Granny will find it too intimidating to do almost any system maintenance task - she's not the target for this software, any more than she's the target for Linux+Lilo repair partitions. And grannie, as well as most desktop and a lot of server users, is probably running windows. Windows cannot write to Linux partitions, so far as I know.
Personally, I'm happy enough just using a bootable disk to fix WinXP (yeah, I know), if it gets hosed. It actually doesn't happen very often anyway. But if for some reason the OS was hosed and using bootable media wasn't an option (perhaps security concerns, for example), how would this be better than just have LILO and a dedicated "repair" partition with linux and a bunch of repair tools on it? This way, as another poster commented, you aren't introducing unneccesary complexity into BIOS. and in fact, this seems very similar to what Phoenix is doing - the ZDNET article mentioned that the bios would have special hard drive partitions with recovery apps at it's disposal. So it seems like the only thing we're doing here is giving BIOS the ability to operate apps on a recovery partition directly, instead of using LILO+linux. Unless your boot record is screwed as well, what's the advantage to this? And if your hard drive is that trashed, doesn't it make more sense to stick the drive in a machine that also has a working HD, copy what you can, and reformat? For that matter, if your hard drive is getting pooched so often that you NEED dedicated bios support, then you should replace it. At least,that's my opinion. IAACTAAHBMMIPS (I Am A Computer Technician As A Hobby But My Major Is Political Science)
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Lab rats examined by laboratory technicians. I watched hay pour into my trough like a golden rain of food. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. Oh, and uh, it's painful to live in fear, isn't it?
This thing, according to the site, ships as an ATX MoBo. Anyone know how big it is? Also, is there any way to get a sufficiently small atx mobo to run off a flexATX power supply? (I've got an adorable flexatx case from directron, perfect for this little bundle of joy.:-) )
I liked the Virtual Boy - was I the only one? I never got a headache from it, and I liked the tennis game for it - it used the sense of depth very well. My sister and I used to play it for hours. Really - did no one else like this system?
A smaller crew means less people available for damage control and maintenance, which can reduce the effectiveness of a warship drastically. James F. Dunnigan, in his textbook "How To Make War", makes a point of explaining that the lack of skilled technicians on Soviet naval ships also limited their maintenence/damage control ability, and so these ships had to be kept in port as much as possible, to reduce wear and tear. My point is, automation may makes ships cheaper, and it will certainly reduce the number of lives at risk - but it won't neccessarily make warships more effective.
Admittedly, I know a lot of CS majors who shouldn't be in CS, or even in college at all. But I also know a lot of people, excellent programmers, who don't need college for the skills they'll "learn" (my best friend is a freshman in college, started working for a cellphone software developer in high school), but because businesses want to see that piece of paper. And outside technology, it's pretty hard to train yourself in a lot of fields. I'm a political science major because I want to work in the American State Department, either as a diplomat or an analyst of some sort. Tell me, how do you propose I train myself sufficiently to be qualified for this sort of work without any college education? How would a doctor "train himself"? Would you want him to?
Frankly, sir, I find the idea that I am somehow *less* competent because I am going to college to be offensive.
...but only in certain fields. If you're actually a court lawyer, or you do civil suits, then I can see that. But corporate lawyers spend huge amounts of time pouring over obscenely thick documents and analyzing them in excrutiating detail - very much like programming, actually, except that the computer executing these commands is a distributed network of highly sophisticated (and unscrupulous) neural networks. And don't even get me started on *international* law.
The problem is that sinks, hair salons, and even cars all tend to be (relatively) standardized. I know I'm on thin ice with the cars, but I think we can agree that most cars will not be different in radical ways from most other cars. They will all have internal combustion engines, sensors, brakes, etc. - and these will certainly vary to an extent, but I would argue that PCs are much, much more customizable, especially on the software end. This means that a certification for an auto mechanic, plumber, stylist etc. indicates at best mastery of a mature, relatively static technology. That isn't the case with computers, where the most important factor in a technician's skill (to my mind) isn't just an encyclopedic knowledge of PC parts and old windows versions, but the mind-set that allows you to pick up on how a computer is supposed to be working, and fix it, even if you've never used that particular software before, because you have a broad enough experience and knowledge to have a feel for how things are supposed to be.
