I went to Best Buy once, looking for a static strap, ad one of the guys behind the counter went into the back room to talk to a technician, and came out with the reccomendation that I buy a "Wireless static strap" because "That's what everyone here uses."
Sounded a little too good to be true, so I looked it up, and found, unsurprisingly, that while people actually DO make wireless static straps, they are, in fact, completely useless. (they rely on the Corona effect, which would maybe be useful if you got, I don't know, struck by lightning, but not for static). Something nice to know before you get them to install your RAM.
Yes, wouldn't it be nice if no one was allowed to give work away for free, and everyone was forced to pay for bloated expensive products, just so the companies that make those products wouldn't go out of business?
It's the way of the world. People are going to have to adapt, and move on to the next level. The megasoftware companies are not in the best position right now, and that's not going to change until they shift from providing programs that claim to do everything for everyone, and turn to providing services for their customers based on their individual needs.
Think about it. You pay for the software, then you pay people to customize it, then you pay people to install it, then you pay people to maintain it.
Sure its great for all the people in the middle, but, reality check, if companies don't have to pay for all those people to still get a quality product, they're going to jump on the opportunity to get rid of them, and no artificially created scarcity is going to stop them.
It's the exact sort of whiny thing that someone who has no grasp of any sort of big picture would say. Want the government to make the internet a safer place. Christ.
Like, "I want better internet service, so I think the government should pay for fiber backbones to all areas" or "The government has never searched my house without a warrant so, I don't see why that is an important freedom." I want the Government to censor and restrict my access to a datasource because I can't be trusted not to hurt myself like a moron.
I'm not per se, in favor of "Poll Taxes", which is to say setting a condition on peoples ability to vote, but I can't help, at times like this, to wish there was some way to either make these bastards learn or, at least, prohibit them from influencing policy. Because, you're right, it's not lack of ability, it's just small-minded, lazy, arrogance.
"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"
Seems pretty scathing to me.
Of course, anyone who is that dedicated to OpenBSD is bound to have some issues. It must be hard to be devoted to the unloved stepchild of the Open source movement, and have to watch as everyone worships Linux.
I found it amusing how they touted the BSD foundations of OpenBSD as being superiour to Linux's from scratch origins, and whined, in almost the same breath, about the lawsuit that nearly shut them down. Need to make the connection there boys; where would linux be if SCO had managed to come up with solid evidence?
That was the first thing that leapt to my mind. What a crap comparison. Now they'll be trumpeting it all over, talking up their own safety based on an apples to oranges comparison.
I have to say I'm surpsied some of the infection numbers were as low as they were. Considering how quickly a windows box gets owned through a typical broadband connection, and how sloppy most people are with security, I would have thought the numbers would have been higher. As an example, I have a friend who's intelligent, works in IT, etc, who had an IPTables firewall issue, and instead of rewriting a rule, just plugged his unpatched windows box directly into the modem to download a 30 meg chunk of software. It was "more convenient". And this is someone who DOES know better.
I imagine they only got stats from customers that they service. I wonder how many customers they have, and how many of those customers attract DoS attacks on a regular basis?
I don't know how many people use this function, but it's pretty common these days on MS boxes. If you click the scroll-wheel button, it changes your cursor to a little up/down (and right left on some applications) cursor link that lets you scroll by moving your mouse up and down. Think I saw it first on office, years ago.
The thing is, I HATE it. There is a fine line between scrolling a little faster and SCREAMING down to the bottom of the page. It's seriously annoying.
So, my question is, how does this touchpad deal with the speed question? I'd like to have more control than is currently possible with the wheel, but I don't want to have it spastically jumping around the screen when I brush it.
It WAS a tradition, but with the 22nd Amendment it became immutable law. Two terms is the limit.
Amendment XXII
Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
The whole point of taxes is to get stuff done that needs to be done, but that no one is willing to pay for.
There is a lot of good R & D that doesn't have immediate $$$ returns that would never get done if the government didn't step in. I think Open Source grants are an excellent idea, and I'd rather see my tax money going toward that than pig farmer subsidies or some other such crap.
Re:Another decade, another hype...
on
Another Dot-com Boom?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Too true.
Generally, it's one boom per industry, then people settle down and start working at it. Just because stocks are finally rebounding doesn't mean the gold rush is back.
Meh. XP is old as hell now. New motherboard, new graphics card, new sound card...All these things will require downloaded drivers. And some hardware doesn't bundle its drivers with windows for whatever stupid reason.
I also hate how windows update forces reboots after every download it considers major. Really slows things down, and doesn't continue automatically after the reboot with the other stuff you need to download.
