> Just imagine if someone creates alt.history.usenet_archive that would contain the archive of all usenet messages (including alt.history.usenet_archive, (including alt.history.usenet_archive, (including alt.history.usenet_archive, (including alt.history.usenet_archive...))))... > > In the future, we will look up old usenet postings in Godel's library catalog.
Who was it that said something along the lines of "For every silly idea, crackpot theory, or oddball sexual kink, there exists at least one adherent. Proof by example is left to USENET."
(Regrettably, I can't find the original quotation.)
"USENET is Frosty the Snowman committing suicide with a flamethrower"
- Kibo.
> > all about as romantic as a job fair
>
now that is a bothersome image. - Socializing with all the romance of a job fair.
Makes sense if you have things you want to cross off the list Right Away, though.
Me: "Do you want kids someday?"
She: "Of course, doesn't everyo..."
Me: "NEXT!"
She: "You mean you don't want kids?"
Me: "When I imagine my future, it never involves waking up to screaming at 0300h and being up to my armpits in babyshi..."
She: "NEXT!"
I could go through 20 non-starters in an hour, which could save years off the search for a mate the conventional way.
> Since you mention Stargate, there's another good example. I've been catching up on the
series retroactively thanks to the late night daily syndication on local TV. It seems so often they go to a new planet,
take a look at the environment around the local stargate and conclude the entire planet is like that.
So every planet other than Earth (and the ice planet you mentioned in your post) is a "Somewhere in British Columbia" planet?;-)
> [Win2K won't let you] Pick a new window manager?
What TheRev said -- why would you want to do that?
(I know why you might want to play with different window managers, but why would your pointy-haired boss, or the secretary in Marketing, give a rat's ass what window manager they used, so long as they could make PowerPoint slides, read Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets?)
Ask them - is a computer a magical box that can do everything you want it to? Or is a computer "that thing I use to make presentations, memos, and email."
> Y'all can't free-ride forever -- these hosting and bandwidth fees have to be paid somehow.
Maybe if your web server gave me the 3K of text that comprised the content I wanted, without the 50K of surrounding Javashit, and the 700K Flash animation, your bandwidth fees would go down?
> Today Boston.com is trying out a new ad scheme called the "Chichacolockney"! This new, media rich ad
dominates your screen, then wraps it's tentacles around the sides of your monitor and pulling itself out of
cyberspace into reality! It then proceeds to run rampant about your home, screaming advertisements for a
company, until you catch it and beat it to death.
Y'know, if I could have the satisfaction of beating the ad delivery vehicle to death, I wouldn't mind ads half as much as I do now.
Shoshkeles are annoying. What you describe sounds like fun.
> [the shoshkele] was for a Mini. Yes, those little cars, seen predominantly on Great Britain's streets, which make you want
to throw house-bricks at them every time you see them.
What, Austin Minis, or shoshkeles? *rimshot*
> Ad or no ad, I'll get in a Mini when someone pulls me by my cold, lifeless hands into one.
Does the Shoshkele's inventor have another daughter with a goofy name? If so, FOR GOD'S SAKE, MAN, STOP GIVING HIM IDEAS!
> I work in the data center for a moderately large company that sells banner ad software (using a hosted
model). All this and more is coming to a web page near you, based on the things our esteemed customers are
trying out.
May I suggest you get a job in a more ethical line of work? I hear the position of chief bioweapons engineer for Osama Bin Laden is open.
(And if you take the job, may the Marines do to your computers for what you do then, what I dearly wish it were legal for web surfers to do to your computers for what you do now;-)
> It also doesn't help that I have never wanted my Linux box to be "easy to use" (as defined by those who say
Linux needs to be more so), and thus have a hard time trying to make it so for others.
I think you've hit the nail squarely on the head here.
Sure, you can do PowerPoint-like presentations in Linux, but how many regular Linux users use PowerPoint on a daily basis? (And for those who do use PowerPoint -- they often have to exchange those presentations with other PP users. They can't use any presentation authoring tool, because they're sending the presentations to people who still use the Real McCoy.)
Sure, you can view web pages with Flash ads^H^Hnimations, but I jump through hoops disabling that crap.
Sure, you can "point, click, drag and drop" to manage your files, but I consider a mouse a device to tell a windowing system which xterm I wanna type into.
Put Joe Newbie and me in front of freshly-installed Linux boxen for 3 months. Joe Newbie will have eventually figured out how to do all that (probably by asking experts other than me), but will have been frustrated because it took him three months to get his box to do what his Windows box did out-of-the-box, and half his questions (to people like me) will be answered with "I guess you can, but I've never used it..."
Meanwhile, I'll have the three or four xterms, my mail by Pine or elm, Junkbuster, and web browsing with Netscape with image-autoload turned off and Flash forcibly removed, like I have for several years, and I'll continue to be happier than a pig in shit.
(What you said. The comment about the Randroids was, well, to make sure that the scoffers knew I wasn't a True Believer quoting her for the sake of quoting her;-)
> Maybe China will, for once, actually help stem the tide, since they have such lax laws. [on copyright]
I wouldn't bank on it.
