That was Deep Space Nine that introduced
Temporal Investigations.
Done right (and used sparingly), some of the best Star Trek
episodes have
involved time travel/alternate reality -
think of Mirror, Mirror,
Yesterday's Enterprise and, yes,
Trials and Tribblations.
Excessive use of
time travel has since become a copout.
If all problems can be solved with a bit of
time travel, where is the drama? And
why don't they use time travel as
a tool (think
The End of Eternity), rather
than merely as an all-too-convenient plot device?
We
didn't have a revolution, but
still have at least the promise of
decent Olympics coverage. That's
the theory, anyway: the last couple of times
have been dominated by talking heads, cutesy
"background" spots (especially the Sydney Olympics),
and general chatter about almost everything
but sports.
They also had a nasty habit of telling us that
Canadians placed 5th, 10th and 21st, but never
told who actually won.
If you have a textbook that says there is part of the moon that's always exposed to the sun, it's dead wrong.
Do you have a citation for such a ridiculous
thing for a textbook to say?
The Moon's axial tilt is
non-zero, so it has areas of midnight
sun/winter darkness near the poles,
just like Earth does. But this is a far cry
from the Moon being gravitationally locked
to the Sun. 'tain't so!
...laura who watched the sun rise in
Mare Tranquillitatis and Mare Nectaris last
night
There's a whole bunch of us who aren't 35+ and can't discuss where we were when it happened. It sucks.
In true proto-geek fashion I listened to
"That's one small step..." on a crystal set.
The earliest mission I remember
with any clarity is Apollo 8. In typical
7 year-old fashion I thought it would really
suck to be away from home on Christmas Day.
The world forgot about space after Apollo 11,
probably helped by the general lack of live
video from Apollo 12. Pointing fancy new
tv cameras at the Sun will do that.:-(
The world noticed Apollo 13.
After that nobody cared. NASA axed
Apollo 18, 19 and 20. After Apollo 17
(no real media coverage, but great
pictures in National Geographic),
NASA decided it was more fun to go around
in circles, and, with minor exceptions,
that's all they've done since.
Since when has it been
acceptable to say those words on broadcast television?
All civilized countries leave this to
the discretion of the tv station
(to show "adult" material at appropriate times) and the
good taste of the audience
(to turn it off if they don't like it).
The first time
I heard signifcant quantities of four-letter
words on TV was Phoenix,
arguably the best cop show ever made
(anther contender would be Between
the Lines, a fine piece of drama, also
with adult language and themes). It was
all in context, and made perfect sense:
the people the Major Crime
Squad track down are not nice people at all, and their
command of English reflects this.
Neither show was produced by U.S. television.
Neither show was produced by a commercial
tv network. Do you suppose there is a connection?
I'm sick of all the "audiophiles" who claim that a non-overdriven tube amp provides a better reproduction of any given sound than a similar, transistor-based amp.
I'm inclined to agree.
The current interest
in tube amps is, as far as I can see, equal parts
conspicuous consumption, fad, and good
old-fashioned hype. Plus all that nostalgia
shit that's getting so old-fashioned!
I always top off the tank of my
elderly-but-serviceable 1986 VW Jetta
(1.8 litre gas engine, 5 speed stickshift)
and know what numbers are in family, and what
ones aren't. I have a whole pile of
gas station receipts with numbers on
them to prove it.
Around town it's 10 litres/100 km.
I refuel when the tank is down to 1/4, and start thinking
about gassing up at 360 km.
On the highway it's 5.8 litres/100 km.
I don't even look at the gas gauge until 550 km.
When the car was new VW quoted 10.1 city, 6.5 highway on leaded regular. Since such
gasoline hasn't been available for years I experimented
and found it runs best on mid-grade unleaded.
I have no complaints.
For one, do you really think they were giving people refunds for these charges? Maybe Canada has some consumer protection laws or something, but from my dealings with scummy utility companies in the US, I know I'd pay every penny for a hijacked modem.
In Canada you are responsible for
phone calls made from your phone, and you
must pay for them. As Telus point
out in their article, they have contracts
for overseas calls, and the calls must be paid
for
even if the other end are corrupt scum.
Exactly what crime are these people guilty of, anyway? If they tell their victims
that they are going to be connected to
an "international number" it's hardly fraud,
even if that's exactly the intent.
There used to be lots of ads on TV for
chat lines that were in places like Peru.
The ads always mentioned that "long distance charges
may apply". Boy, did they ever...
It isn't a scud, but the V2 rockets weren't happily received either.
