Wordperfect file format was frozen at around version 5.1 -- fifteen years ago or more. Good move -- respectful to their customers. Microsoft doesn't even respect their customers enough to maintain compatibility with earlier versions of their own products.
Why is small imp[ortant] ? last time I checked, hardrives are ~ 1 dollar per gig...
Maybe drives are cheap, but they haven't gotten much faster, in recent years. So code bloat is still a problem, since it means that programs are slow to load.
Big bloated programs are slow to swap too. This is much more of a problem than it really deserves to be for users of Microsoft products. Rather than taking the hit for producing a suite of horribly bloated products that were slow to load Microsoft chooses to betray the true interests of their users, by cheating.
Microsoft gives its own products preferential access to system resources. In particular it gives its products preferential access to system memory.
In 1999 I visited a friend of mine. Her brand new computer was comparable to mine, but much slower. It was slower to boot, and non-MS applications ran much more sluggishly.
Why? When she booted an extra minute or two was spent trying to load all of the MS office suite 2000 into her 32 megs of RAM. Of course there wasn't room, so you could hear her hard drive thrashing, as everything MS tried to put into RAM promptly got swapped out.
Finally, when all the thrashing settled down, what happened when you tried to invoke Netscape Navigator? You would wait while it was invoked. And then, heartbreakingly, as soon as you let the program go idle, the disk would start thrashing like crazy?
Why?
Microsoft was cheating. Microsoft was trying to hide that their applications were slow to load by keeping them constantly loaded and ready to go.
Was there a way to turn this dangerous feature off? Maybe, but it was wildly irresponsible of Microsoft to have put this feature in, in the first place.
Doesn't the modern family farm, with land, stock, machinery, barns, cost over a million bucks? Any you thought that student loan was going to kill you?
Another weird one, the
anglerfish. The male bites the female, taps into her bloodstream, and most of his organs wither away, except for his sexual organs.
Sex is wonder and mysterious. Vive le difference. I wouldn't have it any other way. I was delighted to learn it is much more mysterious than I thought.
Sex in birds doesn't work the same way as it does in mammals. Quoting from the linked document:
Birds are different in that their male and female sex-chromosome roles are reversed from mammals, meaning that the female is heterozygous and the male is homozygous. Also, in birds we use Z and W instead of X and Y. (These letters refer to the general shapes of the chromosomes.) So, a male bird is ZZ, and a female bird is ZW. This leads us to the topic of sex-linked traits.
And it works ever more weirdly in social insects like bees. In those species the male drone doesn't have a pair of chromosomes at all. In bees the hive's queen was fertilized on her nuptial flight, and carries a lifetime's supply of sperm. The workers are virgin females. But, unlike what I was taught when I was a kid, they are not sterile. They too can lay eggs -- unfertilized eggs. And these unfertilized eggs, with only a single set of chromosomes, not a pair, can hatch, and grow to maturity, to produce the male drones.
Lol. It irritates me when fans of the Aliens movies refer to the worker aliens as drones.
Your wife has leukemia and you're posting on Slashdot? Don't you see anything wrong with that? Isn't there somewhere you need to be, someone that you should spend every possible minute with because they might not have many of them left?
From the journal...
for the past four weeks I've slept in a chair in the hospital...
So cut the poor guy some slack. I hope he tells his wife slashdotters say, "get well soon" -- instead of thinking about how some coward tried to make him feel even worse than he felt before.
April Ship of Fools?
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I thought April Fool's Day was a couple of weeks ago.:-)
Browsing the Ship of Fools site I came across the contest to pick an
11th commandment. The first winner was "Thou shalt not worship false pop idols". The top five choices won digital cameras.:-)
$14,000,000 is peanuts for any kind of real transit system. raven42rac says
"
I, for one, would much rather ride a Maglev monorail with others, than drive a gas-guzzling car by myself."
I strongly suspect that this particular project is not a substitute for driving a gas-guzzling car. On any campus I have ever been on almost no-one drives a car to get from one spot on campus to another. I strongly suspect this monorail system is substitute for riding one's bike, or going by foot.
When I got my cats "chipped", 12 years ago, the "chip" was about 2 millimetres by 2 millimetres.
About the size of a piece of confetti. Or maybe quite a bit smaller.
What if you had riot control personnel carrying shotguns loaded with shells that shot out clouds of RFID confetti?
Back in the days of punch cards and paper tape some people used the "chad" from those cards in place of confetti. But it wasn't a nice thing to do. Chad, punched from card stock, with sharp edges, is much harder to remove than regular confetti. There is a small amount of oil in punch cards and punch tape.
