I can vouch for the validity of this claim. A friend worked with one of the organizations for a couple of weeks. Most of the donated money ends up in the company's pocket, and very little (if any) goes to the actual charity. I know shopping at a thrift stores mostly benefits the owner of the thrift, not the "abused women and children". However, these charatiable solicitors do not make it clear that most of the donation stays with them. If you want to donate to the police or firefighters, drop off some cookies and soft drinks. Or gift cards to a major store or restaurant. It would go much further than the $1 of your $20 donation.
Our environment contains more substances today which cause cells to mutate: estrogen-like chemicals, fine soot particles, innumerous medicines, radioactive decay, socially acceptable behaviors like smoking. Additionally is the continued decay of the athmosphere's blocking of UV radiation (and basement-dweller sensitivity to the sun) and the "ozone layer" problems. Overuse of antibiotics has created "superbugs" we can't completely cure (tubercolosis, staph infections).
If our bodies were not meant to last this long, babies born of old males and young females should have more genetic problems than young males and females. If our sole purpose was to reproduce a few times and die "young" (before 35), then why do our cells have so many proteins dedicated to detecting and repairing chromosome damage? Shouldn't they deactivate after 35 years?
Why would nature keep old people around? How does nature select for old age genes if you reproduce when young? Some theories are that older people pass their life's knowledge to the next generation, without the next generation having to experience it themselves. Older people act as secondary caregivers, freeing the younger generation to do "useful stuff".
There's no reason to believe our bodies were made to wear out at 60 or 70. Eat less calories, more fruit and veggies high in anti-oxidant compounds, exercise (physical labor and mental), and there's no reason that our bodies couldn't last... longer. How much longer? One study says maybe 120 years.
I called DISH and asked a representative about the injunction -- they are not aware of the injunction yet (or don't have the corporate position to spout).
Remember this is the same DISH network that was willing to turn off all Viacom channels for a while. I don't think they are willing to turn off DVR for all their customers -- it's TiVo playing hardball to get a license settlement now. DISH knows that their best, most profitable customers would leave if their DVR disappeared.
On disabling -- some newer receivers do not have an option to reject updates. Where the old DISHPlayer and the early (non-DVR) receivers did, the (Linux-based) 721, for example, does not. Also, if you disable updates, channels start disappering when the encryption keys change.
Primarily, the multiple streams in NTFS were made to support storing Macintosh dual-fork files (data & resources) on an NTFS volume. Wikipedia, Microsoft, and others have more information. Since then, the alternate data streams have been used for many other purposes.
Did you know that XP used the streams to store the summary information about documents? MSDN has the details.
I remember an anti-virus program was keeping the MD5 of each scanned file in an NTFS stream, a la tripwire.
The ICOM PCR1500 (Japanese) already receives everything from DC to 1.3GHz (minus analog cell frequencies, unless you're a government user). No additional modules required, and uses USB and fairly open software controls.
Or, for even cheaper ($350), Ten-Tec's RX-320D, with digital radio. Everything from DC to 30MHz (shortwave).
I've never used any of them, your milage may vary, etc.
If you can get a user to understand the difference between absolute and relative cell addressing, the problem with editing individual formulas is made a copy-paste task. Instead of typing (or clicking) all the cell references each time, you write the formula pattern and fill it into the appropriate cells.
I agree that the single-line editor for spreadsheet formulas is archaic. Please give us indented spreadsheet formulas. The parenthesis highlighting is nice, but not enough.
If you want spreadsheets as a "rigorous programming environment," please use Visual Basic for Applications. It's there, and will do many nifty tricks. You even get the benefit of making "compiled" Excel spreadsheets.
Myself, I used an embedded Excel spreadsheet within a VB application to generate charts. Change the numbers in the spreadsheet (via VB), and the charts redrew with new numbers. Much easier to use than the Chart OCX.
Somewhat offtopic, but this is/. -- back in the mid-80s, there was a database program for the Mac called Double Helix. It used drag-n-drop, flowchart shapes to program how the database worked. As a programmer, it was frustrating to get the drags and drops of the arrows to work properly. As a non-programmer, users were still just as confused as to what the shapes were supposed to do.
Just a thought. Did you consider bringing in some generic 10/100 switches to replace their 10 hubs on a temporary basis? I would have at least shown an incredible speed-up and charged Oracle consultant fees.
Even more mysterious, tell them that the switch recompiles their database SQL into a more optimized form, pre-digested for Oracle DBMS. Demonstrate with replacing the one hub for the database machine with a switch. At least it wouldn't be as bad.
