Many micro-distros use these extra tracks (80-82) to put extra data on the disk. A good example of this is Tom's Ultimate Boot/Root disk. It formats to a 1.72Meg!
ttyl
Farrell
It's all about the ablity to learn...
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
Before the advent of Minix, then Linux, I would have to take expensive courses, which I couldn't afford, to learn about software and how it works. Today, with access to the source, the numerous HOWTOs and FAQs, I can teach myself anything without having to spend money.
Learning should be free, as long as you are willing to work at it!
One that would be nice to have is a video link to the hospital. This would allow either EMS workers to "show" a doctor something they aren't sure how to handle, or alternately, a public link that patients can connect through and show a nurse to help them decide what to do. The nurse can either summon a doctor for help, refer them to a local clinic, tell them to bring the patient to emegency, and/or dispatch an ambulance to them. In addition, the nurse can tell the people what to do to make the patient more confortable and/or help save their life...like making sure the patient is kept warm, don't pull out the knife, etc. Many people in crisis situations forget their basic first aid, if they ever had it. First aid saves lives.
Egroups is one of the bigest public mailing list providers out there...many communities depend on these mailing lists for their members. A number of them are Pagan oriented, and now that the US is once again playing in the "Bush Leagues", a major media company might not want the controversy of supporting Paganism on their sites.
That is what scares me.
ttyl
Farrell
Druid, Erisian and sometime Thelemite
Seen:
Tues. Jan 16, 200. 10:35 showing at the Paramount in Montreal.
Synopsis:
Geek version of "Wall Street" (1987)
Entertainment value:
2 out of 5 (non-geek)
4 out of 5 (geek)
Review:
Plot followed "Wall Street"...Ultra-rich corperate type seduces young graduate with dreams of money and power. Graduate goes for it, luxuriates in the comfort of it all...then notices somethings is wrong. Finds out that someone close to him is being screwed by the company he works for. He then uses the very skills that he was hired for to make things as right as he can. Happy ending...the moral ones win, the evil ones loose and you walk away with a warm fuzzy.
Like most geek things, the fun parts are in the details! The DVD of this will probably spend a lot of time in slow-mo and freeze-frame on geek owned DVD players when it comes out.
Personal:
I enjoyed the film. This was no 2001, Schindler's List or The Great Escape (Or it's send-up, Chicken Run). A couple of things surpised me, but I won't mention them for fear of causing a spoiler. Go see it, maybe they will make a better one if this one makes lots of money!
ttyl
Farrell
Greetings fellow Program!
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 1
...Just cleaning the jolt off the monitor, never, never drink jolt and laugh at the same time!
I have sitting on my TV a HP Model 204C Oscillator, which I had picked up from some about to be trashed stuff at a company I used to work for. I grabbed it since it looked like a Occillator source that was used on some of the analog synths Pink Floyd used to use.
I find it very interesting that contact to both MIR and the HAM satellite were lost about the same time...I haven't had the time to go and check the exact times, but it would be very interesting!
ttyl
Farrell
It is still out there, and you can play online!
on
Scorched Island 3D
·
· Score: 1
Go to this site, and you can download the best and most accurate port of Scorched Earth, and, if you like to waste time at w/o/r/k/ the computer, you can play on-line against either robots, or other people on-line. Written in Java, it should work on any PC with a JAVA port.
It is really telling that the Creation company, which runs for-profit Science Fiction and Star Trek Conventions is involved this these people. I remember my first and only Creation Con back in the Early '80s...back then Fan run cons where charging $20 for a weekend membership, and it cost me $25 for one day at the Creation Con.
Creation Cons are consistantly over priced, have crappy programming and driven up the speaker's fee s for guests so much that the average convention cannot afford guests.
Thankfully, SF Book oriented conventions never really became a target for Creation...we still have good, inexpensive conventions for people who enjoy Science Fiction and Fantasy Books!
ttyl
Farrell J. McGovern
Founder, CAN-CON
Ottawa, Canada (That is the same places a OLS)
It's a great Pagan holiday fscked up by Christians
on
Gifts For Geeks
·
· Score: 2
Look, we celebrate Yule, the Winter Solistice, etc. as a time when we finally ahve all the prep. done for the winter, and all we have to do is wait it out. We celebrated this Holy Day tens of thousands of years before the Christians came along. It is a time of Celebration sort of like what you do at the end of a big programming crunch to get a product out. You go a little crazy, have some fun, partake of some recreational chemicals (booze mostly), and celebrate a job well done.
