It's also illegal to send unsolicited junk/bulk advertisement faxes, but we get half a dozen of them a day where I work. At least half of them are advertising overpriced toner cartridges, which I personally find very ironic.
Okay, but while using a VOIP system internally might make sense, you still almost certainly want to connect the system to land lines going out to the rest of the world. The average employee might never see the land lines, but the guy who maintains the phone system knows they're there.
On behalf of people everywhere who are smart enough to figure out how to use a rotary phone and/or old enough to just know how to use one, I want to express our profuse gratitude to you for taking the extra two seconds to spell out "for the win". Spelling such things out improves legibility, facilitates easy reading, and makes the internet better. Thank you.
> I still have a twenty-year old phone that I keep > around for when the electricity goes out at home.
We've still got a rotary phone on the wall in the kitchen. It's beige. We bought it from the phone company, because back then that's where you got phones. (A lot of the young whippersnappers on slashdot these days probably don't remember this, so I suppose I should explain a little. When you moved into a house, you contacted the phone company and you told them that you needed to have a phone line set up and you told them how many phones you wanted, and whether you wanted wall-mount or desk phones, and when the guy came to install he brought the phones with him, installed the jacks in the locations you indicated, and hooked up your line, all in one service call. After-market phones that came in a wider variety of colors and styles, which you could buy at K-mart and hook up yourself to replace the boring old phone-company model, came along in the eighties, around the same time as touch-tone lines, which cost extra back then, which is why a lot of older touch-tone phones have a "pulse" option so they could work with a non-touch-tone line; there are modem codes for pulse dialing for the same reason.)
Based on the phone number typed on the card inserted behind the rotary dial (which we've haven't bothered to change because we didn't really see the point in having your own number, which you know anyway, displayed on your phone), the 216 area code indicates that we apparently got the phone (or perhaps already had it) when we moved into the house in Canal Fulton. That would have been 1982. It's possible we got it previously and just changed out the your-number card for the last time when we moved to Canal Fulton. In that case it would have been purchased in Indiana in the late seventies. I don't remember for sure. So assuming we got it in '82 or earlier, that makes it at least 27 years old now (well, 27 years old coming up in the fall, or possibly older).
Why would you keep your cell phone? We ended up getting rid of it. We were getting charged like $70 a month. Granted, for that we got unlimited long distance, text messaging, the whole nine yards... Instead we now have a $70 land line plan that also has unlimited long distance, the whole nine yards... plus we can have phones in several different rooms, several people can talk at once, it's easier to use, and most importantly it actually WORKS correctly: it doesn't drop every third syllable at random, so you don't have to constantly repeat yourself. Why would you keep your cellphone? If you really think you need one, I suggest you get a land line, cut one of the wires, and tap the two cut ends together repeatedly while you're on the phone.
One of the phones we've got hooked up to the landline is a cordless model, so we can take it anywhere we want, even to the bathroom if we are so inclined. (As far as taking it away from home, the other buildings I visit on a regular basis have their own landlines, and I don't want people to call my home number thinking to reach me at home and inadvertently get me at work not realizing I'm at work. If they need to reach me even though I'm at work, they can call my work number.)
As for playing games and sending text messages and all that other non-phone stuff, we've got broadband internet, so why would I want to do that stuff on the phone? Tiny little chicklet keyboard, little tiny screen, rigidly inflexible badly-designed proprietary menu-driven software,... it's not an interface I'd ever want to use.
> > As for "how hot is it today?", surely a scale based roughly > > on 0-100% of full scale is more natural to the answer than > > one based on the boiling point of a common liquid. > > On whose full scale? Los Angeles? Toronto? Vilnius? Norilsk?
The Fahrenheit scale was developed based on relatively temperate English weather, so yeah, a lot of places have sub-zero temperatures in winter (we do in Ohio), and the tropics regularly see temperatures above 100.
Nonetheless, the scale is still very well suited for talking about weather. Even if you're from Florida and seldom see temperatures much below forty, a hundred is still pretty warm (especially if it's also humid), and even if you live in the continuous permafrost zone, zero Fahrenheit is still a wee bit nippy. I suppose on Breen they probably go sunbathing if it gets up to zero Fahrenheit, but here on Earth that's a winter temperature, and the humans put on coats and such.
> By the way, defining 0 as a freezing point is actually > pretty damn convenient when speaking of weather specifically, > since you know immediately whether to expect snow (and ice on > roads) or rain.