Actually, I might have demonstrated that their queries and database workload were fine, but their single collision network was the problem by showing collision and back-off times. Have only one or two computers execute queries and watch them work. Have the same two computers execute while massive network traffic unrelated to Oracle execute and watch the queries fail.
Yes, it's cheaper. You also will wait 1 to 2 weeks for it to ship. Buying from the Apple store ships today (well, it's now 2-4 business days), and is free shipping.
Sure, it's a pretty mouse from Apple. I was tempted to buy one -- until I read this:
Mac OS X v10.4.2 or later -- Enable or disable scrolling, assign primary and secondary buttons, activate Exposé, display Dashboard, open Spotlight, switch applications or open applications.
Mac OS X v10.3.9 or 10.4.1 and earlier -- Assign primary and secondary buttons and activate Exposé. Display Dashboard in Mac OS X v10.4 or 10.4.1.
Mac OS X v10.3.8 and earlier -- Use as a multibutton scrolling mouse.
So, no shiny programmability unless you're running OS X Tiger 10.4.2? Hmmph. Only assigning buttons is not acceptable in OS X 10.3.9. How hard could it be to fix the mouse system widget?
I wonder if it will be the pack-in mouse for new system?
It all goes back to the IBM CGA colors. Lovely explanation and table available here.
Early arcade games used resistor ladders to change the level of red, green, or blue signal to the monitor per pixel. CGA only understood "on" and "off" (and "on brighter").
Pismo is supported, but only just. Even with 1GB of RAM, 10.4 is only slightly faster than 10.3. The Pismo does not have GPU hardware video acceleration support. Most everything else is acceptable. Same applies to original eMac, iMac, and iBook models.
I now know for a fact that developing for 10.5 is going to require at least a G4 processor. How soon before there are G5 laptops? That should hold me down another four or five releases. (I bought a Pismo back in '99, and still boot OS 9 occasionally).
There is no shortage of writers. Quite the contrary. In fact, there is no shortage of good stories and good writers.
What there is, is a shortage of readers, more specifically, there has been a major, major downturn of book-buying.
Have you seen the prices of books recently? Close to $10 for a paperback, or $30 for a hardback. With a choice of three books or a videogame, most people are choosing video games. As much as I like to read and own books, I can't afford to support publishers at the profit levels to which they are accustomed.
It's a declining cycle -- fewer readers, fewer book choices, fewer readers.... Even if books were priced more reasonably, it still would be difficult to recapture the reading market. Short attention span, thousands of television channels (inertial viewers), videogame consoles, blogs, and there's only so much entertainment time in the day/week.
The ability to dial 911 is the only boogy-man the phone company can raise against VoIP.
How about this -- look up the phone number to your fire department and police department. Post the numbers next to the phone. In case of emergency, dial the appropriate number. It's what we did before we had 911 service.
If you just can't live without 911, get an old cell phone and use it to dial 911. No contract required.
Apple has the color iPod, many people say it's the perfect way to store and show video clips. Apple claims that the processor in the iPod is not powerful enough to display video, and sits on their hands.
Microsoft brings out their VD service, and for once beats Apple to the party. Yes, the MS offering only works on WinCE devices, will probably be DRM (no sharing video clips!), and require payments over time. Not to mention the advertisements before the clips (I, for one, am tired of our advertising overlords).
If Apple was working on a video iPod, it's time to make press releases or do damage control.
Dragging outputs to inputs like Helix Express? I remember buying it for the Macintosh back in 1989, along with Maze Wars+.
I found it interesting, but somewhat annoying. Dragging arrows and tiles around to make a for-next loop was lots of work vs. typing two lines of code.
Re:Why has corporate America avoided Macs?
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A Mac might be out of place if you're a Windows admin trying to lock down your users with draconian Group Policies
It's possible to be a BOFH on a Mac network as well: Workgroup Management allows the administrator to control access to the dock, system preferences and applications, among other things. It even works with Active Directory.
You will need a copy of OS X Server, but that's only $500 or $1,000. What BOFH can't hide that expense amount in a budget request? Especially if it means sticking it to those pesky Mac users!
For even more fun, treat your Mac users as if they were children needing supervision with Parental Controls -- no more sending messages to random users, no typing unapproved URLs into Safari, no running unapproved applications. Even better, the Parental Controls are built into every copy of OS X! What more can a BOFH ask for?
Yes, because with the park, you pay Hasbro for the Scrabble sets you use. The creator of this site doesn't.