Then there is all the stupid free crap that ought to be included, but isn't. Winzip, Acrobat, putty, winamp, AIM, Cygwin & Firefox (heh heh).
Then comes all the paid stuff. And all of that has to be updated. Total pain in the ass.
Just an amusing aside; I live in a town in Georgia, south of Atlanta, and one of the best, and highest priced lawyers in town is a black lady with a mohawk she regularly dyes funky colors.
The problem is not with the medium...It's not like a mediocre digital film is any more or less mediocre than a traditional 2d animated film. The problem is with management that is more concerned with the bottom line, who wouldn't know quality if it was sitting on their faces. They lack originality and vision.
You hear the phrase "sleeper success" applied to things the phb's didn't think were going to be successful, and "flop" applied to everything which they were sure was going to be successful was hated by the public. They need to stop trying to find the magic formula.
You see this all the time with TV; they kill perfectly good shows by trying to dissect and reproduce their success without letting them evolve...Or, my personal favorite, the friday night kiss of death. Just because something rocks the world on Tuesday (random example) doesn't mean it's going to dominate on Friday, and a lot of shows have flopped on their second seasons trying to prove it.
Used to be people would jab a little hole in the ground with a stick, put a seed in it, and move on.
Then came plows, for cutting a giant trench to put seeds in, and then convering them over.
Now the new thing is No till farming. Basically a high tech stick poking a hole in the ground, and moving on. Cuts down on erosion, and reduces the need for fertilizer.
It's not a fact, but it seems like the debate is being driven by the views of the lunatic fringe.
Used to be, when I was younger, I hated Dole, and Spectre, and Chafee, and Snow, but these days they're some of my favorite Senators. Not so much because I like their politics, but because they're being rational, and voting their beliefs and not trying to mow down all opposition.
I don't care if people disagree with me. I like people disagreeing.
But I assure you that the conservative Christians here in Georgia don't agree, and that rational discussions regarding such topics as evolution are impossible to have.
The thing that bothers me is that they have no problem putting forward a completely unscientific hypothesis with zero support, and telling you it is fundamentally the same as a theory that has stood up to 100+ years of rigorous scientific thought.
The thing that always amuses me is how many STARS are hard to percieve, and how likely it is, therefore, that we can spot comperably non-existent emf from a civilization similar to ours.
Beyond that, we also have to think about the window of time in which such frequencies would be propagating. Some alien civilization could pick up our signals in a thousand years, send a message back, then watch us nuke ourselves out of existence 400 years later, still 600 years from having gotten their message.
That would probably change if they'd stop trying to kill all science not based in the bible.
Seems far-fetched to say, "The conservative head of the FCC is trying to kill SETI and Radio Astronomy by allowing airline cellphone use" but no less so than "The conservative heads of the Executive and Legislative branches of government are trying to kill modern biology by having creationism taught in schools" and these days that doesn't seem implausible.
Politicians need to get over the idea that the scientific realities of the universe are whimsical matters of opinion.
This kind of stuff can be made unbreakable by adding some of the punctuation and or picking quotes that have words in them that can be converted to numbers/logical operators.
For example: To be or not to be
tbontb ---Not really secure.
(2b)||(!2b)H3.1 ---Pretty dang secure. Added the act and scene, because I'm a dork.
When they refuse to hear it, what they're really doing is saying: "Biznotch you KNOW you ain't got no case, so don't be frontin here or we'll be throwing down a majority opinion that yo punk ass needs some compton air conditionin. Fo shizzle."
The existence of such a replicator technology would have such far reaching implications that it might bankrupt the drug companies.
What would happen then? The smart people who make the drugs would do government subsidised work for universities and government health organizations, and the whole country could reap the rewards for practically nothing.
gosh, you're right, it sounds awful.
The research will get done, though maybe cures for major diseases might get a bit more priority than viagra, for example.
Yea, I left out the part where I have to print them out and get them signed. =P
Even beyond that, everything gets carboned to half the department, the person who gets the access, the person who requests the access, and that persons boss. It's certainly falsifiable, but I would say it's less so than a hardcopy paper trail or a phone message, and face to face just isn't practical.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to Best Buy once, looking for a static strap, ad one of the guys behind the counter went into the back room to talk to a technician, and came out with the reccomendation that I buy a "Wireless static strap" because "That's what everyone here uses."
Sounded a little too good to be true, so I looked it up, and found, unsurprisingly, that while people actually DO make wireless static straps, they are, in fact, completely useless. (they rely on the Corona effect, which would maybe be useful if you got, I don't know, struck by lightning, but not for static). Something nice to know before you get them to install your RAM.
