I just don't think enough people can walk away from air travel for this to significantly impact the airlines. Certainly, business travel will go on.
Of course you're right. I never postulated this as anything that is likely to happen soon, merely as something I would like to happen.
Nevertheless, I wonder how long it will be before the suits decide that teleconferencing or videoconferencing offer more convenient alternatives. Even flying business class isn't much fun, and it certainly isn't a productive way to use one's time.
That's so not true. I tried Linux a few times on my laptop. Each newer version support less and less of my hardware.
I call bullshit.
It's not enough to say "I tried Linux". The kernel itself is a big project, and different distros implement it in different ways. Most modern distributions ship kernels built to support pretty nearly all hardware. Though I suppose it is possible that you *could* have a particularly crappy or obscure chipset that is not supported, there is usually a way to make it work.
The worst thing that could happen would be if one of these Nanos caught fire in luggage...
No.
The worst that could happen (and quite possibly will now) is that the airlines seize this opportunity to make passengers' travel even more unpleasant than it already is by banning or confiscating people's iPods. I wouldn't put it past them at all.
It would be amusing to see a mass boycott of all the airlines by all travellers until they learn to stop being such officious pricks. The way they behave towards passengers is not much better than animals might expect from the live cattle export trade.
The sad thing is that we have largely allowed ourselves to be cowed by this treatment.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
OK, you are free to doubt my reality (I am a 45-year-old old-timer when it comes to both Unix and Linux), but Linux isn't all about bleeding-edginess.
I would stack a nice solid Slackware distro against Solaris or BSD and expect sound results. Until very recently I used this for my desktop system too, but since my preference is for Gnome (for which development of the formerly excellent Dropline distribution appears to have stalled) I have had to go shopping.
I tried Ubuntu (again) and hated it (again), tried Gentoo for 3 weeks and not quite hated it, but found it frustrating enough to look elsewhere. Currently I'm playing with Arch linux, which is looking quite promising. Not quite as quick to set up as Slackware, but with all of its other (i.e. KISS) advantages.
In any case, this is pretty much exactly what Microsoft did: clone an OS marketed by someone much bigger and more powerful (IBM). Nobody objected then...
Re:Maybe C/++ might be unnecessary...
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Bash Cookbook
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...and switching to PCs running NT though...
Years ago (I think it was about 1990), Microsoft used to market (though I guess not very strenuously) a fortran compiler, "Microsoft Fortran". I never tried it, since I was working with mainframes at the time, but others have had good words for it. Most of us had never heard of the GNU Compiler Collection (I can't remember when gcc included the ftn frontend), so there weren't many ftn compilers available to fill the gap on x86 boxes unless you were prepared to write your own...
Maybe C/++ might be unnecessary...
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· Score: 1
I know it's not really fashionable any more, but this is the sort of thing FORTRAN was made for. The right tool for the right job and all that...
(Marantz Turntable, Marantz receiver, Paradigm studio 80 loudspeakers = joy)
Funny how subjective we can all be about our sound systems.
My setup is a relatively modest one from a so-called audiophile's point of view (NAD amp, Marantz CD player, Rega turntable, Naim speakers) but I'm not a candidate for getting sucked into all that snake-oil.
But in my case, the Marantz unit really is the weak link, and I hate it. When I can afford it, it will be the first (and maybe only) bit to be replaced.
because I'm a thief and I don't value your work enough to pay for it.
One might hope this AC was joking, but I know a lot of cheapskates who (although more than able to afford to buy anything they want) are just too damn mean to pay for anything, no matter how much they like to use it.
Furthermore, I'm ashamed to say that all of these people rank among the most tech-savvy of my acquaintances.
Personally, I generally prefer to use free/open source software as a matter of principle, with the exception of OS X on this laptop. I have to admit to (very) occasionally using a copy of PhotoShop downloaded via BitTorrent. Though for the most part I am happy enough with Gimp; my reasoning, for what it's worth, is that I simply can't afford Adobe's licencing fees, so I avoid using their product.
One thing he did for me was my laundry. He brought his own soap. It turns out he made impressions of my keys in the soap and used them to make a working key. Pretty clever...
