Is it possible to just uninstall the update, or the full Quicktime and install the older version? I seem to recall that there are certain things within OS X, like Windows, which can not be "uninstalled": once it's in, it's in for keeps. RealPlayer, Adobe Reader, and Quicktime on Windows all do this, as does any non-Office/"free" MS add-on product.
Well, there's only one way to really interpret that - or rather several ways which result in the same basic idea holding true. It does not necessarily mean that Egyptians were there; it could also mean that they traded with North America.
Remember, the Egyptian trade routes were extensive. It's been acknowledged within the scientific community that they traded with the Far East. If some of the legends hold any credence (Plato's Atlantis), then it is likely there was also a substantial sea trade route at the time. This was long before the "mini-Ice Age" which resulted in a general decline in society, and a loss of knowledge.
I think we in modern societies tend to prefer to think that ancient civilizations were stupid and unadvanced compared to us. Maybe the word should be "unevolved". I don't think this is true, at all. They may not have had iPod addictions, but they were certainly capable of having addictions to pot, chocolate, and tobacco - and as anyone knows, acquiring drugs is pretty trivial for some folks.:P
You're assuming that the food supply remains constant, or at least, does not decrease. It isn't, and varies from year to year and from month to month.
Famine occurs when the food supply is outstripped. It's happened quite a few times throughout history. Currently, we in the modernized West live in very much of a 'hand to mouth' type situation - that is, our food supply is only enough for a couple weeks. This kind of situation is precarious, as any one of many different factors could result in national famine before the next crop is in.
What we need is redundancy and backups to prevent a famine - just as we would with our important data. It doesn't take much sunlight for people to grow small amounts of crops in window boxes; there are plenty of fruits and veggies which actually require indirect sunlight to thrive. The weight of people having a small 5x2 garden bed on their patio is certainly less than the people themselves, as well as the weight of all the shit they've got in their apartments.
The US has more per-acre 'massive forests' than anywhere else in the world. I believe the statistic is something like we've got 50% more forested acreage per acre than any other country in the world - I don't know that's the amount, but it is similarly high.
As it stands, you can't travel anywhere in the city without having dense woodland on either side of the road. Thirty minutes from NYC and you're already "in the woods".
For that matter, have you ever been in the forests in the US Northeast? They are grossly overgrown and unhealthy. They are not "biologically diverse"; they are crowded and overgrown, both in terms of plant and animals. And there is not nearly the variety that there was 50, 60, 70 years ago.
As recently as 30 years ago, there were farms throughout the state of NY offering diverse ecosystems for animals, and woodland was not as thick (for a myriad of reasons: people used the wood, farm land would rotate to forest and vice versa, etc.). Putnam County, for instance, now has one farm whereas it was almost entirely farmland interspersed with woodland 50 years ago - and that one farm is a historic tourist site, not an operational farm. This specific county, at the time, had enough red foxes, coyotes, raccoons, and other fur-bearing animals for my grandfather to pay for all four of his kids to go to high-priced schools solely on the return on trapping. There were enough pheasants, grouse, and partridge to get one's limit in half a day. Deer were not as numerous as they are today - but they were larger, healthier, and lived longer.
Today, there is none of that. The deer are small, young, and stunted. There isn't enough habitat for those fur-bearing animals to survive (foxes, coons, coyotes, etc. need fields to survive, as they are the preferred habitat for rodents, their primary source of food).
The only reason the Northeast has not suffered from the fate of the overgrown, unhealthy, forest monocultures in Australia and California right now is because a) the NE forests are largely deciduous, which has a higher flash point than the trees in California and Australia, b) the NE has more precipitation than California (NFI vs. Australia).
Even the National Parks Service (and National Fire Service) recognize this information as fact now (30 years too late). Systematic thinning, logging, and burning is healthy - and necessary - to both maintain the forest's ecosystem balance and prevent the massive ecological damage a large (hot) fire results in.
Hell, you want to talk about top soil and nutrient cycles... look at the advantage of regular (small, limited) forest fires on an ecosystem. They are an absolute necessity for vibrancy.
Buddy, "0 furlongs" is pretty much identical to "0 feet" or "0 meters". You're fucked once you reach that regardless of which measurement you're using; the idea is to avoid it. Not doing so is pretty much a sign of incompetence, period.
