> Cable companies have audit teams who check the > taps for illegal hookups. There's no easy press > a button at the office solution, but they can > catch you.
I'm not convinced that the threatening letters they send out aren't random mailings. I got a "we think you're stealing cable" letter addressed to "Occupant" once from a cable company in a town I used to live in. While it's true that I was at the time receiving Showtime and the "basic" channels, it was over a satellite dish. In fact, I'd been using the satellite dish for about FOUR YEARS at that point, and anyone who cared to look into the back yard could have seen it.
I also had an attic-mounted antenna for the local channels. That, I'd only had about a year or two (as an upgrade over the rabbit ears) when the cable company's letter came.
> We've gone past the point that a five-speaker > home theater system with DVD player and a > good TV that accepts component video input > will pay for itself in well under a year > when that same family with the home theater > system buys some DVD's and rents others.
I'd forgotten about rentals in my post - thanks for reminding me.:) To tell the truth, I don't do DVD rentals as much as I probably should. Used DVDs are often priced at $10 or less, so I usually pay the extra couple of bucks and keep the DVD as opposed to renting.
But adding DVD rentals to the mix at, say, $6 a rental tips the balance even more in favor of home theater. You don't have to pay up for each family member / friend to watch!
Not that I'm entirely opposed to the "big screen" experience, but as the nearest really good theater is located some 70 miles (one way) away, I'll take my cheap DVDs for most of my movie watching.
> DVDs are not reasonably priced. Go to the > movies and see the film earlier, on a bigger > screen, with better sound and for about > half the price.
Whoah, there. Your argument's not very good. How much does it cost to take a family of four out to see a movie? Even if you don't eat or drink anything, it's going to be over $20.
Even if you only take out your significant other, your cost will be at least $16 (most people don't get student discount tickets, you know) and more than likely over $20. In other words, more than the price of the DVD of the same film.
As for the picture and sound - you might get decent picture and sound at a new / big city theater, but in my town for instance, you pay $8 to see a movie on a stained (did someone spill beer on it?) screen with mono sound.
I'll take my Superflat TV with DTS surround sound any day over that...:)
> Factor in the price of your home cinema > system and it gets even worse.
Ahh, but my home theater system isn't used for just home theater. It's also used for normal TV watching, gaming, and music.
> I'm always curious to find out how they get > stats like this. Where do they get the 250 > million blank CDRs and tapes number?
Also, how's this copy protection going to stop people from recording TO TAPE? Since consumer tape decks are almost exclusively analog devices, if we can play the CD at all, we can record to a tape.
As for the CDRs... I know I'm in the minority on this one, but most of the CDs I burn contain backups and data. The only audio CDs I burn are compilations for the car and to play on my laptop at work.
> It has much fewer bugs and still retains all the > functionality needed to have a decent web > experience.
Let's get real here. Dillo is great to browse simple stuff like local HTML documentation, and it's good for checking on the local news sites (when it doesn't choke on them too badly), but that's about all it's good for.
It has some sort of annoying cache bug that lets it get "stuck" (refusing to load a document whether you hit reload or not) on pages like Google's search results.
As distributed (version 0.6.6), Dillo doesn't do any kind of authentication or SSL. It also doesn't do Javascript/Java. So it has to be *very* casual browsing. It also doesn't print.
(I use Dillo myelf for viewing local copies of web pages I make for my students. This is mainly because it's so FAST.)
> My wife hates Star Office 5.2 for many reasons. > The two biggest are:
> 1. Crappy online documentation
I can't speak to the database issue, since I have absolutely no need for database connectivity. I'd agree with your wife that SO5.2's online help was, well, useless.
The Open Office team has been working to fix that little problem and has actually produced some USEFUL (imagine that) documentation in their package. Their docs aren't complete yet, but at least I could find the things I needed in OO's help rather than merely overviews of the different components that didn't tell you how to do anything.
> What else has a pH of 12? We're still in > the range of common household cleaners.
Nair. So if you fancy jumping into a vat of Nair,...
(No, I'm not making this up. I have some of my students measure the pH of various shampoos and skin care products. Nair weighs in in the 10-12 range, usually.)
