Read the truth about Bowling for Columbine. As much as folks would like to deify Michael Moore, he's a flat-out manipulator and liar (yes, just like the "evil" right wingers he attacks, there's nobody innocent in partisan political arenas).
I'm also not too proud of Canada when I see stufflikethis.
Who cares about APEC? I do. The government completely swept that under the rug, and nothing ever really happened to that thug cop. It could happen again, because nothing's been really done to address the problems inherent in the RCMP. Photo radar in Edmonton is growing in use, not shrinking. The government needs the money because Albertans aren't as highly taxed as you BC folks. That's also despite the doubling of fatalities. But you failed to even address what happened to those reporters. You know that Janice Johnston now works as the PR person for Medic Alert? I think she would've tried to continue to be a reporter if the cops hadn't screwed her and those other two over. Looks like the police have a hell of a hold on people in this country.
Here's the proof...Here's more proof...Here's even more proof...
Seriously, don't delude yourself. Canada is not by any stretch of the imagination the utopia you imagine it to be. Not when the government continually grabs its cash, surveils its media, and assaults citizens protesting peacefully with no reasonable warning to leave.
I play quite a few FPS games, but the one thing that annoys me is the wheel. My standard configuration is: Left=shoot, Middle=moveforward, Right=movebackward. With nearly all wheel mice, I've found that the middle mouse button finger tends to slide back and forth and doesn't allow for positive contact all the time. My brother has a Logitech Wingman Gaming mouse, and I have a four-button contoured Mouseman. We don't know what's going to happen if we can't find replacements, because we both have the same problems with wheel mice in FPS games and refuse to give them up.
Anyone know of a good alternative? Maybe a coping strategy?
US workers cannot get jobs in Canada, Europe, Australia, etc. without first applying, and getting necessary work visas. To get a work visa, you must have an employer who has applied to get you in, and has demonstrated that there isn't local talent who could do the job you're being hired for.
For an American applying for a NAFTA visa in Canada, an employer does not need to demonstrate a lack of local talent. All you need is a job offer, a letter describing why you are qualified (degrees, experience, and how they relate to the open position), and to be part of the list of qualified professions. In fact, it is possible to qualify for the equivalent of a green card in Canada (called Landed Immigrant status) right off the bat.
Sadly, you are likely not to find very many jobs. Go to monster.ca or workopolis.ca and see how many tech jobs there are (e.g. type in "computer science" or "electrical engineering"), then go to monster.com and see the difference. If you think US immigration and naturalization policies are "loose" you obviously haven't been to Canada. Salaries are so low here and jobs so scarce so as to be ridiculous. In fact, many Indians and Chinese immigrate to Canada first, then apply for TN visas in the US and then for H-1Bs.
The MAM-E (former Mitsui) Gold Archive and Verbatim Datalife Plus are the best CD/DVD blanks you can get in terms of longevity. In general, these brands along with TDK are what I recommend to folks almost exclusively because they have the best quality control. I've heard good things about Taiyo-Yuden and Mitsubishi's high-end blanks as well. Sadly, Kodak Gold blanks are no longer made, but if you can find some, go nuts on them.
Longevity is the last thing that people are thinking about. That's why crap blanks like Princo and Memorex are usually the best deal price-wise. Whether it's your music collection or home videos, you can't afford the cheap blanks. Of course, I also recommend many of the same things that the original poster (environmentally controlled environment isolated from light). However, using CDs with less storage space really doesn't make a big difference if you've temperature controlled them. The size of the "bits" is not going to be the deciding factor when there's already in-line error correction and redundancy. Just use good archival blanks.
One last note...for the truly paranoid, you should actually go and get a CD mastered by a manufacturing house that specializes in this type of thing. This may not be the cheapest option (probably on the order of hundreds of dollars), but what's your data really worth if you lose it and can't get it back?
The average person simply doesn't understand the implications of installing browser plug-ins. Most users are using Internet Explorer, and the default settings of Internet Explorer allow the individual to be prompted for plugins that have security certificates. These security certificates are in and of themselves a ruse, since "trusted" source only means the spyware company bought a certificate from someone like Verisign. The average user, however, sees all this and says "hey, why not, must be ok, right?"
