I just zapped a $20 bill for 20 seconds and it's barely even warm
This is probably because if there is anything under his eye, it's smaller than the microwave wavelengths. Our favorite TV Chef pointed this out in his popcorn episode when he informs us that staples are too small to get enough of the microwaves to heat up and burn the paper bag they're stapled into.
Actually, the "weird" file system format on the iPod is actually a database. It allows the iPod to avoid having to scan the entire hard drive for playable media every time it starts up, and saves a lot of battery life.
What DRM on the ipod? As far as I've seen, the DRM is in iTunes, and only applies to music downloaded from the iTunes store. I've had no problem copying self-encoded music files from my machine at home, to my iPod, to my machine at work (all windows). The only hard part was finding the music on the iPod, but since I have "show hidden files/folders" enabled in Windows, it was pretty easy. The filenames are a little strange on the iPod, but if you tell iTunes to file your music away for you, it will happily rename the files and place them in appropriately-named folders.
HOWEVER, if you aren't interested in RHN and support, buy one and install it on a thousand machines.
This is the part that Mr. Taylor seems to have left out of his answer. When you buy RedHat, you're paying predominantly for a support contract, not the software itself. You can either pay a lot up front, if you anticipate a need for support, or pay less and then pay per-instance later. Microsoft generally has the same kind of thing -- they just don't emphasize their support contracts in the sale of Windows itself - you buy the OS and then you buy the support contract.
Since when is federal involvement new? Wasn't it the DMCA that added the addendum to copyright violation law saying that if the violation involved something "digital" it was an instant criminal offense, regardless of profit (which used to be the civil/criminal difference)?
Um, the sony camcorders do have nightvision. Real nightvision - the infrared kind. The built-in illuminators kinda suck, but with the 8-irLED attachment (which also happens to have a normal light) I get awesome nightvision up to a hundred feet or so, just like they advertise.
I love my sony dcr-trv27. Took it on my honeymoon, where the IR let me take some pretty incredible pictures of an active volcano (obviously not the ones in the link), and of all kinds of nocturnal animals on jungle walks. Sony uses Zeiss optics, which are virtually unparalleled, and unlike many of their digicams, the camcorder ccd's are pretty decent (don't expect to rely on the 1.3Mp "still" features, though - they're mediocre at best). Sony doesn't pack very many video editing type features into their cameras like JVC, etc. but really, if you get a digical camcorder, you'll have a lot more options in software (and trust me, even if you think you won't play with video editing software, once you start wanting to burn dvd's for family/friends, you'll appreciate it). Sony cameras are a little more expensive than others, but imho the quality shows in both the manufacturing and the recording quality.
1+1==2 (as a mathematical exercise, not a practical one) can't be proven through the basic axioms of arithmetic. It is the basic axiom of arithmetic, upon which all arithmetic relies. There is a book (I can't remember the authors or title) written by a couple of philosophers that went on for pages (perhaps the "300 pages" mentioned earlier, though I recall that it was closer to 400 or 500) trying to prove this without applying rules derrived from it, and they couldn't do it. This formula is the basis from which all math is taken, and though it's easy enough to demonstrate in a practical manner (see, I have one of X and another of X, therefore I have two of X), you're not proving it, just demonstrating the physical manifestation that 1+1==2 was intended to explain.
My only quibble is that Esperanto is still growing
My bad, then. One of my college roommates spoke Esperanto, and had told me that it was getting harder and harder to find people interested in the language, let alone those who spoke it. Since I remember hearing a lot more about Esperanto in the '80's than I do now, it made sense.
english is a hack, of many different languages and dialects, warped and twisted generation after generation
Show me a language, other than a manmade one like Sanskrit (yes, it was codified, organized and "fixed in stone" about 2000-2400 years ago), that isn't. All languages evolve, that's what makes them "living" languages (as opposed to so-called "dead" ones like latin, ancient greek or classical arabic). You described a pidgin, which English definitely isn't. English has been evolving and in use as its own language for over 1500 years.
If we only had one language (like your example of Esperanto), it, too would begin to evolve as new technologies, etc. came into being. Esperanto lost popularity because it was too simple of a language -- it didn't contain enough complexity to convey the meanings necessary to carry on an intellectual conversation.
