I have an old leathermen, but using the pliers is painful since you are squeazing the jagged gap that the pliers folded out of. That one looks less painful. Whatever happened to that one that opened sideways?
Warning: it is possible to do illegal stuff with this rock. Doing illegal stuff with this rock is illegal. The Maker of this rock will not be held liable for any illegal activity done with this rock.
"The document proposes an unprecedented legal theory with regard to peer-to-peer file-sharing services. If P2P software can be used to violate law, the argument goes, its makers should be obligated to incorporate a warning on the product or face liability for deceptive trade practices."
REI.com has it for $50, and since I have about $86 and change earned on my 1% cash back REI credit card (not a 0.25% scam like Discover, TRUE 1% on every PENNY spent, no $1000 increment BS like all others) it is basically free!
The consensus was to get the inlaws an older computer or a cheap one from dell, load it with win2000 and all the software they would *need*, and then give it to them.
Oh, and not give them the admin password.
Want to install something? Too bad.
Yes, this seems harsh, but you don't know my inlaws. I've already fixed their win98 machine once. Symptom: so much malware that windows would freeze when trying to open IE -- I opened the taskmanager to see what was running and there were three pages of processes. Most of which were adware and spyware, and a few viruses. Many many hours later it was good as new.
Later we get another call. Laurie is in her room crying, mom wont talk to dad, dad is screaming and swearing: the computer is broken, it's our/her/their fault, it wont print, and on top of that the land phone line wont work. We tell them, after an hour of his ranting, to call the fucking phone company. He does, the tech shows up, pulls the USB printer cable out of the phone jack and leaves.
Well, they've called again. Opening IE freezes up the computer, and we've been informed that they have visited us enough and it is time to visit them, now (they live four hours away in the anus of Texas) and we should fix the computer while we're there.
While I don't know anything about the software failure of the Patriot, I do know that the article about it starts off with assumptions that are blatent falshoods, possibly even urban legend material, which leads me to distrust the rest of the article.
The original patriot was not designed to intercepts missles, nor anything at all. It was designed to get near a target with air-breathing engines, like a fighter jet, and detonate thus filling the engine with shrapnel and possibly damaging the aircraft body.
It was then pressed into service as a missle interceptor, something Ratheon argued was impossible right up to the day when Lockheed's Patriot Advanced Concept 3 (PAC3, which the press also calls "the patriot) intercepted one about 5 years later. Unlike the Patriot, the PAC3 has no warhead -- it uses kinetic energy to vaporize the target and all it's contents. Today, longer range anti-missles like ERINT and others build on this concept.
So why didn't the US admit to the panicky citizens that we couldn't stop a missle? Why didn't the US just announce to Saddam that we were powerless to stop a chemical attack on Israel?
If you have to ask, thank God you aren't in the military.
More on my thread about comparing *nix shells with BBSes: even the worst, most bare bone BBS shell had a "menu" command. Any newbie, from a 7 year old to a 77 year old could type "menu" to see what he could do (read email, read news, edit, etc.) and then type help to get more details.
Sit a newbie down at a *nux machine and see how long it takes him to guess that he has to type in a tree species to read his email or a synonym for vigor and vitality to edit a file.
That was my exact thought the first time I used a *nix at school. To me it looked and acted just like DOS and like a lot of BBS software I had used but if you wanted to do something rock-bottom-basic like read email or edit a file you were fucked unless you had someone to show you.
I remember thinking even the absolute worst software I had ever used had a "help" command, and most commands made sence, but on this less-than-intuitive system I had to type in assorted tree species instead of "mail" to read my email or type in a nonsence word like emacs or vi if instead of "edit" if I wanted to edit a file, etc. etc..
Even the most absolute, brain dead, rock bottom basic command was obfuscated. For instance, if you want to change your password, do you type password? No. Maybe it's abreviated to pw? No.Pswd? No. The second half of the word is half abreviated, but not the first half. What fucking idiot came up with that? Oh, and for shits and giggle some genius made the command line case sensitive.