You can't just brush it off.
If an artifact can make chad hard to brush off, then how difficult could you make it to brush off dozens or hundreds of stealth RFID chad, specially designed to be hard to find and brush off? Your demonstrator only has to miss one for you to be able to read their chip with a reader. When they get on the subway, for instance. Even if they have stashed a complete change of clothes the chip might be in their hair.
I agree the gun looked fake. And the details were suspicious.
If you don't care if the rioters see you fire at them, and you don't care if they feel the pain of the, um, "injections", could chips like those used for pets be loaded into something like a shotgun shell?
After the riot you could scan pedestrians to see if they got chipped. Snap their pictures then. Have the turnstiles at the Subway activate hidden cameras to take the pictures of chipped riders automatically.
If you are scanning people shortly after they get chipped it doesn't matter if the chip is merely embedded in their clothing.
Use different id chips for each riot.
"Ah, Tom Hayden, my chip readers shows you were at both Seattle and Chicago 1968. Coincidence? I think not. You must be a terrorist ringleader. I have a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay for you my friend."
The noun for citizens of the United States is Americans not USians. USian makes you sound like some sort of ignorant turd, or French.
Lol. Good troll. Lots of countries get called something else in foreign countries. In English speaking countries we call it "Germany". In French speaking countries they call it "Allemagne". But in German speaking countries I believe they call it Deutchland. This is a very common phenomenon.
You can't really control what foriegners call you. I suggest you try to get used to it.
One of the later contributors to this thread claimed that since Virginia was the first English speaking colony in the Americas, the United States should get to claim the name "America" for the country it eventually became a part of. Lol.
But wasn't Amerigo Vespuci Italian? So what does he have to do with the USA? Lol.
...Also most of the problem is in the materials used in CRTs, so "upgrading" them means replacment anyway.
This is something I have wondered about. Presumably the Lead in the glass of the monitor is the main threat? But leaded glass is vitrified. Would leaded glass be any more soluble than lead ore? Would it be any more toxic than lead ore?
at least the guilt is off my back...?
on
Control-Alt-Recycle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If I have a screwdriver, and I see some old computers put to the curb, I will sit down, open them up, and salvage some parts. Last christmas I came across half a dozen 486 computers. They each had 40 megs of RAM, and a 1 gig (unerased) hard drive. I carried one computer home, to give a friend, and I took the memory and two hard drives from two others.
Did taking the useful parts make the safe disposal of the rest of these computers my responsibility?
By taking the memory and hard drives I turned two of those computers to something that someone else could get working with the addition of no further parts to complete junk.
I said they had not erased the hard drives? Well whoever was responsible for the disposal of these computers had sprayed them with fluorescent orange paint.
So, does putting the computer to the curb relieve you of the responsibility of disposing of the toxic waste, if someone takes them away? It might merely mean that a cheapskate has grabbed them, put them in their car, taken them somewhere, to examine them, and determine if they held anything of value. And then put them right back on the curb when they determined there wasn't anything they wanted...
Sorry, that is not how it would work. A base at the pole would have something like six months of sunlight, and something like six months of darkness, just like our Earth's poles. The Lunar north pole is always going to point at the same part of the sky. Just as the Earth's north pole does. And unless that Lunar axis of rotation is at 90 degrees to the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun the poles will experience seasonal light and darkness.
Further you realize that your hydroponics would have to be mounted on a vertical surface, to get a meaningful amount of solar energy? And that it would have to be on some kind of turntable, to follow the Sun? You do realize the Sun would appear to move in the Lunar sky, just as it does on Earth, only more slowly?
Maybe I haven't been keeping up to date. But wasn't there a problem where earlier versions of realplayer were reporting back to headquarters what its users were listening to?
Does the current version still do this? It is not listed in the user complaints they responded to. Maybe this is the core way they make money. If so I can understand why this might be a complaint they don't want to make changes to please their users.
But some open-ness about it would be a good thing.
Or maybe they made this change a long time ago? Well, a lot of us don't hang on their every announcement...
The flight I mentioned was Toronto to Ottawa -- about 300 kilometres. I can't remember how long the flight took. While I had flown several times on the Dash-8, when I lived in Alberta, the one time I flew from the little boutique airport I mentioned, on Toronto Island, was a smaller plane. It seated 20. One seat on either side of the aisle, with 10 rows. Maybe it was a piston plane?
