Um, no. In software either the program functions, or it does not. Ultimately that authors expression can be acid tested in the real world against objective criteria. The same is not true of lit crit. The author worked to understand the field he discussed, then looked to the structure of the field, and found that none was to be had.
The same holds true in the humanities, except the 'acid test' -- the 'objective', or intersubjectively verifiable, criteria -- are found in other books. I must confess that I don't know a great deal about lit crit, so I'll draw my examples from philosophy instead. In postmodern philosophy, there is this idea of a 'hermeneutic circle'. One can make true and false statements about what constitutes a 'hermeneutic circle' (a real phil/litcrit term, btw) because philosophy has been discussing hermeneutics for five hundred years -- everybody knows what counts and does not count as a hermeneutic circle, in much the same way that as all economists know what is meant by an ideal rational agent, even though they have never seen one, and all scientists know what a quark is, even though they have never seen one. What the scientist has is an *idea* of a quark, and an idea of what measurements confirm or infirm its existence, and the definition stands or falls based on how well the theory maps onto the observations. Crucially, the theory does not just sort of 'pop out' of the observations; no number of experiments will give you the *idea* of a quark. Since the idea of the quark (the theoretical hypothesis of such an entity) exists before the experiments that confirm it, the quark is a metaphysical entity until the experiment is run. But this experiment -- does it somehow change the nature of the quark? Does it make sense to say that the statement 'there are quarks' was false before any experiments were run, and true only afterward? Now, I anticipate the following complaint: "Fine, you can replace 'real object' with 'empirically verified metaphysical entity' if you like, but that just adds more syllables. The truth of the matter is that one gets checked against something 'outside', and the other does not. That's why hermeneutic circles are silly and quarks are not." My reply would be, "So show me an experiment that can prove that quarks don't exist." Now, I know very little about quantum physics, but I suspect your reply would be couched in terms of various measurements. If quarks don't exist, you might aver, then running XYZ particles into one another shouldn't result in ABC's. But what does this prove about quarks? Could this not instead mean that you have faulty ideas about XYZ's? Or ABC's? Doesn't that sort of mix-up happen all the time? And if experiments cannot confirm or infirm the existence of quarks, how do you know they exist? For the same reason that the postmodernist knows that hermeneutic circles exist: Because the existence of quarks makes the rest of the theoretical system make sense, and doing without them makes things much more difficult to explain.
Snafoo: For instance: Are more, or fewer, comments in source code desirable? How about highly-specific, tightly-optimized assembly versus a perl script? DL: Both of which can be tested against objective standards for functionality, cost to produce and maintain, etc.. The same it utterly not true of lit crit. There is no way to judge the objective correctness of two pieces of lit crit writing, only it's political and academic correcness.
Oh, come off it. Functionality depends on the product's intended function, which unless *stipulated* by the designer might be quite different than what you expect. Can you tell me if powerpoint is a 'great' program for small business without making assumptions about the sorts of thing small businesses do? And can you tell me what ownership costs are attributable to the OS? For instance, when Microsoft waves a report claiming that TCO is lower for Windows because the are more MCSE's than certified linux technicians, is this a necessary, or contingent, quality of
I'm going to start my PhD in philosophy in the fall. However, I have also worked extensively with software and software development; I've even written some stuff destined for commercial release. I can tell you that the solidity of the truth-criteria of software development and lit crit are very, very similar, and the fact that you have no clue about the goings-on at that conference of yours speaks only of a difference in field. For instance: Are more, or fewer, comments in source code desirable? How about highly-specific, tightly-optimized assembly versus a perl script? The po-mo's (and, btw, that pastiche of terminology you collected is in no way exclusively postmodern, or even, for that matter, literary) would have just as much trouble understanding the virtues of object re-use and garbage collection and multiple inheritance, and would be just as tempted to derision.
Your critique, BTW, goes much deeper, and is much less grounded than the Sokal hoax, which confined itself to apeing a particularly noisome constellation of theory; the converse of what you have done would be an attack on computer science based on the foibles of visual basic.
The upshot is: Do not be tempted to Volkisch, chauvinist rallies about your discipline. Ignorance, IMO, is fairly evenly distributed over academe.
Patent #333456223: Method for building and/or rebuilding newly-created vassal state's electronic infrastructure using software created in collaboration over the Internet
Any fountain pen by Lamy is good, IMHO. Many fountain pen manufacturers make money off the prestige factor -- there are lots of $500 fountain pens kicking about. Lamy, OTOH, tends to produce scads of high-quality, reasonably-priced pens that work just as well (and, as an added kicker, can switch between cartridge and free-flow refill modes). They're a good choice if you want a pen that works very well, but aren't interested in 'signalling' your socioeconomic status by way of said pen.
