I still don't understand how Sony can make MP3 players to record and play "all your favourite music". And then put copy protection on the CD's they sell. Doesn't this hurt their own business? What's the point of buying an MP3 player if the only legal thing you can play on it is your computer recording of home violin lessons?
I am fairly sure that in Australia you are allowed to make a copy eg tape of a CD or Vinyl recording for personal use. It used to be really important when vinyl deteriorated every time you played it and was completely destroyed the time your little brother got hold of it.
Strangely I got him (Sean) muddled with Jason Connery who is Sean Connery's son, who played Ian Flemming. Just to make confusion whole.
As far as I knew, Speilberg was working on Alexander the Great in 2005. Harrison seems to be working on something about Tombs in 2004 but he's not playing Indiana in that movie.
I'm not sure how a flash back presentation could be so very different from the TV series. And Sean Connery proves you can never be too old to be an action hero even if somewhat unconvincing (sick even) in Entrapment.
They're nearly cheaper than real actors and can be reverse aged more easily.
So I imagine (commences pure fiction) they could use a youthful actor to body double for Harrison and the rest, and paste in Harrison's face scraped from anything he's made where he looks less cragfaced (Star Wars 1977 mode?).
Melted characters could easily be returned this way also. Just like in soap operas. In fact if you've been melted and revived, you'd have to have had lots of plastic surgery right?
So lets have indiana jones and the last unicorn, fight the gremlins in the kremlin...
Just because Debian is for a niche market doesn't mean it has to die if it doesn't go after the mainstream we-don't-care-how-it-works market. "Turn-key" solutions are not for everyone.
My current favourite magazine has several debian articles including this one updating debian
Unfortunately I cannot find the web link for the July issue workshop article about setting up Debian. I expect they'll make it available in August. They're very enthusiastic, and have included the install files on CD in the July 2003 issue. If I had a spare PC I might try it. Especially as they say you can use it to resurrect a pentium 100 (So I guess my pentium 133 would be ok).
I think Debian will survive as long as the guys who are building it now continue to be interested and new programmers take up the quest for the perfect OS, where perfect is defined more in terms of reliabilty, stablility and security than easy good looks.
What will get the mass market but never the geek market, are cheap (reliable) computers that are more compatible with people. They're still years off true user friendliness in hardware, software and people interfaces. Imagine no pain switching versions, or upgrading. Imagine not needing "training" to learn how to use the latest word processor, or to get the best out of animation software or video editing or being able to play the newest adventure game without having to read 300 pages of the manual, and learn lots of weird keyboard or mouse tricks to control the interface. Imagine computer games that you could play and keep fit at the same time. Hmm, I remember a rowing machine that had a video game of a shark chasing your rowing boat, and you had to row to keep ahead of the shark. That was nearly 10 years ago, but the gym I went to most recently didn't have it. Just numbers. Boring. Imagine having to pedal to keep your aeroplane off the ground in flight simulator?
Can FIFA (Soccer) call their international tournament a "World Cup" if they exclude a place for Oceania?
Why does washing the car bring on rain?
Why does serving coffee on aeroplanes cause turbulence?
Was the French Resistance really an evil band of terrorists?
Why do Israelis who understand what the holocost was, do what they do to the Palestinians?
Why would cigarette ash make a keyboard "sticky"? Are you sure it isn't some sugar based substance that you have spilt on it? Are you typing and eating twinkie cakes at the same time?
I think we have this backwards. Telstra is not selling bigpond email addresses. They are doing deals with mass marketers.
Eg Give us the stuff you want to go to all our customers, and we will send it for you.
That way Telstra can fairly truthfully claim they (as opposed to disgruntled employees) did not sell any email addresses.
I know Australia Post does it regularily. I have a PO Box and a home mail box and I get crap directly from Australia post and at the PO box I get unaddressed mail! Like only Australia Post can put stuff in there and they put junk mail.
I think it's the same with Telstra. It's all in how you phrase your request.
"Can you give us your customer database" Answer: NO
"Can you send our marketing stuff to your customer database?" Answer: YES!
I like pick style multivalue databases because I find them more intuitive and direct.
I dislike SQL normalised type "relational" databases where many to many relationships are resolved with annoying link tables removing you ever further from the data you actually want.
