>and have your sites on once again taking the throne back
SIGHTS. Sights. Not "sites". Sights.
Site, n. Geographic location, place. As in: building site, or (by analogy from topology to geography) Web site.
Sight, n. Device used to optically align a firing mechanism. As in: gun sight.
"To have one's sights on" or to "have in one's sights" is a military analogy meaning "to make plans for the acquisition, domination or control of".
"To have one's sites on" is not a fluent English construction but would imply something about locating real estate or selecting web server operating platforms.
Seriously, this kind of casual disregard of language pisses some of us off. How can you get a job in an industry where 'rm -rf ~*' is very definitely NOT the same as 'rm -rf ~ *' and have no comprehension of basic spelling and grammar?
Presumably you've only ever heard the word 'sight' said, never spelled? The sheer immensitity of illiteracy required to make such an error astounds me. And yet you possess the minimum competence with a Qwerty keyboard to access the World Wide Web and post to a forum? How is this possible? Do kids of today live in some kind of pre-literate, oral-mythology, audio-only culture? Was the entire invention of script from the Sumerians through Gutenberg a dead end? Is the American education system to blame, or the morass of mind-numbing, pictorial pop-culture under which the global mental environment reels?
Words have different spellings for a reason. LEARN THEM.
Oh wait, this is Slashdot. Never mind.
Re:Palm's Windows software killed them
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
I second this. I love Palm as a device (though Graffiti 2 is a huge clumsy disappointment compared with the elegant Graffiti 1), but in our work environment I recommend PocketPC for one reason. Palm Desktop does not support roaming users. To be more specific, the version of Palm Desktop released when PalmOne took over control of the software was *deliberately* rewritten to fail installation in a typical corporate environment with shared desktops and roaming users. (The installer registers a bunch of vital COM objects into the HKCU\Classes hive, which by design is erased at logout.) You *must* have either a laptop or your own personal PC, to use Palm Desktop. And even then it needs to be installed as your account - so you have to give a maintenance tech your password, a big security breach - the software can't be pre-installed on any kind of standardised corporate image - and you need a complete reinstall every time you lose your Windows registry settings. This is absolutely ridiculous - we simply can't allow software that maintenance-intensive on our network. And I am a Palm *zealot*, but even I have to admit that they don't belong at work any more.
Palm Desktop 4.1x is probably the single most insanely ill-behaved Windows application I have seen in the last ten years, and PalmOne/Palm don't seem to have cared that they have locked themselves entirely out of the corporate market. Switching to Windows Mobile is not any kind of solution for their survival as a company, but it's an aggressively stupid decision in line with the other ones they've been making for the last couple years, so good riddance to them. May their place be taken by another.
I grew up reading this book - both editions of it.
Man was I confused when the 80s hit and I first started playing with micros (Commodore PET and BBC Micro). Where were the core memory and the disk packs? But I had 8K of RAM all to myself. Woohoo!
Now my Palm Tungsten has a postage-sized removable plastic chip with half gig of flash RAM containing the entire English Wikipedia.
Yes, this is all wonderful and amazing that we have Linux software for videoconferencing but...
How do we actually use the stuff when it's near to impossible to get any off-the-shelf webcam to actually have driver support in Linux?
Seriously, this is one FAQ I really wish was in huge bold typeface on the sites for GnomeMeeting and similar projects:
WHERE DO I GET HARDWARE THAT WILL LET ME USE THIS PROGRAM?
What kind of cameras are the people who hack on these chat clients using, how expensive are they, are they still on the market, can you get them in Australia and New Zealand, what Linux distribution do you need to be running to have out-of-the-box hardware support without compiling from source, etc.
There's the Qbik list, but it's pretty cryptic and not always up to date, and I've not yet got a simple straight list of 'these models of cameras work with GnomeMeeting, go buy them'. Why is this so hard? Why can't it be in the software FAQ? It's the number one question on every potential user's mind, surely.
Note that the Creative Commons button on the de.lirio.us site shows it to be using BY-NC-SA, ie, with the NonCommercial variant.
If I understand correctly, that's not compatible with the GFDL even in spirit, ie, you can't pull de.lirio.us data into Wikipedia. You also couldn't legally put an extract of that data, _or any derivative dataset_, into an RPM package that could be included on any Linux boxed CD set.
Be careful of collaborative projects that use NonCommercial, especially with ShareAlike. It puts a lot of restrictions on what you might want to do later down the track. I don't think it would be worthwhile my contributing to a project like this simply because the licence means the data is useless to me.
I downloaded the CD and I've been running it for a couple of days on an oldish Celeron 1Ghz box I use to play with new distros. I had one hitch which was due to my having overzealously turned off ACPI in the BIOS way back. Fedora Core 2 didn't mind, but Ubuntu got very sore. But after fixing that everything pretty much Just Worked.
