If your memory card is getting full and there's no way for you to offload files or get another one, dial down the image quality settings on your camera before you run out of space. Yeah, it sucks shooting in supercompressed 640x480 mode, but that's better than not getting the pictures at all.
The ability to run whatever equipment on AA cells cannot be overemphasised. Rechargeables are only useful if you have the appropriate current/adapter combo to plug in with. Since I switched from my 35mm SLR (which hardly required any battery at all) to digital, I've always made sure my camera could be powered by AAs in a pinch.
I've never done around-the-world, but I've backpacked abroad for several weeks at a time, and the best computer for my purposes was (at the time) a Psion Series3 PDA. The key features for this use were its size (that of a few checkbooks stacked together) and weight, good apps, decent built-in keyboard, and the fact that it ran for weeks at at time on standard AA batteries (which can be purchased almost anywhere in the world where electricity is found). It was useless for getting online (which in the 90s was a dodgy proposition on the road regardless of your gear), but in most parts of the world today internet cafes are more common than wifi hotspots anyway. I used it for my journal, keeping track of plane and train bookings, converting currencies, and logging expenses. The Series3 is an antique by modern standards (I've long since replaced it with a newer machine with fixed rechargeable-if-there's-an-outlet-handy batteries), but if I were going back out into the world with a pack for an extended period of time, I'd scour eBay for one.
Unrelated to the original question, but a suggestion: Check out Wikitravel.org, an open-content wiki devoted to meeting the information needs of travelers. You may find useful information about many of your destinations, and your contributions both on the road and upon returning home will certainly be appreciated.
The government is - via executive fiat - "breaking" the television equipment that I paid for with my own meager income. It's upcoming ban on analog television broadcasts, requiring a switch to digital, is a government subsidy to the electronics industry (among others), with that money coming directly out of consumers' pockets. So the fact that that government is chipping in $40 on my behalf - restoring to me the basic broadcast television service they're taking away - seems appropriate to me.
It matters because the improbably cluster of "Dubai", "Halliburton", and "Cheney" in this situation suggests that there's more going on here than just business. This isn't Joe al-Blow in Dubai with too much money buying a U.S. business (which would be "just business"). This is a U.S. business partially owned (and directed through a proxy) by the Vice President, buying property and setting up shop in a foreign country where the White House has been involved in deal-making. We know this move ain't for the nightlife, so it raises the important questions of how and why. Cheney's retiring in 2009, but he's on our payroll right now, and his Board of Directors (read "we") have a right to know whether he's working for us, or for someone else.
Does anybody know whether Vice President Cheney has purchased a home in Dubai yet? Between this and the Dubai Ports World deal, the GWB administration seems to be trying to set up a cushy job there for someone.
And this is positing the hypothesis that we want to believe because we are genetically predisposed to. Not just a "believe in God" gene, but a fundamental part of how our brains are structured.
A pastor I knew once talked to me about how we all have a "God-shaped hole" in us... some of us try to fill it with drugs, some with music, some with money, some with technology, some with sex, etc. but the only thing that fills it perfectly (he said) is God. Now, he was coming at it from a creationist perspective: he believed that God made us with this instinct to seek Him out. But it also makes sense from an evolutionary psychological perspective: there could be some kind of survival advantage in this instinctive "want to believe".
For example, in the past several thousand years a belief in God has repeatedly inspired populations to engage in military campaigns, which certainly gives them a survival advantage over others. People who believe in God tend to be more happy (cf. psychologist David Myers), so maybe it's because theistic varieties of hominids were less likely to slit their wrists or drink themselves into extinction.
I don't know... there are a bunch of possible explanations of how/why it developed. But the idea of a "God-shaped hole" in the human psyche or soul - whether natural or supernatural in origin - would explain a great deal of our behavior both as individuals and collectively.
Re:Let's be logical shall we
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 1, Funny
I should be able to name it "Pretty Pink Ponies and Princesses" if I want and not have any problems arise from that.
You mean aside from being beaten up after school every day by the neanderthals at your middle school?
Back in the 1982 there was a new quadrennial international competition for gay and lesbian athletes called the "Gay Olympics". The International and U.S. Olympic Commmitees people stomped on this organization (while condoning the Special Olympics, the Police Olympics, and even the Nebraska Rat Olympics), forcing them to change the name of their event to the "Gay Games". Under this legislation, I guess they'd be banned from using even that name... would the "Gay Things" be OK?
