I think I'm on your side here -- groups of three are very unstable.
The Romans tried to have three-man leadership for a while with their triumvirates, and it worked so spectacularly well that the Republic collapsed and the Empire emerged, largely because they kept ending up with too many power plays and too much backstabbing (sometimes literally). Significantly, I'm not aware of any other country or major organization (companies, NGOs, etc) that have made a serious go at tri-partite leadership ever since.
I'm not aware of any psychological studies on this either way, but I think that what the Romans saw with political leadership would just be a particular example of a more general human social dynamic. The "three's a crowd" expression is usually thought of in terms of intimate relationships, but anyone that has lived with a pair of roommates, like for example in college dorms, has probably either experienced or at least witnessed the same thing, with old friends ready to kill each other over petty things, etc.
So. Anecdotes presented, assertions made. We're right. The grandparent poster is wrong. QED.:-)
I like how the current marketing banner rotates between screenshots of Nasa's Mars Rover site, the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, and eBay [for people who don't like iTunes or Pepsi?]. Nice demographic spread there -- screenshots that'll appeal to (for example) me the science fan, my brothers the football fans, and my dad the online auction junkie. Somehow, I think that spread will cover a lot -- not all, but a lot -- of Safari's audience. Clever...
(I've converted multiple spaces to periods to keep the formatting sort of stable -- the actual output doesn't have all the dots....)
IMO, the output from system_profiler is a little prettier, but this was definitely faster. I wouldn't be surprised if system_profiler is a wrapper around this.
Does anyone know a way to find out your iBook serial number via ssh connection?:-)
Try this:
/usr/sbin/system_profiler --help
A while back I did a run of that -- I forget what flags I used, something like system_profiler -detailLevel 1 -xml -- and saved it to a.plist file in my home directory for later reference (generating the report takes a while; grepping the report output is very fast). One of the keys I've got in my report file is serial_number, and the value given does match what I get if I go to the Apple Menu and click About This Mac....
So, yeah, you can get this info via ssh using system_profiler. It's basically a CLI version of the GUI Apple System Profiler, so you can get acceess to any system data that the graphical ASP program can show.
On a sort of related note, I've noticed recently while observing the Big Dig that heavy machinery, which intuitively should be built as big as the task demands, in practice tends to generally scale up to a size that will fit either inside a standard 40 foot shipping container or, less frequently, the back of a flatbed 18 wheeler trailer.
There's a definite range where equipment will approach this size -- bulldozers & similar tracked digging equipment, high-capacity ventilation fans, and so on -- but for the most part it won't be bigger than will fit on a truck or railcar. If something does need to be bigger, it will either consist of major components that are up to the shipping container's size, &/or it will consist of collapsible sections. Either way, this allows the equipment to be shipped to the construction site, assembled for use, then taken apart & put back when no longer needed.
I suppose this is the modern version of the chariot / railroad constraint. America's Interstates have replaced its riverways & railways as the major means of moving material around the country, so it only makes sense that mass produced products would be built in such a way that they are easy to transport on the back of a truck or, under less common circumstances, on a train or freighter ship. Hence, things tend to be long & skinny, like big shoeboxes.
It isn't necessary to be original to be correct. Nevermind the article: the broad variety of digital music devices being made and sold at prices from $5 to $500 is itself evidence that there is a market for all kinds of players. The question isn't whether or not the iPod Mini is part of that market -- obviously, it is -- but whether this device fills a useful niche within that market.
***********
Those that have drunk deeply from the Apple Kool-Aid well, with its RDF laced waters, argue that the iPod Mini is a compelling alternative to cheaper flash players.
Those that have actually looked at the specs and have done the price-per-capabiility math agree that the iPod Mini may be a better deal than the low end devices, but the high end iPod is a far better deal.
The Apple Kool-Aid Kids don't like that other group very much. They say that the iPod Mini is meant to compete only with Flash players, just like Steve told us.
The skeptics then ask why the iPod Mini has a hard drive in it, and the Kool-Aid Kids spiral into an impenetrable field of distorted reality from which no cogent explanations can escape.:-)
***********
The thing is, you have to look at the full spectrum of available devices, balancing the functionality you want against the price you want to pay (or could be convinced to pay for more features).
Apple is being a bit two-faced here to suggest that the iPod Mini is "only" fifty bucks more than the competition they want you to consider, but then discourage you from comparing it to their other product line, which offers far more for, again, "only" another fifty bucks. From their point of view, this isn't that big a deal, since if you switch up to the iPod Mini or iPod Maxi, you're still buying in to their product line.
That's okay for them, but it's more than a little silly for their fanboys to be trying to defend this kind of marketing sleight of hand, because when you look at the full spectrum of available devices, the iPod Mini is in a weird position:it is indeed a modest steep up capability wise from the low end devices, but it's a pretty steep price jump for what you get, when compared to the much larger capability jump you find when you move up to the full iPod.