> What Linux desktop operating system will 1. run > in GUI mode on hardware that a school system owns > (which may include 5-6 year old PCs), 2. not be > easily broken into (remember Red Hat Linux's old > nickname "Root Hat"), and 3. be easy to install > and configure?
Redhat 7.3? It's still supported, runs fine on "school" hardware (At least my two laptops cope with it well. One's a P233 and the other's a PII/266).
For that matter, I run Redhat 7.3 on the system I use to develop coursework for my students (the PII/266 laptop).
And actually, Red Hat *does* release bug fixes for Redhat 6.2. See http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/errata/ and look under "Supported (Active) Products". However, why you'd run 6.2 on older hardware when you can run 7.x is beyond me. The 7.x series actually ran FASTER on my old hardware than the 6.x series did.
Direct link to winners ...
on
Ig Nobels Awarded
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The winners - from the source - are here. I notice one old favorite on there - the periodic table table, which I linked to from my chemistry web site myself. Ahh, literalism...
Funnier, though, is the pet washing machine. Unfortunately, I can't read the language, but they do have photos...:)
> Funny thing, way back when there on the Usenet > group rec.games.video.classic there was a big > furor over another Novak, Michael J...some odd > similarities in the two situations.
Oddly enough, that's the first person *I* thought of when I heard someone named "Novak" was suing people. Now to be fair to MJN, he handled things a lot better than this other Novak seems to. MJN, if I recall correctly, just posted about other people on his web site rather than threatening to sue the whole group over it.
This was the pre-Ebay days when auctions were conducted on USENET and discussions were in danger of being drowned out by posts of "MASSIVE AUCTIONS" posted every minute of every day. Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration, but...:)
Haven't had the time to visit that group (rec.games.video.classic) in some years, but you could at least get straight video game talk there, as opposed to silly fanboy posturing on r.g.v.sega, r.g.v.sony, and r.g.v.nintendo. Memories...
I have to use really expensive brand-name cables to make the video output from my game consoles look good?
I thought that all I needed to do was run a green pen around the edge of the discs to get optimal picture and sound quality - or does that only work on the older CD-based consoles?;)
> False: see page six, comparing generic composite > to Monster composite (noticeable improvement) and > generic S-video to Monster S-video (slight > improvement in zoomed-in screenshot).
My own tests of the cheaper (sub $20) s-video cable and Monster show almost none of the checkerboard pattern displayed on both that page's screenshots.
I *have* noticed that checkerboard once or twice if the cable wasn't plugged in fully (as in I pulled the console too far forward and pulled the video connector a little ways out of its socket). Hmm...:)
> I remember Mandrake 7.2 bragging about having 11 > different GUIs. I don't think the typical desktop > user wants 11 different GUIs.
Nor do I. Luckily, most of the desktop work is down to two majority desktops these days. As long as I can run stuff from both and have things like the clipboard work, I won't complain much. But neither desktop environment is perfect, and I'm glad that people still see the need to work on both.
> I think it would make more sense to improve > Linux's ability to run MS-Windows applications, > or access windows documents. Rather than > forever tinkering with dozens of different > GUIs.
While I agree to an extent (I'd like a Wine that runs Quicken a little better), I'd much rather deal with native Linux apps than bastardized Windows ones. The Linux apps - when they exist - just work better. I'd love a version of Quicken that ran on Linux with no futzing around with wine! (Hear that, Intuit? You want me to ever upgrade past Quicken 98, you port Quicken to Linux. Otherwise, no $oup for you.:) )
As far as accessing Office documents, Open Office at least has halfway decent filters. They aren't perfect, mind you, but they're better than some give them credit for. (Some of the errors in opening Word docs, for example, can be reproduced in Word simply by changing your printer driver. This caused me no end of grief with my thesis, which had to be done in Word.)
The other side of the coin is this - these KDE and Gnome developers probably like to work on what they're working on. If you want better filters, you might consider making it worth their while to write better filters.;)
> Linux would be making serious headway onto the > desktops of corporate machines (and greater > penetration into the consumer market) if the Wine > project would mature to the point that you could > run any Windows app flawlessly on your Linux > machine.
