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User: dmaxwell

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  1. Re:Depends... on Custom Software vs. COTS Products · · Score: 1

    I wasn't questioning your skills at all. I was making a cynical observation of management types in general. If they see something works, they tend to have a hard time understanding that not all software scales up. This seems to be especially true if Some Real Money has to be spent to transition the system for heavier use.

  2. Re:Depends... on Custom Software vs. COTS Products · · Score: 1

    You do realize that what will more than likely happen is that the small of proof-of-concept will be permanently adopted? What's more, you'll probably wind up holding it together with duct tape and string. I've seen several Filemaker apps deployed (painfully) on WANs and that had to be what happened.

  3. Re:Images on Bill Gates in 1983 Teen Beat Magazine · · Score: 1

    I may have to go straight to Jello shots for this one. The resulting blackout and barforama session might be enough to blot this from my mind.

  4. Re:Did someone say Galactica mugs Enterprise? on 'Star Trek: Enterprise' Cancelled? · · Score: 1

    c) What are the rules of engagement? All weapons available (Can the Galactica launch Vipers) or simply ship to ship combat?

    The Galactaca can launch whatever it wants. The Super Star Destroyer can be flanked by a squadron of TIEs. It doesn't matter. When the Enterprise crew makes some shit up and pulses their warp coils with it, the Imperials and the Colonials are doomed.

  5. Did someone say Galactica mugs Enterprise? on 'Star Trek: Enterprise' Cancelled? · · Score: 1

    It's time for one of those weenie Comic Book Guy threads about who would win if the Galactaca and the Enterprise got into fight. Personally, I'd have to vote for the Enterprise on this one.

    When they reroute the phase inverters through the ODN conduits and then channel the resulting flepteron particles through the deflector dish, those flyboys on the Galactaca won't know what in the name of deus-ex-machina hit them.

  6. Re:Tivo couldn't keep up on Has TiVo's Fate Been Sealed? · · Score: 1

    The new 40 hour Series 2.5's (the nightlight models) are locked down so the kernel is cryptographically signed, so you can't do anything with it.

    That incidentally is a beautiful and totally legal way to completely trample ever practical and political objective the GPL is meant to achieve. It needs to be corrected, stat.

  7. Martin Taylor on Gates Elaborates on IP Communists · · Score: 1

    I thought that MS had given up on this commie shit two years ago. Wasn't Martin Taylor hired to put out intelligent sounding FUD?

  8. Re:For $10K on Oh! Super Toaster! · · Score: 1

    Yes, but will that let it play oggs?

  9. Re:My own spam problem on New Attacks on Spam · · Score: 1

    I hate spammers. Burnt to death with matches, one at a time, is a just reward, and I'd be more than happy to do it myself, except for the time involved. Hang 'em by their toes with their heads in a bucket until they drown in their own vomit sounds more efficient. They are scum.

    I like the idea of giving them the chair. Only I'd replace the switch with a motorized dial. The dial would be clearly marked with fatality and increasing pain zones. When I don't have time to lovingly spin the dial to and fro, I'd have a machine do it for me. For humaneness' sake, I'd let the controller set the dial to "slow roast" after two or three days or so.

  10. Re:cures for cancer, heart disease, aging? on Morse Code Used by Human Cells? · · Score: 1

    Let's assume that laymen can at least correctly grasp broad outlines. Does anyone do a good job of laying them out?

  11. Re:In the case of Iceland... on Hydrogen Buses In Iceland · · Score: 1

    Hydrogen has a low critical temperature. The 33.7 Kelvin critical temperature must be attained or no amount of pressure will suffice to liquefy it. You gain less than twenty degrees Kelvin in exchange for a fairly insane amount of pressure in your storage vessel. Any cryo buffs want to work out what that pressure is?

  12. Re:How do instruments survive the crash?? on Deep Impact Blasts Off For Comet Tempel 1 · · Score: 1

    Have you seen the size of some of these rear projection sets? They make a washing machine look puny. Maybe NASA was thinking of a big honking WEGA.

  13. Re:Good Job Timothy on Windows XP Starter Edition Review · · Score: 1

    Why can we never discuss TECHNOLOGY anymore? I'm sick of moronic discussions and flamebait OSS philosopy vs Apple philosophy vs MS philosophy.

    Since when did that EVER happen. I got started on BBSes in the mid-eighties and back then it was all ST vs. Amiga, Atari 8-bit vs. Commodore, TI vs everybody, oh and Intellivision Basketball is MUCH more like REAL basketball. Don't you think?

    I suppose much the same thing went on among sysadmin flamewarriors on Usenet.