This whole Buy Buy Buy has been perpetrated by the Christian culture that treats religion like a commodity. Stop being so uptight about it! It is supposed to a celebration. If you celebrate by giving gifts, then fine...just don't make a big show about it. Gifts are given from the heart, not because you are hoping to influence the opinion of someone!
Blessed Be, Kallisti, 93!
Farrell McGovern
Re:Instant on. . . . "running fsck /dev/proc"?!?!?
on
Magnetic RAM from IBM
·
· Score: 1
Could we see a linux util that will check the intergrity of a your memory as part of the boot process...if it is corrupt, then you have to re-load memory.
I don't know why it would give you better speech recog, or easier download...but I am guessing it will be fast! No longer will you need to refresh memory all the time, that saves mucho time! It also means that these things will be able to lower the power cosumption...combine these with transmeta chips...and you might see 10+ hour laptop battery lives!
The reason that I have left my last few jobs was not money, but the work environment. Cubical Hell is a good way to loose employees. Give everone an office, even a small one, just so that every once in a while you can close your door and be alone to work on something is an increadble incentive to stay at a company. Free soda, coffee, hot chocolate and snacks are also major pluses. Another personal plus is the ablity to listen to music...esp the music I like. So either a good sound system (the altec-lansings are good! So are the harman-karden stuff), or good headphones...the Koss KSP/Portapro series give excellent frequency response from 50Hz to 20,000Hz, serious bass, and cost about $50. They are open air style, so that they don't block outside sounds.
Flex time, where possible is good, and/or the ablity to "bank" time, then take it off later is good. Extra vacation time is another plus...a week paid vacation is worth $5,000/year less to me.
A lack of dress code is also a major plus...if they really wanted a GQ model, they could have hired one, along with their wardrobe...if they hire me, I am a Unix/Linux SysAdmin/Security person, not a GQ model. Having to wear a tie all the time will cost a company an extra $10,000/year to hire me. A suit does not make a person work better.
Give people input into the company!!!! When people feel engaged in the company, rather than just some cog grinding out product, they tend to become more interested in the company, and thus less likely to be headhunted.
Prevent "little empires" within a company, this is bad for the company anyways, and it builds cliques, and when a person feels excluded, ie., not part of the clique, they are more open to leaving.
I would hardly call a book Irrelevant that inspired the CAW...They are one of the more stable Pagan groups out there. And it is a great deal more healthy than the other SF derived religion, Scientonology! When was that last time CAW went after a web site to shut them down for critizing them, or publishing their "secret" papers?
If I wasn't involved with Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship, I would have joined the Church of All Worlds. Both groups demand a level of intellectuall curiosity that leaves most other churchs behind. And that appeals to me.
Before I got into Unix, I used to do Netware installs and consulting. I've always said that the Novell file system is one of the best around, they have had "journaling" for over a decade. And their Software Fault Tolerant system (AKA SFT) that allows two servers to mirror one another is awesome. When they first introduced that feature, they had a great demo at COMDEX Canada in Toronto where they dropped an anvil on a server that was in replication with another, and it took a couple of sections to switch over...but all the applications didn't even notice...they only paused for those two seconds.
I would love to have that SFT level available for Linux! That would be a killer app!
ttyl
Farrell
I'm sorry, but this is just too funny to resist!
on
DoCoMos Finger Phone
·
· Score: 1
So, I guess with this product, you can combine Phone Sex wit Digital Sex?!?!?!
And if they added an internet browser, would they finally have browser for Deaf people could use without a keyboard?
Of course, if (when?) they port Linux to it, utilities like "Finger" could take on real, multiple, kinky meanings!
"Is your finger ringing, or are you just happy to see me?"
I don't know if anyone here still remembers the days when Linus jumped the revision numbers of the kernel from the.Teens to the.9x...he was sure it was almost ready...but we had at least 50 revisions before the 1.0 kernel was ready. It was challenging to keep track of the various number/letter/level version...but I didn't mind. We eventually got the 1.0 kernel, and I was happy to wait until it's done, because it was done well. And I expect it is the same with the 2.4 kernel.
It's chick to slam Linus and Co., but it's one heck of a job they are doing, many in their spare time...let's cut them some slack, eh?
