I would love to have another reason to hate MS, but as far as I can tell this is as stupid as accusing Sears of helping China torture people by making tools.
I had a really poor friend in Acoustic Engineering. We "borrowed" a book from the store and paid him to photocopy it for all of us, his copy of course was free.
Normally I bought books, but $80 for a book from the 1950s?!?!?! Just about every example in it had to do with WWII aircraft communications. The teacher *claimed* that was the source of most acoustic research.
$76 for a calc book, then the book store offers 75 CENTS for the used book at the end of the term (half semester) because the teacher changed his mind AGAIN about what book to use.
I saw a girl trade in 3 books, probably cost her over $200, and got about $3 in return. The guy running the buy-back table suggested she "buy a candy bar or something."
Luckily for me, I was dating a girl at the bookstore. When the teacher placed an order for the hardcover version of Applied Cryptography for around $95 each she ordered me a paperback copy for under $40.
Of course, that book became the one book I wished was hardcover as it was actually fun to read and I used it again and again, but that's not the point.
The point is, that when every single student gave her grief about the price, she said the same thing every time: the book store has no control over any of the prices, or choices. The teacher gives them an order number and they order it. The company gives them the price they buy back books at.
If the teacher would just choose the same book every year then used books would be worth something and the bookstore would store them instead of selling them back. If the teacher chose a softcover or unbundled book, or even looked at the price before ordering (I once saw a pocket-sized handbook on fire protection engineering for $200!!!) this wouldn't be such a problem.
"In the late 15th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made a great number of celestial observations, concentrating on Mars. In 1600 he hired an assistant,"
"We hate to point out that patching systems is what IT staff do, so we don't quite see the dreadful loss of productivity here. One might as easily say that police lose productivity when they have to interrupt their doughnut runs by investigating crimes, or that doctors lose productivity when they have to abandon the back nine to treat patients."
This is different in that it is not a worm (spread by a hole) but is a trojan (spread by a-holes) but the point is the same: had the IT folks done their job BEFORE the outbreak and secured their systems and trained their staff, the cost would be zero. Now that they have to put out a fire of their own creation they can't whine that the cost was "created" by the virus.
"Or superconductors could allow for the invention of magnetically levitated trains, she added. Free of friction they could glide along at high speeds using a fraction of the energy trains now use."
I can't wait until the invent those things. I've been waiting for years for someone to invent one.
Er, I mean, wow, what a great idea! I hope somebody invents those soon!
Er, I mean, wow, what a great idea! I've never heard of that invention! I can't believe they came upwith that new invention just now!
My advice is the same it was three years ago: don't use IE. It is an accident that already happened, and will keep happening until it takes your computer down with it. Use a browser that time and again is immune to these sad IE hacks. I use Opera, and I make all my relatives use it.
IE had it's time, now it is dead. It's the end of an error, I mean era.
I woke up to the news that some people went canoeing yesterday, during a wind advisory, without life vests, and apparently not knowing how to swim, and one guy drowned. Not to be callous about such a tragedy, but the phrase "survival of the fittest" did cross my mind.
I think this story beats mine, though.
The phrase that starts "a fool an his money..." also seems to apply.
(Oh, and I spell checked this because I'm smart enough to know I'm stupid.)
So, plant behavior kinda sorta looks similar to what a distributed computing system might look like, therefore plants are distributed computers?
"I saw a picture of a Mars rock that looked like a human face, therefore there are people living on Mars."
Or is this just a buzzword-filled way to say the obvious: there is no central brain in a tree; each leaf controls it's own pores and uses chemical signals from surrounding pores and leaves for help. We already knew that trees "communicate" with each other on when it is time to start changing color. Perhaps I should write up that old news and drop in some buzzwords. I can title it "Trees form Beowulf Clusters to incentivize the diversification and downsizing of foliage."
Most systems, human or evolutionary, start out simple and end up very complex, sometimes not even resembling what they started out as.
Like flying. One theory is that bugs first grew wings as solar heaters, as this allowed them to survive colder areas. Mutant larger wings let them glide, gliding led to flight.
As for polination, I would assume plants started out by using the wind to move the pollen, and then through mutation some attracted bugs which for any number of reasons proved benefitial and made them more fit. Bugs that were benefited by the plants also became more fit as they had a new and stable food source.
