For the last few months, about one in ten text messages I've sent have just vanished into the ether - no delivery, no error message. Interestingly enough, O2 seem to be perfectly capable of billing me for every SMS, regardless of whether they manage to send it or not.
Texting used to be very reliable, which means it's all the more annoying as I've come to depend on SMS for organising my social life. For example:
I don't think the author is really up to speed with technology. A couple of examples:
"We have the power, in today's computers, to use filesystems which store a unique identifier for every file, separate from the pathname -- such as the file ID in the HFS and HFS+ filesystems, or the inode in most filesystems used with Linux and Unix. In these filesystems, shortcuts and other references to particular files can keep track of these unchanging identifiers, rather than the pathname, so none of those errors will ever happen."
What about network shares in Windows or remote mounts in *nix? These are filesystem-independent, so unique identifiers like inodes aren't available.
"So why do we still punish people by including "Quit" or "Exit" menu items in programs? Cruft."
Not cruft - the GUI desktop is like a workbench: you pull up the tool you want to use, and you work on your creation with the tool until you're done. Then you put the tool away to make room for using the next tool. You can use several tools at once (multitasking), and you might put one tool down nearby (iconise it) if you know you'll come back to it soon, but it still makes sense to put the tool away for good (exit) when you're done with it.
Not much of a discussion - a very short article with three quotes from some recruitment consultant, including this gem: "People see any additional expenditure as fun..." - eh? Wot?
In any case, most employers know that the presence of a tie around a techie's neck doesn't in general improve his or her morale or productivity. Even if I enjoyed wearing a tie and wore one voluntarily, making it mandatory would piss me off.
Also, the point of closest approach to a large mass is by far the most efficient place to burn fuel for a trajectory change. If you combine this with the slingshot effect, which can be used either to speed you up or slow you down, depending on which way you go around, then it takes far less fuel to get where you're going and park when you arrive.
"At this moment I asked a couple of people on irc (#sage-au) if they have had troubles with compiling openssh the last days. Yups, ^Sarge^@bofh.snsonline.net also had it, also a checksum mismatch."
"I think we'll see a lot of innovation," said Fyfe. "People are talking about weaving displays into clothing. Will there ever be a mass market for that? I doubt it. But it will probably be seized on by someone."
So I'll finally get to shag someone in an AOL-style video-minidress - mmm, ohh...
Dragonfly - Order Odonata. It converted me from a die-hard rocker to a die-hard rocker with an identity crisis. Please don't tell any of my friends...
Seriously - Dragonfly do compilations of very good trance/techno - very intricate, very moody at times, very energetic at others, and overall very musical. Lots of real talent in there. Enjoy.
"Our goal is to resolve difficult issues that are driving a wedge between the commercial and free software models,"
Microsoft's push is a new front in a long-running company assault on the open-source movement, which company officials have called "a cancer" and un-American.
Perhaps the Pentagon should hire a certain Peruvian politician to be a flapper and field the FUD...
According to the court and prior case law, regardless of the "original authorship" contained in a work, "the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking."
FAQ's benefit everyone. They're collections of information, often resulting from many users' experiences over time, and they can be an extremely valuable resource. Although the chap who gathers the information together and presents it might well feel a bit miffed if you copied his FAQ and its style exactly without his permission, trying to prevent someone from distributing a FAQ helps no one.
As has been mentioned once or twice on Slashdot, copyright protection is supposed to benefit the public, not particular individuals.
I managed to disconnect from ntl with the utmost of ease. All I had to do was be someone who signed up in 1997 with Mercury Internet Dial, who became Cable and Wireless, who became ntl, who let me find out from a third party that all of us old-timers were being disconnected last October.
Their disconnection service is very thorough and efficient; despite the fact that I phoned half a dozen times and was assured four times that my service would be replaced with ntl@home, I'm still ntl-less after 7 months. Now that they've filed for Chapter 11, I'm confident that my disconnection is rock-solid and thoroughly reliable.
>Look at crime rates in Europe, where guns are
>near impossible to get hold of
That kid in Germany sure seemed to have his share. I won't mention terrorist groups like the IRA, Red Brigade, ETA, 17 November, or any of a hundred splinter groups...
Please, don't judge us poor Europeans by the behaviour of those of us who make the headlines across the pond. To quote a master,
"Folks are basically decent
conventional wisdom would say.
Well, we read about the exceptions
in the papers every day."
So all Microsoft have to do is drag the lawsuit out for three years. They'd better brush up on their legal delaying and diversionary skills - oh, hang on a sec...