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
> Does anyone think contacting our government representatives will help? Who has to sign this treaty? Is there a way to
encourage our elected leaders not to? (Do we stand a chance?)
> Whatever the case we
would still have a bit of global warming to go before we see tempuratures as high as they were in 1200 when Greenland
really had some "green" and England had viable wine vinyards 300 miles north of the current limit.
Y'know, this Global Warming stuff, if the eco-folks are right, sounds like a good thing.
All that useless tundra up in Canada and Siberia would be fertile land. Billions of dollars spent salting the roads in the Midwest would no longer be needed, as snowfalls would be light and infrequent.
The best part is that if it takes 100-200 years to go from "now" to "warmed", the economy will have time to adapt. Sure, Canadians may be saying "zee" instead of "zed" for the 26th letter of the alphabet in 2144, but the bottom line is that global warming isn't gonna be a catastrophe.
> [$CHICAGO$ / $MEMPHIS$] Perhaps just install DX8, and manually copy over the DLLs and any relevant registry settings for DX8.1?
Possibly. I know for a fact that I can use the "old" (-5 or -6 era, when it was merely adware, not total-flash-banner-wow-all-ads-all-the-timeware) versions of RealPlayer by merely copying certain DLLs from RealPlayer 8 into the proper directories.
Getting the DLLs is another story. I have an expendable installation I ghost onto a partition for just that purpose. I download the "new" Real, then swap drives and see what DLLs have changed between "expendable" and "home" installations after Real "updates" itself to play the "new" file format. I then copy the files, one at a time, until the new.rm plays.
Lord, I must really love South Park to put up with RealPlayer's antics.
> Go to MS's site and it'll
say "Windows 95 users, experience the wonderous yada yada of IE5.5 / WMP 6.4 in all its glory, because it's all you're
getting".
*shrug*
My 98SE box has 6.4 and the DiVX codec. I refuse to go to the bloatware that are WMP 7 and 8. I don't play.WMAs, never have, never will.
> Planned obsolescence is Microsoft's new model. If the old system does everything it needs to, nobody will upgrade.
So true.
Just for a lark, I installed Win3.1 and '95B on a ~1GHz, 7200RPM drive, 256M, decently-high-end machine.
Holy fsck, it boots fast. 3.1 in less than a second. Win95B took up less than 100M when all the extraneous crap was configured out of the install.
Side note on the Registry. Is it just me, or is a good portion of "boot time" reading in the 7-8M of fragmented files that USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT become after a few months?
I suspect defragging doesn't work, because the files are in use during defragging, and many defraggers (with good reason) ignore system/hidden/readonly files.
I concur with the "gimme 1000.ini files any day" approach. Put the config files (and any custom DLLs) in the application's directory, where they belong. I should be able to "uninstall" an application by merely deleting a directory tree.
Slashdot Mirror
Coming in 2008... "google.nsa.gov"
>
> In the future, we will look up old usenet postings in Godel's library catalog.
Who was it that said something along the lines of "For every silly idea, crackpot theory, or oddball sexual kink, there exists at least one adherent. Proof by example is left to USENET."
(Regrettably, I can't find the original quotation.)
"USENET is Frosty the Snowman committing suicide with a flamethrower" - Kibo.
> now that is a bothersome image. - Socializing with all the romance of a job fair.
Makes sense if you have things you want to cross off the list Right Away, though.
Me: "Do you want kids someday?"
She: "Of course, doesn't everyo..."
Me: "NEXT!"
She: "You mean you don't want kids?"
Me: "When I imagine my future, it never involves waking up to screaming at 0300h and being up to my armpits in babyshi..."
She: "NEXT!"
I could go through 20 non-starters in an hour, which could save years off the search for a mate the conventional way.
So every planet other than Earth (and the ice planet you mentioned in your post) is a "Somewhere in British Columbia" planet? ;-)
I'd think that in order for it to be sometime in the eleventh century, you'd have to be off by more than just 15 degrees ;-)
What TheRev said -- why would you want to do that?
(I know why you might want to play with different window managers, but why would your pointy-haired boss, or the secretary in Marketing, give a rat's ass what window manager they used, so long as they could make PowerPoint slides, read Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets?)
Ask them - is a computer a magical box that can do everything you want it to? Or is a computer "that thing I use to make presentations, memos, and email."
Maybe if your web server gave me the 3K of text that comprised the content I wanted, without the 50K of surrounding Javashit, and the 700K Flash animation, your bandwidth fees would go down?
Y'know, if I could have the satisfaction of beating the ad delivery vehicle to death, I wouldn't mind ads half as much as I do now.
Shoshkeles are annoying. What you describe sounds like fun.
An ad agency is a bunch of con men who con you into believing they can con your customers.
Cut. Pasted. .sig.
I only want to make one gesture when I see a Shoshkele, and it ain't with the mouse.