A few years ago when I was unemployed, I applied for a "Technician I" job that required A+ certification. Since I'm not in the habit of wasting time and money, I'd never bothered getting it. They hired me anyway, because I had 10+ years experience... but they still expected me to take the test within six months. Fortunately I found another job before the six months were up, so I never had to demean myself by taking a test to prove what my resume and references (to say nothing of my job performance) already demonstrated.
You'll never be able to stop it completely. And this is not a technology problem; it's a management problem. So configure your DNS to resolve myspace.com to a local machine with a copy of the company's policy against accessing MySpace at work. Then let management and HR take care of anyone caught violating that policy.
Um... IBM introduced a 1024x768 video card (the 8514/A) in 1987, when Windows 2.0 was still brand new. There were plenty of 800x600 and 1024x768 video cards on the market by the time Windows 3.1 came along, five years later. Granted, most of these cards were limited to 8-bit or 16-bit color at those resolutions, but that's not a serious issue for business use. So there's no reason this fictional accounting firm wouldn't have held onto them. There are plenty of reasons why Windows 3.1 is unusable in a 2007 business environment, but supported monitor resolution is not among them.
I know about books; I read them all the time. You said that anyone who buys advertiser-supported media is a moron, and I was pointing out that you were mistaken.
I also have a pretty good idea what's going on in the world today, which is damn hard to find out without reading an advertiser-supported periodical. Even NPR has adverts now, and television has become completely incapable of handling news competently.
I watch Monk on iTunes. Over the course of a year it costs me an average of $2.65/month. Way cheaper than cable, and I have all the episodes available to watch on demand.
I've got a counter-question: What on cable or satellite is worth shelling out $30-100/month for?
Note: This was a rhetorical question. I don't need you to tell me what I'm missing; I know there are some swell pay-only programs out there. But the bottom line for me is that I already get all the couch-potato-format entertainment I'm interested in (maybe 5-7 hours/week September-thru-May) over the air for free. I'd like to continue getting it two years from now, so I'll definitely be buying one of those inexpensive ATSC-to-NTSC converters the feds keep promising, rather than pissing away a monthly fee for a service I've already decided isn't worth it to me.
its still Microsoft Word 2007, Microsoft Excel 2007 et al.
Except that in Office 2003, they were named on the Start Menu as "Microsoft Office Word 2003", "Microsoft Office Excel 2003", etc. You know... to be innovative.
Not "Office 2007". It's the "2007 Microsoft Office system". Because it wasn't enough to completely redesign the UI; they also had to arbitrarily change the name.
And when someone needs to open an MS Word document sent to them by a client....? (The last version of WordPerfect to run on Win31 didn't do a great job importing.DOC files, and would choke entirely on a Word 2003 or 2007 document.) Do they really not care that the OS displays the current year as "19:7"? (":" is the ASCII character after "9".)
I can believe some of your story, and I might have believed most of it several years ago (I worked at company that was still using a DOS-based database app and Win31 when I started in 1998, and was still using Win95 and a terminal app on most of their staff machines until shortly before I left in 2003), but it doesn't sound plausible in 2007.
Back in the mid-90s I tried installing Windows 1.0 on a Pentium, with little luck. The setup program would run but the system crashed when I tried to launch Windows from the DOS prompt. Probably due to incompatibility between the EGA video driver I selected and the onboard VGA of the machine; it might have worked if I'd had an actual EGA card to install. Modern CPUs and even the motherboard chipsets might be adequately backward compatible with XT-era hardware, but you'll have difficulty finding video hardware that's compatible with any modes earlier than 640x480@16 VGA.
In the interest of full disclosure: the Mac SE web server site is currently running on a Linux box, as a placeholder while I figure out a better place in my data center (read: "apartment") to set up my Mac SE and Windows 3.1, and 386 floppy web servers.
More closely related to this article (but not quite the same kind of thing), my current project is to run OS X on a Mac SE. Before anyone imagines an unholy hack involving PowerPC CPU replacements and XPostFacto, or calls bullshit on me, it actually involves stuffing a replacement monochrome VGA CRT and the innards of a G4 Mac Mini inside the SE case, with an iMate to connect the ADB keyboard and mouse. I call this machine the "Macintosh SE X". Most of the basic specs of the finished machine are roughly 1024x the specs of the original machine from 20 years ago: 1GB RAM instead of 1MB, 700MB recordable media (CD-R) instead of 800KB (floppy), 80GB hard drive instead of 20MB. I'm more of a shade-tree software hacker than a hardware hacker, so the "fit and finish" on it is a bit rough, but it's working pretty well so far. I'll put up a page about it when it's completed.
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If your memory card is getting full and there's no way for you to offload files or get another one, dial down the image quality settings on your camera before you run out of space. Yeah, it sucks shooting in supercompressed 640x480 mode, but that's better than not getting the pictures at all.