I kind of think that bumping the low end iPod to 15gb was a tactical mistake here. If you're comparing the $250/4gb iPod Mini to a $300/10gb iPod, the Mini version doesn't look as bad. But that's not what we're looking at: you have to compare the $250/4gb Mini to a $300/15gb maxi, and at that point the entry model iPod looks a lot better.
***********
The thing is, I like Apple. I'm typing this on my iBook, I love using OSX, and if I had the spare cash laying around, I would have bought an iPod a long time ago. So I'm not skeptical because I dislike the company or its products or anything like that. I want them to do well. But the iPod Mini just doesn't make any sense to me, and the Received Marketing Wisdom -- that the device is supposed to be an alternative to flash players -- just doesn't make sense to me.
I'm trying to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, and I'm willing to accept that heavy sales of this player may prove me wrong, but looking at the full spectrum of available devices and their prices & capabilities, I'm just not convinced that the iPod Mini currently manages to hit the sweet spot. For what you get, for what they're charging, I just can't see who would want this thing.
For well under $100, a lot of people would just get a semi-traditional Discman that can play MP3 discs. With one of those, and half a dozen or so CDs, you've got the same functionality as the iPod Mini for perhaps a third of the price, and in a format that has been familiar to people for 10 or 20 years now. That is, to me, the real competition here. If the iPod Mini had been $150 or $200, it would have wiped out the competition that it claims to be running against, and would have been a real threat to the low end co
I wish I could automate the checking for updates form Microsoft.
Err, you can. I believe the feature is built-in to WinXP, and may have been available as a standard part of Win2k. However, it's also available as a separate update for any version of Windows going back at least as far as Win98.
With the Windows auto-update option installed, the system will periodically check for available updates and, depending on your settings, automatically inform you of them, download first & inform you that updates are waiting to be installed, or automatically download and install. I like the second option, if only to grab a copy of everything and show me before anything is committed, but it's up to you.
I think the auto-update runs weekly, but it should just be controlled by the system scheduler. Depending on your version of Windows, you should be able to go in and set this to run at whatever schedule you please, and if that's not good enough for you, you can probably script it with DOS, VB, Perl (ActiveState), Python (ActiveState), Bash (Cygwin), etc. Windows still lags badly behind the scripting abilities of Linux or Macintosh, but the facilities are there if you want to take advantage of them.
All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy.ll work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no plkay makes Spit a dull boy.All lwork and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy.All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boyAll work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play akes psirit a dull boy.
> YELL AT REBELS
You begin to get a sore throat.
The torpedo slams into the side of your battle station.
Your battle station collapses in a cloud of dust, and a stray flying brick hits you squarely on the back of the head. You try to think of some suitable last words, but what with the confusion of the moment and the spinning of your head, you are unable to compose anything pithy and expire in silence.
> YELL "MY DEATH STAR! NOOOO!"
You keep out of this, you're dead. An ambulance arrives.
> YELL AT THAT DAMNED BASTARD VADER
You keep out of this, you're dead and should be concentrating on developing a good firm rigor mortis. You are put in the ambulance, which drives away.
> KILL EMPEROR
For a dead person you are talking too much. As the ambulance reaches the mortuary a fleet of Vogon Constructor ships unexpectedly arrives and demolishes the Galaxy to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.
We are about to give you your score. Put on your peril-sensitive sunglasses now. (Hit
RETURN or ENTER when ready.) >
Your score is 10 of a possible 400, in 15 turns.
Would you like to start over, restore a saved position, or end this session of the game?
Matt Groening did a Fresh Air interview in which he said that the resemblance between Homer & Krusty isn't a coincidence. Originally, the joke was that Bart had absolutely no respect for his own father, but he completely idolized this television clown that in many ways is exactly like Homer -- including the uncanny resemblance between the two.
The interview was really interesting stuff. If you have a RealAudio player available, you can listen to the show from the above link.
Last time my wife & I were at IKEA, we got some cheap home office organizing stuff like what you seem to be looking for here. One promising item they had was a cable organizing tray that can be attached to the back of your desk. They also have these donut-shaped reels that can be used for spooling up excess cable. But the main one, which I can't seem to find on their website, was a simple slitted black tube that you could use to snake all your cabling together.
Note that I don't have anything to push by suggesting IKEA here -- there may be stores in your area that have the same sort of items. The nice thing about IKEA though is that the prices aren't too bad (I think $10 for the organizing tray sounds pretty reasonable, and the reels are two for $1).
As for the cable snake, the one I bought could easily be substituted by going to a swimming pool supply store & picking up a three or six foot length of cheap pool filter hose, and just cutting a slice along the length of it so you can slip your cables into the tube. At a guess, this tube is probably also about a buck at most pool stores, and it should work just as well as a "custom computer cable tube".