The text rendering would be a good possibility. I've noticed substantial speed decreases when turning up AA; I don't know how, or if Wine does it, but my recollection is that it doesn't (by default).
If I recall correctly, there was a kernel module for WINE a while back to allow direct system calls by win32 applications - or something to that effect. Whatever happened to that project? Could that not be used to further speed things up, if it were still around?
There's nothing like making a generalized quality statement (cheap, fast, reliable) an absolute rule, is there?
Using your line of reasoning, because Windows is expensive, it should also be both fast and reliable - and that, relatively speaking, Linux (and the user software which runs on top of it to make it a comparable environment to Windows) it can not possibly be both reliable and fast. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of this to the contrary.
With open source (unlike closed source) a developer can 'afford' to spend a month doing optimizations, because there is no set release deadline or a profit to be made in order to meet stock shareholder needs. This is unlike the closed source model, and does indeed mean that open source can be "cheap" (in terms of time restraints to release, which is the only real metric in determining the cost of software) while still having both other qualities.
Of course, it's all relative. You can't assume that developers, or money, or your relative metrics for determining quality, or anything else is an unlimited quantity. The point here is that a big limiting factor on both speed and robustness is development time (often represented in terms of money, or numbers of developers) - and open source has no concrete limitation on these things vs. the closed model.
You've got a decent point or two there, on both accounts. I've got a 500MHz fujitsu laptop which runs Ubuntu 8.10 decently, and the current laptop I'm on is 5 years old, also running 8.10 well (or as well as can be expected).
I seem to recall the "4 year old hardware" (or so) that I used in 2000 was a 133MHz system with either 32 or 64Mb of RAM. Not speedy by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly faster than, say, w98 or w2k on the same hardware! Looking at Linux alone, it hasn't kept up in terms of relative performance.
Given that W2k3 and XP are still largely maintained and the "main" Windows platforms of today, I'd even say that either MS has caught up, or Linux has fallen behind a bit - or maybe both. Vista and 2k8 throw a wrench in that theory, but those aren't representative of a common Windows system, either.
Hmm, my old air rifle (which was, when new, lethal enough to take out a deer if you shot it in the head), is a.20 cal, not a.22 - ie, 5mm. And no, it's not some European import, but an old genuine-American Sheridan (later/earlier called Benjamin, iirc) single-shot pump air rifle.
What you suggest is good fun, but it doesn't eliminate the problem. My uncle used to do what you describe in Japan (homemade air rifle, as they're illegal there, IIRC) with roaches (which grow really, really big and are everwhere). You have to eliminate the damn things in larger numbers than that once you've got an infestation: they're tricky buggers and don't like exposing themselves.
Not true. Pest control uses poison because it's the lazy approach that takes care of the problem, for the time being - ie, if the rats come back, you've got to hire the exterminator to come back.
A "bucket trap" will work just as well as a pile of poison pellets, and can be used indefinitely - stopping an infestation before it becomes an infestation by killing the first migrants. They're also cheap to make (there are some commercial products which operate under similar principles) and are much, much cleaner (in all regards) than poison.
Ultra-sonic repellers for rodents will work for exactly one generation of rodent - approximately 3 months, I believe. After that, later generations born nearby will be born deaf and will move back into the territory evacuated by their parents, with all successive generations also immune to the sound. (This is partially why the ultrasonic sound of machines in a server room, or the EM from cables, does not bother rodents.)
We have a cat that was the runt of its litter, and as such, the mother attempted to kill it when it was born. It got no care from the mother whatsoever and was bottle-fed from birth.
She was a horrible mouser. Several years ago, we lived in a very old house with mouse problems. On one occasion, I caught a mouse in a bucket (with a bucket trap), without any water. It was a baby/young mouse, and couldn't run very fast. I took said mouse out, and tried to get the cat to play with it. On several occasions I saw this cat watch mice run across the floor, completely uninterested in the prey.
That said, last month she caught and killed half a dozen mice. She's maybe 7 or 8 years old now, and had never previously killed a mouse. Yes, she was being regularly fed - we can't figure out a logical explanation for the change, other than her being bored and having simply been introduced to the scent/odor of a dead mouse (as we caught a couple in mouse traps the weeks before that) that she liked. Who knows.
Just because they don't learn it when they're young doesn't mean they can't learn it later.
Care and attention, for a cat? Surely you've never owned such a creature.