Heh. No, that's not true, but that does bring up the point of what kind of sleeper you are. I can't fall asleep if there is any noise, but once I am asleep I can sleep through, well, anything. Alarm clocks, clock radios, alarm clock AND a clock radio, phone call, door bell. Heck I practically sleep though my shower.
Being startled awake might work, but that doesn't happen very often.
If you stay in the exact position you were sleeping in, and slowly transition from sleeping to waking, you can often remember details more clearly.
Or, you can arrange to be startled awake. Supposedly Salvador Dali would hold a spoon in his hand while dozing off, and the spoon would drop and wake him up just after falling asleep (and entering REM) and thus inspired his paintings of melting clocks (and spoons).
"According to the article, the Republicans claim to have informed the Democrats about it along time ago. However, the Democrats say they were never told."
That was the best part of the story, it made me laugh out loud. "We told them there was a problem with their security, but they didn't do anything, so that's hy we broke in and stole all their stuff -- it's all their fault!"
I wouold expect that arguement from a 13-year-old child, not a, wait, oh nevermind.
Oh yeah, and all the computers were (and most still are) win 2k with sp4. Yes, sp4. And most were on a token ring network. And all apps were run from servers...
Oops, someone kicked their computer cable, now the entire floor has nothing to do until the techs figure out who.
Of course, the techs often fixed things by deleting your entire computer and saying you should have backed everything up to your share (70 MB limit). Even when they told you they backed up your stuff, they didn't. And when the promised they wouldn't nuke you computer, they would, often when you were in a meeting or at odd hours. Thus, we all pasted large notes to our boxes stating "DO NOT FORMAT THIS COMPUTER"
Oh, I forgot to mention the PA system that the secretary never figured out, not once, for years until I left. She would dial in, page hundred or thousands of people instead of the single area, and then forget to disconnect EVERY TIME so there would be a phone-off-the-hook beep blaring until an engineer dialed in a fixed it.
And I sat next to a smoker with tons of health problems. From the moment I was in the stairwell in the morning to the time he left, it was the sound of hacking up phlegm all day. He had his ringer all the way up (until we "fixed" it) and would talk loudly to whoever called about his graphic health problems most days.
Then there was the guy always bragging about how brave he was to mail-order a bride from russia and how brave you have to be to take a risk like that.
I got to stand out in the middle of a field all day in 9 degree (-12.8c) weather with high winds (20-30mph) manning a radiation emmitter known as The Sterilizer for people running tests from a heated building half a mile away. There was a tin shack with a heater, but it was broken, and had been for years. I wore my full snowboarding outfit including the huge boots, snow pants over pants, thick coat over flease and shirt, lobster gloves with inserts, hat, hood, neck gator/face mask, and I still froze my nuts off. I ended up leaving my car running so I could take breaks in it and warm up.
Oh, did I mention how we aligned the testing tools? They strap a laser to their sensor and shined it at me. When I saw a blinding red light I raised my hand so they'd know it was aligned. Yes I'm serious.
It was slightly worse than my previous asignment. I was in basically a warehouse running tests where the noise was non-stop and the levels were WAY above OSHA limits. Because Lockheed (and our later owner BAE) banned the use of shareware and freeware (it could have viruses, you know), we had no terminal program capable of running scripts AND logging results. Thus, I was a script for 8 hours shifts, (1 of 3 a day) for 2 weeks. I would punch a few keys, wait a sec, press "y", wait for the test to run for a minute or less, press a few keys, press "y", for 8 hours straight. The only break I had was every 3 hours or so I would have to change the temperature of the test chamber, so I had to find a guy to press the button for me. The terminal program was written in-house by our incompetent software people. It could either log data, or run a script, but not both at the same time, which is why a human had to be the script if we wanted to log the data. The log was only 300 lines long or so, so we had to click "select all" and "copy" and paste it somewhere quite often. Of course, the "select all" and "copy" menu items were on the same menu and right next to the "permanently delete entire buffer" button, and of course there was no "undo." I often wondered how much data was lost and then... reinvented... It was only life-or-death military equipment.
The rest of the time I sat at a shared cube no where near any window and where the temperature was ususally around 80 degrees, hotter at night, year round. At night bats would fly down the halls (every night) and some racoons were spotted. I spent a while in the finished basement which of course had radon and I also heard carbon monoxide issues. The whole building probably had lead paint and there was an asbestos settlement with employees a few years previous, and a big pile of asbestos contaminated dirt in the parking lot they had to keep covered and wet. The air ducts would occasionally eject chunks of what looked like coal or creosote. One cube got this all the time, so it was draped in cheese cloth to make it easier to clean. The parking lot was a great place to have you car vandalize and broken into. My oh-so tempting '95 Corsica was broken into, and I had parked under a light right next to the building by the cameras, but security refused to let me view the tapes. I heard of people being attacked in the lot, and someone murdered their spouse there, too.