That won't happen - EVER. You can't even do that with different versions of *WINDOWS*, after all. Now it's true that most Windows apps (depending on what niche you use your machine for) will usually still run when you upgrade windows, not all will. And Microsoft has all the documentation and source code for ALL versions of Windows!
> Barring that, if there were even a collection of > native Linux apps that could read and write > perfectly to the MS Office document formats > (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, ACCESS, VISIO, > PUBLISHER, etc), Linux would see a major boom.
Again, that's another impossible task - for exactly the same reasons as above. Even different versions of Microsoft Office don't get everything right when opening documents created in an older version. How do you expect Star/Open Office (for example) to read and write "perfectly" to Microsoft Office format when Office itself can't. (Heck, we sometimes have trouble here sharing documents created by the same office version, but that's another story...:) )
> Ready for the "business desktop"? I don't think > so.
By your definition, only Microsoft has a chance to be "ready for the business desktop", and its chances aren't so good.:)
But back to Red Hat 8. If the screenshots are any indication, it looks like I'm putting this one on my laptop. The font stuff looks particularly nice. Has Open Office in RH 8 been linked with the system's font libraries (so antialiasing looks nice)?
> I wish we the public could watch a news source > that JUST reported the news and then let us > decide for ourselves.
Ahh, but then you get into debates on what exactly *is* news. After all, someone has to decide what it newsworthy. And that person will ALWAYS be accused of bias. The "right" accuses the media of having a "left wing" bias, while the "left" accuses the media of a "right wing" bias.
Back to the creation/evolution issue in Cobb County - reading the actual policy change, they actually changed *from* a policy which appeared to actually NOT allow evolution (after all, teaching evolution wouldn't "respect [...]family teachings") to a policy that actually allows evolution to be taught. (The real purpose is, of course, to wedge religion into science class. After all, who wouldn't want the credibility of a field of study - science - that has produced all of the technology we use?:) )
I think creationism should be taught in schools - as part of a comparative study of the various religions in the world - NOT as part of a science class. It quite simply isn't science.
I finsd it fascinating that Michael Gray (a junior in one of Cobb's high schools) claims to have disproven evolution. Where's his term paper published?:)
> Not at all. I am saying though that leftist > viewpoints are accepted without question, whereas > anything that has to do with true capitalism, > corporations, or wealthy people is portrayed as > bad for the country.
Who controls the media? Oh, that's right... BIG CORPORATIONS!
> Or alternatively, someone's read any one of the > hundreds of philosophical texts that have > existed for a very long time that this movie is > based.
The argument has been done to death, and it's about as silly as the presentation in Dark Star. How can we trust eyes that aren't "designed"? The aswers fall along these lines: They work most of the time, but we're right to question something only one/a few people sees because we realize they don't work reliably *all the time*.
Also, the whole argument of evolution says that the eyes DIDN'T come about through a series of purely random events anyway. They were shaped by natural selection. What works is more likely to survive.
> How can you trust eyes (created through a series > of random events) to see anything correctly?
Someone's seen Dark Star!
Doolittle: Now listen,listen here's the big question,how do you know that the evidence that your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct? What I'm getting at is this: the only experience that is directly available to you is you sensory data,and this sensory data is merely a stream of electrical impulses that stimulates your computing center.
Bomb: In other words,all that I really know about the outside world is relayed to me through my electrical connections.
Doolittle: Exactly!
Bomb: Why,that would mean that I really don't know what the outside universe is like at all for certain.
> This argument popped up at several stages in the > days of the NES and Sega Master system.
No, it was the opposite argument - that these new "PC"s would kill off the console market. (Consoles, of course, existed before people got into home computers.)
Well guess what - Consoles have been around since the 1970s. It's 2002 and THEY'RE STILL HERE!
Long live consoles!:)
> PC games vary from RPGs all the way down to > simple arcades type games, always have and > always will.
Ironically, the variety argument is the one that's used (with some success - given that most of the Slashdot crowd thinks that FPSs are the end-all be-all of gaming) *against* PCs and *for* consoles.
> It's too bad the people who claim broadband is > too expensive can't do math.
It depends on your numbers and situation. Here, broadband is $50 a month, no matter whether it's cable or DSL. (Some comeptition, eh?)