Indirection, is that what we have with MS systems? iforget->Dos->win3.11->Win95->Win98->X P I don't include win2K because thats more of an NT hybrid which is another variety of misdirection altogether - don't let the similar names fool you.
Now I have to go look up Butler Lampson cos I never heard of him. I like Dorothy Parker quotes...I don't care what they say about me so long as it isn't true.
until you get hit on the head
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PeltierBeer
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· Score: 1
I like the idea of a shocking jacket for men or women, but I'd hate to be a mugging victim, hit over the head with a wooden bat, unconscious and then electrocute the paramedic trying to help me...
I heard that in those countries that expect women to cover up so they can't be seen, that men make up for that by using "feel". I always thought a nice fiberglass butt and chest would be very amusing in such situations, and possibly not as offensive as electrocution. Hmm, electrocuting fellow bus or train passengers that get too close? That would be one way of stopping them from sneezing on you maybe.
And I wonder what it would do to dirty old men with pace makers? Possibly more permanent effect than they deserve?
Most of the courses I took were defined by the stuff the lecturer wrote on the blackboard or O/H projector equivalent. Ie if you didn't copy all that stuff down as fast as they could write it you didn't know what would be in the exams. We certainly didn't get time to consider what it was, understand it and then write down extracts. You needed all of it, and when lecturer got to end of board / transpancy it was taken off, ready or not. I would have loved a video camera with sound for those.
I have never found a laptop that did calculus symbols or flow charts or tree structures or chemical diagrams as fast as pen and paper or chalk and blackboard, and we had to keep up. I have a pen tablet now but I couldn't use it to take notes.
Unfortunately, by the end of first year uni, I'd learnt to take notes in my sleep. I would have faithfully copied down everything, but if you asked me what was in the lecture, I would not have been able to tell you. At least those notes were good enough to use later for study. And it sort of proves that sleep education doesn't really work on its own. I still use the technique today to appear interested at public speeches of other varieties.
BTW, since laptops were not available when I was at uni (gawd my age is showing again), we did program the computer games into the Uni Vaxes. We had snake, caterpillar, and star trek among others.
stubbie holders
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PeltierBeer
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· Score: 3, Interesting
We always use stubbie holders. Stubbies are single serve glass bottles, somewhat larger than your can-sized serve usually. RM Williams Oilskin stubbie holder
Axeman's stubbie holder Note unlike the photo, the whole can fits snuggly inside the neoprene (think wetsuit rubber).
In the tropics they take keeping your beer cold seriously: stubbie holders, sixpack holders, You can even stick whole wine bottles into some of these.
By the way, if there's foam in that bra, you're probably getting less than you bargained on. Real women don't need or want padding. Although occasionally I'd bet they'd like hard shielding from octopi disguised as men.
Do you suppose you could secure windows by putting it inside a windows emulator?
For example: is a Mac running OSX and windows emulator (eg virtual PC) more secure than windows by itself
or how about linux running win for lin ?
Can you really stuff things up by running a mac X emulator or unix emulator on windows?
Cryptonomicon, Earth, A Deepness in the Sky, HHGTG
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A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you liked snowcrash and you like maths and computers you have to read Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson). It even has some dodgy perl script in it although corrections have been posted at Neal's web site.
Otherwise there a whole CD or more worth of free sci fi, so you can get a taste of what authors you like here
http://www.baen.com/library/
I really like Lois McMaster Bujold - her "Vorkorsican" novels start with "Cordelia's Honor" which is really two novels published together ("Shards of Honor" and "Barrayar"). Epic like Starwars with much more attention to detail (are you ever annoyed when a novel fails to complete an idea, and leaves some character hanging, or contradicts its universe rules in every new release?).
And I like David Weber - "On basilisk Station" and I just finished CS Friedman "The alien shore" which I liked. Most of these involve space travel. "The alien shore" involved spaceships and social structures and computer gadgets.
David Weber was very military, as is Lois McMaster Bujold, and I don't like strict hierachies but I like these books. I like Elizabeth Moon's "Hunting Party", about Heris Serrano, again in a very hierachical society. I guess I like the breaking the rules bit that most of these use to create the drama.
David Brin - "Earth" is an epic plot weaver, the ultimate internet, combined with some interesting physics, maths and enviromental outcomes. I needed 6 bookmarks to read that one.