One of Penn & Teller's books had a demonstration like this. They wanted to debunk the conspiracy theorists that don't believe that a shooter from the schoolbook depository building was responsible for killing President Kennedy, on grounds that his head snapped backwards -- towards the building -- and his face was more damaged than the back of his head.
According to Newton's laws, this makes sense though: if every action causes an opposite reaction, then it would make sense for the head to bounce back in the direction from which it was hit.
To demonstrate, Penn & Teller set up a high speed photo rig, and, using various pieces of fruit as stand-ins for human skulls (watermelons, canteloupes, etc), they took a bunch of pictures of the fruit being shot with a rifle like the one Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have used. Just as Newton would have predicted, the fruits all bounced *towards* the direction of the shot, and the exit holes were all bigger than the entrance holes. Very interesting stuff...
The guy who started MySQLFront abandoned it, then turned around and let someone else pick up development. If it's still his project -- a big if? -- then maybe he'd be willing to let MySQL AB take it over.
MySQLFront really is the best graphical MySQL interface available today. The only drawback -- and I admit that it's a big one -- is that it's currently only for Windows. If the application were given to MySQL AB, maybe they could flesh it out, port it to other platforms, and not have to start from scratch with their own new GUI client...
I was going to suggest MySQLFront, but you beat me to it.:-)
When I first started using MySQL a few years ago, I wanted to find a nice GUI front end for it, partly because relational databases are designed to hold tables of data, and I just think it's nicer to have that data presented as something looking like a spreadsheet application rather than ascii in a console. Sometimes, GUIs are just nicer tools, and for me this is one of those cases.
More importantly, I wanted to set up the company database so that other staff could work with the system in a way roughly resembling Microsoft Access, which was being used by some people in other contexts -- but I didn't want it to acctually be Access (if only to make it clear that this wasn't just something running on their desktop), so that ruled out ODBC.
Of all the many MySQL GUIs I found -- this would have been 2000 or so -- none of them was half as well done as MySQLFront. It was small, fast, attractive, and functional. The others either had clumsy interfaces, were ugly Tk monstrosities (if ugly & broken is the price to be paid for portability...portability isn't so important), or just couldn't do certain things with the database. MySQLFront was a dream compared to the others.
Unfortunately, for some reason, the guy developing it, Ansgar Becker, abandoned it abruptly in the middle of 2002, and it got very hard to find copies of the application after that. The last version released was 2.4 or something, but copies of 2.5 turned up, and that was it.
And that makes the current status of MySQLFront very confusing -- all of a sudden, the site is offering downloads of version 3.0. Where did this come from? Is Ansgar involved again? Did someone get their hands on the source code? I don't get it....
Im November 2003 fragte mich N. Hoyer, ob er den Namen "MySQL- Front" ubernehmen durfte. Nach ein wenig Hin und Her schlug ich dann ein. Ab diesem Zeitpunkt steht MySQL-Front in einer vollstandig neu entwickelten Version 3.0 zur Verfugung. Die Websitewww.mysqlfront.de ist weiterhin die Anlaufstelle fur Download, Forum usw.
According to Babelfish,
In November 2003 N. Hoyer asked me whether he might take over the name "MySQL front". After a little back and forth I hit then. Starting from this time MySQL front is available in a completely again developed version 3.0. The Website www.mysqlfront.de is further the approach place for Download, forum etc..
So I guess it's a new application under the same name?
In any case, it's alive again, and that's great. It's a shame that it's Windows only, but this really is by far the best graphical MySQL frontend that I know of, and I've tried many. If the new developer[s] wants to, or the source gets opened, maybe we'll see versions of it for Linux and Macintosh some day. But just having it revived on Windows is great news...
With that said, I'd rather see them use Parrot, as it's a nicer approach in the long term.
Dan Sugalski gave a Parrot talk for the Boston Perl Mongers last week, in which he revealed to us that among the primary target languages for Parrot are Perl, Python, Ruby, and ZCode -- as in old Infocom games. Apparently, he's hopeful that Parrot could come to be the software engine for future game platforms like the Game Boy 2005 (or whatever relevant version at that point), and he figures that being able to run games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be a good springboard to future gaming devices. And as a bonus, you could also script your games with Perl or Python or any other language ported to Parrot. I thought it was a silly idea at first, but it actually made a lot of sense, and as you suggest, it seems like it would be a good fit for what Nokia is trying to do here.