I have, on occasion, wondered if our current cat has gone off and died in a dark place: there have been stretches of days where I have not seen her. The only thing we do is fill her food and water bowl, and consider it more of a privilege to see her out and about than we do to see a fox or a cougar in the yard (which has happened all of once or twice that I can recall). Even still, she is not privy to people touching her on their own motivation, and is very picky about who she will rub up against.
The cat before that was christened "Mocca" due to her coloration. That soon became "Demon Cat" on account of it attacking - not playing with - anyone and everyone who came within 5 feet of it. She would often wait in certain locations to attack you when you came through a door. Aside from that, you might be lucky to see her before it's too late to avoid the painful laceration.
The cat before her was short-lived. She was fat, slow, and stupid. She jumped out a window, likely couldn't get back in, and wandered over to be mauled by the neighbor's dog. She, too, sat around doing nothing and ate anything and everything that was put on the floor for her. She was irritable and only came out at night, instead preferring to hide in the closet. She would hiss if you tried to pet her, and never purred.
A mental retard could take care of a cat, and would likely provide entirely too much attention for said cat. It's not a fucking rocket science.
A lot of people are also allergic to cats. Chances are someone would start complaining and your work place would be liable if someone had an aesthmatic attack.
The most straightforward approach, I think, would be to set traps - of the $.50 each, drug store variety. Set up a map with the "problem areas" plotted out. Chances are you will see a pattern: the areas are not that far from sources of food. Rats, like deer and most other animals, will take the shortest route between two locations. Use this information when planting your traps.
A very successful trap is a 'bucket trap'. Here is an example of one such bucket trap.. Basically, you have a basin with water in it, and a lip on the basin high and steep enough to prevent the rodents from climbing out. You then place an object - a board or wire - leading out to the center, where you have placed a pole sticking vertically out of the water which contains the bait. The perpendicular bait pole needs to be narrow and slippery (ie something a rodent can't easily climb).
The object which is parallel to the floor needs to be at least several inches from the vertical rod in order to
You can also make a good bucket trap with a piece of 1x2 lumber from the hardware store and a common door hinge. Balance the 1x2 on the lip of the bucket, with the hinge on the inside (and a small flat wood spacer to allow the hinge to not bind on the side of the bucket), with the tip of the 1x2 in the middle of the bucket's opening. This works well if the other side sits on something where the rodent can/does travel (ie interpret their path of travel nad put the bucket nearby). (Make sure your 1/x is balanced with the weight of the bait included.) Rat or mouse comes by, walks onto the 1x2, and falls in - automatically resetting the trap.
This trap works with pretty much any scavenger, by the way. It'd probably work with deer, if you could make a large enough trap. I've seen stock water feeders used for racoons and halved 30-gallon drums used for rats. Basically, if you can get them in the water, they will drown to death after getting too tired to swim any more. (Obviously, the water has to be deep enough that they can not stand in it and breath). This trap type is a real boon as it's automatically resetting, ecologically safe (ie no neurotoxin poisons in an inhabited area like an office, house, barn, etc.), mostly silent, and easy to maintain.
A couple pointers... rats and mice prefer to nest in stale, warm areas. They will shit in or near their nests, and they should have a fairly poignant odor: if you can't smell it, find someone who can (some people have a very, very strong sense of smell/taste - ask around the office, you're sure to find someone). If you can identify the source of the nests, it'll aide in strategically placing baited traps and ease/speed the extermination. Finally, it only requires trace amounts of food - crumbs - to attract rodents, as that's still something they can eat. (You don't eat in your office/server room, do you?) Any food source used as the bait should be moist and preferably oily with a strong odor, as they locate the food by scent. Rancid organic peanut butter works really, really well (they seem to prefer it over non-rancid non-organic stuff by a long shot).
If you have the inclination and are able, climb up into the ceiling around the problem areas and see if you can see any other signs of rodent infestation: small asymmetrical holes in sheet rock, small piles of dust where there shouldn't be - even foot trails, which should be visible if present (especially in an older building).