Not necessarily. All it takes is a cheapie set of rat-tail files, a bit of patience and a steady hand. It is much easier to reproduce a key if you have the original, but hardly essential. Key impressioning has probably been practiced for nearly as long as locks have been around.
I used to be a blacksmith myself, and I never needed a credit card. My tool of choice was a ground-down.02-inch feeler-gauge (you can get one from any DIY car maintenance shop) and a screwdriver (to do the work of turning the barrel).
So Microsoft is running scared. Ohdearhowsadtoobadnevermind.
If it weren't for the fact that Microsoft has made itself so irrelevant, I might even feel sorry for them. Not so much that I would ever be tempted to buy Vista, though...
Problem is, if it terminates to a POTS connection anywhere, or you're going through a provider that's subject to CALEA, you're still pretty much hosed.
Whether or not you are hosed depends entirely on whether you are saying anything of interest. If I wanted or needed to be confident that my conversation is not overheard, I would insist on a face-to-face conversation out of doors, away from listening ears.
Skype was never really designed at the outset to provide enterprise-level security; it was designed to provide an easy and comparatively cheap interface for casual use among friends and family.
To this end, if authorities want to listen in to such conversation, there is little to stop them doing so by simple means such as listening at windows. But they would have to be prepared for a boring waste of time.
As a matter of interest, I wonder what (benchmarked) performance gain you get compared to a standard Slackware install. As far as I can see, running 64-bit allows you to address much more memory at a time, but with just 2GB RAM I would have thought you would start swapping before you even started working the machine very hard.
I mention this because I'm a diehard Slackware fan, but spent some time dithering over whether to try out Slamd64 and decided against it...
The difference in Vista between 1 GB and 2 GB is pretty dramatic.
I suppose that's probably true, but what that means to me is that you have to spend quite a lot of money before your machine starts becoming useful for productive work.
Thanks all the same, I think I'll pass. I have the RAM in any case, but I think I'll squander it on something a bit more useful.
Thanks, I was unaware that I had Toutrette's syndrome until now.
I can now rest comfortably in the knowledge that the blame for my baldness and all the rest of my symptoms are directly attributable to Microsoft's craniorectal operating systems.
Correct. This was when the planet was just cooled and the x86 was yet to be conceived. Any programmer's curriculum vitae inevitably referred specifically to the processors in question - obviously, since the binaries to which I refer only work on the CPU for which they are assembled or compiled, and nobody in those days expected cross-platform support.
OK, I admit I am a confirmed wearer of tinfoil hats...
But I have never felt it really necessary to leave persistent cookies lying around, as I have never been totally convinced that they are entirely immune to being read by unwelcome parties.
I know modern browsers (at least FF, Safari and Opera, and I guess probably IE) usually have an option to allow session cookies only, but I am still in the habit of forcing this on Linux and Mac boxes by symlinking my cookies.txt (and now cookies.sqlite) to/dev/null, thus ensuring that nothing persists after closing the session.
In the brief spell when I used Windows boxes, I simulated this effect (this is when Netscape was the norm) by creating a directory called cookies.txt in the appropriate place, which had an approximately similar effect.
Optionally, you could always simply live your own life and not bother with a Facebook account. My wife uses one to keep in touch with cronies past and present, but I find it disturbing to see the shenanigans that she has to go through to avoid becoming a buzz-bar between her various acquaintances, who (being predominantly female and possibly more or less human;-)) do not necessarily get along with each other.
Simpler by far to stick to email/skype/SMS/whatever, thus shortening the chains of personal interactions and not have your own time swallowed up by Facebook.
Slashdot Mirror
You're on form today, arent you? ;-) Well done, I've enjoyed reading your posts...
I just don't think enough people can walk away from air travel for this to significantly impact the airlines. Certainly, business travel will go on.
Of course you're right. I never postulated this as anything that is likely to happen soon, merely as something I would like to happen.
Nevertheless, I wonder how long it will be before the suits decide that teleconferencing or videoconferencing offer more convenient alternatives. Even flying business class isn't much fun, and it certainly isn't a productive way to use one's time.
