Okay, I've lived in Germany, and been to England, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, and what is now the Czech Republic. They do have lives there, and I'll give you those. However, I work in (management in) the meat industry in Chicago, and let me assure you, if they have lives in Mexico, why the hell are all the Mexicans up here working in my plant?
Heheheh. I almost included an exception for Mexico saying that they actually do exist only to serve us but decided it wouldn't be funny but just inflammatory. Besides, serving us is only a secondary purpose; their primary purpose is to love soccer (football to all you non-USians).
On a somewhat more serious note, they're up there working in your meat plant because you're paying them enough to make it worth their while yet not enough to not make it worth the while of "local" potential employees. (BTW, I'd wager a large number of them are sending money back to Mexico to help support their extended families.)
When I lived in Texas I heard a lot of people bitching about Mexicans in jobs, but the Mexicans were doing hard labor that the bitchers wouldn't want to do in the first place. Sometimes I worry if we're getting too lazy.
But remember that a majority of us who voted didn't want our current "leaders" in office. Please, remember that. We'll try to change it next year.
I'm not sure there'll be any decent choices next year. Hopefully there will be a check box for "present but not voting". Or maybe Michael Moore can get "Ficus" elected president...it's already been voted into some local governments. "Ficus, because a potted plant can do no harm." (I may have that quote wrong; I can't find the original now. Disclaimer: I'm not as liberal or cynical as Michael, but I find his work entertaining and occasionally insightful.)
I nominate this to precede every future SCO story on Slashdot.
I just got done watching some Flash animations from rathergood.com and b3ta.com and I encourage whoever has the talent to turn this song into a Flash music video.
I'm much more interested in having a google search available over my harddisk.
I thought I remember Google having a product like this, but I can't find it now.
MS Win2k and WinXP have an indexing service that's supposed to do just what you want. It's not enabled by default in 2k; not sure about XP. I've been afraid to try it for various paranoia and stability reasons.
HTdig was my next thought. It's designed for web pages, but I bet you could restrict it to your hard disk. However, the site says they don't index non-text files yet.
For some reason I felt like searching Freshmeat and came up with SWISH++. It says it can index hard drives and non-text files "such as Microsoft Office documents", although the method they describe they use is not one I'm sure would work since Office docs can be in Unicode.
Both HTdig and SWISH++ are GPL. There were other possibilities on Freshmeat, too.
Okay, I got the 0x539 reference, but I had to play with the scientific calculator to figure yours out. Either you like calculators or you're really kickin' it old school.
So, it's a hypercube (4-dimensional), but we can't visually comprehend that so we look at the 3-dimensional shadow...well, actually a 2-d perspective of a 3-dimensional shadow...on a 16-bit OS on a 32-bit computer, etc, etc, 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition?
I'm so confused. I'll go play with that triangular pyramid puzzle...at least I could occasionally solve it without consulting a cheat book.
Oh, you bastard, why did you have to remind me of that? Yes, it was awful.
Now I've got the sound bite of him saying "Rubik" in that attempted-cute way stuck in my head. ARGH! Actually, kind of analagous to Pikachu saying his own name in delight and sense of accomplishment. But Rubik was worse.
How am I supposed to go to sleep with that stuff in my head? Now I'll have to watch some porn or something...
Distance from the CO was one of my considerations when apartment hunting. I'm 5000 feet from the CO, but in my area SBC caps both the up and down data rate and sells 368/128, 768/128 and 1.5M/256 at different $rates.:-P
In my previous residence (a different state but still SBC) the local telco didn't cap the rate, but I was 13,000 ft from the CO geo-wise but about 18,000 feet cable as measured by TDR so my rate was limited to 400/128.
By the way, the ROM image included BASIC and a mini assembler. CALL -151 IIRC put you into a hexdump/memory lister mode, and "!" would start the mini assembler. I may be getting it a little confused with DOS's DEBUG.EXE, but the concept was similar.