I hated Robert Jordan Wheel of time series because he never finishes, there are dangling ideas everywhere and it looks like every book just spawns more threads without completion. Very frustrating. I also disliked CJ Cherryh "The Chronicles of Morgaine" because it was a little bit Arthurian legend (I am sick to death of Arthur), but if you want to know where the "Stargates" come from, then it is interesting.
"A deepness in the sky" by Vernor Vinge is another great epic. It is sort of a prequel to A fire upon the deep (1993), and covers 1000's of years of time, space travel, aliens and humans, traders and religious fundamentalist dictatorships. And interestingly explores the consequences of dependence on computer systems and human augmentation with biotech.
I also like Julian May, Golden Torc series; Anne Macaffery, Mercedes Lackey (although they're a little girly-princess). Terry Goodkind is good but a little too much s&m for me. And for good detective crime fighting, I like Dick Francis, so far as I know he wrote only one computer related story "Twice Shy" and it is quite historical now ie it used cassette tapes to load the programs.
For cultural completeness, if you haven't already read these, you must read Tolkein ("Hobbit", "Lord of the Rings" etc), and Douglas Adams "Hitchikers guide to the galaxy" series.
I guess I just have to add dive software to my list of things I won't work on. The other two that have been on my list for a long time have been air traffic control and missile guidance. At least I don't think the Arms guys are going to let me program their missiles to launch out of the earth's gravitational field and make for the sun (or some other star). At least the dive software can't kill so many people so quickly.
Maybe we could program the flight controls of big aircraft so that they are equipped with GPS maps of where they cannot fly or land, like central business districts.
Ie if the pilot tries to fly at a skyscraper the autopilot takes over and redirects the plane. Hmm. Be good if we could make it work properly.
At least the ink off my bubblejet thing does. Renders it useless for printing meeting minutes and agendas because we nearly always have at least a glass of water each and the printouts get used as coasters. That lovely wet washed out watercolour effect. So you wouldn't need a special pen to test, just a water sprayer or a wet finger.
I wonder if you could make fake aussie notes using transperancy film. Someone did get into trouble once for trying to pass off a friend's copy of a note out of pencil and paper as money. That was when we still had paper $2. I think the person who made the copy, even though it was only one sided, got into as much trouble as the idiot who tried to spend it. Not entirely rational law enforcement.
Ok my age is showing. I remember the pound sign representing English currency (money) being shift-3 on my old typewriter. It looked like a curly capital L with a short dash through the middle of it. When the american keyboards took over, the # replaced the curly L symbols keyed by shift-3. Otherwise I can think of no other reason why the # symbol would be called "pound". So I refuse to go there. The pound weight was always written lb (ell bee). And I have never known how you get lb out of "pound".
Ok I guess I use the phrase re-image as an abbreviation of "restore from image" or maybe "re-apply original disk image", ie the standard corporate disk image that includes the o/s and standard work apps eg office etc. And yes anything that was on that guy's hard drive was lost, but he had warning to shift stuff he needed to network before we trashed and refreshed his hard drive. We tried "uninstalling" Gator, but it didn't fix the problem.
I hate "recovery" disks. Ie most of them start by formatting your hard drive. If all you need was to re-install the o/s, these recovery disks screw everything you've got on the hard drive. They certainly only recover in the sense of re-covering furniture. They don't recover in the sense of restoring. bad bad very bad.
Grammar wise - I'll be happy when everyone stops saying "try *and* " do something. Slashdot is no place for the linguistically sensitive to hang out. hat it all you want, words are going to be abused all over the place.
large numbers of gullible people
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why, because 47% of (australian?) people believe they should invest something even if they think the offer is too good to be true.
scary stuff. Lots of nigerians making money out of it. Not to mention dinner party ladies across the USA.
I modified my hosts file - and the ads stopped...
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Gator Examined
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· Score: 2, Informative
I found adaware didn't work too well through the ISP/Employer's proxy. It told me I had ads but it didn't stop them.
the "hosts" file is in your windows dir or maybe in/etc depending on your op sys. hosts.sam is a sample file and needs renaming to "hosts" (ie no.sam, to work.
127.0.0.1 is local host ie your computer connect blah blah is what I don't want # thingy is a comment
Ie send requests for what I don't want to my bit bucket.
