I've always had a geeky dreamproject of supplementing my traditional lock and key entry to my house with biometric security devices. The idea being that in the event of a systems failure, instead of being locked out of the house I could fall back to the old lock-n-key method.
My idea would be to use either iris-scanning, breath analyzation or some combination of the two (ideally a choice so that if one were to fail, say the iris, the breath analyzer would let you in). Much more efficient than fumbling around for keys in the dark! And a blessing to the drunken Irishman I can sometimes be (not all, but SOME stereotypes certainly hold more than a little water...and occasionally some whiskey too!) I digress.
But the last time I checked, (this was a few years ago) such devices were not so readily available. And when you could find them they were exorbitantly expensive. Insult to injury drivers were only available for NT. Not that it would be that terrible to set up an NT box for this purpose, but Linux of course would be much preferable.
So my question is, has this situation changed? Has the price of this technology become more available and affordable? Still prohibitively expensive? Any sourceforgian opensource driver alternative for the devices that are?
I remember reading an interview with WG yeeears back when he was talking about his relationship to technology (I'm sure this topic is covered many times in interviews with him). He said that when he was writing Nueromancer (I'm paraphrasing here, because I read this sometime in the early 90's) he didn't own a personal computer and didn't even have a practical understanding of what they were. All he had was this romantic notion of an "almost crystaline entitiy" where everything was nearly silent and whooshed and whirred pleasantly as you worked. Nueromancer was written on a typewriter!
When he finally did get his first pc it was, needless to say, a letdown. Clanking, grinding, loud, slow, and chunking out computer errors this machine was an introduction to the real world of computing for this technological romanticist. But I personally am glad that he never really soured on romanticizing technology. Though he has been criticized for an overly uniform body of work stylistically, I personally like and am drawn into the worlds he creates.
Along with video games, books by Gibson and other authors like Stephenson (yes even Quicksilver is building up into computer related themes...starting from the mid 1600s!) and movies like "Hackers" and "Wargames" keeps the notion of computing romantic and fanciful enough that (personally speaking) I retain a bit of that playfulness to what I'm doing even when I'm editing config files!
Hell hath no fury as that family of Redmond. Think they're going to set their sites on slashdotters? Am I going to get setuid for linking? When (if ever) will the courts evolve a sensibe approach to (for lack of a better term) "cyberlaw"?
When Sol dies in 20 billion years, what could you possibly have done in your life that will matter then?
I've heard rumours of the "daystar". How often does it appear, and does it change colors? Or does it always look the same? Must one sacrifice a portion of the herd when it's angry?
I've been having the same experience with this issue on several fronts. One thing that make me acutely aware that I was growing up was a trip my girlfriend and I made to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum this past weekend. I may journal about it.
Specifically I remember taking a trip to this museum with my Dad when I was 10 years old (ca 1980). I was a HUGE Trekkie at the time. Thoroughly obsessed. Seeing the USS Enterprise was a thrill unmatched. I remember feeling like I was bearing witness to the second coming as I inspected every inch of the "starship" with my eyes, soaking in every molecule optically. I earnestly HOPED to have at least an echo of that feeling. Sadly this was not the case. Seeing it again at 34, it just looked like a big toy. I tried to be enthused, but being honest with myself my reaction was just a notch above "meh". All this despite the fact that I am currently in a downtime project of watching every Star Trek episode ever made, currently up to the end of season 3 on DVD. I sincerely wish I could muster just a 10th of that kind of childish enthusiasm for anything. So I myself must wonder, what must we lose to become adult?
Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy the trip or become enthused at all. What perhaps made the biggest impression on me was the Martin B-26B Marauder "Flak Bait" bomber. Here was something real. I was simply bowled over. It made WWII seem really real. And this airplane seemed to represent what it really was: a death machine. Regardless of the fact that it mas killing WWII era Germans, far as I was concerned I was standing there looking at a human meat grinder. THAT left a far, far bigger impression on me than the "USS Enterprise". What also made a very real emotional impression on me was an actual (albeit prototypical) example of a Lunar Lander. Also a big deal to me were the Minuteman Missile as well as a Russian ICBM and a recreation of the Apollo-Soyuz "meetup" in space. It was all very moving, but my reactions were not at all what I might've expected.