It was Super Stellar Trek on the Apple ][+. I remember going over to a friend's place who worked for Computer Innovations, and he had an Apple at home. I was told if I could figure out how to run it, I could use it...I did, and I did! It was a challenging game of the standard Star Trek variety, complete with mining for Delithium Xtals, and whenever you beamed down a landing party, it would be three of the principal charactors, like Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and then some random Ensign (probably wearing a red shirt)...who would be lost to some mishap on the planet, like Hostile Natives, an Alien Fungus, etc.
It was also my first adventure in Hacking, too.
At one point, the program crashed...and spewed BASIC at me. I couldn't get past that point, so I went in with the Apple Basic manual, looked at where the code was crashing, and fixed it. (Oh, No! I just realized I admited I programmed in BASIC!). I then adjusted some of the ships to make the game easier to win...
And Thank you Paul Davidson (Rabbit) for that chance to play with your Apple!
This is the windowing system/user interface to OS/2. Compared to Windows, X-Windows flavours, Mac, and maybe even BeOS, it is the best windowing interface I know. I wrote a multi-media tourism application under OS/2 for kiosks, and I had full-motion Mpeg video, sound, effects..and that was in 1992! It's only now that Windows is catching up. WorkPlace Shell, WPS, push for it!
Many of Piers Anthony's books are no longer in print, and the publishing companies only want more Xanth...so Piers has resorted to using internet publishing. Check out HiPiers for more info if you like The Bio of Space Tyrant, The Cluster series, Cthor, Macroscope and any other of the wonderful books by Piers Anthony besides the Xanth series.
ttyl
Farrell
First, Brunner owes a great debt to *both* Heidi and Alvin Toffler. When they wrote _Future Shock_, they knew at the time it would not sell with a woman's co-credit. So they put it under Alvin's name. Now, go out and read all of their books. You NEED TO!
Next, the worm that Nick and Hearing Aid release to make all data accessable sound a little like Neil Stephenson's talk at CFP2000. I can't seem to find the transcript of his talk. GRRR...great video though.
Slashdot Mirror
Many micro-distros use these extra tracks (80-82) to put extra data on the disk. A good example of this is Tom's Ultimate Boot/Root disk. It formats to a 1.72Meg!
ttyl
Farrell
Before the advent of Minix, then Linux, I would have to take expensive courses, which I couldn't afford, to learn about software and how it works. Today, with access to the source, the numerous HOWTOs and FAQs, I can teach myself anything without having to spend money.
Learning should be free, as long as you are willing to work at it!
ttyl
Farrell
One that would be nice to have is a video link to the hospital. This would allow either EMS workers to "show" a doctor something they aren't sure how to handle, or alternately, a public link that patients can connect through and show a nurse to help them decide what to do. The nurse can either summon a doctor for help, refer them to a local clinic, tell them to bring the patient to emegency, and/or dispatch an ambulance to them. In addition, the nurse can tell the people what to do to make the patient more confortable and/or help save their life...like making sure the patient is kept warm, don't pull out the knife, etc. Many people in crisis situations forget their basic first aid, if they ever had it. First aid saves lives.
ttyl
Farrell
Egroups is one of the bigest public mailing list providers out there...many communities depend on these mailing lists for their members. A number of them are Pagan oriented, and now that the US is once again playing in the "Bush Leagues", a major media company might not want the controversy of supporting Paganism on their sites.
That is what scares me.
ttyl
Farrell
Druid, Erisian and sometime Thelemite
Seen:
Tues. Jan 16, 200. 10:35 showing at the Paramount in Montreal.
Synopsis:
Geek version of "Wall Street" (1987)
Entertainment value:
2 out of 5 (non-geek)
4 out of 5 (geek)
Review:
Plot followed "Wall Street"...Ultra-rich corperate type seduces young graduate with dreams of money and power. Graduate goes for it, luxuriates in the comfort of it all...then notices somethings is wrong. Finds out that someone close to him is being screwed by the company he works for. He then uses the very skills that he was hired for to make things as right as he can. Happy ending...the moral ones win, the evil ones loose and you walk away with a warm fuzzy.
Like most geek things, the fun parts are in the details! The DVD of this will probably spend a lot of time in slow-mo and freeze-frame on geek owned DVD players when it comes out.
Personal:
I enjoyed the film. This was no 2001, Schindler's List or The Great Escape (Or it's send-up, Chicken Run). A couple of things surpised me, but I won't mention them for fear of causing a spoiler. Go see it, maybe they will make a better one if this one makes lots of money!
ttyl
Farrell
...Just cleaning the jolt off the monitor, never, never drink jolt and laugh at the same time!
ttyl
Farrell
Two days ago...ftped slackware-current/slakware.