Gator is a program to slow your computer down
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My friend bought a new computer and after about 3 months it was running very very slowly. I removed Gator and some other stuff and computer perked up instantly. Well after about 4 reboots.
A customer installed it on his computer and several programs including application I support ceased to function, and these were the apps he needed to do his job. The only way we could fix it was to re-image the hard drive.
My friend's staff installed some sort of calendar tool and gator came with that. Personally I can't think of any reason to install it. The last thing I'd want to do is hand my passwords to anything that sends my information back over the internet. How would I know that it wasn't sending my passwords too?
I find if you empty the tray at least daily then cat didn't get messy paws although she did still scatter gravel around the laundry tiles. I actually preferred a kitty litter sieve thing vaguely equivalent to a mucking out rake ie it picks up lumps but lets the litter/sawdust through). So empty lumps out daily and change litter weekly or more often if too soggy/wet.
The other thing I have heard frequently recommended is when you have more than one cat you need n + 1 cat trays where n is the number of cats that you have. For example 2 cats, need 3 trays. And you'd have to empty all of them daily.
and something else I didn't expect when visiting a friend was they used torn up paper or shredded paper for kitty litter. Cheap and can be recycled through the garden compost if you have a backyard or a worm farm. This stuff would require daily changing as it doesn't lend itself to sieving.
I just wish there was some way to stop cats from eating native wildlife and stick to the imported feral rats and mice. Some cats don't mind being confined to the indoors but my former housemate's cat used to get the most diabolical pungent diarrhoea when confined. And the native wildlife (possums) used to beat it to a pussy semi-conscious mess if we let it out. Eventually it went to live on the family farm.
Maybe a large carpet square or doormat might help with the paw cleaning?
The only time I read a # as "sharp" is when it is on a musical staff ie five parallel lines. Otherwise it is a hash as in #5 for number 5 or please press the hash key on the phone.
Maybe my age is showing or my quantity of country rellies but my family used to butcher our own meat, Dad kept chooks and he eventually got to make jam, beer, pickled olives (not necessarily in that order) and I never ate better than when I went camping with him - no tins or dehydrated food involved.
If you can grow tomatos then you must have a go at peaches or apricots or both. The home grown ones are from a completely different taste experience to the shop bought canned or otherwise.
I like to make jam, pickled olives, cake, biscuits (amazing what you can get a tech to do for homemade choc chip cookies). I also like carpentry, gardening including growing things. I currently have wild silverbeet, parsley and lettuce in the garden.
I've also made soap and candles. I've made rope. I also like sailing, you know, wind driven boats.
But my really geeky friends like flying. Gliders or aeroplanes or helicopters. Most of them are not into any kind of food related expression other than consumption of pizza.
And I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a blunt stick than do any more.
But that was a long long time ago in a city far far away (which is still full of mainframes - they're popular with federal government tax collectors, social security/welfare, banks and insurance).
So if you really want to go there, get a job with a large federal government department that counts lots and lots of money in lots and lots of little pieces (transactions), like tax or pensions. They'll even train you.
All you need to know right now is don't ever be really good at what you can't stand doing. Or only be good at what you like doing and be really really good at that.
And I wish I'd had "the programmer's survival guide - Career strategies for computer professionals" by Janet Ruhl ISBN 013-730375-0 when I started. The coding might be different but the corporate structures, options and techniques for getting ahead haven't changed much. I was way too idealistic and optimistic about doing things right when I was 22. All I did was annoy my jaded bosses, and I didn't know when to run and when to make a stand. Hmm, come to think of it, I still annoy my bosses, but my customers love me.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't understand how Sony can make MP3 players to record and play "all your favourite music". And then put copy protection on the CD's they sell. Doesn't this hurt their own business? What's the point of buying an MP3 player if the only legal thing you can play on it is your computer recording of home violin lessons?
I am fairly sure that in Australia you are allowed to make a copy eg tape of a CD or Vinyl recording for personal use. It used to be really important when vinyl deteriorated every time you played it and was completely destroyed the time your little brother got hold of it.
River Phoenix played young indy in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Sean Patrick Flannery played young indy in the TV series.
Strangely I got him (Sean) muddled with Jason Connery who is Sean Connery's son, who played Ian Flemming. Just to make confusion whole.