I recently ran into a professor of mine at the university bookstore's cafe. He was using a Lamy Safari identical (in all but colour) to my own. When I pointed this out, we proceeded to chatter about how much we liked them for a good fifteen minutes or so -- it was like an infomercial or something, I swear.
So again, the breakdown: Lamy Safari: About $30USD. Good Mont Blanc: $500USD.
BTW, lamy pens take 'European' cartridges (which are fairly common in office supply stores, at least in Canada) and work well with bottles of Parker 'Quink' dark blue ink.
First of all, I think the question-poster has a really good idea: Computer interfaces *can* and *should* be separable from the beige box. Furthermore, I don't think that implementing this shit in USB **2.0** is such a bad idea. According to http://www.apple.com/firewire/ (hardly a non-partisan source;) Firewire 800 (the latest Firewire standard) is only twice as fast as USB 2.0, allowing transfer rates of up to 800Mbs, which "delivers more than double the effective bandwidth of the USB 2.0 peripheral standard. That means you can send more than a CD's worth of data every ten seconds." This implies that USB 2.0 can send at least a CD's worth of data every twenty seconds, which is far more bandwidth than your pathetic 52x CD drive will ever put forth.
So, hey, if you have USB 2.0 on your computer, you might as well use it:) (PS. if you don't, then you can just buy a USB2/Firewire combo card, and just use whatever works best.)
Thirdly, if your USB drive refuses to work with a hub, then simply put everything *else* on a hub and use your computer's extra USB port (it has more than one, right?) for the CDR.
Fourthly, VGA will be a problem --- *if* you're using VGA. Many LCD displays can take DVI, which (AFAIK) means that the cables can be strung somewhat further. If you can't use digital out, or if I'm wrong about the cable length feature of digital out, please feel free to use one 'o them VGA extension devices that, eg, use some multimode fiber-optic cabling and some conversion dongles.
Yeah, I bought one of these EMI 'Copy-Controlled' discs before as well (yay Canada-as-testing-ground-for-bad-technologies.) Honestly? I didn't even notice that the disc was supposed to be uncopiable until *after* I'd ripped (w/ cdparanoia) and encoded (w/ lame) the tracks onto my Flash MP3 player. I even have the first track. Go figger.
BTW, the new 'copy-controlled disc' logo is hilarious -- little triangles and circles inside one another. Looks like the cover of a 70's book on analytic philosophy or psychology (members of the relevant disciplines will know what I'm talking about.)
As a constant cordless telephone user, I wanted to know myself, so I did a wee bit o' googling and came up with this FAQ, published by the FDA in 2002:
http://www.fda.gov/cellphones/qa.html
An exerpt:
The term "wireless phone" refers here to hand-held wireless phones with built-in antennas, often called "cell," "mobile," or "PCS" phones.... The so-called "cordless phones," which have a base unit connected to the telephone wiring in a house, typically operate at far lower power levels, and thus produce RF exposures well within the FCC's compliance limits.
The upshot being, your kids are probably okay w/o the tinfoil hat. Esp. considering that your base station isn't strapped to their heads. (Though you could always strap it to the head of one of them, and keep the other as a control.;)
Very well; this was published in 1994. Has anyone duplicated *these* results? And if so, why didn't they form part of the cell-phone health debate till now?
This isn't a technological advance, it's... art! Yes! The complete impracticality (not to mention redundancy) of an underwater sense-dep telephone is a brilliant, scathing critique of the techno-scientifically induced phenomenon that Husserl called 'activity in passivity'. It is not until our culture rediscovers the underlying crisis in the Western project --- that instrumental advances alter and, yes, perhaps even narrow, the horizon of subjective existence --- that we will fully understand the work of this visionary.
Either that, or he's a government-funded british crackpot inventor who happens to like tanks, and telephones, and decided to put the two together. You decide.
First, I've adminned only small networks (10-20 machines) but I think the following should work. It seems to work for my DSL provider:
Set your route permit only PPPoE connections to and from workstations. Then, hand out CDR's containing your favourite DSL implementation. Fix it so the other end of the PPPoE connection empties out into some safe IP space which is not contiguous with that of the rest of your gear's. Finally, make sure that the connections are well-throttled. If you can, write some scripts to automagically decrease a user's bandwidth if excessive activity occurs on port_related_to_latest_ms_hole.
PPPoE is just one option though; any technology which allows you to tunnel all the user's networking should suffice. (IP/SEC VPN, say. )
Remember, it's your students' problem, not yours. Warn them, but furnish them with enough rope to hang themselves by, whilst avoiding the tangle yourself.