TANJ TANJ TANJ TANJ TANJ TANJ TANJ TANJ TANJ!!!!
But, as usual, Thank you for an excellent Distro!
ttyl
Farrell
I have sitting on my TV a HP Model 204C Oscillator, which I had picked up from some about to be trashed stuff at a company I used to work for. I grabbed it since it looked like a Occillator source that was used on some of the analog synths Pink Floyd used to use.
ttyl
Farrell
I find it very interesting that contact to both MIR and the HAM satellite were lost about the same time...I haven't had the time to go and check the exact times, but it would be very interesting!
ttyl
Farrell
Go to this site, and you can download the best and most accurate port of Scorched Earth, and, if you like to waste time at w/o/r/k/ the computer, you can play on-line against either robots, or other people on-line. Written in Java, it should work on any PC with a JAVA port.
ttyl
Farrell
First, do schemes like OPIE and S/Key also suffer from this? (I just found the Answer...YES)
Is SSH2 any better? (Yes, SSH2 is less vulnurable to Man in the Middle attacks...but it is just a matter of time before it, too is made vulnerable.)
ttyl
Farrell
It is really telling that the Creation company, which runs for-profit Science Fiction and Star Trek Conventions is involved this these people. I remember my first and only Creation Con back in the Early '80s...back then Fan run cons where charging $20 for a weekend membership, and it cost me $25 for one day at the Creation Con. Creation Cons are consistantly over priced, have crappy programming and driven up the speaker's fee s for guests so much that the average convention cannot afford guests. Thankfully, SF Book oriented conventions never really became a target for Creation...we still have good, inexpensive conventions for people who enjoy Science Fiction and Fantasy Books!
ttyl
Farrell J. McGovern
Founder, CAN-CON Ottawa, Canada (That is the same places a OLS)
Look, we celebrate Yule, the Winter Solistice, etc. as a time when we finally ahve all the prep. done for the winter, and all we have to do is wait it out. We celebrated this Holy Day tens of thousands of years before the Christians came along. It is a time of Celebration sort of like what you do at the end of a big programming crunch to get a product out. You go a little crazy, have some fun, partake of some recreational chemicals (booze mostly), and celebrate a job well done.
This whole Buy Buy Buy has been perpetrated by the Christian culture that treats religion like a commodity. Stop being so uptight about it! It is supposed to a celebration. If you celebrate by giving gifts, then fine...just don't make a big show about it. Gifts are given from the heart, not because you are hoping to influence the opinion of someone!
Blessed Be, Kallisti, 93!
Farrell McGovern
Could we see a linux util that will check the intergrity of a your memory as part of the boot process...if it is corrupt, then you have to re-load memory.
I don't know why it would give you better speech recog, or easier download...but I am guessing it will be fast! No longer will you need to refresh memory all the time, that saves mucho time! It also means that these things will be able to lower the power cosumption...combine these with transmeta chips...and you might see 10+ hour laptop battery lives!
ttyl
Farrell
The reason that I have left my last few jobs was not money, but the work environment. Cubical Hell is a good way to loose employees. Give everone an office, even a small one, just so that every once in a while you can close your door and be alone to work on something is an increadble incentive to stay at a company. Free soda, coffee, hot chocolate and snacks are also major pluses. Another personal plus is the ablity to listen to music...esp the music I like. So either a good sound system (the altec-lansings are good! So are the harman-karden stuff), or good headphones...the Koss KSP/Portapro series give excellent frequency response from 50Hz to 20,000Hz, serious bass, and cost about $50. They are open air style, so that they don't block outside sounds.
Flex time, where possible is good, and/or the ablity to "bank" time, then take it off later is good. Extra vacation time is another plus...a week paid vacation is worth $5,000/year less to me.
A lack of dress code is also a major plus...if they really wanted a GQ model, they could have hired one, along with their wardrobe...if they hire me, I am a Unix/Linux SysAdmin/Security person, not a GQ model. Having to wear a tie all the time will cost a company an extra $10,000/year to hire me. A suit does not make a person work better.
Give people input into the company!!!! When people feel engaged in the company, rather than just some cog grinding out product, they tend to become more interested in the company, and thus less likely to be headhunted.
Prevent "little empires" within a company, this is bad for the company anyways, and it builds cliques, and when a person feels excluded, ie., not part of the clique, they are more open to leaving.
