Actually Google wasn't even a word - they made it up because googol was already taken. Yourname.com (or whatever) is already taken, so make something else up. If it can work for Google, it can work for you.
Actually the unicorn at the end (without the reference in the dream) makes perfect sense - Gaff was there, could have off'ed Rachael but didn't. Left a calling card to say so. As for the pollution vs sunshine in the driveaway scene - LA was a cesspool in 2019, but drive a few hours away from the cities and the sun shined and trees flourished (kind of like today.) I agree that the driving scene at the end could have been better, but I still like that version the best.
As for not getting the original out on DVD - yea, I harshed on Ridley when I should have just vented in general. That wasn't his doing; as I understand it the way the licensing was divided up the music wasn't allowed to be sold on magnetic media but allowed for 'glass media' (which meant CD's, even though they hadn't really taken off yet) and the movie was only to be sold on magnetic media (which contradicts that big 12" video disk.) I dunno, but best I can remember it had nothing to do with Ridley.
Don't worry, I'm just as bent about the whole Greedo vs Han bar scene.
You really, truly get a sense of what it would be like to live like Deckard in a burned-out hull of a crumbling world, doing a job that you know is morally wrong.
I hear the Bush administration is hiring, if this is an overwhelming need of yours.
I guess I'm old then, because I have never forgiven Ridley for a) fucking up BR with his bastardized Director's Cut, and moreso b) not being able to get the original on DVD. If I had to guess, the European cut (violence++, voiceovers++, I don't know which ending it has though) is probably the one I am after.
Come to think of it, id was a company with no history and no massive bankroll - an indie game company if I ever heard of one. Didn't they come out with that Doom game, the one they gave away (the first few levels) for free, and not open source (to double address issues in one post, lest I go back to answer Marcion with the 'open source' thing he wrote a few posts up) and not a sequel to something that was already a massive hit...
Most of the time the reason a laptop is burning through hard drives has nothing to do with it being a laptop (or using 2.5" drives) and everything to do with being moved around with the hard drive spinning - in particular yawing (changing the direction the spindle is pointing, also known as tilting it.) This puts tremendous stress on the bearings in particular (and load bearing structures ie, where the heads and arms come together, but much less so) and quickly destroys the drive. Gyroscopic effects and all that.
Want your laptop hard drive to last as long as a desktop hard drive? Use it like a desktop : put it down on a hard, flat surface (ie, a table), turn it on, leave it there until you turn it off. Don't put it in your bouncy lap to use it, don't swing it wildly around with the drive spinning, don't flop it up under your arm sideways and carry it across the building still running. I have several laptops with drives ranging from two to five years old and they are reliable as ever.
Just a note on that - maybe people would be a little more open minded to the Linux version of picture editing software if it wasn't named gimp. If you disagree, go watch Pulp Fiction all the way through, pay attention to the Pawn Shop scene, and get back to me.
I believe the Intellivision had a voice module available as a hardware extension, adding realistic voice to completely overwhelm your senses, adding to the 'suspension of disbelief' that made the games more than just games - almost lifelike. I mean when you heard 'Bandits, 12 o'clock' it was enough to make you sweat...
Ok, so maybe not that great, but it made buying a $600 console that used pixels the size of your thumb suck a little less.
Regardless - I hope the motherfucker blows up and destroys what's left of NASA's credibility in the process. I can think of a lot better ways to spend US tax dollars than on oursourcing the money and years of knowledge to help the Indians along in their space program.
All you terrorists out there - if you want to really cripple America, you want to hurt the USA in a way that they will never recover from? Destroy all the tech centers in India and you will succeed in your goal. It would be a lot easier, and much more damaging to the US economy giving you a much higher return on investment than the hassle of striking them on US soil.
Your Panasonic printer emulated the Epson FX-80. And some days I'm doing good to remember my own name.