I notice that I don't quite enjoy punk rock the way I used to, gaming and science fiction the same.
...is the reason that the author of the article chooses not to recommend the distribution...
..."However, the killer problem I found with Debian/PPC was my inability to get X11 working on it -- the installation seemed wholly unaware of any remotely relevant video card models, and some post-installation attempts at configuration proved fruitless, too. I am certain that there are Debian/PPC users who have worked out the configuration issues, but compared to the ease of installation of other distributions, I have trouble recommending Debian to many users..."
I've always found X configuration on Debian to be a bit challenging myself. Anyone have some advice for a Debian on PPC newb? If DebianPPC powah users aren't on this site, I'll try the next Star Trek convention coming to town...;D
The Chinese are so great at protecting property rights (intellectual and otherwise). Remember, they signed a piece of paper(!!!) agreeing they wouldn't share the windows source code with anyone.
On an unrelated note, anyone care to start a football-style pool as to when the next round of microsoft virus hits...
Actually there's only one accent in America (or so it seems to a foreigner), though indeed it's often hard to understand.
Completely and totally wrong. Strange as this may sound, one of the most accent neutral dialects in American English is in Central New Jersey. Not to be confused with North Jersey (Hoboken for example) which sounds almost identical to a NY accent, or a South Jersey accent (Cherry Hill) which sounds almost identical to a Philadelphia accent. People in the central part of the state speak a "Broadcaster's English".
That being said, a New York accent sounds NOTHING like a New England accent. Which sounds NOTHING AT ALL like a southern accent. Which sounds NOTHING at all like a Chicago accent. It's not at all like having a Punjabi speaking to a Gujarti in a lingua franca such as Hindi, where communcation between the two would pose more difficulty than, say, a New Yorker speaking to a Chicagoan. But there is NO mistaking the two accents (to an American Native).
And as I started travelling around the country, I started finding branches of the American dialect of which I had been completely unaware! In Minnesota, people almost sound SWEDISH at times! And one of them really threw me one time when she told me to put down my "bay-ug". She had to actually point to the bag (to me a "bah-g") for me to understand her. I can understand your ignornace if you are not a native American, but you are way off base!
was totally linear video (meaning you had to have a source deck and a record deck) it couldn't even capture video clips.
You are correct, but only partially. Yes, the Video Toaster was for linear video editing only. That is until you added the Video Toaster Flyer to your Amiga rig, which would allow you to do non-linear video editing and capture video on up to 21 SCSI disks.
Okay, stupid question time: When you signed up for the XBox live service did they ASK you if you wanted to renew the charge? Or did the ToS say, buried so that you have to scroll down 15 pages "...Oh! And by the way, we are going to keep on charging you for our service until you tell us to stop taking your money."
Either way, it's not fraud per se (especially for the former). But in the case of the latter, it's certainly not a business practice that should be encouraged by knowledgable consumers. But there will never be enough of those lot to change the way M$ will do business. Caveat Emptor indeed!
One quote: "We allow images of consensual sex in our cinemas, but not images of bestiality or child abuse. Why should the net be any different?"
Not only should the internet "...not be another TV or cinema, it should be a free, user-as-peer and user-controllable media an essential (perhaps the most) tenet of "hacker metaphysics" is that "whatever one mind can achieve, another can duplicate and surpass". Control the content of the Internet? Impossible. Just ask the Chinese.
As ridiculous as the TOS is, I have a better impression after reading the following from their "rants" page:
The Klez and Mydoom worms, for example, do send infected e-mails, but fake ("spoof") the return address. So the virus infected e-mail with our return address didn't come from us! Our e-mail is sent from a Macintosh that can't be infected by Windows only worms, and we use anti-virus software.
Okay, maybe they are nuts. But at least they don't spread Microsoft Viruses. (not that I did not say COMPUTER viruses)
And someone with a bachelor's should not be expected to be able to develop a new language...In general, working Engineers (non-PhD's, software or otherwise) don't contribute to to advancement, i.e. research papers. They work with the tools they're given to solve problems.