/.ers in the UK will know what I mean - now we'll have the New Improved Wanker On The Train This Morning - shouting "I'm just 'avin' a quick pump!" obnoxiously loudly into a mobile phone while frantically charging up his laptop. I can see it now:
"...all those people, then numbering about 500, who have been rounded up in the terrorism investigation. Who are they? Why are they being held? Does anybody know anything? "Who's representing these people and trying to get them out?"
The panelists' silence leaves Gilmore exasperated."
It's interesting to see such a simple and straightforward question having that kind of effect, effectively stumping a respectable panel of experts.
To give credit where it's due, the question is probably only obvious with hindsight, and kudos to John Gilmore for asking it.
A $5000 stereo and you listen to mp3's on it?
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you have a $5000 stereo, then presumably you can hear the difference between that and a $2000 stereo, unless you bought it for that nice warm fuzzy feeling that comes with owning extremely expensive and nifty kit. Which I can understand;) But if you're a true audiophile, and your ears are really that good, why are you listening to mp3's on that nice system?
On the scale of the universe, objects on the other side of the galaxy are moving extremely fast (relative to you). I'm not sure exactly how fast, but I remember reading somewhere that it is getting close to the speed of light
Do you mean "on the other side of the universe"? The most distant objects we've seen (usually quasars or groups of stars like the one being discussed) are indeed travelling away from us at appreciable fractions of the speed of light. However, at much smaller scales, ie the size of a galaxy, the Doppler shift due to the expansion of the universe is swamped by the motion of stars within the galaxy as they orbit its centre, and these velocities are miniscule compared to the speed of light. For example, we're about halfway out along one of the Milky Way's spiral arms. A star nearer the Galactic core, say a fifth of the way out, could appear to be coming towards us or moving away from us, depending on whether it was ahead of us or behind us in the direction of galactic rotation.
I was an astrophysicist, but I got a job as a computer programmer. It pays better.
Slashdot Mirror
For the last few months, about one in ten text messages I've sent have just vanished into the ether - no delivery, no error message. Interestingly enough, O2 seem to be perfectly capable of billing me for every SMS, regardless of whether they manage to send it or not.
Texting used to be very reliable, which means it's all the more annoying as I've come to depend on SMS for organising my social life. For example:
"You at the pub yet?"
"Nope - you?"
"Nearly - call me when you get there."
"Okay. Wot you drinking?"
"Lager shandy."
"Poof!"
I don't think the author is really up to speed with technology. A couple of examples:
"We have the power, in today's computers, to use filesystems which store a unique identifier for every file, separate from the pathname -- such as the file ID in the HFS and HFS+ filesystems, or the inode in most filesystems used with Linux and Unix. In these filesystems, shortcuts and other references to particular files can keep track of these unchanging identifiers, rather than the pathname, so none of those errors will ever happen."
What about network shares in Windows or remote mounts in *nix? These are filesystem-independent, so unique identifiers like inodes aren't available.
"So why do we still punish people by including "Quit" or "Exit" menu items in programs? Cruft."
Not cruft - the GUI desktop is like a workbench: you pull up the tool you want to use, and you work on your creation with the tool until you're done. Then you put the tool away to make room for using the next tool. You can use several tools at once (multitasking), and you might put one tool down nearby (iconise it) if you know you'll come back to it soon, but it still makes sense to put the tool away for good (exit) when you're done with it.
Not much of a discussion - a very short article with three quotes from some recruitment consultant, including this gem: "People see any additional expenditure as fun..." - eh? Wot?
In any case, most employers know that the presence of a tie around a techie's neck doesn't in general improve his or her morale or productivity. Even if I enjoyed wearing a tie and wore one voluntarily, making it mandatory would piss me off.
Prostitutes and pimps and main characters, oh my!
Prostitutes and pimps and main characters, oh my!
Also, the point of closest approach to a large mass is by far the most efficient place to burn fuel for a trajectory change. If you combine this with the slingshot effect, which can be used either to speed you up or slow you down, depending on which way you go around, then it takes far less fuel to get where you're going and park when you arrive.
...is an excellent explanation of the more interesting bits of quantum mechanics, aimed at the layman, but perfectly enjoyable by physicists as well.
I wholeheartedly recommend another of Davies' books, God and the New Physics, which is about what QM and relativity can tell us about our beliefs.
"At this moment I asked a couple of people on irc (#sage-au) if they have had troubles with compiling openssh the last days. Yups, ^Sarge^@bofh.snsonline.net also had it, also a checksum mismatch."
The trojan connects to 203.62.158.32, eh?
> nslookup 203.62.158.32Server: dns2.intra
Address: 10.16.59.15
Name: snsonline.net
Address: 203.62.158.32
>
"I think we'll see a lot of innovation," said Fyfe. "People are talking about weaving displays into clothing. Will there ever be a mass market for that? I doubt it. But it will probably be seized on by someone."