>Sometimes, the stepper motor dies. Then, you're screwed.
Actually, I don't think that motor failures are really that tricky to handle. In my experience (cf. four to five failed IDE/ATA drives, all from motor or spindle problems) motors tend to fail/for the first time/ during powerup. Remember that scene in _The_Princess_Bride_, where Miracle Max contrasts 'mostly dead' with 'all dead'? In my experience, a drive with motor problems is only _mostly_ dead. It can almost certainly be revived, if only temporarily, by holding it upside-down and smacking it against a table or counter. Ideally, smack it only once, but smack it hard, and try to smack it head-on --- you don't want to damage the drive any more than you have to.
The fridge trick that the article mentions is new to me, but I can't wait to give it a shot.
I've been diagnosed with ADD and I have two suggestions for dealing with procrastination and focusing problems. Note that I don't to either of these much anymore, as I'm medicated, but they worked well enough at the time.
Suggestion #1:
I have a little theory to the effect that, for a certain percentage of the population, GUIs have made focusing a lot more difficult: Sure, your taskbar, icons, buttons and menus make it easier to switch rapidly between many different tasks and contexts, but they also _make_it_easier_to_switch_between_many_different_t asks_and_contexts_. One minute you're studying faithfully --- at your mental office, so to speak --- and the next, you're in your mental rec room, playing FreeCiv; or in your mental coffee shop, chatting on/. And, Oh God, the futzing that one can do with a GUI! Desktop icon arrangement. Wallpaper. Themepacks, for heaven's sake. It's a temple of distraction in here.
So here's what I recommend: Ditch it. Ditch the GUI. Install Linux, if you haven't already, and configure/etc/inittab to boot to initlevel 4. Learn to love vi or nano or emacs: They work great for comp sci projects, and if you have an essay or a paper to write, do it in vi first, import it to word_processor_of_your_choice (for formatting) only when you're about to print it.
If you can't ditch the GUI for whatever reason (i.e. you need a proprietary Windoze app, or you can't bear to install Linux) then I recommend setting up a new account (linux) or user profile ('doze) that will only allow you to run only those applications which you need to get the job done. If that doesn't work, you should seriously consider getting yourself a (second-hand?) laptop upon which you will place only work-related programs --- preferably, one without WiFi or some other way of exposing it to the Lethean floodwaters of the 'net.
Suggestion #2. This next one is a little weird, but it works well for me. Note that it might work less well if you don't have any roomates, as it depends greatly on your desire to avoid embarrassment. It also requires that you have an extra room in your house.
Make yourself a home office in a well-heated room, and keep only work-related things in it. When you go to study, take in all the food, caffeine, and books that you'll need for a stint of about five hours. Set an alarm clock to go off in five hours. Now, close the door, and take off your pants. Yes, you heard me, take off your pants. If necessary, take off your shirt as well. Put them in a plastic bag, and tie the bag shut. Put the bag away (the further away the better.). This way, you can't leave the room suddenly without raising eyebrows: If, say, you have a sudden impulse to jump up and watch TV, or phone a friend, it'll take you a good five minutes to dress, which should be plenty to reconsider and sit back down.
After a couple of months of this, you get in the habit of staying in the room until the alarm sounds, you don't have to take off your pants anymore.
Who else read that headline, 'Oldest *Patent* Ever Discovered?' I admit that the 'space' icon is a bit of a tip-off, but still: I was waiting for some litigous Australopithicus-run hole-in-the-jungle-wall to start firing off cease-and-desists at, eg, string manufacturers.
Are they really as cheap and flimsy as all that? Based on previous happy experiences with Dell workstations, I've recommended their laptops to friends, and now I fear my ass is on the line.:) Oh well, that's what I get for trying to look omniscient.
But what we really need...
on
Swiping Out Cancer
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Is something like this for STD's. Oh come on, admit it --- condoms suck, and not in that fun way. Wouldn't you rather just tricoder her nether-regions?
Yeah, I know; it comes as a perennial shock to me as well. BTW, I've even tried the cygwin route, but the sales staff has problems with the lack of integration w/ the rest of the desktop. (Even cut/paste is fux0red.)Y'know, if Ximian came out with a commercial version of Evolution, ported to Windows, I think I could get TPTB to buy this.