Languages, dialects and words evolve because of communication needs. Imagine if I said something like "this is wonderfully spicy food." English uses the word "spicy" for (at least) two different meanings: "flavorful from having a number of spices added", and "hot, as in chili peppers." A language like Spanish has evolved its own word (picante) for the latter meaning, and thus if I were to say "esta comida es deliciosamente picante," you'd know immediately that I love hot-spicy food.
It's not elitist to ask that people learn and use good grammar or spelling. Grammar is what gives sentences meaning. You can completely change the meaning of a sentence by misplacing a comma (I know, I spent an hour defending one sentence in my philosophy thesis because of an ambiguous comma) or other punctuation mark, just as you can make a sentence very difficult to read by using "it's" (it is) instead of "its" (belongs to "it").
Granted, English is a horribly over-complex language that has adopted words and phrases from a variety of other (often non-related) languages, you said it yourself - it's extremely difficult to find a replacement for it. I'm not about to say that everyone should learn English and nothing else -- far from it, I speak/understand 3 languages (only one of them very well, anymore) and find it attrocious that Americans can barely speak their own language, let alone at least one more -- but, it has become the dominant language of information, and like it or not, especially because so many people speak it, it's very important to follow the rules (and the exceptions) in order to be understood.
Just for an experiment, if you want to see how much more effort it is to have something that's just "understandable," go read some Middle English like Chaucer, where words were spelled phonetically instead of according to specified rules (and the spellings change between instances of the words). You practically have to read it aloud if you want to understand it easily. There's a reason why grammar and spelling standards evolved within languages.
Of course, let it not speak too badly of me that I made several typos with regard to quotation marks and punctuation marks in my previous post. That just proves that I've forgotten how to proofread what I write (it's so much easier when the interpreter/compiler tells me my mistakes).
I can definitely agree with this. Though I grew up bilingual in English and Spanish (I had the fortune of growing up for at least a few years of my childhood outside of the US, immersed in South American culture), I learned more about English grammar and linguistics in the 2-3 years of German I took before/after college (long story short, the "after" was pretty much just for fun).
In college, and a good one at that, many of my professors were amazed that more than half of students still didn't understand the differences between "its" and "it's", "their," "they're" and "there," or "your" and "you're". I even ran across the occasional student in grad school who had this problem. It's a sad day when students at some of the top schools in the country don't even understand their own language.
I'd have to agree with this. I doubt that my BA in Philosophy or MA in Social Sciences (Anthro) are what earned me my $50k starting wage. More likely, it was the 6-8 years of "industry" ecommerce design work that paid my way through those colleges.
You pay *first* by buying the stamp from the third party
And who is the third party? I run my own mail server, does that mean that I'd have to set up some sort of payment system (ie. start a business and deal with paperwork, etc.) before people could send me email? Or would I just be stuck "in the dark ages" and remain subject to spam.
Or what if I want to send mail to someone? Do I pay the recipient, or the recipient's ISP? Do I have to buy a "stamp" for each ISP out there? This is just such a bad idea in so many ways.
Business that say "unlimited" when the service is not unlimited are guilty of fraud.
Which is probably why "unlimited" internet access means "unlimited time online," not "unlimited bandwidth usage." If you violate their (unspecified) bandwidth usage limits, they feel that they have the right to stop providing you that "unlimited time online." The problem with this is not that they are preventing users from using the advertised "unlimited" but that they are claiming users are in violation of terms that the users can't even find out.
Microsoft also invested $150 million in Apple a few years ago
There's a big difference between $150M and $1B.
Re:I wish all mail admins..
on
More MyDoom Gloom
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
would TURN OFF those blasted "Your mail has a virus!" auto-replies
I agree - I've taken to replying to them in person, telling them of all the useless traffic they're making. Then again, I've only received one so far.
On the other hand, I really wish that Amavis would respect its "locals" settings and when set not to reply to offsite addresses, NOT to respond to offsite senders. What the heck is an offsite recipient, anyway? If they're getting mail on my server, they're local. It's the senders that I care about being offsite, not the recipients.
Spamassassin already has rules to catch this kind of obfuscation. However, it wouldn't be hard to merely translate these things back into real IP's. After all, the author of this article has already said that he filters on the 2nd (3rd) level domain name, and in an instance like this, there IS no domain name - any good filter would skip over the stuff before the @ and after the :
Mainly because I can guarantee my vendor is available on the phone when I need them to troubleshoot any of the funky ass things servers tend to do.