The ability to run whatever equipment on AA cells cannot be overemphasised. Rechargeables are only useful if you have the appropriate current/adapter combo to plug in with. Since I switched from my 35mm SLR (which hardly required any battery at all) to digital, I've always made sure my camera could be powered by AAs in a pinch.
I've never done around-the-world, but I've backpacked abroad for several weeks at a time, and the best computer for my purposes was (at the time) a Psion Series3 PDA. The key features for this use were its size (that of a few checkbooks stacked together) and weight, good apps, decent built-in keyboard, and the fact that it ran for weeks at at time on standard AA batteries (which can be purchased almost anywhere in the world where electricity is found). It was useless for getting online (which in the 90s was a dodgy proposition on the road regardless of your gear), but in most parts of the world today internet cafes are more common than wifi hotspots anyway. I used it for my journal, keeping track of plane and train bookings, converting currencies, and logging expenses. The Series3 is an antique by modern standards (I've long since replaced it with a newer machine with fixed rechargeable-if-there's-an-outlet-handy batteries), but if I were going back out into the world with a pack for an extended period of time, I'd scour eBay for one.
Unrelated to the original question, but a suggestion: Check out Wikitravel.org, an open-content wiki devoted to meeting the information needs of travelers. You may find useful information about many of your destinations, and your contributions both on the road and upon returning home will certainly be appreciated.
The government is - via executive fiat - "breaking" the television equipment that I paid for with my own meager income. It's upcoming ban on analog television broadcasts, requiring a switch to digital, is a government subsidy to the electronics industry (among others), with that money coming directly out of consumers' pockets. So the fact that that government is chipping in $40 on my behalf - restoring to me the basic broadcast television service they're taking away - seems appropriate to me.
Thanks, because I'm a retarded 10-year-old who's lived in a cave my whole life. I didn't know any of this.
{ahem}
Just because the world is fucked up doesn't mean I don't have a right to argue for fixing it up.
It matters because the improbably cluster of "Dubai", "Halliburton", and "Cheney" in this situation suggests that there's more going on here than just business. This isn't Joe al-Blow in Dubai with too much money buying a U.S. business (which would be "just business"). This is a U.S. business partially owned (and directed through a proxy) by the Vice President, buying property and setting up shop in a foreign country where the White House has been involved in deal-making. We know this move ain't for the nightlife, so it raises the important questions of how and why. Cheney's retiring in 2009, but he's on our payroll right now, and his Board of Directors (read "we") have a right to know whether he's working for us, or for someone else.
Does anybody know whether Vice President Cheney has purchased a home in Dubai yet? Between this and the Dubai Ports World deal, the GWB administration seems to be trying to set up a cushy job there for someone.
"C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized..."
Bah! More liberal media, undermining the country, blah blah grumble etc....
And this is positing the hypothesis that we want to believe because we are genetically predisposed to. Not just a "believe in God" gene, but a fundamental part of how our brains are structured.
A pastor I knew once talked to me about how we all have a "God-shaped hole" in us... some of us try to fill it with drugs, some with music, some with money, some with technology, some with sex, etc. but the only thing that fills it perfectly (he said) is God. Now, he was coming at it from a creationist perspective: he believed that God made us with this instinct to seek Him out. But it also makes sense from an evolutionary psychological perspective: there could be some kind of survival advantage in this instinctive "want to believe". For example, in the past several thousand years a belief in God has repeatedly inspired populations to engage in military campaigns, which certainly gives them a survival advantage over others. People who believe in God tend to be more happy (cf. psychologist David Myers), so maybe it's because theistic varieties of hominids were less likely to slit their wrists or drink themselves into extinction.
I don't know... there are a bunch of possible explanations of how/why it developed. But the idea of a "God-shaped hole" in the human psyche or soul - whether natural or supernatural in origin - would explain a great deal of our behavior both as individuals and collectively.
Back in the 1982 there was a new quadrennial international competition for gay and lesbian athletes called the "Gay Olympics". The International and U.S. Olympic Commmitees people stomped on this organization (while condoning the Special Olympics, the Police Olympics, and even the Nebraska Rat Olympics), forcing them to change the name of their event to the "Gay Games". Under this legislation, I guess they'd be banned from using even that name... would the "Gay Things" be OK?
A few years ago when I was unemployed, I applied for a "Technician I" job that required A+ certification. Since I'm not in the habit of wasting time and money, I'd never bothered getting it. They hired me anyway, because I had 10+ years experience... but they still expected me to take the test within six months. Fortunately I found another job before the six months were up, so I never had to demean myself by taking a test to prove what my resume and references (to say nothing of my job performance) already demonstrated.
