Judges making stupid rulings like this, in total contempt and defiance of the Constitution that makes this country a Republic, not a Monarchy, need to leard to FEAR and respect the People they serve. They are in office as servants of the Law, the highest Law being the Constutution. The Law is not THEIR servant.
Judges today take after Humpty Dumpty. To them, the law means whatever they say it means, no more and no less. Consider this quote from the local paper today:
Thank goodness our judges, like those in California, no longer have to take an oath of office binding them to "protect and defend" a Constitution written by such men as John Jay. Think how inconvenient that would be.
(The rest of the column is recommended reading if you're interested in the rights of jurors to judge the law, as well as to apply it. These rights and others are under attack from the Men In Black.)
If old Mrs. Underwood, who lives around the corner from the Dobsons and who was born in 1920 insists on sleeping under an old-fashioned comforter instead of an aerogel blanket of glass puffed with air so that it is as light as thistledown she must expect people to talk about her "queerness."
I guess they didn't know just how itchy fiberglass was back then.
Check out this auction on eBay. The scary part is that someone bought the item. I wonder if it'll be put to its intended use.
(whowouldbuythat.com is a pretty neat site for tracking down weird auctions. It's usually good for a chuckle or two.)
People who massacre the word "naïveté" make me want to hit them in their smile.
And you're talking about word massacres? I bet you knew that some browsers couldn't display your crackwhore wannabe Unicode characters.
Umm...FWIW, those weren't Unicode. They were high-bit characters that may or may not display properly, depending on your combination of browser and OS. "Naïveté" (written as "Naïveté") would've been better, as it's reasonably cross-platform.
Nobody gets sick from 'em because everyone's vaccinated. That's a cure.
Vaccines aren't cures; they're preventive measures. Try getting the flu sometime and then get a flu shot; see how much good it does you. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a widespread nuisance like the common cold or a killer such as HIV or Ebola...no viral disease has ever been cured. The best that has happened was that some diseases have been contained and no longer exist "in the wild;" this is the case with smallpox (no new known cases since the late 60s or early 70s, IIRC), and polio is supposed to be almost as close to practical non-existence at this point.
Hey - why the hell would anyone want to buy a cramped POS HP, compaq, etc system?
The damn cases are cramped, a bitch to work with, the power supplies are crap, limited upgradibility etc.. etc..
This is definitely true of the "consumer-grade" stuff these companies put out, but don't lump Vectras and Deskpros in with Pavilions and Presarios (and Brios, which are rebadged Pavilions for the most part). The business-grade stuff is somewhat better. (Nothing beats building your own, unless you need to send a computer a couple thousand miles to a remote location. If it breaks on the other side of the country, it's cheaper to call IBM, Compaq, or whoever and have them send their people out than to hop on a plane and fix a homebrew box.)
Dell still has some credibility in my eyes, they have really nice cases, and fairly decent boards.
You must be joking. Back when I fixed computers for The Man, I always dreaded taking in Dells. I got the impression that they took whatever seconds Intel had that week and slapped them together into something that resembled a computer. Upgrading them and fixing them was a cast-iron b*tch compared to nearly anything else. I would rather have worked on Packard Bells...at least they didn't pretend to be high-end, and if you worked on enough of them, you could figure out their quirks and deal with them reasonably well.
It's amazing how quickly a bunch of basement-dwelling, four-eyed hackers can turn on a dime and start talking about photography as if it were just another Linux app.
Whoever said computers were the average/.'er's only interest? Photography is every bit as hackable, as long as you don't limit yourself to point-and-shoot cameras and 1-hour minilabs. The equipment's a bit more expensive, though, especially if you want to do your own color printing (enlargers with dichroic heads are somewhat spendy...last time I had access to one was in high school 13 years ago).
Besides, I don't even have a basement, and my vision's better than 20/20...no glasses.:-)
Hey, I had an uncensored Usenet feed *with* binaries! Of course, I had to limit the users and myself quite a lot so that the line wouldn't be tied up all the time receiving packets. But our local FidoNet Net had all pitched in for a satellite feed of Usenet.