Okay, so it isn't 'subtle', but I think that the philosophical content of the Matrix resembles a late twentieth-century Marxist retort to postmodern/anarchist ethics, rather than a disembodied echo of Plato or Descartes. (In reply to apologists for the former reading: The 'real world' is far too dirty, and requires a revolution of consciousness in order to attain, rather than death, a la Plato. Plato suggests that the best we can hope for as mortals is _knowledge_ of forms, which is quite different from perception. And as for Descartes --- well, if you're painting with strokes that thick, we might as well say that any ontology which clearly distinguishes between perception and reality is Cartesian; ie, almost all philosophy ever written.) Consider the indicators: The antagonist is a 'Mr Smith' (get it? As in 'Adam'?). The object of Neo is to 'awaken' the citizens from the fripperies and consolations of decadence to the reality of tje exploitation of their energies (labour). Sure, the task will require complete subordination to those leading the revolution, but, as ugsome as such a prospect might be to senses of personal dignity and liberty, it is certainly to be favoured over the false liberty of cosmopolitan capitalism.
Really, am I the only one who thought _Raymond_ Chandler? (google for it, ya lazies.)
PIM is a perfect euphemism for a detective!
"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of wet hard rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display hankerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks in them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything a well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars." - Raymond Chandler, _The_Big_Sleep_
A little karma whorin': (from http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_scripts/loretta.txt)
(A huge Roman amphitheatre, sparsely attended. REG, FRANCIS, STAN and JUDITHare seated in the stands. They speak conspiratorially.)
Judith: Any Anti-Imperialist group like ours must *reflect* such a divergence of interests within its power-base.
Reg: Agreed.
(General nodding.)
Francis? Francis: I think Judith's point of view is valid here, Reg, provided the Movement never forgets that it is the inalienable right of every
man-- Stan: Or woman. Francis: Or woman...to rid himself-- Stan: Or herself. Reg: Or herself. Agreed. Thank you, brother. Stan: Or sister. Francis: Thank you, brother. Or sister. Where was I? Reg: I thought you'd finished. Francis: Oh, did I? Right. Reg: Furthermore, it is the birthright of every man... Stan: Or woman. Reg: Why don't you shut up about women, Stan, you're putting us off. Stan: Women have a perfect right to play a part in our movement, Reg. Francis: Why are you always on about women, Stan? Stan: (pause) I want to be one.
(pregnant pause) Reg: What? Stan: I want to be a woman. From now on I want you all to call me Loretta. Reg: What!? Stan: It's my right as a man. Judith: Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan? Stan: I want to have babies. Reg: You want to have babies?!?!?! Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them. Reg: But you can't have babies. Stan: Don't you oppress me. Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan -- you haven't got a womb. Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box? (Stan starts crying.) Judith: Here! I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that he can have the *right* to have babies. Francis: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister, sorry. Reg: (pissed) What's the *point*? Francis: What? Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies? Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression. Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.
I think it should be called 'cougar'.......because it's a 30-some-odd-year-old OS wearing a metric crapload of eye candy in order to appeal to teenage males.
I don't know about you guys, but I find that one of the biggest problems with my guitar cords is simple wear-n'-tear at the connectors. Does Gibson really think that the mechanicals of those flimsy crimped Cat5 connectors will stand up to the (er) acrobatic needs of Joe 'Garage Band' Sixpack?
Darwin didn't judge was was "best," just tried to predict which species would do better under given circumstances. Nature doesn't care about the outcome, or become improved as a result. Species diversity is often the preferable situation.
No, you're wrong. Modern evolutionary theory avoids talking about 'best'; Darwin certainly had no such compunctions. Here's a quote from On The Origin of Species:
To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual...And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
Now, in the context of 'perfecting' mental endowments, read the following excerpt from The Descent of Man:
The belief that there exists in man some close relation between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the comparison of the skulls of savage and civilized races, of ancient and modern people, and by the analogy of the whole vertebrate series.... Dr. J. Bernard Davis has proved by many careful measurements that the mean internal cpacity of the skull in Europeans is 92.3 cubic inches; in Americans, 87.5; in Asiatics, 87.1; and in Australians, only 81.9 cubic inches.
Darwin was a good scientist, but he never entirely shook off the prejudices of his day.
Here's the problem. According to the OpenOffice/ODBC howto (dead)linked to by this howto (but still available via google), versions of MySQL after.49 have a 'bug' that causes missing symbol complaints and crashes on the part of OO. (Basically, I think the problem boils down to: The twits at MySQL have managed to break compat. ) The howto thus recommends downgrading to or sticking with Mysql.49. HOWEVER, the latest word from the RedHat advisories indicates that every version of MySQL below, like,.54 is basically an open door for haxx0rs; multiple buffer-overflows in every executable, etc. etc.
So the upshot is that you can pick one of the following: (1) Have a working database front-end in the form of OpenOffice, or
(2) Have an uncompromised system.
