I would ask the same thing that all of us non-IT have been asking for the past six years or so.... YOU do the IT work so that the departments don't have to do shadow IT work.
There has just been a major reorg at the hands of a new CEO, and the message has finally been heard.
With that, I anticipate that I will be joining the IT department within the year.
Yes, I know, there's the potential for collision with a string that's actually 0xFFFF bytes long
Solve thus: Start with the 0xFFFF to indicate the length of the string. Follw that with the 65535 characters that make up the string. Follow that, as specified by the special meaning of 0xFFFF with an indicator of how many more characters to follow, specifically, 0x0000.
First, Pro-Logic surround sound is a matrix system. It can be implemented wherever there are two separate channels of audio. Implement discrete surround and I will be impressed.
Second, once you have implemented it, what are you going to use for source material? Music, in general, is two-channel stereo. New recordings could be made in discrete surround, but what about the very large corpus of existing work?
I don't know why you posted anonymously, because you have some very good points here.
So, let's see here....
DVD's outdid VHS in quality, convenience, and durability. But a major driver to both CD and DVD sales was the rush to re-buy all your favourites in the new format. Nobody chucks their 500 CD's to buy SACD, and if the HD/BluR groups fiddle too long, and charge too much, by then everyone will have their library of classics on DVD. Nobody will see the need to rebuy more than a handful of classics in HD; their DVD copies will be plenty good.
This is kind of my point exactly. A friend who worked until recently at a video shop tells me that DVD doesn't outdo VHS on durability from a rental perspective (VHS can apparently take more abuse than DVD)but does in the storage perspective (less damage due to time). Just thought I'd clarify that point.
Otherwise, yes, DVD was the quantum leap over VHS that CD is over cassette, or at least pretty close to it (one could make an argument WRT lossy codecs, but this would be largely mental masturbation).
On to a more important point....
Everyone who wanted to re-buy classics of their youth -60's, 70's, or 80's - on CD has done so. The record companies can't rely on the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin to boost their sales.
I want to take that a step further.
CD has brought these older recordings to their logical conclusion. These original studio masters were done in stereo. The recording tape had about a 20kHz frequency response, and real channels of audio, neither can you get better S/N or frequency response. The CD captures it and is as good as it gets.
For those not in the "modern music sucks" camp, okay, you can make 5.1 channel recordings or whatever. Doesn't matter, because people now expect newer optical drives to play older discs (i.e. DVD player plays CDs) and you dare not take that away; CD is as good as it gets for older recordings, so there will not be any future re-sales bloom like there was when CD became available.
Interestingly enough, audio has a bigger impact on the quality of a film than the images do. This understanding was incorporated into the standards for VCD and Hi-Fi VHS in that both had a very good frequency response and dynamic range. This understanding is incorporated even more into DVD with the ability of the movie maker to choose between several codecs of differing characteristics to best match the film being recorded.
I believe that a good 5.1 or more channel sound system, connected to the DVD player with a raw digital connection (i.e. DTS/AC3 when available and LPCM only when DTS/AC3 are not available, over S/PDIF or TOSlink) and properly installed in the room (speakers at ear level, center speaker as close to the screen as possible, satellite speakers in the corners of the viewing area, subwoofer wherever) will do more for the movie viewing experience than high definition will.
A high-end SDTV (with at least S-video in) or low-end HDTV monitor nicely completes the setup without needing to go overboard, and, perhaps more importantly, without having to mess around with AACS or worry about getting 1/4 of what you paid for.
Of course, it also helps if the film-maker does the soundtrack correctly. This is not always the case.
I have a 27" TV. It is an early, analog HDTV, but at that size display, unless you are sitting really, really close to it, 960x540 will be plenty
Joe 6-pack, when his TV breaks, will probably buy another SDTV. Until his TV breaks, he will not buy another TV. He doesn't want to spend $700 on a TV, never mind $2000+ when he can have one for $99.99 at Wal*Mart.
As such, Joe 6-pack will not adopt HD-Ray, because DVD is sufficient. His SDTV is barely capabale of exceeding VHS quality, so DVD will look only slightly better than VHS to him, and HD-Ray will look no better than DVD.
I reap a significant benefit with my 27" HDTV even watching SDTV content, because of it having a deinterlacer. This was a major selling point for me. There is some minor banding (which is a little annoying at times), but for the most part, the picture is fantastic, even at SDTV.