That's so not true. I tried Linux a few times on my laptop. Each newer version support less and less of my hardware.
I call bullshit.
It's not enough to say "I tried Linux". The kernel itself is a big project, and different distros implement it in different ways. Most modern distributions ship kernels built to support pretty nearly all hardware. Though I suppose it is possible that you *could* have a particularly crappy or obscure chipset that is not supported, there is usually a way to make it work.
The worst thing that could happen would be if one of these Nanos caught fire in luggage...
No.
The worst that could happen (and quite possibly will now) is that the airlines seize this opportunity to make passengers' travel even more unpleasant than it already is by banning or confiscating people's iPods. I wouldn't put it past them at all.
It would be amusing to see a mass boycott of all the airlines by all travellers until they learn to stop being such officious pricks. The way they behave towards passengers is not much better than animals might expect from the live cattle export trade.
The sad thing is that we have largely allowed ourselves to be cowed by this treatment.
...but because it's fragmented I don't have to worry that it's going away any time soon.
Exactly. Evolution at work. "The Selfish Code-snippet"?
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
OK, you are free to doubt my reality (I am a 45-year-old old-timer when it comes to both Unix and Linux), but Linux isn't all about bleeding-edginess.
I would stack a nice solid Slackware distro against Solaris or BSD and expect sound results. Until very recently I used this for my desktop system too, but since my preference is for Gnome (for which development of the formerly excellent Dropline distribution appears to have stalled) I have had to go shopping.
I tried Ubuntu (again) and hated it (again), tried Gentoo for 3 weeks and not quite hated it, but found it frustrating enough to look elsewhere. Currently I'm playing with Arch linux, which is looking quite promising. Not quite as quick to set up as Slackware, but with all of its other (i.e. KISS) advantages.
In any case, this is pretty much exactly what Microsoft did: clone an OS marketed by someone much bigger and more powerful (IBM). Nobody objected then...
...and switching to PCs running NT though...
Years ago (I think it was about 1990), Microsoft used to market (though I guess not very strenuously) a fortran compiler, "Microsoft Fortran". I never tried it, since I was working with mainframes at the time, but others have had good words for it. Most of us had never heard of the GNU Compiler Collection (I can't remember when gcc included the ftn frontend), so there weren't many ftn compilers available to fill the gap on x86 boxes unless you were prepared to write your own...
I know it's not really fashionable any more, but this is the sort of thing FORTRAN was made for. The right tool for the right job and all that...
(Marantz Turntable, Marantz receiver, Paradigm studio 80 loudspeakers = joy)
Funny how subjective we can all be about our sound systems.
My setup is a relatively modest one from a so-called audiophile's point of view (NAD amp, Marantz CD player, Rega turntable, Naim speakers) but I'm not a candidate for getting sucked into all that snake-oil.
But in my case, the Marantz unit really is the weak link, and I hate it. When I can afford it, it will be the first (and maybe only) bit to be replaced.
Shhh we want to complain about how he doesn't do everything we want while giving us free music.
:-(
Well said.
I've been slowly digitising my old vinyl LPs for a long time now, but I don't have the bandwidth to host them online. Good for him.
Though I guess it looks as if his bandwidth has taken a hammering. I couldn't get to his site at all.
because I'm a thief and I don't value your work enough to pay for it.
One might hope this AC was joking, but I know a lot of cheapskates who (although more than able to afford to buy anything they want) are just too damn mean to pay for anything, no matter how much they like to use it.
Furthermore, I'm ashamed to say that all of these people rank among the most tech-savvy of my acquaintances.
Personally, I generally prefer to use free/open source software as a matter of principle, with the exception of OS X on this laptop. I have to admit to (very) occasionally using a copy of PhotoShop downloaded via BitTorrent. Though for the most part I am happy enough with Gimp; my reasoning, for what it's worth, is that I simply can't afford Adobe's licencing fees, so I avoid using their product.
One thing he did for me was my laundry. He brought his own soap. It turns out he made impressions of my keys in the soap and used them to make a working key. Pretty clever...