A couple caveats and potential problems you'd run into involving dead animals: dead bodies stink - bad. If you poison them (especially with the kind of poison which they don't bring back to their den), you are likely to have a lot of dead rats and mice all over your building: they will, in many cases, be impossible to retrieve, and people will be very angry about the odor. You might also run into this problem if you use drug store type traps, as they might not be completely killed and run off and die with the trap still attached, making retriev
Precisely. This is even more important if you're stuck having to interview for jobs at Microsoft shops as a "support" type (1st - 3rd level support, Windows admin, etc.). What, you've not administered Vista before? But it's been out for years! You haven't familiarized with W2k8 yet (in late '08)? We know you're very proficient with the technologies we already use, but... You're so not hired.
Or: Oh, you've familiarized with W7 already? Cool, that's not even out yet. You must be very tech savvy. You've worked with MS server clustering and the newer server virtualization? Awesome. You're hired.
Being technologically conservative does not pay in a Windows shop. It can, and does, in a Unix/Linux shop, largely because things don't have to and often don't change as fast, and even when things do change it's not such a revisionist change as with MS products. But it's simply not in the culture (or technical sense) to not be on the cutting edge with Microsoft. "Why change it if it works?" doesn't hold much water there, because by and large, it's not true - and the next version always fixes all the problems you had with the last one.
What you see as a flaw is still seen as a feature by many.
It seems to me that populists on slashdot who would normally suppose that the population of the country/world is overwhelmingly stupid want 'pure' democracy - yet in any other situation would rant at the lunacy of the matter.
Think about this, Slashdot: most of you make well over the median or average US income. Americans are, in this day and age, overwhelmingly socialist (in the "what can I get?" sense) as evidenced by the election of Barack Obama. What do you think is going to happen to that "wealth discrepancy" when the wild masses get absolute control of the government after they realize they can vote themselves affluence?
I'll tell you one thing... it won't be free markets or anything relating to self-determination. It'll be Animal Farm style democracy.
That's just it: nobody sane would support it aside from those in the population centers. That's why guises like "pure democracy" are popular in places like San Francisco and NYC. Unfortunately, in many states, the population centers already have near-complete control of the state, and would wish to force their will irrevocably on the rest of the population as well.
Eh? I don't know what that list is so short, but I know there are a lot more games based on the various id game engines.
One my son is playing at this very moment, Teeworlds, is based on the Q3 engine, I believe. There are also all the games based off of the Quake and Quake 2 game engines - Half-Life and Half-Life 2 ring a bell? There are dozens more which were based off of Quake and Quake 2 I couldn't even begin to recall (as I never played most of them).
Who said they had to do put them in 'netbooks'? If everyone else starts offering low-cost, low-power laptops, and people started buying them to the exclusion of other computers, Apple would almost have to step up, because their primary market segment is the home/personal user.
I can see them offering their iPhone/iPod touch in different form factors, or even with an 'add on' enclosure which would turn them into full computers. IIRC there was/is a 3rd party company owrking on doing just that, actually.
I suspect that Google and other slightly-less-than-completely-deterministic tasks could utilize this technology. It might also have applications in AI.
Other than that, I don't think it has much use. How much error/randomness is a person going to take in a computer? We've spent decades trying to get OSes that are stable and glitch-free. Now we're going to introduce them into our CPUs?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I can certainly taste (and smell) the difference in tap vs. well vs. bottled - and so on and so forth. I can taste the plastic leech in bottled water (even if it's been presented to me in a glass); it's not a psychosomatic thing, as I can tell the difference, blind. I can taste the fluoride, as well, for what it's worth. Just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean others can't.
I also have an obscenely keen sense of smell (and it was worse back when I didn't smoke), so that might have something to do with it. But there are certainly others like myself in this regard.
Audio, on the other hand, isn't something I can tell the difference in - at least when we're comparing lossless recordings with 192kbps MP3s. Depending on the encoder, 128kbps is evidently encoded/tinny to me with half-decent headphones. But then, I don't have the best hearing in the world - I'm slightly deaf in my left ear from an explosion. So to each their own.
How many 'average users' do you know who don't have a printer? I can't say I know many.
Printing is essential. It has been a part of core computer functionality for over 20 years, and was THE point of computing before that. CUPS prints, yet they are removing it; what are they replacing it with, if anything? Anachronistic lpr?
If you have a desktop system, you print. End of story. This is just a stupid move on the part of Ubuntu.
Everything else, I can agree with. Slimming down default installs will go a long way to making this IT person happy.