  14. Re:Heh on End Of Support for Windows NT 4.0 · · Score: 1

    The file formats are a monster problem but how was transferring the data a problem? I'm pretty sure even a TRS-80 can be null-modemed to serial ports on a newer machine. These days things would be even better for your friend. You could use the data in an emulator after pulling over from the other media.

    I once transferred a buddy's C-64 disks to disk images for emulator use. I also did the same for an 80MB Amiga Hard Disk he had. Now that was a fun one. This was a few years back and I had to roll a kernel with Amiga partition support.

  15. Re:WinXP is what NT4.0 should have been on End Of Support for Windows NT 4.0 · · Score: 1

    Do you try to explain to people how they get in and how to avoid them ? Or are you just riding the gravy train ? It's pretty trivial to avoid spyware and viruses on Windows.

    All the time. In words of three syllables or less. It overwhelms them. In my neck of the woods, there are quite a few clubies hopping on RoadRunner and Wide Open West. So lets run through what is no doubt trivial for you and me:

    1. Hardware router, check for his patches too!
    2. Up to date antivirus
    3. Adaware,Spybot,and friends
    4. Windowsupdate
    5. Don't run as Administrator all the time. (oh shit...long story here).

    6. Don't click on attachments in email. There is a setting you have to change if you aren't taking my advice not to use OE.

    7. Here is a long list of settings to change in IE if you aren't taking my advice to use Firefox instead of IE.

    Well, whaddya know! To Joe Blow all of this isn't going to sound trivial at all and there is only so much that can be done to make it simple and painless for a non-gearhead. Except for 6 and 7 even MS gives the same advice. It's still a big list for someone who would rather treat the PC as the Magic Toaster.

    This isn't Unix. The concept of a "privileged port" doesn't exist on Windows.

    Here is yet another example of MS being a bull in a china shop. Those ports are considered privileged for reason and those reasons apply to EVERYBODY. Do any of these sound familiar by any chance? Notice a pattern here?

    ftp-data 20 tcp
    ftp 21 tcp
    ssh 22 tcp
    ssh 22 udp
    telnet 23 tcp
    smtp 25 tcp
    nameserver 42 tcp
    pop2 109 tcp
    pop2 109 udp
    pop3 110 tcp
    pop3 110 udp

    Could it be that public internet services tend to run on ports under 1000? Client machines have little good reason to leave those open incoming. You weren't making an argument for Window superiority there....

  16. Re:It will be interesting on End Of Support for Windows NT 4.0 · · Score: 1

    My worry in taking an NT4 box to 2000 was the worm of the week. I was in no way eager to screw around with something that is working. I count on patches, backups, antivirus, and other measures to protect me from having a bad day. There won't be anymore patches for NT4. It's wormfood.

  17. Re:MS isn't going to do so well at this... on Microsoft Releases Malicious Software Removal Tool · · Score: 1

    This thing sounds more like Stinger than a general antivirus tool. Stinger is a free download from McAfee that will remove 50+ known infections from a machine. Stinger is not a resident scanner or email watchguard. It just removes the infections in it's rather small database. This works fairly well since certain things make the rounds over and over again.

  18. Re:My Knoppix horror story.. on True Stories of Knoppix Rescues · · Score: 1

    Thou shalt always have a full backup before hacking thy filesystems or partition tables. Blessed is he who keeps around an external usb or firewire drive.

  19. Re:Documentation on True Stories of Knoppix Rescues · · Score: 1

    As a matter of fact, there is a whole O'Reilly book:

    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/knoppixhks/

  20. Re:I use it on crapped on WIndows boxes too.. on True Stories of Knoppix Rescues · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If the hardware is sufficiently fubared then probably nothing is going to save you. If the data on a failed disk is valuable enough, you can pay $1000 or so to MAYBE get it back.

    I don't know what procedures you may have tried but if you suspect hard drive failure then the best thing do is use something like dd_recover to copy off as much of the partition as possible and then use filesystem repair tools on a copy of that. Of course, this presumes you have twice as much free storage space as the afflicted partition laying around.....

  21. Re:Poor fellow lost his faith on In The Beginning Was The Command Line, Updated · · Score: 1

    Both Stephenson and the annotator are deluded if they think that Linux is a tank ready for anyone to drive away, or that BeOS was a batmobile. Even a self-configuring Linux like Knoppix is beyond a typical user (e.g. they won't handle dialup connections unless you know what you're doing, and you won't get any support), and BeOS didn't support printing properly, let alone have a decent application base (e.g. no decent word-processor or spreadsheet).

