Re:Rudimentary cache (since Google doesn't have it
on
Physical ASCII Mosaic
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· Score: 2
Calista Flockhart isn't a cartoon character? Coulda fooled me.
What a misogynist thing to say. I've had it with so-called feminists who hate a woman for her body shape. Now, Flockhart doesn't do much for me--not my type--but her body is hers, and she should not be hated so for it.
Why not? They are the manual pages, hence the name. The original Unix manual was the man pages printed out; the man pages were the manual, online. The pages offer help and documentation for every part of the system.
This is, incidentally, why GNU's broken manpages are so intolerably evil. Info's great--it's far better than man. But it should never replace man. Man is usable in situations where info is not. Man has advantages info lacks.
I want to change the file permissions on this file so that noone[sic] can read, write or execute this file but me... Let[sic] see... 4 = read, 2 = write, 1 = execute. Therefore I have to chmod 0700[sic]
Alternatively, I want to make sure that none but I can read it. This means that no other user or group of users can do anything to it. I want to subtractall privileges from others and groups. Thus I want to chmod og-a. There, that wasn't too bad, was it?
How interesting. A few months back various groups were crying out that the wholesale conception and killing of embryos was needed to cure them of their diseases, and that it was simply irresponsible to ask how they justified killing others to save themselves. And now we find that there are viable alternatives to mass-murder. Unfortunately, some embryos were already slain in the headlong rush for knowledge deprived of ethics--but at least no more need be.
It would almost be amusing, were it not so deadly serious.
Now we can get about the serious business of curing disease.
You lie, or are mistaken. Apple bought the right to talk to the Xerox PARC engineers. The use of the GUI was on the up-and-up. The GEM lawsuit was essentially a trade-dress suit--which is fair. So was the Windows one, which was slightly less fair, but still, I think, within the realm of decent acts. Microsoft had previously indicated acceptance of Apple's claims--surely then it should have been held to the deals it made.
There are technical reasons that Macs went in for co-operative multi-tasking, unprotected memory &c. They don't make a lot of sense nowadays, but they were once compelling.
Students need to realize that they aren't the end-all-be-all of the Univ system...
Actually, they are. Who pays for the lion's share of the school? They do. Where would the school be without them? Nowhere. Are they responsible to the administration? No, and they should not be--they are the customer. Is the administration repsonsible to them? No, but it should be.
No other industry steps upon its customers like academia does. The school's services, including the network, are bought buy the students. They obviously want more bandwidth--buy it. And charge them for it. But, and here's just a little hint, don't socialise the cost across everyone. It's wrong to make CS students pay for the football team, and wrong to make Sally Off-campus and Joe Email pay for Ted MP3's music habit. Do like the telcos do--give the students various rate plans.
If any other industry treated its clients like the university system does, then there'd be a lot of bankrupt companies. I'm glad that I am in the real world, where I can pay for what I want, don't pay for what I don't want (well, except for taxes) and am free.
Who cares if the student drinks too much? If he keeps on paying tuition, let him stick around. What he does is his own business. Collecting tuition in return for education is the college's business. Everything else (including athletics) is superfluous.
Now, if the student damages school property, or allows his GPA to slip too low &c., then that is a horse of another colour entirely...
This hilights an attitude I found all-too-prevalent when I was in college. Unlike in every business, schools do not recognise who their customers are. Students are the customers--they are the ones pating the administrators' salaries, the ones without whom there would be no school.
The students do not exist for the school; the school exists for the students. They are the customer, and should be the boss.
Part of the problem is that schools are very socialist. Typically students pay an activity fee and get all college services for free or for a niggling cost. This is wrong. They should be able to opt out of that which they don't desire, and pay only for what they want. When I was in school, part of my fee went to the football team. I never attended a game. I never wanted to see grown men wearing spandex and slapping one another's rears. So why pay for it? OTOH, I used the campus gun locker to store my rifle, and I used the network extensively, and I enjoyed going to Springfest. I should have paid individually for those things.