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Is it possible to just uninstall the update, or the full Quicktime and install the older version? I seem to recall that there are certain things within OS X, like Windows, which can not be "uninstalled": once it's in, it's in for keeps. RealPlayer, Adobe Reader, and Quicktime on Windows all do this, as does any non-Office/"free" MS add-on product.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but Apple doesn't even offer something akin to a RH support contract.
Well, there's only one way to really interpret that - or rather several ways which result in the same basic idea holding true. It does not necessarily mean that Egyptians were there; it could also mean that they traded with North America.
Remember, the Egyptian trade routes were extensive. It's been acknowledged within the scientific community that they traded with the Far East. If some of the legends hold any credence (Plato's Atlantis), then it is likely there was also a substantial sea trade route at the time. This was long before the "mini-Ice Age" which resulted in a general decline in society, and a loss of knowledge.
I think we in modern societies tend to prefer to think that ancient civilizations were stupid and unadvanced compared to us. Maybe the word should be "unevolved". I don't think this is true, at all. They may not have had iPod addictions, but they were certainly capable of having addictions to pot, chocolate, and tobacco - and as anyone knows, acquiring drugs is pretty trivial for some folks. :P
You're assuming that the food supply remains constant, or at least, does not decrease. It isn't, and varies from year to year and from month to month.
Famine occurs when the food supply is outstripped. It's happened quite a few times throughout history. Currently, we in the modernized West live in very much of a 'hand to mouth' type situation - that is, our food supply is only enough for a couple weeks. This kind of situation is precarious, as any one of many different factors could result in national famine before the next crop is in.
What we need is redundancy and backups to prevent a famine - just as we would with our important data. It doesn't take much sunlight for people to grow small amounts of crops in window boxes; there are plenty of fruits and veggies which actually require indirect sunlight to thrive. The weight of people having a small 5x2 garden bed on their patio is certainly less than the people themselves, as well as the weight of all the shit they've got in their apartments.
Forests? Are you kidding me?
The US has more per-acre 'massive forests' than anywhere else in the world. I believe the statistic is something like we've got 50% more forested acreage per acre than any other country in the world - I don't know that's the amount, but it is similarly high.
As it stands, you can't travel anywhere in the city without having dense woodland on either side of the road. Thirty minutes from NYC and you're already "in the woods".
For that matter, have you ever been in the forests in the US Northeast? They are grossly overgrown and unhealthy. They are not "biologically diverse"; they are crowded and overgrown, both in terms of plant and animals. And there is not nearly the variety that there was 50, 60, 70 years ago.
As recently as 30 years ago, there were farms throughout the state of NY offering diverse ecosystems for animals, and woodland was not as thick (for a myriad of reasons: people used the wood, farm land would rotate to forest and vice versa, etc.). Putnam County, for instance, now has one farm whereas it was almost entirely farmland interspersed with woodland 50 years ago - and that one farm is a historic tourist site, not an operational farm. This specific county, at the time, had enough red foxes, coyotes, raccoons, and other fur-bearing animals for my grandfather to pay for all four of his kids to go to high-priced schools solely on the return on trapping. There were enough pheasants, grouse, and partridge to get one's limit in half a day. Deer were not as numerous as they are today - but they were larger, healthier, and lived longer.
Today, there is none of that. The deer are small, young, and stunted. There isn't enough habitat for those fur-bearing animals to survive (foxes, coons, coyotes, etc. need fields to survive, as they are the preferred habitat for rodents, their primary source of food).
The only reason the Northeast has not suffered from the fate of the overgrown, unhealthy, forest monocultures in Australia and California right now is because a) the NE forests are largely deciduous, which has a higher flash point than the trees in California and Australia, b) the NE has more precipitation than California (NFI vs. Australia).
Even the National Parks Service (and National Fire Service) recognize this information as fact now (30 years too late). Systematic thinning, logging, and burning is healthy - and necessary - to both maintain the forest's ecosystem balance and prevent the massive ecological damage a large (hot) fire results in.
Hell, you want to talk about top soil and nutrient cycles... look at the advantage of regular (small, limited) forest fires on an ecosystem. They are an absolute necessity for vibrancy.
Meters? Which meter? The current meter, the 1880 meter, or the 1970 meter?
Buddy, "0 furlongs" is pretty much identical to "0 feet" or "0 meters". You're fucked once you reach that regardless of which measurement you're using; the idea is to avoid it. Not doing so is pretty much a sign of incompetence, period.