I think back to that day every time someone tells me Linux is just about to take over the consumer market.
Kids like this are really good at mastering things with known rules (games) but not situations full of unknowns and subtle social cues. I've often thought the best way to help is to not only jot down the rules, but make it a game one can master.
Maybe a board game or a video game, or just a way he can secretly keep points, or maybe with others like him. That could become another source of teasing from future gas pumpers if it got out, though.
As a side note, I see many here are quick to label him with aspergers, and that may or may not be true, but it IS the latest fad. When I grew up it was hypoglycemia, then hyperactivity, then dyslexia, then attention deficit disorder. Dyslexia made for the best made-for-tv-movies, along with bubble boys and pee-pee problems. Then again, it's good to keep your eyes and mind open to such things -- I discovered my neighbor's kid was alergic to orange juice (made him crazy hyper) but not allergic to bees...
I would buy this in a heartbeat!!! Even if it is designed for chicks.
But, of course, this is a prototype, and it will be years, if not decades, before Volvo releases a Hybrid car. And they will never release this one. In fact, I doubt they even have a 225HP hybrid engine.
Why are Hybrid cars so god damned ugly? Even if there was a plane looking car that was convertible, like a Sebring, with a hybrid engine I would buy it today.
Instead, all that's offered are hedgehogs and pipe dreams.
By "explosive elements" I'm sure he meant electronic elements. Ignoring the fact that they should be behind shielding, and the fact that I haven't looked inside a microwave, but I'd bet there are some capacitors in there. Caps can be extremely explosive, so if someone in EE lab threatens to "bust a cap in your ass" be careful where you sit.
I bought about 200 CDs during the time when they were convicted for price fixing and over charging by up to $5 per CD. So, having been robbed of $1,000 in late 1990's dollars, I am offered $13.86 in 2004 dollars. Woo fucking hoo.
No, I did not sign up for the lawsuit as I correctly assumed it would be a waste of my time and they would probably just sell my personal info for a profit.
Now that they have been convicted, perhaps it would be a simple matter to sue and win in small claims court? Any lawyers out there?
When I started at WPI in 1994 it was "gopher this, gopher that, gopher is so amazing blah blah" and then there was "Veronica" which was talked up even more so maybe it was written at WPI. It had something to do with gopher.
Anyway, the first time I had to research a subject I fired up Gopher, (not veronica, I think) and searched, and searched, and searched. And found utter garbage that had nothing to do with anything, (rantings and other nonsence) and I never used it again.
So, my answer to your question is either 94 or 95.
As for wanting to stick with older technologies, have you seen an osciloscope lately? Now they are basically a computer running win95 with an A/D card. Windows of course crashes and is in no way intuitive like the old scopes. It does allow you to save screen shots, but getting them out of the scope is a whole 'nother story. It has a floppy drive, if you can get your captures to fit on a floppy. It also has a NIC, but the drivers don't come installed. So, you have to hack around and do it yourself. But then you can't make it accessible to the network at work since you can't just log into the servers from an oscilloscope. What I eventually did was use Internet Explorer from the scope (gotta love monopoly integration) to download some software from the 'net and set up a share that could be seen by other computers at work.
I love Gnome, but even on a fresh install of RedHat 9 it is crash city. It almost always recovers, but it also almost always crashes when I click on desktop icons like home or preferences.
KDE just gives me "unknown error" on about 25% of settings I try to change, fresh after a rh9 install on any box. Settings like some clock settings, or my favorite: changing the shell. The first time you try to change it: unknown error. The second time: unknown error followed by an unknown error. The third time... you get the picture.
The error is caused by a network setting, but I certainly didn't find that out from the error message.
Average people don't know the difference between a.jpg an.exe. There are two solutions:
1) Assume everyone on Earth has perfect and complete knowledge of everything, including messages like "error pqx7923.8", which is the current model of software development.
2) Give messages that are in ENGLISH and MEAN SOMETHING. Yes, I know this is totally radical and completely new and unheard of in software. That's because I'm a hardware engineer.