As far as I knew, Speilberg was working on Alexander the Great in 2005. Harrison seems to be working on something about Tombs in 2004 but he's not playing Indiana in that movie.
I'm not sure how a flash back presentation could be so very different from the TV series. And Sean Connery proves you can never be too old to be an action hero even if somewhat unconvincing (sick even) in Entrapment.
They're nearly cheaper than real actors and can be reverse aged more easily.
So I imagine (commences pure fiction) they could use a youthful actor to body double for Harrison and the rest, and paste in Harrison's face scraped from anything he's made where he looks less cragfaced (Star Wars 1977 mode?).
Melted characters could easily be returned this way also. Just like in soap operas. In fact if you've been melted and revived, you'd have to have had lots of plastic surgery right?
So lets have indiana jones and the last unicorn, fight the gremlins in the kremlin...
And that's my final fantasy.
Just because Debian is for a niche market doesn't mean it has to die if it doesn't go after the mainstream we-don't-care-how-it-works market. "Turn-key" solutions are not for everyone.
My current favourite magazine has several debian articles including this one updating debian
Unfortunately I cannot find the web link for the July issue workshop article about setting up Debian. I expect they'll make it available in August. They're very enthusiastic, and have included the install files on CD in the July 2003 issue. If I had a spare PC I might try it. Especially as they say you can use it to resurrect a pentium 100 (So I guess my pentium 133 would be ok).
I think Debian will survive as long as the guys who are building it now continue to be interested and new programmers take up the quest for the perfect OS, where perfect is defined more in terms of reliabilty, stablility and security than easy good looks.
What will get the mass market but never the geek market, are cheap (reliable) computers that are more compatible with people. They're still years off true user friendliness in hardware, software and people interfaces. Imagine no pain switching versions, or upgrading. Imagine not needing "training" to learn how to use the latest word processor, or to get the best out of animation software or video editing or being able to play the newest adventure game without having to read 300 pages of the manual, and learn lots of weird keyboard or mouse tricks to control the interface. Imagine computer games that you could play and keep fit at the same time. Hmm, I remember a rowing machine that had a video game of a shark chasing your rowing boat, and you had to row to keep ahead of the shark. That was nearly 10 years ago, but the gym I went to most recently didn't have it. Just numbers. Boring. Imagine having to pedal to keep your aeroplane off the ground in flight simulator?
Hmm got a bit carried away there.
Why do smart people commit slow suicide by smoking? Note: I consider "addiction" an insufficient answer.
Is there a god?
If yes: Is s/he/it benevolent?
If yes: Why do so many good people die horribly?
Why do really stupid people run the USA, and the Pentagon? If we don't stop it we're all going to die
Can FIFA (Soccer) call their international tournament a "World Cup" if they exclude a place for Oceania?
Why does washing the car bring on rain?
Why does serving coffee on aeroplanes cause turbulence?
Was the French Resistance really an evil band of terrorists?
Why do Israelis who understand what the holocost was, do what they do to the Palestinians?
Why would cigarette ash make a keyboard "sticky"? Are you sure it isn't some sugar based substance that you have spilt on it? Are you typing and eating twinkie cakes at the same time?
I think we have this backwards. Telstra is not selling bigpond email addresses. They are doing deals with mass marketers.
Eg Give us the stuff you want to go to all our customers, and we will send it for you.
That way Telstra can fairly truthfully claim they (as opposed to disgruntled employees) did not sell any email addresses.
I know Australia Post does it regularily. I have a PO Box and a home mail box and I get crap directly from Australia post and at the PO box I get unaddressed mail! Like only Australia Post can put stuff in there and they put junk mail.
I think it's the same with Telstra. It's all in how you phrase your request.
"Can you give us your customer database"
Answer: NO
"Can you send our marketing stuff to your customer database?"
Answer: YES!
Australian IT is definitely governed by idiots.
And it can be strip searched every time it goes near an airport...
Trouble is with these kind of databases,
garbage in = innocent people in jail.
I like pick style multivalue databases because I find them more intuitive and direct.
I dislike SQL normalised type "relational" databases where many to many relationships are resolved with annoying link tables removing you ever further from the data you actually want.
Indirection, is that what we have with MS systems? iforget->Dos->win3.11->Win95->Win98->X P I don't include win2K because thats more of an NT hybrid which is another variety of misdirection altogether - don't let the similar names fool you.