You mean I can't just call up RedHat and pay them a reasonable fee to have them help me debug whatever troubles I might be having? Funny, I thought I could - that's what service level agreements are all about.
If you want free support (last I checked, the days of unlimited free calls to 1-800-SOS-APPL are long gone), there are hundreds of IRC channels, usenet groups, etc. where people hang out 24/7 and are usually happy to answer questions or have a new problem to figure out. Of course, there are similar places for Mac issues, too.
Your Dell died and you think it's not going to recover? Drop the drive (or dd, or rsync, or whatever) into an IBM and you're basically good to go.
Have you ever actually tried this with Windows? Aside from having to go through "activation" again because of the hardware changes, most of the time it won't work right (if at all) afterward. I've done this countless times on desktop machines, and always end up having to reinstall Windows to fix all of the little annoyances and random slowdowns that happen from switching machines.
But I will admit that at least most of the major distributions of Linux are much more capable at handling the switch.
he will be back to having the same problems that he had with his Dell
And how is this hardware lock-in any different than Apple's? It's not like you can go out and (easily) find/buy/put a Supermicro or Asus motherboard into a Dell laptop (or heck, even many of their desktop cases).
Well, most programming jobs I've applied for have given little homework type problems to solve. Annoying, but a "show me how you would do X" task (where X is some common/related task that the job would require) is a really quick way for employers to see if applicants can handle the job they're applying for.
And it sucks that all of your "good" work is NDA'd - I have a nice library of code snippets that I've worked up over the years (I've never had NDA'd code to deal with) and I bring that with me as yet another asset - it speeds up development if I already have all of the common routines I need pre-written and ready for copy-paste (and since it's all my code, I just provide a license to the employer to do whatever they want with it if I ever leave).
At least, wear a shirt and tie. Don't roll out of bed and throw on some jeans, take the time to look presentable.
Last time I dressed up for an interview, I was told that if I ever showed up to work looking like that I'd be laughed at - and it was a pretty standard office type job (and when I got the job, I wore jeans to work every day). I've had other interviews where I was asked not to dress up because the interviewer wanted to see me "as myself."
And who says that I can't throw on some jeans and take the time to look presentable. Granted, I might not wear jeans to an interview, but a job fair? Then again, I haven't been to a job fair since I was in college - something about being employeed keeps me away.
Maybe he was hired by a CS guy who actually knew that C+ is a programming language
Anyone who hires a programmer without looking at code samples and having him/her talk with knowledgeable coders currently on-staff is an idiot. I can say that I'm good at Perl and PHP, and I can prove it by showing you a list of satisfied clients and functional websites. I can say that I'm a god when it comes to writing C/C++ code, but if you asked me to prove it, you'd easily realize that I'm not.
I thought that in order to be knighted, you had to swear fealty to the Crown. As an American citizen, it's a treasonable offense to swear fealty to the ruler of another country, even if that country is currently an ally.
Though I guess there are some special provisions or something granted to Americans, so you can swear conditional fealty. Still, "Sir William the Traitor" has a nice ring to it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably because if there is anything under his eye, it's smaller than the microwave wavelengths. Our favorite TV Chef pointed this out in his popcorn episode when he informs us that staples are too small to get enough of the microwaves to heat up and burn the paper bag they're stapled into.
Actually, the "weird" file system format on the iPod is actually a database. It allows the iPod to avoid having to scan the entire hard drive for playable media every time it starts up, and saves a lot of battery life.
What DRM on the ipod? As far as I've seen, the DRM is in iTunes, and only applies to music downloaded from the iTunes store. I've had no problem copying self-encoded music files from my machine at home, to my iPod, to my machine at work (all windows). The only hard part was finding the music on the iPod, but since I have "show hidden files/folders" enabled in Windows, it was pretty easy. The filenames are a little strange on the iPod, but if you tell iTunes to file your music away for you, it will happily rename the files and place them in appropriately-named folders.
This is the part that Mr. Taylor seems to have left out of his answer. When you buy RedHat, you're paying predominantly for a support contract, not the software itself. You can either pay a lot up front, if you anticipate a need for support, or pay less and then pay per-instance later. Microsoft generally has the same kind of thing -- they just don't emphasize their support contracts in the sale of Windows itself - you buy the OS and then you buy the support contract.
Since when is federal involvement new? Wasn't it the DMCA that added the addendum to copyright violation law saying that if the violation involved something "digital" it was an instant criminal offense, regardless of profit (which used to be the civil/criminal difference)?