My A+ certification says that I have mastered such-and-such skills, identified by bullet points on the certificate. And that's great, but a monkey could pass the A+ exam, it could easily master the specific, exact issues the exam measures. What it doesn't measure is good, ole-fashioned tech-savviness, and I don't think any certification short of a CompSci degree can. The best tech I've ever known is forty years old, former French teacher, just got his cert last year on a whim. And I've known A+ certified techs who couldn't install a hard drive.
Finished reading "Down and Out", and it's pretty good. Not brilliant or classic or anything like that, but more than good enough that I'd be willing to pay for the dead-tree version, even though it's pretty short (67 pages). It's got a very nice, twisted sense of humor, definately worth the read.
Lois Duncan edited this book - if you visit the author's website, you'll notice she's his mom. That's so sweet - mother/son bonding time with semi-pornographic novel editing. adorable.
Don't you remember? In the future, humans use dogs to "sniff out" terminators infiltrated into their midst. (Terminator I). If even cyborg terminators with organic parts smell different, shapeshifters must smell even more different. No good for infiltration into future-earth human enclaves.
What, you think all the Terminators look alike? They were created by Skynet, remember, to infiltrate human enclaves. If every single Terminator is a tall white scary guy who looks like Ahnold, then they're no good for covert infiltration. The "hot female" chassis is probably just one of many designs for the pre-T1000 series, with, yes, the added advantage that a female Terminator could have certain psychological advantages in manipulating humans over a male terminator.
Porn might indeed be harmful
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 2
You know, you might have a point here, especially regarding porn changing a person's view of women and sexuality. I didn't look at any hard-core porn before I came to college, but it was easily available here (LAN), and so I started to. And I do find that my attitudes did start to change a little - which is why I stopped watching it. I try to think of myself as a good man, you see, and I don't want to be like my roomate, who yells with rage when his porn sites are altered and whose first thought on meeting a woman tends to be "I wonder what she'd look like in her panties?" or "I bet her [expletive] is really nice". He watches a lot of porn, a huge amount, and I don't know whether this is what did that, or the drugs, or whether he's just a f--ked-up individual - but I try to hold myself to a higher standard. I'm not saying porn should be outlawed or regulated, or that it's anywhere near as harmful as booze or tobacco - but it is *not* entirely benign, and I'm glad someone mentioned that.
All you had to do was say "No". I dunno about you guys, but the local Radio Shack people just let it go after that. It's not like you *had* to give your information.
"We have one chance, one single point of failure, one instance of probability defining the satisfaction of our continuation as a species."
Well, no. We have only one planet, true, but a planet is a BIG place, it can take a *lot* of damage before it becomes uninhabitable by people. Even if a dinosaur-killer sized asteroid actually hit the planet and ruined the environment and sent us into a new and terrible ice age, we would still have huge amounts of water (later, water ice), oxygen, trace elements, metals, fissile materials (power source) available. In other words, even a post-apocalyptic Earth would have more resources and be more survivable than, say, a domed Mars colony with only very limited supplies of the above items - and it's also worth pointing out that building an airtight shelter than can filter the crap out of the surrounding air is a hell of a lot easier than building an airtight shelter than needs its own self-sufficient air supply, AND has to deal with radiation hazards from the thin Martian atmosphere (I'm assuming mars would be the first choice for a colony), AND deal with the fact that in the event of a breach, you won't have contaminants slowly leaking in - you'll have your air rushing out fast.
The Earth is vulnerable to an extent, yes. But it's so well-suited to human life that even a terrible cataclymic asteroid impact would leave it more habitable, and a better choice for the future residence of the human race, than anyplace else in the solar system.
"it is evident from the colonization of the Americas that people desire to go into the unknown, as refected in the popularity of Star Trek and other similar exploration entertainment"
Well, no. People did not colonize or even explore the Americas for the joy of it - they were looking for gold, or trade routs, or native to indoctrinate and/or enslave. Their mission wasn't "to boldly go where no man has gone before", it was "To boldly go, get rich (or at least get a better life, or religious freedom), and bring glory to the Crown and god". People do NOT abandon their homes for a whimsical love of the unknown, they leave because "the grass is greener...". And their ain't no freaking grass anywhere but Earth.