Bandwidth was the main reason binaries weren't made available. I think the Usenet feed for Net209 came in by satellite as well, and they didn't want 75% of the bandwidth to be chewed up by pr0n (MP3 didn't even exist, so mp3z wouldn't have been a factor:-) ). I didn't complain too much as I had full-feed access through UNLV until I quit for a while and they mothballed my account. After that, I signed up with a local ISP. Usenet was a nice extra to be able to offer callers, and it didn't cost anything more than the $10/month that we already paid to move the mail and echoes.
Maximus/Binkley/Squash
Squish is what I think you meant, unless I'm remembering things incorrectly. That's what I ran the Skunk Works on, though I didn't use Blue Wave as (1) I was cheap:-) and wanted to run the BBS with free software (as in beer, if not as in speech, though the eventual migration to Linux fixed that) and (2) I thought the authors of Blue Wave had a rather puerile attitude WRT their format vs. QWK (the default taglines bundled with their reader were a bit of a turn-off). Besides, there was no Blue Wave reader for the Apple II (yes, there were QWK readers for the II), and that was one of the machines I explicitly supported (hey, I was still using a "stealth GS" up until '94 or '95 for everyday computing tasks).
I only used DOS for the time it lasted (single line, anyway), with as low as a 2MB 12-Mhz 286 with an old 5 1/4" 40MB Seagate (ST-251N) MFM Hard Disk (the N was the 28MS version, not the 40MS:) with mono HGC like card for disply.
Sounds like the system I built in early '91 (or was it '92?) to run my BBS, only I snagged a 125-meg drive from another sysop in town pretty cheap (I thought $200 for an ST-1144A was cheap, anyway).
BTW, the N suffix on a Seagate drive means it's SCSI, not MFM. This page on Seagate's website describes the ST-251N. Maybe you meant ST-251, which was MFM.
300 - 1200 buad wasn't much fun when calling a BBS with only 3 lines, but you could connect and most were free. For the same fun now, try using one of the free ISP's. It will simulate the trying to connect to a busy number and slow connection speeds due to limited bandwidth, and yes the time limits.
...not to mention that the average BBS didn't bombard you with ads while you were dialed in, unlike the average free ISP today. You typically had a splash screen and some kind of motd at startup, and a "come back soon" type of message at the end that might have had "free advertising" for the sysop's favorite other BBSes, but that was usually it. You would never have seen one of those stupid "bash the monkey in the head and maybe you'll win something" banners on a BBS.
That's because WWIV sucks, completely and totally. Sorry, couldn't resist one last jab in the BBS software wars. I ran Renegade, and although I called a few BBSes that ran WWIV, I really didn't like it much.
I don't remember much about WWIV, but there were some boards around here that ran Renegade. It was OK, though for the couple of years that I ran under DOS, I used Maximus. Wildcat was the most popular around here, with a few boards running Major BBS, PCBoard (which I always thought stunk to high heaven, and a few others I can't recall right now. That's not counting those who ran boards on Macs, Apple IIs (mine started on a IIe, running AppleNet and Warp Six at various times), Amigas, and whatever else other sysops were using.
Back in 1993-4, before my area got Internet, BBS's WERE the net... I set up on FidoNet, allowed access to hundreds of Echos (the precursor to Usenet) and even had a way for users to send Internet E-mail (via the FidoNet-Internet gateway)...
We had a gateway that handled Usenet (no binaries, though) as well as mail. Since the gateway was local, it took less time for mail to hit the Internet than if it had to wend its way through "Fight-o-Net." I was running an early version of Linux at the time, too...getting sendmail and cnews to talk to Fidonet was, um, interesting.:-)
My old address was 1:2260/140:)
1:209/263, or skunkworks.genesplicer.org through the gateway. In 1993, it was kinda cool to have mail arriving from the Internet on my desktop.
Blockbuster is PISSED that DVDs are only good for about 7 to 10 rentals before they gradually become unplayable without major skipping and such. Then angry renters demand their money back because their rental has unwatchable segments.
If you mishandle it (get fingerprints and food smudges over it, use it as a Frisbee, etc.), a DVD won't last too long. That is Blockbuster's likely problem. I rented a movie once and it wouldn't play at first. A few minutes at the kitchen sink with some water, some dishwashing detergent, and a towel fixed it...maybe they should invest in some cleaning equipment to deal with the slobs who don't know how to properly handle DVDs.