Short of DV and D8 casettes, which are used for shooting home video and not used for distribution of commercial content, DVDs are the highest-quality SDTV medium you will find in most homes. Technically, they are EDTV, because the MPEG stream may be encoded as progressive scan (and many DVD players can play them as such, and deinterlace interlaced streams), and the resolution is well above that of even the cleanest of composite video signals. DVDs look fantastic on my 27" HDTV.
960x540 is only 50% better than 720x480. Many store that sell TVs still can't get an HDTV signal to demo their HDTVs, so who is going to notice that HD-Ray might be better than DVD?
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are starting a format war, and people will, therefore, stay away in droves.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will die if they can't clearly show superiority to DVD and their competition. Doing what they are doing, they will fail to show superiority to DVD in many installations. They're stillborn.
Now, you have to keep in mind that, as a Slashdot reader, you are part of a minority. You are technologically literate, and probably willing to dish out more than most people to get better technology. The majority don't care about the technology, just as long as they can see something. Hell, quite frequently they don't even care whether or not the aspect ratio is right, or know what an aspect ratio is! The view with which you and I approach technology is going to be skewed, period. We are technophiles, and most of our friends are technophiles. Most importantly, we who would be interested in this technology if it weren't such a clusterfuck are the minority.
That's why I specified New England. Although I've never been to New York, I have an idea how big it is and that just specifying the state would be as useless there
Okay, let's turn my example on its head.
Let's say I lived in Lee, Massachusetts. That is in New England.
From there, a slightly long, but reasonable commute would put me into New York State, specifically, into Albany or Rensselaer, and maybe some points south. As such, selecting New York would be reasonable for someone living in Lee.
However, by selecting New York, again, jobs from NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton would all show up and be as useful as the jobs listed in Boston, Cambridge, Marlborough, Salem.... just too far away.
If you want to work with a smaller state, let's go with someone who, for watever reason, is living in Rupert, VT (been there, cute town, wouldn't want to live there). This person does not want a job in Montpelier. It's too far away--3 hours, to be specific. He might, however, want a job in Saratoga Springs or Wilton, NY; that's commutable, and thus, the whole "All of New York" problem pops back up again.
Even when they don't commit this error, sometimes the regions are too large.... Monster, for example, considers Albany and Poughkeepsie to be the same area. Yeah, right!
This is the equivalent of either a dick-size or old-school engine displacement war. Its nothing than more Slashdot navel-gazing, about how über we all are, vs. the unwashed masses, with a subtle MS bash thrown in.
Instead of a "what trinkets do you have?" Ask Slashdot, how about a "Whats needed in a home lab?" Ask Slashdot question? Otherwise it degenerates into a wallet-size competition, or an obscure "my firmware version on my Linksys is better than yours because Fry's is teh suck, CompUSA is teh r0XX0r!" discussion.
Sort of true, but not completely.
It's not really the trinkets that are interesting, so much as it is what you do with them.
To drive my point home, suppose I tell you that I have six machines on my home network, and list off the hardware. Have I told you anything useful? No, not really.
OTOH, if I tell you that these machines are: A firewall/web server/NAT router, A file/database server, a workstation for me, a workstation for the wife (yes, I actually do have one), a server to tinker with, and my company-issued laptop computer, then maybe I've told you something useful -- that I can set up a network
If I tell you that I use 100% wired networking because it is faster and more secure than wireless, then I have told you something -- that I care about performance.
If I tell you about the unique solution I concocted for the power starvation problems in my file server and workstation, then I have told you something -- that can (a) use a soldering iron, (b) design a circuit and (c) etch a PC board, all without outside assistance.
If I tell you about the high ratio of recycled equipment in my network, then I have told you something -- that I don't believe you have to have the latest, greatest, fastest thing out there.
If I tell you what I use for motherboards in my workstation and file server (Via MII-12000), then I have told you something -- that I value energy efficiency and compactness over speed.
If, on the other hand, I tell you about my processor speeds, ram sizes, HDD sizes, and the shiny Morex chasses, then all I have told you about is what I can afford, and I might as well be quoting penile dimensions as you suggest.
The problem, I suspect, is that the site was set up by somebody born and reaised in New England where the states are much smaller and has never been to the rest of the country.