You'll never be able to stop it completely. And this is not a technology problem; it's a management problem. So configure your DNS to resolve myspace.com to a local machine with a copy of the company's policy against accessing MySpace at work. Then let management and HR take care of anyone caught violating that policy.
Um... IBM introduced a 1024x768 video card (the 8514/A) in 1987, when Windows 2.0 was still brand new. There were plenty of 800x600 and 1024x768 video cards on the market by the time Windows 3.1 came along, five years later. Granted, most of these cards were limited to 8-bit or 16-bit color at those resolutions, but that's not a serious issue for business use. So there's no reason this fictional accounting firm wouldn't have held onto them. There are plenty of reasons why Windows 3.1 is unusable in a 2007 business environment, but supported monitor resolution is not among them.
I know about books; I read them all the time. You said that anyone who buys advertiser-supported media is a moron, and I was pointing out that you were mistaken.
I also have a pretty good idea what's going on in the world today, which is damn hard to find out without reading an advertiser-supported periodical. Even NPR has adverts now, and television has become completely incapable of handling news competently.
I take it you've never paid for a magazine or newspaper?
:)
It may surprise you that most of the people who do buy those are not only not morons, they're actually literate.
Allow me to introduce myself. I get all my TV programming over the air.
If you consider cable rates "cheap", I have some "cheap" long distance and electrical services I'd like to resell to you.
I watch Monk on iTunes. Over the course of a year it costs me an average of $2.65/month. Way cheaper than cable, and I have all the episodes available to watch on demand.
I've got a counter-question: What on cable or satellite is worth shelling out $30-100/month for?
Note: This was a rhetorical question. I don't need you to tell me what I'm missing; I know there are some swell pay-only programs out there. But the bottom line for me is that I already get all the couch-potato-format entertainment I'm interested in (maybe 5-7 hours/week September-thru-May) over the air for free. I'd like to continue getting it two years from now, so I'll definitely be buying one of those inexpensive ATSC-to-NTSC converters the feds keep promising, rather than pissing away a monthly fee for a service I've already decided isn't worth it to me.
Not "Office 2007". It's the "2007 Microsoft Office system". Because it wasn't enough to completely redesign the UI; they also had to arbitrarily change the name.
By the way, anyone notice that these crippled-WinXP guys are using an old Apple monitor with a VGA-plug adapter?
And when someone needs to open an MS Word document sent to them by a client....? (The last version of WordPerfect to run on Win31 didn't do a great job importing .DOC files, and would choke entirely on a Word 2003 or 2007 document.) Do they really not care that the OS displays the current year as "19:7"? (":" is the ASCII character after "9".)
I can believe some of your story, and I might have believed most of it several years ago (I worked at company that was still using a DOS-based database app and Win31 when I started in 1998, and was still using Win95 and a terminal app on most of their staff machines until shortly before I left in 2003), but it doesn't sound plausible in 2007.
Back in the mid-90s I tried installing Windows 1.0 on a Pentium, with little luck. The setup program would run but the system crashed when I tried to launch Windows from the DOS prompt. Probably due to incompatibility between the EGA video driver I selected and the onboard VGA of the machine; it might have worked if I'd had an actual EGA card to install. Modern CPUs and even the motherboard chipsets might be adequately backward compatible with XT-era hardware, but you'll have difficulty finding video hardware that's compatible with any modes earlier than 640x480@16 VGA.
In the interest of full disclosure: the Mac SE web server site is currently running on a Linux box, as a placeholder while I figure out a better place in my data center (read: "apartment") to set up my Mac SE and Windows 3.1, and 386 floppy web servers.
More closely related to this article (but not quite the same kind of thing), my current project is to run OS X on a Mac SE. Before anyone imagines an unholy hack involving PowerPC CPU replacements and XPostFacto, or calls bullshit on me, it actually involves stuffing a replacement monochrome VGA CRT and the innards of a G4 Mac Mini inside the SE case, with an iMate to connect the ADB keyboard and mouse. I call this machine the "Macintosh SE X". Most of the basic specs of the finished machine are roughly 1024x the specs of the original machine from 20 years ago: 1GB RAM instead of 1MB, 700MB recordable media (CD-R) instead of 800KB (floppy), 80GB hard drive instead of 20MB. I'm more of a shade-tree software hacker than a hardware hacker, so the "fit and finish" on it is a bit rough, but it's working pretty well so far. I'll put up a page about it when it's completed.