It could have come from the meteor, but I think that volcanic activity might be more likely. I'm not sure though, I'm straining to remember my college geology courses, but the important thing to put this in context is Bowen's Reaction Series (explanations from U. Florida, U. Oregon, Skidmore, Florida State U., Google). Basically, this model describes (quoting from the U. Oregon page):
Bowen determined that specific minerals form at specific temperatures as a magma cools. At the higher temperatures associated with
mafic and intermediate magmas, the general progression can be separated into two branches. The continuous branch describes the evolution of the plagioclase feldspars as they evolve from being calcium-rich to more sodium rich. The discontinuous branch describes the formation of the mafic minerals olivine, pyroxene, amphibole, and biotite mica. The weird thing that Bowen found concerned the discontinuous branch. At a certain temperature a magma might produce olivine, but if that same magma was allowed to cool further, the olivine would "react" with the residual magma, and change to the next mineral on the series (in this case pyroxene). Continue cooling and the pyroxene would convert to amphibole, and then to biotite. Mighty strange stuff, but if you consider that most silicate minerals are made from slightly different proportions of the same 8 elements, all we're really doing here is adjusting the internal crystalline lattice to achieve stability at different temperatures. Really no big deal.
At lower temperatures, the branches merge and we obtain the minerals common to the felsic rocks -- orthoclase feldspar, muscovite mica, and quartz (the banana slug of the mineral world).
So basically, the assumption begins by pointing out that the Earth's crust mainly has eight elements present. By mass, they are oxygen (46.6%), silicon (27.7%), aluminum (8.1%), iron (5.0%), calcium (3.6%), sodium (2.8%), potassium (2.6%), and magnesium (2.1%). I suspect, but am not positive, that the proportions of elements in this cocktail will be similar for most of the solar system's rocky planets, so Mars should more or less obey the same rules.
Those of you that remember your high school chemistry will notice that, of these top eight elements, all but oxygen are metals or metalloids, so they all will want to bond with a non-metal -- and hey presto, there's plenty of oxygen to go around. As a result, nearly all of the minerals in the Earth's crust are composed of oxygen bonded to one or more metals. But which? This is where Bowen's reaction series comes in.
Given a roughly uniform cocktail of the top eight elements present in a magma flow, you have a range of different minerals that can form as the magma cools & solidifies. If the magma was very hot, it will solidify into olivine, which has a complex crystalline structure. If the magma was cooler, it would solidify into some simpler mineral, down to quartz for the lowest temperature magmas.
Moreover, Bowen's reaction series also sheds light on how materials will break down over the course of millenia of weathering -- basically, they'll tend to keep breaking down into simpler & simpler minerals, until eventually you just have quartz. A
Yes, the Bush administration is *gasp* doing it's job by enforcing the law of the land.
Just like they "did their job" with the ABM treaty? Or the Kyoto accords? This regime seems to be very selective about what laws they will or will not go along with, so the fact that they happen not to be scuttling DMCA just as they've scuttled other laws suggests that they're going more than "just obeying the law". Don't be so naive.
Not only that, but you only had to get 7 out of 10 questions correct. While I realize that getting, say, 35 out of 50 or 70 out of 100 is "the same thing", it still seemed less substantial to me to have such a brief exam.
Plus, the test was programmed to halt once you had 7 correct answers -- they weren't interested in whether you could ace the test, they just wanted you to demonstrate the minimum required proficiency and then get out of the exam room so the next applicant could begin. Again, I suppose that's meeting the letter & maybe even the spirit of the regulations, but it feels a lot less demanding that the descriptions I hear of license tests in Europe or Japan. *shrug*
Of course, the real irony is that an easy to obtain American driver's license is valid in most or all of Europe, just as a valid European license is, from what I understand, valid over here in the USA. I don't feel so uncomfortable about this on our end -- great, the well trained and carefully tested European drivers can share the great American highway, no big deal -- but I feel bad for the Europeans that have to put up with crazy-ass American tourists bombing around on their roadways...
Reminds me of a comment made to my wife (English) while she was a student in the USA. She reversed into a parking bay at the mall, and was congratulated. "You must be British" they said "an American wouldn't be able to park in reverse".
I learned to drive in Massachusetts, where the rule is that you can either get your driver's license at 17, or you can take a driver's education course and get your license at 16.5, and you get a discount on your mandatory automotive insurance. Therefore, almost everyone signs up for driver's ed at 16 so they can get their license six months early, and the insurance discount ends up more than paying for the course tuition.
One of the requirements when I took driver's ed was learning how to park both nose-in and nose-out, as well as how to parallel park. This involved both class demonstrations and actual practice in the parking lot of the local mall, where the driving instructor would have us park over & over, sometimes driving in, sometimes backing in, sometimes into spots on the right, others to spots on the left.
Whether or not you had to use any of this on the actual driving test for the RMV depended on where exactly you were being tested. People that took their tests in more urban areas would be required to parallel park at a minimum, and might or might not be required to back into to parking lot spaces. People that took their tests in the suburbs were less likely to be asked to do this. (I knew one guy that set up his license test out on Martha's Vineyard just to get around the parking part of the test, even though driving down to Cape Cod and taking the ferry over to Martha's Vineyard takes two hours from the town I grew up in.)
