Why the devil has parent been modded flamebait? Just because he doesn't agree with the groupthink doesn't mean that it's a null/void opinion!
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#ifndef _SARCASM_H
#include <sarcasm.h>
Anyone who disagrees with the Slashbot hive-mind is obviously a reichwing Christianist deathbeast who must be silenced by the oh-so-tolerant-of-diverse-opinions progressives.
#endif
What I found disappointing was that the original poster in this thread was surprised that it was adult stem cells that provided this breakthrough. If he had googled "adult stem cell cures," he would've learned that they've already been developed into dozens of useful cures. Compare that to the number of useful cures derived to date from embryonic stem-cell research.
I'm sure this inconvenient truth (to borrow a phrase) will get modded down...so be it. I've quit giving a damn about/. karma. It's devolved into the collective opinion of a pack of foaming-at-the-mouth left-wingers; why should I pay it any attention?
What I want to see is a MIDlet that lets you check in, then displays a 2D barcode on your phone screen that acts as your boarding pass.
I don't think laser scanners can read LCDs. They're designed to work with reflective media (such as paper); LCDs are transmissive.
Your idea might work if your phone had an "electronic paper" display, if that display delivered high-enough contrast. Most phones don't, though, as we want our shiny color displays instead.
For future reference, United Airlines 747 jets do have exit row seats that recline.
Ditto for Southwest's 737s. A better question might be "which aircraft have exit-row seats that don't recline?" I've not come across one; the last time I was stuck in a seat that didn't recline was on a A3something (319? 320?), and it was all the way in the back of the plane against a bulkhead. (Getting stuck in such a seat for a cross-country redeye was a Bad Idea.)
Sounds like somebody is bitter about getting an English degree instead of an Engineering degree...
Are you sure that was an English major? Given the questionable recommendations (for one thing, verbing weirds English:-) ), I think you need to look a bit further down the food chain. Bad advice combined with a snotty, holier-than-thou attitude from someone who knows less than he thinks he knows (and is too stupid to recognize it) makes me think he's an education major.
Time & temperature in Las Vegas is a 3-digit number: 118. It only works on landline phones connected to Embarq (the local phone company, spun off from Sprint a while back) AFAICT; it doesn't work with VoIP or cell-phone services.
The simple truth is that at least for IBM (now Levno) laptops and HP... and probably others... the build quality is just not there compared to Apple.
I've bought a couple of HPs (most recent one was the "Lance Armstrong special") and I've not had any issues with either of them.
That said, if I were in the market for a notebook today, it'd most likely be a Mac. HP still offers XP on its BTO notebooks, but there's less and less stuff for which I need Windows...both of my machines boot Linux (the older one only boots Linux; the newer one can boot Windows from a USB hard drive or inside VMware if I need it). For most of what I do, there's less difference between Linux and Mac OS X than between Linux and Windows. If HP were to stop selling XP and only offer Vista, that'd be yet another incentive to go with a MacBook the next time. (I already have a G4 Mac mini and a small collection of older Macs and Apple IIs, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with Apple hardware.)
It's where the dipshits who keep inflicting Ted "Swimmer" Kennedy and John "Traitor" Kerry on the rest of the nation live. I would characterize it as 10,555 square miles surrounded by reality, but its neighbors aren't much better.
We eventually got rid of some of them as we upgraded, but we still have a 150 Mhz box that still runs to this day on 100% original hardware. Not one thing has ever failed, and I can't say that about any of the HP, Toshiba or Dell computers I have bought.
My parents had a 166-MHz Packard Bell that was still running when I gave them one of my hand-me-downs (it was excess to my needs, and a fair bit faster). I still have the monitor (with speakers that screwed into the sides) from that system on my workbench.
By the time I started dealing with them in the mid-'90s, they usually didn't seem substantially better or worse than the competition. They had some weird ideas from time to time (one model had 1.2-GB and 850-MB hard drives combined by a combination of the system BIOS and custom firmware in the drives to appear as a single 2-GB drive, and there were those weird L-shaped desktops that you were supposed to shove into a corner), but I didn't have a harder time working on them than any other machine out there.
Well, no, most of the people like that live in places like Wyoming where their vote is magnified three times what you and I living in places not called Wyoming have due to the electoral college.
Better that than to have the dipshits in the People's Republics of California and Massa-two-shits running roughshod over the rest of us.
The only reason we keep hearing this noise about getting rid of the electoral college was that the Dims can't accept that they lost and they weren't allowed to keep changing the rules on-the-fly to get a different result. Do you think the left-wing noise machine would be agitating for presidential elections by popular vote if Algore had rooked a few more people into voting for him?
