And, I'm still trying to figure out by what you mean by non-square pixels. Are you trying to say the physical size on the screen, or how they are stored in memory on the graphics adaptor?
The pixels that make up a CGA image aren't square...they were drawn on a 640x200 grid. The pixels on a VGA display at most resolutions are square (1280x1024 is the most common exception)...for instance, (1024/4)/(768/3)=1. With CGA, (640/4)/(200/3)=2.4, which means it's stretched vertically.
The truth of the matter is, more people are willing to pay extra to get quality. Case in point: my first online purchase (2 years ago) was a CD burner, and I bought it from the retailer who had the cheapest price. Three months later, still without my CD burner, the company (TheBigStore.com) was out of business, and my $200 was gone.
You never just buy from whoever has the cheapest Pricewatch entry. I've bought plenty of stuff from vendors who list their prices with Pricewatch, but I always cross-reference a vendor with its score at ResellerRatings to get a feel for whether the company in question is on the up-and-up. Since I've started checking prices this way, I've gotten reasonable prices and I've never been burned.
I had a set of scripts that would search Pricewatch for an item and ResellerRatings for vendor scores, and then merge the two together so that you'd get scores alongside prices. I'm not sure if it'd still work, since it relies on screen-scraping (HTML parsing, really) to extract data from the two websites. (A quick check indicated that the sites have changed enough that the scripts would need to be fixed.)
That explains everything. There are too many idiots on Ebay, and people too lazy to comparison shop.
Most of it is people getting caught up in a bidding frenzy, as if an eBay auction is some sort of game. People seem to forget that the idea behind eBay was to uncover good deals on stuff, not to let the price spiral out of control because "I've just gotta win this."
I think people's unwillingness to keep this in mind has worked to my favor in some circumstances, though, so I'm not complaining too much about other people's stupidity.:-) A few years ago, I sold a Mustek flatbed scanner. I had had it for about a year and had just replaced it with an HP ScanJet 4p. I bought the scanner new for about $270 and would've been happy to get $100 for it...it got the job done, but it was slow as hell (despite the SCSI interface). IIRC, it got bid up to over $200. I wouldn't have paid that much for it at that time (hell, the HP only cost me $100 as a demo item), but someone was crazy enough to do so. (Maybe it got bid up like that because it was in the original box, but selling a scanner in its original box isn't exactly like selling (for instance) an Enterprise Christmas tree ornament ("NCC-1701...no bloody A, B, C, or D") in its original box.)
It justhappens that the single largest opponent of Open Source and the GPL is also the single largest corporation
Hmm...since when have these guys ever said anything bad about anything pertaining to open source? They're not even in the computer business!
(Just because Microsoft's market cap is bigger than everyone else's doesn't make it a bigger company. There are no doubt other companies besides GM that "outweigh" Microsoft.)
A senator will never send you a letter that says s/he disagrees with you.
Wrong. I fired off a few letters a few years ago to the Nevada delegation to the effect that Social Security is little more than a Ponzi scheme and ought to be fixed or (better yet) scrapped and replaced with something other than what's become a generational wealth-transfer scheme. The response from Harry Reid could only be characterized as a message of disagreement. (Two-and-a-half years until we get another whack at knocking him out of office...having the majority whip be from your state isn't worth a damn if his politics are bad for your state and bad for America.)
Microsoft, bad as it is, is no where as restrictive and closed as Apple is.
Hmm...who was it who used to publish manuals for its products that included schematics and assembler output (source and object, side by side) for its products? Who is it that has made a sizable chunk of its latest OS open source? It certainly isn't these guys.
In the IIgs arena, the Apple High-Speed (or any other) SCSI card is very hard to acquire without fierce competition on ebay.
Really? Wow; I never knew that.
Accelerators and SCSI cards both get bid up into the stratosphere. I got my ZipGS and RamFAST for reasonable prices in the early 90s (somewhere around $100 each, IIRC), but they'd probably get 2-3x that if I put them on eBay.