Schools should charge students for bandwidth used. If a student wishes, he can go for the cheap-but-slow plan, or ante up and get more bang for more bucks. We Have the Technology. This is right, just and fair. Honestly, most folks don't need more than maybe 128kbps max. Some people want more than that. Let them pay.
But the attitude that the students exist as a nuisance to the school is foolish, for without them there would be no network, no sysadmins and no college. The customer is always right--even when he's wrong. And the students are your customer. They do not exist at your sufferance: you do at theirs.
If someone smokes it doesn't mean they don't value life, it means they are a weakling with no self-will to stop and are probably pretty stupid for starting in the first place.
Bullshit. Pure and utter bullshit. Have you ever stopped to consider that some folks, just maybe, smoke because they actively want to? I love tobacco. I love smoking a pipe. I enjoy the occasional cigar. Even a good cigarette every couple of months (sadly, there aren't many good brands--I think it must be the paper). Very infrequently I'll have some chewing tobacco.
I smoke because I value my life. I want to enjoy the time I have. I like the taste of the tobacco as it swirls up the stem and out the mouthpiece. I love the feel of the smoke. I enjoy blowing smoke-rings.
And you know something? Far from being addicted, I often forget to smoke. As in, for a week or two at a time. I've been smoking for six years now--more than half a decade--and I have never been addicted. That's the nice thing about pipesmoking.
You know something else? Oddly enough, pipesmokers live longer, as was found in the '64 Surgeon General's report. The '70 Surgeon General's report found that pipesmokers who smoke 4 or fewer bowls a day live longer than nonsmokers.
It seems to me that the stupid ones are those who do not engage in a pleasurable, enjoyable and safe activity which prolongs their lifespans. It seems to me that the weaklings are those without the self-will to disbelieve that lies which are crammed down their throats.
I suppose my point was lost in this, though: the submission itself was appalingly careless about human life.
Bullshit. Sorry, but five lives out of two hundred and fifty million over the course of 3 months are nothing. Yes, they were human beings. Yes, they loved and were loved in return. But more people die from falling airplane toilet-flushings! Five lives are experimental error. That's the cold hard truth.
And to inconvenience and endanger millions because of five deaths is careless disregard for the living. Did you see the official notice on things which are effected by irradiation? Medical samples, testing kits, contact lenses, food? How many lives have been lost because the right medicine wasn't available, because the testing kit lied, because the fellow's contact lenses were screwy and he crashed into a tree?
That's careless disregard. Pointing out the lunacy of even bothering to trouble oneself over fewer deaths than are due to sharks isn't.
I recommend CVS. Much better and more scalable for large-scale document sharing. LaTeX makes a wonderful document format. And emacs has an excellent LaTeX mode and good CVS support. See where I'm headed here?
There's a reason the educated world did so well for so long. Microsoft Ain't It.
I don't watch TV anymore (just DVDs & tapes), but the bogus time slot sounds like exactly what happened to The Single Guy when I was at college. It used to be a good show in a great slot--between Friends and Seinfeld. Then they moved it to its own night and ran it head-to-head with some show I don't recall anymore, but which was better. It was suicide, plain and simple: like sending out a poodle to fight a hippo. And there was no reason for it. The network had a guaranteed audience for an hour-and-a-half, and three good shows in each slot. But they killed that, for no reason I can discern. And a good show died for no good reason.
That sort of nonsense is not, actually, why I don't watch TV. The simple fact of the matter is that television is finely crafted to be as appealing as possible. As such, it
s deuced difficult not to be attracted to it. And if one's not careful, one might spend all one's time in front of the tube. So I play on the computer, which is slightly less bad, or read books, which is much better. More of the former than the latter, I'm afraid:-)
I am reminded of the Greek philosopher who `proved' that one can never get from Point A to Point B. After all, one must pass through a point exactly halfway between A and B; let's call it Point A'. And one must pass through a point exactly halfway through a point exactly halfway between Point A' and Point B; let's call that Point A''. And one must pass through A''', a point exactly halfway from A'' to B. One can prove that there are an infinite number of points between A and B, and since no-one can traverse the infinite in finite time, no-one can cross from A to B. QED.