..just a few ideas...
ttyl
Farrell
I would hardly call a book Irrelevant that inspired the CAW...They are one of the more stable Pagan groups out there. And it is a great deal more healthy than the other SF derived religion, Scientonology! When was that last time CAW went after a web site to shut them down for critizing them, or publishing their "secret" papers?
If I wasn't involved with Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship, I would have joined the Church of All Worlds. Both groups demand a level of intellectuall curiosity that leaves most other churchs behind. And that appeals to me.
Kallisti!
ttyl
Farrell J. McGovern
Geepers, don't you people ever use FTP?!?!?!
When ever I upgrade, I just ftp to ftpx.netscape.com, replacing "x" with a single digit, non-zero number.
ttyl
Farrell
Before I got into Unix, I used to do Netware installs and consulting. I've always said that the Novell file system is one of the best around, they have had "journaling" for over a decade. And their Software Fault Tolerant system (AKA SFT) that allows two servers to mirror one another is awesome. When they first introduced that feature, they had a great demo at COMDEX Canada in Toronto where they dropped an anvil on a server that was in replication with another, and it took a couple of sections to switch over...but all the applications didn't even notice...they only paused for those two seconds.
I would love to have that SFT level available for Linux! That would be a killer app!
ttyl
Farrell
So, I guess with this product, you can combine Phone Sex wit Digital Sex?!?!?!
And if they added an internet browser, would they finally have browser for Deaf people could use without a keyboard?
Of course, if (when?) they port Linux to it, utilities like "Finger" could take on real, multiple, kinky meanings!
"Is your finger ringing, or are you just happy to see me?"
ttyl
Farrell
I don't know if anyone here still remembers the days when Linus jumped the revision numbers of the kernel from the .Teens to the .9x...he was sure it was almost ready...but we had at least 50 revisions before the 1.0 kernel was ready. It was challenging to keep track of the various number/letter/level version...but I didn't mind. We eventually got the 1.0 kernel, and I was happy to wait until it's done, because it was done well. And I expect it is the same with the 2.4 kernel.
It's chick to slam Linus and Co., but it's one heck of a job they are doing, many in their spare time...let's cut them some slack, eh?
ttyl
Farrell
It was Super Stellar Trek on the Apple ][+. I remember going over to a friend's place who worked for Computer Innovations, and he had an Apple at home. I was told if I could figure out how to run it, I could use it...I did, and I did! It was a challenging game of the standard Star Trek variety, complete with mining for Delithium Xtals, and whenever you beamed down a landing party, it would be three of the principal charactors, like Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and then some random Ensign (probably wearing a red shirt)...who would be lost to some mishap on the planet, like Hostile Natives, an Alien Fungus, etc.
It was also my first adventure in Hacking, too.
At one point, the program crashed...and spewed BASIC at me. I couldn't get past that point, so I went in with the Apple Basic manual, looked at where the code was crashing, and fixed it. (Oh, No! I just realized I admited I programmed in BASIC!). I then adjusted some of the ships to make the game easier to win...
And Thank you Paul Davidson (Rabbit) for that chance to play with your Apple!
ttyl
Farrell
This is the windowing system/user interface to OS/2. Compared to Windows, X-Windows flavours, Mac, and maybe even BeOS, it is the best windowing interface I know. I wrote a multi-media tourism application under OS/2 for kiosks, and I had full-motion Mpeg video, sound, effects..and that was in 1992! It's only now that Windows is catching up. WorkPlace Shell, WPS, push for it!
ttyl
Farrell
Former OS/2 Developer, using AVC
Many of Piers Anthony's books are no longer in print, and the publishing companies only want more Xanth...so Piers has resorted to using internet publishing. Check out HiPiers for more info if you like The Bio of Space Tyrant, The Cluster series, Cthor, Macroscope and any other of the wonderful books by Piers Anthony besides the Xanth series.
ttyl
Farrell
First, Brunner owes a great debt to *both* Heidi and Alvin Toffler. When they wrote _Future Shock_, they knew at the time it would not sell with a woman's co-credit. So they put it under Alvin's name. Now, go out and read all of their books. You NEED TO!
Next, the worm that Nick and Hearing Aid release to make all data accessable sound a little like Neil Stephenson's talk at CFP2000. I can't seem to find the transcript of his talk. GRRR...great video though.
tty
Farrell
Way to Cory! It won't be too long until Canada dominates the Worldcon!
ttyl
Farrell
past Co-Chair, CAN-CON