Dialup ranges from $13 or so to $20-ish and (I'm in the USA) local phone service is *not* metered.
Like most folks, we don't do enough major downloading at home to require a second phone line - we mainly check e-mail, do some light browsing / etc.
On the basis of sheer monetary cost, $13-$20 vs $50 is a no-brainer. Dialup wins by at minimum $25-$30 a month.
What about "always-on"? We have laptops here as our primary computers. Approximately 30 seconds to get out of hibernation and another 30 seconds to connect and we're online with the dialup at home. Always-on isn't THAT big a deal for us. Nice? Sure, but we'd rather take an extra rafting trip this year.:)
> It's easy to show it as a better value than > dial up, especially if you factor in the time > saved not having to wait for pages to transmit > and display.
You save a few seconds here and there on web sites - provided you're not into streaming video/audio (and we aren't). Web browsers cache most static images on web sites, so you generally don't have to wait on every single image on a web site to load if it's one you frequent.
I have broadband at work and on the same pages I look at there and at home the differences are on the order of seconds.
The point is this: Just because someone doesn't have much of a need for broadband at home doesn't mean that they can't do math. They may simply use the internet for different things.
> I wrote a nice utility for Windows called > Dragnifier. It's donate-ware. It is a taskbar > applet that can be attached to any hotkey, and > will show a magnifying glass that moves with the > mouse. It magnifies whatever is below the lens as > the user drags the mouse.
Sounds a lot like xmag, actually. As far as I can tell from your description, the only difference is that you need to click on what you want xmag to magnify.
A brief hack of xmag might do exactly what you want...
Slashdot Mirror
> Cable companies have audit teams who check the
> taps for illegal hookups. There's no easy press
> a button at the office solution, but they can
> catch you.
I'm not convinced that the threatening letters they send out aren't random mailings. I got a "we think you're stealing cable" letter addressed to "Occupant" once from a cable company in a town I used to live in. While it's true that I was at the time receiving Showtime and the "basic" channels, it was over a satellite dish. In fact, I'd been using the satellite dish for about FOUR YEARS at that point, and anyone who cared to look into the back yard could have seen it.
I also had an attic-mounted antenna for the local channels. That, I'd only had about a year or two (as an upgrade over the rabbit ears) when the cable company's letter came.
> We've gone past the point that a five-speaker
:) To tell the truth, I don't do DVD rentals as much as I probably should. Used DVDs are often priced at $10 or less, so I usually pay the extra couple of bucks and keep the DVD as opposed to renting.
> home theater system with DVD player and a
> good TV that accepts component video input
> will pay for itself in well under a year
> when that same family with the home theater
> system buys some DVD's and rents others.
I'd forgotten about rentals in my post - thanks for reminding me.
But adding DVD rentals to the mix at, say, $6 a rental tips the balance even more in favor of home theater. You don't have to pay up for each family member / friend to watch!
Not that I'm entirely opposed to the "big screen" experience, but as the nearest really good theater is located some 70 miles (one way) away, I'll take my cheap DVDs for most of my movie watching.
> DVDs are not reasonably priced. Go to the
... :)
> movies and see the film earlier, on a bigger
> screen, with better sound and for about
> half the price.
Whoah, there. Your argument's not very good. How much does it cost to take a family of four out to see a movie? Even if you don't eat or drink anything, it's going to be over $20.
Even if you only take out your significant other, your cost will be at least $16 (most people don't get student discount tickets, you know) and more than likely over $20. In other words, more than the price of the DVD of the same film.
As for the picture and sound - you might get decent picture and sound at a new / big city theater, but in my town for instance, you pay $8 to see a movie on a stained (did someone spill beer on it?) screen with mono sound.
I'll take my Superflat TV with DTS surround sound any day over that
> Factor in the price of your home cinema
> system and it gets even worse.
Ahh, but my home theater system isn't used for just home theater. It's also used for normal TV watching, gaming, and music.
> I'm always curious to find out how they get
> stats like this. Where do they get the 250
> million blank CDRs and tapes number?
Also, how's this copy protection going to stop people from recording TO TAPE? Since consumer tape decks are almost exclusively analog devices, if we can play the CD at all, we can record to a tape.