I wish I still had my RocketChip. 10 MHz on a IIe was schweeeet. The guy who bought it from me still has it AFAIK; I wonder if I could buy it back...
The Second Sight worked on the IIe as well, though most of 'em more than likely ended up in IIGS systems. My understanding was that it mostly worked, but had a few issues (IIRC, it didn't do fill-mode SHR and might've had problems with 3200-color mode). I ended up eventually tracking down a VGA monitor that'd plug directly into my GS instead and work with its slow refresh rate (60 Hz vertical, 15.75 kHz horizontal)...an NEC MultiSync 3D, which works great through the "Mac adapter" that came with it. As an added bonus, it's compatible with everything else around here with a VGA port.
Hand-operated paper punch. Just pull up the inside edges on each side of the ring, *punch* *punch*, and then one on the side where the WP notch was, *punch* and it's done.
You only needed the notch at the edge to write-enable the disk. Apple IIs don't use the index hole.
Indeed it is...under socialism, everybody is equally miserable. Without it, people are free to go however far their skills, talents, and education will take them.
minumum wage - while 15 is rather high, minumum wage is supposed to be a LIVING wage.
Since when? The vast majority of minimum-wage earners are teenagers who live with their parents and work for gas money, etc. A fair number of them are older people who work to supplement their Social Security/pension/etc. or just to have something to do so they don't go nuts sitting at home and doing nothing. An insignificant number of people are stuck in the position of living off of a minimum-wage job, and for the ones who aren't afraid to put in a good day's work, the situation is usually short-term. As for the people who are unwilling to take advantage of the opportunities that are readily available for getting ahead in life, tough sh*t. Nobody said life was easy.
All the minimum wage has ever been has been a means by which Big Labor can extort more money from "management" (if those minimum-wage guys are making more, then we deserve more to keep ahead of them). It also has the side effect of increasing unemployment, as some jobs can no longer be profitably carried out at a higher minimum wage. (I've noticed that the average McDonald's, for instance, has nowhere near as many people working in it today (with a minimum wage of $5.15?) than it did when I was working at one in high school (when the minimum wage was $3.15). Yes, they have newer equipment now that enables them to get the job done with fewer people...but why do you think they made the investment in the first place?)
Other measures are more controversial and if you want to get elected you'd best steer clear of divisive issues (such as zoning of a megastore) where 90% of the people are on one side of the issue and 90% of the money is on the other side of the issue.
<offtopic>
FWIW, when that issue popped up here in Las Vegas, most of the ordinary people were in favor of the megastores coming to town. It was a crack-addict county commissioner and the grocery-store union thugs who bought her that initially rammed a ban through the county commission. It took a petition, signed by tens of thousands, to get the ban lifted.
Erin Kenny's still a crackhead, though.:-P </offtopic>
I don't know what part of the States you are living in, but I'm living in north-east Florida & I've never seen diesel be more expensive than gasoline.
Here in Las Vegas, diesel has almost always been more expensive than gasoline. Neither of them are particularly cheap compared to other states, though...while Nevada has no state income tax, the gas tax here is among the highest in the country. While I suspect that a big part of the country is paying under $1.00/gallon, I filled up last night for closer to $1.10/gallon at one of the cheapest places to get gas. (I'm not complaining too much, given that prices maxed out last year around $1.80-$1.90 for the cheap stuff.)
Re:I resent the underlying sexism of your comment.
on
The Ultimate S.U.V.
·
· Score: 2
but certainly not automatic liability.
If you're specifically driving a vehicle that's designed to resist damage, and I'm driving one that's designed to write itself off, on impact, for safety reasons, then yes, you should have automatic liability.
Wrong. You should have a more durable vehicle. Why should the rest of us be forced to accept responsibility for your poor choice of transportation?
(For the record, I don't own an SUV...don't have any need for one and don't really want one. The pickup I just bought (a 2002 S10 extended-cab, RWD instead of 4WD because it'll never go off-road) is better for hauling stuff around and gets better mileage, while my car (a 1977 Cutlass Supreme Brougham) is better for hauling people and for fooling around under the hood. An SUV could do both of those jobs, but like a Swiss Army knife and all of its tools, it doesn't do those tasks as well something more specialized.)