Yes, wouldn't it be nice if no one was allowed to give work away for free, and everyone was forced to pay for bloated expensive products, just so the companies that make those products wouldn't go out of business?
It's the way of the world. People are going to have to adapt, and move on to the next level. The megasoftware companies are not in the best position right now, and that's not going to change until they shift from providing programs that claim to do everything for everyone, and turn to providing services for their customers based on their individual needs.
Think about it. You pay for the software, then you pay people to customize it, then you pay people to install it, then you pay people to maintain it.
Sure its great for all the people in the middle, but, reality check, if companies don't have to pay for all those people to still get a quality product, they're going to jump on the opportunity to get rid of them, and no artificially created scarcity is going to stop them.
Welcome to capitalism. It's a bitch.
It's the exact sort of whiny thing that someone who has no grasp of any sort of big picture would say. Want the government to make the internet a safer place. Christ.
Like, "I want better internet service, so I think the government should pay for fiber backbones to all areas" or "The government has never searched my house without a warrant so, I don't see why that is an important freedom." I want the Government to censor and restrict my access to a datasource because I can't be trusted not to hurt myself like a moron.
I'm not per se, in favor of "Poll Taxes", which is to say setting a condition on peoples ability to vote, but I can't help, at times like this, to wish there was some way to either make these bastards learn or, at least, prohibit them from influencing policy. Because, you're right, it's not lack of ability, it's just small-minded, lazy, arrogance.
That's SIX-THOUSAND AND NINE HERETIC!
But seriously.
My first thought, upon reading the article head was, "Yea, and most of them are stupid too."
"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"
Seems pretty scathing to me.
Of course, anyone who is that dedicated to OpenBSD is bound to have some issues. It must be hard to be devoted to the unloved stepchild of the Open source movement, and have to watch as everyone worships Linux.
I found it amusing how they touted the BSD foundations of OpenBSD as being superiour to Linux's from scratch origins, and whined, in almost the same breath, about the lawsuit that nearly shut them down. Need to make the connection there boys; where would linux be if SCO had managed to come up with solid evidence?
That was the first thing that leapt to my mind. What a crap comparison. Now they'll be trumpeting it all over, talking up their own safety based on an apples to oranges comparison.
I have to say I'm surpsied some of the infection numbers were as low as they were. Considering how quickly a windows box gets owned through a typical broadband connection, and how sloppy most people are with security, I would have thought the numbers would have been higher. As an example, I have a friend who's intelligent, works in IT, etc, who had an IPTables firewall issue, and instead of rewriting a rule, just plugged his unpatched windows box directly into the modem to download a 30 meg chunk of software. It was "more convenient". And this is someone who DOES know better.
I imagine they only got stats from customers that they service. I wonder how many customers they have, and how many of those customers attract DoS attacks on a regular basis?
I don't know how many people use this function, but it's pretty common these days on MS boxes. If you click the scroll-wheel button, it changes your cursor to a little up/down (and right left on some applications) cursor link that lets you scroll by moving your mouse up and down. Think I saw it first on office, years ago.
The thing is, I HATE it. There is a fine line between scrolling a little faster and SCREAMING down to the bottom of the page. It's seriously annoying.
So, my question is, how does this touchpad deal with the speed question? I'd like to have more control than is currently possible with the wheel, but I don't want to have it spastically jumping around the screen when I brush it.
I haven't heard of it either, but it's cool as hell! I'll have to check out the other ones...
It WAS a tradition, but with the 22nd Amendment it became immutable law. Two terms is the limit.
Amendment XXII
Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
I find it amusing that you justify sloppy gambling on the stock market with Buddist philosophy.
The whole point of taxes is to get stuff done that needs to be done, but that no one is willing to pay for.
There is a lot of good R & D that doesn't have immediate $$$ returns that would never get done if the government didn't step in. I think Open Source grants are an excellent idea, and I'd rather see my tax money going toward that than pig farmer subsidies or some other such crap.
Too true.
Generally, it's one boom per industry, then people settle down and start working at it. Just because stocks are finally rebounding doesn't mean the gold rush is back.
Meh. XP is old as hell now. New motherboard, new graphics card, new sound card...All these things will require downloaded drivers. And some hardware doesn't bundle its drivers with windows for whatever stupid reason.
I also hate how windows update forces reboots after every download it considers major. Really slows things down, and doesn't continue automatically after the reboot with the other stuff you need to download.