As for the bittorrents from Warner Bros - if they are going to provide a legal avenue for us to get the same quality (or higher) DVD rips in.avi format (and not some DRM encrypted crap that requires 'a player') at a reasonable cost, I will buy it. If they think I'm going to pay DVD prices for a medialess download (the key here : no media creation costs, no shipping costs, no shrinkage, no markup for the reseller, no salespeople to pay, etc.) that consists of DRM encrypted crap that plays how they decide it will play on hardware (or operating systems) they approve - fuck 'em.
If you bail the most likely thing that will happen is that the other employees are punished a little in the form of additional work, the project may be a little later than usual (and the project manager will be happy to finally have a concrete scape-goat to blame the impending lateness on anyways), and the company may be inconvenienced a bit. The downside to the company is approximately nil, because the company generally has built in allowances in the form of ability to slide schedules or throw money at the problem. Companies do not have unlimited resources, but they have enough spare resources to cover your departure.
On the other hand, if the company suddenly discards you, you may be fucked. Expect (on the far side) it to take one month of searching for every $10,000 worth of salary you command - in yesterday's economy (and possibly today's also) it isn't unreasonable to spend 9 months unemployed looking for a job that pays $90,000. And anybody making $90k a year probably has a burn rate of $5k a month, with fixed expenses (things they can't adjust the monthly cost of - mortgage, car payment, insurance, existing credit card debt) of easily $3,500 a month, and you can cut your soft spending (food, entertainment, alcohol, etc) maybe in half. The first two months you don't change your burn rate because you 'know' you will get another good job, and after you burn through the first $10,000 of your savings you make some drastic changes and get it down to $4,200 a month. Two months later you have burned through a total of $20,000 of your savings and are starting to panic. Companies like to hire guys that are still working somewhere, and you have been unemployed for four months. Why is he unemployed - maybe he isn't worth hiring for our company of other people haven't hired him for four months. Push that out to six months and you have burned through $30,000 of your savings and the same thing still applies, but now the hiring company is looking at a guy that hasn't touched a computer (professionally) in half a year. If you don't have that $30k (or more) laying around then you run out of money and lose your house, car, credit rating - and yes, hiring HR teams pull credit reports - and then you are truly fucked. Hit the one year mark and you are working at Home Depot, the potential for ever being employed as a software engineer is gone.
The following is almost on-topic in a discussion thread about employment.
I have no formal education in any of those things, but I thought myself HTML with W3C's website, PHP with PHP's website, SQL with PostrgreSQL's documentation and various programming languages - Python, Java, C - with their websites kind help (except C, which I learned from Nethack's source code).
Of course, as a result, my skills have huge holes - I've learned things as I've needed them, without knowing if something is the correct way of doing things. Still don't quite have a handle on C's string manipulation functions, despite doing experimentation on Linux kernel.
If you really want to be professionally employed as a software engineer, if it is something that you love to do - consider following up with formal education. You can already see the reasons, it appears, and you appear to have the aptitude.
The best example to leverage here would be Wilbur and Orville Wright - self taught plane builders. Everything they did they taught themselves, and they were the first ones to escape the chains of gravity in flight (with a heavier than air vehicle.) They learned enough to overcome every obstacle they encountered as they encountered them, but they lacked a complete and thorough understanding of all that entails aeronautical engineering - and lets face it, their airplane sucked ass. I mean it really sucked compared to what they would have built if they both had spent a few years getting degrees in aeronautical engineering.
That degree plan wasn't available for them, so in my opinion those guys are heros for what they did. But a degree in software engineering is available for you. Coding is about a LOT of things, and simple language syntax is only the beginning. A thousand monkeys with typewriters can string together syntactically correct individual lines of code in Javascript, Java, and SQL (I know, that's how the last application I inherited was written, or so it appears) but maintainable and reliable corporate grade code is as much about code structure and design as it is the individual lines of code - possibly more so.
Anyways - good luck on becoming who you want to become. Consider pursuing a formal education. And don't ever say the word 'MebiByte'.
I finally gave in to the pressure from the Ryder truck rental guy to pay an extra $100 for the insurance. Two days later I drove that 12 foot truck under an 11 foot overhang, doing about four thousand dollars worth of damage in the process. I was amazed at how fragile that big truck was, actually - but I was real happy I bought that insurance.