My license test didn't require me to parallel or reverse park, but I was glad I learned how to do it when I ended up going to college in Alabama and I was about the only one of my friends that could reliably park my car at the downtown meters in Mobile -- and moreover, I could get the car into any space that was at least a foot or two longer than the car itself.
Once you get used to it, parking in reverse is actually easier than going forwards, as has been noted elsewhere in this thread. The difference, it seems to me, is that the car is more maneuverable when being steered from the back end -- just as it is for a boat or an airplane. Think about it: power boats can pull really tight corners just by flipping the outboard motor to one side -- especially at low speed -- because you're effectively pushing the vehicle in the direction you want it to go, rather than pulling it.
When backing into a space, all you have to do is get the rear wheels about where you want them lined up, and then steer around to make the front pivot into a straight line from that point to the back of the space. When parallel parking, the same thing applies: push the back wheels back towards the end of the space, and then flip the steering wheel to tuck the front end of the car in. Easy, once you get used to it.
Slashdot Mirror
As they say, "two's company, three's a crowd."
I think I'm on your side here -- groups of three are very unstable.
The Romans tried to have three-man leadership for a while with their triumvirates, and it worked so spectacularly well that the Republic collapsed and the Empire emerged, largely because they kept ending up with too many power plays and too much backstabbing (sometimes literally). Significantly, I'm not aware of any other country or major organization (companies, NGOs, etc) that have made a serious go at tri-partite leadership ever since.
I'm not aware of any psychological studies on this either way, but I think that what the Romans saw with political leadership would just be a particular example of a more general human social dynamic. The "three's a crowd" expression is usually thought of in terms of intimate relationships, but anyone that has lived with a pair of roommates, like for example in college dorms, has probably either experienced or at least witnessed the same thing, with old friends ready to kill each other over petty things, etc.
So. Anecdotes presented, assertions made. We're right. The grandparent poster is wrong. QED. :-)
I like how the current marketing banner rotates between screenshots of Nasa's Mars Rover site, the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, and eBay [for people who don't like iTunes or Pepsi?]. Nice demographic spread there -- screenshots that'll appeal to (for example) me the science fan, my brothers the football fans, and my dad the online auction junkie. Somehow, I think that spread will cover a lot -- not all, but a lot -- of Safari's audience. Clever...
Yeah, that seems to be faster than system_profiler:
(I've converted multiple spaces to periods to keep the formatting sort of stable -- the actual output doesn't have all the dots....)
IMO, the output from system_profiler is a little prettier, but this was definitely faster. I wouldn't be surprised if system_profiler is a wrapper around this.
Try this:
A while back I did a run of that -- I forget what flags I used, something like system_profiler -detailLevel 1 -xml -- and saved it to a .plist file in my home directory for later reference (generating the report takes a while; grepping the report output is very fast). One of the keys I've got in my report file is serial_number, and the value given does match what I get if I go to the Apple Menu and click About This Mac....
So, yeah, you can get this info via ssh using system_profiler. It's basically a CLI version of the GUI Apple System Profiler, so you can get acceess to any system data that the graphical ASP program can show.
On a sort of related note, I've noticed recently while observing the Big Dig that heavy machinery, which intuitively should be built as big as the task demands, in practice tends to generally scale up to a size that will fit either inside a standard 40 foot shipping container or, less frequently, the back of a flatbed 18 wheeler trailer.
There's a definite range where equipment will approach this size -- bulldozers & similar tracked digging equipment, high-capacity ventilation fans, and so on -- but for the most part it won't be bigger than will fit on a truck or railcar. If something does need to be bigger, it will either consist of major components that are up to the shipping container's size, &/or it will consist of collapsible sections. Either way, this allows the equipment to be shipped to the construction site, assembled for use, then taken apart & put back when no longer needed.
I suppose this is the modern version of the chariot / railroad constraint. America's Interstates have replaced its riverways & railways as the major means of moving material around the country, so it only makes sense that mass produced products would be built in such a way that they are easy to transport on the back of a truck or, under less common circumstances, on a train or freighter ship. Hence, things tend to be long & skinny, like big shoeboxes.
***********
Those that have drunk deeply from the Apple Kool-Aid well, with its RDF laced waters, argue that the iPod Mini is a compelling alternative to cheaper flash players.
Those that have actually looked at the specs and have done the price-per-capabiility math agree that the iPod Mini may be a better deal than the low end devices, but the high end iPod is a far better deal.
The Apple Kool-Aid Kids don't like that other group very much. They say that the iPod Mini is meant to compete only with Flash players, just like Steve told us.
The skeptics then ask why the iPod Mini has a hard drive in it, and the Kool-Aid Kids spiral into an impenetrable field of distorted reality from which no cogent explanations can escape. :-)
***********
The thing is, you have to look at the full spectrum of available devices, balancing the functionality you want against the price you want to pay (or could be convinced to pay for more features).