Try using: ATrpms or NewRPMs or FreshRPMs or Dag's
All friendly with apt and yum. It's rare that I don't find a package in one of these repositories..
I love my sony dcr-trv27. Took it on my honeymoon, where the IR let me take some pretty incredible pictures of an active volcano (obviously not the ones in the link), and of all kinds of nocturnal animals on jungle walks. Sony uses Zeiss optics, which are virtually unparalleled, and unlike many of their digicams, the camcorder ccd's are pretty decent (don't expect to rely on the 1.3Mp "still" features, though - they're mediocre at best). Sony doesn't pack very many video editing type features into their cameras like JVC, etc. but really, if you get a digical camcorder, you'll have a lot more options in software (and trust me, even if you think you won't play with video editing software, once you start wanting to burn dvd's for family/friends, you'll appreciate it). Sony cameras are a little more expensive than others, but imho the quality shows in both the manufacturing and the recording quality.
1+1==2 (as a mathematical exercise, not a practical one) can't be proven through the basic axioms of arithmetic. It is the basic axiom of arithmetic, upon which all arithmetic relies. There is a book (I can't remember the authors or title) written by a couple of philosophers that went on for pages (perhaps the "300 pages" mentioned earlier, though I recall that it was closer to 400 or 500) trying to prove this without applying rules derrived from it, and they couldn't do it. This formula is the basis from which all math is taken, and though it's easy enough to demonstrate in a practical manner (see, I have one of X and another of X, therefore I have two of X), you're not proving it, just demonstrating the physical manifestation that 1+1==2 was intended to explain.
My bad, then. One of my college roommates spoke Esperanto, and had told me that it was getting harder and harder to find people interested in the language, let alone those who spoke it. Since I remember hearing a lot more about Esperanto in the '80's than I do now, it made sense.
Show me a language, other than a manmade one like Sanskrit (yes, it was codified, organized and "fixed in stone" about 2000-2400 years ago), that isn't. All languages evolve, that's what makes them "living" languages (as opposed to so-called "dead" ones like latin, ancient greek or classical arabic). You described a pidgin, which English definitely isn't. English has been evolving and in use as its own language for over 1500 years.
If we only had one language (like your example of Esperanto), it, too would begin to evolve as new technologies, etc. came into being. Esperanto lost popularity because it was too simple of a language -- it didn't contain enough complexity to convey the meanings necessary to carry on an intellectual conversation.
Languages, dialects and words evolve because of communication needs. Imagine if I said something like "this is wonderfully spicy food." English uses the word "spicy" for (at least) two different meanings: "flavorful from having a number of spices added", and "hot, as in chili peppers." A language like Spanish has evolved its own word (picante) for the latter meaning, and thus if I were to say "esta comida es deliciosamente picante," you'd know immediately that I love hot-spicy food.
It's not elitist to ask that people learn and use good grammar or spelling. Grammar is what gives sentences meaning. You can completely change the meaning of a sentence by misplacing a comma (I know, I spent an hour defending one sentence in my philosophy thesis because of an ambiguous comma) or other punctuation mark, just as you can make a sentence very difficult to read by using "it's" (it is) instead of "its" (belongs to "it").
Granted, English is a horribly over-complex language that has adopted words and phrases from a variety of other (often non-related) languages, you said it yourself - it's extremely difficult to find a replacement for it. I'm not about to say that everyone should learn English and nothing else -- far from it, I speak/understand 3 languages (only one of them very well, anymore) and find it attrocious that Americans can barely speak their own language, let alone at least one more -- but, it has become the dominant language of information, and like it or not, especially because so many people speak it, it's very important to follow the rules (and the exceptions) in order to be understood.
Just for an experiment, if you want to see how much more effort it is to have something that's just "understandable," go read some Middle English like Chaucer, where words were spelled phonetically instead of according to specified rules (and the spellings change between instances of the words). You practically have to read it aloud if you want to understand it easily. There's a reason why grammar and spelling standards evolved within languages.
Of course, let it not speak too badly of me that I made several typos with regard to quotation marks and punctuation marks in my previous post. That just proves that I've forgotten how to proofread what I write (it's so much easier when the interpreter/compiler tells me my mistakes).
