I have to agree. Pretty much every TV show or book I've tried to turn my kid onto (now 11) has failed. What's worked? Watching the show when I know he's around. Then, he wants to watch it. For books, the best I've done is just take him to the library and let him browse to find stuff.
We're on our 3rd MX Smarttop in a month. The first 2 kept turning themselves off after a few hours to a day. We have a ton of equipment in that server room, and nothing else has power issues, so it is not our power. It's their quality. The 3rd one seems to be OK, but beware. Several of us were thinking of buying them for home, but I'm not after the quality issues.
Re:Hi- I'm the Author
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1
I cancelled my Directv service a few months ago, too. Looks like a lot of other people have: http://www.tvpredictions.com/tivo082709.htm... 139,000 last quarter. At $70 a pop, that's almost $10M. I, too, and using Hulu, Netflix and torrents to replace the incredible over-priced services that Directv was offering. I didn't even mention they swapped my broken TiVo box for a really crappy DVR. I replaced the old rig with a Mac Mini running Plex, and I love it (though it isn't quite as nice as the old TiVo experience... a lot more manual steps, for torrents).
I got it recently. Yes, it's more expensive (16 Mbps up and 2.5 Mbps down, 5 static ips is $100/mo), but it's much faster than the advertised speed. I get 6 Mbps up, and I have no trouble seeding my torrents.
That's a gross oversimplification. People don't kill themselves over their job. They kill themselves because they are mentally ill. The job wasn't the cause. The lack of proportion and perspective was the cause. The job was incidental.
In this particular case, the guy's mother and sister committed suicide. There are much higher rates of suicide among people who have relatives who have also committed suicide. That, with the isolation he appears to have suffered from, the job is looking not that significant, at most some sort of trigger.
First, this is bullshit. It's an idle threat. Second, this is bullshit. MS has been hugely successful and will likely continue to be, even more so if they get their (his) head out of their ass. This would put a minor dent profits, and would be good for the rest of us. MS should pay their fair share.
I got a mini and installed XBMC and uTorrent (which sucks on the Mac, btw, but Vuze is just too bloated). One issue is my son, who watches most of his shows in another room on another TV, away from the mini. The Slingbox/Slingcatch combo isn't that cheap, not too far from another mini. Another is that as soon as I turn off the service, what I have on my DVR will be inaccessible. So, I have to download or watch all that is there before I call them.
I'm also using ted (http://www.ted.nu/) as a poor man's DVR for torrents. It is not that good (it downloads torrents from private trackers whick never go anywhere, missing downloads that I can easily find on mininova, etc). It does have a nice interface, so there's hope that it will get better over time.
Rant on uTorrent on the Mac: doesn't stop at pre-defined share ratio, just keeps seeding forever. Has a bug which pushes CPU use up to 100%. These bugs are 5+ months old. The perils of arrogant developers (they delete cries for patches on their forums) on a closed source project.
Right after the dot bomb bust, many of the open source project I was following gained a lot of momentum. All those techies out of work, what're they going to do, sit around and not use their computer?
I get them a couple of times a week. They're robo calls, with the usual "press 1 to..." and they all start with the claim to help you with your CC rates and that this is "your last chance".
Once, I played them. I pressed 1. Said I was interested. Was asked if I had "at least $4000 in CC debt." Once I passed that test, I was handled off to the closer, a really slick asshole who asked for my CC#'s. I stalled. He waited. I acted dumb and said I'd look for my statements. I just set down the phone. 10 minutes later I hung up. I immediately got a call back. At first, he thought I accidentally hung up, but I hung up again. He called back again and before I hung up again I hear "you'll be sorry..." The next 5 rings were people that asked to be taken off their list. I had to take the phone off the hook for 30 minutes.
Neither worked on my 18 yr old CVS repo (that was populated with 7 yr old RCS files). What I did find was fromcvs. I found a couple of bugs, with the author fixed very quickly. It is also fast. My 3.5G CVS repo was converted in about an hour. Both of the others took 10+ hours (and didn't produce usable output). The biggest reason I love it: it allows incremental updates from CVS to GIT. You can run it any number of times and it imports the new stuff. You do need to leave the git repo you are importing into alone (no commits other than the import commits).
