I've recently just purchased an old HP-IV for just this reason. Those heavy steel bulks can take nearly anything you can dish out, all while constantly churning out page after page of crisp text and graphics. ^_^
Yeah. I checked around and I can never get any kind of laser surgery. I have -15 in my left eye and -17 in my right - basically off the x/20 scale entirely. Apparently the width of my cornea is bordering on 9mm, and they won't do the surgery on anything 8mm or over, due to the complications you mention.
I was told this about two years ago, but I don't remember it being part of the materials I read before that. I'm still waiting for a proceedure that works for me. ^_^
... I work in the newspaper industry, which is basically run entirely on Macs. More often than not, we get emails from newspaper editors with so many misspellings and grammar mistakes that we actually keep the emails for posterity and pass them around the office for a good chuckle.
Correlation != causation.
Remember folks, there are all kinds of people in all kinds of groups. I would say that this article is flame-bait lacking any modicum of real insight, but it was expressed so eloquently! If you don't see the irony in that, maybe you're a Mac user. ^_^
I've been following the PHP developers mailing list. The comments I've made have come up in discussion in that list quite a few times, with many ensuing flame-wars. Maybe some of that got quietly dropped, but that would be odd. Here are a couple links that illustrate what I've been watching over the past few months:
I didn't make any of this up, nobody could. Maybe it was finally decided off list to drop these things, but some pretty big developers were involved in these conversations. I'm just stating what I last knew to be the direction they were going with certain decisions and giving people warning that things may not be as compatible as they think.
Uh... no. They also changed the object inheritance rules so that overloaded child methods have to have the exact same number of parameters as the original class. So, now you can't have multiple constructors *or* have child constructors that assume certain values and reduce the amount of paramters accordingly.
Yuck.
As a person who codes entire 20,000+ line application libraries in PHP and has been watching the development of PHP 5 very closely, there are a lot of decisions the PHP developers have made that make me very hesitant about going anywhere near the new PHP version.
As an aside, the PHP developers have decided to make SQLite, a light file-based database engine, the default session handler. Even with all file locking turned off, this is at least 4 times slower than the current system used by PHP 4. Of course you can change this setting back to flat session files, but the fact this is their default should say something about other decisions they've made. This setting itself makes especially no sense to me, as all session variables go into the $_SESSION superglobal as associative array keys - there is absolutely no benefit to using a database-enabled flat file for this, as opposed to a regular flat file. It's as if the PHP group were excited about sqlite and tried shoving it into everything.
Just read the changelog very carefully. If you're already using PHP, and have gone deeper than casual use, your applications *will* break - especially if you turn on PHP's strict mode which kills backwards compatibility with PHP 4.
Backwards compatible is right. But that's easy. Whatever the new system is, it'll be larger than 17 digits. Detection code should be able to tell 17 digits from > 17 digits, and handle the VIN accordingly. The main problem is locating the breathtakingly large amount of software that uses VINs in some way, and retrofitting them.
The problem with designing it to only last 30 years, is that means there would have to be a migration path long before the 30 years were up. Now we get to re-engineer the entire VIN system in place all over the country for insurance, government, personal, decoding, and tracking purposes in about 4 years. If they used 2 characters for the year instead of 1, for an 18 character VIN, it could have lasted 961 - and that's only *one* change that could have made the number much more scalable.
We run an automotive listing and search system. We've been building and maintaining a list of manufacturers for every type of vehicle that started with over 50 manufacturers of regular road vehicles. Personally, I'm surprised they came up with this stupid system at all. One character for country? After removing I, O, Q, U and Z, that leaves 31. Now count how many countries there are in the world - I'll wait until you're done. Why, oh why can't they have designed something more scalable to begin with?
You don't know the half of it. In the VIN code system, only one character from 0-9 and any letter except for I, O, Q, or U, is used for the year. Oddly enough, it cycles (1980 = A, 1990 = L, 2001=1,..., 2010 = A) so it's already a flawed system. Theoretically, you could have the same VIN for a 1980 vehicle as a 2010 vehicle. Nice design!
Nope. Make a thin-layer dummy fingerprint, wear it over your own finger. Pulse and body-head supplied by your body, fingerprint supplied by someone else.