Apple is being a bit two-faced here to suggest that the iPod Mini is "only" fifty bucks more than the competition they want you to consider, but then discourage you from comparing it to their other product line, which offers far more for, again, "only" another fifty bucks. From their point of view, this isn't that big a deal, since if you switch up to the iPod Mini or iPod Maxi, you're still buying in to their product line.
That's okay for them, but it's more than a little silly for their fanboys to be trying to defend this kind of marketing sleight of hand, because when you look at the full spectrum of available devices, the iPod Mini is in a weird position:it is indeed a modest steep up capability wise from the low end devices, but it's a pretty steep price jump for what you get, when compared to the much larger capability jump you find when you move up to the full iPod.
I kind of think that bumping the low end iPod to 15gb was a tactical mistake here. If you're comparing the $250/4gb iPod Mini to a $300/10gb iPod, the Mini version doesn't look as bad. But that's not what we're looking at: you have to compare the $250/4gb Mini to a $300/15gb maxi, and at that point the entry model iPod looks a lot better.
***********
The thing is, I like Apple. I'm typing this on my iBook, I love using OSX, and if I had the spare cash laying around, I would have bought an iPod a long time ago. So I'm not skeptical because I dislike the company or its products or anything like that. I want them to do well. But the iPod Mini just doesn't make any sense to me, and the Received Marketing Wisdom -- that the device is supposed to be an alternative to flash players -- just doesn't make sense to me.
I'm trying to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, and I'm willing to accept that heavy sales of this player may prove me wrong, but looking at the full spectrum of available devices and their prices & capabilities, I'm just not convinced that the iPod Mini currently manages to hit the sweet spot. For what you get, for what they're charging, I just can't see who would want this thing.
For well under $100, a lot of people would just get a semi-traditional Discman that can play MP3 discs. With one of those, and half a dozen or so CDs, you've got the same functionality as the iPod Mini for perhaps a third of the price, and in a format that has been familiar to people for 10 or 20 years now. That is, to me, the real competition here. If the iPod Mini had been $150 or $200, it would have wiped out the competition that it claims to be running against, and would have been a real threat to the low end co
The rabbit didn't get very far from the avalanche.
Poor thing.
(Actually, if anyone here can translate, that rabbit site is beyond bizarre...
Err, you can. I believe the feature is built-in to WinXP, and may have been available as a standard part of Win2k. However, it's also available as a separate update for any version of Windows going back at least as far as Win98.
With the Windows auto-update option installed, the system will periodically check for available updates and, depending on your settings, automatically inform you of them, download first & inform you that updates are waiting to be installed, or automatically download and install. I like the second option, if only to grab a copy of everything and show me before anything is committed, but it's up to you.
I think the auto-update runs weekly, but it should just be controlled by the system scheduler. Depending on your version of Windows, you should be able to go in and set this to run at whatever schedule you please, and if that's not good enough for you, you can probably script it with DOS, VB, Perl (ActiveState), Python (ActiveState), Bash (Cygwin), etc. Windows still lags badly behind the scripting abilities of Linux or Macintosh, but the facilities are there if you want to take advantage of them.
All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy.ll work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no plkay makes Spit a dull boy.All lwork and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy.All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boyAll work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play makes Spirit a dull boy. All work and no play akes psirit a dull boy.
Funny, I thought a diagnostic was a person that doubts the existence of two gods...
And Howe!
The colorful device on the far side is clearly a fake version of a well-established product. Are they skirting patent law here?
;-)
> YELL AT REBELS
You begin to get a sore throat.
The torpedo slams into the side of your battle station.
Your battle station collapses in a cloud of dust, and a stray flying brick hits you squarely on the back of the head. You try to think of some suitable last words, but what with the confusion of the moment and the spinning of your head, you are unable to compose anything pithy and expire in silence.
> YELL "MY DEATH STAR! NOOOO!"
You keep out of this, you're dead. An ambulance arrives.
> YELL AT THAT DAMNED BASTARD VADER
You keep out of this, you're dead and should be concentrating on developing a good firm rigor mortis. You are put in the ambulance, which drives away.
> KILL EMPEROR
For a dead person you are talking too much. As the ambulance reaches the mortuary a fleet of Vogon Constructor ships unexpectedly arrives and demolishes the Galaxy to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.
We are about to give you your score. Put on your peril-sensitive sunglasses now. (Hit RETURN or ENTER when ready.) >
Your score is 10 of a possible 400, in 15 turns.
Would you like to start over, restore a saved position, or end this session of the game?
(Type RESTART, RESTORE, or QUIT): >
Responding to your .sig...
Matt Groening did a Fresh Air interview in which he said that the resemblance between Homer & Krusty isn't a coincidence. Originally, the joke was that Bart had absolutely no respect for his own father, but he completely idolized this television clown that in many ways is exactly like Homer -- including the uncanny resemblance between the two.
The interview was really interesting stuff. If you have a RealAudio player available, you can listen to the show from the above link.