"it is not your place to belittle their opportunities. It may be your will to undermine the will of the continuation of the species through this means." Excuse me? I didn't mean to belittle any "opportunities" - if the opportunity should someday arise, and people decide against all logic to colonize other worlds, good for them. I wish them nothing but good. I do, however, doubt very much that this will happen, for reasons already discussed.
"You have not demonstrated that colonization is any less viable than the multi-generational solutions proposed by the NY Times"
I'm sorry, I should have made the point more clear - but I DID mention that the nytimes ideas use technology we either have now, or could reasonably be expected to have fairly soon. Yes, these are multigenerational solutions, but the issue with colonization isn't time. It's social issues, and to a lesser extent, technology. Building a ship that can sustain life for hundreds or thousands of passengers for months would be *hard* - and please, do not talk to me about suspended animation until it actually exists.
Yeah, but that's not the first solution we can do
on
Stopping Killer Asteroids
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's a hell of a lot simpler to send a robot probe, or even a manned spacecraft with a small crew, into space than it is to establish sustainable colonies on another world. Colonization is all well and good, but some of the options discussed in the NYTimes article are things we can either do now, or should be able to do within a few generations. Colonization, in addition to the logistic and technical diffulties involved, has social problems. If you want a self-sustaining colony capable of perpetuating the race, you need a large population, and you need it to be economically self-sufficient. That means you can't just send scientists - you need engineers, factory workers, politicians, even telemarketers - all the things that make a modern capitalist economy work. And the only way you get people who *aren't* explorers by nature to colonize is for things to be absolutely miserable for them at home, or truly grand in the New World. No matter how bad things get on Earth, it'll be quite a while before life in a pressure dome on another planet starts to even rival the quality of life one can enjoy on Earth, let alone surpass it. I repeat: You need more than just scientists and explorers for a colony large enough to perpetuate the human race if Earth gets snuffed.
You can't test a nuclear weapon in space - there are treaties that regulate this sort of thing, and they say space has to stay demilitarized. That means no nukes - that's one of the reasons, other than the horrible amount of radioactive pollution, that the Orion project never really took off. For better or worse, the only test we'll get is when there's actually an asteroid on the way to Earth.
Frankly, what really worries me - and what the article really fails to address - is the fact that while there are a few programs going on in the Northern Hemisphere, there's not much happening with our buddies in the Southern Hemisphere - that means half the sky isn't really being covered well.
On another note, who wants to bet that in the event we had, say, 50 years warning, the politicians would be utterly unwilling to do anything about it for at least 48 years?
A lot fewer people use the Panama Canal these days - with ships getting larger and larger, a lot can't fit through the locks, and the fast modern engines reduce the neccessity. And for the military, so far as I know there aren't many warships bigger than a missile sub or destroyer that can use the Panama Canal these days.
So, regarding the Northwest Passage, I wonder (a) how passable it will be for large ships, and (b) whether the hassle/risk of using the new passage will be worth it for commercial shipping and the military, especially if it's just two months a year.
Of course, if militaries do start using it, that could have interesting consequences - maybe something like the Straight of Gibralter, a chokepoint that becomes utterly impassable if you can delay your enemy's shipping long enough. Just a thought.
Here's a thought: paint each keycap in heat-sensitive dyes, like what they use for those postcard thermometers and the lighters with the picture of women with bras that disappear when you heat them. Have, say, 7 of these little ink strips, and put a small resistor under each - you should probably compartmentalize the inside of the keycap, or mold it so that heat from one resistor doesn't spill over to an adjacent ink line. If you work out some way to interface with the resistors - another poster mentioned a pin/socket system that I bet would work well here - you could controll the resistors, and thus control which ink line changes color from the "default", thus giving the ability to create characters. The problems are that this change would be relatively slow - maybe a minute, and you have to put something over the ink to insulate it from the user's fingers. Probably not really workable, but then again there really aren't any cheap solutions to this that are, probably.
Lowercase is damn sexy - very stream-of-conciousness-ey. I know a girl who talks like that on AIM all the time, complete with "er". *Sigh*. Some girls look sexy, some sound sexy, and some type sexy.