Then there was management issues, and pay issues, and ethics issues, and purchasing issues, but I don't want to get too off topic. Lets just say Dilbert doesn't know how good he's got it.
Don't forget the cost of ink, too. And many fax machines back then (and still today) need special, extra-expensive paper. Luckily, at work we get fax spams selling fax paper all the time.
"I had to sit through other equally useless presentations, like how html code needs to be designed so it's compatible in lynx in order for libraries and poor people who can only afford 386 computers can surf the Internet. (I shit you not!) "
Not only is that not useless, but if you can view your page with lynx then you know a blind person can navigate it, too, using text-to-speech programs. Depending on where you work, this can be required by LAW.
I suppose if you don't want disabled and disadvantaged people to view your site, it is useless, but I doubt most people think like you, nor do I believe this idea has even occured to most web designers.
Superior number of artifacts even at the highest "quality" setting, superior amount of information lost, superior amount of annoyance to a listener with any amount of hearing, superior at convincing people to stick with CDs, etc. etc. etc.
I can turn a $300 card into a $400 card! Let me run out and spend $300 today to get 5% more performance than a card half it's price so I can save $100 on a card that will cost half that in 6 months anyway.
Now, turning a ATI 9500 in 9700 Pro was news, but this is not really worthy of front-page treatment.
Now, if NewEgg carries refurbished 5900s for cheap that can be turned into 5950s, call me.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to have another reason to hate MS, but as far as I can tell this is as stupid as accusing Sears of helping China torture people by making tools.
I had a really poor friend in Acoustic Engineering. We "borrowed" a book from the store and paid him to photocopy it for all of us, his copy of course was free.
Normally I bought books, but $80 for a book from the 1950s?!?!?! Just about every example in it had to do with WWII aircraft communications. The teacher *claimed* that was the source of most acoustic research.
$76 for a calc book, then the book store offers 75 CENTS for the used book at the end of the term (half semester) because the teacher changed his mind AGAIN about what book to use.
I saw a girl trade in 3 books, probably cost her over $200, and got about $3 in return. The guy running the buy-back table suggested she "buy a candy bar or something."
Luckily for me, I was dating a girl at the bookstore. When the teacher placed an order for the hardcover version of Applied Cryptography for around $95 each she ordered me a paperback copy for under $40.
Of course, that book became the one book I wished was hardcover as it was actually fun to read and I used it again and again, but that's not the point.
The point is, that when every single student gave her grief about the price, she said the same thing every time: the book store has no control over any of the prices, or choices. The teacher gives them an order number and they order it. The company gives them the price they buy back books at.
If the teacher would just choose the same book every year then used books would be worth something and the bookstore would store them instead of selling them back. If the teacher chose a softcover or unbundled book, or even looked at the price before ordering (I once saw a pocket-sized handbook on fire protection engineering for $200!!!) this wouldn't be such a problem.
[/rant]
Tycho Brahe lived for 200 years? That's insane!
"In the late 15th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made a great number of celestial observations, concentrating on Mars. In 1600 he hired an assistant,"
I think The Register put it best:
7 79 .html
"We hate to point out that patching systems is what IT staff do, so we don't quite see the dreadful loss of productivity here. One might as easily say that police lose productivity when they have to interrupt their doughnut runs by investigating crimes, or that doctors lose productivity when they have to abandon the back nine to treat patients."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/20
This is different in that it is not a worm (spread by a hole) but is a trojan (spread by a-holes) but the point is the same: had the IT folks done their job BEFORE the outbreak and secured their systems and trained their staff, the cost would be zero. Now that they have to put out a fire of their own creation they can't whine that the cost was "created" by the virus.
"Or superconductors could allow for the invention of magnetically levitated trains, she added. Free of friction they could glide along at high speeds using a fraction of the energy trains now use."
I can't wait until the invent those things. I've been waiting for years for someone to invent one.
Er, I mean, wow, what a great idea! I hope somebody invents those soon!
Er, I mean, wow, what a great idea! I've never heard of that invention! I can't believe they came upwith that new invention just now!