Oh, and all vehicles should come with cell phone jammers that are on when the car is running.
You made that comment at least half in jest...but that penalizes the people who somehow managed to learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. (As for me, I keep talking-while-driving to a minimum.)
i want to agree, but i'm not sure if i can. china tends to have more people working close to where they live, i believe. i commute an hour to work at 60 MPH. this would take a day or two on bike.
america is just obsessed with going great distances to do pedantic things,
"Obsessed?" How about "just huge and spread out?" In most parts of the world, you can travel through entire countries in less time than it would take to get across just one state here. I'm in one of the more densely-populated cities, yet going anywhere other than the grocery store a mile downhill from me involves a trip of at least five miles. I'm on the outskirts, but it's better than living in a more central area (which I've also done...close proximity to everything is outweighed by the crime, the bums, and other nastiness that comes with most urban areas).
Other alternatives have popped up in recent years...in particular, Fox News Channel doesn't have the far-left tilt that infects most
other media outlets.
Yeah, I'd hate my "conservative news" to have a shred of honesty and accuracy
Just go to FAUX NEWS and enjoy the lies. They delude, I deride.
http://www.fair.org...
You trust that FAIR gets any of its stories right? They're nothing more than a mouthpiece for lefties...apologists for Dan Rather and his ilk. They tried to skewer Rush Limbaugh a few years back, but failed miserably due to their (typically) poor grasp of the facts. If you really want to get some idea of what the media don't want you to know, I'd suggest the Media Research Center or Accuracy In Media. I suspect that the truth may be a bit too much for you, though.
As for Fox News, I guess the fact that they don't accept as gospel every word from the Democrats and their fellow travelers must make them "members of the vast right-wing conspiracy." I would wear that label myself as a badge of honor, but Fox doesn't want to be known as leaning either way. Those of us on the right might gravitate toward them because the left-wing bias isn't there, but if they were the conservative news outlet that you say they are, what are the odds that they would've hired left-wing apologists such as Geraldo Rivera (as a war correspondent, no less)?
IOW, don't be surprised if the news coming out of the member companies -- CNN for instance -- starts to become blatantly biased.
...as if CNN was never "blatantly biased." It didn't take AOHell for that to happen (we can blame Ted Turner for that), though that certainly doesn't make things better. Other alternatives have popped up in recent years...in particular, Fox News Channel doesn't have the far-left tilt that infects most other media outlets. (That's not to say that they have no lefties among them...it's just that they aren't all that way, so left and right usually balance out.) If that's not your speed, there's MSNBC, which isn't half bad (it still tilts leftward somewhat, but nowhere near as much as CNN).
Total: CDN$89.24 or US$55.93 for DSL, long distance and cable TV.
Now to me, US$200+ for all that stuff is a rip-off in the extreme.
It is a ripoff...but consider that NYC is one of the most expensive places to live in the US, and it's also up there among the most expensive places in the world. In most of the rest of the country (a place of which most people from New York and LA deny its existence), rates are nowhere near that bad. In Las Vegas, I pay about $80 to the cable company ($50 for 512/128 business-class cable-modem service with modem rental and a static IP and the balance for standard analog cable service) and about $15+long distance to the phone company. That's still more than you're paying, but not too much more and nowhere near as nasty as $230/month.
(Remind me to never move to an area where AOHell runs the cable company...if I'm forced into such a move, then I'd have to make the switch to DSL and satellite TV. Now if there was only some way to get Cox to dump CNN, TBS, etc...)
Will we see a similar situation to the DVD players that did not conform to the DVD spec (you know, the ones that would play any region DVDs and did not force you to watch the goddamn FBI warning for the 256,000th time)? Remember how quickly most national resellers stopped carring those brands? How hard it was to find one once the Word was Out?
