That said, I like STL and highly suggest using it. Never write a linked-list again.
It was good for fleshing out the first version of an image compressor that needed to maintain a few linked lists as part of its operation. One of the first optimizations I ended up making, though, was to rip out the STL linked lists and do old-school C-style linked lists instead. The speed improvement was non-trivial. (I also threw a wrapper around malloc() to minimize the number of calls to the real malloc()...that probably yielded the biggest speed boost, and it wouldn't have been possible with STL.)
That list would appear to be somewhat inaccurate, at least for what they say is available in Nevada. They say that the Century Orleans 18 is equipped with digital projection, but a quick trip to the Century Theatres website sez that the Century 18 Sam's Town is the local digital-projection outlet. (No word on whether AotC will run on their digital screen...they're currently playing Ice Age on it.)
Prostitution is only legal in a couple counties in Nevada
It's the other way around. It's illegal in Clark County (which includes Las Vegas) and Washoe County (which includes Reno). It's legal nearly everywhere else in the state.
So you won't see Yucca Mountain plates anytime soon unless it's part of a political ploy during the next election, when Nevada's 4 electoral votes are up for grabs.
Make that 5 electoral votes...there'll be a 3rd congressional district beginning in 2003. (Visit this site to learn who not to vote for if, like me, you're in this new district.)
During a packed hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, Democrats appeared far more eager for the government to intervene in what has become a highly visible tussle between Silicon Valley, which advocates a laissez-faire approach, and the Hollywood firms lobbying Congress to step in to prevent piracy....
Republicans appeared much more skeptical of the SSSCA -- which is, after all, championed by a Democratic committee chairman -- and argued legislation would be too interventionist.
In the 2000 election cycle, the entertainment industry gave Democrats a whopping $24.2 million in contributions compared to $13.3 million to Republicans, according to figures compiled by opensecrets.org....
Isn't Rogan also one of those Republican party hacks who was very active in the House's prosecution of Clinton's impeachment?
Before you get on your high horse, you would do well to remember that it was your pal Slick Willie who signed the DMCA into law. (I could crack a joke about how that ought to be justification enough for his impeachment, but that would be piling on.) Think about it for a minute...how beholden do you think an administration would be to a media elite that has pretty much nothing but hostility toward it?
Left-wingers have never been known to let the truth get in the way of an argument, though...why do you think we had eight years of lies, quibbles, and equivocations?
I hope this spells the end of ActiveX website "enhancements."
When's the last time you saw a website that used VBScript or some other ActiveX-related stuff? The major offenders today WRT usability and (to a slightly lesser extent) interoperability are Flash and JavaScript.
(The main problem with them is that they tend to be abused...a site I was at a few minutes ago used Flash for its godforsaken site-navigation frame (two evils for the price of one—Flash abuse and frames). Considering that I hadn't yet figured out how to get Flash working in Mozilla (got that done now, but Macromedia doesn't make it easy), this basically allowed you to do little more than view their homepage.)
So you're saying you can get more work done on an Apple II+ than you can on a dual Athlon system with a modern OS?
It depends on how you define "work." You're not going to use an Apple II (or other vintage computer) to (for instance) write videoconferencing software, but lots of people used 'em all the time in the 80s and early 90s for word processing, BBSing, etc. On the few occasions that I need to grind out a letter, I'd probably use Word 2000 now...but there's no reason I couldn't use AppleWorks 3.0 to do that if I wanted. (Hell, I haven't bothered porting the maintenance log for my car...it's still on my IIGS, which still gets fired up after an oil change or whatever.)
Some things (like web browsing) are a little more difficult to pull off, but they're still doable. The first browser I used was Lynx on a shell account, dialed in to either UNLV or Access Nevada with my II. I still use text-based mail and news clients (Mutt and trn, respectively); trn, in particular, isn't all that different from the rn that I learned 12 or 13 years ago. Finding an ISP today that would support that type of usage would be more difficult...but if you can live without the chrome, I think an Apple IIe with 128K, AppleWorks, and ProTERM (or something comparable if your tastes in vintage computing swing some other way) would still do the level of stuff that your average AOLer would do with a computer (write letters, send email, etc.). At least it would never display pr0n popups, punch-the-monkey banners, or the goatse.cx guy...
I used to run a web server on my static IP @Home connection, until they went under. Now it's DHCP so no DNS possible.
dyndns.org is your friend.:-) Even after switching from dynamic to static IP, I'm still using their services...with a dynamic IP, you just run a program that checks your address periodically and sends an update if it changes. It's a free service (though it'd be nice of you to send some of your burrito money their way) and it's been fairly reliable.