The real solution here is to develop good habits in users, including the use of alternative non-M$ browsers/OS, changing default browser settings to enable the installation of possibly only the most common plug-ins like Flash/Shockwave, automatic set up of Javascript-disabling and ad-disabling CSS, pop-up and cookie control apps and settings, firewall apps, hosts files, and of course the regular use of programs such as Spybot and Ad-Aware. The amount of spyware/malware that I find on computers is phenomenal, and when I consult for individuals or families they are always astounded at the amount of this crap on their computer. Particularly when I explain to them what's going on, they invariably get quite angry at the peddlers of this junk. They always say "well nobody told us about this." I lament that I am the first.
Maybe it's time for the geek community to develop some altruistic marketing schemes and start educating the public at large about what's out there. Until M$ fixes a horribly broken set of Internet access apps, someone has to fill that void. Any takers?
Out of all the computer hardware you probably have to destroy, old hard drives top the list for security and privacy reasons. Although taking apart the hard drive is good, it's time consuming and difficult if you have a lot of computers to dispose of. A better solution would be to subject it to the magnetic field of a degaussing coil. The magnetic field of course is strongest along an axis that passes through the center of the coil, so making small circles and passing the HD through it should be enough to kill it. This is also handy for the paranoid who are afraid to have their data found to have a smaller version wrapped around a hard drive attached to an alarm mechanism.
If SCO truly has claims, then they should send out the rabid pitbull of the software industry, the BSA. I'm sure they'd love to sink their teeth into some of these infringers.
I'm personally betting diamonds to dollars that the BSA will never touch anything SCO related, now or in the future.
I bought a Dell Axim X5 400MHz last year. The PocketPC OS notwithstanding, it is a great little unit. I can store 2.33 hours of DivX MPEG-4 encoded video on my 256MB flash card, and that's at 30fps 320x240 with 16-bit 22kHz mono audio. In addition, I have all sorts of emulators for old game systems and my old HP48GX, plus (surprise) it's my information organizer and remote Internet access device. Its battery life for movie playback is about 4 hours on a full charge on the standard battery, and 10 hours of MP3 playback. That's more than enough for a full day of use, and I can still do other things with it.
The downside of the Axim, of course, is that it doesn't have anywhere near the capacity of the Archos. Even that can be partly addressed by attaching a PC card hard drive to the PDA using a CF-to-PC-card adapter though it saps battery life. The multifunction nature of the Dell, however, is something I can't compromise on for now (Small-and-Flaccid(TM) OS notwithstanding).
I have seen a lot of people who jaywalk, or hop off curbs with bicycles in the middle of the street, or ride their bicycles through a pedestrian crosswalk expecting people to stop. They're not allowed to carry liability insurance. If someone jaywalks and I hit them, and they damage my car, I *HAVE* to sue them. There is no recourse with their insurance agency since they aren't required to carry public liability insurance. The same thing goes for bicycles. I agree that many drivers are inconsiderate towards pedestrians and cyclists, but if you want it to work one way, it has to work both ways.
Oh, and if you want drivers to carry these tracking devices around, how about equipping every bicycle and human being with them? Wait a minute, they should just rename the UK into Oceania and put up pictures of Big Brother to go along with all the cameras monitoring everyone. Don't expect me to throw a rope to you now that you're sliding down that slippery slope.
I'm curious to see how Gnumeric performs in terms of its implementation of certain complex functions, such as Solver. Anyone know where we can dig this information up?
Considering the downturn in the telecom market, I'd think that some of these companies would at least be willing to make new customers with some reasonable terms rather than piss them off. Maybe this is one of the reasons why the downturn happened in the first place.
The Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada is one of the most exceptional museums I have ever been to. It truly feels like you are stepping back millions of years, and is a world-class facility.
While you're out there, check out the Banff-Jasper corridor of the Rocky Mountains, particularly the Columbia Icefields and Johnston Canyon. Spectacular geographic features of North America can be found there, and the glaciers date back to the last ice age!