In one of his novellas Poul Anderson has two of his characters discuss "communism" and the several dozen states that claimed to be communist. Which ones came closest to the communism described by Marx and Engels? They decided to wait and see in which one the state withered away first.
Lol.
You see Marx and Engels said, "Under Communism the State will wither away."
Maybe I should spell out that there has never been a country that claimed to be Communist that showed any sign of the state withering away.
Was real communism possible? I doubt it. Human nature being what it is there is just too much opportunity for petty corruption.
But the "free market", that so many Americans worship, is also, in practice, extremely corrupt. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, what embarrassments those guys are. Awarding lucrative defence contracts to their corporate cronies. Aren't those huge, useless, defence contracts a form of corporate welfare?
There are countries that Police the namespace used for their newborns. They don't allow eccentric parents to give their kids eccentric names.
But giving your kid a weird name doesn't guarantee they will grow up to be weird.
Frank Zappa gave his kids Moon Unit and Dweezil weird names. Did they grow up to be weird failures because of their names?
I don't know. But I bet there are moments when they wonder, "what was dad thinking?"
Slashdot Mirror
Wordperfect file format was frozen at around version 5.1 -- fifteen years ago or more. Good move -- respectful to their customers. Microsoft doesn't even respect their customers enough to maintain compatibility with earlier versions of their own products.
Maybe drives are cheap, but they haven't gotten much faster, in recent years. So code bloat is still a problem, since it means that programs are slow to load.
Big bloated programs are slow to swap too. This is much more of a problem than it really deserves to be for users of Microsoft products. Rather than taking the hit for producing a suite of horribly bloated products that were slow to load Microsoft chooses to betray the true interests of their users, by cheating.
Microsoft gives its own products preferential access to system resources. In particular it gives its products preferential access to system memory.
In 1999 I visited a friend of mine. Her brand new computer was comparable to mine, but much slower. It was slower to boot, and non-MS applications ran much more sluggishly.
Why? When she booted an extra minute or two was spent trying to load all of the MS office suite 2000 into her 32 megs of RAM. Of course there wasn't room, so you could hear her hard drive thrashing, as everything MS tried to put into RAM promptly got swapped out.
Finally, when all the thrashing settled down, what happened when you tried to invoke Netscape Navigator? You would wait while it was invoked. And then, heartbreakingly, as soon as you let the program go idle, the disk would start thrashing like crazy?
Why?
Microsoft was cheating. Microsoft was trying to hide that their applications were slow to load by keeping them constantly loaded and ready to go.
Was there a way to turn this dangerous feature off? Maybe, but it was wildly irresponsible of Microsoft to have put this feature in, in the first place.
Doesn't the modern family farm, with land, stock, machinery, barns, cost over a million bucks? Any you thought that student loan was going to kill you?
Another weird one, the anglerfish. The male bites the female, taps into her bloodstream, and most of his organs wither away, except for his sexual organs.
Here is a link about honeybee genetics.
And it works ever more weirdly in social insects like bees. In those species the male drone doesn't have a pair of chromosomes at all. In bees the hive's queen was fertilized on her nuptial flight, and carries a lifetime's supply of sperm. The workers are virgin females. But, unlike what I was taught when I was a kid, they are not sterile. They too can lay eggs -- unfertilized eggs. And these unfertilized eggs, with only a single set of chromosomes, not a pair, can hatch, and grow to maturity, to produce the male drones.
Lol. It irritates me when fans of the Aliens movies refer to the worker aliens as drones.
If so, expect to see young Kirk face the Kobamashi Maru test.
From the journal...
So cut the poor guy some slack. I hope he tells his wife slashdotters say, "get well soon" -- instead of thinking about how some coward tried to make him feel even worse than he felt before.
Get the office's web-site slashdotted...
Browsing the Ship of Fools site I came across the contest to pick an 11th commandment. The first winner was "Thou shalt not worship false pop idols". The top five choices won digital cameras. :-)
$14,000,000 is peanuts for any kind of real transit system. raven42rac says
I strongly suspect that this particular project is not a substitute for driving a gas-guzzling car. On any campus I have ever been on almost no-one drives a car to get from one spot on campus to another. I strongly suspect this monorail system is substitute for riding one's bike, or going by foot.
I wanted to see what it tasted like. I ate some. 41 years later, no cancer yet.
And where would one go looking for your software? The homepage listed for you here on slashdot is http://www.imaluser.com/
This link doesn't work.
About the size of a piece of confetti. Or maybe quite a bit smaller.