I disagree, completely. You shouldn't need a college degree at all if what you want to do is invent your own comiler, language, OS, etc...as if such things were impossible without one. In other words your potential for achievement has more to do with your passions and above all
who you are than what Uni you've attended and how far you make it in formalized education. Some people have been known to INVENT circuit boards, elegant interfaces, write compilers and port languages to their newly created hardware...all without having been traditionally "academic" as we understand it. The last time the non-academic intellectual has been in vogue was during the beat generation. But whether that lifestyle is well regarded by the world at large or not does not affect the potential rewards of this approach to life.
I can honestly attest to the above statements as per image quality, the lack of need for conversion of formats between DirecTV and TiVO integrated units. The quality is outstanding!
Not to mention that in addition to the need to convert from MPREG to analogue and back to MPEG using "digital" cable (resulting in inevitable loss of quality) is not the only thing to consider. A lerned fellow once told me that "digital" (and I use those quotes advisedly) cable is indeed digital from satellite to your local cable CO, but ANALOGUE from CO to your home on some cable systems. Which is then converted BACK to digital by your box.
As to interference causing loss of signal to your satellite, I can only say that this has only happened less than a handful of times in over 3 years of service. In fact I would say it would be only 3 exact times in that period (that I was there to witness it). Of those 3 times ONCE was during a Noreaster (severe thunderstorms for those not from my area, I once confused a Californian with that term) and both of the other times were during BLIZZARDS (white stuff falling from the sky (LOTS OF IT!) for you Hawaiians;).
Prior to having DirecTV I had cable for something on the order of 20 years, since I was a child. Now, I don't know exactly how many times the cable went out in our household, but I can say with honesty that it seemed to happen far FAR more often than my direcTV has gone down (proportionately speaking. Come back to me in 20 years for a more scientific analysis!). And I remember ALWAYS having sub-standard quality images on my TV using cable. I've never used digital cable. But given my experiences with them and my overall loathing for their monopolistic business practices (I'm still not sure how such monopolies can exist legally!) I stay about as FAR away from cable as I can. I am at this point a dyed in the wool DirecTV head!
Don't get me wrong though, as big a trekkie as I am (and I am indeed) no amount of DirecTV digital goodness will turn Enterprise into something worth watching!
Not sure how widely known this is, but Comcast is a Microsoft company. So, if you're wondering why they engage in senseless, draconian authoritarianism...now ya know why!
DSL has been berry berry goot to me. SO, if you have a choice do yourself a favor! Personally I use Earthlink DSL and they pretty much leave you to your own. I've been running websited, ftp, news. The only hurdle I haven't taken on is as of yet is getting sendmail working. The only port they block is 25. I send linux isos from work to my home ftp server and other large files on a frequent basis. My friends also download said those same iso's and in over a year and a half not a PEEP out of them about bandwidth hogging!
Looks like I'll finally get to delve into Hacking the Xbox. I'm not willing to potentially compromise my main gaming box for a developing set of skills and competencies that I could acquire from this book. Not while the Xbox is at the $200 level. But at the $100 level I am. It seems like a really nice guide to reverse engineering other low-level stuff that could also possibly help me get more out of this book now that it's finally in print.
I make $54k a year, plus full benefits (All medical expenses paid for my family, vision, dental, vacation, and company paid pension). This is a good job, but a far cry from $60/hour.
Pretty amazing. I work in tech support, which is a MUCH lower competency line of work than programming and I make just a bit over $60 a year, $72 with full dental/medical. Of course that is in New York City, where $60k a year is *NOT* considered a wad of cash!
My girlfriend makes $150k a year as corporate trainer, and (since she owns her own company) only works on average 2-3 days per week. And she has friends in her line of work who actually have the temerity to ask her "How can you work for so little income?". So, naturally, she thinks my paycheck is peanuts. I actually had a therapist tell me one time "Of course you have trouble making ends meet! You hardly make any money!" (naturally, I fired her not long after that conversation!)
I program for enjoyment and because I like to learn. But even though it seems like a far more intellectually stimulating line of work, I don't think I'll ever persue it as a career. ESPECIALLY if it would mean having to take a cut in salary!