Would it be legal if we all donated our old Scrabble sets to him for use on his website? If we donate 1,000 boards, can we play 1,000 simultaneous games?
On a related note, Amateur Radio has been using APRS for amateur radio operators to send their location (via GPS) and other information (such as weather conditions or short messages) using the 2 meter (144.390 MHz) frequency.
The local digipeter picks up the APRS packet and forwards it to another digipeter or an internet-connected station, at which point the packet information is visible on several web sites.
Creating a mesh of access points for 802.11b is not a trivial task, but proper coordination within a municipiality could create a geek-administered metro area network similar to the APRS network.
Bad sector viruses do exist in the wild -- early PC computers had boot-sector or application-patched code to load data from a (hard-coded) sector/cluster marked as bad (but really wasn't).
I remember checking a brand-new floppy disc and seeing bad sectors listed by the CHKDSK program -- the disc had been infected with a bad-sector virus.
The really nice part about bad-sector viruses is that the code to load a hard-coded sector from the hard drive and transfer execution is just a few bytes -- load AX, BX, CX, DX, call INT 13, and JSR to virus code.
A dead-space virus would work in a similar manner, but the infection code would look for incompletely filled clusters and store code in the slack space of a cluster. Unfortunately, you also have to patch INT 13 to catch writes to your special sector so you can re-locate when your slack space is no longer slack (another file moves into the cluster). Much more difficult all around. (With dead-space viruses, if you have 4K clusters and store a file that's 1K long, there's 3K of slack space in the cluster holding the file data. If it's a 14K file with 4K clusters, that's 3 full clusters and 2K of slack space in the last cluster of the file data.)
A virus using bad sectors to hold their code would be far more difficult in a microkernel environment where hardware access (INT 13) is not allowed from user space. It would be interesting to see Stoned or Ping-Pong on the "Press F8 for Boot Menu" text screen, though.
Mail that looks like a check, but is really something else..... Credit card applications with little fake credit cards in them. Err, why?
To counter mail theft, companies mail real credit cards and checks in a blizzard of fake credit card and fake check mail. People who would steal credit cards from a mailbox would "feel" the card through the envelope and lift it.
Most of the time, credit cards arrive in a non-descript envelope triple-folded in heavy paper. It's really hard to tell there's a credit card in the envelope.
The fake checks really bother me as well. I always figured it was a way to get you to open the envelope and see the sales message inside, instead of immediately disposing of the junk mail and not seeing their message.
I usually dispose of any envelopes with bulk-mail postage without opening it -- except credit card offers. I like reading the outrageous terms and conditions before they hit the shredder. And the fake credit cards make great ice scrapers.
If everyone who visits/. visited and dropped a treat for the kitties, I would imagine the kitties are probably quite ill.
Too bad there's not a webcam of the pile of kitty treats in front of the server. Over 3000 treats have been dropped, but no indication of the timeframe.
If I buy a painting from an artist, I have not bought the copyright along with that painting. I cannot make copies of it and distribute it.
However, if you paid the artist to create the painting, you own both the painting and the copyright. Otherwise, artists who create trade marks for corporations would be rich.
So, grab yourself a "starving artist" and pay them to be creative. However, I think there was a problem with this system back in the middle ages.... ask the RIAA about their "Work for Hire" program.
This week's set of Windows patches requires the machine to reboot. I'm about to give a presentation, so I click on the 'Reboot Later' button. Ten minutes into the presentation, the full-screen presentation reverts to window-sized, and the 'You need to reboot' message pops up again.
Yes, you can drag the window off to the left or right of the screen so that it doesn't annoy, but how many users know to do that? Clicking 'Later' makes the box go away for a while (or click 'Now' and lose what you were doing, oops). There is no preference to make the delay longer, or not pop up at all.
The issues addressed in the parent are easily solved. The 'Reboot Now' message is not. I'll reboot when I'm good and ready, and not a moment before, so stop bothering me!
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I can vouch for the validity of this claim. A friend worked with one of the organizations for a couple of weeks. Most of the donated money ends up in the company's pocket, and very little (if any) goes to the actual charity.
I know shopping at a thrift stores mostly benefits the owner of the thrift, not the "abused women and children". However, these charatiable solicitors do not make it clear that most of the donation stays with them.
If you want to donate to the police or firefighters, drop off some cookies and soft drinks. Or gift cards to a major store or restaurant. It would go much further than the $1 of your $20 donation.