Geez...Slashbots are getting nearly as idiotic--and nearly as predictable--as the Kossacks and the DUmmies.
Actually some Linux Distro's do have open ports. One of the first things I do when I install a distro at work is run nmap to get a list, and then start closing them ports I don't want open. Usually those are Redhat / RPM based distros.
I set up an Ubuntu VPS recently because the service provider didn't offer Gentoo. In addition to sshd, the VPS already had Apache and Sendmail installed and running. There were some ports associated with VPS management that were open. I think Samba may have even been installed and running (but I got rid of that). Now that I've done another port scan again, it looks like something is still running on TCP port 53...probably BIND.
With Gentoo, OTOH, an out-of-the-box install doesn't have anything open. OpenSSH is installed, but you have to enable it yourself. Nothing else is installed, so you don't have to worry about holes in Sendmail or BIND getting your new box pwned before you have a chance to replace them with qmail and djbdns. For that matter, if you don't need a mail server (or any other kind of server) at all, you can just not install one.
I've noticed that flash on my amd64 box using the nspluginwrapper is quite unstable compared to my other box with is running a P4 and doesn't need the wrapper.
It used to be unreliable for me, but nspluginwrapper has worked well for me the past few months. What version are you using? I'm using 0.9.91.4, with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Gentoo.
Just to let you know, I live in phoenix (well, a bit north of phoenix actually), and really do get my full 8mbps.
I live in the southwest corner of Las Vegas. I replaced my cable modem yesterday...the old one was taking hours to reconnect to the network after a power outage or reset, and it was maxing out around 1-1.5 Mbps on service that's supposed to deliver 10 Mbps (and it had delivered that speed in the past). Playing around with Speedtest.net yesterday with the new modem up and running, I maxed out at 22 Mbps and usually pulled 5-8 Mbps, depending on which test server I picked (the fastest connection, FWIW, was to San Francisco).
Just saying, cable doesn't suck everywhere..
I've noticed most of the complaints have been aimed at Comcast. Occasionally, you hear complaints about Time Warner (my parents moved from Phoenix to Dayton, OH, and they had trouble getting both their TV and data services working right there). I don't think I've ever seen anyone say anything bad about Cox. I know I've never had any trouble with them, and my parents didn't either.
Strangely enough it seems like the more expensive hotels are the ones who still charge. I was recently at a Hilton in Florida. Internet was like $8 per day, and then only in the LOBBY (they had a "wireless area" setup). On the flip side, I've been in several Days Inns with free access in the rooms, and just recently I was in a Ramada Limited where I had free access with BETTER ping times than I get at home.
The more you pay for a room, the more likely you're going to get nickel-and-dimed for things like Internet access. A hotel that gets mostly business travelers (like a Hilton or a Sheraton) knows that most of its guests have expense accounts that'll pay every little expense they throw up. If they're going after leisure travelers, they know that you tend to be tighter with your money than you would be with someone else's money, and they set their prices accordingly.
The AHA held its annual conference at a Denver-area Sheraton a couple of months ago. In-room WiFi would've run about $10-$12 per day. Rather than fork over that kind of money, I just used my phone's data connection. It may only be somewhere between dial-up and ISDN in speed, but it gets the job done and I'm already paying for it ($15 per month, unlimited...Sprint rocks).
I think there are probably better ways of doing this. There are emulators that can read the audio data, and so it would be simpler to just store a digital copy of the data...
There are also methods for transferring files over audio connections between vintage and modern hardware. ADTPro works with the cassette ports in an Apple IIe, II+, or II. I remember reading recently about something with similar capabilities for the TI-99/4A, but I don't recall the name offhand. (Some quick looking-around turned up Tape994a and CS1er.)
A few emulators can read from WAV files of the tapes. MP3 should be okay bandwidth-wise, but the psycho-acoustic model throws away information humans can't hear, and I don't know if that is a problem for some data encodings.
With most computers writing to tape at somewhere between 600 and 2400 bps, I'd think that lossless compression would be able to shrink the file size significantly without running the risk of garbling the data.
The CD as released is very fragile and prone to scratching. In the old days of cassette tapes, I could throw all my tapes in a big pile and still be fairly confident they would play (unless I left them out in the sun or something). If you try and throw your CDs into a big pile, you're going to get a big pile of scratched up coasters.
"It hurts when I hit my thumb with a hammer."
"Don't hit your thumb with a hammer, then!"
Vinyl needs careful handling, too...more so than CDs. When pulling one out of its sleeve, I check it for dust. There are usually a few specks that need to be blown off the surface before putting it on the turntable. With a CD, any dust on the surface will get flung off as soon as it spins up.