Now I have to go look up Butler Lampson cos I never heard of him. I like Dorothy Parker quotes...I don't care what they say about me so long as it isn't true.
I like the idea of a shocking jacket for men or women, but I'd hate to be a mugging victim, hit over the head with a wooden bat, unconscious and then electrocute the paramedic trying to help me...
I heard that in those countries that expect women to cover up so they can't be seen, that men make up for that by using "feel". I always thought a nice fiberglass butt and chest would be very amusing in such situations, and possibly not as offensive as electrocution. Hmm, electrocuting fellow bus or train passengers that get too close? That would be one way of stopping them from sneezing on you maybe.
And I wonder what it would do to dirty old men with pace makers? Possibly more permanent effect than they deserve?
Most of the courses I took were defined by the stuff the lecturer wrote on the blackboard or O/H projector equivalent. Ie if you didn't copy all that stuff down as fast as they could write it you didn't know what would be in the exams. We certainly didn't get time to consider what it was, understand it and then write down extracts. You needed all of it, and when lecturer got to end of board / transpancy it was taken off, ready or not. I would have loved a video camera with sound for those.
I have never found a laptop that did calculus symbols or flow charts or tree structures or chemical diagrams as fast as pen and paper or chalk and blackboard, and we had to keep up. I have a pen tablet now but I couldn't use it to take notes.
Unfortunately, by the end of first year uni, I'd learnt to take notes in my sleep. I would have faithfully copied down everything, but if you asked me what was in the lecture, I would not have been able to tell you. At least those notes were good enough to use later for study. And it sort of proves that sleep education doesn't really work on its own. I still use the technique today to appear interested at public speeches of other varieties.
BTW, since laptops were not available when I was at uni (gawd my age is showing again), we did program the computer games into the Uni Vaxes. We had snake, caterpillar, and star trek among others.
We always use stubbie holders. Stubbies are single serve glass bottles, somewhat larger than your can-sized serve usually.
RM Williams Oilskin stubbie holder
Axeman's stubbie holder Note unlike the photo, the whole can fits snuggly inside the neoprene (think wetsuit rubber).
In the tropics they take keeping your beer cold seriously:
stubbie holders, sixpack holders, You can even stick whole wine bottles into some of these.
The hard plastic and polystyrene sort. Buy a boat to hold your beer?
By the way, if there's foam in that bra, you're probably getting less than you bargained on. Real women don't need or want padding. Although occasionally I'd bet they'd like hard shielding from octopi disguised as men.
Do you suppose you could secure windows by putting it inside a windows emulator?
For example: is a Mac running OSX and windows emulator (eg virtual PC) more secure than windows by itself
or how about linux running win for lin ?
Can you really stuff things up by running a mac X emulator or unix emulator on windows?
If you liked snowcrash and you like maths and computers you have to read Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson). It even has some dodgy perl script in it although corrections have been posted at Neal's web site.
Otherwise there a whole CD or more worth of free sci fi, so you can get a taste of what authors you like here
http://www.baen.com/library/
I really like Lois McMaster Bujold - her "Vorkorsican" novels start with "Cordelia's Honor" which is really two novels published together ("Shards of Honor" and "Barrayar"). Epic like Starwars with much more attention to detail (are you ever annoyed when a novel fails to complete an idea, and leaves some character hanging, or contradicts its universe rules in every new release?).
And I like David Weber - "On basilisk Station" and I just finished CS Friedman "The alien shore" which I liked. Most of these involve space travel. "The alien shore" involved spaceships and social structures and computer gadgets.
David Weber was very military, as is Lois McMaster Bujold, and I don't like strict hierachies but I like these books. I like Elizabeth Moon's "Hunting Party", about Heris Serrano, again in a very hierachical society. I guess I like the breaking the rules bit that most of these use to create the drama.
David Brin - "Earth" is an epic plot weaver, the ultimate internet, combined with some interesting physics, maths and enviromental outcomes. I needed 6 bookmarks to read that one.
I hated Robert Jordan Wheel of time series because he never finishes, there are dangling ideas everywhere and it looks like every book just spawns more threads without completion. Very frustrating. I also disliked CJ Cherryh "The Chronicles of Morgaine" because it was a little bit Arthurian legend (I am sick to death of Arthur), but if you want to know where the "Stargates" come from, then it is interesting.