    My fairly intelligent yet non-IT-gearhead brother in law does it all the time. It is not at all uncommon for unskilled users to turn to local ISPs to get lower rates and less UI junk. This means somebody walking you through the Dial-Up Networking and mail client dialogs. Since he went through three ISPs over the years, KPPP didn't seem particularly hard when he tried a Knoppix I gave him. Come to think of it, doesn't Knoppix have a dial-up wizard?

  22. Re:No quite on Astronomers Solve Magnetic Fields Mystery · · Score: 1


    No, it's to saw the question "Was everything designed - by God?" in half, so that each half can be dealt with separately and sensibly.

    Once you saw off the God section and park it to one side, you are free to discuss more kinds of design possibilities than would otherwise be acceptable, and also to ask the "everything is an accident" team to bisect their own question, "Did everything happen at random - because there is no God?"


    This doesn't really happen. Pretty much everybody pushing ID has a political-religious cause they are pushing. Making casualties of the life sciences, earth sciences, physics, and cosmology would be among these (only in those nations foolish enough to permit it). Most of them are capital 'C' Christians.

    I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Most scientists aren't evil God-hating materialists out to corrupt your children's impressionable minds. Most of them even have a faith of some kind although that doesn't mean they will sign something like this. I believe you brought the subject of oaths up?

    I have a brother who wanted the Discovery channel blocked at his house because it was "against God". He's smart enough to know young-earth creationism is completely hopeless but by golly he can have arguments with ID! This is the sort of politically motivated person who has a use for it.

    The plain fact of matter is that injecting God into a problem (for or against) is pretty much no help at all when trying to model parts of the universe. You can instead inject a Designer instead of God but it is a difference without any real distinction. If anything, it will hose up the model you're trying to build. The only way I could see it being helpful is if you had a really outre problem like a super advanced civilization destroying or creating astronomical objects. It is rightful that anybody who proposes such a thing has to run the peer-review gauntlet. It is right and proper that something like that would have to take years to be accepted. Proclaiming "Scientists are faithless closed-minded materialists!!" will do nothing to advance such an argument, even if it happened to be correct. For specific problems Design would be an extraordinary claim to swallow. As I posted earlier, I.D.ers will have to do their homework and play by the rules (the Method really). This means evidence, falsifiable hypotheses, and predictive models among other things. Since they are making extraordinary claims they will have to provide extraordinary evidence. Even scientists can have faith in God but no good one would attempt to prove it with half-baked work.

    To be sure, there is no particular reason not to posit a Designer to solve a problem. But there is also nothing in particular that makes a Designer a first or even a third choice when modeling nature. Historically, the hypothesis bats zeros. At best, it is the scientific equivalent of deus-ex-machina. If you have puzzler that can't be solved any other way then invoke the Gods! It's usually pretty lame as a literary device and more often than not bad science as well.

  23. Re:Whew! This makes a refreshing change from... on Astronomers Solve Magnetic Fields Mystery · · Score: 1

    If you can satisfactorily explain where the intelligent designer comes from then I might buy the Occam's Razor argument. The only thing using a creator to explain hard problems accomplishes is to displace the complexity. There is always the way a fairly bright 5 year old might put it: "So who created God?"

    I believe that the entire point of Intelligent Design is to dress creationism in a white lab coat; it's been tried before. Creation Science anyone? Since ID's proponents want to call this stuff science then they will have to play by the rules. This means no resorting to faith as a last resort or using that classic cop-out "But GO^h^h the Intelligent Designer just is. He^h^hIt needs no explanation."

    ID does not function to make creationism scientifically sound. It functions to make creationism politically sound. It also works as a "big tent" that everyone from Flat-Earthers to Old-Earth creationists can work together from. Again, the purpose is primarily political. The question is will it do it well enough that I will one day have to painstakingly correct my son's science education. Oh well, I'll have to do that anyway. The system is already bad enough without this latest rehash of "equal time" being injected into it.

  24. Re:Troll [Was: Re:It's the "video" drivers stupid] on Does Linux Have Game? · · Score: 1

    The current Doom3 code for Linux does not use SSE instructions and Windows code does. This accounts for most of difference between the two platforms as the engine makes heavy use of the main CPU. This was caused by the use of Visual Studio SSE assembly macros. The next release of the Doom3 client for Linux will correct this disparity.

  25. pingfuckits on $1.5 Million Bar-code Scheme Bilks Wal-Mart Stores · · Score: 1

    On this side of the pond we call them "Jesus-clips". If you lose it, "Oh Jesus!" is exactly what you are going to say. The best Jesus-clips are springy metal things that can't be had from any hardware and will fly faster than the eye can see to eventually embed themselves vertically in neutral colored carpet.