Thanks, Open Source, for wasting two precious hours of my life with a difficult installation procedure that fails because of security vulnerabilities and cross-version incompatibilities!
Slashdot Mirror
Um, no. In software either the program functions, or it does not. Ultimately that authors expression can be acid tested in the real world against objective criteria. The same is not true of lit crit. The author worked to understand the field he discussed, then looked to the structure of the field, and found that none was to be had.
The same holds true in the humanities, except the 'acid test' -- the 'objective', or intersubjectively verifiable, criteria -- are found in other books. I must confess that I don't know a great deal about lit crit, so I'll draw my examples from philosophy instead. In postmodern philosophy, there is this idea of a 'hermeneutic circle'. One can make true and false statements about what constitutes a 'hermeneutic circle' (a real phil/litcrit term, btw) because philosophy has been discussing hermeneutics for five hundred years -- everybody knows what counts and does not count as a hermeneutic circle, in much the same way that as all economists know what is meant by an ideal rational agent, even though they have never seen one, and all scientists know what a quark is, even though they have never seen one. What the scientist has is an *idea* of a quark, and an idea of what measurements confirm or infirm its existence, and the definition stands or falls based on how well the theory maps onto the observations. Crucially, the theory does not just sort of 'pop out' of the observations; no number of experiments will give you the *idea* of a quark. Since the idea of the quark (the theoretical hypothesis of such an entity) exists before the experiments that confirm it, the quark is a metaphysical entity until the experiment is run. But this experiment -- does it somehow change the nature of the quark? Does it make sense to say that the statement 'there are quarks' was false before any experiments were run, and true only afterward?
Now, I anticipate the following complaint: "Fine, you can replace 'real object' with 'empirically verified metaphysical entity' if you like, but that just adds more syllables. The truth of the matter is that one gets checked against something 'outside', and the other does not. That's why hermeneutic circles are silly and quarks are not."
My reply would be, "So show me an experiment that can prove that quarks don't exist." Now, I know very little about quantum physics, but I suspect your reply would be couched in terms of various measurements. If quarks don't exist, you might aver, then running XYZ particles into one another shouldn't result in ABC's. But what does this prove about quarks? Could this not instead mean that you have faulty ideas about XYZ's? Or ABC's? Doesn't that sort of mix-up happen all the time? And if experiments cannot confirm or infirm the existence of quarks, how do you know they exist? For the same reason that the postmodernist knows that hermeneutic circles exist: Because the existence of quarks makes the rest of the theoretical system make sense, and doing without them makes things much more difficult to explain.
Snafoo: For instance: Are more, or fewer, comments in source code desirable? How about highly-specific, tightly-optimized assembly versus a perl script?
DL:
Both of which can be tested against objective standards for functionality, cost to produce and maintain, etc.. The same it utterly not true of lit crit. There is no way to judge the objective correctness of two pieces of lit crit writing, only it's political and academic correcness.
Oh, come off it. Functionality depends on the product's intended function, which unless *stipulated* by the designer might be quite different than what you expect. Can you tell me if powerpoint is a 'great' program for small business without making assumptions about the sorts of thing small businesses do? And can you tell me what ownership costs are attributable to the OS? For instance, when Microsoft waves a report claiming that TCO is lower for Windows because the are more MCSE's than certified linux technicians, is this a necessary, or contingent, quality of
I'm going to start my PhD in philosophy in the fall. However, I have also worked extensively with software and software development; I've even written some stuff destined for commercial release. I can tell you that the solidity of the truth-criteria of software development and lit crit are very, very similar, and the fact that you have no clue about the goings-on at that conference of yours speaks only of a difference in field. For instance: Are more, or fewer, comments in source code desirable? How about highly-specific, tightly-optimized assembly versus a perl script? The po-mo's (and, btw, that pastiche of terminology you collected is in no way exclusively postmodern, or even, for that matter, literary) would have just as much trouble understanding the virtues of object re-use and garbage collection and multiple inheritance, and would be just as tempted to derision.
Your critique, BTW, goes much deeper, and is much less grounded than the Sokal hoax, which confined itself to apeing a particularly noisome constellation of theory; the converse of what you have done would be an attack on computer science based on the foibles of visual basic.
The upshot is: Do not be tempted to Volkisch, chauvinist rallies about your discipline. Ignorance, IMO, is fairly evenly distributed over academe.
Patent #333456223: Method for building and/or rebuilding newly-created vassal state's electronic infrastructure using software created in collaboration over the Internet
How big is the hard drive in the X-Box? How much do hard drives of that size run for these days?