As for the CDRs... I know I'm in the minority on this one, but most of the CDs I burn contain backups and data. The only audio CDs I burn are compilations for the car and to play on my laptop at work.
> It has much fewer bugs and still retains all the
> functionality needed to have a decent web
> experience.
Let's get real here. Dillo is great to browse simple stuff like local HTML documentation, and it's good for checking on the local news sites (when it doesn't choke on them too badly), but that's about all it's good for.
It has some sort of annoying cache bug that lets it get "stuck" (refusing to load a document whether you hit reload or not) on pages like Google's search results.
As distributed (version 0.6.6), Dillo doesn't do any kind of authentication or SSL. It also doesn't do Javascript/Java. So it has to be *very* casual browsing. It also doesn't print.
(I use Dillo myelf for viewing local copies of web pages I make for my students. This is mainly because it's so FAST.)
> My wife hates Star Office 5.2 for many reasons.
> The two biggest are:
> 1. Crappy online documentation
I can't speak to the database issue, since I have absolutely no need for database connectivity. I'd agree with your wife that SO5.2's online help was, well, useless.
The Open Office team has been working to fix that little problem and has actually produced some USEFUL (imagine that) documentation in their package. Their docs aren't complete yet, but at least I could find the things I needed in OO's help rather than merely overviews of the different components that didn't tell you how to do anything.
> What else has a pH of 12? We're still in
...
> the range of common household cleaners.
Nair. So if you fancy jumping into a vat of Nair,
(No, I'm not making this up. I have some of my students measure the pH of various shampoos and skin care products. Nair weighs in in the 10-12 range, usually.)
> What Linux desktop operating system will 1. run
> in GUI mode on hardware that a school system owns
> (which may include 5-6 year old PCs), 2. not be
> easily broken into (remember Red Hat Linux's old
> nickname "Root Hat"), and 3. be easy to install
> and configure?
Redhat 7.3? It's still supported, runs fine on "school" hardware (At least my two laptops cope with it well. One's a P233 and the other's a PII/266).
For that matter, I run Redhat 7.3 on the system I use to develop coursework for my students (the PII/266 laptop).
And actually, Red Hat *does* release bug fixes for Redhat 6.2. See http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/errata/ and look under "Supported (Active) Products". However, why you'd run 6.2 on older hardware when you can run 7.x is beyond me. The 7.x series actually ran FASTER on my old hardware than the 6.x series did.
The winners - from the source - are here. I notice one old favorite on there - the periodic table table, which I linked to from my chemistry web site myself. Ahh, literalism ...
Funnier, though, is the pet washing machine. Unfortunately, I can't read the language, but they do have photos ... :)
> Funny thing, way back when there on the Usenet
... :)
...
> group rec.games.video.classic there was a big
> furor over another Novak, Michael J...some odd
> similarities in the two situations.
Oddly enough, that's the first person *I* thought of when I heard someone named "Novak" was suing people. Now to be fair to MJN, he handled things a lot better than this other Novak seems to. MJN, if I recall correctly, just posted about other people on his web site rather than threatening to sue the whole group over it.
This was the pre-Ebay days when auctions were conducted on USENET and discussions were in danger of being drowned out by posts of "MASSIVE AUCTIONS" posted every minute of every day. Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration, but
Haven't had the time to visit that group (rec.games.video.classic) in some years, but you could at least get straight video game talk there, as opposed to silly fanboy posturing on r.g.v.sega, r.g.v.sony, and r.g.v.nintendo. Memories
I have to use really expensive brand-name cables to make the video output from my game consoles look good?
;)
I thought that all I needed to do was run a green pen around the edge of the discs to get optimal picture and sound quality - or does that only work on the older CD-based consoles?
> False: see page six, comparing generic composite
... :)
> to Monster composite (noticeable improvement) and
> generic S-video to Monster S-video (slight
> improvement in zoomed-in screenshot).
My own tests of the cheaper (sub $20) s-video cable and Monster show almost none of the checkerboard pattern displayed on both that page's screenshots.