The DVDs I own, OTOH, all look like-new, with no scratches or smudges. I handle them only by their edges, and they're either in the player or in their boxes. I suspect they'll last much longer than 7 to 10 plays.
None of this, of course, negates the fair-use rights of people who buy DVDs to make backup and/or working copies. I don't have kids, but if I did, it'd be nice to rip DVDs of their favorite movies to VCD or SVCD, lock up the DVDs, and let them use the copies. They won't notice the difference, and if they screw it up, you just rip & burn again.
Send mail to bubba@alum.beerdrinker.edu and it'll automagically get redirected to beerswiller@hotmail.com. Should Bubba decide to change to AOL our hypothetical graduate need only update the service at alum.beerdrinker.edu in order to get all of his email now forwarded to idrinkspud@aol.com, no need to mass-email all of his drinking buddies.
I know it's only an example, but it seems unrealistic...after all, who would even think of changing from some other service to AOHell?
I realize that this may seem obvious, be we need to reward Micron & Infineon by purchasing their RAM products. They spent tons of money fighting an unjust cause. The next time I purchase RAM, it will be for one of these two brands
Been there, done that, got 256 megs of PC1600 DDR SDRAM from Crucial in my GHz Athlon box to prove it.:-) At $95, it was also the least expensive DDR SDRAM at the time...an added bonus. I think you can get PC2100 for the same (or maybe less) now, but I haven't checked lately.
I think OO has been around long enough now for there to be little excuse for people not to know
anything about it.
On the occasions I've tried picking it up, I've usually ended up with headaches. Either in terms of how people think or how computers work, it makes no sense that I've ever been able to figure.
My most recent attempt was to pick up Visual C++ for an image-processing class I'm taking this semester (the instructor recommended it in order to access whatever bells and whistles Win32 offers). It seemed to me that you spent more time moving widgets around on the screen than you spent actually writing program code. After a few weeks, I said "screw this" and went back to gcc under Linux. While the rest of the class was running into trouble getting its software working (I'll admit that I don't know if they were struggling to get VC++ to do what they wanted or if they were running into more fundamental problems with the algorithms to be coded), I was producing working code for histogram equalization, 2-D Fourier transforms, and DCT-based lossy image compression (among other things) long before anyone else I spoke with on the subject.
When I did a bit of tech support a few years ago, the best term for those who couldn't or wouldn't RTFM was PEBKAC: Problem exists between keyboard and chair.
That's OK, but "ID-10-T error" (or a variation thereof) is better.
Is it? The last Intel processor I bought was a 12-MHz 286 back in '90 or '91. I've bought several different AMD and Cyrix processors since then and haven't regretted any of them. I'll allow that everything I've bought from the 386SX-25 up through the K6-200 was purchased mainly because it was the cheaper alternative, but the K6-2-300 and K6-III-450 were bought in part because they weren't Intel parts (and they deliver more than adequate integer performance; floating-point performance is OK, but I'm not a gamer). The 1.0-GHz Athlon I'm running now is faster, across-the-board, than any P!!! you can get, and gives P4s clocked 30-50% faster a run for their money. That the Athlon is not from Intel is an added bonus.
It seems that Rambus is now the patent and litigation company. Do they even sell memory anymore?:)
AFAIK, they never did. Rambus is an IP company, which means it has a few engineers (maybe), a handful of patents, and an army of lawyers. They don't actually produce any tangible product.
I don't know if there's an active boycott of Rambus products, but I think there should be.
Not buying products based on Rambus' technologies makes plenty of sense from a price/performance standpoint. An Athlon of moderate to high speed combined with DDR SDRAM is the fastest x86 setup you can get for the vast majority of apps. (There are a few (very few) apps which can run faster on a P4, but they're definitely outside ±3.)
I'd be interested in knowing if anyone tried building a pc in this case. How serious is the static problem?
RFI is likely to be the bigger problem. Conventional metal cases keep most RFI bottled up inside, but it seems that acrylic would just let it all out to trash your radio and TV reception. The usual solution would be to paint the inside with some kind of conductive paint (like the inside of an Apple II, where the upper part of the case was plastic), but then that would defeat the purpose of building the case out of acrylic in the first place.