Ever put Elmers glue on your hand and peel it off to make fake "skin" ? Fake fingerprints can be made just as thin.
I myself make, uh, plenty of myostatin. In fact, that's my superpower -- making tons of myostatin to keep my body almost superhumanly unmuscled.
Yeah, I have that superpower. I think it comes with hyper metabolisms. If you don't mind eating two or three times as much as any normal human being, you can probably put on some muscle, but it sure as hell isn't easy. Oh well, I have an appointment to be beaten up by a little girl - see ya later.:p
Yes, I've heard of the "free" command, and I know about disk buffers and cache. Linux GUI still takes more memory. It's a fact of life I've come to accept, and now use Windows for GUI tasks and restrict my Linux usage to servers and project development.
My previous machine was a K6-2 450. With KDE? It sucked. With Gnome? Sucked. XFCE? Awsome. Old machines just need a lightweight window manager, the new/popular ones are simply memory hogs.
After getting my XP machine, I turned off a few services, killed off the animations, and that was it. Themes are still on, and I use powertoys to give myself 4 desktops. How much memory does my machine use upon booting? About 90. To hear that modern Linux desktops use twice that, I just want to laugh. My home Linux machine still only has Redhat 7.2 on it, and though I was considering upgrading; maybe I won't now. Or if I do, I'll just install xfce.
Really, how in the hell did Linux desktops get so bloated?
What, uncoordinated computer geeks can't play? I've been playing seriously for about a year now, and all but the most difficult songs are possible for me to complete.
This from someone who used to just watch TV all day, or do homework, or play video games... not exactly very strenuous activities. I'm one of those people with a fast metabolism, so I never got fat, just never ask me to run a mile back then, I would have died. No coordination, out of shape, no musical talent whatsoever.
And yet I'm pretty good at DDR. I see it as a video game; my addiction comes from wanting to 0w/\/z0r it, the skill comes from countless hours of playing. So yeah, even uncoordinated geeks can play this game, trust me.
You know... you'd think a country as logical as Japan wouldn't be drawn in by this kind of superstitious crap. It's like France and Handwriting Analysis. I mean, seriously:
"Wow, you have a great resume! You're everything you're looking for! Hell, you can have MY job! oohhh, I'm sorry... it looks like your blood type is B-. So sorry to waste your time."
Yeah, like there's something people can do ABOUT THE VERY BLOOD THAT FLOWS THROUGH VEINS.
If you would please shut up. Gas prices in most European countries are higher due to taxes. We all know this. All efforts to do this to gas prices in the US have been quickly shot down. For whatever reason, the US strongly resists gas taxes. This may not always be the case, but it is for now.
You also have available public transportation. Know how much there is in my town? I've seen two busses, and both go to and from the mall; none go across the river to our sister city. Walk? Sure, if there were sidewalks, and I didn't have to cross a highway to get anywhere. One way or another, most of the US is built for driving - sometimes to the degree that you can't get to certain locations *without* a car.
Driving isn't optional here unless you live in a really big city, or are under 18 where everything is provided by your parents. That's why Americans go insane when gas prices rise. It's like the recent price spike in milk of over $1 a gallon. Something everyone uses, considers a basic staple, suddenly takes a giant jump in price. People are going to complain. It would be as if all toilet paper in the world suddenly doubled in price. Sure, you can get by without TP, but the complexity involved makes it a daunting proposition.
Careful just saying adaware. The software is named Ad-aware, a start contrast to Ada-Ware which is itself a spyware program masquerading as a removal tool. Note that both of these are "adaware" when all punctuation and capitalization are removed. Scary, huh?
To be fair, people often complain more than they praise. Sometimes the vocal minority can skew the perception of a community. We at Slashdot should know this.
Slashdot Mirror
I've recently just purchased an old HP-IV for just this reason. Those heavy steel bulks can take nearly anything you can dish out, all while constantly churning out page after page of crisp text and graphics. ^_^
Yeah. I checked around and I can never get any kind of laser surgery. I have -15 in my left eye and -17 in my right - basically off the x/20 scale entirely. Apparently the width of my cornea is bordering on 9mm, and they won't do the surgery on anything 8mm or over, due to the complications you mention.