When making ambitious trilogies, shoot the whole set in one go. Do not try to make a Version 2 years after the first one made it big, or you will end up looking like a fool. And yes, I'm still regretting having seen the second Matrix movie.
While I agree that on the whole LoTR works a helluva lot better than Matrix did as a trilogy, I believe it's worth noting that Matrix was so experimental at the time it was made that the Wachowskis most likely had no clue that there would ever be more than one Matrix. They may have hoped there would be a sql. But its probably more the case that they felt fortunate to have made the movie they did, with the cast they had and would have had a great deal more trouble getting a trilogy based on a franchise as untried (nae, nonexistent) as Matrix was at the time "greenlighted".
DS9 also did really well when it had to compete against Babylon 5.
Urban legend has it that J. Michael Straczynski went to Paramount trying to sell his idea for this innovate new
space opera whose central focus was life aboard a
space station. The way I've heard it told, the studio brass sat there nodding silently and appreciatively during
the pitch session but ultimately said "Thanks, but No Thanks".
Then, mysteriously, a new show appeared featuring Star Trek
themes and...whaddya know! many spacefaring races mingling in intrigue and commerce on a space station! Go
figure, what were the odds of something like that happening? Two shows with nearly identical scenarios
hitting the air at roughly the same time?;)
But to tell the truth the Star Trek folk were just doling out
a bit of what they got back in the 60s (okay a bit of a stretch, but bear with me here). According to William
Shatner in his book about the
making of 60's series he told of how Roddenberry approached (I think it was CBS) trying to sell his "wagon
train to the stars" (making an attempt to appeal the success of a show called Gunsmoke) to the execs there. One major selling point was how
cheaply the show could be made because of his "similar worlds theory". The theory in question states that given
the enormity of the universe there is a mathematically possibility that other worlds could have evolved similarly
to the earth. That being the case, depictions of allien races could be achieved cheaply through inexpensive costuming
techniques and alien landscapes could be achieved through location shoots. Like their Paramount counterparts of
the 1990's, they sat there and said "Interesting, good, but ultimatly no thanks". Then...lo and behold look what
hits the air before Roddenberry can get the okay to do Star Trek...
Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb.'"
duuuuuuuhhhh When your done telling me about BSD Georgeie, can you please tell me about da' rabbits? I wanna know how dey dance and frolick in da springtime! I really wanna know about da rabbits George...duuuuhhh....
I remember back in around 1996 seeing slots for eps I,II,III,IV,V,VI and VII,VIII,IX on the StarWars.com homepage. Though a recent trip to the WayBack Machine seems to refute that memory. But they only go back to Dec 30th of '96 and my memory of VII,VIII,IX is a pretty clear one I'm adamant of having seen. But, interestingly enough Lucas had made some pretty clear statements that he NEVER intended to make a VII,VIII,IX trilogy. But I chalk those statements up to the same sort of Soviet revisionist history that made Greedo shoot first.
However, as we all know, the prequels don't hold a CANDEL to the originals. Maybe Lucas is FINALLY starting to realize this and hoping to restore the franchise to it's former glory, removing the tarnish of eps I and II. If that be the case, I truly hope that he can. Truly.
A favorite place for me and my fellow IT'ers to hang out at after work is a place called GameTime Nation. What they offer are lots of comfy couches and flat screen (not panel) displays to play the games on. The hardware is a choice of X-Box and PS2 on each machine. With soda/candy for sale and booming hip hop music plus eps of Red Vs Blue projected on the wall the place is a great geek hangout. It has apparently developed a large-ish social network of young hip-hopsters who play (what seems to be) mostly Halo and cheer and jeer each other on voiciferously. It'd be nice to find a correlate that had networked PC hardware, but thus far this place is the best I've found of this type. The one I go to (I think it's a chain) is on 13th (12th? don't go there that often) street between 3rd and 4th Aves in the best city in the world. Close to the Astor Place subway, walkable from Union Square.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always had a geeky dreamproject of supplementing my traditional lock and key entry to my house with biometric security devices. The idea being that in the event of a systems failure, instead of being locked out of the house I could fall back to the old lock-n-key method.