I would think that static, OTOH, wouldn't be that big a problem as long as grounding straps are run between devices. Your neighbors wouldn't like it when your GHz Athlon in the clear case kills the mind-rot they're watching that passes for TV.
If you consider a one Watt phone (it's probably a bit below that on more recent phones, but it's still reasonable), your head receives about 1/2 Watt of energy. This energy probably affects at most a 100 cm^2 area of your head.
AMPS allowed up to 600 mW for handheld phones. "Bag phones" and phones installed in cars were allowed up to 3W, but I don't think those have been sold in years. The various digital systems use even less power...the GSM PCS phone I used until about a year ago maxed out at 125 mW according to the manual.
Apple figured this out long ago when they came up with NuBus. Plug and Play is a crock of shit. It always breaks sooner or later.
Apple's experience with this goes back even further than that (besides, NuBus wasn't theirs...they got that from someone else (TI?)). Each expansion slot in an Apple II had 16 bytes of memory-mapped I/O space and 256 bytes of ROM space. An additional 2K of shared ROM space was available that cards could switch in as needed. In addition to firmware, the 256-byte ROM space served as identification so that the system firmware could locate a disk controller for booting. Jumpers on Apple II expansion cards were rare, for the most part...you stuck the card in an available slot and it worked. Plug & Play...nearly two decades before Microsoft bought into the idea.
Somehow, I don't think fiber is the answer for mouse and keyboard, and the reason you just expressed is one of them. The other one is cost: do you really want to build a fiber transceiver into a mouse, and then pay for a fiber cable?
But the fiber cable going into the mouse would look cool. Besides, (borrowing from the audiophooles here) the bits would probably be in better alignment, so your mouse would work better...or something like that.
(Note to the humor-impaired: stick a:-) after each sentence.)
ISA was phased out in the recent motherboards. Almost all motherboards being released have no ISA slots.
Go see for yourself.
Guess again. While you usually don't get the 3 or 4 ISA slots you would get in the past, you don't have to look far to find a board that'll support your modem, SCSI card (hey, why waste an Adaptec 29160 on a scanner when a 1502 works just as well for that purpose?), or whatever, while still supporting the latest technologies (such as DDR SDRAM) and the fastest processors available.
Slashdot Mirror
Judges today take after Humpty Dumpty. To them, the law means whatever they say it means, no more and no less. Consider this quote from the local paper today:
(The rest of the column is recommended reading if you're interested in the rights of jurors to judge the law, as well as to apply it. These rights and others are under attack from the Men In Black.)
Check out this auction on eBay. The scary part is that someone bought the item. I wonder if it'll be put to its intended use.
(whowouldbuythat.com is a pretty neat site for tracking down weird auctions. It's usually good for a chuckle or two.)
Umm...FWIW, those weren't Unicode. They were high-bit characters that may or may not display properly, depending on your combination of browser and OS. "Naïveté" (written as "Naïveté") would've been better, as it's reasonably cross-platform.
Vaccines aren't cures; they're preventive measures. Try getting the flu sometime and then get a flu shot; see how much good it does you. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a widespread nuisance like the common cold or a killer such as HIV or Ebola...no viral disease has ever been cured. The best that has happened was that some diseases have been contained and no longer exist "in the wild;" this is the case with smallpox (no new known cases since the late 60s or early 70s, IIRC), and polio is supposed to be almost as close to practical non-existence at this point.
This is definitely true of the "consumer-grade" stuff these companies put out, but don't lump Vectras and Deskpros in with Pavilions and Presarios (and Brios, which are rebadged Pavilions for the most part). The business-grade stuff is somewhat better. (Nothing beats building your own, unless you need to send a computer a couple thousand miles to a remote location. If it breaks on the other side of the country, it's cheaper to call IBM, Compaq, or whoever and have them send their people out than to hop on a plane and fix a homebrew box.)
You must be joking. Back when I fixed computers for The Man, I always dreaded taking in Dells. I got the impression that they took whatever seconds Intel had that week and slapped them together into something that resembled a computer. Upgrading them and fixing them was a cast-iron b*tch compared to nearly anything else. I would rather have worked on Packard Bells...at least they didn't pretend to be high-end, and if you worked on enough of them, you could figure out their quirks and deal with them reasonably well.