My advice is the same it was three years ago: don't use IE. It is an accident that already happened, and will keep happening until it takes your computer down with it. Use a browser that time and again is immune to these sad IE hacks. I use Opera, and I make all my relatives use it.
IE had it's time, now it is dead. It's the end of an error, I mean era.
It's ok, I'm from Texas. Y'all'd talk like that too if you up an' moved here.
I woke up to the news that some people went canoeing yesterday, during a wind advisory, without life vests, and apparently not knowing how to swim, and one guy drowned. Not to be callous about such a tragedy, but the phrase "survival of the fittest" did cross my mind.
I think this story beats mine, though.
The phrase that starts "a fool an his money..." also seems to apply.
(Oh, and I spell checked this because I'm smart enough to know I'm stupid.)
A: Very carefully.
So, plant behavior kinda sorta looks similar to what a distributed computing system might look like, therefore plants are distributed computers?
"I saw a picture of a Mars rock that looked like a human face, therefore there are people living on Mars."
Or is this just a buzzword-filled way to say the obvious: there is no central brain in a tree; each leaf controls it's own pores and uses chemical signals from surrounding pores and leaves for help. We already knew that trees "communicate" with each other on when it is time to start changing color. Perhaps I should write up that old news and drop in some buzzwords. I can title it "Trees form Beowulf Clusters to incentivize the diversification and downsizing of foliage."
Most systems, human or evolutionary, start out simple and end up very complex, sometimes not even resembling what they started out as.
Like flying. One theory is that bugs first grew wings as solar heaters, as this allowed them to survive colder areas. Mutant larger wings let them glide, gliding led to flight.
As for polination, I would assume plants started out by using the wind to move the pollen, and then through mutation some attracted bugs which for any number of reasons proved benefitial and made them more fit. Bugs that were benefited by the plants also became more fit as they had a new and stable food source.
Y'all must've been pretty rich to spend what today would be around $2000 on a watch and not wear it after one comment from pops.
I do remember seeing ads for those watches. I didn't realize you had to push a button to turn on the LEDs.
Heh. No, that's not true, but that does bring up the point of what kind of sleeper you are. I can't fall asleep if there is any noise, but once I am asleep I can sleep through, well, anything. Alarm clocks, clock radios, alarm clock AND a clock radio, phone call, door bell. Heck I practically sleep though my shower.
Being startled awake might work, but that doesn't happen very often.
If you stay in the exact position you were sleeping in, and slowly transition from sleeping to waking, you can often remember details more clearly.
Or, you can arrange to be startled awake. Supposedly Salvador Dali would hold a spoon in his hand while dozing off, and the spoon would drop and wake him up just after falling asleep (and entering REM) and thus inspired his paintings of melting clocks (and spoons).
"According to the article, the Republicans claim to have informed the Democrats about it along time ago. However, the Democrats say they were never told."
That was the best part of the story, it made me laugh out loud. "We told them there was a problem with their security, but they didn't do anything, so that's hy we broke in and stole all their stuff -- it's all their fault!"
I wouold expect that arguement from a 13-year-old child, not a, wait, oh nevermind.
No.
If aerogel made with air is 3 times as dense as air, then replacing the air with hydrogen would still leave it at least 2 times as dense as air.
Oh yeah, and all the computers were (and most still are) win 2k with sp4. Yes, sp4. And most were on a token ring network. And all apps were run from servers...
Oops, someone kicked their computer cable, now the entire floor has nothing to do until the techs figure out who.
Of course, the techs often fixed things by deleting your entire computer and saying you should have backed everything up to your share (70 MB limit). Even when they told you they backed up your stuff, they didn't. And when the promised they wouldn't nuke you computer, they would, often when you were in a meeting or at odd hours. Thus, we all pasted large notes to our boxes stating "DO NOT FORMAT THIS COMPUTER"
Oh, I forgot to mention the PA system that the secretary never figured out, not once, for years until I left. She would dial in, page hundred or thousands of people instead of the single area, and then forget to disconnect EVERY TIME so there would be a phone-off-the-hook beep blaring until an engineer dialed in a fixed it.
And I sat next to a smoker with tons of health problems. From the moment I was in the stairwell in the morning to the time he left, it was the sound of hacking up phlegm all day. He had his ringer all the way up (until we "fixed" it) and would talk loudly to whoever called about his graphic health problems most days.