As I understand it with Zipcar, there is a deposit you pay ($25 or $50 maybe?) and when the next guy rents the car and doesn't complain about it being dirty inside those funds are released. Like a bond, sort of. I could be wrong, haven't had any coffee yet.
He wants to seem like a hapless guy who got lucky but didn't know what he's doing.
Honestly, that describes most of us, most of the time. Every once in a while you know exactly what you are doing, but most of the time you just get lucky. Granted for this guy the most appropriate quote might be 'some days the sun even shines on a dog's ass.'
I'd rather be lucky than good - any day. Of course the harder I work, the luckier seem to get.
Actually (as I understand it) they half-stepped the motors so it would read/write in the space between tracks. Apple 5.25" floppy disks used 40 tracks, but the media and the drive were capable of 80 tracks in theory - so the half-steppers put some stuff on the non-tracks between the regularly used tracks, and included code in the game to half-step the drive to go read that code. Without a way-cool hack to copy the disk, you couldn't replicate the data that was in the non-tracks (you could possibly read it, but making your floppy write it there was a bitch.)
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned the 'donate a computer less than two years old to a school and write off the entire purchase price on your taxes' thing they have in the US. Couple of caveats :
1. Only works for companies - individuals can't do it (which is too bad, because I would have donated my entire four box Beowulf cluster (PowerEdge 400sc machines, P4 2.8GHz HyperThreaded CPUs, GigE, and about 6G of memory and 1.3T of drive space spread across the four machines) just for the ability to write them off.) 2. You are allowed to double dip - even if you have depreciated the machines completely, you get to write off 100% of the original purchase price. If your company is paying 30% taxes and you get to write off the entire purchase price twice in two years - TCO for those two years is ~ 40% of the sticker price. If you were a small company that wasn't adverse to a little book juggling, got machines with fairly hefty rebates on them your out of pocket costs for a new machine every two years could approach $0
Here is a PC World article with enough buzzwords to assist you in better Googling.
Sounds like a perfect application of Wiki on a stick. I set one up in a few hours, most of which I wasn't even sober - and it can install with a zero-footprint (designed to run from a thumbdrive.) I have a little more write-up in my Journal, along with links.
Actually what I was saying is that laptop drive speeds (throughput) haven't seen the massive gains that CPUs have over the last six years.
Not magic 'burst' throughput (which is akin to measuring horsepower at the piston rings) but real throughput.
Open two command line windows, and on each one start a copy of a zillion small / medium size files from some directory to another directory on the same drive (your MP3 directory would be perfect.) Two threads just doing concurrent reads and writes of uncached data, lots of small files, long enough for you to get some quality throughput numbers. Since your read throughput has to approximately equal your write throughput (reading the files, then writing them, absorbing the minor overhead for creating the directory structure and updating the file allocation table) measure the average sustained overall write speed using perfmon (or nmon if you are using Linux) - this is a fairly accurate measurable real-world throughput that demonstrates what your drive (and drive alone, as it will be the limiting factor) will do and I'd be amazed if it exceeded 7 megabytes written per second, sustained average over the course of ninety seconds. Mind bendingly amazed, actually, as I expect a 4200 rpm laptop drive to run less than 5MB/s for this test (again - sustained write speed for two simultaneous sets of file copies, multiple files and not one massive file, to another directory on the same physical drive.)
It wouldn't be too difficult to dig up a six year old laptop to run this test against - I am sure it would be slower, but it wouldn't be 10x slower (meaning that in six years laptop drives have gotten faster, but not 10x faster.)
For a long time Dell made drive carriers that were the same size as their removable CD drives (back when you could swap out a CD or Floppy on your laptop) - you could put another laptop drive in the carrier and run two drives in the same laptop. I don't believe there was hardware support for RAID, but I'm sure you could do it in software.
I don't know if the current generation Dell laptops have removable bay CD drives, as it has been a while since I bought a new laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
English! - Samuel L. Jackson said it best.
Actually Google wasn't even a word - they made it up because googol was already taken.
