I am posting this at a web cafe in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a town full of dusty computer stores packed with tottering piles of moth-eaten Fujitsu PCs and laptops with Japanese keyboards.
You can get a functional 400-MHz PIII with monitor, mouse, keboard, CDROM and 128 MB/10 GB for 100 USD. You may laugh, but I know it runs XP and Office 2003, because it runs this PC. (Actually as soon as I sat down I booted Damn Small Linux for the sake of security but that's another issue.).
Hmmm... I always wondered who *really* sends out so much spam -- most of which actively makes the recipient hate the supposed advertiser. In whose interest is it that an anonymous communication medium be slowly turned into one based on whitelists and officially-approved, logging referral sites?
Now there's a way for people to use the net with anonymity again. But it gets poisoned with child porn, which is now the root password to destroy your life, and which would make most people believe the government was justified in searching your computer without a warrant. Poisoned... in whose interest?
I think I'm the first person to make this point: English speakers do not routinely distinguish between "true" red, green and blue -- ie the color which contains only light from the red fraction of the spectrum, etc -- and *painter's* red, green and blue, which are more accurately orange, green-cyan and blue-cyan.
A painter needs paints which reflect a mix of colors because if you were to try to mix paints which were truly monochromatic it would result in black.
I don't know if other languages have this issue. But as I recall both Thais and Cambodians refer to cyan as "blue" when they speak English.
[CastrTroy] -- It would be like having laws against murduring someone while wearing pants. If you wore pants when you murdered them, you'd get an extra 5 years.
Of course, then you'd be sending a message that crooks shouldn't wear pants. Well, that's already been tried:
[misanthrope101]...the police departments had requested a modification--they wanted a way to turn off the camera while the flashing lights were still on. The first thing that popped into my mind was "why would they want to turn off the camera?" My entire political philosophy is built up from that question...
A similar experience for me was finding out about the "drop gun" -- the gun that police carry in the trunk to drop next to someone they shoot if he isn't carrying a weapon. (It's the reason why police are required to carry only their service firearm, but when cops get caught on that one they're usually let off.)
I am not an architect, but here are my guesses as to why the English prefer carpets to tiled floors in bathrooms:
1. As others have pointed out on this thread, British houses are poorly insulated. So there are strong draughts and the floor gets extremely cold. This will cause heavy condensation on tile floors and rot in adjacent wood (chairs etc).
2. English people do miss when they pee. This is why they buy add-on "collars" for the toilet pedestal which can be washed occasionally.
3. They do drip when they come out of the shower. They prefer not to slip on the resulting puddles.
4. Many people have discussed the mixing faucets thing -- it is probably in a faq somewhere. Basically the English devised their plumbing code back when mixing faucets didn't work very well and often contaminated the supply. They got used to non-mixing faucets and the demand for mixing faucets never formed.
As I understand it, Christians believe that dead people *stay* dead until Resurrection Day, when Christ raises the righteous from the tomb. They then live forever in their human form: no wings etc -- on Earth. (Cremation is not a problem.)
Saints are a special case.
People argue about whether New Testament Christianity really has a place for Hell at all.
I don't know where the "going to heaven" thing came from. My impression is that it came in from another religion, probably Judaism. It may just be some sort of secular heresy, Shirley-Maclaine-style.
EllisDees: There is already a powerful organization dedicated to protecting that particular civil liberty, so why should the ACLU waste resources doing the same?
The President has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution. So you think the ACLU can rest easy?
re fdisk/mbr: I think this might be a little exciting. You may want to Google for the new "volume bytes" field, which is needed for W2K and XP and which fdisk/mbr trashes.
I think one reason why Microsoft are prepared to lose money on the gaming boxes if necessary is to protect their core product -- Windows.
For one thing, games designed to run on the Xbox can easily be converted to the PC.
But more importantly, an internet-connected game machine is a *platform*, just like the browser was(is), and it has just the same potential to take over the role of an operating system.
Just keeping the game market fragmented is probably a big payoff from MS's viewpoint.
I think the original question from Ronin suggests he will not know what "partitioning" means. Indeed, the parent seems to be using it differently from my own understanding of the term.
Let me rephrase the parent like this: make sure that you have easy access to your domain's DNS configuration so that you can easily create new machine names in your domain. *Initially, all of these new names can point to a single machine.* When you write your app, you can create multiple databases -- for instance -- on multiple machine *names*, all of which resolve (at the beginning of your project) to a single machine. (You can do the same thing with image servers, mailservers, etc.)