"Throwing your CDs in a pile" when you know they're going to sustain some damage is just stupid. How much effort does it take to put it back in its box? That said, at least you can fix minor scratches to the underside of a CD.
For the most part, my CDs have always stayed at home. Back in the day, I made mixtapes and played those in the car. Now, I just plug in the iPod and put it on shuffle. I don't think I've ever used the CD player in my car.
...and PR#1 to print. It would've been handy to have had my IIe a couple or three years earlier than I did, as I could've handed the output of this in to the teacher:
10 PRINT CHR$(4);"PR#1"
20 FOR I=1 TO 200
30 PRINT "I WILL NOT THROW PAPER AIRPLANES IN CLASS."
40 NEXT I
50 PRINT CHR$(4);"PR#0"
120 cps from an Imagewriter is a hell of a lot faster than I could (or can) write.:-)
Will the new iWork suite open old Claris/Appleworks documents? It would be nice if they did. I haven't played with the new iWork apps at all (I realized that I don't need a word-processor for most of what I now do, and just use TextMate to butcher ASCII instead).
How old is "old?" Unless I'm just doing something wrong, the Mac OS X version of AppleWorks (came with my Mac mini) won't even touch the files I created back in the day with AppleWorks 3.0 on the Apple II. (Yes, I have a way to get the files from their storage media (some on a SCSI hard drive, some on 5.25" floppies) to the Mac...it's just that the new AppleWorks doesn't seem to know what to make of them. I can buy that it wouldn't translate SuperFonts codes into font settings and embedded images, but it won't even bring in a simple word-processor document, spreadsheet, or database.)
I have about 5kg worth of Mac disks with everything from various OS versions, apps, games, and tons of HyperCard stacks... and vanishingly little of it is still readable. Floppies degrade over time.
3.5" floppies (especially the cheap ones of the past few years) tend to degrade pretty badly. My experience with 5.25" floppies, OTOH, hasn't been nearly as bad. Last time I checked, the boot floppies that came with my IIe back in the day still work, and they're about 22 years old now.
At some point, I still need to image all of my floppies just in case something does happen to them. I hooked the GS's hard drive up to a Linux box at home a couple or three weeks ago to image that...boots up in KEGS in a split-second, too. I'll need to do some 6502 assembly for a project I'm working on. With the assembler running in KEGS, the board-design software running natively, and the EPROM burner running in a WinXP VM under VMware, that's one machine doing the work of three.
Through hole prototypes on a breadboard can be wire wrapped rather than soldered, and surface mount PCBs can't readily be done by hand anyway.
As long as you're not working with BGAs, there's no reason why you can't hand-solder SMDs. In some ways, I think they're easier than working with through-hole parts. Apply some flux to the pads, position the part, tack it down at the corners, then hit each leg in turn (taking care not to overheat devices with lots of pins). You usually don't need to add extra solder, as what's already on the pad and leg is enough to get the job done. Hit the completed board with some flux remover when you're done and you'll be hard-pressed to tell the difference between hand-assembled and machine-assembled.
For a board made without a solder mask, this might not work so well, but you're better off paying a little bit more to get a board with solder mask anyway.
Using an iron with a small tip is the only somewhat-critical part of it, and even here you don't need to spend big bucks...a Weller WM120 12W soldering pencil works well enough for me, and they go for about $40 most places.
(IANAEE, but I have designed and built some computer add-ons and other gadgets that used SMDs.)
That depends on what they are. Laptops may need a special driver for their media keys, or a card reader.
I'm not sure what a "media key" is supposed to be, but drivers (generally speaking) should be available from the manufacturer's website. HP, at least, is pretty good about making drivers for its stuff downloadable.
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I corrected that for you. :-)
You must be new here.
#ifndef _SARCASM_H
#include <sarcasm.h>
Anyone who disagrees with the Slashbot hive-mind is obviously a reichwing Christianist deathbeast who must be silenced by the oh-so-tolerant-of-diverse-opinions progressives.
#endif
What I found disappointing was that the original poster in this thread was surprised that it was adult stem cells that provided this breakthrough. If he had googled "adult stem cell cures," he would've learned that they've already been developed into dozens of useful cures. Compare that to the number of useful cures derived to date from embryonic stem-cell research.
I'm sure this inconvenient truth (to borrow a phrase) will get modded down...so be it. I've quit giving a damn about /. karma. It's devolved into the collective opinion of a pack of foaming-at-the-mouth left-wingers; why should I pay it any attention?
I don't think laser scanners can read LCDs. They're designed to work with reflective media (such as paper); LCDs are transmissive.