The Israeli tech sector is really booming, and they turn out a lot of good stuff. If the Iraqi site were using Israeli software, that would be hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you daft, man? You used the word! The M-Word! Don't you realize how devestatingly unlucky that is when you're in a play? You are now doomed. :-)
Granny will find it too intimidating to do almost any system maintenance task - she's not the target for this software, any more than she's the target for Linux+Lilo repair partitions. And grannie, as well as most desktop and a lot of server users, is probably running windows. Windows cannot write to Linux partitions, so far as I know.
Personally, I'm happy enough just using a bootable disk to fix WinXP (yeah, I know), if it gets hosed. It actually doesn't happen very often anyway. But if for some reason the OS was hosed and using bootable media wasn't an option (perhaps security concerns, for example), how would this be better than just have LILO and a dedicated "repair" partition with linux and a bunch of repair tools on it? This way, as another poster commented, you aren't introducing unneccesary complexity into BIOS. and in fact, this seems very similar to what Phoenix is doing - the ZDNET article mentioned that the bios would have special hard drive partitions with recovery apps at it's disposal. So it seems like the only thing we're doing here is giving BIOS the ability to operate apps on a recovery partition directly, instead of using LILO+linux. Unless your boot record is screwed as well, what's the advantage to this? And if your hard drive is that trashed, doesn't it make more sense to stick the drive in a machine that also has a working HD, copy what you can, and reformat? For that matter, if your hard drive is getting pooched so often that you NEED dedicated bios support, then you should replace it. At least,that's my opinion. IAACTAAHBMMIPS (I Am A Computer Technician As A Hobby But My Major Is Political Science)
Baa, baa, baa!
TRANSLATION:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Lab rats examined by laboratory technicians. I watched hay pour into my trough like a golden rain of food. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. Oh, and uh, it's painful to live in fear, isn't it?
This thing, according to the site, ships as an ATX MoBo. Anyone know how big it is? Also, is there any way to get a sufficiently small atx mobo to run off a flexATX power supply? (I've got an adorable flexatx case from directron, perfect for this little bundle of joy. :-) )
I liked the Virtual Boy - was I the only one? I never got a headache from it, and I liked the tennis game for it - it used the sense of depth very well. My sister and I used to play it for hours. Really - did no one else like this system?
A smaller crew means less people available for damage control and maintenance, which can reduce the effectiveness of a warship drastically. James F. Dunnigan, in his textbook "How To Make War", makes a point of explaining that the lack of skilled technicians on Soviet naval ships also limited their maintenence/damage control ability, and so these ships had to be kept in port as much as possible, to reduce wear and tear. My point is, automation may makes ships cheaper, and it will certainly reduce the number of lives at risk - but it won't neccessarily make warships more effective.
Admittedly, I know a lot of CS majors who shouldn't be in CS, or even in college at all. But I also know a lot of people, excellent programmers, who don't need college for the skills they'll "learn" (my best friend is a freshman in college, started working for a cellphone software developer in high school), but because businesses want to see that piece of paper. And outside technology, it's pretty hard to train yourself in a lot of fields. I'm a political science major because I want to work in the American State Department, either as a diplomat or an analyst of some sort. Tell me, how do you propose I train myself sufficiently to be qualified for this sort of work without any college education? How would a doctor "train himself"? Would you want him to?
Frankly, sir, I find the idea that I am somehow *less* competent because I am going to college to be offensive.
...but only in certain fields. If you're actually a court lawyer, or you do civil suits, then I can see that. But corporate lawyers spend huge amounts of time pouring over obscenely thick documents and analyzing them in excrutiating detail - very much like programming, actually, except that the computer executing these commands is a distributed network of highly sophisticated (and unscrupulous) neural networks. And don't even get me started on *international* law.
The problem is that sinks, hair salons, and even cars all tend to be (relatively) standardized. I know I'm on thin ice with the cars, but I think we can agree that most cars will not be different in radical ways from most other cars. They will all have internal combustion engines, sensors, brakes, etc. - and these will certainly vary to an extent, but I would argue that PCs are much, much more customizable, especially on the software end. This means that a certification for an auto mechanic, plumber, stylist etc. indicates at best mastery of a mature, relatively static technology. That isn't the case with computers, where the most important factor in a technician's skill (to my mind) isn't just an encyclopedic knowledge of PC parts and old windows versions, but the mind-set that allows you to pick up on how a computer is supposed to be working, and fix it, even if you've never used that particular software before, because you have a broad enough experience and knowledge to have a feel for how things are supposed to be.