My idea would be to use either iris-scanning, breath analyzation or some combination of the two (ideally a choice so that if one were to fail, say the iris, the breath analyzer would let you in). Much more efficient than fumbling around for keys in the dark! And a blessing to the drunken Irishman I can sometimes be (not all, but SOME stereotypes certainly hold more than a little water...and occasionally some whiskey too!) I digress.
But the last time I checked, (this was a few years ago) such devices were not so readily available. And when you could find them they were exorbitantly expensive. Insult to injury drivers were only available for NT. Not that it would be that terrible to set up an NT box for this purpose, but Linux of course would be much preferable.
So my question is, has this situation changed? Has the price of this technology become more available and affordable? Still prohibitively expensive? Any sourceforgian opensource driver alternative for the devices that are?
I remember reading an interview with WG yeeears back when he was talking about his relationship to technology (I'm sure this topic is covered many times in interviews with him). He said that when he was writing Nueromancer (I'm paraphrasing here, because I read this sometime in the early 90's) he didn't own a personal computer and didn't even have a practical understanding of what they were. All he had was this romantic notion of an "almost crystaline entitiy" where everything was nearly silent and whooshed and whirred pleasantly as you worked. Nueromancer was written on a typewriter!
When he finally did get his first pc it was, needless to say, a letdown. Clanking, grinding, loud, slow, and chunking out computer errors this machine was an introduction to the real world of computing for this technological romanticist. But I personally am glad that he never really soured on romanticizing technology. Though he has been criticized for an overly uniform body of work stylistically, I personally like and am drawn into the worlds he creates.
Along with video games, books by Gibson and other authors like Stephenson (yes even Quicksilver is building up into computer related themes...starting from the mid 1600s!) and movies like "Hackers" and "Wargames" keeps the notion of computing romantic and fanciful enough that (personally speaking) I retain a bit of that playfulness to what I'm doing even when I'm editing config files!
Hell hath no fury as that family of Redmond. Think they're going to set their sites on slashdotters? Am I going to get setuid for linking? When (if ever) will the courts evolve a sensibe approach to (for lack of a better term) "cyberlaw"?
When Sol dies in 20 billion years, what could you possibly have done in your life that will matter then?
I've heard rumours of the "daystar". How often does it appear, and does it change colors? Or does it always look the same? Must one sacrifice a portion of the herd when it's angry?
I've been having the same experience with this issue on several fronts. One thing that make me acutely aware that I was growing up was a trip my girlfriend and I made to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum this past weekend. I may journal about it.
Specifically I remember taking a trip to this museum with my Dad when I was 10 years old (ca 1980). I was a HUGE Trekkie at the time. Thoroughly obsessed. Seeing the USS Enterprise was a thrill unmatched. I remember feeling like I was bearing witness to the second coming as I inspected every inch of the "starship" with my eyes, soaking in every molecule optically. I earnestly HOPED to have at least an echo of that feeling. Sadly this was not the case. Seeing it again at 34, it just looked like a big toy. I tried to be enthused, but being honest with myself my reaction was just a notch above "meh". All this despite the fact that I am currently in a downtime project of watching every Star Trek episode ever made, currently up to the end of season 3 on DVD. I sincerely wish I could muster just a 10th of that kind of childish enthusiasm for anything. So I myself must wonder, what must we lose to become adult?
Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy the trip or become enthused at all. What perhaps made the biggest impression on me was the Martin B-26B Marauder "Flak Bait" bomber. Here was something real. I was simply bowled over. It made WWII seem really real. And this airplane seemed to represent what it really was: a death machine. Regardless of the fact that it mas killing WWII era Germans, far as I was concerned I was standing there looking at a human meat grinder. THAT left a far, far bigger impression on me than the "USS Enterprise". What also made a very real emotional impression on me was an actual (albeit prototypical) example of a Lunar Lander. Also a big deal to me were the Minuteman Missile as well as a Russian ICBM and a recreation of the Apollo-Soyuz "meetup" in space. It was all very moving, but my reactions were not at all what I might've expected.