Your idea might work if your phone had an "electronic paper" display, if that display delivered high-enough contrast. Most phones don't, though, as we want our shiny color displays instead.
Ditto for Southwest's 737s. A better question might be "which aircraft have exit-row seats that don't recline?" I've not come across one; the last time I was stuck in a seat that didn't recline was on a A3something (319? 320?), and it was all the way in the back of the plane against a bulkhead. (Getting stuck in such a seat for a cross-country redeye was a Bad Idea.)
Are you sure that was an English major? Given the questionable recommendations (for one thing, verbing weirds English :-) ), I think you need to look a bit further down the food chain. Bad advice combined with a snotty, holier-than-thou attitude from someone who knows less than he thinks he knows (and is too stupid to recognize it) makes me think he's an education major.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
Eww. Is K/S going to be the new goatse.cx around here? :-P
Time & temperature in Las Vegas is a 3-digit number: 118. It only works on landline phones connected to Embarq (the local phone company, spun off from Sprint a while back) AFAICT; it doesn't work with VoIP or cell-phone services.
I've bought a couple of HPs (most recent one was the "Lance Armstrong special") and I've not had any issues with either of them.
That said, if I were in the market for a notebook today, it'd most likely be a Mac. HP still offers XP on its BTO notebooks, but there's less and less stuff for which I need Windows...both of my machines boot Linux (the older one only boots Linux; the newer one can boot Windows from a USB hard drive or inside VMware if I need it). For most of what I do, there's less difference between Linux and Mac OS X than between Linux and Windows. If HP were to stop selling XP and only offer Vista, that'd be yet another incentive to go with a MacBook the next time. (I already have a G4 Mac mini and a small collection of older Macs and Apple IIs, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with Apple hardware.)
It's where the dipshits who keep inflicting Ted "Swimmer" Kennedy and John "Traitor" Kerry on the rest of the nation live. I would characterize it as 10,555 square miles surrounded by reality, but its neighbors aren't much better.
My parents had a 166-MHz Packard Bell that was still running when I gave them one of my hand-me-downs (it was excess to my needs, and a fair bit faster). I still have the monitor (with speakers that screwed into the sides) from that system on my workbench.
By the time I started dealing with them in the mid-'90s, they usually didn't seem substantially better or worse than the competition. They had some weird ideas from time to time (one model had 1.2-GB and 850-MB hard drives combined by a combination of the system BIOS and custom firmware in the drives to appear as a single 2-GB drive, and there were those weird L-shaped desktops that you were supposed to shove into a corner), but I didn't have a harder time working on them than any other machine out there.
Better that than to have the dipshits in the People's Republics of California and Massa-two-shits running roughshod over the rest of us.
The only reason we keep hearing this noise about getting rid of the electoral college was that the Dims can't accept that they lost and they weren't allowed to keep changing the rules on-the-fly to get a different result. Do you think the left-wing noise machine would be agitating for presidential elections by popular vote if Algore had rooked a few more people into voting for him?
Geez...Slashbots are getting nearly as idiotic--and nearly as predictable--as the Kossacks and the DUmmies.
I set up an Ubuntu VPS recently because the service provider didn't offer Gentoo. In addition to sshd, the VPS already had Apache and Sendmail installed and running. There were some ports associated with VPS management that were open. I think Samba may have even been installed and running (but I got rid of that). Now that I've done another port scan again, it looks like something is still running on TCP port 53...probably BIND.
With Gentoo, OTOH, an out-of-the-box install doesn't have anything open. OpenSSH is installed, but you have to enable it yourself. Nothing else is installed, so you don't have to worry about holes in Sendmail or BIND getting your new box pwned before you have a chance to replace them with qmail and djbdns. For that matter, if you don't need a mail server (or any other kind of server) at all, you can just not install one.
Well played, sir...quality humor like that is something the next generation isn't likely to grok.
It doesn't work well on any hardware when the WGA servers are tango-uniform.
It used to be unreliable for me, but nspluginwrapper has worked well for me the past few months. What version are you using? I'm using 0.9.91.4, with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Gentoo.
I live in the southwest corner of Las Vegas. I replaced my cable modem yesterday...the old one was taking hours to reconnect to the network after a power outage or reset, and it was maxing out around 1-1.5 Mbps on service that's supposed to deliver 10 Mbps (and it had delivered that speed in the past). Playing around with Speedtest.net yesterday with the new modem up and running, I maxed out at 22 Mbps and usually pulled 5-8 Mbps, depending on which test server I picked (the fastest connection, FWIW, was to San Francisco).