Even that does not excuse such an error. The roads in this part of the country tend to be narrower, windier, twistier. Yes, we have Interstate highways up here in the northeast, but they are retrofits, and there are a lot of places that ar just flat out inconvenient to get to.
Besides that, the states are still big enough not to be a sufficient division. I live in the western end of the Capital District of New York State (basically the Capital District is Albany, Schenectady and Rensselaer counties), more specifically, in the city of Schenectady. A job in Albany, Rensselaer, Troy, Saratoga Springs, Amsterdam, any of these would be good. A job in Lee, Massachusetts or Mahcnester, Vermont would be pushing it, but survivable.
Within that specification, I would want to select Vermont, New York and Massachusetts as my job search area. Under that, I'm likely to get a gazillion job postings from Boston and Cambridge, New York City, Poughkeepsie, Binghamton, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Rutland, etc, all of which are waaaay beyond a reasonable commute.
(An exception might be made for a job from NYC or Poughkeepsie, as I understand that people commute by bus or train to get to jobs there from here. I've never tried this myself.)
Use a machine with several CD-ROM drives. Script the system to do one drive at a time. I'm picturing three drives, placed at/dev/hdb,/dev/hdc and/dev/hdd (assuming Linux). Don't try to use all three at once.
Similar to above, using SCSI drives instead.... eliminates the need to avoid using all at once.
Similar to above, using firewire external drives instead... easier to set up.
Use several computers (obviously not mutually exclusive to the other options)
I bought a whole bunch of energy efficient bulbs. Most of them died within a year because they don't like dirty electricity and being cycled rapidly -- shorter than the average lifetime I get out of normal bulbs (despite the marketing blurb explaining that they last 8 times longer). The only energy efficient bulbs I have retained are the ones in the living/lounge room -- ie, the ones that are on for a substantial part of the day and are kept on for hours at a time without being cycled, and if they last 1 year, then I have likely saved >$10 in electricity, hence they have acted as a net energy saving.
You bought junk!
I have CF bulbs that I have been operating for years. For that matter, I still have the first one I bought way back in 1994, and it is still in service and still works.
My experiences are that you need to buy decent quality (which does not necessarily rule out cheap), or you will pay for it in the long run.
First, do not buy Lights of America. As much as I would love to support an American manufacturing concern, they suck. I think I still have one of the six of these that I bought; the other five bombed out within a year; two of them within a month..
Don't get me started about GE.
Sylvania, Sunbeam, Philips are all good, but a bit expensive.
Commercial Electric bulbs work really well, last really well, come on instantly, and are at very nearly full intensity with a second.
Don't get bulbs with magnetic ballasts. Get bulbs with electronic ballasts.
That's about all I've got. Follow these guidelines, and you should have no problems.
Oh, BTW, my power is not really describable as clean. I've seen worse, but I've seen much, much better, too.
Please remain where you are. The RIAA will be arriving shortly to collect a copyright fee (99 Cents) and a convenience fee ($2000). There may also be unspecified interest and late charges.
I would like to suggest that you listen to his ideas before discarding this idea as a waste of time and effort. Then, if you still want to discard the idea, at least you are making an informed decision.
Whether you keep your current job or not is your call. Only you can do the necessary soul-searching to decide whether or not staying on board is something you want to do.
That said, if you do decide to quit, make sure that you read the employment contract of your next employer carefully. Quite frequently, employment contracts include clauses that give your employer first dibs on anything you invent, at the office or not, on the clock or not. You will need to negotiate that item out.
This dashes my profound belief in the meek librarian cliche.
Librarians are actually very cool people. They have a meek outer layer, yes, but they know a lot about a lot of things. Most librarians that I have met have also been willing to bend over backwards to help the clients of the library in any way conceivable, and protecting the privacy of those clients is just one of those ways.
Actually Wico made a whole line of controllers. There were several versions of their joystick, a keypad controller, etc.
Yes, they sure did. The one I mentioned was the top of the top, the best of the best, yada yada yada. I actually didn't like their smaller sticks because they had too much swing for their size. The SunCom TAC-2 was just flat-out predictable and dependable. It also rocked for speed games like Track and Field. (I never had an Atary 2600, BTW, I did all of my gaming on C-64, C-128 and Amiga platforms. I did, however, once have a pair of Atari sticks for them.)