The text rendering would be a good possibility. I've noticed substantial speed decreases when turning up AA; I don't know how, or if Wine does it, but my recollection is that it doesn't (by default).
If I recall correctly, there was a kernel module for WINE a while back to allow direct system calls by win32 applications - or something to that effect. Whatever happened to that project? Could that not be used to further speed things up, if it were still around?
There's nothing like making a generalized quality statement (cheap, fast, reliable) an absolute rule, is there?
Using your line of reasoning, because Windows is expensive, it should also be both fast and reliable - and that, relatively speaking, Linux (and the user software which runs on top of it to make it a comparable environment to Windows) it can not possibly be both reliable and fast. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of this to the contrary.
With open source (unlike closed source) a developer can 'afford' to spend a month doing optimizations, because there is no set release deadline or a profit to be made in order to meet stock shareholder needs. This is unlike the closed source model, and does indeed mean that open source can be "cheap" (in terms of time restraints to release, which is the only real metric in determining the cost of software) while still having both other qualities.
Of course, it's all relative. You can't assume that developers, or money, or your relative metrics for determining quality, or anything else is an unlimited quantity. The point here is that a big limiting factor on both speed and robustness is development time (often represented in terms of money, or numbers of developers) - and open source has no concrete limitation on these things vs. the closed model.
You've got a decent point or two there, on both accounts. I've got a 500MHz fujitsu laptop which runs Ubuntu 8.10 decently, and the current laptop I'm on is 5 years old, also running 8.10 well (or as well as can be expected).
I seem to recall the "4 year old hardware" (or so) that I used in 2000 was a 133MHz system with either 32 or 64Mb of RAM. Not speedy by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly faster than, say, w98 or w2k on the same hardware! Looking at Linux alone, it hasn't kept up in terms of relative performance.
Given that W2k3 and XP are still largely maintained and the "main" Windows platforms of today, I'd even say that either MS has caught up, or Linux has fallen behind a bit - or maybe both. Vista and 2k8 throw a wrench in that theory, but those aren't representative of a common Windows system, either.
Hmm, my old air rifle (which was, when new, lethal enough to take out a deer if you shot it in the head), is a .20 cal, not a .22 - ie, 5mm. And no, it's not some European import, but an old genuine-American Sheridan (later/earlier called Benjamin, iirc) single-shot pump air rifle.
What you suggest is good fun, but it doesn't eliminate the problem. My uncle used to do what you describe in Japan (homemade air rifle, as they're illegal there, IIRC) with roaches (which grow really, really big and are everwhere). You have to eliminate the damn things in larger numbers than that once you've got an infestation: they're tricky buggers and don't like exposing themselves.
Not true. Pest control uses poison because it's the lazy approach that takes care of the problem, for the time being - ie, if the rats come back, you've got to hire the exterminator to come back.
A "bucket trap" will work just as well as a pile of poison pellets, and can be used indefinitely - stopping an infestation before it becomes an infestation by killing the first migrants. They're also cheap to make (there are some commercial products which operate under similar principles) and are much, much cleaner (in all regards) than poison.
Ultra-sonic repellers for rodents will work for exactly one generation of rodent - approximately 3 months, I believe. After that, later generations born nearby will be born deaf and will move back into the territory evacuated by their parents, with all successive generations also immune to the sound. (This is partially why the ultrasonic sound of machines in a server room, or the EM from cables, does not bother rodents.)
We have a cat that was the runt of its litter, and as such, the mother attempted to kill it when it was born. It got no care from the mother whatsoever and was bottle-fed from birth.
She was a horrible mouser. Several years ago, we lived in a very old house with mouse problems. On one occasion, I caught a mouse in a bucket (with a bucket trap), without any water. It was a baby/young mouse, and couldn't run very fast. I took said mouse out, and tried to get the cat to play with it. On several occasions I saw this cat watch mice run across the floor, completely uninterested in the prey.
That said, last month she caught and killed half a dozen mice. She's maybe 7 or 8 years old now, and had never previously killed a mouse. Yes, she was being regularly fed - we can't figure out a logical explanation for the change, other than her being bored and having simply been introduced to the scent/odor of a dead mouse (as we caught a couple in mouse traps the weeks before that) that she liked. Who knows.