Whoever said computers were the average /.'er's only interest? Photography is every bit as hackable, as long as you don't limit yourself to point-and-shoot cameras and 1-hour minilabs. The equipment's a bit more expensive, though, especially if you want to do your own color printing (enlargers with dichroic heads are somewhat spendy...last time I had access to one was in high school 13 years ago).
Besides, I don't even have a basement, and my vision's better than 20/20...no glasses. :-)
Bandwidth was the main reason binaries weren't made available. I think the Usenet feed for Net209 came in by satellite as well, and they didn't want 75% of the bandwidth to be chewed up by pr0n (MP3 didn't even exist, so mp3z wouldn't have been a factor :-) ). I didn't complain too much as I had full-feed access through UNLV until I quit for a while and they mothballed my account. After that, I signed up with a local ISP. Usenet was a nice extra to be able to offer callers, and it didn't cost anything more than the $10/month that we already paid to move the mail and echoes.
Squish is what I think you meant, unless I'm remembering things incorrectly. That's what I ran the Skunk Works on, though I didn't use Blue Wave as (1) I was cheap :-) and wanted to run the BBS with free software (as in beer, if not as in speech, though the eventual migration to Linux fixed that) and (2) I thought the authors of Blue Wave had a rather puerile attitude WRT their format vs. QWK (the default taglines bundled with their reader were a bit of a turn-off). Besides, there was no Blue Wave reader for the Apple II (yes, there were QWK readers for the II), and that was one of the machines I explicitly supported (hey, I was still using a "stealth GS" up until '94 or '95 for everyday computing tasks).
Sounds like the system I built in early '91 (or was it '92?) to run my BBS, only I snagged a 125-meg drive from another sysop in town pretty cheap (I thought $200 for an ST-1144A was cheap, anyway).
BTW, the N suffix on a Seagate drive means it's SCSI, not MFM. This page on Seagate's website describes the ST-251N. Maybe you meant ST-251, which was MFM.
I don't remember much about WWIV, but there were some boards around here that ran Renegade. It was OK, though for the couple of years that I ran under DOS, I used Maximus. Wildcat was the most popular around here, with a few boards running Major BBS, PCBoard (which I always thought stunk to high heaven, and a few others I can't recall right now. That's not counting those who ran boards on Macs, Apple IIs (mine started on a IIe, running AppleNet and Warp Six at various times), Amigas, and whatever else other sysops were using.
(FWIW, "here" refers to Las Vegas.)
We had a gateway that handled Usenet (no binaries, though) as well as mail. Since the gateway was local, it took less time for mail to hit the Internet than if it had to wend its way through "Fight-o-Net." I was running an early version of Linux at the time, too...getting sendmail and cnews to talk to Fidonet was, um, interesting. :-)
1:209/263, or skunkworks.genesplicer.org through the gateway. In 1993, it was kinda cool to have mail arriving from the Internet on my desktop.
If you mishandle it (get fingerprints and food smudges over it, use it as a Frisbee, etc.), a DVD won't last too long. That is Blockbuster's likely problem. I rented a movie once and it wouldn't play at first. A few minutes at the kitchen sink with some water, some dishwashing detergent, and a towel fixed it...maybe they should invest in some cleaning equipment to deal with the slobs who don't know how to properly handle DVDs.
The DVDs I own, OTOH, all look like-new, with no scratches or smudges. I handle them only by their edges, and they're either in the player or in their boxes. I suspect they'll last much longer than 7 to 10 plays.
None of this, of course, negates the fair-use rights of people who buy DVDs to make backup and/or working copies. I don't have kids, but if I did, it'd be nice to rip DVDs of their favorite movies to VCD or SVCD, lock up the DVDs, and let them use the copies. They won't notice the difference, and if they screw it up, you just rip & burn again.
I know it's only an example, but it seems unrealistic...after all, who would even think of changing from some other service to AOHell?
Been there, done that, got 256 megs of PC1600 DDR SDRAM from Crucial in my GHz Athlon box to prove it. :-) At $95, it was also the least expensive DDR SDRAM at the time...an added bonus. I think you can get PC2100 for the same (or maybe less) now, but I haven't checked lately.