HGR was the hi-res command. I don't remember it as well, but it was meory mapped from 0x2000-0x4000 IIRC. It was 2 colors logically, but the display device was a TV and the output was designed so that two lit pixels would look white while alternating lit/unlit pixels would be a color.
If you had a lone pixel or vertical pixel line lit it would be a color whether you wanted it color or not. Two adjacent pixels (left-to-right) were always white. Vertical placement had no effect on color.
That should help explain why things look weird sometimes in Apple II emulators. You can't quite duplicate the effect in modern RGB. Not that you'd want to except to see how the graphics were natively viewed in this color-hack manner. Diagonal colored lines were extraordinarily jaggy.
It's all coming back now. The high bit told whether the color options for this byte should be blue/orange or green/violet. The next 7 bits were memory-mapped on/off pixels. So, for example you were in HGR mode and wrote binary 10101010 to 0x2000 you would get a colored line. (Note to continue the same color in the next byte it would be 11010101, so HGR wasn't totally easy.) 11010101 at 0x2000 would show the complimentary color (blue vs. orange or green vs. violet).
Of course that's for people with no social lives who like to code in 6502 assembly. Normal people would write a basic program:
10 HGR 20 HCOLOR 2 30 HDRAW 0,0 TO 150,150 40 HDRAW TO 250,10
See the grandparent post for a low-res BASIC example.
Then there were some that did the turtle graphics (early vector drawing with a turtle-is-the-pencil metaphor), but that was a separate product.
It was techincally 16 colors, but really it was "light" and "dark" versions of 8 colors.
The text mode display of an Apple ][+ is 40x24. The command GR changed it to "low res graphics" which left the bottom 4 lines as text and the top 20 lines had each character split into a top half and bottom half colored square/rectangular blocks.
For text and low-res modes (and hi-res btw, but low-res and text mode used the same memory range, 400H-800H IIRC--that's 0x400 and 0x800 these days) the display was mapped directly from main memory. In text mode each character was represented by its ASCII value. In GR/low-res mode the graphics 'character' was split into a high and low nybble to represent the block colors. No pallete, no RGB.
I was geeky enough then to get into 6502 assembly language (in pre-teen/teen years), so I even did some assembly programming of the display. (But I'm only an amateur programmer today.)
Come to think of it, both 0 and 8 were the color black, so you had 15 visual colors and 16 logical colors.
It was a very valuable learning tool. I doubt I would know as much about computers today if I had started on a 16- or 32-bit machine.
Some of the best code reuse I've seen is in Microsoft products. On my Win2k PC I have about 20 copies of 5 different versions of MSVCRT*.DLL. Previous versions of Windows had similar reuse of VBRUN*.DLL.
I'm in the same situation where the cable comes with the apartment. I didn't want it, but it's there anyway. I tend to watch it too much (well, I leave it on while I'm at the computer), but lately it's difficult to find anything worth watching even though I have 60-80 channels. And the stuff I do like is edited for content and commerical breaks.
What SBC service do you have? I have 5-static-IP 768k/128k ADSL at a little less than half your price. I'd pay your price if the uplink speed is good enough and try to defray the costs by serving web pages or something.
I have the computing power and knowledge to take advantage of what's out there, but I'm not "living it" yet.
With the likely consolidation of most of the US broadcast/cable media looming, it occurred to me last night that instead of lamenting how much more crappy everything's going to be that I should just embrace on-demand entertainment exclusively. Video rentals, streamed audio/video, downloaded audio/video, borrowed-from-library audio/video, etc..
TV generally sucks, cable generally sucks. The "best of" shows like the funniest/most amazing/most interesting videos have a few clips interlaced with lots of annoying filler and artificial build-up.
With BitTorrent (and other technology) it's now easy for a momentarily popular clip to be quickly and widely distributed. Late examples are movie and video game trailers, but think of old favorites like the exploding whale or the liquid oxygen barbecue...things like that can now spread more efficiently than joke emails.