Except that I can cross from A to B. QED.
This is much the same sort of silly nonsense.
I figure that alien life probably doesn't exist--but I don't resort to silly arguments to `prove' it.
I dunno--domain name speculation and stealing seems to still be going on. There used to be a wonderful site at www.mixdrinks.com. It was owned by a bartender who put his magnum opus on the net. He even had old-time pictures of his ancestors in the banners.
It's now being glommed onto by *#@(!$ thieves, more's the pity. And the bartender's work has disappeared. Wish I knew where to find it--it did well for me back in school:-)
That said, I still got three new shirts, a pair of trousers, some candy, and $150. Go me!
What a selfish bastard you are, you dont think thats a lot? You are the kind of person that gives a bad name to americans!
Well, let's see:
Three shirts @ $30 apiece
One pair of trousers @ $60
Misc. candy, let's say $10
$150 in cash
That adds up to $250. No, that's not that much, for someone living in the civilised world. That's a fortnight's rent on a cheap single bedroom flat here in Denver. That's enough for two to go out to dinner three or four times.
But it's certainly appreciated--that was obvious from the poster's tone.
Re:religion don't enter into it.
on
Merry Christmas
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· Score: 2
As we know, Christmas is a holiday to celebrate the birth of Christ and the church made it dec 25th in order to usurp a pagan holiday.
Not quite. There are some good reasons to believe that Christ was indeed born on the 25th. I don't recall any at the moment (that not being my field of study), save this one. December is the time of year when the lambs for Passover (Hebrew Pesach, Greek Pascha) were born. These same lambs would then be sacrificed some months later. Christ being the ultimate Paschal Lamb, it makes sense that he be born at the same time.
When I moved to the States from Japan, I thought that Metric was the best invention since the butterknife. I still puzzle people by asking them to convert from miles to inches for arbitrary long distances. They get the point quickly after trying to come up with some answer for 2 minutes.
Why? When do you ever feel the need to convert from miles to inches? It never comes up. When does one ever feel the need to convert from millimeters to gigameters? It never comes up. The AU and parsec are not attractive SI units, but they sure do make sense with their problem domains. Ditto for the inch and the mile.
Metricists are silly. They optimise for the unlikely case (conversion on paper between units) and not for the common case (division and multiplication of concrete measures). It's very easy to cut a foot into inches (half, half, thirds); it's very easy to cut a gallon into cups (half, half, half, half); it's hell itself to cut a metre into a centimetre (half, half, fifths, fifths--shoot me now!).
These are the same people who tried to cut France into equal-sized, equally populated regions. Never mind that population is not distributed equally. The Enlightenment fallacy is that the world is neatly measurable. The truth is that it's not, and that One True System cannot work. Adaptation and flexibility are needed: true elegance, not elegance-on-paper.
Kilobyte and megabyte make sense within the problem domain--for hard drives as well as for RAM. A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. The lunatic raving of infantile minds cannot change this fact.
Somebody mod this man up. He speaks Truth. The difference between a megabyte and a mebibyte is 0 bytes; they are both 1,024 * 1,024 bytes. The difference between a megabyte and a mebibyte is that one is a standard, and the other is the lunatic product of a diseased and inflexible mind.
And this is why the metric failure is such a loss. Unlike a real system, it is unable to accept that (gasp!) different circumstances call for different approaches. It is a product of the same yobbos who tried to divide France into equal-sized, equally-populated regions. Given the population is not evenly distributed, this is impossible. This fact did not stop their lunatic effort.
Kilobyte is exactly the term which should be used. The standard is already here; let those with small and inflexible brains get used to it.
Why'd you say 61 cm? Why not say 2 feet? According to units, 61 cm = 24.02 ft. Given that two feet is a nice round measurement, and that 61 centimetres is not, I hazard a guess that the resolution is, in fact, the former.