Last time my wife & I were at IKEA, we got some cheap home office organizing stuff like what you seem to be looking for here. One promising item they had was a cable organizing tray that can be attached to the back of your desk. They also have these donut-shaped reels that can be used for spooling up excess cable. But the main one, which I can't seem to find on their website, was a simple slitted black tube that you could use to snake all your cabling together.
Note that I don't have anything to push by suggesting IKEA here -- there may be stores in your area that have the same sort of items. The nice thing about IKEA though is that the prices aren't too bad (I think $10 for the organizing tray sounds pretty reasonable, and the reels are two for $1).
As for the cable snake, the one I bought could easily be substituted by going to a swimming pool supply store & picking up a three or six foot length of cheap pool filter hose, and just cutting a slice along the length of it so you can slip your cables into the tube. At a guess, this tube is probably also about a buck at most pool stores, and it should work just as well as a "custom computer cable tube".
To be "pluralistic", maybe they used Unicode.
To be "modern", maybe they used XML.
That'll account for more than 88 bytes... :-)
One of Penn & Teller's books had a demonstration like this. They wanted to debunk the conspiracy theorists that don't believe that a shooter from the schoolbook depository building was responsible for killing President Kennedy, on grounds that his head snapped backwards -- towards the building -- and his face was more damaged than the back of his head.
According to Newton's laws, this makes sense though: if every action causes an opposite reaction, then it would make sense for the head to bounce back in the direction from which it was hit.
To demonstrate, Penn & Teller set up a high speed photo rig, and, using various pieces of fruit as stand-ins for human skulls (watermelons, canteloupes, etc), they took a bunch of pictures of the fruit being shot with a rifle like the one Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have used. Just as Newton would have predicted, the fruits all bounced *towards* the direction of the shot, and the exit holes were all bigger than the entrance holes. Very interesting stuff...
The guy who started MySQLFront abandoned it, then turned around and let someone else pick up development. If it's still his project -- a big if? -- then maybe he'd be willing to let MySQL AB take it over.
MySQLFront really is the best graphical MySQL interface available today. The only drawback -- and I admit that it's a big one -- is that it's currently only for Windows. If the application were given to MySQL AB, maybe they could flesh it out, port it to other platforms, and not have to start from scratch with their own new GUI client...
<aol />
I was going to suggest MySQLFront, but you beat me to it. :-)
When I first started using MySQL a few years ago, I wanted to find a nice GUI front end for it, partly because relational databases are designed to hold tables of data, and I just think it's nicer to have that data presented as something looking like a spreadsheet application rather than ascii in a console. Sometimes, GUIs are just nicer tools, and for me this is one of those cases.
More importantly, I wanted to set up the company database so that other staff could work with the system in a way roughly resembling Microsoft Access, which was being used by some people in other contexts -- but I didn't want it to acctually be Access (if only to make it clear that this wasn't just something running on their desktop), so that ruled out ODBC.
Of all the many MySQL GUIs I found -- this would have been 2000 or so -- none of them was half as well done as MySQLFront. It was small, fast, attractive, and functional. The others either had clumsy interfaces, were ugly Tk monstrosities (if ugly & broken is the price to be paid for portability ...portability isn't so important), or just couldn't do certain things with the database. MySQLFront was a dream compared to the others.
Unfortunately, for some reason, the guy developing it, Ansgar Becker, abandoned it abruptly in the middle of 2002, and it got very hard to find copies of the application after that. The last version released was 2.4 or something, but copies of 2.5 turned up, and that was it.
And that makes the current status of MySQLFront very confusing -- all of a sudden, the site is offering downloads of version 3.0. Where did this come from? Is Ansgar involved again? Did someone get their hands on the source code? I don't get it....
Actually, answering my own question, it looks like his website explains all -- in German:
According to Babelfish,
So I guess it's a new application under the same name?
In any case, it's alive again, and that's great. It's a shame that it's Windows only, but this really is by far the best graphical MySQL frontend that I know of, and I've tried many. If the new developer[s] wants to, or the source gets opened, maybe we'll see versions of it for Linux and Macintosh some day. But just having it revived on Windows is great news...
Dan Sugalski gave a Parrot talk for the Boston Perl Mongers last week, in which he revealed to us that among the primary target languages for Parrot are Perl, Python, Ruby, and ZCode -- as in old Infocom games. Apparently, he's hopeful that Parrot could come to be the software engine for future game platforms like the Game Boy 2005 (or whatever relevant version at that point), and he figures that being able to run games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be a good springboard to future gaming devices. And as a bonus, you could also script your games with Perl or Python or any other language ported to Parrot. I thought it was a silly idea at first, but it actually made a lot of sense, and as you suggest, it seems like it would be a good fit for what Nokia is trying to do here.
Hey, at least they're working on something...