I was told this about two years ago, but I don't remember it being part of the materials I read before that. I'm still waiting for a proceedure that works for me. ^_^
... I work in the newspaper industry, which is basically run entirely on Macs. More often than not, we get emails from newspaper editors with so many misspellings and grammar mistakes that we actually keep the emails for posterity and pass them around the office for a good chuckle.
Correlation != causation.
Remember folks, there are all kinds of people in all kinds of groups. I would say that this article is flame-bait lacking any modicum of real insight, but it was expressed so eloquently! If you don't see the irony in that, maybe you're a Mac user. ^_^
I've been following the PHP developers mailing list. The comments I've made have come up in discussion in that list quite a few times, with many ensuing flame-wars. Maybe some of that got quietly dropped, but that would be odd. Here are a couple links that illustrate what I've been watching over the past few months:
Method Overloading and Sqlite Session Handler.I didn't make any of this up, nobody could. Maybe it was finally decided off list to drop these things, but some pretty big developers were involved in these conversations. I'm just stating what I last knew to be the direction they were going with certain decisions and giving people warning that things may not be as compatible as they think.
Uh... no. They also changed the object inheritance rules so that overloaded child methods have to have the exact same number of parameters as the original class. So, now you can't have multiple constructors *or* have child constructors that assume certain values and reduce the amount of paramters accordingly.
Yuck.
As a person who codes entire 20,000+ line application libraries in PHP and has been watching the development of PHP 5 very closely, there are a lot of decisions the PHP developers have made that make me very hesitant about going anywhere near the new PHP version.
As an aside, the PHP developers have decided to make SQLite, a light file-based database engine, the default session handler. Even with all file locking turned off, this is at least 4 times slower than the current system used by PHP 4. Of course you can change this setting back to flat session files, but the fact this is their default should say something about other decisions they've made. This setting itself makes especially no sense to me, as all session variables go into the $_SESSION superglobal as associative array keys - there is absolutely no benefit to using a database-enabled flat file for this, as opposed to a regular flat file. It's as if the PHP group were excited about sqlite and tried shoving it into everything.
Just read the changelog very carefully. If you're already using PHP, and have gone deeper than casual use, your applications *will* break - especially if you turn on PHP's strict mode which kills backwards compatibility with PHP 4.
Tell that to all the automated systems that only see the number. ^_^
Backwards compatible is right. But that's easy. Whatever the new system is, it'll be larger than 17 digits. Detection code should be able to tell 17 digits from > 17 digits, and handle the VIN accordingly. The main problem is locating the breathtakingly large amount of software that uses VINs in some way, and retrofitting them.
Yuck.
The problem with designing it to only last 30 years, is that means there would have to be a migration path long before the 30 years were up. Now we get to re-engineer the entire VIN system in place all over the country for insurance, government, personal, decoding, and tracking purposes in about 4 years. If they used 2 characters for the year instead of 1, for an 18 character VIN, it could have lasted 961 - and that's only *one* change that could have made the number much more scalable.
Nice job, guys!
We run an automotive listing and search system. We've been building and maintaining a list of manufacturers for every type of vehicle that started with over 50 manufacturers of regular road vehicles. Personally, I'm surprised they came up with this stupid system at all. One character for country? After removing I, O, Q, U and Z, that leaves 31. Now count how many countries there are in the world - I'll wait until you're done. Why, oh why can't they have designed something more scalable to begin with?
U can look like a V, and Z may look like a 2. It's not just numbers, but any confusing or possibly misleading combination that is restricted.
You don't know the half of it. In the VIN code system, only one character from 0-9 and any letter except for I, O, Q, or U, is used for the year. Oddly enough, it cycles (1980 = A, 1990 = L, 2001=1, ..., 2010 = A) so it's already a flawed system. Theoretically, you could have the same VIN for a 1980 vehicle as a 2010 vehicle. Nice design!
Nope. Make a thin-layer dummy fingerprint, wear it over your own finger. Pulse and body-head supplied by your body, fingerprint supplied by someone else.