Metric units suck. Especially when they're inappropriate.
Double entry accounting is vital. It's not there to check math--it's to accurately represent the flow of money. Its invention was what fueled the Italian Rennaissance. Its use is what enables one to accurately track one's financial status. It's a Good Thing.
Double entry does not mean that you need to enter things twice--not with a computer to do it for you. What it means is that every transaction involves taking money from one account and putting it in another. Unlike a cheque register, where money just flows in and out, a double entry system shows where money comes from and where it goes.
GnuCash is a pretty good DE accounting system. It's been designed modularly. The transaction engine is suitable for business use--it's the front end which is currently more-or-less a personal use sort of thing. Although you'd be surprised how usable it would be for a smallish business. It does have quite a way to go, admittedly. But it gets better with each release.
You're thinking Rohirric, which is simply Old English (although not the traditional West Saxon one is typically taught). Elvish is nothing like Anglo-Saxon anything. Compare the Rohirric `Ferthu Theoden hal' to the Elvish `A Elbereth Gilthoniel.' The first is pretty obvious; the second is pretty obviously foreign.
Much of Quenya and Sindarin (Tolkien's Elvish tongues) was picked out of Finnish and Welsh, with a lot of additions and evolutions.
He uses English for the Riders of Rohan because, IIRC, he'd not gotten around to developing a full Rohirric. Or possibly he just loved OE too much to leave it out:-)
on a more USian note, how about introducing a few hundred wolves back into the ecosystem to at least nibble at the incredible deer population? what's a few small children, anyway?
That's American...
That's why we have deer hunters. If the population gets out of hand, you simply increase the number of deer per license; if it gets too low, you decrease the number of tags. Simplicity itself.
The advantage is that deer hunters kill far fewer humans than do wolves/bobcats/bears/other predators. The disadvantage is that said nasty maneating evil killing machines die out. Or perhaps that's another advantage...
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What a misogynist thing to say. I've had it with so-called feminists who hate a woman for her body shape. Now, Flockhart doesn't do much for me--not my type--but her body is hers, and she should not be hated so for it.
Why not? They are the manual pages, hence the name. The original Unix manual was the man pages printed out; the man pages were the manual, online. The pages offer help and documentation for every part of the system.
This is, incidentally, why GNU's broken manpages are so intolerably evil. Info's great--it's far better than man. But it should never replace man. Man is usable in situations where info is not. Man has advantages info lacks.
I want to change the file permissions on this file so that noone[sic] can read, write or execute this file but me... Let[sic] see... 4 = read, 2 = write, 1 = execute. Therefore I have to chmod 0700[sic]
Alternatively, I want to make sure that none but I can read it. This means that no other user or group of users can do anything to it. I want to subtract all privileges from others and groups. Thus I want to chmod og-a. There, that wasn't too bad, was it?
It would almost be amusing, were it not so deadly serious.
Now we can get about the serious business of curing disease.
Moron. The difference is that these can be harvested without killing the adult. Embryonic stem cells could only be harvested by slaying the embryo.
You lie, or are mistaken. Apple bought the right to talk to the Xerox PARC engineers. The use of the GUI was on the up-and-up. The GEM lawsuit was essentially a trade-dress suit--which is fair. So was the Windows one, which was slightly less fair, but still, I think, within the realm of decent acts. Microsoft had previously indicated acceptance of Apple's claims--surely then it should have been held to the deals it made.
There are technical reasons that Macs went in for co-operative multi-tasking, unprotected memory &c. They don't make a lot of sense nowadays, but they were once compelling.
Oh, you're a free university, then? Students don't pay tuition? How odd...
That must come as quite a surprise to those with financial aid, or who must work to afford tuition.
* Skip Entire Silly Series
ST just Ain't That Great, folks. Poor writing, poor economics, poor physics, poor philosophy: a poor show.
Now, Blackadder and Red Dwarf: those are shows!