It could have come from the meteor, but I think that volcanic activity might be more likely. I'm not sure though, I'm straining to remember my college geology courses, but the important thing to put this in context is Bowen's Reaction Series (explanations from U. Florida, U. Oregon, Skidmore, Florida State U., Google). Basically, this model describes (quoting from the U. Oregon page):
So basically, the assumption begins by pointing out that the Earth's crust mainly has eight elements present. By mass, they are oxygen (46.6%), silicon (27.7%), aluminum (8.1%), iron (5.0%), calcium (3.6%), sodium (2.8%), potassium (2.6%), and magnesium (2.1%). I suspect, but am not positive, that the proportions of elements in this cocktail will be similar for most of the solar system's rocky planets, so Mars should more or less obey the same rules.
Those of you that remember your high school chemistry will notice that, of these top eight elements, all but oxygen are metals or metalloids, so they all will want to bond with a non-metal -- and hey presto, there's plenty of oxygen to go around. As a result, nearly all of the minerals in the Earth's crust are composed of oxygen bonded to one or more metals. But which? This is where Bowen's reaction series comes in.
Given a roughly uniform cocktail of the top eight elements present in a magma flow, you have a range of different minerals that can form as the magma cools & solidifies. If the magma was very hot, it will solidify into olivine, which has a complex crystalline structure. If the magma was cooler, it would solidify into some simpler mineral, down to quartz for the lowest temperature magmas.
Moreover, Bowen's reaction series also sheds light on how materials will break down over the course of millenia of weathering -- basically, they'll tend to keep breaking down into simpler & simpler minerals, until eventually you just have quartz. A
Just like they "did their job" with the ABM treaty? Or the Kyoto accords? This regime seems to be very selective about what laws they will or will not go along with, so the fact that they happen not to be scuttling DMCA just as they've scuttled other laws suggests that they're going more than "just obeying the law". Don't be so naive.
:-)
Not only that, but you only had to get 7 out of 10 questions correct. While I realize that getting, say, 35 out of 50 or 70 out of 100 is "the same thing", it still seemed less substantial to me to have such a brief exam.
Plus, the test was programmed to halt once you had 7 correct answers -- they weren't interested in whether you could ace the test, they just wanted you to demonstrate the minimum required proficiency and then get out of the exam room so the next applicant could begin. Again, I suppose that's meeting the letter & maybe even the spirit of the regulations, but it feels a lot less demanding that the descriptions I hear of license tests in Europe or Japan. *shrug*
Of course, the real irony is that an easy to obtain American driver's license is valid in most or all of Europe, just as a valid European license is, from what I understand, valid over here in the USA. I don't feel so uncomfortable about this on our end -- great, the well trained and carefully tested European drivers can share the great American highway, no big deal -- but I feel bad for the Europeans that have to put up with crazy-ass American tourists bombing around on their roadways...
I learned to drive in Massachusetts, where the rule is that you can either get your driver's license at 17, or you can take a driver's education course and get your license at 16.5, and you get a discount on your mandatory automotive insurance. Therefore, almost everyone signs up for driver's ed at 16 so they can get their license six months early, and the insurance discount ends up more than paying for the course tuition.
One of the requirements when I took driver's ed was learning how to park both nose-in and nose-out, as well as how to parallel park. This involved both class demonstrations and actual practice in the parking lot of the local mall, where the driving instructor would have us park over & over, sometimes driving in, sometimes backing in, sometimes into spots on the right, others to spots on the left.
Whether or not you had to use any of this on the actual driving test for the RMV depended on where exactly you were being tested. People that took their tests in more urban areas would be required to parallel park at a minimum, and might or might not be required to back into to parking lot spaces. People that took their tests in the suburbs were less likely to be asked to do this. (I knew one guy that set up his license test out on Martha's Vineyard just to get around the parking part of the test, even though driving down to Cape Cod and taking the ferry over to Martha's Vineyard takes two hours from the town I grew up in.)
My license test didn't require me to parallel or reverse park, but I was glad I learned how to do it when I ended up going to college in Alabama and I was about the only one of my friends that could reliably park my car at the downtown meters in Mobile -- and moreover, I could get the car into any space that was at least a foot or two longer than the car itself.
Once you get used to it, parking in reverse is actually easier than going forwards, as has been noted elsewhere in this thread. The difference, it seems to me, is that the car is more maneuverable when being steered from the back end -- just as it is for a boat or an airplane. Think about it: power boats can pull really tight corners just by flipping the outboard motor to one side -- especially at low speed -- because you're effectively pushing the vehicle in the direction you want it to go, rather than pulling it.
When backing into a space, all you have to do is get the rear wheels about where you want them lined up, and then steer around to make the front pivot into a straight line from that point to the back of the space. When parallel parking, the same thing applies: push the back wheels back towards the end of the space, and then flip the steering wheel to tuck the front end of the car in. Easy, once you get used to it.