Then there was the guy always bragging about how brave he was to mail-order a bride from russia and how brave you have to be to take a risk like that.
And the lady with goats, but she was nice.
I got to stand out in the middle of a field all day in 9 degree (-12.8c) weather with high winds (20-30mph) manning a radiation emmitter known as The Sterilizer for people running tests from a heated building half a mile away. There was a tin shack with a heater, but it was broken, and had been for years. I wore my full snowboarding outfit including the huge boots, snow pants over pants, thick coat over flease and shirt, lobster gloves with inserts, hat, hood, neck gator/face mask, and I still froze my nuts off. I ended up leaving my car running so I could take breaks in it and warm up.
Oh, did I mention how we aligned the testing tools? They strap a laser to their sensor and shined it at me. When I saw a blinding red light I raised my hand so they'd know it was aligned. Yes I'm serious.
It was slightly worse than my previous asignment. I was in basically a warehouse running tests where the noise was non-stop and the levels were WAY above OSHA limits. Because Lockheed (and our later owner BAE) banned the use of shareware and freeware (it could have viruses, you know), we had no terminal program capable of running scripts AND logging results. Thus, I was a script for 8 hours shifts, (1 of 3 a day) for 2 weeks. I would punch a few keys, wait a sec, press "y", wait for the test to run for a minute or less, press a few keys, press "y", for 8 hours straight. The only break I had was every 3 hours or so I would have to change the temperature of the test chamber, so I had to find a guy to press the button for me. The terminal program was written in-house by our incompetent software people. It could either log data, or run a script, but not both at the same time, which is why a human had to be the script if we wanted to log the data. The log was only 300 lines long or so, so we had to click "select all" and "copy" and paste it somewhere quite often. Of course, the "select all" and "copy" menu items were on the same menu and right next to the "permanently delete entire buffer" button, and of course there was no "undo." I often wondered how much data was lost and then... reinvented... It was only life-or-death military equipment.
The rest of the time I sat at a shared cube no where near any window and where the temperature was ususally around 80 degrees, hotter at night, year round. At night bats would fly down the halls (every night) and some racoons were spotted. I spent a while in the finished basement which of course had radon and I also heard carbon monoxide issues. The whole building probably had lead paint and there was an asbestos settlement with employees a few years previous, and a big pile of asbestos contaminated dirt in the parking lot they had to keep covered and wet. The air ducts would occasionally eject chunks of what looked like coal or creosote. One cube got this all the time, so it was draped in cheese cloth to make it easier to clean. The parking lot was a great place to have you car vandalize and broken into. My oh-so tempting '95 Corsica was broken into, and I had parked under a light right next to the building by the cameras, but security refused to let me view the tapes. I heard of people being attacked in the lot, and someone murdered their spouse there, too.
Then there was management issues, and pay issues, and ethics issues, and purchasing issues, but I don't want to get too off topic. Lets just say Dilbert doesn't know how good he's got it.
Oh, I don't work there anymore.
Don't forget the cost of ink, too. And many fax machines back then (and still today) need special, extra-expensive paper. Luckily, at work we get fax spams selling fax paper all the time.
"I had to sit through other equally useless presentations, like how html code needs to be designed so it's compatible in lynx in order for libraries and poor people who can only afford 386 computers can surf the Internet. (I shit you not!) "
Not only is that not useless, but if you can view your page with lynx then you know a blind person can navigate it, too, using text-to-speech programs. Depending on where you work, this can be required by LAW.
I suppose if you don't want disabled and disadvantaged people to view your site, it is useless, but I doubt most people think like you, nor do I believe this idea has even occured to most web designers.
Yes, the camera is 1 megapixel, but the published images are often made from multiple* shots, sometimes hundreds: for instance the panoramic images.
*No, I am not refering to 3 shots it takes to get red, green and blue data for each pixel.
Superior number of artifacts even at the highest "quality" setting, superior amount of information lost, superior amount of annoyance to a listener with any amount of hearing, superior at convincing people to stick with CDs, etc. etc. etc.
I can turn a $300 card into a $400 card! Let me run out and spend $300 today to get 5% more performance than a card half it's price so I can save $100 on a card that will cost half that in 6 months anyway.
Now, turning a ATI 9500 in 9700 Pro was news, but this is not really worthy of front-page treatment.
Now, if NewEgg carries refurbished 5900s for cheap that can be turned into 5950s, call me.
- Proud owner of OC'ed, refurbished 9700.