DVD-R is the only format that the DVD-Forum endorses. I don't see a hint of +R or +RW anywhere in there.
Just because Sony, Microsoft, or any number of other manufacturers are endorsing +R/+RW means nothing. Just because there are more drives in the store being purchased as +R/+RW means nothing. One could easily make the same argument for the +R/+RW only camp in introducing -R/-RW compatibility in their products. Besides that, +R/+RW media is both more expensive and newer. The -R/-RW media has been around a while, and this is why you see it for cheaper.
You want maximum compatibility, stick with -R. The nice folks in the story proved it. You don't know if someone will try to play the DVD you write on an older player. It'd suck for someone to get caught not being able to read what they have.
Note: How the parent got modded up this high is beyond my level of understanding.
I've worked with enough Indians to know this. Even they admit that their english is better than their Hindi or whatever other language they speak.
Incidentally, this is also why India will have the biggest advantage of that group of Asian and Eastern European countries in this regard. If the governments of China and other countries are really smart, they will make english instruction mandatory.
I've rarely seen it where I was in the US. I've lived in California and rarely did I feel unsafe. Most of the time that type of crime is pretty well delineated into good areas and bad areas, and mostly from folks who are involved in illegal activities (e.g. drive into East Palo Alto at night...not smart...). In fact, back in Edmonton, Alberta, there is a lot of gang violence and a lot more home invasions than I ever remembered in the Bay Area.
As far as Michael Moore goes, I think some folks need a bit of a reality check.
Just wait and see what that high Canadian dollar, inflation, SARS and BSE will do to the Canadian economy. I've lived in both places (US and Canada) and I can assure you that quality of life can be as high in the US as in Canada, if not higher. Plus, there is an imbalance in the Purchasing Power Parity which basically makes Canadian goods much more expensive than their US counterparts right now.
PCI-Express uses high-speed multichannel SERDES on its datapath. PCI-X uses special single-ended I/O and is slower. There are good networkable PCI-X adapters coming out for things like iSCSI and the like, but PCI-Express hardware doesn't exist yet. Very common mistake to make, btw.
I saw this movie, and I thought it was great with the exception of one thing - the nukes. It's my understanding that most nuclear warheads are programmed to detonate a certain altitude OVER their target (air burst) in order to maximize the destructive power. Sure, if you actually hit somthing at its surface with a nuke, you will obliterate a certain mass of the atoms right at the center of the explosion, but this doesn't continue indefinitely and would only likely be necessary to target specific explosions.
The other thing is that we didn't see one of those enormous nukes, like the 55 Megaton monster detonated over Novaya Zemlya by the former Soviet Union. Every time I see that footage, it makes my skin crawl. I've been told by several people that there were 500 Megaton nukes pointed at the most critical targets in a nuclear war in North America because Edmonton, Alberta (where I'm from) was apparently the Soviet/Russian #4 target in the world in a nuclear strike. This was due to the large number of chemical/petroleum processing plants, landing strips and relative close proximity to northern Asia. Now THAT I would've wanted to see.
I remember nine years ago when I was shopping for a top of the line PC (at that time, a 486DX-2/66). I walked into a local computer superstore and told them what I wanted; however, I also wanted to save a few bucks and just have the hard drive boot to a DOS prompt, no more.
The salesperson was very pushy and asked "well what are you going to install on there?" and I of course responded "anything - SCO Unix (note: what irony, little did I know...), Linux, BSD...why?" Well, sadly, I was informed by the salesperson there that I "would not be receiving a hardware warranty if I did not order it with Windows."
Needless to say, I walked out shortly thereafter and later learned that this was a common practice at the time and at later points in time. The moral of the story is that anything that Microsoft might have its grubby little hands, in any form, may affect the average Joe in unimaginable ways, and many imaginable ones. Just like me, and just like the folks trying to legally dupe CDs.
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The Canadian Senate is appointed, not elected, and has no real legal power in Canada. It is a very very expensive rubber stamp, in effect. In addition, it is not like the US system of counterbalances where the House has "rep by pop" and the Senate has "rep by region".