I still have more testing to do before we go live, but it's looking very, very nice.
I used to use mwave, until 3 consecutive computers I purchased from them had problems. These were complete systems that were supposed to be tested, and they were DOA. Never used them again.
I recently used MagicMicro.com and had a very good experience with them.
Yes, all that is needed to prevent this is monthly reconciliation of all your checking accounts.
Now, the guy from the story, he's exceedingly rich, so I think he could afford to hire someone to do this for the 1000+ checks he writes a month on that checking account.
When I was 18 and still living at home, my family had some guests from out of town. One of the guests, Martin, was in town for the (1978?) SciFi convention in Lake Tahoe. The night before my friend's father was to leave, I was up late. I had the phone in my room (we had a 30' extension... man, those days before cordless were fun!) and it rang at about, oh, 2am. Now, this never happened in our house. Ever. I answered it and said hello. What I got back stunned me. "Is Martin there?" "Yeah, but, like, he and everyone else in the house are asleep... it's 2am." "Please tell him I'm on the phone." "OK, and who are you?" "Harlan Ellison." "OK, I'll tell him."
At that point I had read a lot of his stuff, but I was too chicken to say so.
The next day I got to drive Martin to Oakland so he could hitch a ride with Robert Silverberg. But, that's a another, very interesting story...
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I have to agree. Pretty much every TV show or book I've tried to turn my kid onto (now 11) has failed. What's worked? Watching the show when I know he's around. Then, he wants to watch it. For books, the best I've done is just take him to the library and let him browse to find stuff.
Without an enforcement agency, which is contained in the EPA, the regulations aren't worth the paper they are printed on.
If you don't think the Republicans want to get rid of the EPA so that companies don't have to follow the rules, ... wait, what?! AC? I've been trolled.
We're on our 3rd MX Smarttop in a month. The first 2 kept turning themselves off after a few hours to a day. We have a ton of equipment in that server room, and nothing else has power issues, so it is not our power. It's their quality. The 3rd one seems to be OK, but beware. Several of us were thinking of buying them for home, but I'm not after the quality issues.
Should have included this: http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/
(I'm joking of course... it will take some getting use to not thinking of KT behind your posts, though)
Does Kenny know you stole his user name??
Yeah, I think the proximity sensor on his phone is broken. I have a Moto Droid and have never had any unintended selections with my face.
/.'ers you disappoint me.
I cancelled my Directv service a few months ago, too. Looks like a lot of other people have: http://www.tvpredictions.com/tivo082709.htm ... 139,000 last quarter. At $70 a pop, that's almost $10M. I, too, and using Hulu, Netflix and torrents to replace the incredible over-priced services that Directv was offering. I didn't even mention they swapped my broken TiVo box for a really crappy DVR. I replaced the old rig with a Mac Mini running Plex, and I love it (though it isn't quite as nice as the old TiVo experience... a lot more manual steps, for torrents).
I have DOCSIS 2.0. 3.0 is not in my area yet. Will be by the end of the year. I already checked with several people, including the install guy.
I got it recently. Yes, it's more expensive (16 Mbps up and 2.5 Mbps down, 5 static ips is $100/mo), but it's much faster than the advertised speed. I get 6 Mbps up, and I have no trouble seeding my torrents.
That's a gross oversimplification. People don't kill themselves over their job. They kill themselves because they are mentally ill. The job wasn't the cause. The lack of proportion and perspective was the cause. The job was incidental.
In this particular case, the guy's mother and sister committed suicide. There are much higher rates of suicide among people who have relatives who have also committed suicide. That, with the isolation he appears to have suffered from, the job is looking not that significant, at most some sort of trigger.
First, this is bullshit. It's an idle threat.
Second, this is bullshit. MS has been hugely successful and will likely continue to be, even more so if they get their (his) head out of their ass. This would put a minor dent profits, and would be good for the rest of us. MS should pay their fair share.