Any fountain pen by Lamy is good, IMHO. Many fountain pen manufacturers make money off the prestige factor -- there are lots of $500 fountain pens kicking about. Lamy, OTOH, tends to produce scads of high-quality, reasonably-priced pens that work just as well (and, as an added kicker, can switch between cartridge and free-flow refill modes). They're a good choice if you want a pen that works very well, but aren't interested in 'signalling' your socioeconomic status by way of said pen.
I recently ran into a professor of mine at the university bookstore's cafe. He was using a Lamy Safari identical (in all but colour) to my own. When I pointed this out, we proceeded to chatter about how much we liked them for a good fifteen minutes or so -- it was like an infomercial or something, I swear.
So again, the breakdown: Lamy Safari: About $30USD. Good Mont Blanc: $500USD.
BTW, lamy pens take 'European' cartridges (which are fairly common in office supply stores, at least in Canada) and work well with bottles of Parker 'Quink' dark blue ink.
First of all, I think the question-poster has a really good idea: Computer interfaces *can* and *should* be separable from the beige box. Furthermore, I don't think that implementing this shit in USB **2.0** is such a bad idea. According to http://www.apple.com/firewire/ (hardly a non-partisan source ;) Firewire 800 (the latest Firewire standard) is only twice as fast as USB 2.0, allowing transfer rates of up to 800Mbs, which "delivers more than double the effective bandwidth of the USB 2.0 peripheral standard. That means you can send more than a CD's worth of data every ten seconds." This implies that USB 2.0 can send at least a CD's worth of data every twenty seconds, which is far more bandwidth than your pathetic 52x CD drive will ever put forth.
:) (PS. if you don't, then
l
So, hey, if you have USB 2.0 on your computer, you might as well use it
you can just buy a USB2/Firewire combo card, and just use whatever works best.)
Thirdly, if your USB drive refuses to work with a hub, then simply put everything *else* on a hub and use your computer's extra USB port (it has more than one, right?) for the CDR.
Fourthly, VGA will be a problem --- *if* you're using VGA. Many LCD displays can take DVI, which (AFAIK) means that the cables can be strung somewhat further. If you can't use digital out, or if I'm wrong about the cable length feature of digital out, please feel free to use one 'o them VGA extension devices that, eg, use some multimode fiber-optic cabling and some conversion dongles.
I just googled a nice FAQ about such matters at
http://www.scala.com/hardware/dvi-vga-cable.htm
Have fun.
Yeah, I bought one of these EMI 'Copy-Controlled' discs before as well (yay Canada-as-testing-ground-for-bad-technologies.) Honestly? I didn't even notice that the disc was supposed to be uncopiable until *after* I'd ripped (w/ cdparanoia) and encoded (w/ lame) the tracks onto my Flash MP3 player. I even have the first track. Go figger. BTW, the new 'copy-controlled disc' logo is hilarious -- little triangles and circles inside one another. Looks like the cover of a 70's book on analytic philosophy or psychology (members of the relevant disciplines will know what I'm talking about.)
Linux would probably boot faster if we removed all that SCO code from the kernel....
;)
Oh wait...
As a constant cordless telephone user, I wanted to know myself, so I did a wee bit o' googling and came up with this FAQ, published by the FDA in 2002:
... The so-called "cordless phones," which have a base unit connected to the telephone wiring in a house, typically operate at far lower power levels, and thus produce RF exposures well within the FCC's compliance limits.
;)
http://www.fda.gov/cellphones/qa.html
An exerpt:
The term "wireless phone" refers here to hand-held wireless phones with built-in antennas, often called "cell," "mobile," or "PCS" phones.
The upshot being, your kids are probably okay w/o the tinfoil hat. Esp. considering that your base station isn't strapped to their heads. (Though you could always strap it to the head of one of them, and keep the other as a control.
Very well; this was published in 1994. Has anyone duplicated *these* results? And if so, why didn't they form part of the cell-phone health debate till now?
This isn't a technological advance, it's... art! Yes! The complete impracticality (not to mention redundancy) of an underwater sense-dep telephone is a brilliant, scathing critique of the techno-scientifically induced phenomenon that Husserl called 'activity in passivity'. It is not until our culture rediscovers the underlying crisis in the Western project --- that instrumental advances alter and, yes, perhaps even narrow, the horizon of subjective existence --- that we will fully understand the work of this visionary.
Either that, or he's a government-funded british crackpot inventor who happens to like tanks, and telephones, and decided to put the two together. You decide.
First, I've adminned only small networks (10-20 machines) but I think the following should work. It seems to work for my DSL provider:
Set your route permit only PPPoE connections to and from workstations. Then, hand out CDR's containing your favourite DSL implementation. Fix it so the other end of the PPPoE connection empties out into some safe IP space which is not contiguous with that of the rest of your gear's. Finally, make sure that the connections are well-throttled. If you can, write some scripts to automagically decrease a user's bandwidth if excessive activity occurs on port_related_to_latest_ms_hole.