Later, as you start to need higher performance, you can reinstall each of these databases on a separate machine, update the DNS, and *everything continues to work* with no code changes or funky failure modes at all.
Oh, make sure you can get a largish block of addresses from your ISP/hosting service before you start. You don't want passwords going between machines to have to cross network boundaries.
> the only evidence Paramount has is the IP address
Hmmm. You know, most domestic traffic these days is filesharing. So if the source is *inside* the ISP's network, the ISP pays zero peering fees. So if the ISP sets up *their own* leechable IPs, they save thousands, maybe millions of dollars...
It might look a little fishy in their logs if all the traffic comes from IPs which don't belong to subscribers, so they probably reuse subscriber IPs when possible.
I suggest a Slashdot poll: if you use filesharing, what fraction of your downloads comes from inside your ISP's network? Hmmm?
I wondered about Hitler's motives for the moves you mention too. Someone once explained them to me as follows:
1. Expecting England to fold: He offered very advantageous peace terms which Churchill rationally should have accepted. (I think this ties in with all that Hess mystery.) England was a big loser in WW2: it lost its empire and its investments in Poland, and it lost its world markets to the US. But Churchill's career was based on "Carthago delenda est", and he always did what the US wanted.
2. Declaring war on US: US was shipping large amounts of munitions to England in breach of the Geneva Convention on noncombatants. By declaring war, Hitler was free to attack US shipping without breaching the Geneva Convention.
3. Declaring war on Soviet Union: Hitler indeed had always planned to seize territory to the east. He had good information that the Soviet officer cadre, obliterated during the purges, was close to becoming effective again; he was also extremely worried about the new T34 tank, which the Soviets were not able to produce in large quantities until 1942. He felt that he needed to seize a window of opportunity while the US was precoccupied with the Japs.
>> "American nationalism has always been something which the rest of the world has largely considered ugly...but that has become more true than ever before in the last three years."
> Excellent observations, and they'd be relevant if Superman weren't created by a Canadian.
The French for "blah" is "bling". (There should be an acute accent on the "i" in bling, but this terminal is set up for Asian languages, not European.)
> Actually MUDs (the precursor to MMORPGs) came up with the concept of jail. Better yet, the more evil you were, the more the reward went up for your capture.
> Of course, people then went around being deliberately evil, ran up the bounty, then logged in their good character, and had the good one kill the bad one for the reward.
You have just summed up how the "War on Terror" works.
I think it should be illegal to bundle ads with content, but that isn't going to happen!
But how about this: you know how news sites let you select *news* you're interested in? How about an ad site that lets you select *ads* you're interested in? I don't know about you, but I *like* to read the PC Connection catalog. Suppose you could go to a site that had collected all the latest digital camera ads for you? Or all the latest anatomically-correct fullsize lovedolls? If this site were "not evil", it could encourage users to rate ads for annoyingness and you could set a threshold and...
Advertisers have been trying to *sneakily* figure out what we want to buy so that they can *force* ads on us. Why don't they just *ask*?
1. No matter how you feel, remain civil at all times when negotiating with the old company, and make an effort to leave on good terms. For instance, suppose your boss quits and the company wants to offer you his job?
2. For some reason, it is human nature for a boss to get angry if you refuse to do something outright, but if you *name a high price* tempers will remain cool. However, if they accept, *make sure you get everything signed by your boss *and* his boss*. If they say something like "we're grownups, you can trust us!" it's a *time to worry*.
3. Your new company cannot feel too harshly about you trying to support a previous employer. On the other hand, you should keep in touch with them about what you are offering the old company. For instance, the new company might say "heck, no more than five hours per week!". If you get that in writing and wave it at the old employer, your boss will see the problem.
4. This is not relevant to your current issue, but make sure you get personal contact info from everyone you liked at the old company. Then *keep in touch*.
5. If something goes *wrong* with something you worked on, don't feel guilty. You wouldn't have returned your pay for fixing it if you still worked there, would you?
Slashdot Mirror
I am posting this at a web cafe in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a town full of dusty computer stores packed with tottering piles of moth-eaten Fujitsu PCs and laptops with Japanese keyboards.
You can get a functional 400-MHz PIII with monitor, mouse, keboard, CDROM and 128 MB/10 GB for 100 USD. You may laugh, but I know it runs XP and Office 2003, because it runs this PC. (Actually as soon as I sat down I booted Damn Small Linux for the sake of security but that's another issue.).
A Cambodian can probably get all that for 50 USD.