I guess the Atari sticks were okay once broken in a bit. Fresh out of the box, they were really bad, at least from my POV. As with all things, there's a lot of personal preference involved.
RadioShack also had an interesting stick. It had suction cups on the bottom so you could mount it to a table, and a thumb-button on the top of the stick to fire with. Not quite as short of a throw as the Atari stick, but still used the bubble-button mechanism that I really didn't like.
Wico used cherry switches throughout. Expensive, but sweet.
Suncom used hard contacts. On the underside of the stick was a ball that was connected to Vcc, and four metal plates, connected to each directional signal. The fire buttons had a copper plate on the underside that connected to a pair of contacts at the bottom of the button well. Cheap, but effective.
All of these were more reliable over time than the keyboard on my C-64:-/
Also missing from this discussion is any non-stock, third party controller.
Yes, the Atari joystick sucked, and was the same stick also used on several computers (Commodore Vic-20, 64, 128, Amiga, and, of course, all Atari computers) and some other game systems (could be used with ColecoVision, for instance) and was a de facto standard at the time.
That said, you could buy third-party controllers from a number of sources. I liked the SunCom TAC-2 joystick, because it was super-reliable, and it had some swing to it. It also had dual fire buttons, so you could give it to a lefty and they could play pretty well with it.
Then there was the prize of all, the Wico stick. Wico made the josticks found in many arcade consoles, and they used the same design for their game controller, complete with cherry switch buttons. It was mounted in a broad, heavy base, which would sit nicely on a table and give you a pretty realistic feel of an arcade console.
You can still acknowledge the other side and remain strong.
I think that mondern American politics is a sort of a Prisoner's Dilemma. If you would like an example, please look at the conduct of the two main parties (<I object to the phrase "both parties" as there are alternatives</rant>) after the 2000 election, when the recount mess was going on.
Specifically, the Democrats appeared to be cooperative at one point, conceding the possibility that the Republicans could emerge victorious after a complete count. The Republicans, however, admitted no reciprocal possibility for the Democrats. This was then spun by the Republicans into an admission that the Democrats were wrong. From there, just kick in the mechanisms that were discussed in TFA, and you have the ensuing shitstorm.
They are just trying to prove that it is easy for anyone (including a minor) to find pr0n on the internet.
Would it not be much simpler and far less invasive for them to just submit a bunch of queries themselves? Of course it would! There's something more going on here that is not related to pr0n. The war on pr0n is a Trojan Horse to get them into the database.
Slashdot Mirror
I would ask the same thing that all of us non-IT have been asking for the past six years or so.... YOU do the IT work so that the departments don't have to do shadow IT work.
There has just been a major reorg at the hands of a new CEO, and the message has finally been heard.
With that, I anticipate that I will be joining the IT department within the year.
Yes, I know, there's the potential for collision with a string that's actually 0xFFFF bytes long
Solve thus: Start with the 0xFFFF to indicate the length of the string. Follw that with the 65535 characters that make up the string. Follow that, as specified by the special meaning of 0xFFFF with an indicator of how many more characters to follow, specifically, 0x0000.
Not a big deal.
GPL 3.0 license is a call to the faithful
I thought that open source was supposed to be a bazaar rather than a cathedral
Be sure, at the very least if these folks are your senators, to thank the ten who voted no. They are:
If you live in Hawaii, you might ask Sen. Inouye why he didn't vote.
If you live anywhere else, make sure that your senators feel it.
enhancements such as pro-logic surround sound.
Two points I would like to make about this.
First, Pro-Logic surround sound is a matrix system. It can be implemented wherever there are two separate channels of audio. Implement discrete surround and I will be impressed.
Second, once you have implemented it, what are you going to use for source material? Music, in general, is two-channel stereo. New recordings could be made in discrete surround, but what about the very large corpus of existing work?
I don't know why you posted anonymously, because you have some very good points here.
So, let's see here....
DVD's outdid VHS in quality, convenience, and durability. But a major driver to both CD and DVD sales was the rush to re-buy all your favourites in the new format. Nobody chucks their 500 CD's to buy SACD, and if the HD/BluR groups fiddle too long, and charge too much, by then everyone will have their library of classics on DVD. Nobody will see the need to rebuy more than a handful of classics in HD; their DVD copies will be plenty good.