PPPoE is just one option though; any technology which allows you to tunnel all the user's networking should suffice. (IP/SEC VPN, say. )
Remember, it's your students' problem, not yours. Warn them, but furnish them with enough rope to hang themselves by, whilst avoiding the tangle yourself.
>Sometimes, the stepper motor dies. Then, you're screwed.
/for the first time/ during powerup. Remember that scene in _The_Princess_Bride_, where Miracle Max contrasts 'mostly dead' with 'all dead'? In my experience, a drive with motor problems is only _mostly_ dead. It can almost certainly be revived, if only temporarily, by holding it upside-down and smacking it against a table or counter. Ideally, smack it only once, but smack it hard, and try to smack it head-on --- you don't want to damage the drive any more than you have to.
Actually, I don't think that motor failures are really that tricky to handle. In my experience (cf. four to five failed IDE/ATA drives, all from motor or spindle problems) motors tend to fail
The fridge trick that the article mentions is new to me, but I can't wait to give it a shot.
I've been diagnosed with ADD and I have two suggestions for dealing with procrastination and focusing problems. Note that I don't to either of these much anymore, as I'm medicated, but they worked well enough at the time.
t asks_and_contexts_. One minute you're studying faithfully --- at your mental office, so to speak --- and the next, you're in your mental rec room, playing FreeCiv; or in your mental coffee shop, chatting on /. And, Oh God, the futzing that one can do with a GUI! Desktop icon arrangement. Wallpaper. Themepacks, for heaven's sake. It's a temple of distraction in here.
/etc/inittab to boot to initlevel 4. Learn to love vi or nano or emacs: They work great for comp sci projects, and if you have an essay or a paper to write, do it in vi first, import it to word_processor_of_your_choice (for formatting) only when you're about to print it.
Suggestion #1:
I have a little theory to the effect that, for a certain percentage of the population, GUIs have made focusing a lot more difficult: Sure, your taskbar, icons, buttons and menus make it easier to switch rapidly between many different tasks and contexts, but they also _make_it_easier_to_switch_between_many_different_
So here's what I recommend: Ditch it. Ditch the GUI. Install Linux, if you haven't already, and configure
If you can't ditch the GUI for whatever reason (i.e. you need a proprietary Windoze app, or you can't bear to install Linux) then I recommend setting up a new account (linux) or user profile ('doze) that will only allow you to run only those applications which you need to get the job done. If that doesn't work, you should seriously consider getting yourself a (second-hand?) laptop upon which you will place only work-related programs --- preferably, one without WiFi or some other way of exposing it to the Lethean floodwaters of the 'net.
Suggestion #2. This next one is a little weird, but it works well for me. Note that it might work less well if you don't have any roomates, as it depends greatly on your desire to avoid embarrassment. It also requires that you have an extra room in your house.
Make yourself a home office in a well-heated room, and keep only work-related things in it. When you go to study, take in all the food, caffeine, and books that you'll need for a stint of about five hours. Set an alarm clock to go off in five hours. Now, close the door, and take off your pants. Yes, you heard me, take off your pants. If necessary, take off your shirt as well. Put them in a plastic bag, and tie the bag shut. Put the bag away (the further away the better.). This way, you can't leave the room suddenly without raising eyebrows: If, say, you have a sudden impulse to jump up and watch TV, or phone a friend, it'll take you a good five minutes to dress, which should be plenty to reconsider and sit back down.
After a couple of months of this, you get in the habit of staying in the room until the alarm sounds, you don't have to take off your pants anymore.
Who else read that headline, 'Oldest *Patent* Ever Discovered?' I admit that the 'space' icon is a bit of a tip-off, but still: I was waiting for some litigous Australopithicus-run hole-in-the-jungle-wall to start firing off cease-and-desists at, eg, string manufacturers.
Are they really as cheap and flimsy as all that? Based on previous happy experiences with Dell workstations, I've recommended their laptops to friends, and now I fear my ass is on the line. :)
Oh well, that's what I get for trying to look omniscient.
Is something like this for STD's. Oh come on, admit it --- condoms suck, and not in that fun way. Wouldn't you rather just tricoder her nether-regions?
Yeah, I know; it comes as a perennial shock to me as well. BTW, I've even tried the cygwin route, but the sales staff has problems with the lack of integration w/ the rest of the desktop. (Even cut/paste is fux0red.)Y'know, if Ximian came out with a commercial version of Evolution, ported to Windows, I think I could get TPTB to buy this.