I don't know what kind of traffic you are talking about here, but I'm serving some 10-15Gb a month from my Earthlink DSL on a PII-300 running FreeBSD.
Sounds like my site, only mine gets less traffic (or else my outbound connection would be pegged) and I'm running Linux.
Can I take a slashdot effect with this setup? No. Will I ever be slashdotted? Not likely:)
Been there, done that, wasn't able to do much with my connection for a day or so when it happened.:-) The server didn't mind at all (dual P!!!-500 with 256MB of RAM and 8GB of SCSI RAID-0 disk), but the cable modem stayed lit up like a Christmas tree.
I'd be very suspicious of 'cleaned' applications floating about on p2p networks.
Whilst it's likely the author had your best interests at heart there's some chance he didn't.
It wouldn't be too hard to build a trojan...
...and how, exactly, is this different from the spyware-infested version you get directly from Kazaa (or whoever)?
Getting back to the original article for a minute, one of the legal tacks being considered by Kazaa is that they claim you can't (among other things) pass along derivative works. Has anyone considered distributing spyware-free file-sharing clients as patches to the "official" releases? You're not distributing a derivative work. LAME began life as a patch to the ISO (?) reference MP3 encoder, and that worked well enough until they could write a new encoder from scratch.
Spend your "toy budget" at Circuit City or PC Club instead...that's what I've done.
I agree about PC Club (bought my last machine from them), but aren't we still mad at Circuit City for the DIVX (the crippled DVD, not the codec) fiasco?
Maybe it's just me, but I suspect that the Apex AD600A more than makes up for Divx. It's the perfect tool for giving the MPAA a big "fsck you people in the neck.":-)
Re:Kodak and others
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A friend of mine came across a typo on the BestBuy website once. They were listing 5-port ethernet switches for $0.01. He ordered 10 of them, as did a coworker of his.
I used to work at Best Buy...you'd occasionally see stuff tagged in the store at a penny because it had been on clearance for so long that they just wanted to get rid of the product. I have some cell-phone battery packs somewhere at home that I bought that way for use in projects (nothing like getting 40 NiMH cells for 8:-) ).
It was a fairly cool company back in '94 (when I started there), but it started losing sometime in '97 or '98. I quit in mid-'99. After a "customer-no-service" incident about a year and a half ago, I haven't been back since. Spend your "toy budget" at Circuit City or PC Club instead...that's what I've done.
As far as inkjet printers go, you can't go wrong with Epson.
...as long as you don't mind the stupid POS clogging its nozzles after a few months.:-P (This was a constant problem with the demo printers back when I worked for The Man.)
Others have noted that Lexmark provides halfway-decent Linux support for its printers. I have an Optra Color 40; while it doesn't need Ghostscript as a print processor (it groks PostScript all by itself), Lexmark provides source code for a command-line utility to swap cartridges and do other maintenance tasks. (Others have made WIMP tools that do the same.) As for the other models (the ones that don't even do PCL, let alone PostScript), others have said various models work as well. I don't have any experience with them, though. It's also worth noting that if the nozzles get clogged beyond hope of unclogging, you don't have to send the printer in for repair...you buy a new cartridge for $25, pop it in, and get back to work.
If these regular users were concerned with eavesdropping, they wouldn't be using cordless phones, would they?
Using an old-school VHF cordless phone wouldn't be too bright if security and/or privacy is a concern...but I somehow think the Bad Guys would have a harder time snooping on a call through, say, a 2.4-GHz spread-spectrum cordless. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it'd be out of the reach of most people.
Zero...and it's covered, too. (Who the hell pays to park at work, anyway? Your employer ought to have a lot where you can stick your car...how else are you supposed to get to work on time, every time?)
Do you like creeping along in traffic having to watch out for people who don't really know how to drive but the DMV gave them licenses anyway? How much gas do you waste while waiting to merge because one of those drivers caused an accident a half mile up the road?
If you avoid the Strip at all times and avoid I-15 and the part of US 95 west of the Spaghetti Bowl during rush hour, getting around town isn't as bad as some people have made it out to be. Idiot drivers are a problem (especially since we have so many ex-Californians here who never learned to drive in the first place), but they seem to be a problem nearly anywhere you go.
Could you use the time riding public transport for reading in order to upgrade your skills to get something better than a $6/hr job?
Already have the degree and the decent-paying job...last time I made $6/hr. was when I started at Best Buy at the tail end of '94. Thanks for playing, though.
Who knows, maybe driving to work is costing you more than $5/day.
Closer to $2.00 at current gas prices, given my commute...and it takes half an hour each way. CAT charges $2.50 for the same round trip, and you'll be stuck on the bus 3x longer. (Been there, done that.)
Caliche and other tough-as-nails crap that would be a royal PITA to punch holes through. Back when my parents lived here and they had a pool put in the backyard, lots of good-sized rocks also got pulled out of the ground. Up where I live now (in the northeast corner of town, up on Frenchman Mountain), one of the pools in this condo development was built shallower than planned because the builder hadn't done an adequate geological survey of the property (among many other problems, but that's drifting offtopic) and ran into caliche just two or three feet down.
I've heard that the dry desert air plays some funny optical illusion tricks with your eyes and makes distances look much shorter than they actually are
I think it has to do with the fact that the casino's are MASSIVE and there's nothing in between to help judge the distance.
Many of 'em are pretty big, but they're right next to each other. There aren't many open lots left on the Strip...from Trop to Sahara, the only open lot of any considerable size is the southeast corner of Sahara & Las Vegas Blvd., north of Circus Circus. The rest of it has been built up for some time now.
Within your needlessly knee-jerk response, you completely missed the important point made. No matter which side you vote for, no matter which issues you represent, campaign finance reform is vitally important to the success of both digital and real-world rights and voice.
You are seriously deluded if you believe that so-called "campaign finance reform" will improve the political climate in the slightest. It's little more than an incumbent-protection racket. With the recently-passed legislation, you can't take Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) to task over his asinine legislation within 60 days of an election. If you do, you're breaking the law and could face huge fines and/or time in the Big House. His opponents can't do this either. What is needed is not more control over the election process, but more transparency. Let people say what they want (within the bounds of the slander and libel laws) and let them donate as much money as they want...but require full disclosure. If the voters knew of the millions that Hollings gets from the Hollyweird crowd, maybe they'd stop and wonder if he's really representing them or if he's been bought by others who don't have their interests at heart.
There was a case, Bond v. US, in which a Border Patrol agent was performing ID checks on a bus in Texas. The agent squeezed a piece of luggage and felt marijuana. The court had to decide whether or not the squeeze constituted a 'search' requiring probable cause or other legal justification. The Court ruled that it was, with Thomas concurring. The dissent (the idea being that a squeeze doesn't require justification) was written by Breyer with Scalia joining. Who appointed Breyer? (I THINK Breyer was a Clinton appointee, but I could be wrong)
He was appointed by Bush 41, but his track record on the Supreme Court has usually put him among the left-leaning justices. He might as well have been appointed by der Slickmeister, for all the "good" he's done. (At his confirmation hearings, IIRC he wouldn't answer many questions pertaining to how he might vote in more than a few hypothetical situations.)
I used to be able to meta-moderate and I used to be asked to moderate about once a month. Since the subscription service came out I have not been able to meta-moderate or been asked to moderate.
AFAIK, doesn't everybody who's logged in get metamod once a day (it resets at midnight GMT)? On some weird occasions it'd give fewer than 10 posts to metamod, but I haven't seen it do that in a long time.
Moderation comes up less frequently, but maybe that's a function of how many users/. has now vs. the smaller numbers of people it had in the past. (I'm sure it also takes some time for the system to weed out the constant influx of trolls, crapflooders, and crack-addict moderation abusers so that they don't get mod points.)
What if your file manager could sort files by type by looking at their "actual" type?
...and where would you propose storing this metadata? The vast majority of filesystems out there make no provision for any differentiation beyond whether a directory entry belongs to a file or a subdirectory. Some also know about file links, device "files," and such...but for differentiating the different kinds of data that might be in regular files, the only filesystems I know of that do that are the different filesystems Apple has come up with over the years (HFS, ProDOS, etc.). FAT*, NTFS, ext*, reiserfs, XFS, etc. don't allow for a way to tag a directory entry to say that it points to a JPEG image, an MP3, or whatever. To identify the file, you either use a few characters in the filename (.jpg) or you search for magic bytes in the file (0xFF 0xD8 0xFF 0xE0 0x00 0x10 'JFIF'). Which of these two methods is more efficient for the computer to carry out for a large number of files is an exercise left to the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
First thing I did with AOHell floppies was peel the label off...there goes that theory. Thanks for playing, though...:-)
It was good for fleshing out the first version of an image compressor that needed to maintain a few linked lists as part of its operation. One of the first optimizations I ended up making, though, was to rip out the STL linked lists and do old-school C-style linked lists instead. The speed improvement was non-trivial. (I also threw a wrapper around malloc() to minimize the number of calls to the real malloc()...that probably yielded the biggest speed boost, and it wouldn't have been possible with STL.)
That list would appear to be somewhat inaccurate, at least for what they say is available in Nevada. They say that the Century Orleans 18 is equipped with digital projection, but a quick trip to the Century Theatres website sez that the Century 18 Sam's Town is the local digital-projection outlet. (No word on whether AotC will run on their digital screen...they're currently playing Ice Age on it.)
It's the other way around. It's illegal in Clark County (which includes Las Vegas) and Washoe County (which includes Reno). It's legal nearly everywhere else in the state.
Make that 5 electoral votes...there'll be a 3rd congressional district beginning in 2003. (Visit this site to learn who not to vote for if, like me, you're in this new district.)
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50754,00 . tml
Selected paragraphs from the article:
Before you get on your high horse, you would do well to remember that it was your pal Slick Willie who signed the DMCA into law. (I could crack a joke about how that ought to be justification enough for his impeachment, but that would be piling on.) Think about it for a minute...how beholden do you think an administration would be to a media elite that has pretty much nothing but hostility toward it?
Left-wingers have never been known to let the truth get in the way of an argument, though...why do you think we had eight years of lies, quibbles, and equivocations?
When's the last time you saw a website that used VBScript or some other ActiveX-related stuff? The major offenders today WRT usability and (to a slightly lesser extent) interoperability are Flash and JavaScript.
(The main problem with them is that they tend to be abused...a site I was at a few minutes ago used Flash for its godforsaken site-navigation frame (two evils for the price of one—Flash abuse and frames). Considering that I hadn't yet figured out how to get Flash working in Mozilla (got that done now, but Macromedia doesn't make it easy), this basically allowed you to do little more than view their homepage.)
It depends on how you define "work." You're not going to use an Apple II (or other vintage computer) to (for instance) write videoconferencing software, but lots of people used 'em all the time in the 80s and early 90s for word processing, BBSing, etc. On the few occasions that I need to grind out a letter, I'd probably use Word 2000 now...but there's no reason I couldn't use AppleWorks 3.0 to do that if I wanted. (Hell, I haven't bothered porting the maintenance log for my car...it's still on my IIGS, which still gets fired up after an oil change or whatever.)
Some things (like web browsing) are a little more difficult to pull off, but they're still doable. The first browser I used was Lynx on a shell account, dialed in to either UNLV or Access Nevada with my II. I still use text-based mail and news clients (Mutt and trn, respectively); trn, in particular, isn't all that different from the rn that I learned 12 or 13 years ago. Finding an ISP today that would support that type of usage would be more difficult...but if you can live without the chrome, I think an Apple IIe with 128K, AppleWorks, and ProTERM (or something comparable if your tastes in vintage computing swing some other way) would still do the level of stuff that your average AOLer would do with a computer (write letters, send email, etc.). At least it would never display pr0n popups, punch-the-monkey banners, or the goatse.cx guy...
dyndns.org is your friend. :-) Even after switching from dynamic to static IP, I'm still using their services...with a dynamic IP, you just run a program that checks your address periodically and sends an update if it changes. It's a free service (though it'd be nice of you to send some of your burrito money their way) and it's been fairly reliable.
Sounds like my site, only mine gets less traffic (or else my outbound connection would be pegged) and I'm running Linux.
Been there, done that, wasn't able to do much with my connection for a day or so when it happened. :-) The server didn't mind at all (dual P!!!-500 with 256MB of RAM and 8GB of SCSI RAID-0 disk), but the cable modem stayed lit up like a Christmas tree.
Getting back to the original article for a minute, one of the legal tacks being considered by Kazaa is that they claim you can't (among other things) pass along derivative works. Has anyone considered distributing spyware-free file-sharing clients as patches to the "official" releases? You're not distributing a derivative work. LAME began life as a patch to the ISO (?) reference MP3 encoder, and that worked well enough until they could write a new encoder from scratch.
Maybe it's just me, but I suspect that the Apex AD600A more than makes up for Divx. It's the perfect tool for giving the MPAA a big "fsck you people in the neck." :-)
I used to work at Best Buy...you'd occasionally see stuff tagged in the store at a penny because it had been on clearance for so long that they just wanted to get rid of the product. I have some cell-phone battery packs somewhere at home that I bought that way for use in projects (nothing like getting 40 NiMH cells for 8 :-) ).
It was a fairly cool company back in '94 (when I started there), but it started losing sometime in '97 or '98. I quit in mid-'99. After a "customer-no-service" incident about a year and a half ago, I haven't been back since. Spend your "toy budget" at Circuit City or PC Club instead...that's what I've done.
Others have noted that Lexmark provides halfway-decent Linux support for its printers. I have an Optra Color 40; while it doesn't need Ghostscript as a print processor (it groks PostScript all by itself), Lexmark provides source code for a command-line utility to swap cartridges and do other maintenance tasks. (Others have made WIMP tools that do the same.) As for the other models (the ones that don't even do PCL, let alone PostScript), others have said various models work as well. I don't have any experience with them, though. It's also worth noting that if the nozzles get clogged beyond hope of unclogging, you don't have to send the printer in for repair...you buy a new cartridge for $25, pop it in, and get back to work.
Using an old-school VHF cordless phone wouldn't be too bright if security and/or privacy is a concern...but I somehow think the Bad Guys would have a harder time snooping on a call through, say, a 2.4-GHz spread-spectrum cordless. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it'd be out of the reach of most people.
Zero...and it's covered, too. (Who the hell pays to park at work, anyway? Your employer ought to have a lot where you can stick your car...how else are you supposed to get to work on time, every time?)
If you avoid the Strip at all times and avoid I-15 and the part of US 95 west of the Spaghetti Bowl during rush hour, getting around town isn't as bad as some people have made it out to be. Idiot drivers are a problem (especially since we have so many ex-Californians here who never learned to drive in the first place), but they seem to be a problem nearly anywhere you go.
Already have the degree and the decent-paying job...last time I made $6/hr. was when I started at Best Buy at the tail end of '94. Thanks for playing, though.
Closer to $2.00 at current gas prices, given my commute...and it takes half an hour each way. CAT charges $2.50 for the same round trip, and you'll be stuck on the bus 3x longer. (Been there, done that.)
Caliche and other tough-as-nails crap that would be a royal PITA to punch holes through. Back when my parents lived here and they had a pool put in the backyard, lots of good-sized rocks also got pulled out of the ground. Up where I live now (in the northeast corner of town, up on Frenchman Mountain), one of the pools in this condo development was built shallower than planned because the builder hadn't done an adequate geological survey of the property (among many other problems, but that's drifting offtopic) and ran into caliche just two or three feet down.
Many of 'em are pretty big, but they're right next to each other. There aren't many open lots left on the Strip...from Trop to Sahara, the only open lot of any considerable size is the southeast corner of Sahara & Las Vegas Blvd., north of Circus Circus. The rest of it has been built up for some time now.
You are seriously deluded if you believe that so-called "campaign finance reform" will improve the political climate in the slightest. It's little more than an incumbent-protection racket. With the recently-passed legislation, you can't take Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) to task over his asinine legislation within 60 days of an election. If you do, you're breaking the law and could face huge fines and/or time in the Big House. His opponents can't do this either. What is needed is not more control over the election process, but more transparency. Let people say what they want (within the bounds of the slander and libel laws) and let them donate as much money as they want...but require full disclosure. If the voters knew of the millions that Hollings gets from the Hollyweird crowd, maybe they'd stop and wonder if he's really representing them or if he's been bought by others who don't have their interests at heart.
He was appointed by Bush 41, but his track record on the Supreme Court has usually put him among the left-leaning justices. He might as well have been appointed by der Slickmeister, for all the "good" he's done. (At his confirmation hearings, IIRC he wouldn't answer many questions pertaining to how he might vote in more than a few hypothetical situations.)
2001? I'm 99.9% positive that it goes back much further than that...
AFAIK, doesn't everybody who's logged in get metamod once a day (it resets at midnight GMT)? On some weird occasions it'd give fewer than 10 posts to metamod, but I haven't seen it do that in a long time.
Moderation comes up less frequently, but maybe that's a function of how many users /. has now vs. the smaller numbers of people it had in the past. (I'm sure it also takes some time for the system to weed out the constant influx of trolls, crapflooders, and crack-addict moderation abusers so that they don't get mod points.)
One number:
9.8 m/s^2