This little retailer you might've heard about had a huge stack of Apex DVD players in a store I visited going into Christmas. AFAIK the current models are hackable to some degree (it might take a while after they first come out, but it usually happens sooner or later).
According to the article, Philips is not going to try to get offending companies to remove the logo since the patents are running out in 2003/2004.
The logo is a trademark, and they unlike patents and (in theory) copyright do not run out.
Is it? Maybe I should look in the dox that I downloaded from Philips along with all of the CD-related logos...but if the various CD logos are governed by trademark law, shouldn't they have or ® somewhere near them?
IIRC, use of the logos is governed by a license agreement between Philips and the user (you sign on the dotted line and fax it to them to get the password to the encrypted zipfile you download from their website). IANAL, but this would appear to fall under contract law. That said, there's no expiration on a contract unless one is written into it. Record labels that produce intentionally incompatible CDs and stick the CD-DA logo on them would be in breach of contract. If Philips wanted, it could go after the labels on these grounds. (Other posts in this thread indicate that while Philips knows it has this option, it's chosen for the time being to take a different course.)
An interesting note is that most professional audio systems totally ignore this protection bit. I believe most store-bought CDs have this bit set in their stream if you use a CD player capable of AES/EBU output. We used to plug it direct digital into a professional mixing console, which should have not read it since the bit was set. I think someone didn't have the insight to know that the honor system rarely works.
It's probably more along the lines of most people/things/etc. not paying attention to bozo bits.
There's no way to 'block' flash ads in Mozilla yet, and Yahoo keeps throwing up this damn huge Oracle/IBM ad on the my.yahoo.com page I have.
squid-redir lets you block anything from anywhere, based on the URL. This rule, for instance, blocks all Flash at the Motley Fool:
//.*.fool.com/.*.swf BLANK
It substitutes a 1x1 transparent GIF for the Flash. Something similar would work elsewhere...if you want to cut off all Flash from all sites, you can do that:
//.*.swf BLANK
It works on any system that can run Squid and Perl, and it'll work with any browser (I usually use IE, though I also have Lynx, Konqueror, and iCab available). More info and the block list I'm currently using are available here. Here are the Yahoo-related rules I'm currently using:
Slashdot Mirror
Some things just can't be fixed.
You never just buy from whoever has the cheapest Pricewatch entry. I've bought plenty of stuff from vendors who list their prices with Pricewatch, but I always cross-reference a vendor with its score at ResellerRatings to get a feel for whether the company in question is on the up-and-up. Since I've started checking prices this way, I've gotten reasonable prices and I've never been burned.
I had a set of scripts that would search Pricewatch for an item and ResellerRatings for vendor scores, and then merge the two together so that you'd get scores alongside prices. I'm not sure if it'd still work, since it relies on screen-scraping (HTML parsing, really) to extract data from the two websites. (A quick check indicated that the sites have changed enough that the scripts would need to be fixed.)
Most of it is people getting caught up in a bidding frenzy, as if an eBay auction is some sort of game. People seem to forget that the idea behind eBay was to uncover good deals on stuff, not to let the price spiral out of control because "I've just gotta win this."
I think people's unwillingness to keep this in mind has worked to my favor in some circumstances, though, so I'm not complaining too much about other people's stupidity. :-) A few years ago, I sold a Mustek flatbed scanner. I had had it for about a year and had just replaced it with an HP ScanJet 4p. I bought the scanner new for about $270 and would've been happy to get $100 for it...it got the job done, but it was slow as hell (despite the SCSI interface). IIRC, it got bid up to over $200. I wouldn't have paid that much for it at that time (hell, the HP only cost me $100 as a demo item), but someone was crazy enough to do so. (Maybe it got bid up like that because it was in the original box, but selling a scanner in its original box isn't exactly like selling (for instance) an Enterprise Christmas tree ornament ("NCC-1701...no bloody A, B, C, or D") in its original box.)
Hmm...since when have these guys ever said anything bad about anything pertaining to open source? They're not even in the computer business!
(Just because Microsoft's market cap is bigger than everyone else's doesn't make it a bigger company. There are no doubt other companies besides GM that "outweigh" Microsoft.)