Okay, so it isn't 'subtle', but I think that the philosophical content of the Matrix resembles a late twentieth-century Marxist retort to postmodern/anarchist ethics, rather than a disembodied echo of Plato or Descartes. (In reply to apologists for the former reading: The 'real world' is far too dirty, and requires a revolution of consciousness in order to attain, rather than death, a la Plato. Plato suggests that the best we can hope for as mortals is _knowledge_ of forms, which is quite different from perception. And as for Descartes --- well, if you're painting with strokes that thick, we might as well say that any ontology which clearly distinguishes between perception and reality is Cartesian; ie, almost all philosophy ever written.) Consider the indicators: The antagonist is a 'Mr Smith' (get it? As in 'Adam'?). The object of Neo is to 'awaken' the citizens from the fripperies and consolations of decadence to the reality of tje exploitation of their energies (labour). Sure, the task will require complete subordination to those leading the revolution, but, as ugsome as such a prospect might be to senses of personal dignity and liberty, it is certainly to be favoured over the false liberty of cosmopolitan capitalism.
Or maybe it's just a movie.
Really, am I the only one who thought _Raymond_ Chandler?
(google for it, ya lazies.)
PIM is a perfect euphemism for a detective!
"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of wet hard rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display hankerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks in them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything a well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."
- Raymond Chandler, _The_Big_Sleep_
A little karma whorin':)
...
(from http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_scripts/loretta.txt
(A huge Roman amphitheatre, sparsely attended. REG, FRANCIS, STAN and JUDITHare seated in the stands. They speak conspiratorially.)
Judith: Any Anti-Imperialist group like ours must *reflect* such a divergence of interests within its power-base.
Reg: Agreed.
(General nodding.)
Francis?
Francis: I think Judith's point of view is valid here, Reg, provided the Movement never forgets that it is the inalienable right of every
man--
Stan: Or woman.
Francis: Or woman...to rid himself--
Stan: Or herself.
Reg: Or herself. Agreed. Thank you, brother.
Stan: Or sister.
Francis: Thank you, brother. Or sister. Where was I?
Reg: I thought you'd finished.
Francis: Oh, did I? Right.
Reg: Furthermore, it is the birthright of every man
Stan: Or woman.
Reg: Why don't you shut up about women, Stan, you're putting us off.
Stan: Women have a perfect right to play a part in our movement, Reg.
Francis: Why are you always on about women, Stan?
Stan: (pause) I want to be one.
(pregnant pause)
Reg: What?
Stan: I want to be a woman. From now on I want you all to call me Loretta.
Reg: What!?
Stan: It's my right as a man.
Judith: Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Stan: I want to have babies.
Reg: You want to have babies?!?!?!
Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But you can't have babies.
Stan: Don't you oppress me.
Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan -- you haven't got a womb. Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?
(Stan starts crying.)
Judith: Here! I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that he can have the *right* to have babies.
Francis: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister, sorry.
Reg: (pissed) What's the *point*?
Francis: What?
Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies?
Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.
I think it should be called 'cougar'... ....because it's a 30-some-odd-year-old OS wearing a metric crapload of eye candy in order to appeal to teenage males.
I don't know about you guys, but I find that one of the biggest problems with my guitar cords is simple wear-n'-tear at the connectors. Does Gibson really think that the mechanicals of those flimsy crimped Cat5 connectors will stand up to the (er) acrobatic needs of Joe 'Garage Band' Sixpack?
No, you're wrong. Modern evolutionary theory avoids talking about 'best'; Darwin certainly had no such compunctions. Here's a quote from On The Origin of Species:
Now, in the context of 'perfecting' mental endowments, read the following excerpt from The Descent of Man:
Darwin was a good scientist, but he never entirely shook off the prejudices of his day.
Here's the problem. According to the OpenOffice/ODBC howto (dead)linked to by this howto (but still available via google), versions of MySQL after .49 have a 'bug' that causes missing symbol complaints and crashes on the part of OO. (Basically, I think the problem boils down to: The twits at MySQL have managed to break compat. ) The howto thus recommends downgrading to or sticking with Mysql .49. HOWEVER, the latest word from the RedHat advisories indicates that every version of MySQL below, like, .54 is basically an open door for haxx0rs; multiple buffer-overflows in every executable, etc. etc.
So the upshot is that you can pick one of the following:
(1) Have a working database front-end in the form of OpenOffice, or
(2) Have an uncompromised system.
Thanks, Open Source, for wasting two precious hours of my life with a difficult installation procedure that fails because of security vulnerabilities and cross-version incompatibilities!
(Now where's my Office CD again...?)