Hmmm... I always wondered who *really* sends out so much spam -- most of which actively makes the recipient hate the supposed advertiser. In whose interest is it that an anonymous communication medium be slowly turned into one based on whitelists and officially-approved, logging referral sites?
Now there's a way for people to use the net with anonymity again. But it gets poisoned with child porn, which is now the root password to destroy your life, and which would make most people believe the government was justified in searching your computer without a warrant. Poisoned... in whose interest?
An even simpler solution would be for every bank user to hand out user names and passwords to each bank.
... well screw 'em.
Hmmm... it occurs to me then the bank would have to be paranoid about giving out *its* identifying information
I think I'm the first person to make this point: English speakers do not routinely distinguish between "true" red, green and blue -- ie the color which contains only light from the red fraction of the spectrum, etc -- and *painter's* red, green and blue, which are more accurately orange, green-cyan and blue-cyan.
A painter needs paints which reflect a mix of colors because if you were to try to mix paints which were truly monochromatic it would result in black.
I don't know if other languages have this issue. But as I recall both Thais and Cambodians refer to cyan as "blue" when they speak English.
[CastrTroy] -- It would be like having laws against murduring someone while wearing pants. If you wore pants when you murdered them, you'd get an extra 5 years.
6 04,1502159,00.html/
Of course, then you'd be sending a message that crooks shouldn't wear pants. Well, that's already been tried:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3
[misanthrope101]...the police departments had requested a modification--they wanted a way to turn off the camera while the flashing lights were still on. The first thing that popped into my mind was "why would they want to turn off the camera?" My entire political philosophy is built up from that question...
A similar experience for me was finding out about the "drop gun" -- the gun that police carry in the trunk to drop next to someone they shoot if he isn't carrying a weapon. (It's the reason why police are required to carry only their service firearm, but when cops get caught on that one they're usually let off.)
I am not an architect, but here are my guesses as to why the English prefer carpets to tiled floors in bathrooms:
1. As others have pointed out on this thread, British houses are poorly insulated. So there are strong draughts and the floor gets extremely cold. This will cause heavy condensation on tile floors and rot in adjacent wood (chairs etc).
2. English people do miss when they pee. This is why they buy add-on "collars" for the toilet pedestal which can be washed occasionally.
3. They do drip when they come out of the shower. They prefer not to slip on the resulting puddles.
4. Many people have discussed the mixing faucets thing -- it is probably in a faq somewhere. Basically the English devised their plumbing code back when mixing faucets didn't work very well and often contaminated the supply. They got used to non-mixing faucets and the demand for mixing faucets never formed.
As I understand it, Christians believe that dead people *stay* dead until Resurrection Day, when Christ raises the righteous from the tomb. They then live forever in their human form: no wings etc -- on Earth. (Cremation is not a problem.)
Saints are a special case.
People argue about whether New Testament Christianity really has a place for Hell at all.
I don't know where the "going to heaven" thing came from. My impression is that it came in from another religion, probably Judaism. It may just be some sort of secular heresy, Shirley-Maclaine-style.
EllisDees: There is already a powerful organization dedicated to protecting that particular civil liberty, so why should the ACLU waste resources doing the same?
The President has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution. So you think the ACLU can rest easy?
> Never attribute to cunning and deception what is easily explained by incompetence and laziness when it comes to the Government.
In whose interests is it that we should follow that rule?
re fdisk /mbr: I think this might be a little exciting. You may want to Google for the new "volume bytes" field, which is needed for W2K and XP and which fdisk /mbr trashes.
I think one reason why Microsoft are prepared to lose money on the gaming boxes if necessary is to protect their core product -- Windows.
For one thing, games designed to run on the Xbox can easily be converted to the PC.
But more importantly, an internet-connected game machine is a *platform*, just like the browser was(is), and it has just the same potential to take over the role of an operating system.
Just keeping the game market fragmented is probably a big payoff from MS's viewpoint.
The issue is that anybody who knows what a cookie is can see immediately that the site has put a cookie on their PC.
So the NSA didn't bother to follow the law even when it's *completely obvious* they're breaking it.
So why should we believe them about anything else? "Trust me, I won't come in your mouth."
I think the original question from Ronin suggests he will not know what "partitioning" means. Indeed, the parent seems to be using it differently from my own understanding of the term.
Let me rephrase the parent like this: make sure that you have easy access to your domain's DNS configuration so that you can easily create new machine names in your domain. *Initially, all of these new names can point to a single machine.* When you write your app, you can create multiple databases -- for instance -- on multiple machine *names*, all of which resolve (at the beginning of your project) to a single machine. (You can do the same thing with image servers, mailservers, etc.)