This is kind of my point exactly. A friend who worked until recently at a video shop tells me that DVD doesn't outdo VHS on durability from a rental perspective (VHS can apparently take more abuse than DVD)but does in the storage perspective (less damage due to time). Just thought I'd clarify that point.
Otherwise, yes, DVD was the quantum leap over VHS that CD is over cassette, or at least pretty close to it (one could make an argument WRT lossy codecs, but this would be largely mental masturbation).
On to a more important point....
Everyone who wanted to re-buy classics of their youth -60's, 70's, or 80's - on CD has done so. The record companies can't rely on the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin to boost their sales.
I want to take that a step further.
CD has brought these older recordings to their logical conclusion. These original studio masters were done in stereo. The recording tape had about a 20kHz frequency response, and real channels of audio, neither can you get better S/N or frequency response. The CD captures it and is as good as it gets.
For those not in the "modern music sucks" camp, okay, you can make 5.1 channel recordings or whatever. Doesn't matter, because people now expect newer optical drives to play older discs (i.e. DVD player plays CDs) and you dare not take that away; CD is as good as it gets for older recordings, so there will not be any future re-sales bloom like there was when CD became available.
Except for a small handfull, that is.
Interestingly enough, audio has a bigger impact on the quality of a film than the images do. This understanding was incorporated into the standards for VCD and Hi-Fi VHS in that both had a very good frequency response and dynamic range. This understanding is incorporated even more into DVD with the ability of the movie maker to choose between several codecs of differing characteristics to best match the film being recorded.
I believe that a good 5.1 or more channel sound system, connected to the DVD player with a raw digital connection (i.e. DTS/AC3 when available and LPCM only when DTS/AC3 are not available, over S/PDIF or TOSlink) and properly installed in the room (speakers at ear level, center speaker as close to the screen as possible, satellite speakers in the corners of the viewing area, subwoofer wherever) will do more for the movie viewing experience than high definition will.
A high-end SDTV (with at least S-video in) or low-end HDTV monitor nicely completes the setup without needing to go overboard, and, perhaps more importantly, without having to mess around with AACS or worry about getting 1/4 of what you paid for.
Of course, it also helps if the film-maker does the soundtrack correctly. This is not always the case.
Some random points that occur to me:
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will die if they can't clearly show superiority to DVD and their competition. Doing what they are doing, they will fail to show superiority to DVD in many installations. They're stillborn.
Now, you have to keep in mind that, as a Slashdot reader, you are part of a minority. You are technologically literate, and probably willing to dish out more than most people to get better technology. The majority don't care about the technology, just as long as they can see something. Hell, quite frequently they don't even care whether or not the aspect ratio is right, or know what an aspect ratio is! The view with which you and I approach technology is going to be skewed, period. We are technophiles, and most of our friends are technophiles. Most importantly, we who would be interested in this technology if it weren't such a clusterfuck are the minority.
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will die.
Yep. I think we are on the same page here. It's Bad And Wrong, regardless what part of the country you are talking about.
That's why I specified New England. Although I've never been to New York, I have an idea how big it is and that just specifying the state would be as useless there
Okay, let's turn my example on its head.
Let's say I lived in Lee, Massachusetts. That is in New England.
From there, a slightly long, but reasonable commute would put me into New York State, specifically, into Albany or Rensselaer, and maybe some points south. As such, selecting New York would be reasonable for someone living in Lee.
However, by selecting New York, again, jobs from NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton would all show up and be as useful as the jobs listed in Boston, Cambridge, Marlborough, Salem.... just too far away.
If you want to work with a smaller state, let's go with someone who, for watever reason, is living in Rupert, VT (been there, cute town, wouldn't want to live there). This person does not want a job in Montpelier. It's too far away--3 hours, to be specific. He might, however, want a job in Saratoga Springs or Wilton, NY; that's commutable, and thus, the whole "All of New York" problem pops back up again.
Even when they don't commit this error, sometimes the regions are too large.... Monster, for example, considers Albany and Poughkeepsie to be the same area. Yeah, right!
This is the equivalent of either a dick-size or old-school engine displacement war. Its nothing than more Slashdot navel-gazing, about how über we all are, vs. the unwashed masses, with a subtle MS bash thrown in.
Instead of a "what trinkets do you have?" Ask Slashdot, how about a "Whats needed in a home lab?" Ask Slashdot question? Otherwise it degenerates into a wallet-size competition, or an obscure "my firmware version on my Linksys is better than yours because Fry's is teh suck, CompUSA is teh r0XX0r!" discussion.