I have a hard time relating Communism to open source, and here's why:
Let's use corn as an example. We're all corn growers in our communist state. Ideally we all produce what we can produce and eat what we need. But everyone knows this doesn't happen. Some people only take, and many who could produce more produce just enough for themselves because aside from altrusim/idealism there's no incentive to produce more. Highly oversimplified, but that's how I see it.
With open source software, there is no physical product. Software, unlike corn, can be perfectly copied ad infinitum at no incremental cost. (If you're picky you could argue about CDRs or bandwidth costing money, but that's not the software, and there are many ways to replicate software, and every computer owner can use at least one of those ways at no- or negligible incremental cost.) Everyone can use the product produced to be enough for one person. As long as a few people are willing to produce enough for one to use then everyone else can just take. Again, that's oversimplified.
This makes it hard to equate with communism and hard to work into capitalism because you have a sought-after product with no intrinsic value. Open source works great here, but companies that are used to charging you for each copy of software and for how many people use it (per-seat, per-concurrent-user and per-connection licensing) are having trouble dealing with the technology-induced revenue reduction.
It seems to me to be very similar to home tape recorders and commercial music where it became cheaper to make your own copy than to buy it from the original distributor. We're still wrestling with that issue. And no, that's not the same as buying discount corn from Mr. Shady who stole from Mr. Smith's farm. I can listen to arguments as to why it's also wrong, but it's not the same thing.
I hate it when that happens
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: 1
I'm reading at score 4, and I just followed the link from the previous story in my list to the Snopes article about chicken cannons. I still had chicken cannons on the mind when I read your post:
If they could ramp this up⦠â¦to toddler size, this could revolutionize the daycare industry.
It took me a few seconds of horror before I remembered the original article topic.
For one, a lot of commercial companies are use the commercial support provided by the JBoss Group as justification for going with an open source software solution (as opposed to one of the much more expensive commercial application servers).
I've been wondering about this a lot lately. A couple of my buddies and I are kicking around the idea of starting up a service company which would include a small centralized server farm to be used for most/all customer server needs.
Just last night I installed JBoss/Tomcat to kick it around and consider it for our possible future business.
I keep going back and forth about commercial suppport. I keep thinking "gee, in a business where business revenue relies on the server software perhaps we should go ahead and pay the big bucks for a commercial product with support." Then I realize I currently work in a large company that pays for commerical products and the vendor support reps are clueless and we have to eventually figure out the problems and fix them ourselves anyway. (Disclaimer: I'm a network admin, not a developer, so my vendor experiences are with implementation and operational issues.)
Okay, what about liability then? I've heard before that you want to feel there's someone to sue if something goes wrong. But who's ever sued Microsoft (or IBM, Sun, HP, BEA, Oracle) because of lost business revenue due to their products?
What do you really get from paying the big boys big money?
I have a sneaking suspicion I'd come out way ahead financially and operationally if I take the money I save on huge up-front licensing and ongoing per-seat licensing and split it between the business and a support fund, and if we run into a problem we can't handle it's time to hire one of the developers of the software to fix it for us, or in the case of JBoss use the Core Developer's consulting service.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I've lived in Germany, and been to England, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, and what is now the Czech Republic. They do have lives there, and I'll give you those. However, I work in (management in) the meat industry in Chicago, and let me assure you, if they have lives in Mexico, why the hell are all the Mexicans up here working in my plant?
Heheheh. I almost included an exception for Mexico saying that they actually do exist only to serve us but decided it wouldn't be funny but just inflammatory. Besides, serving us is only a secondary purpose; their primary purpose is to love soccer (football to all you non-USians).
On a somewhat more serious note, they're up there working in your meat plant because you're paying them enough to make it worth their while yet not enough to not make it worth the while of "local" potential employees. (BTW, I'd wager a large number of them are sending money back to Mexico to help support their extended families.)