I notice that I don't quite enjoy punk rock the way I used to, gaming and science fiction the same.
...nevermind.
...is the reason that the author of the article chooses not to recommend the distribution...
..."However, the killer problem I found with Debian/PPC was my inability to get X11 working on it -- the installation seemed wholly unaware of any remotely relevant video card models, and some post-installation attempts at configuration proved fruitless, too. I am certain that there are Debian/PPC users who have worked out the configuration issues, but compared to the ease of installation of other distributions, I have trouble recommending Debian to many users..."
;D
I've always found X configuration on Debian to be a bit challenging myself. Anyone have some advice for a Debian on PPC newb? If DebianPPC powah users aren't on this site, I'll try the next Star Trek convention coming to town...
The Chinese are so great at protecting property rights (intellectual and otherwise). Remember, they signed a piece of paper(!!!) agreeing they wouldn't share the windows source code with anyone.
On an unrelated note, anyone care to start a football-style pool as to when the next round of microsoft virus hits...
and tells why you won't be able to run Linux directly on this chip."
....Oh! The Irony!
Actually there's only one accent in America (or so it seems to a foreigner), though indeed it's often hard to understand.
Completely and totally wrong. Strange as this may sound, one of the most accent neutral dialects in American English is in Central New Jersey. Not to be confused with North Jersey (Hoboken for example) which sounds almost identical to a NY accent, or a South Jersey accent (Cherry Hill) which sounds almost identical to a Philadelphia accent. People in the central part of the state speak a "Broadcaster's English".
That being said, a New York accent sounds NOTHING like a New England accent. Which sounds NOTHING AT ALL like a southern accent. Which sounds NOTHING at all like a Chicago accent. It's not at all like having a Punjabi speaking to a Gujarti in a lingua franca such as Hindi, where communcation between the two would pose more difficulty than, say, a New Yorker speaking to a Chicagoan. But there is NO mistaking the two accents (to an American Native).
And as I started travelling around the country, I started finding branches of the American dialect of which I had been completely unaware! In Minnesota, people almost sound SWEDISH at times! And one of them really threw me one time when she told me to put down my "bay-ug". She had to actually point to the bag (to me a "bah-g") for me to understand her. I can understand your ignornace if you are not a native American, but you are way off base!
was totally linear video (meaning you had to have a source deck and a record deck) it couldn't even capture video clips.
You are correct, but only partially. Yes, the Video Toaster was for linear video editing only. That is until you added the Video Toaster Flyer to your Amiga rig, which would allow you to do non-linear video editing and capture video on up to 21 SCSI disks.
Okay, stupid question time: When you signed up for the XBox live service did they ASK you if you wanted to renew the charge? Or did the ToS say, buried so that you have to scroll down 15 pages "...Oh! And by the way, we are going to keep on charging you for our service until you tell us to stop taking your money."
Either way, it's not fraud per se (especially for the former). But in the case of the latter, it's certainly not a business practice that should be encouraged by knowledgable consumers. But there will never be enough of those lot to change the way M$ will do business. Caveat Emptor indeed!
One quote: "We allow images of consensual sex in our cinemas, but not images of bestiality or child abuse. Why should the net be any different?"
Not only should the internet "...not be another TV or cinema, it should be a free, user-as-peer and user-controllable media an essential (perhaps the most) tenet of "hacker metaphysics" is that "whatever one mind can achieve, another can duplicate and surpass". Control the content of the Internet? Impossible. Just ask the Chinese.
As ridiculous as the TOS is, I have a better impression after reading the following from their "rants" page:
The Klez and Mydoom worms, for example, do send infected e-mails, but fake ("spoof") the return address. So the virus infected e-mail with our return address didn't come from us! Our e-mail is sent from a Macintosh that can't be infected by Windows only worms, and we use anti-virus software.
Okay, maybe they are nuts. But at least they don't spread Microsoft Viruses. (not that I did not say COMPUTER viruses)
And someone with a bachelor's should not be expected to be able to develop a new language...In general, working Engineers (non-PhD's, software or otherwise) don't contribute to to advancement, i.e. research papers. They work with the tools they're given to solve problems.