I *have* noticed that checkerboard once or twice if the cable wasn't plugged in fully (as in I pulled the console too far forward and pulled the video connector a little ways out of its socket). Hmm
> I remember Mandrake 7.2 bragging about having 11
:) )
;)
> different GUIs. I don't think the typical desktop
> user wants 11 different GUIs.
Nor do I. Luckily, most of the desktop work is down to two majority desktops these days. As long as I can run stuff from both and have things like the clipboard work, I won't complain much. But neither desktop environment is perfect, and I'm glad that people still see the need to work on both.
> I think it would make more sense to improve
> Linux's ability to run MS-Windows applications,
> or access windows documents. Rather than
> forever tinkering with dozens of different
> GUIs.
While I agree to an extent (I'd like a Wine that runs Quicken a little better), I'd much rather deal with native Linux apps than bastardized Windows ones. The Linux apps - when they exist - just work better. I'd love a version of Quicken that ran on Linux with no futzing around with wine! (Hear that, Intuit? You want me to ever upgrade past Quicken 98, you port Quicken to Linux. Otherwise, no $oup for you.
As far as accessing Office documents, Open Office at least has halfway decent filters. They aren't perfect, mind you, but they're better than some give them credit for. (Some of the errors in opening Word docs, for example, can be reproduced in Word simply by changing your printer driver. This caused me no end of grief with my thesis, which had to be done in Word.)
The other side of the coin is this - these KDE and Gnome developers probably like to work on what they're working on. If you want better filters, you might consider making it worth their while to write better filters.
> Linux would be making serious headway onto the
... :) )
:)
> desktops of corporate machines (and greater
> penetration into the consumer market) if the Wine
> project would mature to the point that you could
> run any Windows app flawlessly on your Linux
> machine.
That won't happen - EVER. You can't even do that with different versions of *WINDOWS*, after all. Now it's true that most Windows apps (depending on what niche you use your machine for) will usually still run when you upgrade windows, not all will. And Microsoft has all the documentation and source code for ALL versions of Windows!
> Barring that, if there were even a collection of
> native Linux apps that could read and write
> perfectly to the MS Office document formats
> (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, ACCESS, VISIO,
> PUBLISHER, etc), Linux would see a major boom.
Again, that's another impossible task - for exactly the same reasons as above. Even different versions of Microsoft Office don't get everything right when opening documents created in an older version. How do you expect Star/Open Office (for example) to read and write "perfectly" to Microsoft Office format when Office itself can't. (Heck, we sometimes have trouble here sharing documents created by the same office version, but that's another story
> Ready for the "business desktop"? I don't think
> so.
By your definition, only Microsoft has a chance to be "ready for the business desktop", and its chances aren't so good.
But back to Red Hat 8. If the screenshots are any indication, it looks like I'm putting this one on my laptop. The font stuff looks particularly nice. Has Open Office in RH 8 been linked with the system's font libraries (so antialiasing looks nice)?
> Steve Ballmer didn't create the universe - he
... :)
> just likes to think he did.
I thought Al Gore created the universe
> Shaped implies direction, it implies choice, it
> implies decisions.
No it doesn't. Stalagmites and stalagtites are also shaped by natural forces. How you get "decision" or "choice" out of that, I don't know.
> I wish we the public could watch a news source
:) )
:)
> that JUST reported the news and then let us
> decide for ourselves.
Ahh, but then you get into debates on what exactly *is* news. After all, someone has to decide what it newsworthy. And that person will ALWAYS be accused of bias. The "right" accuses the media of having a "left wing" bias, while the "left" accuses the media of a "right wing" bias.
Back to the creation/evolution issue in Cobb County - reading the actual policy change, they actually changed *from* a policy which appeared to actually NOT allow evolution (after all, teaching evolution wouldn't "respect [...]family teachings") to a policy that actually allows evolution to be taught. (The real purpose is, of course, to wedge religion into science class. After all, who wouldn't want the credibility of a field of study - science - that has produced all of the technology we use?
I think creationism should be taught in schools - as part of a comparative study of the various religions in the world - NOT as part of a science class. It quite simply isn't science.
I finsd it fascinating that Michael Gray (a junior in one of Cobb's high schools) claims to have disproven evolution. Where's his term paper published?
> Not at all. I am saying though that leftist
... BIG CORPORATIONS!