Okay, there's some song-and-dance still needed to get a Palm Tungsten E to sync without crashing, but this is the simplest, most up-to-date and most fun desktop distro I've used. Synaptic and 'universe' is making me realise why Debian users are so weirdly happy.
(Case in point: tinyfugue, my favourite MUD client. A real pain to install on Fedora Core 1, I had to manually hack a source RPM downloaded from a random website. On Ubuntu, it was point, click, go.)
Also the default desktop and menu layout is very slick, much more intuitive than Fedora. I think I've found my new home distro.
Okay, so I go to their order page, fill in my details, hit submit, and I get this:
Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@www54.rapidsite.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. There was also some additional information available about the error: [Sat Jan 8 01:56:39 2000] access to/u/web/biotoy/cgi-local/FormMail.pl failed for 210.55.83.245, reason: Premature end of script headers
Slashdotted already? Geez, they just don't make e-commerce servers like they used to, do they?
From "The Ghost Not": --------------------- In the problem, a gameshow contestant is shown three closed doors, and is told that there are lemons behind two of them, and a car behind the third. The contestant must pick a door, and then the host opens one of the two doors the contestant didn't pick, to reveal a lemon. Then, the contestant is offered the chance to switch choice to the third, unopened door, or stick with the original one. Most people don't believe there is anything to be gained by switching. Since they have moved nothing about on their internal whiteboard, they cannot see any way that the situation could have changed. This position omits the fact that the lemons and cars all have definite positions at all times, even though the contestant doesn't know them. Moreover the host knows which door conceals the car, because he must never open it by mistake. So the first choice the contestant made had a 1/3 chance of concealing the car, but after the host had thrown a lemon away, the remaining door had a 2/3 chance of concealing the car. ---------------
Am I missing something, or does this maths just not make sense?
You've got three doors, one car, you make a blind choice of one, that's a 1/3 chance. Fine. Got that.
Then the host discards one door, which is guaranteed to not be either the door with the car or the door you picked.
This leaves two doors, one of which must have car. You now have the choice of moving or staying - in other words, no matter what your original choice, the entire problem collapses to a blind choice of one out of two doors.
That's a 1/2 chance. Not 2/3. So there's no difference whether you move or stay, and most people are right.
I'm obviously infected with the Ghost Not, because I can't see how anyone can make 2 equal 3. What strange maths am I missing that could possibly make this bizarre claim work?
I just tried setiathome for Red Hat 6.0 on my 32mb MMX-200. Ouch. I ran it nice 19, ps and top showed the seti process always at lowest priority, but GUI performance went way down the toilet. It was taking on the order of 5-10 seconds just to repaint a window in KDE 1.1.
I'll need to figure out how to get cron to pause it during the day, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
>and have your sites on once again taking the throne back
SIGHTS. Sights. Not "sites". Sights.
Site, n. Geographic location, place. As in: building site, or (by analogy from topology to geography) Web site.
Sight, n. Device used to optically align a firing mechanism. As in: gun sight.
"To have one's sights on" or to "have in one's sights" is a military analogy meaning "to make plans for the acquisition, domination or control of".
"To have one's sites on" is not a fluent English construction but would imply something about locating real estate or selecting web server operating platforms.
Seriously, this kind of casual disregard of language pisses some of us off. How can you get a job in an industry where 'rm -rf ~*' is very definitely NOT the same as 'rm -rf ~ *' and have no comprehension of basic spelling and grammar?
Presumably you've only ever heard the word 'sight' said, never spelled? The sheer immensitity of illiteracy required to make such an error astounds me. And yet you possess the minimum competence with a Qwerty keyboard to access the World Wide Web and post to a forum? How is this possible? Do kids of today live in some kind of pre-literate, oral-mythology, audio-only culture? Was the entire invention of script from the Sumerians through Gutenberg a dead end? Is the American education system to blame, or the morass of mind-numbing, pictorial pop-culture under which the global mental environment reels?
Words have different spellings for a reason. LEARN THEM.
Oh wait, this is Slashdot. Never mind.
I second this. I love Palm as a device (though Graffiti 2 is a huge clumsy disappointment compared with the elegant Graffiti 1), but in our work environment I recommend PocketPC for one reason. Palm Desktop does not support roaming users. To be more specific, the version of Palm Desktop released when PalmOne took over control of the software was *deliberately* rewritten to fail installation in a typical corporate environment with shared desktops and roaming users. (The installer registers a bunch of vital COM objects into the HKCU\Classes hive, which by design is erased at logout.) You *must* have either a laptop or your own personal PC, to use Palm Desktop. And even then it needs to be installed as your account - so you have to give a maintenance tech your password, a big security breach - the software can't be pre-installed on any kind of standardised corporate image - and you need a complete reinstall every time you lose your Windows registry settings. This is absolutely ridiculous - we simply can't allow software that maintenance-intensive on our network. And I am a Palm *zealot*, but even I have to admit that they don't belong at work any more.