Just because they don't learn it when they're young doesn't mean they can't learn it later.
Care and attention, for a cat? Surely you've never owned such a creature.
I have, on occasion, wondered if our current cat has gone off and died in a dark place: there have been stretches of days where I have not seen her. The only thing we do is fill her food and water bowl, and consider it more of a privilege to see her out and about than we do to see a fox or a cougar in the yard (which has happened all of once or twice that I can recall). Even still, she is not privy to people touching her on their own motivation, and is very picky about who she will rub up against.
The cat before that was christened "Mocca" due to her coloration. That soon became "Demon Cat" on account of it attacking - not playing with - anyone and everyone who came within 5 feet of it. She would often wait in certain locations to attack you when you came through a door. Aside from that, you might be lucky to see her before it's too late to avoid the painful laceration.
The cat before her was short-lived. She was fat, slow, and stupid. She jumped out a window, likely couldn't get back in, and wandered over to be mauled by the neighbor's dog. She, too, sat around doing nothing and ate anything and everything that was put on the floor for her. She was irritable and only came out at night, instead preferring to hide in the closet. She would hiss if you tried to pet her, and never purred.
A mental retard could take care of a cat, and would likely provide entirely too much attention for said cat. It's not a fucking rocket science.
A lot of people are also allergic to cats. Chances are someone would start complaining and your work place would be liable if someone had an aesthmatic attack.
The most straightforward approach, I think, would be to set traps - of the $.50 each, drug store variety. Set up a map with the "problem areas" plotted out. Chances are you will see a pattern: the areas are not that far from sources of food. Rats, like deer and most other animals, will take the shortest route between two locations. Use this information when planting your traps.
A very successful trap is a 'bucket trap'. Here is an example of one such bucket trap.. Basically, you have a basin with water in it, and a lip on the basin high and steep enough to prevent the rodents from climbing out. You then place an object - a board or wire - leading out to the center, where you have placed a pole sticking vertically out of the water which contains the bait. The perpendicular bait pole needs to be narrow and slippery (ie something a rodent can't easily climb).
The object which is parallel to the floor needs to be at least several inches from the vertical rod in order to
You can also make a good bucket trap with a piece of 1x2 lumber from the hardware store and a common door hinge. Balance the 1x2 on the lip of the bucket, with the hinge on the inside (and a small flat wood spacer to allow the hinge to not bind on the side of the bucket), with the tip of the 1x2 in the middle of the bucket's opening. This works well if the other side sits on something where the rodent can/does travel (ie interpret their path of travel nad put the bucket nearby). (Make sure your 1/x is balanced with the weight of the bait included.) Rat or mouse comes by, walks onto the 1x2, and falls in - automatically resetting the trap.
This trap works with pretty much any scavenger, by the way. It'd probably work with deer, if you could make a large enough trap. I've seen stock water feeders used for racoons and halved 30-gallon drums used for rats. Basically, if you can get them in the water, they will drown to death after getting too tired to swim any more. (Obviously, the water has to be deep enough that they can not stand in it and breath). This trap type is a real boon as it's automatically resetting, ecologically safe (ie no neurotoxin poisons in an inhabited area like an office, house, barn, etc.), mostly silent, and easy to maintain.
A couple pointers... rats and mice prefer to nest in stale, warm areas. They will shit in or near their nests, and they should have a fairly poignant odor: if you can't smell it, find someone who can (some people have a very, very strong sense of smell/taste - ask around the office, you're sure to find someone). If you can identify the source of the nests, it'll aide in strategically placing baited traps and ease/speed the extermination. Finally, it only requires trace amounts of food - crumbs - to attract rodents, as that's still something they can eat. (You don't eat in your office/server room, do you?) Any food source used as the bait should be moist and preferably oily with a strong odor, as they locate the food by scent. Rancid organic peanut butter works really, really well (they seem to prefer it over non-rancid non-organic stuff by a long shot).
If you have the inclination and are able, climb up into the ceiling around the problem areas and see if you can see any other signs of rodent infestation: small asymmetrical holes in sheet rock, small piles of dust where there shouldn't be - even foot trails, which should be visible if present (especially in an older building).