For instance, when clicking on an exe, a message could come up that says "Clicking on an unknown executable is the computer equivalent of swapping body fluids with a stranger. Are you SURE you want to do this?"
In my experience watching DirectTV is like watching movies on a 256-color monitor. I often wonder if DirectTV even has 256 colors. Shadows are a mosaic of grey rectangles, dark scenes look like shit, you can clearly see the key frames every second, etc. Football is the WORST. On long shots, once a second the players look like players, the rest of the time they are a jumble of pixels with an aura of jumbled pixels around them. NOT big screen TV material.
For all I know digital cable could be worse. I'm sticking with analog cable (which is often free with a cable modem...)
Actually, I do pretty nifty technical stuff, and get paid well, too. (A better attack would be to attack my spelling -- I misspelled "terabyte" twice) But then again, maybe they are where they are today because they boldly spend rediculous money and call it a sucess no mater how it turns out. Often it seems that confidence in a decision is more important to people than the logic of a decision.
Anyway, I've been modded an insightful troll. My work on this planet is done. Aloha!
So, instead of paying $70 for a 40GB firewire drive, they spent $500. Talk about news! Or maybe the news is that the 614% more expensive device didn't fail?
Apple sure is amazing and superior and stuff.
Heck, for $500, all a lowly PC user could afford is half a terrabyte in firewire drives, and still have money left over to buy some pizza and beer, and catch a movie, and buy a CD. Not nearly as cool as a 40GB iPod.
But I admit, if I could convince my boss to transfer terrabytes of data on iPods that I could snake afterwards, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Slashdot Mirror
and doesn't crash every five minutes like Gnome or give "Unknown error" for half of commands like KDE, and then forget all settings after a reboot.
How many of you have sat down with a new distro and within 3 minutes found 5 major bugs? We just need some basic quality control...
I have an old leathermen, but using the pliers is painful since you are squeazing the jagged gap that the pliers folded out of. That one looks less painful. Whatever happened to that one that opened sideways?
Warning: it is possible to do illegal stuff with this rock. Doing illegal stuff with this rock is illegal. The Maker of this rock will not be held liable for any illegal activity done with this rock.
"The document proposes an unprecedented legal theory with regard to peer-to-peer file-sharing services. If P2P software can be used to violate law, the argument goes, its makers should be obligated to incorporate a warning on the product or face liability for deceptive trade practices."
REI.com has it for $50, and since I have about $86 and change earned on my 1% cash back REI credit card (not a 0.25% scam like Discover, TRUE 1% on every PENNY spent, no $1000 increment BS like all others) it is basically free!
I love REI!!!!!
1994? Did they also invent the microcode emulator I made in college in 1997?
With a typical 3V 1800mAh NiMH battery you would have a talk time of 2.7 milleseconds.
The consensus was to get the inlaws an older computer or a cheap one from dell, load it with win2000 and all the software they would *need*, and then give it to them.
Oh, and not give them the admin password.
Want to install something? Too bad.
Yes, this seems harsh, but you don't know my inlaws. I've already fixed their win98 machine once. Symptom: so much malware that windows would freeze when trying to open IE -- I opened the taskmanager to see what was running and there were three pages of processes. Most of which were adware and spyware, and a few viruses. Many many hours later it was good as new.
Later we get another call. Laurie is in her room crying, mom wont talk to dad, dad is screaming and swearing: the computer is broken, it's our/her/their fault, it wont print, and on top of that the land phone line wont work. We tell them, after an hour of his ranting, to call the fucking phone company. He does, the tech shows up, pulls the USB printer cable out of the phone jack and leaves.
Well, they've called again. Opening IE freezes up the computer, and we've been informed that they have visited us enough and it is time to visit them, now (they live four hours away in the anus of Texas) and we should fix the computer while we're there.
I may bring a gift.
Extended Range INTerceptor.
I think there was another one with even longer range, but my memory is fuzzy now.
While I don't know anything about the software failure of the Patriot, I do know that the article about it starts off with assumptions that are blatent falshoods, possibly even urban legend material, which leads me to distrust the rest of the article.
