I think, though, that you've hit on a thorny issue.
While I've yet to write a non-trival Word macro, a lot of my daily work is greatly enhanced by Excel macros I've written.
Will OO ever be able to incorporate VBA? I know it has a scripting language, but will it be compatible with VBA? Or will there be easy-to-use converters?
If not, then a lot of people will be stuck with Excel because they can't afford to spend time learning a new scripting language or to convert and test their macros.
We might be okay on Word, but I think there will be a lot of problems, converters or not, getting people/companies to switch to OO for their spreadsheet work.
The only reason someone lives from paycheck to paycheck is because they choose to live that life.
Sure... when you're smart, talented, and have a healhty mind and body, it's pretty easy.
But, there are many people who are not as smart as you and have not had the education and opportunities you have had. There are those who are disabled in many ways who simply can't get a better job or a better life. And that's not even considering the racism, age-ism, and classism that exists in our society.
What should the widowed mother of 3 do to improve her lot, when she's already working 2 part-time jobs and can barely get by. She dosen't have a 401k, and if she did, she can't put any money in it anyway. I'm sure you like to cling to the idea of welfare moms eating potato chips and watching Regis, but there are a lot of poor people who aren't like this.
What about the 50 year old mechanic who hurts his back on the job and can't work. His case for workman's comp gets denied, all the way up to the state supreme court. His considerable savings are exhausted to pay his medical bills. And now he can't work in his profession. Try changing professions at 50 when you're not already highly educated. Maybe he'll be able to work at walmart when his back is healed enough he can stand all day.
It must be nice to be inusulated from the hard realities that many people live hand to mouth because there just is no slack to get ahead with. It's bad enough when the resources are limited, but it's made worse by people who prey upon others.
Not everyone who is poor simply chooses to be poor.
I hope you're lucky and don't have the world collapse around you - no amount of planning and preparation can spare you from everything.
The corruption and graft you talk about is usually done by "well off" people with power and connections. It's these people who are preying on the poor, uneducated, and disadvantaged.
Actually, I use acrobat outside of web-browsing. I scan all my bills/etc, and keep them as PDFs while recycling the paper. It meets my obsessive need to keep copies of everything without having a basement full of 7-year old phone bills.
So, the techniques I posted make acrobat open quicker, whether it's part of a web-browser or not.
And actually, I tried everything what you said to get it to load seperately, but it would not. I even removed both mozilla and acrobat and tried installing them in different orders and it did not make a difference.
Even with the tricks above, adobe stays in my browser and I wish it didn't. But this makes it load faster. I wish, though, there was a good windows based pdf viewer that wasn't acrobat.
This article shows how to do "liposuction" on acrobat and make it load much faster by removing a bunch of the plugins. If you lose functionality you need, find the plugin and put it back in the plugins directory.
It works for both the reader and the full acrobat.
The essence of the instructions are:
* From the Start->Run windows menu, Open the "x:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader" folder, where x is the right drive letter.
* Find the plug_ins folder and rename it plug_ins_disabled
* Create a new folder named plug_ins
* Copy the following files from "plug_ins_disabled" to "plug_ins": EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api
Or when I'm minding my business on a one-lane highway, doing somewhere around the speed limit, and some drunk moron comes flying up behind me leaving me nowhere to go but forward in order to avoid being hit.
When this happens you must report it to the police immediately.
So... if I'm out on a country road, with no cell phone, and this happens, are you saying I can speed to the next town, as fast as possible, so I can report it to the police? Sweet!
I don't believe this is the "image search" retaining images. Rather, it's their map system that features satellite and arial photography of the map. That's where you can see the white house is blocked out.
That's why I say I agree. But I wonder if there is something we could do, that we don't understand yet, that could actually affect the sun. Maybe something that could "foul" the fusion reactions going on there.
But as for this topic of space-station trash, I completely agree that this trash wouldn't make the slightest impact on the sun.
In fact, I've wondered if it might be feasible send nuclear waste into the sun. Of course, there's the tricky problem of getting it away from the earth without a tragic accident spilling it everywhere. And the cost of sending the waste up eats into any energy advantage you get from nuclear. Oh well.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Now, maybe I'm just a crazy left-wing wacko, but I think one should be able to reasonably extraplotate "papers and effects" to include their own computer networks and files.
It's been a long time since I took physics, but isn't there a conservation of energy and mass?
Isn't heat the least-ordered (highest entropy) form of energy? So, if you're making heat from another energy form, you can be pretty darned efficient.
For example, if you're trying to get motion from an electric motor, you have losses because of heating in the coils - you can't get 100% conversion of electricity to motion.