Yourname.com (or whatever) is already taken, so make something else up. If it can work for Google, it can work for you.
you just don't like the movie we originally made
We?
Actually the unicorn at the end (without the reference in the dream) makes perfect sense - Gaff was there, could have off'ed Rachael but didn't. Left a calling card to say so. As for the pollution vs sunshine in the driveaway scene - LA was a cesspool in 2019, but drive a few hours away from the cities and the sun shined and trees flourished (kind of like today.) I agree that the driving scene at the end could have been better, but I still like that version the best.
As for not getting the original out on DVD - yea, I harshed on Ridley when I should have just vented in general. That wasn't his doing; as I understand it the way the licensing was divided up the music wasn't allowed to be sold on magnetic media but allowed for 'glass media' (which meant CD's, even though they hadn't really taken off yet) and the movie was only to be sold on magnetic media (which contradicts that big 12" video disk.) I dunno, but best I can remember it had nothing to do with Ridley.
Don't worry, I'm just as bent about the whole Greedo vs Han bar scene.
You really, truly get a sense of what it would be like to live like Deckard in a burned-out hull of a crumbling world, doing a job that you know is morally wrong.
I hear the Bush administration is hiring, if this is an overwhelming need of yours.
I guess I'm old then, because I have never forgiven Ridley for a) fucking up BR with his bastardized Director's Cut, and moreso b) not being able to get the original on DVD. If I had to guess, the European cut (violence++, voiceovers++, I don't know which ending it has though) is probably the one I am after.
Wanna-be poser geeks.
Real geeks would used the 'Pure Energy' sample by Leonard Nimoy.
Come to think of it, id was a company with no history and no massive bankroll - an indie game company if I ever heard of one. ...
Didn't they come out with that Doom game, the one they gave away (the first few levels) for free, and not open source (to double address issues in one post, lest I go back to answer Marcion with the 'open source' thing he wrote a few posts up) and not a sequel to something that was already a massive hit
So how did that turn out anyways?
How is mentioning the literacy relevant? Be objective.
Perhaps because without the ability to read, the Internet is nothing more than pretty pictures. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I'd rather pay more for a ticket
I just RTFA and boy have I got some good news for you!
Most of the time the reason a laptop is burning through hard drives has nothing to do with it being a laptop (or using 2.5" drives) and everything to do with being moved around with the hard drive spinning - in particular yawing (changing the direction the spindle is pointing, also known as tilting it.) This puts tremendous stress on the bearings in particular (and load bearing structures ie, where the heads and arms come together, but much less so) and quickly destroys the drive. Gyroscopic effects and all that.
Want your laptop hard drive to last as long as a desktop hard drive? Use it like a desktop : put it down on a hard, flat surface (ie, a table), turn it on, leave it there until you turn it off. Don't put it in your bouncy lap to use it, don't swing it wildly around with the drive spinning, don't flop it up under your arm sideways and carry it across the building still running. I have several laptops with drives ranging from two to five years old and they are reliable as ever.
Just a note on that - maybe people would be a little more open minded to the Linux version of picture editing software if it wasn't named gimp.
If you disagree, go watch Pulp Fiction all the way through, pay attention to the Pawn Shop scene, and get back to me.
No joke.
You know this probably wouldn't be happening right now, if it weren't for that damn Sony rootkit.
I believe the Intellivision had a voice module available as a hardware extension, adding realistic voice to completely overwhelm your senses, adding to the 'suspension of disbelief' that made the games more than just games - almost lifelike. I mean when you heard 'Bandits, 12 o'clock' it was enough to make you sweat...
Ok, so maybe not that great, but it made buying a $600 console that used pixels the size of your thumb suck a little less.
Regardless - I hope the motherfucker blows up and destroys what's left of NASA's credibility in the process. I can think of a lot better ways to spend US tax dollars than on oursourcing the money and years of knowledge to help the Indians along in their space program.
All you terrorists out there - if you want to really cripple America, you want to hurt the USA in a way that they will never recover from? Destroy all the tech centers in India and you will succeed in your goal. It would be a lot easier, and much more damaging to the US economy giving you a much higher return on investment than the hassle of striking them on US soil.