Funny you should mention scud and the V-2 - they
actually
areV-2 derivatives.
Like all tools, they can be used for good
(think of the pioneering space research that
was done in New Mexico with captured V-2s)
or evil. Sadly, this seems to have been forgotten
in some circles.
I use LaTeX for everything that
I can get away with. This included
my M.A.Sc. thesis, with diagrams done
in
xfig. The price is right and
the quality is excellent. What more
do you want?
My resume is in LaTeX and, yes, it
has a makefile.
i'm told it doesn't get more stable than Debian Stable, but i normally hear people say Slack is hard to install or hard to work with. Why is that? And can someone please clear that up for me? i'm not trolling, i just don't know enough about Slack to see why people would want to run it. Is it small and fast and just less "junk" to worry about for security reasons? Help me out!
It's all a matter of expectations: if you want an installer
that looks and feels like that GUI shell
they make for MS-DOS in Redmond, Slackware probably isn't for you.
I've always likened Slackware to a construction
set for
building Linux systems. RedHat et al are a Linux system
in a can; open the can and pour out your system,
ready to go. Slackware doesn't build system, but
instead gives you the tools to build any kind
of system you like.
My only non-Slackware system is a Sun Ultra 5
(bought on EBay),
which runs Debian. That UltraSPARC hardware, y'know. Debian is different,
but I can certainly see where they're coming from.
Both are good approaches, maintaining that
lightweight minimalist approach that Linux
is in serious danger of losing.
My fave for news is indeed Radio One
(690 kHz in Vancouver), but for music I prefer
La Chaine culturelle,
the French version of Radio Two. Some
really cool music, now on the air in Vancouver
(90.9 MHz).
This stuff is also all on
DAB
(the CBC/Radio-Canada networks are all on
the same multiplex), one
of the better-kept secrets of Canadian broadcasting. The transmitter on Mount
Seymour is line-of-sight
from my apartment, so I get good reception.
It seems that over the past few years there have been a few unique astronomical events that happen very infrequently compared to a human lifespan.
I think you will find that the frequency of Really
Interesting Events hasn't changed.
What has changed, however,
is the amount of publicity they get.
Thanks to facilities like this one, more
people know about them. At one
time only people who read specialist literature
knew about various comets, oppositions, and so on.
I seriously considered a trip
to Inuvik,
which will see the entire show as the sun
slides along the northern horizon. The
weather prospects aren't bad, either.
Here in Vancouver the transit starts just after sunset,
and ends just before sunrise. Sigh.
Actually, film died a while ago, it's just taking awhile for the old farts to realize it.
Film is far from dead.
Some of us actually like the
craft of playing with wet things in the dark,
the meditative process of taking a really
good picture with a large format camera,
the look of a print with the quality
that only a large negative (120 is small
in this context) can give.
It's still kicking. I use digital lots
for snapshots myself, but the good stuff
is still on film, and will be so for a long
time to come.
...laura, Pentax 67 owner, 4x5 owner, considering
moving up to 8x10
Why are the drivers closed in the first place? Won't they sell more cards if they're supported by a wider variety of software?
There are many reasons. General
paranoia over possible trade secrets and
concerns over support costs are the top of
most lists I've seen. If you document it,
you have to support it.
If they support Windows they already support
such a huge customer base that the
incremental
gain from supporting the tiny population
of non-Windows users just isn't worth it.
They're not allowed to pull stunts like that here.
Canadian search and seizure laws are,
well,
interesting, but the onus still remains on
The Authorities to show cause.
Fortunately, we're nowhere nearly as paranoid
as our neighbours. My apartment looks like
an explosion in a surplus electronic junk
store, with assorted computers, radios, and
such, as well as lots of camera and telescope
gear. Suspicious? No. At worst people
view me as (mostly) harmless.
A couple of times people have wondered if I
was a spook (I could do some
pretty good electronic and photographic surveillance
with the gear I've got), but they believe me when I
tell them that I'm not, and am,
in any case,
far too conspicuous to
be a field agent.
Besides, if they didn't believe me, I'd
have to kill them.:-)
Lately basic physics has branched out into such technologically unproductive pursuits as String theory. They are interesting to mathematicians but the technological fruits aren't there yet.
You forget the operative word. Basic, fundamental
investigation is where all the neato cool interesting
stuff comes from. We have no idea what that stuff
will be, but it will come, if we are prepared
to let people continue their research.
Just think what the world would be like if
the Powers That Were had told
Messrs.
Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen to quit messing
with those ridiculous bits of germanium,
that crazy chemistry and that silly quantum theory
(none of which has any application anyway, you know) and
work with something real, like better
tubes.
They only provide technical support for Windoze and Mac.
They will not answer any technical
questions if you have a Linux box,
even if the problem has nothing to do with
the fact that it is a Linux box.
Case in point: a while back they "upgraded" their
DHCP server, so it suddenly refused to give my ADSL-connected
Linux
box an IP address. Rebooting as Windoze 98
(yeah, I know...) provided an IP address.
I found, quickly, that there was an update
to the Linux DHCP client that was only a couple of
days old - apparently the new Microsoft DHCP
server had odd notions about what were valid
parameters in a DHCP request.
I installed the update and was back on the air.
After a couple of weeks of telephone tag the 2nd
level tech support people finally admitted that it was indeed
their server.
Apologize? Of course not. They
only support Windows and Mac. But they
are always happy to take my money.
The problem is with the 40 year old women in the office who use their kids names over and over with different numbers at the end of the password, and then write even that simple to remember password down at their desk.
40 years old? You had me worried there
for a minute. I'm 42, so I should be OK, then.
I've been expecting this year to be an enlightening
one.
Like others, my favourite password algorithm is
the first-letter-of-each-word-in-a-phrase algorithm.
My standard example is TbontbTitq - random
garbage unless you think of Shakespeare.
Anybody watching over your shoulder sees random
garbage, can't remember it because there is
no pattern, and all is well.
No, I have never used this particular example
password on any computer system.
Actually, the whole series of metric paper
sizes from A1 to A5 are made by repeatedly
folding sheets in half. And the width-to-height
ratio is certainly not the Golden Mean! As
others have pointed out...
I used to develop software that printed things,
and always had a supply of A4 paper handy
so I could make sure I didn't have any
paper size-related bugs lurking. If I
was lucky the folks at the local office supply
place would know what A4 was, but they certainly
wouldn't have it (not even in Canada). So
I'd wait for the next business trip to Europe
and grab a package when I was there.
Does anyone know of job openings in British Columbia for a computer programmer with two years' job experience?
If you're not a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant, no. There are lots of out-of-work techies
already in this part of the world, and many
have lots more experience than you do.
If you want to immigrate, you'll need to meet
the requirements, then wait in line.
If you want to come on a visa and
work, you'll have to
convince somebody that those two years of experience
were awfully special. Your experience almost
certainly doesn't qualify
under the Professional provisions of NAFTA.
I've quietly run a security camera with
Motion in my cubicle
at work for a couple of years now. It's
picked up lots of interesting things, and cost
a bad security guard his job.
Hardware? I've experimented. My current
setup is a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 on USB.
I tried a cheapie BT878 card but wasn't happy
with the results. The hardware is a 733 MHz
Pentium 3 running a heavily patched and upgraded
system that started life as RedHat 7.3.
If things look interesting during the day
I use
CamStream and mjpegtools to make timelapse videos of the view out
my window.
Slashdot Mirror
That was Deep Space Nine that introduced Temporal Investigations.
Done right (and used sparingly), some of the best Star Trek episodes have involved time travel/alternate reality - think of Mirror, Mirror, Yesterday's Enterprise and, yes, Trials and Tribblations.
Excessive use of time travel has since become a copout. If all problems can be solved with a bit of time travel, where is the drama? And why don't they use time travel as a tool (think The End of Eternity), rather than merely as an all-too-convenient plot device?
...laura
We didn't have a revolution, but still have at least the promise of decent Olympics coverage. That's the theory, anyway: the last couple of times have been dominated by talking heads, cutesy "background" spots (especially the Sydney Olympics), and general chatter about almost everything but sports.
They also had a nasty habit of telling us that Canadians placed 5th, 10th and 21st, but never told who actually won.
...laura
A couple of other implementations, with various wrinkles: one that is assisted, and one that stands alone.
I've done some interesting plots by driving around town with a GPS receiver, a data cable and a laptop.
...laura
Do you have a citation for such a ridiculous thing for a textbook to say?
The Moon's axial tilt is non-zero, so it has areas of midnight sun/winter darkness near the poles, just like Earth does. But this is a far cry from the Moon being gravitationally locked to the Sun. 'tain't so!
...laura who watched the sun rise in Mare Tranquillitatis and Mare Nectaris last night
In true proto-geek fashion I listened to "That's one small step..." on a crystal set.
The earliest mission I remember with any clarity is Apollo 8. In typical 7 year-old fashion I thought it would really suck to be away from home on Christmas Day.