The original patriot was not designed to intercepts missles, nor anything at all. It was designed to get near a target with air-breathing engines, like a fighter jet, and detonate thus filling the engine with shrapnel and possibly damaging the aircraft body.
It was then pressed into service as a missle interceptor, something Ratheon argued was impossible right up to the day when Lockheed's Patriot Advanced Concept 3 (PAC3, which the press also calls "the patriot) intercepted one about 5 years later. Unlike the Patriot, the PAC3 has no warhead -- it uses kinetic energy to vaporize the target and all it's contents. Today, longer range anti-missles like ERINT and others build on this concept.
So why didn't the US admit to the panicky citizens that we couldn't stop a missle? Why didn't the US just announce to Saddam that we were powerless to stop a chemical attack on Israel?
If you have to ask, thank God you aren't in the military.
More on my thread about comparing *nix shells with BBSes: even the worst, most bare bone BBS shell had a "menu" command. Any newbie, from a 7 year old to a 77 year old could type "menu" to see what he could do (read email, read news, edit, etc.) and then type help to get more details.
Sit a newbie down at a *nux machine and see how long it takes him to guess that he has to type in a tree species to read his email or a synonym for vigor and vitality to edit a file.
That was my exact thought the first time I used a *nix at school. To me it looked and acted just like DOS and like a lot of BBS software I had used but if you wanted to do something rock-bottom-basic like read email or edit a file you were fucked unless you had someone to show you.
I remember thinking even the absolute worst software I had ever used had a "help" command, and most commands made sence, but on this less-than-intuitive system I had to type in assorted tree species instead of "mail" to read my email or type in a nonsence word like emacs or vi if instead of "edit" if I wanted to edit a file, etc. etc..
Even the most absolute, brain dead, rock bottom basic command was obfuscated. For instance, if you want to change your password, do you type password? No. Maybe it's abreviated to pw? No.Pswd? No. The second half of the word is half abreviated, but not the first half. What fucking idiot came up with that? Oh, and for shits and giggle some genius made the command line case sensitive.
I think back to that day every time someone tells me Linux is just about to take over the consumer market.
Kids like this are really good at mastering things with known rules (games) but not situations full of unknowns and subtle social cues. I've often thought the best way to help is to not only jot down the rules, but make it a game one can master.
Maybe a board game or a video game, or just a way he can secretly keep points, or maybe with others like him. That could become another source of teasing from future gas pumpers if it got out, though.
As a side note, I see many here are quick to label him with aspergers, and that may or may not be true, but it IS the latest fad. When I grew up it was hypoglycemia, then hyperactivity, then dyslexia, then attention deficit disorder. Dyslexia made for the best made-for-tv-movies, along with bubble boys and pee-pee problems. Then again, it's good to keep your eyes and mind open to such things -- I discovered my neighbor's kid was alergic to orange juice (made him crazy hyper) but not allergic to bees...
he didn't have time to preview?
I would buy this in a heartbeat!!! Even if it is designed for chicks.
But, of course, this is a prototype, and it will be years, if not decades, before Volvo releases a Hybrid car. And they will never release this one. In fact, I doubt they even have a 225HP hybrid engine.
Why are Hybrid cars so god damned ugly? Even if there was a plane looking car that was convertible, like a Sebring, with a hybrid engine I would buy it today.
Instead, all that's offered are hedgehogs and pipe dreams.
Did you just give a disclaimer about your hatred of disclaimers?
By "explosive elements" I'm sure he meant electronic elements. Ignoring the fact that they should be behind shielding, and the fact that I haven't looked inside a microwave, but I'd bet there are some capacitors in there. Caps can be extremely explosive, so if someone in EE lab threatens to "bust a cap in your ass" be careful where you sit.
I bought about 200 CDs during the time when they were convicted for price fixing and over charging by up to $5 per CD. So, having been robbed of $1,000 in late 1990's dollars, I am offered $13.86 in 2004 dollars. Woo fucking hoo.