A little known fact about Canada - Canada only got its full independence from England on April 17, 1982. Canada Day, which is July 1, 1867, created the Dominion of Canada, but the constitution of Canada was formally held until that day.
Canada fell to 8th place behind the United States in the UN rankings.
Read the truth about Bowling for Columbine. As much as folks would like to deify Michael Moore, he's a flat-out manipulator and liar (yes, just like the "evil" right wingers he attacks, there's nobody innocent in partisan political arenas).
I'm also not too proud of Canada when I see stuff like this.
Who cares about APEC? I do. The government completely swept that under the rug, and nothing ever really happened to that thug cop. It could happen again, because nothing's been really done to address the problems inherent in the RCMP. Photo radar in Edmonton is growing in use, not shrinking. The government needs the money because Albertans aren't as highly taxed as you BC folks. That's also despite the doubling of fatalities. But you failed to even address what happened to those reporters. You know that Janice Johnston now works as the PR person for Medic Alert? I think she would've tried to continue to be a reporter if the cops hadn't screwed her and those other two over. Looks like the police have a hell of a hold on people in this country.
Here's the proof... Here's more proof... Here's even more proof... Seriously, don't delude yourself. Canada is not by any stretch of the imagination the utopia you imagine it to be. Not when the government continually grabs its cash, surveils its media, and assaults citizens protesting peacefully with no reasonable warning to leave.
I play quite a few FPS games, but the one thing that annoys me is the wheel. My standard configuration is: Left=shoot, Middle=moveforward, Right=movebackward. With nearly all wheel mice, I've found that the middle mouse button finger tends to slide back and forth and doesn't allow for positive contact all the time. My brother has a Logitech Wingman Gaming mouse, and I have a four-button contoured Mouseman. We don't know what's going to happen if we can't find replacements, because we both have the same problems with wheel mice in FPS games and refuse to give them up.
Anyone know of a good alternative? Maybe a coping strategy?
For an American applying for a NAFTA visa in Canada, an employer does not need to demonstrate a lack of local talent. All you need is a job offer, a letter describing why you are qualified (degrees, experience, and how they relate to the open position), and to be part of the list of qualified professions. In fact, it is possible to qualify for the equivalent of a green card in Canada (called Landed Immigrant status) right off the bat.
Sadly, you are likely not to find very many jobs. Go to monster.ca or workopolis.ca and see how many tech jobs there are (e.g. type in "computer science" or "electrical engineering"), then go to monster.com and see the difference. If you think US immigration and naturalization policies are "loose" you obviously haven't been to Canada. Salaries are so low here and jobs so scarce so as to be ridiculous. In fact, many Indians and Chinese immigrate to Canada first, then apply for TN visas in the US and then for H-1Bs.
The MAM-E (former Mitsui) Gold Archive and Verbatim Datalife Plus are the best CD/DVD blanks you can get in terms of longevity. In general, these brands along with TDK are what I recommend to folks almost exclusively because they have the best quality control. I've heard good things about Taiyo-Yuden and Mitsubishi's high-end blanks as well. Sadly, Kodak Gold blanks are no longer made, but if you can find some, go nuts on them.
Longevity is the last thing that people are thinking about. That's why crap blanks like Princo and Memorex are usually the best deal price-wise. Whether it's your music collection or home videos, you can't afford the cheap blanks. Of course, I also recommend many of the same things that the original poster (environmentally controlled environment isolated from light). However, using CDs with less storage space really doesn't make a big difference if you've temperature controlled them. The size of the "bits" is not going to be the deciding factor when there's already in-line error correction and redundancy. Just use good archival blanks.
One last note...for the truly paranoid, you should actually go and get a CD mastered by a manufacturing house that specializes in this type of thing. This may not be the cheapest option (probably on the order of hundreds of dollars), but what's your data really worth if you lose it and can't get it back?
The average person simply doesn't understand the implications of installing browser plug-ins. Most users are using Internet Explorer, and the default settings of Internet Explorer allow the individual to be prompted for plugins that have security certificates. These security certificates are in and of themselves a ruse, since "trusted" source only means the spyware company bought a certificate from someone like Verisign. The average user, however, sees all this and says "hey, why not, must be ok, right?"