I disagree, completely. You shouldn't need a college degree at all if what you want to do is invent your own comiler, language, OS, etc...as if such things were impossible without one. In other words your potential for achievement has more to do with your passions and above all who you are than what Uni you've attended and how far you make it in formalized education. Some people have been known to INVENT circuit boards, elegant interfaces, write compilers and port languages to their newly created hardware...all without having been traditionally "academic" as we understand it. The last time the non-academic intellectual has been in vogue was during the beat generation. But whether that lifestyle is well regarded by the world at large or not does not affect the potential rewards of this approach to life.
I can honestly attest to the above statements as per image quality, the lack of need for conversion of formats between DirecTV and TiVO integrated units. The quality is outstanding!
;).
Not to mention that in addition to the need to convert from MPREG to analogue and back to MPEG using "digital" cable (resulting in inevitable loss of quality) is not the only thing to consider. A lerned fellow once told me that "digital" (and I use those quotes advisedly) cable is indeed digital from satellite to your local cable CO, but ANALOGUE from CO to your home on some cable systems. Which is then converted BACK to digital by your box.
As to interference causing loss of signal to your satellite, I can only say that this has only happened less than a handful of times in over 3 years of service. In fact I would say it would be only 3 exact times in that period (that I was there to witness it). Of those 3 times ONCE was during a Noreaster (severe thunderstorms for those not from my area, I once confused a Californian with that term) and both of the other times were during BLIZZARDS (white stuff falling from the sky (LOTS OF IT!) for you Hawaiians
Prior to having DirecTV I had cable for something on the order of 20 years, since I was a child. Now, I don't know exactly how many times the cable went out in our household, but I can say with honesty that it seemed to happen far FAR more often than my direcTV has gone down (proportionately speaking. Come back to me in 20 years for a more scientific analysis!). And I remember ALWAYS having sub-standard quality images on my TV using cable. I've never used digital cable. But given my experiences with them and my overall loathing for their monopolistic business practices (I'm still not sure how such monopolies can exist legally!) I stay about as FAR away from cable as I can. I am at this point a dyed in the wool DirecTV head!
Don't get me wrong though, as big a trekkie as I am (and I am indeed) no amount of DirecTV digital goodness will turn Enterprise into something worth watching!
Not sure how widely known this is, but Comcast is a Microsoft company. So, if you're wondering why they engage in senseless, draconian authoritarianism...now ya know why!
DSL has been berry berry goot to me. SO, if you have a choice do yourself a favor! Personally I use Earthlink DSL and they pretty much leave you to your own. I've been running websited, ftp, news. The only hurdle I haven't taken on is as of yet is getting sendmail working. The only port they block is 25. I send linux isos from work to my home ftp server and other large files on a frequent basis. My friends also download said those same iso's and in over a year and a half not a PEEP out of them about bandwidth hogging!
Looks like I'll finally get to delve into Hacking the Xbox. I'm not willing to potentially compromise my main gaming box for a developing set of skills and competencies that I could acquire from this book. Not while the Xbox is at the $200 level. But at the $100 level I am. It seems like a really nice guide to reverse engineering other low-level stuff that could also possibly help me get more out of this book now that it's finally in print.
I make $54k a year, plus full benefits (All medical expenses paid for my family, vision, dental, vacation, and company paid pension). This is a good job, but a far cry from $60/hour.
Pretty amazing. I work in tech support, which is a MUCH lower competency line of work than programming and I make just a bit over $60 a year, $72 with full dental/medical. Of course that is in New York City, where $60k a year is *NOT* considered a wad of cash!
My girlfriend makes $150k a year as corporate trainer, and (since she owns her own company) only works on average 2-3 days per week. And she has friends in her line of work who actually have the temerity to ask her "How can you work for so little income?". So, naturally, she thinks my paycheck is peanuts. I actually had a therapist tell me one time "Of course you have trouble making ends meet! You hardly make any money!" (naturally, I fired her not long after that conversation!)
I program for enjoyment and because I like to learn. But even though it seems like a far more intellectually stimulating line of work, I don't think I'll ever persue it as a career. ESPECIALLY if it would mean having to take a cut in salary!