The world forgot about space after Apollo 11, probably helped by the general lack of live video from Apollo 12. Pointing fancy new tv cameras at the Sun will do that. :-(
The world noticed Apollo 13.
After that nobody cared. NASA axed Apollo 18, 19 and 20. After Apollo 17 (no real media coverage, but great pictures in National Geographic), NASA decided it was more fun to go around in circles, and, with minor exceptions, that's all they've done since.
Sad.
...laura, space geek from very early on
Slackware's SPARC port was stillborn, but has been reincarnated as SPLACK.
Never tried it; I run Debian (sorry...) on an Ultra 5. It works fine. For me, at least.
...laura
All civilized countries leave this to the discretion of the tv station (to show "adult" material at appropriate times) and the good taste of the audience (to turn it off if they don't like it).
The first time I heard signifcant quantities of four-letter words on TV was Phoenix, arguably the best cop show ever made (anther contender would be Between the Lines, a fine piece of drama, also with adult language and themes). It was all in context, and made perfect sense: the people the Major Crime Squad track down are not nice people at all, and their command of English reflects this.
Neither show was produced by U.S. television. Neither show was produced by a commercial tv network. Do you suppose there is a connection?
...laura who would love to see Phoenix again
The current interest in tube amps is, as far as I can see, equal parts conspicuous consumption, fad, and good old-fashioned hype. Plus all that nostalgia shit that's getting so old-fashioned!
...laura
I always top off the tank of my elderly-but-serviceable 1986 VW Jetta (1.8 litre gas engine, 5 speed stickshift) and know what numbers are in family, and what ones aren't. I have a whole pile of gas station receipts with numbers on them to prove it.
Around town it's 10 litres/100 km. I refuel when the tank is down to 1/4, and start thinking about gassing up at 360 km.
On the highway it's 5.8 litres/100 km. I don't even look at the gas gauge until 550 km.
When the car was new VW quoted 10.1 city, 6.5 highway on leaded regular. Since such gasoline hasn't been available for years I experimented and found it runs best on mid-grade unleaded. I have no complaints.
...laura
In Canada you are responsible for phone calls made from your phone, and you must pay for them. As Telus point out in their article, they have contracts for overseas calls, and the calls must be paid for even if the other end are corrupt scum.
Exactly what crime are these people guilty of, anyway? If they tell their victims that they are going to be connected to an "international number" it's hardly fraud, even if that's exactly the intent.
There used to be lots of ads on TV for chat lines that were in places like Peru. The ads always mentioned that "long distance charges may apply". Boy, did they ever...
...laura, a Telus customer
Funny you should mention scud and the V-2 - they actually are V-2 derivatives.
Like all tools, they can be used for good (think of the pioneering space research that was done in New Mexico with captured V-2s) or evil. Sadly, this seems to have been forgotten in some circles.
...laura
I use LaTeX for everything that I can get away with. This included my M.A.Sc. thesis, with diagrams done in xfig. The price is right and the quality is excellent. What more do you want?
My resume is in LaTeX and, yes, it has a makefile.
...laura
It's all a matter of expectations: if you want an installer that looks and feels like that GUI shell they make for MS-DOS in Redmond, Slackware probably isn't for you.
I've always likened Slackware to a construction set for building Linux systems. RedHat et al are a Linux system in a can; open the can and pour out your system, ready to go. Slackware doesn't build system, but instead gives you the tools to build any kind of system you like.
My only non-Slackware system is a Sun Ultra 5 (bought on EBay), which runs Debian. That UltraSPARC hardware, y'know. Debian is different, but I can certainly see where they're coming from. Both are good approaches, maintaining that lightweight minimalist approach that Linux is in serious danger of losing.
...laura
I too listen to CBC radio.
My fave for news is indeed Radio One (690 kHz in Vancouver), but for music I prefer La Chaine culturelle, the French version of Radio Two. Some really cool music, now on the air in Vancouver (90.9 MHz).
This stuff is also all on DAB (the CBC/Radio-Canada networks are all on the same multiplex), one of the better-kept secrets of Canadian broadcasting. The transmitter on Mount Seymour is line-of-sight from my apartment, so I get good reception.
...laura
I think you will find that the frequency of Really Interesting Events hasn't changed.
What has changed, however, is the amount of publicity they get. Thanks to facilities like this one, more people know about them. At one time only people who read specialist literature knew about various comets, oppositions, and so on.
...laura
I seriously considered a trip to Inuvik, which will see the entire show as the sun slides along the northern horizon. The weather prospects aren't bad, either.