I don't know where you're from (Physics Textbook Land, perhaps, where people and vehicles are point masses and/or frictionless?), but around here there's about a ten- or fifteen-degree range wherein you can just as easily get rain, freezing rain, snow*, slush, sleet, or some combination, depending on conditions. On the Fahrenheit scale this runs from the lower twenties into the high thirties. If you want a round figure I'll round it off to thirty, but that's very much an approximation. In gradeschool they teach the official figure as 32, but I'm pretty sure that's based on textbook standard pressure at mean sea level, not to mention the obviously preposterous assumption that the ambient temperature is completely uniform all the way from the stratosphere right down to the bedrock. In the real world you can easily have snow* at 36 one day and pouring rain at 28 the next.
* By "snow" in these temperature ranges I actually mean the warm soggy stuff that passes for snow in December. Obviously, if you want *proper* snow (the kind that squeaks when you walk on it and can still blow around afterward) you need subzero temperatures. I think ten below is just about the warmest temperature at which I've experienced real snow.
When would you ever want to convert acres into square inches?
"Yeah, there's this lot for sale outside of town, that I'm thinking about buying. The ad says it's four and a quarter acres, but I'm going to convert that into square inches so I can understand how big it is..."
I can see possibly wanting to convert between square miles and acres, though even that is a bit of a stretch. Acres and square inches? Get real. Nothing that is measured in acres would ever be expressed in square inches. Ever.
It's like memorizing how many atoms of platinum and iridium are in the artifact that officially defines the kilogram. Knowing the number would NOT give you a better understanding of how much a kilogram is.
> And 1760 yards in a mile - gosh, how convenient that must be.
Yards are only used in football.
The rest of the time we use feet and inches for mundane distances, or miles when we're talking about driving somewhere in the car.
There's never any reason to convert between them.
Yes, in gradeschool they teach us that there are 5280 feet in a mile. They also teach us about Johnny Appleseed and casting out nines, because the gradeschool curriculum is set up by morons. But it doesn't *matter* how many feet there are in a mile, because it's not a conversion you would ever actually do. It's like memorizing how many molecules there are in the platinum-iridium doohickey that officially defines the kilogram.
> it's completely wrong on so many levels > that NASA refuses to convert to metric.
NASA should be using SI, not metric. Actually, SI is what we mostly use in science class (in the US), and it works pretty well for that.
They tried to teach us full-blown metric in elementary school, but it didn't take. All those hectolitres and deciwhatsits, it's even more useless than memorizing pointless conversion facts like how many feet there are in a mile. (Yeah, that's a useful conversion to be able to do. Google Maps says it's forty-seven miles to Bob's house, but I happen to know his driveway is fifty-two feet long. I guess I'll have to convert one of those numbers into the other units to add them up and see what the total comes out to...)
I suspect most countries that actually use "metric" don't really use all those stupid prefixes much. But nonetheless, all those stupid prefixes are what Americans think of when somebody says "metric". We see ourselves back in fourth grade doing a math worksheet that's asking us stuff like "Rico's swimming pool had 42 hectolitres of water in it, but then Juan dipped out 175 decilitres, how many decalitres are left?"
Do we know how much a litre is? Sure, no problem: it's half the volume of a two-liter pop bottle. Do we want to "convert to metric"? No, and go soak your head. All those stupid prefixes make our heads swim.
> For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question
Celsius sucks in general. If you want a temperature scale that makes some kind of scientific sense, you use Kelvin.
If you just want to talk about the weather, you use Fahrenheit with ISO standard hyperbole (e.g., "It's eight hundred degrees outside today!")
> if they were trying to notify the world of their existence why they > wouldn't just hijack one of our television satellites for five minutes.
That would only work if they'd figured out our communications systems, which would be alien to them. Unlikely.
However, they could land. Conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, landing would be a VERY effective way to let us all know they're here. Word would get around very quickly, I daresay.
> statistically speaking, out of all the reports and > sightings, at least one of them has to be real.
Statistically speaking, that doesn't make any sense. (I am a math geek.) The number of sightings has absolutely no impact on the probability that any of them are real. If 99% of them can be bogus, or 50% of them for that matter, then they can just as easily all be bogus.
Do you have any idea how uncomfortable it is to see someone use the phrase "when I was a kid" in reference to the X-Files? That show ran, what, all of five years ago?