Later, as you start to need higher performance, you can reinstall each of these databases on a separate machine, update the DNS, and *everything continues to work* with no code changes or funky failure modes at all.
Oh, make sure you can get a largish block of addresses from your ISP/hosting service before you start. You don't want passwords going between machines to have to cross network boundaries.
> the only evidence Paramount has is the IP address
Hmmm. You know, most domestic traffic these days is filesharing. So if the source is *inside* the ISP's network, the ISP pays zero peering fees. So if the ISP sets up *their own* leechable IPs, they save thousands, maybe millions of dollars...
It might look a little fishy in their logs if all the traffic comes from IPs which don't belong to subscribers, so they probably reuse subscriber IPs when possible.
I suggest a Slashdot poll: if you use filesharing, what fraction of your downloads comes from inside your ISP's network? Hmmm?
> That info could also clear you of a crime.
In Soviet Russia!
I wondered about Hitler's motives for the moves you mention too. Someone once explained them to me as follows:
1. Expecting England to fold: He offered very advantageous peace terms which Churchill rationally should have accepted. (I think this ties in with all that Hess mystery.) England was a big loser in WW2: it lost its empire and its investments in Poland, and it lost its world markets to the US. But Churchill's career was based on "Carthago delenda est", and he always did what the US wanted.
2. Declaring war on US: US was shipping large amounts of munitions to England in breach of the Geneva Convention on noncombatants. By declaring war, Hitler was free to attack US shipping without breaching the Geneva Convention.
3. Declaring war on Soviet Union: Hitler indeed had always planned to seize territory to the east. He had good information that the Soviet officer cadre, obliterated during the purges, was close to becoming effective again; he was also extremely worried about the new T34 tank, which the Soviets were not able to produce in large quantities until 1942. He felt that he needed to seize a window of opportunity while the US was precoccupied with the Japs.
>> "American nationalism has always been something which the rest of the world has largely considered ugly...but that has become more true than ever before in the last three years."
> Excellent observations, and they'd be relevant if Superman weren't created by a Canadian.
Don't forget. Hitler was Austrian.
Mr Blair may have in mind the words of the famous old drinking song:
As soon as this pub closes,
As soon as this pub closes,
As soon as this pub closes...
The revolution starts.
> Well tickle me pink and call me Norman, but I'd rather have my car stolen than my brains blown out.
Who made you think those are your only options?
As any fule kno.
The French for "blah" is "bling". (There should be an acute accent on the "i" in bling, but this terminal is set up for Asian languages, not European.)
The German for "blah" is "Blazkowicz".
> Actually MUDs (the precursor to MMORPGs) came up with the concept of jail. Better yet, the more evil you were, the more the reward went up for your capture.
> Of course, people then went around being deliberately evil, ran up the bounty, then logged in their good character, and had the good one kill the bad one for the reward.
You have just summed up how the "War on Terror" works.
I think it should be illegal to bundle ads with content, but that isn't going to happen!
But how about this: you know how news sites let you select *news* you're interested in? How about an ad site that lets you select *ads* you're interested in? I don't know about you, but I *like* to read the PC Connection catalog. Suppose you could go to a site that had collected all the latest digital camera ads for you? Or all the latest anatomically-correct fullsize lovedolls? If this site were "not evil", it could encourage users to rate ads for annoyingness and you could set a threshold and...
Advertisers have been trying to *sneakily* figure out what we want to buy so that they can *force* ads on us. Why don't they just *ask*?
1. No matter how you feel, remain civil at all times when negotiating with the old company, and make an effort to leave on good terms. For instance, suppose your boss quits and the company wants to offer you his job?
2. For some reason, it is human nature for a boss to get angry if you refuse to do something outright, but if you *name a high price* tempers will remain cool. However, if they accept, *make sure you get everything signed by your boss *and* his boss*. If they say something like "we're grownups, you can trust us!" it's a *time to worry*.
3. Your new company cannot feel too harshly about you trying to support a previous employer. On the other hand, you should keep in touch with them about what you are offering the old company. For instance, the new company might say "heck, no more than five hours per week!". If you get that in writing and wave it at the old employer, your boss will see the problem.
4. This is not relevant to your current issue, but make sure you get personal contact info from everyone you liked at the old company. Then *keep in touch*.
5. If something goes *wrong* with something you worked on, don't feel guilty. You wouldn't have returned your pay for fixing it if you still worked there, would you?