Ever put Elmers glue on your hand and peel it off to make fake "skin" ? Fake fingerprints can be made just as thin.
Naw, just do what the guy in the movie "7" did: cut them off with a knife for temporary anonymity. ^_^
Errr... you are aware that CompactFlash has a limited amount of write cycles, aren't you?
Yeah, I have that superpower. I think it comes with hyper metabolisms. If you don't mind eating two or three times as much as any normal human being, you can probably put on some muscle, but it sure as hell isn't easy. Oh well, I have an appointment to be beaten up by a little girl - see ya later. :p
Read the 10th Amendment and say that again. Here, I'll help you
Yes, I've heard of the "free" command, and I know about disk buffers and cache. Linux GUI still takes more memory. It's a fact of life I've come to accept, and now use Windows for GUI tasks and restrict my Linux usage to servers and project development.
My previous machine was a K6-2 450. With KDE? It sucked. With Gnome? Sucked. XFCE? Awsome. Old machines just need a lightweight window manager, the new/popular ones are simply memory hogs.
After getting my XP machine, I turned off a few services, killed off the animations, and that was it. Themes are still on, and I use powertoys to give myself 4 desktops. How much memory does my machine use upon booting? About 90. To hear that modern Linux desktops use twice that, I just want to laugh. My home Linux machine still only has Redhat 7.2 on it, and though I was considering upgrading; maybe I won't now. Or if I do, I'll just install xfce.
Really, how in the hell did Linux desktops get so bloated?
What, uncoordinated computer geeks can't play? I've been playing seriously for about a year now, and all but the most difficult songs are possible for me to complete.
This from someone who used to just watch TV all day, or do homework, or play video games... not exactly very strenuous activities. I'm one of those people with a fast metabolism, so I never got fat, just never ask me to run a mile back then, I would have died. No coordination, out of shape, no musical talent whatsoever.
And yet I'm pretty good at DDR. I see it as a video game; my addiction comes from wanting to 0w/\/z0r it, the skill comes from countless hours of playing. So yeah, even uncoordinated geeks can play this game, trust me.
You know... you'd think a country as logical as Japan wouldn't be drawn in by this kind of superstitious crap. It's like France and Handwriting Analysis. I mean, seriously:
"Wow, you have a great resume! You're everything you're looking for! Hell, you can have MY job! oohhh, I'm sorry... it looks like your blood type is B-. So sorry to waste your time."
Yeah, like there's something people can do ABOUT THE VERY BLOOD THAT FLOWS THROUGH VEINS.
God...
If you would please shut up. Gas prices in most European countries are higher due to taxes. We all know this. All efforts to do this to gas prices in the US have been quickly shot down. For whatever reason, the US strongly resists gas taxes. This may not always be the case, but it is for now.
You also have available public transportation. Know how much there is in my town? I've seen two busses, and both go to and from the mall; none go across the river to our sister city. Walk? Sure, if there were sidewalks, and I didn't have to cross a highway to get anywhere. One way or another, most of the US is built for driving - sometimes to the degree that you can't get to certain locations *without* a car.
Driving isn't optional here unless you live in a really big city, or are under 18 where everything is provided by your parents. That's why Americans go insane when gas prices rise. It's like the recent price spike in milk of over $1 a gallon. Something everyone uses, considers a basic staple, suddenly takes a giant jump in price. People are going to complain. It would be as if all toilet paper in the world suddenly doubled in price. Sure, you can get by without TP, but the complexity involved makes it a daunting proposition.
So... global warming and lots of toxic clouds. We're turning into Venus!
So, if a legit company makes an actual bona-fide virus that benefits them in some obscure way, no virus removal program can touch it?
Oh, I get it now:
Joe random hacker makes virus == bad.
Company makes virus == good.
I see the difference now! Never mind.
Careful just saying adaware. The software is named Ad-aware, a start contrast to Ada-Ware which is itself a spyware program masquerading as a removal tool. Note that both of these are "adaware" when all punctuation and capitalization are removed. Scary, huh?
To be fair, people often complain more than they praise. Sometimes the vocal minority can skew the perception of a community. We at Slashdot should know this.