But, it seems if you want to make heat, then you should have a high level of efficiency, as the waste product is the same as the desired product.
So, you use electricity to crack water, and get lower efficiency because of heat generated. Then you burn that cracked water to make heat.
Where else does the waste, lower efficiency go? It has to come from somewhere and go somewhere.
In my HS Chemistry class, our teacher 1st showed us how to make super-bubble solution (included glycerin).
We then hooked funnels up to the gas lines with rubber hoses (normally used for bunsen burners). Turned on the gas to a slow rate, and poured the bubble solution into the funnel. These giant bubbles filled would then come out. We'd touch those with a long wooden match (lit), and they'd whoosh into a burning donut of flame.
It was lots of fun until one flaming donut went up into an air vent and caught stuff on fire. Ooops!
Re:My theory... DVD ripping (for backup purposes!)
on
Hacking Hotels 101
·
· Score: 1
Oh! And make sure windows is set to use DMA if your drive and motherboard can handle it.
I was very sad that it took more than 30 minutes to burn a DVD. Once I finally found out that I should be using DMA and that I wasn't, I fixed it. Now it burns in less than 6 minutes. I also found my CD burner burns much faster with DMA enabled.
Re:My theory... DVD ripping (for backup purposes!)
on
Hacking Hotels 101
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Of course, I only use my equipment and software to make legitimate backups of the DVDs I have purchased. That said, I use the following:
Hardware: NEC 3520A dual-layer burner. It has all kinds of great firmware hacks available that make it region free, enable bit-setting (allows your DVD+R media to self-identify as DVD-ROM so it plays on more DVD players), and disables Rip-Lock so you can copy the data off more quickly (rip-lock limits it to about 2 x speed when copying a DVD-ROM)
Software: DVDShrink - it allows you to shrink a dual-layer disk (about 9GB) to a single-layer (4.5GB) with compression. It also allows you to replace video pieces with still-images. This can reduce the amount of compression - for example, my Usual Suspsects has a Widescreen and Fullscreen version. I replaced the fullscreen version with a still-image and I didn't have to compress the widescreen at all to fit a single-layer disk. It also removes PUO (prohibted user options - you know, the "you can't do that with this disk"), and removes region coding. That way, you can watch the DVDs you bought on your trip to Europe (though you still have to reconvert PAL to NTSC).
DVD Decrypter - this program is more robust than DVD Shrink, and provides many more options for manipulating your drive and the output. When DVD Shrink can't handle something, I use DVD Decryptor to copy the disk to my harddrive, then use DVDShrink to make it fit on a single layer disk.
Note that even if your drive is region free, windows will keep track of your changes on its own. If it's region free, it will assing a default region and let you change it once. This is in the registry and is independent of the drive's settings itself. I accidentally let my drive get set to region-2. Even after flashing the original firmware back on it, I could not get it off region-2. Only after deleting all references in the registry to the drive (while the drive was removed), was I able to get windows to return to region-1.
The other thing about the "standing on the shoulders of giants" is that many believe that Newton was being mean-spirited when he said it, rather than visionary in his views of the source of his brilliance.
"Science: A History 1534-2001" by John Gribbin which suggests that his comment was in fact a barely disguised personal attack. It written in a letter to a scientific competitor, Robert Hooke, who had complained, correctly, that Newton was not giving him proper credit for his discoveries. Newton's response that he had seen further by "standing on the shoulders of Giants" was intended to rule out Hooke, who was famously short and hunchbacked. This is not 100% accepted history but it does seem to fit in with Newton's general demenour and behaviour.
We(society) accept traffic cops and their patrolling of the streets to keep us safe. (This is not the same as "law enforcement though.)
I do believe you are wrong on this count. I do contract work for a person who works for my state - giving "Traffic Law Enforcement" presentations to judges and cops.
There are traffic laws, and cops enforce them. That's law enforcement.
It's still not so easy - you need enough water for 45,000 people. That's going to be a large facility - and again, these ships aren't anything special.
Suppose you have storage for 1 million gallons of water - because you need 1 million gallons of water. Where are you going to put non-potable water while you distill it? How long would it take to distill 1 million gallons of water using a couple pots and some tubes?
Remember, they're on the run from the cylons, they don't have many resources, and they probably just don't have enough resources to build a large enough distillery to handle their needs.
I'm just saying that the lack of water and seeking water is not so unplausible.
I find Starbucks' ability to shoot-down/kill the cylon raider - then somehow getting inside, cutting its guts out - and still flying it much more unplausible. If the bio-junk in the ship is important, then how did the ship fly without it? And if it isn't important, why did the cylons put it in there?