My A+ certification says that I have mastered such-and-such skills, identified by bullet points on the certificate. And that's great, but a monkey could pass the A+ exam, it could easily master the specific, exact issues the exam measures. What it doesn't measure is good, ole-fashioned tech-savviness, and I don't think any certification short of a CompSci degree can. The best tech I've ever known is forty years old, former French teacher, just got his cert last year on a whim. And I've known A+ certified techs who couldn't install a hard drive.
Finished reading "Down and Out", and it's pretty good. Not brilliant or classic or anything like that, but more than good enough that I'd be willing to pay for the dead-tree version, even though it's pretty short (67 pages). It's got a very nice, twisted sense of humor, definately worth the read.
Lois Duncan edited this book - if you visit the author's website, you'll notice she's his mom. That's so sweet - mother/son bonding time with semi-pornographic novel editing. adorable.
Don't you remember? In the future, humans use dogs to "sniff out" terminators infiltrated into their midst. (Terminator I). If even cyborg terminators with organic parts smell different, shapeshifters must smell even more different. No good for infiltration into future-earth human enclaves.
What, you think all the Terminators look alike? They were created by Skynet, remember, to infiltrate human enclaves. If every single Terminator is a tall white scary guy who looks like Ahnold, then they're no good for covert infiltration. The "hot female" chassis is probably just one of many designs for the pre-T1000 series, with, yes, the added advantage that a female Terminator could have certain psychological advantages in manipulating humans over a male terminator.
You know, you might have a point here, especially regarding porn changing a person's view of women and sexuality. I didn't look at any hard-core porn before I came to college, but it was easily available here (LAN), and so I started to. And I do find that my attitudes did start to change a little - which is why I stopped watching it. I try to think of myself as a good man, you see, and I don't want to be like my roomate, who yells with rage when his porn sites are altered and whose first thought on meeting a woman tends to be "I wonder what she'd look like in her panties?" or "I bet her [expletive] is really nice". He watches a lot of porn, a huge amount, and I don't know whether this is what did that, or the drugs, or whether he's just a f--ked-up individual - but I try to hold myself to a higher standard. I'm not saying porn should be outlawed or regulated, or that it's anywhere near as harmful as booze or tobacco - but it is *not* entirely benign, and I'm glad someone mentioned that.
All you had to do was say "No". I dunno about you guys, but the local Radio Shack people just let it go after that. It's not like you *had* to give your information.
"We have one chance, one single point of failure, one instance of probability defining the satisfaction of our continuation as a species."
Well, no. We have only one planet, true, but a planet is a BIG place, it can take a *lot* of damage before it becomes uninhabitable by people. Even if a dinosaur-killer sized asteroid actually hit the planet and ruined the environment and sent us into a new and terrible ice age, we would still have huge amounts of water (later, water ice), oxygen, trace elements, metals, fissile materials (power source) available. In other words, even a post-apocalyptic Earth would have more resources and be more survivable than, say, a domed Mars colony with only very limited supplies of the above items - and it's also worth pointing out that building an airtight shelter than can filter the crap out of the surrounding air is a hell of a lot easier than building an airtight shelter than needs its own self-sufficient air supply, AND has to deal with radiation hazards from the thin Martian atmosphere (I'm assuming mars would be the first choice for a colony), AND deal with the fact that in the event of a breach, you won't have contaminants slowly leaking in - you'll have your air rushing out fast.
The Earth is vulnerable to an extent, yes. But it's so well-suited to human life that even a terrible cataclymic asteroid impact would leave it more habitable, and a better choice for the future residence of the human race, than anyplace else in the solar system.
"it is evident from the colonization of the Americas that people desire to go into the unknown, as refected in the popularity of Star Trek and other similar exploration entertainment"
Well, no. People did not colonize or even explore the Americas for the joy of it - they were looking for gold, or trade routs, or native to indoctrinate and/or enslave. Their mission wasn't "to boldly go where no man has gone before", it was "To boldly go, get rich (or at least get a better life, or religious freedom), and bring glory to the Crown and god". People do NOT abandon their homes for a whimsical love of the unknown, they leave because "the grass is greener...". And their ain't no freaking grass anywhere but Earth.