> viewpoints are accepted without question, whereas
> anything that has to do with true capitalism,
> corporations, or wealthy people is portrayed as
> bad for the country.
Who controls the media? Oh, that's right
> Or alternatively, someone's read any one of the
> hundreds of philosophical texts that have
> existed for a very long time that this movie is
> based.
The argument has been done to death, and it's about as silly as the presentation in Dark Star. How can we trust eyes that aren't "designed"? The aswers fall along these lines: They work most of the time, but we're right to question something only one/a few people sees because we realize they don't work reliably *all the time*.
Also, the whole argument of evolution says that the eyes DIDN'T come about through a series of purely random events anyway. They were shaped by natural selection. What works is more likely to survive.
> How can you trust eyes (created through a series
> of random events) to see anything correctly?
Someone's seen Dark Star!
Doolittle: Now listen,listen here's the big question,how do you know that the evidence that your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct? What I'm getting at is this: the only experience that is directly available to you is you sensory data,and this sensory data is merely a stream of electrical impulses that stimulates your computing center.
Bomb: In other words,all that I really know about the outside world is relayed to me through my electrical connections.
Doolittle: Exactly!
Bomb: Why,that would mean that I really don't know what the outside universe is like at all for certain.
Doolittle: That's it! That's it!
> This argument popped up at several stages in the
:)
> days of the NES and Sega Master system.
No, it was the opposite argument - that these new "PC"s would kill off the console market. (Consoles, of course, existed before people got into home computers.)
Well guess what - Consoles have been around since the 1970s. It's 2002 and THEY'RE STILL HERE!
Long live consoles!
> PC games vary from RPGs all the way down to
> simple arcades type games, always have and
> always will.
Ironically, the variety argument is the one that's used (with some success - given that most of the Slashdot crowd thinks that FPSs are the end-all be-all of gaming) *against* PCs and *for* consoles.
> It's too bad the people who claim broadband is
:)
> too expensive can't do math.
It depends on your numbers and situation. Here, broadband is $50 a month, no matter whether it's cable or DSL. (Some comeptition, eh?)
Dialup ranges from $13 or so to $20-ish and (I'm in the USA) local phone service is *not* metered.
Like most folks, we don't do enough major downloading at home to require a second phone line - we mainly check e-mail, do some light browsing / etc.
On the basis of sheer monetary cost, $13-$20 vs $50 is a no-brainer. Dialup wins by at minimum $25-$30 a month.
What about "always-on"? We have laptops here as our primary computers. Approximately 30 seconds to get out of hibernation and another 30 seconds to connect and we're online with the dialup at home. Always-on isn't THAT big a deal for us. Nice? Sure, but we'd rather take an extra rafting trip this year.
> It's easy to show it as a better value than
> dial up, especially if you factor in the time
> saved not having to wait for pages to transmit
> and display.
You save a few seconds here and there on web sites - provided you're not into streaming video/audio (and we aren't). Web browsers cache most static images on web sites, so you generally don't have to wait on every single image on a web site to load if it's one you frequent.
I have broadband at work and on the same pages I look at there and at home the differences are on the order of seconds.
The point is this: Just because someone doesn't have much of a need for broadband at home doesn't mean that they can't do math. They may simply use the internet for different things.
> Because they have done the wrong decision
> adopting GNOME in first palce. KDE is
> better, so chose a really KDE
> distibutiong
What you say !!
Take off every 'zig'
You know what you doing
Move 'zig'
For great justice
> I wrote a nice utility for Windows called
> Dragnifier. It's donate-ware. It is a taskbar
> applet that can be attached to any hotkey, and
> will show a magnifying glass that moves with the
> mouse. It magnifies whatever is below the lens as
> the user drags the mouse.
Sounds a lot like xmag, actually. As far as I can tell from your description, the only difference is that you need to click on what you want xmag to magnify.
A brief hack of xmag might do exactly what you want...
> Yeah. Confusing it is. I don't see anything in
...
> the RedHat RPM indicating that it is different
> from stock 0.9.6b.
You could try looking at the changelog
rpm -q --changelog openssl
(or rpm -qi --changelog openssl if you prefer.)