I'm not so sure. This is not breaking in and doing nefarious things. And the fact that it's wireless is significant - because the broadcasts are going out into the public.
In this case, the router is actualy broadcasting to the public, saying, "Hi there - I'm WAP #12345. Would you like to connect to the internet?"
The computer's broadcasting, "hi there, I'm computer #67890. I'd like to connect to the internet."
The router says, "okay - here you go".
The computer guy did not hack the router - he was actually invited by the hardware to connect. The fact that the owner of the router did not want to invite people is irrelevant - his router was sending out invitations. And openly accessible WAPs are pretty common, so the owner can't even say, "well, he should have known that I wouldn't want him using the connection".
Well, you have to remember, this is a fleet of whatever ships that happened to survive, with a flagship that was about to be retired. Equipment for water processing is somewhat a limited resource - note how many of the ships relied on Galactica for water replenishment.
So, sure, water in some form is abundant in space/planets, etc. But they need water "now", and probably dont' have facilities to collect hydrogen/oxygen to make water, or to do a "moisture vaporator thing" - they had to support some 45,000 people - they had to get it fast, and worry about being caught by cylons on top of all that.
Hell... the colonel was upset that the water they found was salty - aparently they couldn't deal with even that.
So now you're on a search for potable water - and that has to be much more rare than water in any form. And it has to be in large quantities - and somewhat accessible in a quick manner.
I mean, imagine you're just 100 people, crashed in eastern Afghanistan, and you're being hunted by Taliban. Oh yeah, and you don't have enough water to get anywhere. So, sure, you could set up all kinds of ways to collect water - even in an erid environment. But, few of those will lend themselves well to being on the run and resource-poor.
One of the nice things about WinSCP is that you can either have it look like midnight commander - with two panes - local & remote, or you can have the remote side look like a normal file browser window that you can drag & drop to and from.
I'm sure some scripting could make it automatically log in, etc and make it fairly transparent to the user.
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I think, though, that you've hit on a thorny issue.
While I've yet to write a non-trival Word macro, a lot of my daily work is greatly enhanced by Excel macros I've written.
Will OO ever be able to incorporate VBA? I know it has a scripting language, but will it be compatible with VBA? Or will there be easy-to-use converters?
If not, then a lot of people will be stuck with Excel because they can't afford to spend time learning a new scripting language or to convert and test their macros.
We might be okay on Word, but I think there will be a lot of problems, converters or not, getting people/companies to switch to OO for their spreadsheet work.
The only reason someone lives from paycheck to paycheck is because they choose to live that life.
Sure... when you're smart, talented, and have a healhty mind and body, it's pretty easy.
But, there are many people who are not as smart as you and have not had the education and opportunities you have had. There are those who are disabled in many ways who simply can't get a better job or a better life. And that's not even considering the racism, age-ism, and classism that exists in our society.
What should the widowed mother of 3 do to improve her lot, when she's already working 2 part-time jobs and can barely get by. She dosen't have a 401k, and if she did, she can't put any money in it anyway. I'm sure you like to cling to the idea of welfare moms eating potato chips and watching Regis, but there are a lot of poor people who aren't like this.
What about the 50 year old mechanic who hurts his back on the job and can't work. His case for workman's comp gets denied, all the way up to the state supreme court. His considerable savings are exhausted to pay his medical bills. And now he can't work in his profession. Try changing professions at 50 when you're not already highly educated. Maybe he'll be able to work at walmart when his back is healed enough he can stand all day.
It must be nice to be inusulated from the hard realities that many people live hand to mouth because there just is no slack to get ahead with. It's bad enough when the resources are limited, but it's made worse by people who prey upon others.
Not everyone who is poor simply chooses to be poor.
I hope you're lucky and don't have the world collapse around you - no amount of planning and preparation can spare you from everything.
The corruption and graft you talk about is usually done by "well off" people with power and connections. It's these people who are preying on the poor, uneducated, and disadvantaged.
Actually, I use acrobat outside of web-browsing. I scan all my bills/etc, and keep them as PDFs while recycling the paper. It meets my obsessive need to keep copies of everything without having a basement full of 7-year old phone bills.
So, the techniques I posted make acrobat open quicker, whether it's part of a web-browser or not.
And actually, I tried everything what you said to get it to load seperately, but it would not. I even removed both mozilla and acrobat and tried installing them in different orders and it did not make a difference.
Even with the tricks above, adobe stays in my browser and I wish it didn't. But this makes it load faster. I wish, though, there was a good windows based pdf viewer that wasn't acrobat.
This article shows how to do "liposuction" on acrobat and make it load much faster by removing a bunch of the plugins. If you lose functionality you need, find the plugin and put it back in the plugins directory.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11041
It works for both the reader and the full acrobat.