Actually, they are. Who pays for the lion's share of the school? They do. Where would the school be without them? Nowhere. Are they responsible to the administration? No, and they should not be--they are the customer. Is the administration repsonsible to them? No, but it should be.
No other industry steps upon its customers like academia does. The school's services, including the network, are bought buy the students. They obviously want more bandwidth--buy it. And charge them for it. But, and here's just a little hint, don't socialise the cost across everyone. It's wrong to make CS students pay for the football team, and wrong to make Sally Off-campus and Joe Email pay for Ted MP3's music habit. Do like the telcos do--give the students various rate plans.
If any other industry treated its clients like the university system does, then there'd be a lot of bankrupt companies. I'm glad that I am in the real world, where I can pay for what I want, don't pay for what I don't want (well, except for taxes) and am free.
Now, if the student damages school property, or allows his GPA to slip too low &c., then that is a horse of another colour entirely...
The students do not exist for the school; the school exists for the students. They are the customer, and should be the boss.
Part of the problem is that schools are very socialist. Typically students pay an activity fee and get all college services for free or for a niggling cost. This is wrong. They should be able to opt out of that which they don't desire, and pay only for what they want. When I was in school, part of my fee went to the football team. I never attended a game. I never wanted to see grown men wearing spandex and slapping one another's rears. So why pay for it? OTOH, I used the campus gun locker to store my rifle, and I used the network extensively, and I enjoyed going to Springfest. I should have paid individually for those things.
Schools should charge students for bandwidth used. If a student wishes, he can go for the cheap-but-slow plan, or ante up and get more bang for more bucks. We Have the Technology. This is right, just and fair. Honestly, most folks don't need more than maybe 128kbps max. Some people want more than that. Let them pay.
But the attitude that the students exist as a nuisance to the school is foolish, for without them there would be no network, no sysadmins and no college. The customer is always right--even when he's wrong. And the students are your customer. They do not exist at your sufferance: you do at theirs.
Bullshit. Pure and utter bullshit. Have you ever stopped to consider that some folks, just maybe, smoke because they actively want to? I love tobacco. I love smoking a pipe. I enjoy the occasional cigar. Even a good cigarette every couple of months (sadly, there aren't many good brands--I think it must be the paper). Very infrequently I'll have some chewing tobacco.
I smoke because I value my life. I want to enjoy the time I have. I like the taste of the tobacco as it swirls up the stem and out the mouthpiece. I love the feel of the smoke. I enjoy blowing smoke-rings.
And you know something? Far from being addicted, I often forget to smoke. As in, for a week or two at a time. I've been smoking for six years now--more than half a decade--and I have never been addicted. That's the nice thing about pipesmoking.
You know something else? Oddly enough, pipesmokers live longer, as was found in the '64 Surgeon General's report. The '70 Surgeon General's report found that pipesmokers who smoke 4 or fewer bowls a day live longer than nonsmokers.
It seems to me that the stupid ones are those who do not engage in a pleasurable, enjoyable and safe activity which prolongs their lifespans. It seems to me that the weaklings are those without the self-will to disbelieve that lies which are crammed down their throats.
Smokers of the World Unite! In Fumo Veritas!
Bullshit. Sorry, but five lives out of two hundred and fifty million over the course of 3 months are nothing. Yes, they were human beings. Yes, they loved and were loved in return. But more people die from falling airplane toilet-flushings! Five lives are experimental error. That's the cold hard truth.
And to inconvenience and endanger millions because of five deaths is careless disregard for the living. Did you see the official notice on things which are effected by irradiation? Medical samples, testing kits, contact lenses, food? How many lives have been lost because the right medicine wasn't available, because the testing kit lied, because the fellow's contact lenses were screwy and he crashed into a tree?
That's careless disregard. Pointing out the lunacy of even bothering to trouble oneself over fewer deaths than are due to sharks isn't.
There's a reason the educated world did so well for so long. Microsoft Ain't It.
