Why should I use it in preference to RH or Debian or any of the countless other distros? Does it have some special features? Is it easy to install? Does it have some packages you can't find elsewhere? Have they made some amazing customizations to the kernel?
Well blow me down with a feather - I didn't know about that!
But as we all know it doesn't really switch off the iPod. It's still consuming battery power at a prodigious rate. I want a real off button so I can leave my iPod off for a month and expect it to work the moment I switch it on. Why can't it just dump out its state to disk and shut down for real?
Every other gadget I own has an off switch. But the iPod doesn't have one. The problem isn't firmware. It runs the battery flat because it has no off switch. This was the first thing I noticed when I took my iPod out of its box. How could Apple have missed this? Don't they have a QA department? Don't they teach electrical engineers about on/off switches these days? Maybe it would upset the sleek design of the device. But an off switch would really have made all the difference. Even 10 days is kinda annoying. For example if I go on vacation it'd be nice to have the iPod for the flights and not have to worry about it running down in the intervening week.
If you were a real geek you'd find Turing complete systems wherever you look. For example there's my old friend who showed that train sets were universal (Mathematical Recreations, in Scientific American (September, 1994)). You don't even need completeness. If you're smart you'll be able to build a tic-tac-toe machine out of matchboxes and marbles as described in one of Martin Gardner's books.
Get out, drink lots of beer, and build an AI out of the cans to prove Searle wrong.
He he! I talk some sophomore level physics and you say it's "scientific sounding crap". Clearly you don't know enough science to make a judgement of your own at such an elementary level. So who are you to say I'm a troll? I judge each proposition I read by its own merits, not by some theory I made up based on some bad reading of someone's journal.
...presented in textbooks. Like the definition of energy as "the ability to do work". It's just plain silly. I might as well argue that money is energy because I can use it to pay people to push against forces. It's not even approximately right. In order to convey what, exactly, this is supposed to mean, you need to do quite a bit of work. But having done that work you hardly need the original definition any more.
Or I could argue that energy is the ability to heat things. There is a whole network of types of energy that are interconvertible. To pick one, and not another, as the fundamental definition is quite misleading. You could perform complex computations using different types of energy without a single time involving 'work' (ie. the integral of force times distance).
Same goes for many other silly definitions in textbooks.
Re:damn you, decimal hating is my issue
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 1
Because I have the en locale installed in my brain. But that shouldn't affect how I actually process my thoughts, just how I communicate them.
Who cares about decimal?
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 4, Funny
Now 64th birthday, that might be interesting. But 50 has few interesting properties besides being half of 10^2.
Shit! The day I said this a friend of mine actually did this. He's now in hospital having plastic surgery. Shit shit shit! Be careful what you joke about!
Sure you can protect yourself from differential power analysis, or whatever it's called. You can design logic gates that draw the same power whatever. Or you can add extra logic that masks other activity. You can design algorithms that draw power in exactly the same power whatever the input, possibly performing unnecessary dummy steps. There are lots of defenses.
True. It's just that I've already paid for many of these games for PC and unfortunately Blizzard seem to be the only company decent enough to give away Mac and PC versions on the same disk.
I heard Tomb Raider works pretty well under OS 9 too. I actually installed OS 9 only recently, partly in order to try running the Mac versions of the Infocom games 'natively' (as well as to get one of my old printers working). It's a bit of a pain to have to reboot. Do VPC 5 and 6 run under 9?
I was hoping to play more games
on
Virtual PC 6 Review
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· Score: 3, Informative
Very oldies like Civilization run too fast but anything recent is far too slow. AOE2, for example, crawls on a 550MHz PowerBook and an oldie like the origonal Command and Conquer are too slow to be playable. You have to go back as far as Warfract (I!) or Settlers II to find a real time graphics game that plays fine. Microprose's Magic the Gathering works well however. Of course there's no problem running the original Infocom adventure games for that real retro experience. I found the original Tomb Raider almost tolerable. Surprisingly I found the old PC Wolfenstein a bit choppy on v5 but I'll try v6 some time soon. I tried the recent freebie GTA. It actually runs but too slow to be fun. On a 1GHz PowerBook it may actually be playable.
All in all it's a fine app. Integration of individual Windows apps into the dock is cool.
BTW I originally bought v5 with PC-DOC and installed my own Windows 98 (legally I might add).
I've also tried running every OS I could get my hands on. Pretty well everything from Plan 9 to Menuet runs. The only thing that failed was Darwin - that was on v5.
Do you realise the consequences of driving safely?
You contribute to overpopulation. Maybe you don't realise that the human death rate is extremely and unnaturally low. By driving carefully you effectively cheat death and upset the cycle of nature.
You underappreciate life if you don't take risks. Part of the sweetness of life derives from the knowledge that we could lose what we have at any moment. Did you know that driving safely makes the biggest dent in the risk-taking we take and hence is the biggest reducer of our appreciation of life?
By choosing to drive carefully you increase your chances of suffering from diseases like cancer. The choice is up to the individual but many would prefer not to suffer a painful lingering death.
I actually have all the 'feelies' in a PDF file because I bought the Masterpieces CD-ROM a few years ago. I may still buy an original Trinity from ebay along with a 5.25" drive for that real retro gaming feel!