On the occasions I've tried picking it up, I've usually ended up with headaches. Either in terms of how people think or how computers work, it makes no sense that I've ever been able to figure.
My most recent attempt was to pick up Visual C++ for an image-processing class I'm taking this semester (the instructor recommended it in order to access whatever bells and whistles Win32 offers). It seemed to me that you spent more time moving widgets around on the screen than you spent actually writing program code. After a few weeks, I said "screw this" and went back to gcc under Linux. While the rest of the class was running into trouble getting its software working (I'll admit that I don't know if they were struggling to get VC++ to do what they wanted or if they were running into more fundamental problems with the algorithms to be coded), I was producing working code for histogram equalization, 2-D Fourier transforms, and DCT-based lossy image compression (among other things) long before anyone else I spoke with on the subject.
Imagine...a Beowulf cluster in your hand.
That's OK, but "ID-10-T error" (or a variation thereof) is better.
Is it? The last Intel processor I bought was a 12-MHz 286 back in '90 or '91. I've bought several different AMD and Cyrix processors since then and haven't regretted any of them. I'll allow that everything I've bought from the 386SX-25 up through the K6-200 was purchased mainly because it was the cheaper alternative, but the K6-2-300 and K6-III-450 were bought in part because they weren't Intel parts (and they deliver more than adequate integer performance; floating-point performance is OK, but I'm not a gamer). The 1.0-GHz Athlon I'm running now is faster, across-the-board, than any P!!! you can get, and gives P4s clocked 30-50% faster a run for their money. That the Athlon is not from Intel is an added bonus.
AFAIK, they never did. Rambus is an IP company, which means it has a few engineers (maybe), a handful of patents, and an army of lawyers. They don't actually produce any tangible product.
Not buying products based on Rambus' technologies makes plenty of sense from a price/performance standpoint. An Athlon of moderate to high speed combined with DDR SDRAM is the fastest x86 setup you can get for the vast majority of apps. (There are a few (very few) apps which can run faster on a P4, but they're definitely outside ±3.)
RFI is likely to be the bigger problem. Conventional metal cases keep most RFI bottled up inside, but it seems that acrylic would just let it all out to trash your radio and TV reception. The usual solution would be to paint the inside with some kind of conductive paint (like the inside of an Apple II, where the upper part of the case was plastic), but then that would defeat the purpose of building the case out of acrylic in the first place.
I would think that static, OTOH, wouldn't be that big a problem as long as grounding straps are run between devices. Your neighbors wouldn't like it when your GHz Athlon in the clear case kills the mind-rot they're watching that passes for TV.
AMPS allowed up to 600 mW for handheld phones. "Bag phones" and phones installed in cars were allowed up to 3W, but I don't think those have been sold in years. The various digital systems use even less power...the GSM PCS phone I used until about a year ago maxed out at 125 mW according to the manual.
Done. You can also get an archive, with HTML and images ready to dump into your own website to make mirroring even easier, here.
Apple's experience with this goes back even further than that (besides, NuBus wasn't theirs...they got that from someone else (TI?)). Each expansion slot in an Apple II had 16 bytes of memory-mapped I/O space and 256 bytes of ROM space. An additional 2K of shared ROM space was available that cards could switch in as needed. In addition to firmware, the 256-byte ROM space served as identification so that the system firmware could locate a disk controller for booting. Jumpers on Apple II expansion cards were rare, for the most part...you stuck the card in an available slot and it worked. Plug & Play...nearly two decades before Microsoft bought into the idea.
But the fiber cable going into the mouse would look cool. Besides, (borrowing from the audiophooles here) the bits would probably be in better alignment, so your mouse would work better...or something like that.
(Note to the humor-impaired: stick a :-) after each sentence.)
Guess again. While you usually don't get the 3 or 4 ISA slots you would get in the past, you don't have to look far to find a board that'll support your modem, SCSI card (hey, why waste an Adaptec 29160 on a scanner when a 1502 works just as well for that purpose?), or whatever, while still supporting the latest technologies (such as DDR SDRAM) and the fastest processors available.