"A deepness in the sky" by Vernor Vinge is another great epic. It is sort of a prequel to A fire upon the deep (1993), and covers 1000's of years of time, space travel, aliens and humans, traders and religious fundamentalist dictatorships. And interestingly explores the consequences of dependence on computer systems and human augmentation with biotech.
I also like Julian May, Golden Torc series; Anne Macaffery, Mercedes Lackey (although they're a little girly-princess). Terry Goodkind is good but a little too much s&m for me. And for good detective crime fighting, I like Dick Francis, so far as I know he wrote only one computer related story "Twice Shy" and it is quite historical now ie it used cassette tapes to load the programs.
For cultural completeness, if you haven't already read these, you must read Tolkein ("Hobbit", "Lord of the Rings" etc), and Douglas Adams "Hitchikers guide to the galaxy" series.
I guess I just have to add dive software to my list of things I won't work on. The other two that have been on my list for a long time have been air traffic control and missile guidance. At least I don't think the Arms guys are going to let me program their missiles to launch out of the earth's gravitational field and make for the sun (or some other star). At least the dive software can't kill so many people so quickly.
Maybe we could program the flight controls of big aircraft so that they are equipped with GPS maps of where they cannot fly or land, like central business districts.
Ie if the pilot tries to fly at a skyscraper the autopilot takes over and redirects the plane. Hmm. Be good if we could make it work properly.
At least the ink off my bubblejet thing does. Renders it useless for printing meeting minutes and agendas because we nearly always have at least a glass of water each and the printouts get used as coasters. That lovely wet washed out watercolour effect. So you wouldn't need a special pen to test, just a water sprayer or a wet finger.
I wonder if you could make fake aussie notes using transperancy film. Someone did get into trouble once for trying to pass off a friend's copy of a note out of pencil and paper as money. That was when we still had paper $2. I think the person who made the copy, even though it was only one sided, got into as much trouble as the idiot who tried to spend it. Not entirely rational law enforcement.
Ok my age is showing. I remember the pound sign representing English currency (money) being shift-3 on my old typewriter. It looked like a curly capital L with a short dash through the middle of it. When the american keyboards took over, the # replaced the curly L symbols keyed by shift-3. Otherwise I can think of no other reason why the # symbol would be called "pound". So I refuse to go there. The pound weight was always written lb (ell bee). And I have never known how you get lb out of "pound".
Hmm, correct use of jargon in right place?
Ok I guess I use the phrase re-image as an abbreviation of "restore from image" or maybe "re-apply original disk image", ie the standard corporate disk image that includes the o/s and standard work apps eg office etc. And yes anything that was on that guy's hard drive was lost, but he had warning to shift stuff he needed to network before we trashed and refreshed his hard drive. We tried "uninstalling" Gator, but it didn't fix the problem.
I hate "recovery" disks. Ie most of them start by formatting your hard drive. If all you need was to re-install the o/s, these recovery disks screw everything you've got on the hard drive. They certainly only recover in the sense of re-covering furniture. They don't recover in the sense of restoring. bad bad very bad.
Grammar wise - I'll be happy when everyone stops saying "try *and* " do something. Slashdot is no place for the linguistically sensitive to hang out. hat it all you want, words are going to be abused all over the place.
Why, because 47% of (australian?) people believe they should invest something even if they think the offer is too good to be true.
Too good to be true, full report page 54
scary stuff. Lots of nigerians making money out of it. Not to mention dinner party ladies across the USA.
I found adaware didn't work too well through the ISP/Employer's proxy. It told me I had ads but it didn't stop them.
/etc depending on your op sys. hosts.sam is a sample file and needs renaming to "hosts" (ie no .sam, to work.
the "hosts" file is in your windows dir or maybe in
127.0.0.1 is local host ie your computer
connect blah blah is what I don't want
# thingy is a comment
Ie send requests for what I don't want to my bit bucket.