When I lived in Texas I heard a lot of people bitching about Mexicans in jobs, but the Mexicans were doing hard labor that the bitchers wouldn't want to do in the first place. Sometimes I worry if we're getting too lazy.
But remember that a majority of us who voted didn't want our current "leaders" in office. Please, remember that. We'll try to change it next year.
I'm not sure there'll be any decent choices next year. Hopefully there will be a check box for "present but not voting". Or maybe Michael Moore can get "Ficus" elected president...it's already been voted into some local governments. "Ficus, because a potted plant can do no harm." (I may have that quote wrong; I can't find the original now. Disclaimer: I'm not as liberal or cynical as Michael, but I find his work entertaining and occasionally insightful.)
USians? How is that pronounced?
Heh. In my mind it's "you-ess-ians".
In real life I'd say "Americans", but some of the Slashdot crowd balks that "American" can refer to anyone in North America or South America.
I just have to wonder what they [asians] actually DO for us rather than make porn and spam which we can do ourself, . . .
Hint: People on other countries don't exist for the sole purpose of serving us.
I've been to Mexico, England, Finland, Russia and Latvia. People actualy have lives there, too. You'd be amazed.
Note to non-USians: I won't judge your country by your most outrageous people if you don't judge mine by ours. Deal?
Sun's contributed a lot to UNIX over the years (RPC, NFS, NIS, OpenOffice) . . .
As clumsy at it sounds, the correct name is OpenOffice.org.
It's not an idealistic or political thing; it's a trademark thing.
I nominate this to precede every future SCO story on Slashdot.
I just got done watching some Flash animations from rathergood.com and b3ta.com and I encourage whoever has the talent to turn this song into a Flash music video.
I'm much more interested in having a google search available over my harddisk.
I thought I remember Google having a product like this, but I can't find it now.
MS Win2k and WinXP have an indexing service that's supposed to do just what you want. It's not enabled by default in 2k; not sure about XP. I've been afraid to try it for various paranoia and stability reasons.
HTdig was my next thought. It's designed for web pages, but I bet you could restrict it to your hard disk. However, the site says they don't index non-text files yet.
For some reason I felt like searching Freshmeat and came up with SWISH++. It says it can index hard drives and non-text files "such as Microsoft Office documents", although the method they describe they use is not one I'm sure would work since Office docs can be in Unicode.
Both HTdig and SWISH++ are GPL. There were other possibilities on Freshmeat, too.
I never knew the source but figured it had to be Emacs. grep, grok, natch?
I feel so much more enlightened now, and now I have less reason to learn Emacs. Viva vi!
(iChat, for example, does NOT need to be 64-bit)
Damnit! You mean I'll still be stuck with only a 4GB line buffer?
apple is offering sweet $300 dollar rebates to students . . .
Cool!
Note to self: To Do List:
1: Enroll in school
2: Find a $600 Mac with all the features my $300 PC has.
(Not trolling; I want OS X, but it's not worth the $ to me to switch.)
Actually, it's more 0x2DF.
Okay, I got the 0x539 reference, but I had to play with the scientific calculator to figure yours out. Either you like calculators or you're really kickin' it old school.
Here, this is even more obscure and old school:
0x43C8DE1
Good luck.
...the 2 workers at each company were relieved to here today that their jobs were no in jeopardy.
However, they are very concerned about the announced 10% in staff reduction.
I use it and love it but I am still in the vast minority.
:-)
Well, at least it's a vast minority.
So, it's a hypercube (4-dimensional), but we can't visually comprehend that so we look at the 3-dimensional shadow...well, actually a 2-d perspective of a 3-dimensional shadow...on a 16-bit OS on a 32-bit computer, etc, etc, 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition?
I'm so confused. I'll go play with that triangular pyramid puzzle...at least I could occasionally solve it without consulting a cheat book.
Oh, you bastard, why did you have to remind me of that? Yes, it was awful.