"it is not your place to belittle their opportunities. It may be your will to undermine the will of the continuation of the species through this means."
Excuse me? I didn't mean to belittle any "opportunities" - if the opportunity should someday arise, and people decide against all logic to colonize other worlds, good for them. I wish them nothing but good. I do, however, doubt very much that this will happen, for reasons already discussed.
"You have not demonstrated that colonization is any less viable than the multi-generational solutions proposed by the NY Times"
I'm sorry, I should have made the point more clear - but I DID mention that the nytimes ideas use technology we either have now, or could reasonably be expected to have fairly soon. Yes, these are multigenerational solutions, but the issue with colonization isn't time. It's social issues, and to a lesser extent, technology. Building a ship that can sustain life for hundreds or thousands of passengers for months would be *hard* - and please, do not talk to me about suspended animation until it actually exists.
It's a hell of a lot simpler to send a robot probe, or even a manned spacecraft with a small crew, into space than it is to establish sustainable colonies on another world. Colonization is all well and good, but some of the options discussed in the NYTimes article are things we can either do now, or should be able to do within a few generations. Colonization, in addition to the logistic and technical diffulties involved, has social problems. If you want a self-sustaining colony capable of perpetuating the race, you need a large population, and you need it to be economically self-sufficient. That means you can't just send scientists - you need engineers, factory workers, politicians, even telemarketers - all the things that make a modern capitalist economy work. And the only way you get people who *aren't* explorers by nature to colonize is for things to be absolutely miserable for them at home, or truly grand in the New World. No matter how bad things get on Earth, it'll be quite a while before life in a pressure dome on another planet starts to even rival the quality of life one can enjoy on Earth, let alone surpass it. I repeat: You need more than just scientists and explorers for a colony large enough to perpetuate the human race if Earth gets snuffed.
You can't test a nuclear weapon in space - there are treaties that regulate this sort of thing, and they say space has to stay demilitarized. That means no nukes - that's one of the reasons, other than the horrible amount of radioactive pollution, that the Orion project never really took off. For better or worse, the only test we'll get is when there's actually an asteroid on the way to Earth.
Frankly, what really worries me - and what the article really fails to address - is the fact that while there are a few programs going on in the Northern Hemisphere, there's not much happening with our buddies in the Southern Hemisphere - that means half the sky isn't really being covered well.
On another note, who wants to bet that in the event we had, say, 50 years warning, the politicians would be utterly unwilling to do anything about it for at least 48 years?
A lot fewer people use the Panama Canal these days - with ships getting larger and larger, a lot can't fit through the locks, and the fast modern engines reduce the neccessity. And for the military, so far as I know there aren't many warships bigger than a missile sub or destroyer that can use the Panama Canal these days.
So, regarding the Northwest Passage, I wonder (a) how passable it will be for large ships, and (b) whether the hassle/risk of using the new passage will be worth it for commercial shipping and the military, especially if it's just two months a year.
Of course, if militaries do start using it, that could have interesting consequences - maybe something like the Straight of Gibralter, a chokepoint that becomes utterly impassable if you can delay your enemy's shipping long enough. Just a thought.
Here's a thought: paint each keycap in heat-sensitive dyes, like what they use for those postcard thermometers and the lighters with the picture of women with bras that disappear when you heat them. Have, say, 7 of these little ink strips, and put a small resistor under each - you should probably compartmentalize the inside of the keycap, or mold it so that heat from one resistor doesn't spill over to an adjacent ink line. If you work out some way to interface with the resistors - another poster mentioned a pin/socket system that I bet would work well here - you could controll the resistors, and thus control which ink line changes color from the "default", thus giving the ability to create characters. The problems are that this change would be relatively slow - maybe a minute, and you have to put something over the ink to insulate it from the user's fingers. Probably not really workable, but then again there really aren't any cheap solutions to this that are, probably.
Mine is, my friend. And I count my lucky stars for that.
Lowercase is damn sexy - very stream-of-conciousness-ey. I know a girl who talks like that on AIM all the time, complete with "er". *Sigh*. Some girls look sexy, some sound sexy, and some type sexy.
The Israeli tech sector is really booming, and they turn out a lot of good stuff. If the Iraqi site were using Israeli software, that would be hilarious.