No, I did not sign up for the lawsuit as I correctly assumed it would be a waste of my time and they would probably just sell my personal info for a profit.
Now that they have been convicted, perhaps it would be a simple matter to sue and win in small claims court? Any lawyers out there?
When I started at WPI in 1994 it was "gopher this, gopher that, gopher is so amazing blah blah" and then there was "Veronica" which was talked up even more so maybe it was written at WPI. It had something to do with gopher.
Anyway, the first time I had to research a subject I fired up Gopher, (not veronica, I think) and searched, and searched, and searched. And found utter garbage that had nothing to do with anything, (rantings and other nonsence) and I never used it again.
So, my answer to your question is either 94 or 95.
As for wanting to stick with older technologies, have you seen an osciloscope lately? Now they are basically a computer running win95 with an A/D card. Windows of course crashes and is in no way intuitive like the old scopes. It does allow you to save screen shots, but getting them out of the scope is a whole 'nother story. It has a floppy drive, if you can get your captures to fit on a floppy. It also has a NIC, but the drivers don't come installed. So, you have to hack around and do it yourself. But then you can't make it accessible to the network at work since you can't just log into the servers from an oscilloscope. What I eventually did was use Internet Explorer from the scope (gotta love monopoly integration) to download some software from the 'net and set up a share that could be seen by other computers at work.
I love Gnome, but even on a fresh install of RedHat 9 it is crash city. It almost always recovers, but it also almost always crashes when I click on desktop icons like home or preferences.
KDE just gives me "unknown error" on about 25% of settings I try to change, fresh after a rh9 install on any box. Settings like some clock settings, or my favorite: changing the shell. The first time you try to change it: unknown error. The second time: unknown error followed by an unknown error. The third time... you get the picture.
The error is caused by a network setting, but I certainly didn't find that out from the error message.
Average people don't know the difference between a .jpg an .exe. There are two solutions:
1) Assume everyone on Earth has perfect and complete knowledge of everything, including messages like "error pqx7923.8", which is the current model of software development.
2) Give messages that are in ENGLISH and MEAN SOMETHING. Yes, I know this is totally radical and completely new and unheard of in software. That's because I'm a hardware engineer.
For instance, when clicking on an exe, a message could come up that says "Clicking on an unknown executable is the computer equivalent of swapping body fluids with a stranger. Are you SURE you want to do this?"
In my experience watching DirectTV is like watching movies on a 256-color monitor. I often wonder if DirectTV even has 256 colors. Shadows are a mosaic of grey rectangles, dark scenes look like shit, you can clearly see the key frames every second, etc. Football is the WORST. On long shots, once a second the players look like players, the rest of the time they are a jumble of pixels with an aura of jumbled pixels around them. NOT big screen TV material.
For all I know digital cable could be worse. I'm sticking with analog cable (which is often free with a cable modem...)
Actually, I do pretty nifty technical stuff, and get paid well, too. (A better attack would be to attack my spelling -- I misspelled "terabyte" twice) But then again, maybe they are where they are today because they boldly spend rediculous money and call it a sucess no mater how it turns out. Often it seems that confidence in a decision is more important to people than the logic of a decision.
Anyway, I've been modded an insightful troll. My work on this planet is done. Aloha!
So, instead of paying $70 for a 40GB firewire drive, they spent $500. Talk about news! Or maybe the news is that the 614% more expensive device didn't fail?
Apple sure is amazing and superior and stuff.
Heck, for $500, all a lowly PC user could afford is half a terrabyte in firewire drives, and still have money left over to buy some pizza and beer, and catch a movie, and buy a CD. Not nearly as cool as a 40GB iPod.
But I admit, if I could convince my boss to transfer terrabytes of data on iPods that I could snake afterwards, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Haven't they been reading the news? It's a worm, folks. Or a virus. Anything bad is a virus worm. or worm virus. Written by hackers. Who use linux.
Stupid reporters.
Welcome to the ranks of VR, worms and cyberspace.