Sample mod:
127.0.0.1 connect.247media.ads.link4ads.com # 247media.ads.link4ads.com
127.0.0.1 www.24pm-affiliation.com # 24pm-affiliation.com
127.0.0.1 im.800.com # 800.com
127.0.0.1 us.a1.yimg.com # a1.yimg.com
127.0.0.1 view.accendo.com # accendo.com
127.0.0.1 actionsplash.com # actionsplash.com
127.0.0.1 ads1.activeagent.at # activeagent.at
127.0.0.1 primetime.ad.asap-asp.net # ad.asap-asp.net
My friend bought a new computer and after about 3 months it was running very very slowly. I removed Gator and some other stuff and computer perked up instantly. Well after about 4 reboots.
A customer installed it on his computer and several programs including application I support ceased to function, and these were the apps he needed to do his job. The only way we could fix it was to re-image the hard drive.
My friend's staff installed some sort of calendar tool and gator came with that. Personally I can't think of any reason to install it. The last thing I'd want to do is hand my passwords to anything that sends my information back over the internet. How would I know that it wasn't sending my passwords too?
I find if you empty the tray at least daily then cat didn't get messy paws although she did still scatter gravel around the laundry tiles. I actually preferred a kitty litter sieve thing vaguely equivalent to a mucking out rake ie it picks up lumps but lets the litter/sawdust through). So empty lumps out daily and change litter weekly or more often if too soggy/wet.
The other thing I have heard frequently recommended is when you have more than one cat you need n + 1 cat trays where n is the number of cats that you have. For example 2 cats, need 3 trays. And you'd have to empty all of them daily.
and something else I didn't expect when visiting a friend was they used torn up paper or shredded paper for kitty litter. Cheap and can be recycled through the garden compost if you have a backyard or a worm farm. This stuff would require daily changing as it doesn't lend itself to sieving.
I just wish there was some way to stop cats from eating native wildlife and stick to the imported feral rats and mice. Some cats don't mind being confined to the indoors but my former housemate's cat used to get the most diabolical pungent diarrhoea when confined. And the native wildlife (possums) used to beat it to a pussy semi-conscious mess if we let it out. Eventually it went to live on the family farm.
Maybe a large carpet square or doormat might help with the paw cleaning?
Caffine dehydrates me because if I drink a cup of coffee I have to pee more and sooner than if I had drunk a cup of water.
It is very significant. And it is devastating when combined with excessive exercise on a hot day. Blech.
But I still like coffee.
I think you'd see the adverse effect in the office if you let everyone come in and get their morning cuppa and then locked them out of the loo.
The only time I read a # as "sharp" is when it is on a musical staff ie five parallel lines. Otherwise it is a hash as in #5 for number 5 or please press the hash key on the phone.
hash definitions
Of course when ever I see F# and Micro$oft together I read F#$%
The description reads like F# is OCaml on hash ie dumbed down.
Maybe my age is showing or my quantity of country rellies but my family used to butcher our own meat, Dad kept chooks and he eventually got to make jam, beer, pickled olives (not necessarily in that order) and I never ate better than when I went camping with him - no tins or dehydrated food involved. If you can grow tomatos then you must have a go at peaches or apricots or both. The home grown ones are from a completely different taste experience to the shop bought canned or otherwise. I like to make jam, pickled olives, cake, biscuits (amazing what you can get a tech to do for homemade choc chip cookies). I also like carpentry, gardening including growing things. I currently have wild silverbeet, parsley and lettuce in the garden. I've also made soap and candles. I've made rope. I also like sailing, you know, wind driven boats. But my really geeky friends like flying. Gliders or aeroplanes or helicopters. Most of them are not into any kind of food related expression other than consumption of pizza.
And I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a blunt stick than do any more.
But that was a long long time ago in a city far far away (which is still full of mainframes - they're popular with federal government tax collectors, social security/welfare, banks and insurance).
So if you really want to go there, get a job with a large federal government department that counts lots and lots of money in lots and lots of little pieces (transactions), like tax or pensions. They'll even train you.
All you need to know right now is don't ever be really good at what you can't stand doing. Or only be good at what you like doing and be really really good at that.
And I wish I'd had "the programmer's survival guide - Career strategies for computer professionals" by Janet Ruhl ISBN 013-730375-0 when I started. The coding might be different but the corporate structures, options and techniques for getting ahead haven't changed much. I was way too idealistic and optimistic about doing things right when I was 22. All I did was annoy my jaded bosses, and I didn't know when to run and when to make a stand. Hmm, come to think of it, I still annoy my bosses, but my customers love me.