Sort of true, but not completely.
It's not really the trinkets that are interesting, so much as it is what you do with them.
To drive my point home, suppose I tell you that I have six machines on my home network, and list off the hardware. Have I told you anything useful? No, not really.
OTOH, if I tell you that these machines are: A firewall/web server/NAT router, A file/database server, a workstation for me, a workstation for the wife (yes, I actually do have one), a server to tinker with, and my company-issued laptop computer, then maybe I've told you something useful -- that I can set up a network
If I tell you that I use 100% wired networking because it is faster and more secure than wireless, then I have told you something -- that I care about performance.
If I tell you about the unique solution I concocted for the power starvation problems in my file server and workstation, then I have told you something -- that can (a) use a soldering iron, (b) design a circuit and (c) etch a PC board, all without outside assistance.
If I tell you about the high ratio of recycled equipment in my network, then I have told you something -- that I don't believe you have to have the latest, greatest, fastest thing out there.
If I tell you what I use for motherboards in my workstation and file server (Via MII-12000), then I have told you something -- that I value energy efficiency and compactness over speed.
If, on the other hand, I tell you about my processor speeds, ram sizes, HDD sizes, and the shiny Morex chasses, then all I have told you about is what I can afford, and I might as well be quoting penile dimensions as you suggest.
The problem, I suspect, is that the site was set up by somebody born and reaised in New England where the states are much smaller and has never been to the rest of the country.
Even that does not excuse such an error. The roads in this part of the country tend to be narrower, windier, twistier. Yes, we have Interstate highways up here in the northeast, but they are retrofits, and there are a lot of places that ar just flat out inconvenient to get to.
Besides that, the states are still big enough not to be a sufficient division. I live in the western end of the Capital District of New York State (basically the Capital District is Albany, Schenectady and Rensselaer counties), more specifically, in the city of Schenectady. A job in Albany, Rensselaer, Troy, Saratoga Springs, Amsterdam, any of these would be good. A job in Lee, Massachusetts or Mahcnester, Vermont would be pushing it, but survivable.
Within that specification, I would want to select Vermont, New York and Massachusetts as my job search area. Under that, I'm likely to get a gazillion job postings from Boston and Cambridge, New York City, Poughkeepsie, Binghamton, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Rutland, etc, all of which are waaaay beyond a reasonable commute.
(An exception might be made for a job from NYC or Poughkeepsie, as I understand that people commute by bus or train to get to jobs there from here. I've never tried this myself.)
So you see, it is not just a California problem.
Some suggestions:
I bought a whole bunch of energy efficient bulbs. Most of them died within a year because they don't like dirty electricity and being cycled rapidly -- shorter than the average lifetime I get out of normal bulbs (despite the marketing blurb explaining that they last 8 times longer). The only energy efficient bulbs I have retained are the ones in the living/lounge room -- ie, the ones that are on for a substantial part of the day and are kept on for hours at a time without being cycled, and if they last 1 year, then I have likely saved >$10 in electricity, hence they have acted as a net energy saving.
You bought junk!
I have CF bulbs that I have been operating for years. For that matter, I still have the first one I bought way back in 1994, and it is still in service and still works.
My experiences are that you need to buy decent quality (which does not necessarily rule out cheap), or you will pay for it in the long run.
First, do not buy Lights of America. As much as I would love to support an American manufacturing concern, they suck. I think I still have one of the six of these that I bought; the other five bombed out within a year; two of them within a month..
Don't get me started about GE.
Sylvania, Sunbeam, Philips are all good, but a bit expensive.
Commercial Electric bulbs work really well, last really well, come on instantly, and are at very nearly full intensity with a second.
Don't get bulbs with magnetic ballasts. Get bulbs with electronic ballasts.
That's about all I've got. Follow these guidelines, and you should have no problems.
Oh, BTW, my power is not really describable as clean. I've seen worse, but I've seen much, much better, too.
Please remain where you are. The RIAA will be arriving shortly to collect a copyright fee (99 Cents) and a convenience fee ($2000). There may also be unspecified interest and late charges.
I would like to suggest looking up Robert Steele and open source intelligence. He gave a four-plus-hour presentation on the topic at The Fifth Hope, the audio of which can be found on the Fifth Hope site in five parts.