Not necessarily. All it takes is a cheapie set of rat-tail files, a bit of patience and a steady hand. It is much easier to reproduce a key if you have the original, but hardly essential. Key impressioning has probably been practiced for nearly as long as locks have been around.
I used to be a blacksmith myself, and I never needed a credit card. My tool of choice was a ground-down .02-inch feeler-gauge (you can get one from any DIY car maintenance shop) and a screwdriver (to do the work of turning the barrel).
What the hell are shrinky dinks, anyway? Something curable by Viagra?
So Microsoft is running scared. Ohdearhowsadtoobadnevermind.
If it weren't for the fact that Microsoft has made itself so irrelevant, I might even feel sorry for them. Not so much that I would ever be tempted to buy Vista, though...
If you know what selects for intelligence, by all means post it here
God.
Oh dear, oh dear. Are you pregnant, by any chance?
If those funky hormones aren't responsible, what's your excuse for such stupidity?
Problem is, if it terminates to a POTS connection anywhere, or you're going through a provider that's subject to CALEA, you're still pretty much hosed.
Whether or not you are hosed depends entirely on whether you are saying anything of interest. If I wanted or needed to be confident that my conversation is not overheard, I would insist on a face-to-face conversation out of doors, away from listening ears.
Skype was never really designed at the outset to provide enterprise-level security; it was designed to provide an easy and comparatively cheap interface for casual use among friends and family.
To this end, if authorities want to listen in to such conversation, there is little to stop them doing so by simple means such as listening at windows. But they would have to be prepared for a boring waste of time.
As a matter of interest, I wonder what (benchmarked) performance gain you get compared to a standard Slackware install. As far as I can see, running 64-bit allows you to address much more memory at a time, but with just 2GB RAM I would have thought you would start swapping before you even started working the machine very hard.
I mention this because I'm a diehard Slackware fan, but spent some time dithering over whether to try out Slamd64 and decided against it...
The difference in Vista between 1 GB and 2 GB is pretty dramatic.
I suppose that's probably true, but what that means to me is that you have to spend quite a lot of money before your machine starts becoming useful for productive work.
Thanks all the same, I think I'll pass. I have the RAM in any case, but I think I'll squander it on something a bit more useful.
Thanks, I was unaware that I had Toutrette's syndrome until now.
I can now rest comfortably in the knowledge that the blame for my baldness and all the rest of my symptoms are directly attributable to Microsoft's craniorectal operating systems.
Why not? Sounds perfectly plausible to me...
Correct. This was when the planet was just cooled and the x86 was yet to be conceived. Any programmer's curriculum vitae inevitably referred specifically to the processors in question - obviously, since the binaries to which I refer only work on the CPU for which they are assembled or compiled, and nobody in those days expected cross-platform support.
OK, I admit I am a confirmed wearer of tinfoil hats...
/dev/null, thus ensuring that nothing persists after closing the session.
But I have never felt it really necessary to leave persistent cookies lying around, as I have never been totally convinced that they are entirely immune to being read by unwelcome parties.
I know modern browsers (at least FF, Safari and Opera, and I guess probably IE) usually have an option to allow session cookies only, but I am still in the habit of forcing this on Linux and Mac boxes by symlinking my cookies.txt (and now cookies.sqlite) to
In the brief spell when I used Windows boxes, I simulated this effect (this is when Netscape was the norm) by creating a directory called cookies.txt in the appropriate place, which had an approximately similar effect.
Optionally, you could always simply live your own life and not bother with a Facebook account. My wife uses one to keep in touch with cronies past and present, but I find it disturbing to see the shenanigans that she has to go through to avoid becoming a buzz-bar between her various acquaintances, who (being predominantly female and possibly more or less human ;-)) do not necessarily get along with each other.
Simpler by far to stick to email/skype/SMS/whatever, thus shortening the chains of personal interactions and not have your own time swallowed up by Facebook.
I've just completed a BA in maths...
Maths is a Bachelor of Arts?
What the... ?
Sorry, but this seems a bit strange to me.