The essence of the instructions are:
* From the Start->Run windows menu, Open the "x:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader" folder, where x is the right drive letter.
* Find the plug_ins folder and rename it plug_ins_disabled
* Create a new folder named plug_ins
* Copy the following files from "plug_ins_disabled" to "plug_ins": EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api
simpler technique would be more fitting and elegant
This is GOTO, an elegant statement for a more civilized age.
Or when I'm minding my business on a one-lane highway, doing somewhere around the speed limit, and some drunk moron comes flying up behind me leaving me nowhere to go but forward in order to avoid being hit.
When this happens you must report it to the police immediately.
So... if I'm out on a country road, with no cell phone, and this happens, are you saying I can speed to the next town, as fast as possible, so I can report it to the police? Sweet!
Is that what they've put in Windows Vista? Impressive...
I don't believe this is the "image search" retaining images. Rather, it's their map system that features satellite and arial photography of the map. That's where you can see the white house is blocked out.
That's why I say I agree. But I wonder if there is something we could do, that we don't understand yet, that could actually affect the sun. Maybe something that could "foul" the fusion reactions going on there.
But as for this topic of space-station trash, I completely agree that this trash wouldn't make the slightest impact on the sun.
In fact, I've wondered if it might be feasible send nuclear waste into the sun. Of course, there's the tricky problem of getting it away from the earth without a tragic accident spilling it everywhere. And the cost of sending the waste up eats into any energy advantage you get from nuclear. Oh well.
The 4th Ammendment covers it pretty well:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Now, maybe I'm just a crazy left-wing wacko, but I think one should be able to reasonably extraplotate "papers and effects" to include their own computer networks and files.
While I tend to agree with you, I'll bit it was not so long ago that most people believed the same of the Earth.
but that it's questionable to say the least if they enter the industry to help lobbying efforts with their old political contacts.
That's not the worst. It's even worse when they do things to benefit their future employer while they are still a government official.
It's been a long time since I took physics, but isn't there a conservation of energy and mass?
Isn't heat the least-ordered (highest entropy) form of energy? So, if you're making heat from another energy form, you can be pretty darned efficient.
For example, if you're trying to get motion from an electric motor, you have losses because of heating in the coils - you can't get 100% conversion of electricity to motion.
But, it seems if you want to make heat, then you should have a high level of efficiency, as the waste product is the same as the desired product.
So, you use electricity to crack water, and get lower efficiency because of heat generated. Then you burn that cracked water to make heat.
Where else does the waste, lower efficiency go? It has to come from somewhere and go somewhere.
In my HS Chemistry class, our teacher 1st showed us how to make super-bubble solution (included glycerin).
We then hooked funnels up to the gas lines with rubber hoses (normally used for bunsen burners). Turned on the gas to a slow rate, and poured the bubble solution into the funnel. These giant bubbles filled would then come out. We'd touch those with a long wooden match (lit), and they'd whoosh into a burning donut of flame.
It was lots of fun until one flaming donut went up into an air vent and caught stuff on fire. Ooops!
Oh! And make sure windows is set to use DMA if your drive and motherboard can handle it.
I was very sad that it took more than 30 minutes to burn a DVD. Once I finally found out that I should be using DMA and that I wasn't, I fixed it. Now it burns in less than 6 minutes. I also found my CD burner burns much faster with DMA enabled.
Of course, I only use my equipment and software to make legitimate backups of the DVDs I have purchased. That said, I use the following:
Hardware: NEC 3520A dual-layer burner. It has all kinds of great firmware hacks available that make it region free, enable bit-setting (allows your DVD+R media to self-identify as DVD-ROM so it plays on more DVD players), and disables Rip-Lock so you can copy the data off more quickly (rip-lock limits it to about 2 x speed when copying a DVD-ROM)
Software:
DVDShrink - it allows you to shrink a dual-layer disk (about 9GB) to a single-layer (4.5GB) with compression. It also allows you to replace video pieces with still-images. This can reduce the amount of compression - for example, my Usual Suspsects has a Widescreen and Fullscreen version. I replaced the fullscreen version with a still-image and I didn't have to compress the widescreen at all to fit a single-layer disk. It also removes PUO (prohibted user options - you know, the "you can't do that with this disk"), and removes region coding. That way, you can watch the DVDs you bought on your trip to Europe (though you still have to reconvert PAL to NTSC).
DVD Decrypter - this program is more robust than DVD Shrink, and provides many more options for manipulating your drive and the output. When DVD Shrink can't handle something, I use DVD Decryptor to copy the disk to my harddrive, then use DVDShrink to make it fit on a single layer disk.