The real solution here is to develop good habits in users, including the use of alternative non-M$ browsers/OS, changing default browser settings to enable the installation of possibly only the most common plug-ins like Flash/Shockwave, automatic set up of Javascript-disabling and ad-disabling CSS, pop-up and cookie control apps and settings, firewall apps, hosts files, and of course the regular use of programs such as Spybot and Ad-Aware. The amount of spyware/malware that I find on computers is phenomenal, and when I consult for individuals or families they are always astounded at the amount of this crap on their computer. Particularly when I explain to them what's going on, they invariably get quite angry at the peddlers of this junk. They always say "well nobody told us about this." I lament that I am the first.
Maybe it's time for the geek community to develop some altruistic marketing schemes and start educating the public at large about what's out there. Until M$ fixes a horribly broken set of Internet access apps, someone has to fill that void. Any takers?
Out of all the computer hardware you probably have to destroy, old hard drives top the list for security and privacy reasons. Although taking apart the hard drive is good, it's time consuming and difficult if you have a lot of computers to dispose of. A better solution would be to subject it to the magnetic field of a degaussing coil. The magnetic field of course is strongest along an axis that passes through the center of the coil, so making small circles and passing the HD through it should be enough to kill it. This is also handy for the paranoid who are afraid to have their data found to have a smaller version wrapped around a hard drive attached to an alarm mechanism.
If SCO truly has claims, then they should send out the rabid pitbull of the software industry, the BSA. I'm sure they'd love to sink their teeth into some of these infringers.
I'm personally betting diamonds to dollars that the BSA will never touch anything SCO related, now or in the future.
I bought a Dell Axim X5 400MHz last year. The PocketPC OS notwithstanding, it is a great little unit. I can store 2.33 hours of DivX MPEG-4 encoded video on my 256MB flash card, and that's at 30fps 320x240 with 16-bit 22kHz mono audio. In addition, I have all sorts of emulators for old game systems and my old HP48GX, plus (surprise) it's my information organizer and remote Internet access device. Its battery life for movie playback is about 4 hours on a full charge on the standard battery, and 10 hours of MP3 playback. That's more than enough for a full day of use, and I can still do other things with it.
The downside of the Axim, of course, is that it doesn't have anywhere near the capacity of the Archos. Even that can be partly addressed by attaching a PC card hard drive to the PDA using a CF-to-PC-card adapter though it saps battery life. The multifunction nature of the Dell, however, is something I can't compromise on for now (Small-and-Flaccid(TM) OS notwithstanding).
I have seen a lot of people who jaywalk, or hop off curbs with bicycles in the middle of the street, or ride their bicycles through a pedestrian crosswalk expecting people to stop. They're not allowed to carry liability insurance. If someone jaywalks and I hit them, and they damage my car, I *HAVE* to sue them. There is no recourse with their insurance agency since they aren't required to carry public liability insurance. The same thing goes for bicycles. I agree that many drivers are inconsiderate towards pedestrians and cyclists, but if you want it to work one way, it has to work both ways.
Oh, and if you want drivers to carry these tracking devices around, how about equipping every bicycle and human being with them? Wait a minute, they should just rename the UK into Oceania and put up pictures of Big Brother to go along with all the cameras monitoring everyone. Don't expect me to throw a rope to you now that you're sliding down that slippery slope.
I'm curious to see how Gnumeric performs in terms of its implementation of certain complex functions, such as Solver. Anyone know where we can dig this information up?
Considering the downturn in the telecom market, I'd think that some of these companies would at least be willing to make new customers with some reasonable terms rather than piss them off. Maybe this is one of the reasons why the downturn happened in the first place.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
The Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada is one of the most exceptional museums I have ever been to. It truly feels like you are stepping back millions of years, and is a world-class facility.
While you're out there, check out the Banff-Jasper corridor of the Rocky Mountains, particularly the Columbia Icefields and Johnston Canyon. Spectacular geographic features of North America can be found there, and the glaciers date back to the last ice age!