Now I've got the sound bite of him saying "Rubik" in that attempted-cute way stuck in my head. ARGH! Actually, kind of analagous to Pikachu saying his own name in delight and sense of accomplishment. But Rubik was worse.
How am I supposed to go to sleep with that stuff in my head? Now I'll have to watch some porn or something...
Distance from the CO was one of my considerations when apartment hunting. I'm 5000 feet from the CO, but in my area SBC caps both the up and down data rate and sells 368/128, 768/128 and 1.5M/256 at different $rates. :-P
In my previous residence (a different state but still SBC) the local telco didn't cap the rate, but I was 13,000 ft from the CO geo-wise but about 18,000 feet cable as measured by TDR so my rate was limited to 400/128.
By the way, the ROM image included BASIC and a mini assembler. CALL -151 IIRC put you into a hexdump/memory lister mode, and "!" would start the mini assembler. I may be getting it a little confused with DOS's DEBUG.EXE, but the concept was similar.
HGR was the hi-res command. I don't remember it as well, but it was meory mapped from 0x2000-0x4000 IIRC. It was 2 colors logically, but the display device was a TV and the output was designed so that two lit pixels would look white while alternating lit/unlit pixels would be a color.
If you had a lone pixel or vertical pixel line lit it would be a color whether you wanted it color or not. Two adjacent pixels (left-to-right) were always white. Vertical placement had no effect on color.
That should help explain why things look weird sometimes in Apple II emulators. You can't quite duplicate the effect in modern RGB. Not that you'd want to except to see how the graphics were natively viewed in this color-hack manner. Diagonal colored lines were extraordinarily jaggy.
It's all coming back now. The high bit told whether the color options for this byte should be blue/orange or green/violet. The next 7 bits were memory-mapped on/off pixels. So, for example you were in HGR mode and wrote binary 10101010 to 0x2000 you would get a colored line. (Note to continue the same color in the next byte it would be 11010101, so HGR wasn't totally easy.) 11010101 at 0x2000 would show the complimentary color (blue vs. orange or green vs. violet).
Of course that's for people with no social lives who like to code in 6502 assembly. Normal people would write a basic program:
10 HGR
20 HCOLOR 2
30 HDRAW 0,0 TO 150,150
40 HDRAW TO 250,10
See the grandparent post for a low-res BASIC example.
Then there were some that did the turtle graphics (early vector drawing with a turtle-is-the-pencil metaphor), but that was a separate product.
It was techincally 16 colors, but really it was "light" and "dark" versions of 8 colors.
The text mode display of an Apple ][+ is 40x24. The command GR changed it to "low res graphics" which left the bottom 4 lines as text and the top 20 lines had each character split into a top half and bottom half colored square/rectangular blocks.
For text and low-res modes (and hi-res btw, but low-res and text mode used the same memory range, 400H-800H IIRC--that's 0x400 and 0x800 these days) the display was mapped directly from main memory. In text mode each character was represented by its ASCII value. In GR/low-res mode the graphics 'character' was split into a high and low nybble to represent the block colors. No pallete, no RGB.
I was geeky enough then to get into 6502 assembly language (in pre-teen/teen years), so I even did some assembly programming of the display. (But I'm only an amateur programmer today.)
Come to think of it, both 0 and 8 were the color black, so you had 15 visual colors and 16 logical colors.
It was a very valuable learning tool. I doubt I would know as much about computers today if I had started on a 16- or 32-bit machine.
Some of the best code reuse I've seen is in Microsoft products. On my Win2k PC I have about 20 copies of 5 different versions of MSVCRT*.DLL. Previous versions of Windows had similar reuse of VBRUN*.DLL.
I'm in the same situation where the cable comes with the apartment. I didn't want it, but it's there anyway. I tend to watch it too much (well, I leave it on while I'm at the computer), but lately it's difficult to find anything worth watching even though I have 60-80 channels. And the stuff I do like is edited for content and commerical breaks.