Here in Vancouver the transit starts just after sunset, and ends just before sunrise. Sigh.
2012 it is.
...laura
Film is far from dead.
Some of us actually like the craft of playing with wet things in the dark, the meditative process of taking a really good picture with a large format camera, the look of a print with the quality that only a large negative (120 is small in this context) can give.
It's still kicking. I use digital lots for snapshots myself, but the good stuff is still on film, and will be so for a long time to come.
...laura, Pentax 67 owner, 4x5 owner, considering moving up to 8x10
There are many reasons. General paranoia over possible trade secrets and concerns over support costs are the top of most lists I've seen. If you document it, you have to support it.
If they support Windows they already support such a huge customer base that the incremental gain from supporting the tiny population of non-Windows users just isn't worth it.
...laura, who wishes this wasn't the case
Canadian search and seizure laws are, well, interesting, but the onus still remains on The Authorities to show cause.
Fortunately, we're nowhere nearly as paranoid as our neighbours. My apartment looks like an explosion in a surplus electronic junk store, with assorted computers, radios, and such, as well as lots of camera and telescope gear. Suspicious? No. At worst people view me as (mostly) harmless.
A couple of times people have wondered if I was a spook (I could do some pretty good electronic and photographic surveillance with the gear I've got), but they believe me when I tell them that I'm not, and am, in any case, far too conspicuous to be a field agent.
Besides, if they didn't believe me, I'd have to kill them. :-)
...laura
You forget the operative word. Basic, fundamental investigation is where all the neato cool interesting stuff comes from. We have no idea what that stuff will be, but it will come, if we are prepared to let people continue their research.
Just think what the world would be like if the Powers That Were had told Messrs. Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen to quit messing with those ridiculous bits of germanium, that crazy chemistry and that silly quantum theory (none of which has any application anyway, you know) and work with something real, like better tubes.
...laura
My ISP already do.
They only provide technical support for Windoze and Mac. They will not answer any technical questions if you have a Linux box, even if the problem has nothing to do with the fact that it is a Linux box.
Case in point: a while back they "upgraded" their DHCP server, so it suddenly refused to give my ADSL-connected Linux box an IP address. Rebooting as Windoze 98 (yeah, I know...) provided an IP address. I found, quickly, that there was an update to the Linux DHCP client that was only a couple of days old - apparently the new Microsoft DHCP server had odd notions about what were valid parameters in a DHCP request.
I installed the update and was back on the air. After a couple of weeks of telephone tag the 2nd level tech support people finally admitted that it was indeed their server.
Apologize? Of course not. They only support Windows and Mac. But they are always happy to take my money.
...laura
40 years old? You had me worried there for a minute. I'm 42, so I should be OK, then. I've been expecting this year to be an enlightening one.
Like others, my favourite password algorithm is the first-letter-of-each-word-in-a-phrase algorithm. My standard example is TbontbTitq - random garbage unless you think of Shakespeare. Anybody watching over your shoulder sees random garbage, can't remember it because there is no pattern, and all is well.
No, I have never used this particular example password on any computer system.
...laura
Actually, the whole series of metric paper sizes from A1 to A5 are made by repeatedly folding sheets in half. And the width-to-height ratio is certainly not the Golden Mean! As others have pointed out...
I used to develop software that printed things, and always had a supply of A4 paper handy so I could make sure I didn't have any paper size-related bugs lurking. If I was lucky the folks at the local office supply place would know what A4 was, but they certainly wouldn't have it (not even in Canada). So I'd wait for the next business trip to Europe and grab a package when I was there.
"Anything to declare?"
"I went to Paris and bought a package of paper."
...laura
If you're not a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant, no. There are lots of out-of-work techies already in this part of the world, and many have lots more experience than you do.
If you want to immigrate, you'll need to meet the requirements, then wait in line.
If you want to come on a visa and work, you'll have to convince somebody that those two years of experience were awfully special. Your experience almost certainly doesn't qualify under the Professional provisions of NAFTA.
...laura, born and raised in British Columbia
Allow me to second the suggestion for Motion.
I've quietly run a security camera with Motion in my cubicle at work for a couple of years now. It's picked up lots of interesting things, and cost a bad security guard his job.
Hardware? I've experimented. My current setup is a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 on USB. I tried a cheapie BT878 card but wasn't happy with the results. The hardware is a 733 MHz Pentium 3 running a heavily patched and upgraded system that started life as RedHat 7.3.
If things look interesting during the day I use CamStream and mjpegtools to make timelapse videos of the view out my window.
...laura