So I'll finally get to shag someone in an AOL-style video-minidress - mmm, ohh...
Dragonfly - Order Odonata. It converted me from a die-hard rocker to a die-hard rocker with an identity crisis. Please don't tell any of my friends...
Seriously - Dragonfly do compilations of very good trance/techno - very intricate, very moody at times, very energetic at others, and overall very musical. Lots of real talent in there. Enjoy.
"Our goal is to resolve difficult issues that are driving a wedge between the commercial and free software models,"
Microsoft's push is a new front in a long-running company assault on the open-source movement, which company officials have called "a cancer" and un-American.
Perhaps the Pentagon should hire a certain Peruvian politician to be a flapper and field the FUD...
According to the court and prior case law, regardless of the "original authorship" contained in a work, "the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking."
FAQ's benefit everyone. They're collections of information, often resulting from many users' experiences over time, and they can be an extremely valuable resource. Although the chap who gathers the information together and presents it might well feel a bit miffed if you copied his FAQ and its style exactly without his permission, trying to prevent someone from distributing a FAQ helps no one.
As has been mentioned once or twice on Slashdot, copyright protection is supposed to benefit the public, not particular individuals.
I managed to disconnect from ntl with the utmost of ease. All I had to do was be someone who signed up in 1997 with Mercury Internet Dial, who became Cable and Wireless, who became ntl, who let me find out from a third party that all of us old-timers were being disconnected last October.
Their disconnection service is very thorough and efficient; despite the fact that I phoned half a dozen times and was assured four times that my service would be replaced with ntl@home, I'm still ntl-less after 7 months. Now that they've filed for Chapter 11, I'm confident that my disconnection is rock-solid and thoroughly reliable.
I guess some of us are just lucky, eh?
Oh, and I can't let this one go...
>Look at crime rates in Europe, where guns are
>near impossible to get hold of
That kid in Germany sure seemed to have his share. I won't mention terrorist groups like the IRA, Red Brigade, ETA, 17 November, or any of a hundred splinter groups...
Please, don't judge us poor Europeans by the behaviour of those of us who make the headlines across the pond. To quote a master,
"Folks are basically decent
conventional wisdom would say.
Well, we read about the exceptions
in the papers every day."
"The source code for the vault, which runs under the Linux operating system, is available on Dartmouth's website."
So this system will itself be illegal when Senator Hollings and his ilk finally get non-security-compliant systems banned.
Picture, if you will, a vast cubicle farm full of XP pc's.
Now throw in an evil sysadmin who, on the day he leaves the company, sets all system sounds on all pc's to:
"Start menu, Shut down, Shut down the computer."
So all Microsoft have to do is drag the lawsuit out for three years. They'd better brush up on their legal delaying and diversionary skills - oh, hang on a sec...
/.ers in the UK will know what I mean - now we'll have the New Improved Wanker On The Train This Morning - shouting "I'm just 'avin' a quick pump!" obnoxiously loudly into a mobile phone while frantically charging up his laptop. I can see it now:
"Cause of death, constable?"
"Being a complete tosser, if you ask me, sir."
"...all those people, then numbering about 500, who have been rounded up in the terrorism investigation. Who are they? Why are they being held? Does anybody know anything? "Who's representing these people and trying to get them out?"
The panelists' silence leaves Gilmore exasperated."
It's interesting to see such a simple and straightforward question having that kind of effect, effectively stumping a respectable panel of experts.
To give credit where it's due, the question is probably only obvious with hindsight, and kudos to John Gilmore for asking it.
If you have a $5000 stereo, then presumably you can hear the difference between that and a $2000 stereo, unless you bought it for that nice warm fuzzy feeling that comes with owning extremely expensive and nifty kit. Which I can understand ;) But if you're a true audiophile, and your ears are really that good, why are you listening to mp3's on that nice system?
On the scale of the universe, objects on the other side of the galaxy are moving extremely fast (relative to you). I'm not sure exactly how fast, but I remember reading somewhere that it is getting close to the speed of light
Do you mean "on the other side of the universe"? The most distant objects we've seen (usually quasars or groups of stars like the one being discussed) are indeed travelling away from us at appreciable fractions of the speed of light. However, at much smaller scales, ie the size of a galaxy, the Doppler shift due to the expansion of the universe is swamped by the motion of stars within the galaxy as they orbit its centre, and these velocities are miniscule compared to the speed of light. For example, we're about halfway out along one of the Milky Way's spiral arms. A star nearer the Galactic core, say a fifth of the way out, could appear to be coming towards us or moving away from us, depending on whether it was ahead of us or behind us in the direction of galactic rotation.
I was an astrophysicist, but I got a job as a computer programmer. It pays better.