What if you had riot control personnel carrying shotguns loaded with shells that shot out clouds of RFID confetti?
Back in the days of punch cards and paper tape some people used the "chad" from those cards in place of confetti. But it wasn't a nice thing to do. Chad, punched from card stock, with sharp edges, is much harder to remove than regular confetti. There is a small amount of oil in punch cards and punch tape.
You can't just brush it off.
If an artifact can make chad hard to brush off, then how difficult could you make it to brush off dozens or hundreds of stealth RFID chad, specially designed to be hard to find and brush off? Your demonstrator only has to miss one for you to be able to read their chip with a reader. When they get on the subway, for instance. Even if they have stashed a complete change of clothes the chip might be in their hair.
If you don't care if the rioters see you fire at them, and you don't care if they feel the pain of the, um, "injections", could chips like those used for pets be loaded into something like a shotgun shell?
After the riot you could scan pedestrians to see if they got chipped. Snap their pictures then. Have the turnstiles at the Subway activate hidden cameras to take the pictures of chipped riders automatically.
If you are scanning people shortly after they get chipped it doesn't matter if the chip is merely embedded in their clothing.
Use different id chips for each riot.
No, I don't like this idea.
Range? Lol. The article said the chips would be tracked "by satellite".
Lol. Good troll. Lots of countries get called something else in foreign countries. In English speaking countries we call it "Germany". In French speaking countries they call it "Allemagne". But in German speaking countries I believe they call it Deutchland. This is a very common phenomenon.
You can't really control what foriegners call you. I suggest you try to get used to it.
One of the later contributors to this thread claimed that since Virginia was the first English speaking colony in the Americas, the United States should get to claim the name "America" for the country it eventually became a part of. Lol.
But wasn't Amerigo Vespuci Italian? So what does he have to do with the USA? Lol.
This is something I have wondered about. Presumably the Lead in the glass of the monitor is the main threat? But leaded glass is vitrified. Would leaded glass be any more soluble than lead ore? Would it be any more toxic than lead ore?
Did taking the useful parts make the safe disposal of the rest of these computers my responsibility?
By taking the memory and hard drives I turned two of those computers to something that someone else could get working with the addition of no further parts to complete junk.
I said they had not erased the hard drives? Well whoever was responsible for the disposal of these computers had sprayed them with fluorescent orange paint.
So, does putting the computer to the curb relieve you of the responsibility of disposing of the toxic waste, if someone takes them away? It might merely mean that a cheapskate has grabbed them, put them in their car, taken them somewhere, to examine them, and determine if they held anything of value. And then put them right back on the curb when they determined there wasn't anything they wanted...
Further you realize that your hydroponics would have to be mounted on a vertical surface, to get a meaningful amount of solar energy? And that it would have to be on some kind of turntable, to follow the Sun? You do realize the Sun would appear to move in the Lunar sky, just as it does on Earth, only more slowly?
Does the current version still do this? It is not listed in the user complaints they responded to. Maybe this is the core way they make money. If so I can understand why this might be a complaint they don't want to make changes to please their users.
But some open-ness about it would be a good thing.
Or maybe they made this change a long time ago? Well, a lot of us don't hang on their every announcement...
The flight I mentioned was Toronto to Ottawa -- about 300 kilometres. I can't remember how long the flight took. While I had flown several times on the Dash-8, when I lived in Alberta, the one time I flew from the little boutique airport I mentioned, on Toronto Island, was a smaller plane. It seated 20. One seat on either side of the aisle, with 10 rows. Maybe it was a piston plane?
Lol.
You see Marx and Engels said, "Under Communism the State will wither away."
Maybe I should spell out that there has never been a country that claimed to be Communist that showed any sign of the state withering away.
Was real communism possible? I doubt it. Human nature being what it is there is just too much opportunity for petty corruption.
But the "free market", that so many Americans worship, is also, in practice, extremely corrupt. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, what embarrassments those guys are. Awarding lucrative defence contracts to their corporate cronies. Aren't those huge, useless, defence contracts a form of corporate welfare?
There are countries that Police the namespace used for their newborns. They don't allow eccentric parents to give their kids eccentric names. But giving your kid a weird name doesn't guarantee they will grow up to be weird.
Frank Zappa gave his kids Moon Unit and Dweezil weird names. Did they grow up to be weird failures because of their names?
I don't know. But I bet there are moments when they wonder, "what was dad thinking?"
I am following up my own note with a link to a spirited attack on the idea that highways are paid for by gasoline taxes.