What, Austin Minis, or shoshkeles? *rimshot*
> Ad or no ad, I'll get in a Mini when someone pulls me by my cold, lifeless hands into one.
Does the Shoshkele's inventor have another daughter with a goofy name? If so, FOR GOD'S SAKE, MAN, STOP GIVING HIM IDEAS!
May I suggest you get a job in a more ethical line of work? I hear the position of chief bioweapons engineer for Osama Bin Laden is open.
(And if you take the job, may the Marines do to your computers for what you do then, what I dearly wish it were legal for web surfers to do to your computers for what you do now ;-)
Hey, marketroids, if I want your friggin' web site to make noise, I'll lick my fingers and rub the screen.
Until then, fuck you.
Shoshkeles. Named after the guy's daughter. With a name like that, I wouldn't fuck her with the VP of Marketing's dick.
Yup, just like yesterday's thread on how techies weren't the right ones to teach newbies how to do "all that flashy graphical stuff" Windoze boxen do.
I knew there was a reason I never install Flash, and why I disable it on any system (Windoze or otherwise) I expect to use regularly.
These Shoshkele things are the excuse I was looking for to show folks how good the Web can be with Flash disabled.
One problem with that approach.
Users. Don't. Read. Documentation.
Go around your office, and ask your non-technical (marketing, accounting, etc.) Windows users questions like:
I'll be amazed if more than 5% of your user community answers "yes" to any of those questions.
I think you've hit the nail squarely on the head here.
Sure, you can do PowerPoint-like presentations in Linux, but how many regular Linux users use PowerPoint on a daily basis? (And for those who do use PowerPoint -- they often have to exchange those presentations with other PP users. They can't use any presentation authoring tool, because they're sending the presentations to people who still use the Real McCoy.)
Sure, you can view web pages with Flash ads^H^Hnimations, but I jump through hoops disabling that crap.
Sure, you can "point, click, drag and drop" to manage your files, but I consider a mouse a device to tell a windowing system which xterm I wanna type into.
Put Joe Newbie and me in front of freshly-installed Linux boxen for 3 months. Joe Newbie will have eventually figured out how to do all that (probably by asking experts other than me), but will have been frustrated because it took him three months to get his box to do what his Windows box did out-of-the-box, and half his questions (to people like me) will be answered with "I guess you can, but I've never used it..."
Meanwhile, I'll have the three or four xterms, my mail by Pine or elm, Junkbuster, and web browsing with Netscape with image-autoload turned off and Flash forcibly removed, like I have for several years, and I'll continue to be happier than a pig in shit.
(What you said. The comment about the Randroids was, well, to make sure that the scoffers knew I wasn't a True Believer quoting her for the sake of quoting her ;-)
I wouldn't bank on it.
You don't have to be a Randroid to see the wisdom in this passage.No, Edgar "My company comes from a long line of bootleggers" Bronfman, No, and (No), in that order.
I agree, but wouldn't it be fun to confirm that hypothesis by experiment?
Y'know, this Global Warming stuff, if the eco-folks are right, sounds like a good thing.
All that useless tundra up in Canada and Siberia would be fertile land. Billions of dollars spent salting the roads in the Midwest would no longer be needed, as snowfalls would be light and infrequent.
The best part is that if it takes 100-200 years to go from "now" to "warmed", the economy will have time to adapt. Sure, Canadians may be saying "zee" instead of "zed" for the 26th letter of the alphabet in 2144, but the bottom line is that global warming isn't gonna be a catastrophe.
Possibly. I know for a fact that I can use the "old" (-5 or -6 era, when it was merely adware, not total-flash-banner-wow-all-ads-all-the-timeware) versions of RealPlayer by merely copying certain DLLs from RealPlayer 8 into the proper directories.
Getting the DLLs is another story. I have an expendable installation I ghost onto a partition for just that purpose. I download the "new" Real, then swap drives and see what DLLs have changed between "expendable" and "home" installations after Real "updates" itself to play the "new" file format. I then copy the files, one at a time, until the new .rm plays.
Lord, I must really love South Park to put up with RealPlayer's antics.
*shrug*
My 98SE box has 6.4 and the DiVX codec. I refuse to go to the bloatware that are WMP 7 and 8. I don't play .WMAs, never have, never will.
So true.
Just for a lark, I installed Win3.1 and '95B on a ~1GHz, 7200RPM drive, 256M, decently-high-end machine.
Holy fsck, it boots fast. 3.1 in less than a second. Win95B took up less than 100M when all the extraneous crap was configured out of the install.
Side note on the Registry. Is it just me, or is a good portion of "boot time" reading in the 7-8M of fragmented files that USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT become after a few months?
I suspect defragging doesn't work, because the files are in use during defragging, and many defraggers (with good reason) ignore system/hidden/readonly files.
I concur with the "gimme 1000 .ini files any day" approach. Put the config files (and any custom DLLs) in the application's directory, where they belong. I should be able to "uninstall" an application by merely deleting a directory tree.