Just make the name a unique identifier and have done. You can name them after plants, animals, politicians, authors, performers, composers, mathematicians, scientists, cities, or consumer products. It doesn't matter how you generate the names, as long as each computer has a unique name assigned when the computer first enters the organization and retained until it leaves the organization or is scrapped for parts.
Resist the temptation to put any information in the name that might possibly change before the computer is permanently retired. It's tempting to put user or location information in the computer name, but this is a bad idea. Put that stuff in your inventory database (or, if you're a small operation, just make a list in a text file) so it can be updated without renaming the computer.
Because for a system administrator, paranoia is a basic job requirement. Consequently, when it comes to data security, there's no such thing as too much overkill. Even when you have subjected the drive to a thermite reaction, let it cool, and ground the whole resulting mess down to the consistency of talcum powder, you still have to scatter the ashes over at least a thousand square miles of ocean, just to be sure. Ideally, you'd scatter half the ashes over the central Pacific, some of them over the north Atlantic, and the rest over the southern ocean.
Extra bonus points if you scrub the platters with fluorine trichloride before putting it through the thermite reaction.
Even then, you'll never be fully comfortable with the job until you destroy the entire galaxy that the drive was in. Maybe the whole universe. You can't be too sure.
In the first place, it never gives a specific timeframe.
In the second place, although the predictions range from fairly severe right on up to extremely dire (watermelon-sized hail, multiple consecutive years of worldwide drought, a day's wages for a quart of wheat, earthquakes so severe they relocate or just plain level every mountain and island worldwide,...), the text also clearly states that a significant minority of the human population does survive. I don't see any prediction of uninhabitability there (unless you're talking about 21:1, when the whole thing is scrapped and replaced with a new one).
Slashdot Mirror
It's also illegal to send unsolicited junk/bulk advertisement faxes, but we get half a dozen of them a day where I work. At least half of them are advertising overpriced toner cartridges, which I personally find very ironic.
Okay, but while using a VOIP system internally might make sense, you still almost certainly want to connect the system to land lines going out to the rest of the world. The average employee might never see the land lines, but the guy who maintains the phone system knows they're there.
On behalf of people everywhere who are smart enough to figure out how to use a rotary phone and/or old enough to just know how to use one, I want to express our profuse gratitude to you for taking the extra two seconds to spell out "for the win". Spelling such things out improves legibility, facilitates easy reading, and makes the internet better. Thank you.
> I still have a twenty-year old phone that I keep
> around for when the electricity goes out at home.
We've still got a rotary phone on the wall in the kitchen. It's beige. We bought it from the phone company, because back then that's where you got phones. (A lot of the young whippersnappers on slashdot these days probably don't remember this, so I suppose I should explain a little. When you moved into a house, you contacted the phone company and you told them that you needed to have a phone line set up and you told them how many phones you wanted, and whether you wanted wall-mount or desk phones, and when the guy came to install he brought the phones with him, installed the jacks in the locations you indicated, and hooked up your line, all in one service call. After-market phones that came in a wider variety of colors and styles, which you could buy at K-mart and hook up yourself to replace the boring old phone-company model, came along in the eighties, around the same time as touch-tone lines, which cost extra back then, which is why a lot of older touch-tone phones have a "pulse" option so they could work with a non-touch-tone line; there are modem codes for pulse dialing for the same reason.)
Based on the phone number typed on the card inserted behind the rotary dial (which we've haven't bothered to change because we didn't really see the point in having your own number, which you know anyway, displayed on your phone), the 216 area code indicates that we apparently got the phone (or perhaps already had it) when we moved into the house in Canal Fulton. That would have been 1982. It's possible we got it previously and just changed out the your-number card for the last time when we moved to Canal Fulton. In that case it would have been purchased in Indiana in the late seventies. I don't remember for sure. So assuming we got it in '82 or earlier, that makes it at least 27 years old now (well, 27 years old coming up in the fall, or possibly older).
Oh, yeah, one other thing: $70/month for a landline? Holy cow. Where do you live, New York City? It costs less than $40/month around here.
Why would you keep your cell phone? We ended up getting rid of it. We were getting charged like $70 a month. Granted, for that we got unlimited long distance, text messaging, the whole nine yards... Instead we now have a $70 land line plan that also has unlimited long distance, the whole nine yards... plus we can have phones in several different rooms, several people can talk at once, it's easier to use, and most importantly it actually WORKS correctly: it doesn't drop every third syllable at random, so you don't have to constantly repeat yourself. Why would you keep your cellphone? If you really think you need one, I suggest you get a land line, cut one of the wires, and tap the two cut ends together repeatedly while you're on the phone.