Your Panasonic printer emulated the Epson FX-80.
.avi format (and not some DRM encrypted crap that requires 'a player') at a reasonable cost, I will buy it. If they think I'm going to pay DVD prices for a medialess download (the key here : no media creation costs, no shipping costs, no shrinkage, no markup for the reseller, no salespeople to pay, etc.) that consists of DRM encrypted crap that plays how they decide it will play on hardware (or operating systems) they approve - fuck 'em.
And some days I'm doing good to remember my own name.
As for the bittorrents from Warner Bros - if they are going to provide a legal avenue for us to get the same quality (or higher) DVD rips in
Here's the difference :
If you bail the most likely thing that will happen is that the other employees are punished a little in the form of additional work, the project may be a little later than usual (and the project manager will be happy to finally have a concrete scape-goat to blame the impending lateness on anyways), and the company may be inconvenienced a bit. The downside to the company is approximately nil, because the company generally has built in allowances in the form of ability to slide schedules or throw money at the problem. Companies do not have unlimited resources, but they have enough spare resources to cover your departure.
On the other hand, if the company suddenly discards you, you may be fucked. Expect (on the far side) it to take one month of searching for every $10,000 worth of salary you command - in yesterday's economy (and possibly today's also) it isn't unreasonable to spend 9 months unemployed looking for a job that pays $90,000. And anybody making $90k a year probably has a burn rate of $5k a month, with fixed expenses (things they can't adjust the monthly cost of - mortgage, car payment, insurance, existing credit card debt) of easily $3,500 a month, and you can cut your soft spending (food, entertainment, alcohol, etc) maybe in half. The first two months you don't change your burn rate because you 'know' you will get another good job, and after you burn through the first $10,000 of your savings you make some drastic changes and get it down to $4,200 a month. Two months later you have burned through a total of $20,000 of your savings and are starting to panic. Companies like to hire guys that are still working somewhere, and you have been unemployed for four months. Why is he unemployed - maybe he isn't worth hiring for our company of other people haven't hired him for four months. Push that out to six months and you have burned through $30,000 of your savings and the same thing still applies, but now the hiring company is looking at a guy that hasn't touched a computer (professionally) in half a year. If you don't have that $30k (or more) laying around then you run out of money and lose your house, car, credit rating - and yes, hiring HR teams pull credit reports - and then you are truly fucked. Hit the one year mark and you are working at Home Depot, the potential for ever being employed as a software engineer is gone.
See the difference?
If you really want to be professionally employed as a software engineer, if it is something that you love to do - consider following up with formal education. You can already see the reasons, it appears, and you appear to have the aptitude.
The best example to leverage here would be Wilbur and Orville Wright - self taught plane builders. Everything they did they taught themselves, and they were the first ones to escape the chains of gravity in flight (with a heavier than air vehicle.) They learned enough to overcome every obstacle they encountered as they encountered them, but they lacked a complete and thorough understanding of all that entails aeronautical engineering - and lets face it, their airplane sucked ass. I mean it really sucked compared to what they would have built if they both had spent a few years getting degrees in aeronautical engineering.
That degree plan wasn't available for them, so in my opinion those guys are heros for what they did.
But a degree in software engineering is available for you. Coding is about a LOT of things, and simple language syntax is only the beginning. A thousand monkeys with typewriters can string together syntactically correct individual lines of code in Javascript, Java, and SQL (I know, that's how the last application I inherited was written, or so it appears) but maintainable and reliable corporate grade code is as much about code structure and design as it is the individual lines of code - possibly more so.
Anyways - good luck on becoming who you want to become. Consider pursuing a formal education. And don't ever say the word 'MebiByte'.
That's funny, only because it's true.
I finally gave in to the pressure from the Ryder truck rental guy to pay an extra $100 for the insurance. Two days later I drove that 12 foot truck under an 11 foot overhang, doing about four thousand dollars worth of damage in the process. I was amazed at how fragile that big truck was, actually - but I was real happy I bought that insurance.