In college, and a good one at that, many of my professors were amazed that more than half of students still didn't understand the differences between "its" and "it's", "their," "they're" and "there," or "your" and "you're". I even ran across the occasional student in grad school who had this problem. It's a sad day when students at some of the top schools in the country don't even understand their own language.
I'd have to agree with this. I doubt that my BA in Philosophy or MA in Social Sciences (Anthro) are what earned me my $50k starting wage. More likely, it was the 6-8 years of "industry" ecommerce design work that paid my way through those colleges.
And who is the third party? I run my own mail server, does that mean that I'd have to set up some sort of payment system (ie. start a business and deal with paperwork, etc.) before people could send me email? Or would I just be stuck "in the dark ages" and remain subject to spam.
Or what if I want to send mail to someone? Do I pay the recipient, or the recipient's ISP? Do I have to buy a "stamp" for each ISP out there? This is just such a bad idea in so many ways.
Which is probably why "unlimited" internet access means "unlimited time online," not "unlimited bandwidth usage." If you violate their (unspecified) bandwidth usage limits, they feel that they have the right to stop providing you that "unlimited time online." The problem with this is not that they are preventing users from using the advertised "unlimited" but that they are claiming users are in violation of terms that the users can't even find out.
There's a big difference between $150M and $1B.
I agree - I've taken to replying to them in person, telling them of all the useless traffic they're making. Then again, I've only received one so far.
On the other hand, I really wish that Amavis would respect its "locals" settings and when set not to reply to offsite addresses, NOT to respond to offsite senders. What the heck is an offsite recipient, anyway? If they're getting mail on my server, they're local. It's the senders that I care about being offsite, not the recipients.
Spamassassin already has rules to catch this kind of obfuscation. However, it wouldn't be hard to merely translate these things back into real IP's. After all, the author of this article has already said that he filters on the 2nd (3rd) level domain name, and in an instance like this, there IS no domain name - any good filter would skip over the stuff before the @ and after the :
You mean I can't just call up RedHat and pay them a reasonable fee to have them help me debug whatever troubles I might be having? Funny, I thought I could - that's what service level agreements are all about.
If you want free support (last I checked, the days of unlimited free calls to 1-800-SOS-APPL are long gone), there are hundreds of IRC channels, usenet groups, etc. where people hang out 24/7 and are usually happy to answer questions or have a new problem to figure out. Of course, there are similar places for Mac issues, too.
Have you ever actually tried this with Windows? Aside from having to go through "activation" again because of the hardware changes, most of the time it won't work right (if at all) afterward. I've done this countless times on desktop machines, and always end up having to reinstall Windows to fix all of the little annoyances and random slowdowns that happen from switching machines.
But I will admit that at least most of the major distributions of Linux are much more capable at handling the switch.
And how is this hardware lock-in any different than Apple's? It's not like you can go out and (easily) find/buy/put a Supermicro or Asus motherboard into a Dell laptop (or heck, even many of their desktop cases).
Well, most programming jobs I've applied for have given little homework type problems to solve. Annoying, but a "show me how you would do X" task (where X is some common/related task that the job would require) is a really quick way for employers to see if applicants can handle the job they're applying for.
And it sucks that all of your "good" work is NDA'd - I have a nice library of code snippets that I've worked up over the years (I've never had NDA'd code to deal with) and I bring that with me as yet another asset - it speeds up development if I already have all of the common routines I need pre-written and ready for copy-paste (and since it's all my code, I just provide a license to the employer to do whatever they want with it if I ever leave).
Last time I dressed up for an interview, I was told that if I ever showed up to work looking like that I'd be laughed at - and it was a pretty standard office type job (and when I got the job, I wore jeans to work every day). I've had other interviews where I was asked not to dress up because the interviewer wanted to see me "as myself."
And who says that I can't throw on some jeans and take the time to look presentable. Granted, I might not wear jeans to an interview, but a job fair? Then again, I haven't been to a job fair since I was in college - something about being employeed keeps me away.
Anyone who hires a programmer without looking at code samples and having him/her talk with knowledgeable coders currently on-staff is an idiot. I can say that I'm good at Perl and PHP, and I can prove it by showing you a list of satisfied clients and functional websites. I can say that I'm a god when it comes to writing C/C++ code, but if you asked me to prove it, you'd easily realize that I'm not.
Though I guess there are some special provisions or something granted to Americans, so you can swear conditional fealty. Still, "Sir William the Traitor" has a nice ring to it.