... it's not an interface I'd ever want to use.
One of the phones we've got hooked up to the landline is a cordless model, so we can take it anywhere we want, even to the bathroom if we are so inclined. (As far as taking it away from home, the other buildings I visit on a regular basis have their own landlines, and I don't want people to call my home number thinking to reach me at home and inadvertently get me at work not realizing I'm at work. If they need to reach me even though I'm at work, they can call my work number.)
As for playing games and sending text messages and all that other non-phone stuff, we've got broadband internet, so why would I want to do that stuff on the phone? Tiny little chicklet keyboard, little tiny screen, rigidly inflexible badly-designed proprietary menu-driven software,
> > As for "how hot is it today?", surely a scale based roughly
> > on 0-100% of full scale is more natural to the answer than
> > one based on the boiling point of a common liquid.
>
> On whose full scale? Los Angeles? Toronto? Vilnius? Norilsk?
The Fahrenheit scale was developed based on relatively temperate English weather, so yeah, a lot of places have sub-zero temperatures in winter (we do in Ohio), and the tropics regularly see temperatures above 100.
Nonetheless, the scale is still very well suited for talking about weather. Even if you're from Florida and seldom see temperatures much below forty, a hundred is still pretty warm (especially if it's also humid), and even if you live in the continuous permafrost zone, zero Fahrenheit is still a wee bit nippy. I suppose on Breen they probably go sunbathing if it gets up to zero Fahrenheit, but here on Earth that's a winter temperature, and the humans put on coats and such.
> By the way, defining 0 as a freezing point is actually
> pretty damn convenient when speaking of weather specifically,
> since you know immediately whether to expect snow (and ice on
> roads) or rain.
I don't know where you're from (Physics Textbook Land, perhaps, where people and vehicles are point masses and/or frictionless?), but around here there's about a ten- or fifteen-degree range wherein you can just as easily get rain, freezing rain, snow*, slush, sleet, or some combination, depending on conditions. On the Fahrenheit scale this runs from the lower twenties into the high thirties. If you want a round figure I'll round it off to thirty, but that's very much an approximation. In gradeschool they teach the official figure as 32, but I'm pretty sure that's based on textbook standard pressure at mean sea level, not to mention the obviously preposterous assumption that the ambient temperature is completely uniform all the way from the stratosphere right down to the bedrock. In the real world you can easily have snow* at 36 one day and pouring rain at 28 the next.
* By "snow" in these temperature ranges I actually mean the warm soggy stuff that passes for snow in December. Obviously, if you want *proper* snow (the kind that squeaks when you walk on it and can still blow around afterward) you need subzero temperatures. I think ten below is just about the warmest temperature at which I've experienced real snow.
When would you ever want to convert acres into square inches?
"Yeah, there's this lot for sale outside of town, that I'm thinking about buying. The ad says it's four and a quarter acres, but I'm going to convert that into square inches so I can understand how big it is..."
I can see possibly wanting to convert between square miles and acres, though even that is a bit of a stretch. Acres and square inches? Get real. Nothing that is measured in acres would ever be expressed in square inches. Ever.
It's like memorizing how many atoms of platinum and iridium are in the artifact that officially defines the kilogram. Knowing the number would NOT give you a better understanding of how much a kilogram is.
> And 1760 yards in a mile - gosh, how convenient that must be.
Yards are only used in football.
The rest of the time we use feet and inches for mundane distances, or miles when we're talking about driving somewhere in the car.
There's never any reason to convert between them.
Yes, in gradeschool they teach us that there are 5280 feet in a mile. They also teach us about Johnny Appleseed and casting out nines, because the gradeschool curriculum is set up by morons. But it doesn't *matter* how many feet there are in a mile, because it's not a conversion you would ever actually do. It's like memorizing how many molecules there are in the platinum-iridium doohickey that officially defines the kilogram.
> it's completely wrong on so many levels
> that NASA refuses to convert to metric.
NASA should be using SI, not metric. Actually, SI is what we mostly use in science class (in the US), and it works pretty well for that.
They tried to teach us full-blown metric in elementary school, but it didn't take. All those hectolitres and deciwhatsits, it's even more useless than memorizing pointless conversion facts like how many feet there are in a mile. (Yeah, that's a useful conversion to be able to do. Google Maps says it's forty-seven miles to Bob's house, but I happen to know his driveway is fifty-two feet long. I guess I'll have to convert one of those numbers into the other units to add them up and see what the total comes out to...)