Then there is all the stupid free crap that ought to be included, but isn't. Winzip, Acrobat, putty, winamp, AIM, Cygwin & Firefox (heh heh).
Then comes all the paid stuff. And all of that has to be updated. Total pain in the ass.
Just an amusing aside; I live in a town in Georgia, south of Atlanta, and one of the best, and highest priced lawyers in town is a black lady with a mohawk she regularly dyes funky colors.
Life can be pretty wierd sometimes.
The problem is not with the medium...It's not like a mediocre digital film is any more or less mediocre than a traditional 2d animated film. The problem is with management that is more concerned with the bottom line, who wouldn't know quality if it was sitting on their faces. They lack originality and vision.
You hear the phrase "sleeper success" applied to things the phb's didn't think were going to be successful, and "flop" applied to everything which they were sure was going to be successful was hated by the public. They need to stop trying to find the magic formula.
You see this all the time with TV; they kill perfectly good shows by trying to dissect and reproduce their success without letting them evolve...Or, my personal favorite, the friday night kiss of death. Just because something rocks the world on Tuesday (random example) doesn't mean it's going to dominate on Friday, and a lot of shows have flopped on their second seasons trying to prove it.
Used to be people would jab a little hole in the ground with a stick, put a seed in it, and move on.
Then came plows, for cutting a giant trench to put seeds in, and then convering them over.
Now the new thing is No till farming. Basically a high tech stick poking a hole in the ground, and moving on. Cuts down on erosion, and reduces the need for fertilizer.
Yay progress.
It's not a fact, but it seems like the debate is being driven by the views of the lunatic fringe.
Used to be, when I was younger, I hated Dole, and Spectre, and Chafee, and Snow, but these days they're some of my favorite Senators. Not so much because I like their politics, but because they're being rational, and voting their beliefs and not trying to mow down all opposition.
I have a big Antec case with 6 fans, and a 525 watt power supply (with attendant giant fan) and none of them can be heard over the cpu fan.
The only issue I have is that all the holes in the case for the fans means there is less metal to insulate me from the CPU fan noise.
I don't care if people disagree with me. I like people disagreeing.
But I assure you that the conservative Christians here in Georgia don't agree, and that rational discussions regarding such topics as evolution are impossible to have.
The thing that bothers me is that they have no problem putting forward a completely unscientific hypothesis with zero support, and telling you it is fundamentally the same as a theory that has stood up to 100+ years of rigorous scientific thought.
The thing that always amuses me is how many STARS are hard to percieve, and how likely it is, therefore, that we can spot comperably non-existent emf from a civilization similar to ours.
Beyond that, we also have to think about the window of time in which such frequencies would be propagating. Some alien civilization could pick up our signals in a thousand years, send a message back, then watch us nuke ourselves out of existence 400 years later, still 600 years from having gotten their message.
That would probably change if they'd stop trying to kill all science not based in the bible.
Seems far-fetched to say, "The conservative head of the FCC is trying to kill SETI and Radio Astronomy by allowing airline cellphone use" but no less so than "The conservative heads of the Executive and Legislative branches of government are trying to kill modern biology by having creationism taught in schools" and these days that doesn't seem implausible.
Politicians need to get over the idea that the scientific realities of the universe are whimsical matters of opinion.
This kind of stuff can be made unbreakable by adding some of the punctuation and or picking quotes that have words in them that can be converted to numbers/logical operators.
For example:
To be or not to be
tbontb ---Not really secure.
(2b)||(!2b)H3.1 ---Pretty dang secure. Added the act and scene, because I'm a dork.
For the above, I guess you could do:
TaL=S,ATG=G
Ahhh, you're thinking of it the wrong way.
When they refuse to hear it, what they're really doing is saying: "Biznotch you KNOW you ain't got no case, so don't be frontin here or we'll be throwing down a majority opinion that yo punk ass needs some compton air conditionin. Fo shizzle."
The existence of such a replicator technology would have such far reaching implications that it might bankrupt the drug companies.
What would happen then? The smart people who make the drugs would do government subsidised work for universities and government health organizations, and the whole country could reap the rewards for practically nothing.
gosh, you're right, it sounds awful.
The research will get done, though maybe cures for major diseases might get a bit more priority than viagra, for example.
Yea, I left out the part where I have to print them out and get them signed. =P
Even beyond that, everything gets carboned to half the department, the person who gets the access, the person who requests the access, and that persons boss. It's certainly falsifiable, but I would say it's less so than a hardcopy paper trail or a phone message, and face to face just isn't practical.