Palm Desktop 4.1x is probably the single most insanely ill-behaved Windows application I have seen in the last ten years, and PalmOne/Palm don't seem to have cared that they have locked themselves entirely out of the corporate market. Switching to Windows Mobile is not any kind of solution for their survival as a company, but it's an aggressively stupid decision in line with the other ones they've been making for the last couple years, so good riddance to them. May their place be taken by another.
I grew up reading this book - both editions of it.
Man was I confused when the 80s hit and I first started playing with micros (Commodore PET and BBC Micro). Where were the core memory and the disk packs? But I had 8K of RAM all to myself. Woohoo!
Now my Palm Tungsten has a postage-sized removable plastic chip with half gig of flash RAM containing the entire English Wikipedia.
I don't miss those days, actually.
What about OGRE? Not used it but it looks like a competitor to CrystalSpace.
Yes, this is all wonderful and amazing that we have Linux software for videoconferencing but...
How do we actually use the stuff when it's near to impossible to get any off-the-shelf webcam to actually have driver support in Linux?
Seriously, this is one FAQ I really wish was in huge bold typeface on the sites for GnomeMeeting and similar projects:
WHERE DO I GET HARDWARE THAT WILL LET ME USE THIS PROGRAM?
What kind of cameras are the people who hack on these chat clients using, how expensive are they, are they still on the market, can you get them in Australia and New Zealand, what Linux distribution do you need to be running to have out-of-the-box hardware support without compiling from source, etc.
There's the Qbik list, but it's pretty cryptic and not always up to date, and I've not yet got a simple straight list of 'these models of cameras work with GnomeMeeting, go buy them'. Why is this so hard? Why can't it be in the software FAQ? It's the number one question on every potential user's mind, surely.
Two words. Red Dwarf.
Note that the Creative Commons button on the de.lirio.us site shows it to be using BY-NC-SA, ie, with the NonCommercial variant.
If I understand correctly, that's not compatible with the GFDL even in spirit, ie, you can't pull de.lirio.us data into Wikipedia. You also couldn't legally put an extract of that data, _or any derivative dataset_, into an RPM package that could be included on any Linux boxed CD set.
Be careful of collaborative projects that use NonCommercial, especially with ShareAlike. It puts a lot of restrictions on what you might want to do later down the track. I don't think it would be worthwhile my contributing to a project like this simply because the licence means the data is useless to me.
I downloaded the CD and I've been running it for a couple of days on an oldish Celeron 1Ghz box I use to play with new distros. I had one hitch which was due to my having overzealously turned off ACPI in the BIOS way back. Fedora Core 2 didn't mind, but Ubuntu got very sore. But after fixing that everything pretty much Just Worked.
Okay, there's some song-and-dance still needed to get a Palm Tungsten E to sync without crashing, but this is the simplest, most up-to-date and most fun desktop distro I've used. Synaptic and 'universe' is making me realise why Debian users are so weirdly happy.
(Case in point: tinyfugue, my favourite MUD client. A real pain to install on Fedora Core 1, I had to manually hack a source RPM downloaded from a random website. On Ubuntu, it was point, click, go.)
Also the default desktop and menu layout is very slick, much more intuitive than Fedora. I think I've found my new home distro.
From "The Ghost Not":
---------------------
In the problem, a gameshow contestant is shown three closed doors, and is told that there are lemons behind two of them, and a car behind the third. The contestant must pick a door, and then the host opens one of the two doors the contestant didn't pick, to reveal a lemon. Then, the contestant is offered the chance to switch choice to the third, unopened door, or stick with the original one. Most people don't believe there is anything to be gained by switching. Since they have moved nothing about on their internal whiteboard, they cannot see any way that the situation could have changed. This position omits the fact that the lemons and cars all have definite positions at all times, even though the contestant doesn't know them. Moreover the host knows which door conceals the car, because he must never open it by mistake. So the first choice the contestant made had a 1/3 chance of concealing the car, but after the host had thrown a lemon away, the remaining door had a 2/3 chance of concealing the car.
---------------
Am I missing something, or does this maths just not make sense?
You've got three doors, one car, you make a blind choice of one, that's a 1/3 chance. Fine. Got that.
Then the host discards one door, which is guaranteed to not be either the door with the car or the door you picked.
This leaves two doors, one of which must have car. You now have the choice of moving or staying - in other words, no matter what your original choice, the entire problem collapses to a blind choice of one out of two doors.
That's a 1/2 chance. Not 2/3. So there's no difference whether you move or stay, and most people are right.
I'm obviously infected with the Ghost Not, because I can't see how anyone can make 2 equal 3. What strange maths am I missing that could possibly make this bizarre claim work?
I just tried setiathome for Red Hat 6.0 on my 32mb MMX-200. Ouch. I ran it nice 19, ps and top showed the seti process always at lowest priority, but GUI performance went way down the toilet. It was taking on the order of 5-10 seconds just to repaint a window in KDE 1.1.
I'll need to figure out how to get cron to pause it during the day, I think.