When making ambitious trilogies, shoot the whole set in one go. Do not try to make a Version 2 years after the first one made it big, or you will end up looking like a fool. And yes, I'm still regretting having seen the second Matrix movie.
While I agree that on the whole LoTR works a helluva lot better than Matrix did as a trilogy, I believe it's worth noting that Matrix was so experimental at the time it was made that the Wachowskis most likely had no clue that there would ever be more than one Matrix. They may have hoped there would be a sql. But its probably more the case that they felt fortunate to have made the movie they did, with the cast they had and would have had a great deal more trouble getting a trilogy based on a franchise as untried (nae, nonexistent) as Matrix was at the time "greenlighted".
DS9 also did really well when it had to compete against Babylon 5.
...whaddya know! many spacefaring races mingling in intrigue and commerce on a space station! Go
figure, what were the odds of something like that happening? Two shows with nearly identical scenarios
hitting the air at roughly the same time? ;)
Urban legend has it that J. Michael Straczynski went to Paramount trying to sell his idea for this innovate new space opera whose central focus was life aboard a space station. The way I've heard it told, the studio brass sat there nodding silently and appreciatively during the pitch session but ultimately said "Thanks, but No Thanks".
Then, mysteriously, a new show appeared featuring Star Trek themes and
But to tell the truth the Star Trek folk were just doling out a bit of what they got back in the 60s (okay a bit of a stretch, but bear with me here). According to William Shatner in his book about the making of 60's series he told of how Roddenberry approached (I think it was CBS) trying to sell his "wagon train to the stars" (making an attempt to appeal the success of a show called Gunsmoke) to the execs there. One major selling point was how cheaply the show could be made because of his "similar worlds theory". The theory in question states that given the enormity of the universe there is a mathematically possibility that other worlds could have evolved similarly to the earth. That being the case, depictions of allien races could be achieved cheaply through inexpensive costuming techniques and alien landscapes could be achieved through location shoots. Like their Paramount counterparts of the 1990's, they sat there and said "Interesting, good, but ultimatly no thanks". Then...lo and behold look what hits the air before Roddenberry can get the okay to do Star Trek...
Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb.'"
duuuuuuuhhhh When your done telling me about BSD Georgeie, can you please tell me about da' rabbits? I wanna know how dey dance and frolick in da springtime! I really wanna know about da rabbits George...duuuuhhh....
I remember back in around 1996 seeing slots for eps I,II,III,IV,V,VI and VII,VIII,IX on the StarWars.com homepage. Though a recent trip to the WayBack Machine seems to refute that memory. But they only go back to Dec 30th of '96 and my memory of VII,VIII,IX is a pretty clear one I'm adamant of having seen. But, interestingly enough Lucas had made some pretty clear statements that he NEVER intended to make a VII,VIII,IX trilogy. But I chalk those statements up to the same sort of Soviet revisionist history that made Greedo shoot first.
However, as we all know, the prequels don't hold a CANDEL to the originals. Maybe Lucas is FINALLY starting to realize this and hoping to restore the franchise to it's former glory, removing the tarnish of eps I and II. If that be the case, I truly hope that he can. Truly.
A favorite place for me and my fellow IT'ers to hang out at after work is a place called GameTime Nation. What they offer are lots of comfy couches and flat screen (not panel) displays to play the games on. The hardware is a choice of X-Box and PS2 on each machine. With soda/candy for sale and booming hip hop music plus eps of Red Vs Blue projected on the wall the place is a great geek hangout. It has apparently developed a large-ish social network of young hip-hopsters who play (what seems to be) mostly Halo and cheer and jeer each other on voiciferously. It'd be nice to find a correlate that had networked PC hardware, but thus far this place is the best I've found of this type. The one I go to (I think it's a chain) is on 13th (12th? don't go there that often) street between 3rd and 4th Aves in the best city in the world. Close to the Astor Place subway, walkable from Union Square.
The AP has a story about the windows of the future they can go from clear to opaque and the can also act as an LCD TV or Computer Monitor.
Does Bill Gates know about this development? I smell a lawsuit...