A couple caveats and potential problems you'd run into involving dead animals: dead bodies stink - bad. If you poison them (especially with the kind of poison which they don't bring back to their den), you are likely to have a lot of dead rats and mice all over your building: they will, in many cases, be impossible to retrieve, and people will be very angry about the odor. You might also run into this problem if you use drug store type traps, as they might not be completely killed and run off and die with the trap still attached, making retriev
Precisely. This is even more important if you're stuck having to interview for jobs at Microsoft shops as a "support" type (1st - 3rd level support, Windows admin, etc.). What, you've not administered Vista before? But it's been out for years! You haven't familiarized with W2k8 yet (in late '08)? We know you're very proficient with the technologies we already use, but... You're so not hired.
Or: Oh, you've familiarized with W7 already? Cool, that's not even out yet. You must be very tech savvy. You've worked with MS server clustering and the newer server virtualization? Awesome. You're hired.
Being technologically conservative does not pay in a Windows shop. It can, and does, in a Unix/Linux shop, largely because things don't have to and often don't change as fast, and even when things do change it's not such a revisionist change as with MS products. But it's simply not in the culture (or technical sense) to not be on the cutting edge with Microsoft. "Why change it if it works?" doesn't hold much water there, because by and large, it's not true - and the next version always fixes all the problems you had with the last one.
What you see as a flaw is still seen as a feature by many.
It seems to me that populists on slashdot who would normally suppose that the population of the country/world is overwhelmingly stupid want 'pure' democracy - yet in any other situation would rant at the lunacy of the matter.
Think about this, Slashdot: most of you make well over the median or average US income. Americans are, in this day and age, overwhelmingly socialist (in the "what can I get?" sense) as evidenced by the election of Barack Obama. What do you think is going to happen to that "wealth discrepancy" when the wild masses get absolute control of the government after they realize they can vote themselves affluence?
I'll tell you one thing... it won't be free markets or anything relating to self-determination. It'll be Animal Farm style democracy.
That's just it: nobody sane would support it aside from those in the population centers. That's why guises like "pure democracy" are popular in places like San Francisco and NYC. Unfortunately, in many states, the population centers already have near-complete control of the state, and would wish to force their will irrevocably on the rest of the population as well.
Eh? I don't know what that list is so short, but I know there are a lot more games based on the various id game engines.
One my son is playing at this very moment, Teeworlds, is based on the Q3 engine, I believe. There are also all the games based off of the Quake and Quake 2 game engines - Half-Life and Half-Life 2 ring a bell? There are dozens more which were based off of Quake and Quake 2 I couldn't even begin to recall (as I never played most of them).
Who said they had to do put them in 'netbooks'? If everyone else starts offering low-cost, low-power laptops, and people started buying them to the exclusion of other computers, Apple would almost have to step up, because their primary market segment is the home/personal user.
I can see them offering their iPhone/iPod touch in different form factors, or even with an 'add on' enclosure which would turn them into full computers. IIRC there was/is a 3rd party company owrking on doing just that, actually.
I suspect that Google and other slightly-less-than-completely-deterministic tasks could utilize this technology. It might also have applications in AI.
Other than that, I don't think it has much use. How much error/randomness is a person going to take in a computer? We've spent decades trying to get OSes that are stable and glitch-free. Now we're going to introduce them into our CPUs?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I can certainly taste (and smell) the difference in tap vs. well vs. bottled - and so on and so forth. I can taste the plastic leech in bottled water (even if it's been presented to me in a glass); it's not a psychosomatic thing, as I can tell the difference, blind. I can taste the fluoride, as well, for what it's worth. Just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean others can't.
I also have an obscenely keen sense of smell (and it was worse back when I didn't smoke), so that might have something to do with it. But there are certainly others like myself in this regard.
Audio, on the other hand, isn't something I can tell the difference in - at least when we're comparing lossless recordings with 192kbps MP3s. Depending on the encoder, 128kbps is evidently encoded/tinny to me with half-decent headphones. But then, I don't have the best hearing in the world - I'm slightly deaf in my left ear from an explosion. So to each their own.
How many 'average users' do you know who don't have a printer? I can't say I know many.
Printing is essential. It has been a part of core computer functionality for over 20 years, and was THE point of computing before that. CUPS prints, yet they are removing it; what are they replacing it with, if anything? Anachronistic lpr?
If you have a desktop system, you print. End of story. This is just a stupid move on the part of Ubuntu.
Everything else, I can agree with. Slimming down default installs will go a long way to making this IT person happy.