That sort of nonsense is not, actually, why I don't watch TV. The simple fact of the matter is that television is finely crafted to be as appealing as possible. As such, it s deuced difficult not to be attracted to it. And if one's not careful, one might spend all one's time in front of the tube. So I play on the computer, which is slightly less bad, or read books, which is much better. More of the former than the latter, I'm afraid:-)
Except that I can cross from A to B. QED.
This is much the same sort of silly nonsense.
I figure that alien life probably doesn't exist--but I don't resort to silly arguments to `prove' it.
It's now being glommed onto by *#@(!$ thieves, more's the pity. And the bartender's work has disappeared. Wish I knew where to find it--it did well for me back in school:-)
Well, let's see:
That adds up to $250. No, that's not that much, for someone living in the civilised world. That's a fortnight's rent on a cheap single bedroom flat here in Denver. That's enough for two to go out to dinner three or four times.
But it's certainly appreciated--that was obvious from the poster's tone.
Not quite. There are some good reasons to believe that Christ was indeed born on the 25th. I don't recall any at the moment (that not being my field of study), save this one. December is the time of year when the lambs for Passover (Hebrew Pesach, Greek Pascha) were born. These same lambs would then be sacrificed some months later. Christ being the ultimate Paschal Lamb, it makes sense that he be born at the same time.
When I moved to the States from Japan, I thought that Metric was the best invention since the butterknife. I still puzzle people by asking them to convert from miles to inches for arbitrary long distances. They get the point quickly after trying to come up with some answer for 2 minutes.
Why? When do you ever feel the need to convert from miles to inches? It never comes up. When does one ever feel the need to convert from millimeters to gigameters? It never comes up. The AU and parsec are not attractive SI units, but they sure do make sense with their problem domains. Ditto for the inch and the mile.
Metricists are silly. They optimise for the unlikely case (conversion on paper between units) and not for the common case (division and multiplication of concrete measures). It's very easy to cut a foot into inches (half, half, thirds); it's very easy to cut a gallon into cups (half, half, half, half); it's hell itself to cut a metre into a centimetre (half, half, fifths, fifths--shoot me now!).
These are the same people who tried to cut France into equal-sized, equally populated regions. Never mind that population is not distributed equally. The Enlightenment fallacy is that the world is neatly measurable. The truth is that it's not, and that One True System cannot work. Adaptation and flexibility are needed: true elegance, not elegance-on-paper.
Kilobyte and megabyte make sense within the problem domain--for hard drives as well as for RAM. A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. The lunatic raving of infantile minds cannot change this fact.
Somebody mod this man up. He speaks Truth. The difference between a megabyte and a mebibyte is 0 bytes; they are both 1,024 * 1,024 bytes. The difference between a megabyte and a mebibyte is that one is a standard, and the other is the lunatic product of a diseased and inflexible mind.
Kilobyte is exactly the term which should be used. The standard is already here; let those with small and inflexible brains get used to it.
Metric units suck. Especially when they're inappropriate.
Double entry does not mean that you need to enter things twice--not with a computer to do it for you. What it means is that every transaction involves taking money from one account and putting it in another. Unlike a cheque register, where money just flows in and out, a double entry system shows where money comes from and where it goes.
GnuCash is a pretty good DE accounting system. It's been designed modularly. The transaction engine is suitable for business use--it's the front end which is currently more-or-less a personal use sort of thing. Although you'd be surprised how usable it would be for a smallish business. It does have quite a way to go, admittedly. But it gets better with each release.
Much of Quenya and Sindarin (Tolkien's Elvish tongues) was picked out of Finnish and Welsh, with a lot of additions and evolutions.
He uses English for the Riders of Rohan because, IIRC, he'd not gotten around to developing a full Rohirric. Or possibly he just loved OE too much to leave it out:-)
That's American...
That's why we have deer hunters. If the population gets out of hand, you simply increase the number of deer per license; if it gets too low, you decrease the number of tags. Simplicity itself.
The advantage is that deer hunters kill far fewer humans than do wolves/bobcats/bears/other predators. The disadvantage is that said nasty maneating evil killing machines die out. Or perhaps that's another advantage...