't live here think we're crazy. There are really only a few weeks every summer where it's so hot that your house even warms up inside, and yet we spend a ton of cash on an A/C unit. Why?
Well, our electricity is CHEAP. Mostly (all?) hydro-electric. But the biggest reason is our bodies. Let me tell you, living in this climate, you *really* notice heat. When it gets close to 30C outside, it's unpleasant. Add in the 60-70% humidity, and I can hardly move outside. When it gets in the high 30s (100F and up for the yanks), it's intolerable. Our bodies simply aren't used to the heat. After a few days of this, most people just seem to laze around. It becomes difficult to concentrate at work, and sleeping is well nigh impossible. There's also the sweating factor. I just don't do it. It's never warm enough for me to perspire much here, unless I'm doing some strenuous activity. But for a couple of weeks every summer, people start to smell, and not in the roses kind of way.
I talk to people who live in places like Texas, Florida, Mexico.. and to them this is pretty much what it's like all the time (or at least most of the summer). They're used to it, and have adjusted. Of course, the thought of going for a walk at night when it's -25C outside is simply impossible to them
If you're used to sleeping in 85F, fine, but not for me. If you enjoy sweating all the time, hey, that's your perogative. But I gotta tell you, I enjoy creature comforts. You could also save a lot of money by living in a tent, sleeping on the ground, or washing in a local lake/river (assuming that's legal where you live). Sometimes money isn't the only reason to do something.
To some of us, ALL TVs produce this. It's known as "CRT whine".
:) When TV shopping I've actually gone to the trouble to ask if I can check out a TV in a manager's office (or some other quiet room), because it's simply too loud for me to hear if a particular set is going to bug me or not.
:)
I've always been especially sensitive to it; it was always fun in elementary school when the teacher would spend 15 minutes trying to get the TV/VCR to work, everything seemed fine, yet no picture on the TV. I'd eventually pipe up "the TV isn't plugged in." Worked for TVs without power-on lights the best, of course, because other than the picture they have no indication of whether or not the TV is actually powered up. The teachers eventually learned to trust me on this one. I can hear CRT whine in other rooms, down the hall, you name it. I can tell blindfolded, and yes, friends and I have tested this, whether or not a TV or monitor is turned on. It freaks some people out, but a surprising number of people can hear it if it's pointed out to them.
And yes, I'm one of those people who uses LCD monitors exclusively, unless I have no choice. It's simply too irritating otherwise. Cube farms are a real treat - eventually you learn to tune it out, but it's always there in the background.
When a TV/monitor is on its last legs, it gets REALLY bad, although at that point everyone can hear it. It's fun to tell my friends when their monitor is on the fritz, I can usually pick it up months before the tube dies. I've also noticed, as have you, that newer tubes are even noisier. I notice this particularly on some models; RCA proscans are some of the worst. No idea why, other than to say welcome to my own personal hell
Oh, and walking past the wall-o-televisions at Best Buy is about as close to torture as I've experienced.
This has ZERO (0) effect on me. I'm never going to break the law this way.
With all due respect, that is quite possibly the stupidest argument for deciding the fairness of our judicial system.
I'm sure I can find *something* you do that can be construed as illegal. Ever speed by even as much as 5 mph? I don't. Ever spit on the sidewalk? I don't. There. I can come up with 2 laws where you should be put in jail for life. They have ZERO (0) effect on me, I'm never going to break them. By your reasoning, I should support laws like that, and not worry about any ramifications.
If you don't see a slippery slope with pretty much ANY law, you're just not thinking about it very deeply.
Sitting up in the Great White North (Canada), the general consensus up here is that OBL achieved his goals quite nicely. The terrorists have in fact won, at least as much as they attempted to win from 9/11.
The very existence of the Patriot Act, the hysteria that resulted from the anthrax scare, the massive delays going on with some flights, the incredibly annoying security checks, the fact that quite simply the life of the average American seems to have changed greatly...
You folks down there may not realize it, but what we see up here is that the US has changed, changed dramatically, changed permanently, and changed for the worse. The fact that the word "terrorism" even came up with this guy hacking WebTV is pretty much proof of that.
Yup, you (and we, in the larger global community) let the terrorists win. Now it's up to us to try to reverse some of the damage before it's too late. And I have no idea how to do that, sadly. The best I can come up with is "stop being so damn scared of your own shadow". I think we'll be dealing with these issues for decades to come.
Nothing every works right and I spend a good half hour each day recovering from crashed programs, or whacked out states of all the software I used. None of it ever works right. I've even had Notepad crash my computer (I'm sure it was a symptom of another problem, but it's still shocking when it happens).
:) I'd also say your Gatorade machine works pretty well, too. If there's one bottle left, that means it worked for everyone else before you. Again, you're upset because something doesn't work ALL the time, but you phrase it as though it NEVER works. Slight difference.
Call me crazy, but I'd say your browser worked just fine if you were able to post this message to Slashdot. In fact, I'd bet that your software "works right" most of the time - or else why would you be using it? I know mine works pretty much all the time, maybe you should use what I use.
I think what you mean is "software doesn't work 100% correctly ALL the time". If you get stressed about something not working ALL the time, you have much deeper issues than software-induced stress
Windows file sharing.
Back in the original 95 release, MS had a neat little bug. If you shared a folder, it was shared to the outside world by default (as it still is today, but I digress). The only security offered from within Windows was to password-protect the share. Now, the exploit:
Windows 95, and also at least the original 98, both contained a bug in which only the first character of the password had to be guessed. So, if your password was "Slashdot", I could get into your share by simply using "s". Yup, 26 tries and I'm in (iirc windows passwords have to start with a letter, but even if not, the ascii character set isn't that big). Forget dictionary attacks on the password, you were basically in within a second - and of course denied logins didn't count against you.
The patch for this wasn't released until well after 98 was on the market, which meant it sat for at least 3 years unpatched. I know damn well that it was known and being exploited before then, because I used to play jokes on my friends by getting into their supposedly protected folders. This was back in 1996.
Opaserv, among other worms, used this hole to spread through a lot of systems, but I can't find the first date any of these were noticed. So I can't prove large-scale explotation of this hole, but I do know that at least I was using it well before it was patched.
the Sega Master System had 3 or 4 months on the NES
:)
Why do people keep repeating this on Slashdot?
Nintendo took a very famous gamble releasing the NES in North America. At the time, the home console market had been almost dead for a couple of years, and most people were of the opinion that the videogame "fad" was over. When the NES was initially released, everyone thought Nintendo was crazy. Only once the NES had shown that home videogames could once again be profitable did Sega release their system. This was a year or more after the NES was on store shelves, depending on where you were.
As for the Saturn/PS1, you're right - in some areas the Saturn did come out a few months before. Sega dropped the ball (especially after the SegaCD+32X fiasco) and failed to grab any sort of decent market share. Sony had easy pickings, because the only real competition to the PS1 was the SNES, a distinctly non-3D unit, for one thing. A similar thing happened with the Dreamcast, except it was Sony's fanbase and marketing that stopped the Dreamcast from reaching a critical mass.
Lesson: get in the game early, grab a substantial chunk of the market, and you will dominate for years. Failing this, hope like hell that your competitors who beat you are really, really poor at the game. It's worked for Sony twice now
Sorry, I meant thought up by Nintendo.
:)
Of course, mentioning the 7800 just reinforces my argument that backwards compatibility has little, if anything, to do with a console's success