I've noticed most of the complaints have been aimed at Comcast. Occasionally, you hear complaints about Time Warner (my parents moved from Phoenix to Dayton, OH, and they had trouble getting both their TV and data services working right there). I don't think I've ever seen anyone say anything bad about Cox. I know I've never had any trouble with them, and my parents didn't either.
The more you pay for a room, the more likely you're going to get nickel-and-dimed for things like Internet access. A hotel that gets mostly business travelers (like a Hilton or a Sheraton) knows that most of its guests have expense accounts that'll pay every little expense they throw up. If they're going after leisure travelers, they know that you tend to be tighter with your money than you would be with someone else's money, and they set their prices accordingly.
The AHA held its annual conference at a Denver-area Sheraton a couple of months ago. In-room WiFi would've run about $10-$12 per day. Rather than fork over that kind of money, I just used my phone's data connection. It may only be somewhere between dial-up and ISDN in speed, but it gets the job done and I'm already paying for it ($15 per month, unlimited...Sprint rocks).
There are also methods for transferring files over audio connections between vintage and modern hardware. ADTPro works with the cassette ports in an Apple IIe, II+, or II. I remember reading recently about something with similar capabilities for the TI-99/4A, but I don't recall the name offhand. (Some quick looking-around turned up Tape994a and CS1er.)
With most computers writing to tape at somewhere between 600 and 2400 bps, I'd think that lossless compression would be able to shrink the file size significantly without running the risk of garbling the data.
"It hurts when I hit my thumb with a hammer."
"Don't hit your thumb with a hammer, then!"
Vinyl needs careful handling, too...more so than CDs. When pulling one out of its sleeve, I check it for dust. There are usually a few specks that need to be blown off the surface before putting it on the turntable. With a CD, any dust on the surface will get flung off as soon as it spins up.
"Throwing your CDs in a pile" when you know they're going to sustain some damage is just stupid. How much effort does it take to put it back in its box? That said, at least you can fix minor scratches to the underside of a CD.
For the most part, my CDs have always stayed at home. Back in the day, I made mixtapes and played those in the car. Now, I just plug in the iPod and put it on shuffle. I don't think I've ever used the CD player in my car.
10 PRINT CHR$(4);"PR#1"
20 FOR I=1 TO 200
30 PRINT "I WILL NOT THROW PAPER AIRPLANES IN CLASS."
40 NEXT I
50 PRINT CHR$(4);"PR#0"
120 cps from an Imagewriter is a hell of a lot faster than I could (or can) write. :-)
How old is "old?" Unless I'm just doing something wrong, the Mac OS X version of AppleWorks (came with my Mac mini) won't even touch the files I created back in the day with AppleWorks 3.0 on the Apple II. (Yes, I have a way to get the files from their storage media (some on a SCSI hard drive, some on 5.25" floppies) to the Mac...it's just that the new AppleWorks doesn't seem to know what to make of them. I can buy that it wouldn't translate SuperFonts codes into font settings and embedded images, but it won't even bring in a simple word-processor document, spreadsheet, or database.)
3.5" floppies (especially the cheap ones of the past few years) tend to degrade pretty badly. My experience with 5.25" floppies, OTOH, hasn't been nearly as bad. Last time I checked, the boot floppies that came with my IIe back in the day still work, and they're about 22 years old now.
At some point, I still need to image all of my floppies just in case something does happen to them. I hooked the GS's hard drive up to a Linux box at home a couple or three weeks ago to image that...boots up in KEGS in a split-second, too. I'll need to do some 6502 assembly for a project I'm working on. With the assembler running in KEGS, the board-design software running natively, and the EPROM burner running in a WinXP VM under VMware, that's one machine doing the work of three.
As long as you're not working with BGAs, there's no reason why you can't hand-solder SMDs. In some ways, I think they're easier than working with through-hole parts. Apply some flux to the pads, position the part, tack it down at the corners, then hit each leg in turn (taking care not to overheat devices with lots of pins). You usually don't need to add extra solder, as what's already on the pad and leg is enough to get the job done. Hit the completed board with some flux remover when you're done and you'll be hard-pressed to tell the difference between hand-assembled and machine-assembled.
For a board made without a solder mask, this might not work so well, but you're better off paying a little bit more to get a board with solder mask anyway.
Using an iron with a small tip is the only somewhat-critical part of it, and even here you don't need to spend big bucks...a Weller WM120 12W soldering pencil works well enough for me, and they go for about $40 most places.
(IANAEE, but I have designed and built some computer add-ons and other gadgets that used SMDs.)
I'm not sure what a "media key" is supposed to be, but drivers (generally speaking) should be available from the manufacturer's website. HP, at least, is pretty good about making drivers for its stuff downloadable.
You say that like they haven't been doing that all along.