What SBC service do you have? I have 5-static-IP 768k/128k ADSL at a little less than half your price. I'd pay your price if the uplink speed is good enough and try to defray the costs by serving web pages or something.
I have the computing power and knowledge to take advantage of what's out there, but I'm not "living it" yet.
Interesting article timing.
With the likely consolidation of most of the US broadcast/cable media looming, it occurred to me last night that instead of lamenting how much more crappy everything's going to be that I should just embrace on-demand entertainment exclusively. Video rentals, streamed audio/video, downloaded audio/video, borrowed-from-library audio/video, etc..
TV generally sucks, cable generally sucks. The "best of" shows like the funniest/most amazing/most interesting videos have a few clips interlaced with lots of annoying filler and artificial build-up.
With BitTorrent (and other technology) it's now easy for a momentarily popular clip to be quickly and widely distributed. Late examples are movie and video game trailers, but think of old favorites like the exploding whale or the liquid oxygen barbecue...things like that can now spread more efficiently than joke emails.
I have a hard time relating Communism to open source, and here's why:
Let's use corn as an example. We're all corn growers in our communist state. Ideally we all produce what we can produce and eat what we need. But everyone knows this doesn't happen. Some people only take, and many who could produce more produce just enough for themselves because aside from altrusim/idealism there's no incentive to produce more. Highly oversimplified, but that's how I see it.
With open source software, there is no physical product. Software, unlike corn, can be perfectly copied ad infinitum at no incremental cost. (If you're picky you could argue about CDRs or bandwidth costing money, but that's not the software, and there are many ways to replicate software, and every computer owner can use at least one of those ways at no- or negligible incremental cost.) Everyone can use the product produced to be enough for one person. As long as a few people are willing to produce enough for one to use then everyone else can just take. Again, that's oversimplified.
This makes it hard to equate with communism and hard to work into capitalism because you have a sought-after product with no intrinsic value. Open source works great here, but companies that are used to charging you for each copy of software and for how many people use it (per-seat, per-concurrent-user and per-connection licensing) are having trouble dealing with the technology-induced revenue reduction.
It seems to me to be very similar to home tape recorders and commercial music where it became cheaper to make your own copy than to buy it from the original distributor. We're still wrestling with that issue. And no, that's not the same as buying discount corn from Mr. Shady who stole from Mr. Smith's farm. I can listen to arguments as to why it's also wrong, but it's not the same thing.
I'm reading at score 4, and I just followed the link from the previous story in my list to the Snopes article about chicken cannons. I still had chicken cannons on the mind when I read your post:
If they could ramp this up⦠â¦to toddler size, this could revolutionize the daycare industry.
It took me a few seconds of horror before I remembered the original article topic.
Just last night I installed JBoss/Tomcat to kick it around and consider it for our possible future business.
I keep going back and forth about commercial suppport. I keep thinking "gee, in a business where business revenue relies on the server software perhaps we should go ahead and pay the big bucks for a commercial product with support." Then I realize I currently work in a large company that pays for commerical products and the vendor support reps are clueless and we have to eventually figure out the problems and fix them ourselves anyway. (Disclaimer: I'm a network admin, not a developer, so my vendor experiences are with implementation and operational issues.)
Okay, what about liability then? I've heard before that you want to feel there's someone to sue if something goes wrong. But who's ever sued Microsoft (or IBM, Sun, HP, BEA, Oracle) because of lost business revenue due to their products?
What do you really get from paying the big boys big money?
I have a sneaking suspicion I'd come out way ahead financially and operationally if I take the money I save on huge up-front licensing and ongoing per-seat licensing and split it between the business and a support fund, and if we run into a problem we can't handle it's time to hire one of the developers of the software to fix it for us, or in the case of JBoss use the Core Developer's consulting service.
And I am unanimous in that!
If they did that, I would be sure to buy a few copies of whatever they release next.
ThankWare?