Note that even if your drive is region free, windows will keep track of your changes on its own. If it's region free, it will assing a default region and let you change it once. This is in the registry and is independent of the drive's settings itself. I accidentally let my drive get set to region-2. Even after flashing the original firmware back on it, I could not get it off region-2. Only after deleting all references in the registry to the drive (while the drive was removed), was I able to get windows to return to region-1.
The other thing about the "standing on the shoulders of giants" is that many believe that Newton was being mean-spirited when he said it, rather than visionary in his views of the source of his brilliance.
"Science: A History 1534-2001" by John Gribbin which suggests that his comment was in fact a barely disguised personal attack. It written in a letter to a scientific competitor, Robert Hooke, who had complained, correctly, that Newton was not giving him proper credit for his discoveries. Newton's response that he had seen further by "standing on the shoulders of Giants" was intended to rule out Hooke, who was famously short and hunchbacked. This is not 100% accepted history but it does seem to fit in with Newton's general demenour and behaviour.
It's a great saying, nonetheless.
We(society) accept traffic cops and their patrolling of the streets to keep us safe. (This is not the same as "law enforcement though.)
I do believe you are wrong on this count. I do contract work for a person who works for my state - giving "Traffic Law Enforcement" presentations to judges and cops.
There are traffic laws, and cops enforce them. That's law enforcement.
What do you think a "code" is? Go check out http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/
The first sentence is: "The United States Code is the codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the United States."
It's still not so easy - you need enough water for 45,000 people. That's going to be a large facility - and again, these ships aren't anything special.
Suppose you have storage for 1 million gallons of water - because you need 1 million gallons of water. Where are you going to put non-potable water while you distill it? How long would it take to distill 1 million gallons of water using a couple pots and some tubes?
Remember, they're on the run from the cylons, they don't have many resources, and they probably just don't have enough resources to build a large enough distillery to handle their needs.
I'm just saying that the lack of water and seeking water is not so unplausible.
I find Starbucks' ability to shoot-down/kill the cylon raider - then somehow getting inside, cutting its guts out - and still flying it much more unplausible. If the bio-junk in the ship is important, then how did the ship fly without it? And if it isn't important, why did the cylons put it in there?
I'm not so sure. This is not breaking in and doing nefarious things. And the fact that it's wireless is significant - because the broadcasts are going out into the public.
In this case, the router is actualy broadcasting to the public, saying, "Hi there - I'm WAP #12345. Would you like to connect to the internet?"
The computer's broadcasting, "hi there, I'm computer #67890. I'd like to connect to the internet."
The router says, "okay - here you go".
The computer guy did not hack the router - he was actually invited by the hardware to connect. The fact that the owner of the router did not want to invite people is irrelevant - his router was sending out invitations. And openly accessible WAPs are pretty common, so the owner can't even say, "well, he should have known that I wouldn't want him using the connection".
Well, you have to remember, this is a fleet of whatever ships that happened to survive, with a flagship that was about to be retired. Equipment for water processing is somewhat a limited resource - note how many of the ships relied on Galactica for water replenishment.
So, sure, water in some form is abundant in space/planets, etc. But they need water "now", and probably dont' have facilities to collect hydrogen/oxygen to make water, or to do a "moisture vaporator thing" - they had to support some 45,000 people - they had to get it fast, and worry about being caught by cylons on top of all that.
Hell... the colonel was upset that the water they found was salty - aparently they couldn't deal with even that.
So now you're on a search for potable water - and that has to be much more rare than water in any form. And it has to be in large quantities - and somewhat accessible in a quick manner.
I mean, imagine you're just 100 people, crashed in eastern Afghanistan, and you're being hunted by Taliban. Oh yeah, and you don't have enough water to get anywhere. So, sure, you could set up all kinds of ways to collect water - even in an erid environment. But, few of those will lend themselves well to being on the run and resource-poor.
It's really not that much of a stretch.
And that's different from most posts how?
One of the nice things about WinSCP is that you can either have it look like midnight commander - with two panes - local & remote, or you can have the remote side look like a normal file browser window that you can drag & drop to and from.
I'm sure some scripting could make it automatically log in, etc and make it fairly transparent to the user.
Right, but I thought we were making analogies.
The same kinds of idiots who have no idea what WEP is will be on the jury. Talking about unsecure networks is going to sail just over their heads.
It would be just like trying to describe open source software to people who've never heard of a computer.
It's more like sitting on the sidewalk outside someone's house at night. Their porch light is on and you're reading a book by that light.
One could say you're using the light they paid for without their permission. On the other hand, they're letting the light spill out into public land.