DVD-R is the only format that the DVD-Forum endorses. I don't see a hint of +R or +RW anywhere in there. Just because Sony, Microsoft, or any number of other manufacturers are endorsing +R/+RW means nothing. Just because there are more drives in the store being purchased as +R/+RW means nothing. One could easily make the same argument for the +R/+RW only camp in introducing -R/-RW compatibility in their products. Besides that, +R/+RW media is both more expensive and newer. The -R/-RW media has been around a while, and this is why you see it for cheaper.
You want maximum compatibility, stick with -R. The nice folks in the story proved it. You don't know if someone will try to play the DVD you write on an older player. It'd suck for someone to get caught not being able to read what they have.
Note: How the parent got modded up this high is beyond my level of understanding.
Check the press release here.
As I've said in previous comments, this is pretty much the best media out there, along with Verbatim (Data Life), TDK and Taiyo Yuden.
I've worked with enough Indians to know this. Even they admit that their english is better than their Hindi or whatever other language they speak.
Incidentally, this is also why India will have the biggest advantage of that group of Asian and Eastern European countries in this regard. If the governments of China and other countries are really smart, they will make english instruction mandatory.
I've rarely seen it where I was in the US. I've lived in California and rarely did I feel unsafe. Most of the time that type of crime is pretty well delineated into good areas and bad areas, and mostly from folks who are involved in illegal activities (e.g. drive into East Palo Alto at night...not smart...). In fact, back in Edmonton, Alberta, there is a lot of gang violence and a lot more home invasions than I ever remembered in the Bay Area.
As far as Michael Moore goes, I think some folks need a bit of a reality check.
Just wait and see what that high Canadian dollar, inflation, SARS and BSE will do to the Canadian economy. I've lived in both places (US and Canada) and I can assure you that quality of life can be as high in the US as in Canada, if not higher. Plus, there is an imbalance in the Purchasing Power Parity which basically makes Canadian goods much more expensive than their US counterparts right now.
PCI-Express uses high-speed multichannel SERDES on its datapath. PCI-X uses special single-ended I/O and is slower. There are good networkable PCI-X adapters coming out for things like iSCSI and the like, but PCI-Express hardware doesn't exist yet. Very common mistake to make, btw.
I saw this movie, and I thought it was great with the exception of one thing - the nukes. It's my understanding that most nuclear warheads are programmed to detonate a certain altitude OVER their target (air burst) in order to maximize the destructive power. Sure, if you actually hit somthing at its surface with a nuke, you will obliterate a certain mass of the atoms right at the center of the explosion, but this doesn't continue indefinitely and would only likely be necessary to target specific explosions.
The other thing is that we didn't see one of those enormous nukes, like the 55 Megaton monster detonated over Novaya Zemlya by the former Soviet Union. Every time I see that footage, it makes my skin crawl. I've been told by several people that there were 500 Megaton nukes pointed at the most critical targets in a nuclear war in North America because Edmonton, Alberta (where I'm from) was apparently the Soviet/Russian #4 target in the world in a nuclear strike. This was due to the large number of chemical/petroleum processing plants, landing strips and relative close proximity to northern Asia. Now THAT I would've wanted to see.
I remember nine years ago when I was shopping for a top of the line PC (at that time, a 486DX-2/66). I walked into a local computer superstore and told them what I wanted; however, I also wanted to save a few bucks and just have the hard drive boot to a DOS prompt, no more.
The salesperson was very pushy and asked "well what are you going to install on there?" and I of course responded "anything - SCO Unix (note: what irony, little did I know...), Linux, BSD...why?" Well, sadly, I was informed by the salesperson there that I "would not be receiving a hardware warranty if I did not order it with Windows."
Needless to say, I walked out shortly thereafter and later learned that this was a common practice at the time and at later points in time. The moral of the story is that anything that Microsoft might have its grubby little hands, in any form, may affect the average Joe in unimaginable ways, and many imaginable ones. Just like me, and just like the folks trying to legally dupe CDs.