I got a mini and installed XBMC and uTorrent (which sucks on the Mac, btw, but Vuze is just too bloated). One issue is my son, who watches most of his shows in another room on another TV, away from the mini. The Slingbox/Slingcatch combo isn't that cheap, not too far from another mini. Another is that as soon as I turn off the service, what I have on my DVR will be inaccessible. So, I have to download or watch all that is there before I call them.
I'm also using ted (http://www.ted.nu/) as a poor man's DVR for torrents. It is not that good (it downloads torrents from private trackers whick never go anywhere, missing downloads that I can easily find on mininova, etc). It does have a nice interface, so there's hope that it will get better over time.
Rant on uTorrent on the Mac: doesn't stop at pre-defined share ratio, just keeps seeding forever. Has a bug which pushes CPU use up to 100%. These bugs are 5+ months old. The perils of arrogant developers (they delete cries for patches on their forums) on a closed source project.
Right after the dot bomb bust, many of the open source project I was following gained a lot of momentum. All those techies out of work, what're they going to do, sit around and not use their computer?
I get them a couple of times a week. They're robo calls, with the usual "press 1 to ..." and they all start with the claim to help you with your CC rates and that this is "your last chance".
Once, I played them. I pressed 1. Said I was interested. Was asked if I had "at least $4000 in CC debt." Once I passed that test, I was handled off to the closer, a really slick asshole who asked for my CC#'s. I stalled. He waited. I acted dumb and said I'd look for my statements. I just set down the phone. 10 minutes later I hung up. I immediately got a call back. At first, he thought I accidentally hung up, but I hung up again. He called back again and before I hung up again I hear "you'll be sorry..." The next 5 rings were people that asked to be taken off their list. I had to take the phone off the hook for 30 minutes.
Neither worked on my 18 yr old CVS repo (that was populated with 7 yr old RCS files). What I did find was fromcvs. I found a couple of bugs, with the author fixed very quickly. It is also fast. My 3.5G CVS repo was converted in about an hour. Both of the others took 10+ hours (and didn't produce usable output). The biggest reason I love it: it allows incremental updates from CVS to GIT. You can run it any number of times and it imports the new stuff. You do need to leave the git repo you are importing into alone (no commits other than the import commits).
I still have more testing to do before we go live, but it's looking very, very nice.
I used to use mwave, until 3 consecutive computers I purchased from them had problems. These were complete systems that were supposed to be tested, and they were DOA. Never used them again.
I recently used MagicMicro.com and had a very good experience with them.
Yes, all that is needed to prevent this is monthly reconciliation of all your checking accounts.
Now, the guy from the story, he's exceedingly rich, so I think he could afford to hire someone to do this for the 1000+ checks he writes a month on that checking account.
What does Vista do better than XP?
Serious question.
"We are making butt loads of money on PCs right now, and I'd hate to see that come to an end."
When something goes wrong with my mother's Windoze computer, I use CrossLoop.com to get in and fix the problem. A very nice solution.
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/ipodclassic/
http://ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/ipod-classic-tests-reveal-audio-problems
and the best list is here:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070914_002928.html
When I was 18 and still living at home, my family had some guests from out of town. One of the guests, Martin, was in town for the (1978?) SciFi convention in Lake Tahoe. The night before my friend's father was to leave, I was up late. I had the phone in my room (we had a 30' extension... man, those days before cordless were fun!) and it rang at about, oh, 2am. Now, this never happened in our house. Ever. I answered it and said hello. What I got back stunned me. "Is Martin there?" "Yeah, but, like, he and everyone else in the house are asleep... it's 2am." "Please tell him I'm on the phone." "OK, and who are you?" "Harlan Ellison." "OK, I'll tell him."
At that point I had read a lot of his stuff, but I was too chicken to say so.
The next day I got to drive Martin to Oakland so he could hitch a ride with Robert Silverberg. But, that's a another, very interesting story...
I think this explains it pretty well:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schadenfreude