As I understand it with Zipcar, there is a deposit you pay ($25 or $50 maybe?) and when the next guy rents the car and doesn't complain about it being dirty inside those funds are released. Like a bond, sort of. I could be wrong, haven't had any coffee yet.
He wants to seem like a hapless guy who got lucky but didn't know what he's doing.
Honestly, that describes most of us, most of the time. Every once in a while you know exactly what you are doing, but most of the time you just get lucky. Granted for this guy the most appropriate quote might be 'some days the sun even shines on a dog's ass.'
I'd rather be lucky than good - any day. Of course the harder I work, the luckier seem to get.
Actually (as I understand it) they half-stepped the motors so it would read/write in the space between tracks.
Apple 5.25" floppy disks used 40 tracks, but the media and the drive were capable of 80 tracks in theory - so the half-steppers put some stuff on the non-tracks between the regularly used tracks, and included code in the game to half-step the drive to go read that code. Without a way-cool hack to copy the disk, you couldn't replicate the data that was in the non-tracks (you could possibly read it, but making your floppy write it there was a bitch.)
I'm guessing this is the same marketing team advertising "unlimited sex" if you get married.
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned the 'donate a computer less than two years old to a school and write off the entire purchase price on your taxes' thing they have in the US. Couple of caveats :
1. Only works for companies - individuals can't do it (which is too bad, because I would have donated my entire four box Beowulf cluster (PowerEdge 400sc machines, P4 2.8GHz HyperThreaded CPUs, GigE, and about 6G of memory and 1.3T of drive space spread across the four machines) just for the ability to write them off.)
2. You are allowed to double dip - even if you have depreciated the machines completely, you get to write off 100% of the original purchase price. If your company is paying 30% taxes and you get to write off the entire purchase price twice in two years - TCO for those two years is ~ 40% of the sticker price. If you were a small company that wasn't adverse to a little book juggling, got machines with fairly hefty rebates on them your out of pocket costs for a new machine every two years could approach $0
Here is a PC World article with enough buzzwords to assist you in better Googling.
Sounds like a perfect application of Wiki on a stick. I set one up in a few hours, most of which I wasn't even sober - and it can install with a zero-footprint (designed to run from a thumbdrive.)
I have a little more write-up in my Journal, along with links.
Actually what I was saying is that laptop drive speeds (throughput) haven't seen the massive gains that CPUs have over the last six years.
Not magic 'burst' throughput (which is akin to measuring horsepower at the piston rings) but real throughput.
Open two command line windows, and on each one start a copy of a zillion small / medium size files from some directory to another directory on the same drive (your MP3 directory would be perfect.) Two threads just doing concurrent reads and writes of uncached data, lots of small files, long enough for you to get some quality throughput numbers. Since your read throughput has to approximately equal your write throughput (reading the files, then writing them, absorbing the minor overhead for creating the directory structure and updating the file allocation table) measure the average sustained overall write speed using perfmon (or nmon if you are using Linux) - this is a fairly accurate measurable real-world throughput that demonstrates what your drive (and drive alone, as it will be the limiting factor) will do and I'd be amazed if it exceeded 7 megabytes written per second, sustained average over the course of ninety seconds. Mind bendingly amazed, actually, as I expect a 4200 rpm laptop drive to run less than 5MB/s for this test (again - sustained write speed for two simultaneous sets of file copies, multiple files and not one massive file, to another directory on the same physical drive.)
It wouldn't be too difficult to dig up a six year old laptop to run this test against - I am sure it would be slower, but it wouldn't be 10x slower (meaning that in six years laptop drives have gotten faster, but not 10x faster.)
For a long time Dell made drive carriers that were the same size as their removable CD drives (back when you could swap out a CD or Floppy on your laptop) - you could put another laptop drive in the carrier and run two drives in the same laptop. I don't believe there was hardware support for RAID, but I'm sure you could do it in software.
I don't know if the current generation Dell laptops have removable bay CD drives, as it has been a while since I bought a new laptop.