I suspect most countries that actually use "metric" don't really use all those stupid prefixes much. But nonetheless, all those stupid prefixes are what Americans think of when somebody says "metric". We see ourselves back in fourth grade doing a math worksheet that's asking us stuff like "Rico's swimming pool had 42 hectolitres of water in it, but then Juan dipped out 175 decilitres, how many decalitres are left?"
Do we know how much a litre is? Sure, no problem: it's half the volume of a two-liter pop bottle. Do we want to "convert to metric"? No, and go soak your head. All those stupid prefixes make our heads swim.
> For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question
Celsius sucks in general. If you want a temperature scale that makes some kind of scientific sense, you use Kelvin.
If you just want to talk about the weather, you use Fahrenheit with ISO standard hyperbole (e.g., "It's eight hundred degrees outside today!")
In US textbooks his name is usually anglicised to Nicholas. The same goes for Tsar Nicholas II.
Actually, where I come from (Ohio), people who live north of the border are generally still considered to be Americans.
Maybe we should have built more nuclear power plants instead!
I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the BSA goes after businesses and ignores home users.
> if they were trying to notify the world of their existence why they
> wouldn't just hijack one of our television satellites for five minutes.
That would only work if they'd figured out our communications systems, which would be alien to them. Unlikely.
However, they could land. Conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, landing would be a VERY effective way to let us all know they're here. Word would get around very quickly, I daresay.
> You're statement implies that there are 'on-planet aliens'.
> Just curious as to whom you're referring to.
He's probably talking about me.
HTH.HAND.
> statistically speaking, out of all the reports and
> sightings, at least one of them has to be real.
Statistically speaking, that doesn't make any sense. (I am a math geek.) The number of sightings has absolutely no impact on the probability that any of them are real. If 99% of them can be bogus, or 50% of them for that matter, then they can just as easily all be bogus.
Do you have any idea how uncomfortable it is to see someone use the phrase "when I was a kid" in reference to the X-Files? That show ran, what, all of five years ago?
> took me that long to migrate from Windows 2000. I waited until SP1
Only SP1, not SP2?
(As for me, I experimented with Windows 95 and then installed Debian...)
Just make the name a unique identifier and have done. You can name them after plants, animals, politicians, authors, performers, composers, mathematicians, scientists, cities, or consumer products. It doesn't matter how you generate the names, as long as each computer has a unique name assigned when the computer first enters the organization and retained until it leaves the organization or is scrapped for parts.
Resist the temptation to put any information in the name that might possibly change before the computer is permanently retired. It's tempting to put user or location information in the computer name, but this is a bad idea. Put that stuff in your inventory database (or, if you're a small operation, just make a list in a text file) so it can be updated without renaming the computer.
Microsoft wants to *continue* selling one of its biggest products?
I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked.
Because for a system administrator, paranoia is a basic job requirement. Consequently, when it comes to data security, there's no such thing as too much overkill. Even when you have subjected the drive to a thermite reaction, let it cool, and ground the whole resulting mess down to the consistency of talcum powder, you still have to scatter the ashes over at least a thousand square miles of ocean, just to be sure. Ideally, you'd scatter half the ashes over the central Pacific, some of them over the north Atlantic, and the rest over the southern ocean.
Extra bonus points if you scrub the platters with fluorine trichloride before putting it through the thermite reaction.
Even then, you'll never be fully comfortable with the job until you destroy the entire galaxy that the drive was in. Maybe the whole universe. You can't be too sure.
Wait, so these are people who, due to their past behavior, can't be trusted to be in contact with the general population, have I got that about right?
Anybody else wonder how come they're out of jail, then?
They also don't say how much it's going to cost. My money says it'll cost significantly more than the regular kind of cement. Any takers?
Actually, no.
...), the text also clearly states that a significant minority of the human population does survive. I don't see any prediction of uninhabitability there (unless you're talking about 21:1, when the whole thing is scrapped and replaced with a new one).
In the first place, it never gives a specific timeframe.
In the second place, although the predictions range from fairly severe right on up to extremely dire (watermelon-sized hail, multiple consecutive years of worldwide drought, a day's wages for a quart of wheat, earthquakes so severe they relocate or just plain level every mountain and island worldwide,