Our environment contains more substances today which cause cells to mutate: estrogen-like chemicals, fine soot particles, innumerous medicines, radioactive decay, socially acceptable behaviors like smoking. Additionally is the continued decay of the athmosphere's blocking of UV radiation (and basement-dweller sensitivity to the sun) and the "ozone layer" problems. Overuse of antibiotics has created "superbugs" we can't completely cure (tubercolosis, staph infections).
If our bodies were not meant to last this long, babies born of old males and young females should have more genetic problems than young males and females. If our sole purpose was to reproduce a few times and die "young" (before 35), then why do our cells have so many proteins dedicated to detecting and repairing chromosome damage? Shouldn't they deactivate after 35 years?
Why would nature keep old people around? How does nature select for old age genes if you reproduce when young? Some theories are that older people pass their life's knowledge to the next generation, without the next generation having to experience it themselves. Older people act as secondary caregivers, freeing the younger generation to do "useful stuff".
There's no reason to believe our bodies were made to wear out at 60 or 70. Eat less calories, more fruit and veggies high in anti-oxidant compounds, exercise (physical labor and mental), and there's no reason that our bodies couldn't last... longer. How much longer? One study says maybe 120 years.
I called DISH and asked a representative about the injunction -- they are not aware of the injunction yet (or don't have the corporate position to spout).
Remember this is the same DISH network that was willing to turn off all Viacom channels for a while. I don't think they are willing to turn off DVR for all their customers -- it's TiVo playing hardball to get a license settlement now. DISH knows that their best, most profitable customers would leave if their DVR disappeared.
On disabling -- some newer receivers do not have an option to reject updates. Where the old DISHPlayer and the early (non-DVR) receivers did, the (Linux-based) 721, for example, does not. Also, if you disable updates, channels start disappering when the encryption keys change.
Primarily, the multiple streams in NTFS were made to support storing Macintosh dual-fork files (data & resources) on an NTFS volume. Wikipedia, Microsoft, and others have more information. Since then, the alternate data streams have been used for many other purposes.
Did you know that XP used the streams to store the summary information about documents? MSDN has the details.
I remember an anti-virus program was keeping the MD5 of each scanned file in an NTFS stream, a la tripwire.
Your searches may vary -- this is enough to get the ball rolling.
Or, for even cheaper ($350), Ten-Tec's RX-320D, with digital radio. Everything from DC to 30MHz (shortwave).
I've never used any of them, your milage may vary, etc.
I agree that the single-line editor for spreadsheet formulas is archaic. Please give us indented spreadsheet formulas. The parenthesis highlighting is nice, but not enough.
If you want spreadsheets as a "rigorous programming environment," please use Visual Basic for Applications. It's there, and will do many nifty tricks. You even get the benefit of making "compiled" Excel spreadsheets.
Myself, I used an embedded Excel spreadsheet within a VB application to generate charts. Change the numbers in the spreadsheet (via VB), and the charts redrew with new numbers. Much easier to use than the Chart OCX.
Somewhat offtopic, but this is /. -- back in the mid-80s, there was a database program for the Mac called Double Helix. It used drag-n-drop, flowchart shapes to program how the database worked. As a programmer, it was frustrating to get the drags and drops of the arrows to work properly. As a non-programmer, users were still just as confused as to what the shapes were supposed to do.
Even more mysterious, tell them that the switch recompiles their database SQL into a more optimized form, pre-digested for Oracle DBMS. Demonstrate with replacing the one hub for the database machine with a switch. At least it wouldn't be as bad.
Actually, I might have demonstrated that their queries and database workload were fine, but their single collision network was the problem by showing collision and back-off times. Have only one or two computers execute queries and watch them work. Have the same two computers execute while massive network traffic unrelated to Oracle execute and watch the queries fail.
Occam's Razor, and all that.
Save $3, or have geek toy by the end of the week?
I wonder if it will be the pack-in mouse for new system?
Early arcade games used resistor ladders to change the level of red, green, or blue signal to the monitor per pixel. CGA only understood "on" and "off" (and "on brighter").
I now know for a fact that developing for 10.5 is going to require at least a G4 processor. How soon before there are G5 laptops? That should hold me down another four or five releases. (I bought a Pismo back in '99, and still boot OS 9 occasionally).
It's a declining cycle -- fewer readers, fewer book choices, fewer readers.... Even if books were priced more reasonably, it still would be difficult to recapture the reading market. Short attention span, thousands of television channels (inertial viewers), videogame consoles, blogs, and there's only so much entertainment time in the day/week.
How about this -- look up the phone number to your fire department and police department. Post the numbers next to the phone. In case of emergency, dial the appropriate number. It's what we did before we had 911 service.