I'm trying as hard as possible not to cheat. When I'm old and dying in hospital of cancer 40 years hence, only then will I look at the invisiclues.
Hey! No spoilers without warning please! But I recognise the magpie quotes which I'm sure are clues.
Damn you! I just figured out what the (aha, coconut!) milk, honey and lizard (aha, skink!) are. But not the garlic. But think I do know where they go! That pretty well tells you how far I am.
I'm currently playing Infocom's Trinity. It's still an awesome game even if it's 15 or so years old and has no graphics. To make my experience as true to life as possible I'm playing it under emulated DOS on my PowerBook:-)
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying Slackware is the distro for newbies?
Why should I use it in preference to RH or Debian or any of the countless other distros? Does it have some special features? Is it easy to install? Does it have some packages you can't find elsewhere? Have they made some amazing customizations to the kernel?
Ruins the integrity of albums to play them out of order. Or something like that.
But as we all know it doesn't really switch off the iPod. It's still consuming battery power at a prodigious rate. I want a real off button so I can leave my iPod off for a month and expect it to work the moment I switch it on. Why can't it just dump out its state to disk and shut down for real?
Every other gadget I own has an off switch. But the iPod doesn't have one. The problem isn't firmware. It runs the battery flat because it has no off switch. This was the first thing I noticed when I took my iPod out of its box. How could Apple have missed this? Don't they have a QA department? Don't they teach electrical engineers about on/off switches these days? Maybe it would upset the sleek design of the device. But an off switch would really have made all the difference. Even 10 days is kinda annoying. For example if I go on vacation it'd be nice to have the iPod for the flights and not have to worry about it running down in the intervening week.
Get out, drink lots of beer, and build an AI out of the cans to prove Searle wrong.
Neither do viruses.
He he! I talk some sophomore level physics and you say it's "scientific sounding crap". Clearly you don't know enough science to make a judgement of your own at such an elementary level. So who are you to say I'm a troll? I judge each proposition I read by its own merits, not by some theory I made up based on some bad reading of someone's journal.
Or I could argue that energy is the ability to heat things. There is a whole network of types of energy that are interconvertible. To pick one, and not another, as the fundamental definition is quite misleading. You could perform complex computations using different types of energy without a single time involving 'work' (ie. the integral of force times distance).
Same goes for many other silly definitions in textbooks.
Because I have the en locale installed in my brain. But that shouldn't affect how I actually process my thoughts, just how I communicate them.
Now 64th birthday, that might be interesting. But 50 has few interesting properties besides being half of 10^2.
Shit! The day I said this a friend of mine actually did this. He's now in hospital having plastic surgery. Shit shit shit! Be careful what you joke about!
...sell them AMD64s...
Sure you can protect yourself from differential power analysis, or whatever it's called. You can design logic gates that draw the same power whatever. Or you can add extra logic that masks other activity. You can design algorithms that draw power in exactly the same power whatever the input, possibly performing unnecessary dummy steps. There are lots of defenses.
True. It's just that I've already paid for many of these games for PC and unfortunately Blizzard seem to be the only company decent enough to give away Mac and PC versions on the same disk.
I heard Tomb Raider works pretty well under OS 9 too. I actually installed OS 9 only recently, partly in order to try running the Mac versions of the Infocom games 'natively' (as well as to get one of my old printers working). It's a bit of a pain to have to reboot. Do VPC 5 and 6 run under 9?
Warfract is a pretty good name for a game. Synthesizes Warcraft, frag and faction in one word. No doubt if I used it I'd be sued by Blizzard.
I know, and I do. I also run it on my Palm.
All in all it's a fine app. Integration of individual Windows apps into the dock is cool.
BTW I originally bought v5 with PC-DOC and installed my own Windows 98 (legally I might add).
I've also tried running every OS I could get my hands on. Pretty well everything from Plan 9 to Menuet runs. The only thing that failed was Darwin - that was on v5.
- You contribute to overpopulation. Maybe you don't realise that the human death rate is extremely and unnaturally low. By driving carefully you effectively cheat death and upset the cycle of nature.
- You underappreciate life if you don't take risks. Part of the sweetness of life derives from the knowledge that we could lose what we have at any moment. Did you know that driving safely makes the biggest dent in the risk-taking we take and hence is the biggest reducer of our appreciation of life?
- By choosing to drive carefully you increase your chances of suffering from diseases like cancer. The choice is up to the individual but many would prefer not to suffer a painful lingering death.
So drive dangerously folks!I'm trying as hard as possible not to cheat. When I'm old and dying in hospital of cancer 40 years hence, only then will I look at the invisiclues.
Damn you! I just figured out what the (aha, coconut!) milk, honey and lizard (aha, skink!) are. But not the garlic. But think I do know where they go! That pretty well tells you how far I am.
I think it was more than 2p.
I'm currently playing Infocom's Trinity. It's still an awesome game even if it's 15 or so years old and has no graphics. To make my experience as true to life as possible I'm playing it under emulated DOS on my PowerBook :-)
Interesting years in computing simply aren't interesting any more!