You say that as if Redh*t isn't broken already. LFS is the One True Linux. :-)
Wrong. I fired off a few letters a few years ago to the Nevada delegation to the effect that Social Security is little more than a Ponzi scheme and ought to be fixed or (better yet) scrapped and replaced with something other than what's become a generational wealth-transfer scheme. The response from Harry Reid could only be characterized as a message of disagreement. (Two-and-a-half years until we get another whack at knocking him out of office...having the majority whip be from your state isn't worth a damn if his politics are bad for your state and bad for America.)
Hmm...who was it who used to publish manuals for its products that included schematics and assembler output (source and object, side by side) for its products? Who is it that has made a sizable chunk of its latest OS open source? It certainly isn't these guys.
Accelerators and SCSI cards both get bid up into the stratosphere. I got my ZipGS and RamFAST for reasonable prices in the early 90s (somewhere around $100 each, IIRC), but they'd probably get 2-3x that if I put them on eBay.
I wish I still had my RocketChip. 10 MHz on a IIe was schweeeet. The guy who bought it from me still has it AFAIK; I wonder if I could buy it back...
The Second Sight worked on the IIe as well, though most of 'em more than likely ended up in IIGS systems. My understanding was that it mostly worked, but had a few issues (IIRC, it didn't do fill-mode SHR and might've had problems with 3200-color mode). I ended up eventually tracking down a VGA monitor that'd plug directly into my GS instead and work with its slow refresh rate (60 Hz vertical, 15.75 kHz horizontal)...an NEC MultiSync 3D, which works great through the "Mac adapter" that came with it. As an added bonus, it's compatible with everything else around here with a VGA port.
You only needed the notch at the edge to write-enable the disk. Apple IIs don't use the index hole.
Indeed it is...under socialism, everybody is equally miserable. Without it, people are free to go however far their skills, talents, and education will take them.
Since when? The vast majority of minimum-wage earners are teenagers who live with their parents and work for gas money, etc. A fair number of them are older people who work to supplement their Social Security/pension/etc. or just to have something to do so they don't go nuts sitting at home and doing nothing. An insignificant number of people are stuck in the position of living off of a minimum-wage job, and for the ones who aren't afraid to put in a good day's work, the situation is usually short-term. As for the people who are unwilling to take advantage of the opportunities that are readily available for getting ahead in life, tough sh*t. Nobody said life was easy.
All the minimum wage has ever been has been a means by which Big Labor can extort more money from "management" (if those minimum-wage guys are making more, then we deserve more to keep ahead of them). It also has the side effect of increasing unemployment, as some jobs can no longer be profitably carried out at a higher minimum wage. (I've noticed that the average McDonald's, for instance, has nowhere near as many people working in it today (with a minimum wage of $5.15?) than it did when I was working at one in high school (when the minimum wage was $3.15). Yes, they have newer equipment now that enables them to get the job done with fewer people...but why do you think they made the investment in the first place?)
<offtopic>
FWIW, when that issue popped up here in Las Vegas, most of the ordinary people were in favor of the megastores coming to town. It was a crack-addict county commissioner and the grocery-store union thugs who bought her that initially rammed a ban through the county commission. It took a petition, signed by tens of thousands, to get the ban lifted.
Erin Kenny's still a crackhead, though. :-P
</offtopic>
Here in Las Vegas, diesel has almost always been more expensive than gasoline. Neither of them are particularly cheap compared to other states, though...while Nevada has no state income tax, the gas tax here is among the highest in the country. While I suspect that a big part of the country is paying under $1.00/gallon, I filled up last night for closer to $1.10/gallon at one of the cheapest places to get gas. (I'm not complaining too much, given that prices maxed out last year around $1.80-$1.90 for the cheap stuff.)
Wrong. You should have a more durable vehicle. Why should the rest of us be forced to accept responsibility for your poor choice of transportation?