If you just can't live without 911, get an old cell phone and use it to dial 911. No contract required.
Microsoft brings out their VD service, and for once beats Apple to the party. Yes, the MS offering only works on WinCE devices, will probably be DRM (no sharing video clips!), and require payments over time. Not to mention the advertisements before the clips (I, for one, am tired of our advertising overlords).
If Apple was working on a video iPod, it's time to make press releases or do damage control.
I found it interesting, but somewhat annoying. Dragging arrows and tiles around to make a for-next loop was lots of work vs. typing two lines of code.
You will need a copy of OS X Server, but that's only $500 or $1,000. What BOFH can't hide that expense amount in a budget request? Especially if it means sticking it to those pesky Mac users!
For even more fun, treat your Mac users as if they were children needing supervision with Parental Controls -- no more sending messages to random users, no typing unapproved URLs into Safari, no running unapproved applications. Even better, the Parental Controls are built into every copy of OS X! What more can a BOFH ask for?
Restart your Macintosh
While the Macintosh makes the pleasant startup sound, press and hold the 'T' key on your Macintosh's keyboard
As you wait approximately 20 seconds for Target Disk mode to begin, imagine the profitability of the third step
When the pretty day-glow orange FireWire logo appears on your Target Disk Macintosh's screen, release the 'T' key
Connect your Target Disk Macintosh's FireWire port to another Macintosh's FireWire port using a standard FireWire cable
Watch as the drive(s) of the Target Disk Macintosh appear on the screen of the other Macintosh in bright day-glow orange
Copy files previously unaccessable on the Target Disk Macintosh to a safe location
With Target Disk mode, it's easy to make backup copies of critical files for offsite storage.
The local digipeter picks up the APRS packet and forwards it to another digipeter or an internet-connected station, at which point the packet information is visible on several web sites.
Creating a mesh of access points for 802.11b is not a trivial task, but proper coordination within a municipiality could create a geek-administered metro area network similar to the APRS network.
I remember checking a brand-new floppy disc and seeing bad sectors listed by the CHKDSK program -- the disc had been infected with a bad-sector virus.
The really nice part about bad-sector viruses is that the code to load a hard-coded sector from the hard drive and transfer execution is just a few bytes -- load AX, BX, CX, DX, call INT 13, and JSR to virus code.
A dead-space virus would work in a similar manner, but the infection code would look for incompletely filled clusters and store code in the slack space of a cluster. Unfortunately, you also have to patch INT 13 to catch writes to your special sector so you can re-locate when your slack space is no longer slack (another file moves into the cluster). Much more difficult all around. (With dead-space viruses, if you have 4K clusters and store a file that's 1K long, there's 3K of slack space in the cluster holding the file data. If it's a 14K file with 4K clusters, that's 3 full clusters and 2K of slack space in the last cluster of the file data.)
A virus using bad sectors to hold their code would be far more difficult in a microkernel environment where hardware access (INT 13) is not allowed from user space. It would be interesting to see Stoned or Ping-Pong on the "Press F8 for Boot Menu" text screen, though.
Most of the time, credit cards arrive in a non-descript envelope triple-folded in heavy paper. It's really hard to tell there's a credit card in the envelope.
The fake checks really bother me as well. I always figured it was a way to get you to open the envelope and see the sales message inside, instead of immediately disposing of the junk mail and not seeing their message.
I usually dispose of any envelopes with bulk-mail postage without opening it -- except credit card offers. I like reading the outrageous terms and conditions before they hit the shredder. And the fake credit cards make great ice scrapers.
Too bad there's not a webcam of the pile of kitty treats in front of the server. Over 3000 treats have been dropped, but no indication of the timeframe.
I wonder if the web spiders feed the kitties...
So, grab yourself a "starving artist" and pay them to be creative. However, I think there was a problem with this system back in the middle ages.... ask the RIAA about their "Work for Hire" program.
This week's set of Windows patches requires the machine to reboot. I'm about to give a presentation, so I click on the 'Reboot Later' button. Ten minutes into the presentation, the full-screen presentation reverts to window-sized, and the 'You need to reboot' message pops up again.
Yes, you can drag the window off to the left or right of the screen so that it doesn't annoy, but how many users know to do that? Clicking 'Later' makes the box go away for a while (or click 'Now' and lose what you were doing, oops). There is no preference to make the delay longer, or not pop up at all.
The issues addressed in the parent are easily solved. The 'Reboot Now' message is not. I'll reboot when I'm good and ready, and not a moment before, so stop bothering me!