I would like to suggest that you listen to his ideas before discarding this idea as a waste of time and effort. Then, if you still want to discard the idea, at least you are making an informed decision.
Whether you keep your current job or not is your call. Only you can do the necessary soul-searching to decide whether or not staying on board is something you want to do.
That said, if you do decide to quit, make sure that you read the employment contract of your next employer carefully. Quite frequently, employment contracts include clauses that give your employer first dibs on anything you invent, at the office or not, on the clock or not. You will need to negotiate that item out.
This dashes my profound belief in the meek librarian cliche.
Librarians are actually very cool people. They have a meek outer layer, yes, but they know a lot about a lot of things. Most librarians that I have met have also been willing to bend over backwards to help the clients of the library in any way conceivable, and protecting the privacy of those clients is just one of those ways.
Actually Wico made a whole line of controllers. There were several versions of their joystick, a keypad controller, etc.
Yes, they sure did. The one I mentioned was the top of the top, the best of the best, yada yada yada. I actually didn't like their smaller sticks because they had too much swing for their size. The SunCom TAC-2 was just flat-out predictable and dependable. It also rocked for speed games like Track and Field. (I never had an Atary 2600, BTW, I did all of my gaming on C-64, C-128 and Amiga platforms. I did, however, once have a pair of Atari sticks for them.)
I guess the Atari sticks were okay once broken in a bit. Fresh out of the box, they were really bad, at least from my POV. As with all things, there's a lot of personal preference involved.
RadioShack also had an interesting stick. It had suction cups on the bottom so you could mount it to a table, and a thumb-button on the top of the stick to fire with. Not quite as short of a throw as the Atari stick, but still used the bubble-button mechanism that I really didn't like.
Wico used cherry switches throughout. Expensive, but sweet.
Suncom used hard contacts. On the underside of the stick was a ball that was connected to Vcc, and four metal plates, connected to each directional signal. The fire buttons had a copper plate on the underside that connected to a pair of contacts at the bottom of the button well. Cheap, but effective.
All of these were more reliable over time than the keyboard on my C-64 :-/
Also missing from this discussion is any non-stock, third party controller.
Yes, the Atari joystick sucked, and was the same stick also used on several computers (Commodore Vic-20, 64, 128, Amiga, and, of course, all Atari computers) and some other game systems (could be used with ColecoVision, for instance) and was a de facto standard at the time.
That said, you could buy third-party controllers from a number of sources. I liked the SunCom TAC-2 joystick, because it was super-reliable, and it had some swing to it. It also had dual fire buttons, so you could give it to a lefty and they could play pretty well with it.
Then there was the prize of all, the Wico stick. Wico made the josticks found in many arcade consoles, and they used the same design for their game controller, complete with cherry switch buttons. It was mounted in a broad, heavy base, which would sit nicely on a table and give you a pretty realistic feel of an arcade console.
Point is, this analysis is missing a lot.
r33l!, th3 b!7 @b0u7 $p3llin9 !$ n0 $urpr!$3 70 31337 h@><0rz....
You can still acknowledge the other side and remain strong.
I think that mondern American politics is a sort of a Prisoner's Dilemma. If you would like an example, please look at the conduct of the two main parties (<I object to the phrase "both parties" as there are alternatives</rant>) after the 2000 election, when the recount mess was going on.
Specifically, the Democrats appeared to be cooperative at one point, conceding the possibility that the Republicans could emerge victorious after a complete count. The Republicans, however, admitted no reciprocal possibility for the Democrats. This was then spun by the Republicans into an admission that the Democrats were wrong. From there, just kick in the mechanisms that were discussed in TFA, and you have the ensuing shitstorm.
Does this mean...
DROP DATABASEYou cannot drop a database that is in use by some thread.
I think that you are being a smartass (which I respect and it is in keeping with Slashdot tradition), but just in case, the answer would be no.
They are just trying to prove that it is easy for anyone (including a minor) to find pr0n on the internet.
Would it not be much simpler and far less invasive for them to just submit a bunch of queries themselves? Of course it would! There's something more going on here that is not related to pr0n. The war on pr0n is a Trojan Horse to get them into the database.
The solution is obvious! Let's all submit pornographic requests to Google.
...and make sure that they all hit either goatse or tubgirl on the first link! That will make sure that the screeners go blind, solving the problem.