(For the record, I don't own an SUV...don't have any need for one and don't really want one. The pickup I just bought (a 2002 S10 extended-cab, RWD instead of 4WD because it'll never go off-road) is better for hauling stuff around and gets better mileage, while my car (a 1977 Cutlass Supreme Brougham) is better for hauling people and for fooling around under the hood. An SUV could do both of those jobs, but like a Swiss Army knife and all of its tools, it doesn't do those tasks as well something more specialized.)
You made that comment at least half in jest...but that penalizes the people who somehow managed to learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. (As for me, I keep talking-while-driving to a minimum.)
"Obsessed?" How about "just huge and spread out?" In most parts of the world, you can travel through entire countries in less time than it would take to get across just one state here. I'm in one of the more densely-populated cities, yet going anywhere other than the grocery store a mile downhill from me involves a trip of at least five miles. I'm on the outskirts, but it's better than living in a more central area (which I've also done...close proximity to everything is outweighed by the crime, the bums, and other nastiness that comes with most urban areas).
You trust that FAIR gets any of its stories right? They're nothing more than a mouthpiece for lefties...apologists for Dan Rather and his ilk. They tried to skewer Rush Limbaugh a few years back, but failed miserably due to their (typically) poor grasp of the facts. If you really want to get some idea of what the media don't want you to know, I'd suggest the Media Research Center or Accuracy In Media. I suspect that the truth may be a bit too much for you, though.
As for Fox News, I guess the fact that they don't accept as gospel every word from the Democrats and their fellow travelers must make them "members of the vast right-wing conspiracy." I would wear that label myself as a badge of honor, but Fox doesn't want to be known as leaning either way. Those of us on the right might gravitate toward them because the left-wing bias isn't there, but if they were the conservative news outlet that you say they are, what are the odds that they would've hired left-wing apologists such as Geraldo Rivera (as a war correspondent, no less)?
It is a ripoff...but consider that NYC is one of the most expensive places to live in the US, and it's also up there among the most expensive places in the world. In most of the rest of the country (a place of which most people from New York and LA deny its existence), rates are nowhere near that bad. In Las Vegas, I pay about $80 to the cable company ($50 for 512/128 business-class cable-modem service with modem rental and a static IP and the balance for standard analog cable service) and about $15+long distance to the phone company. That's still more than you're paying, but not too much more and nowhere near as nasty as $230/month.
(Remind me to never move to an area where AOHell runs the cable company...if I'm forced into such a move, then I'd have to make the switch to DSL and satellite TV. Now if there was only some way to get Cox to dump CNN, TBS, etc...)
This little retailer you might've heard about had a huge stack of Apex DVD players in a store I visited going into Christmas. AFAIK the current models are hackable to some degree (it might take a while after they first come out, but it usually happens sooner or later).
Is it? Maybe I should look in the dox that I downloaded from Philips along with all of the CD-related logos...but if the various CD logos are governed by trademark law, shouldn't they have or ® somewhere near them?
IIRC, use of the logos is governed by a license agreement between Philips and the user (you sign on the dotted line and fax it to them to get the password to the encrypted zipfile you download from their website). IANAL, but this would appear to fall under contract law. That said, there's no expiration on a contract unless one is written into it. Record labels that produce intentionally incompatible CDs and stick the CD-DA logo on them would be in breach of contract. If Philips wanted, it could go after the labels on these grounds. (Other posts in this thread indicate that while Philips knows it has this option, it's chosen for the time being to take a different course.)
It's probably more along the lines of most people/things/etc. not paying attention to bozo bits.
...and digging into SourceForge this way shows no files either. Anyone have a link that works?
squid-redir lets you block anything from anywhere, based on the URL. This rule, for instance, blocks all Flash at the Motley Fool:
It substitutes a 1x1 transparent GIF for the Flash. Something similar would work elsewhere...if you want to cut off all Flash from all sites, you can do that:
It works on any system that can run Squid and Perl, and it'll work with any browser (I usually use IE, though I also have Lynx, Konqueror, and iCab available). More info and the block list I'm currently using are available here. Here are the Yahoo-related rules I'm currently using: