I grew up a few hours away from Yellowstone (Bozeman, MT). I've since moved, but on my last visit which would have been somtime around the sumer 1998, it was obvious that activity was picking up. Several geysers with historically low activity have been going off more frequently.
Not your macbook. That's a huge label to get robbed in a lot of countries.
This has likely been brought up (I'm at work and don't have time to read on the comments) but one of my old bosses wanted to be able to administer his windows machine at home and also be able to do all his regular stuff on it as well (pop email, etc) so he wrote a program for his wirelessly enabled handheld that did basically the same thing as what VNC will do.
My suggestion is just set up a linux box runing `vncserver` (Mac probably has a vncserver, too) and get a good handheld device: Something with a color screen with enough processing power to play MP3s/OGG/FLAC and a vnc client (familiar linux can run on a number of iPaq models. I'm sure there's better solutions, however). You'll need a friend that can run your linux box for you to help keep it going and I'm sure you'll have to play with resoltuions on the server to be legible on a handheld.
If the handheld screen is just too small, you could do the same thing on something old and crappy enough that you wouldn't mind parting from should it come to it.
CleanSoftware.org makes finding PDFCreator and many other (very) useful apps very easy to find. Many of you may recall the site was featured on an 'ask slashdot' about 2-3yrs back.
My minor in college was English and my focus was on 20th/21st century poetry. That said, I guarantee you that (real) poets never steal. Its an homage but only so long as the phrase in question is used in such a way as to make it "their own" (which is to say, in the simplest of terms, it holds a different meaning under the new context).
If the phrase is altered slightly, it's tpyically considered an allusion to another work.
The phrase can be both an homage and an allusuion when (typical) left unaltered and the phrase in question first has it's own unique meaning in the new context and gains further meaning from the original work.
This is all to say that a 'poet' that sues another poet for copyright infringmnet is no poet at all.
You might see if the folks in Detroit can help out. I imagine it'll take a little detective work to hunt down an email address, but having been through all of your same woes, I'd imagine they could lend some very helpful insight.
I can't speak for anyone else, but because of all this RIAA nonsense, I buy from the Artist's website, anymore. It's not a sure bet that I'll bypass the RIAA that way, but it's been my experiance that, for the most part, you will and also that more of the money you just spent goes directly to the artist.
The reasoin why I've downloaded (dramatically) fewer files is that I can get what I want the frist time via BitTorrent. I'm no longer sifting through hunderds of copies of an artist in an attempt to weed out poor encodes, damaged files, files made from radio recordings, etc. BitTorrent sites tell me the audio sorce, quality, format and at the same time give me the whole album so I can decide if I want to buy it (and if it innovative and good, I do buy. The Books is a good point-in-case for me), or delete the files off my drive. If a torrent is no good, it tends to die. If it is good, it tends to get re-seeded. I guess this is all just a long winded way of saying that there is a lot less guess-n-checking going on and as a result, fewer files being downlaoded.
Perhaps a bit off topic and very likely to get burried as this was posted a while ago......here's a link to How well Linux is working in detroit schools. The artical is a bit old, but it couldn't hurt to dial up another school official and find out a few things from basic, like how well the project is still going, to technial, like how exactly they've got their system set up. Can studetns still access their files regarless of what machine they sit in front of?
Super Mario: When I'm stressed out, I like simple, and in terms of games it's hard to get more simple than 8 buttons and side scrolling. When I want a bit of a challenge, I go Mario 1 as the game doesn't respond how I expect and that ups the difficulty for me. the US version of Mario 2 didn't make it because that game is much more of a novelty for me. It's fun, enough, just too different from Mario 1, the REAL Mario 2, and mario 3.
If I'm looking for a little less challenge, I go Mario 3 and I'll warp to the levels I have the most fun with like the pipe and giant worlds. Plus, you've got to love that little boot you can hop around in.
Worms World Party: This is just a silly game. It's hard to play it and not laugh at least once. I was introduced to one of the older versions of this game by one of my college buddies. We'd turn on all weapons, up the move time to the maximum and ninja rope or super sheep for hours.
C&C Red Alert II: This is the second RTS I ever played and talk about a great one. The acting might be cheesy as hell, but troops respond just the way I want and how I tell them. Setting up a solid defense that takes care of itself is no problem at all which I like because it allows me to focus on my offense and saves me a lot of jumping around on the map.
Star Trek Armada: This is one of those games that never took off because there wasn't any driving force behind it to get it to take off; no new movie, TV Show, etc. The story line was compelling and shifted you through all the 4 avail. races. I first started playing this game as the demo and immediately wanted more. Sadly, my current computer has hardware compatibility issues with the game so I haven't played it in years, but there were a few interface options in this game that are missing in other RTS games. Unlike many RTSs, Strategy matters a lot more than just having a huge attack force. To destroy an enemy base, you really do have to find the weakest point, create a weak point with a first wave attack, or attack from multiple directions and have a diversity of ships or having a huge force won't make much of a difference.
Battle For Middle Earth: One of my co-workers selected this as a game to play at our monthly LAN parties as no one had played it before and we'd all be on the same learning curve. We all loved the game immediately. It's very well conceived and the limitations imposed force you to think strategy, not overwhelming force. The biggest problem we've had with the game is that when we play against each other, we stalemate, and when we play against the computer, we get bored.
Runners up:
Othello (reversi)
World of Warcraft
Max Payne (1 & 2. Haven't played Mafia)
Othello: You either squish your opponent, or get squished. There's no middle ground and as a result, the game has lost its novelty.
World of Warcraft: Really, it's just too new to me and I don't yet know if it really falls under 'comfort' although I do have a lot of fun with this game and it's nice to have something that my girlfriend will play as well.
Max Payne: Simply put, I overplayed the fist one and by that I mean that not enough bathroom, food and sleep breaks occurred. That, combined with the fact that playing on a laptop on my lap, did weird things with my body temprature and I ended up feeling a little ill when playing the game. There is still a little hint of that memory, however, I don't use a laptop anymore and I think if I played again, there would be some question as to BFME or Max Payne.
Based on parent, I decided to dig a little deeper and unfortunatly, I was unable to find anything from a site that I would deem 'trustworthy' (read: unbiased). Most everything I read was on webpages/webistes that were poorly put together and nothing that seemed like a creditable news source....that said, I'd look into them, but I'd be wary of most of what I found.
I haven't looked into windmills myself as I'm still living the apartment life, but I've a friend who has read up on the matter some and raves about the vertical axis windmill and all the benifits thereof. Were I in a position to consider it, I'd start with these.
I agree with parent. Have we REALLY forgotten our IE/Netscape history so quickly? Microsoft is following their exact same vendor lock-in strategy now as they did then. Integrate the new product with the old and to make matters worse they're doing that instead of 'fixing' the original product (namely windows).
I'll be the first to say that XP was a huge improvement and that worm-spread was much reduced. I'll also say that I'm a developer myself and I understand that saying 'write it securely' is a hell of a lot easier than actually doing it. So, lets give MS the benefit of the doubt and presume that they're writing their OS even more securely than before. What are we left with, then? A very expensive to write program integrated with the OS for free. I'll again point out my parallel with IE, which was also a very expensive to write program integrated with the OS for free.
Now maybe I'm mistaken in my understanding that the anti-virus software is part of the default installation and if it is, my argument is admittedly all shot to hell and that Symantec and McAfee are big cry-babies. Given Microsoft's history, however, I doubt it.
I just did a quick page search on the comments. Have we all really forgotten about the sequal to Alien titled Aliens where our bad-ass Ripley pwns our favorite acid-for-blood monster in such a suit?
I see a lot of people saying, effectively, that long=good but I don't think that they've missed the real problem. There are many games that simply lack a way to intuit what should be done. Things like ladders in pitch black corners have huge potential to make the game boring and even frustrating. A good game should be like a good GUI where to go and what to do next should be easy to deduce. When one has paced all the corners of the room, investigated every item and used all your ammo shooting boxes, grills and barrels one only hopes explodes and no means of exit has presented itself, it not only makes the game long, but very boring as well.
Effectively what I'm saying is that long may be good, but also, long can easily be bad.
I'm aware of the anatomical differences between a crab and a turtle, but could Sony not just flip Gamera on his back and attack his weak point for massive damage?
...as an individual who has watched several Gamera movies, thanks to the ingenious Joel Hodgson and the not so lovely Sandy Frank, I have concluded that you are male, Japanese, are sitting in front of your computer with two comrades (one male one female), are wearing disturbingly short shorts, and that you are approximately 7 years of age.
I had a similar problem to the OP except mine was that I lacked the constitution to back up on a regular basis and when I did back up, it was rarely to the same place twice. This resulted in many partial backups and differing versions of the same file which got confusing and messy. My solution was to buy my buddy's old 1ghz AMD Thunderbird, a nice fat hard drive and install Linux making sure Samba was included. Three times a week (read: crontab), the Linux box in my closet runs a script (I don't guarantee linked is bug free) that uses smbclient to log into my WinXP machine. Now, my script TARs all the files, but it could be easily rewritten to simply copy.
the COWON iAudio 6 outstrips both iPod and Scandisk products (imo). It's bound to be a bit more pricy but word has it that it's better than my iAudio X5 and the extra price there seems well worth it to me.
...found this on Digg yesterday and tweaked the colors in photoshop to make a 10x7 desktop. Assuming anyone cares, I can host larger versions as well. Just be sure to specify the exact dimentions you want.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up a few hours away from Yellowstone (Bozeman, MT). I've since moved, but on my last visit which would have been somtime around the sumer 1998, it was obvious that activity was picking up. Several geysers with historically low activity have been going off more frequently.
...enough to have been mugged, yes.
Not your macbook. That's a huge label to get robbed in a lot of countries.
This has likely been brought up (I'm at work and don't have time to read on the comments) but one of my old bosses wanted to be able to administer his windows machine at home and also be able to do all his regular stuff on it as well (pop email, etc) so he wrote a program for his wirelessly enabled handheld that did basically the same thing as what VNC will do.
My suggestion is just set up a linux box runing `vncserver` (Mac probably has a vncserver, too) and get a good handheld device: Something with a color screen with enough processing power to play MP3s/OGG/FLAC and a vnc client (familiar linux can run on a number of iPaq models. I'm sure there's better solutions, however). You'll need a friend that can run your linux box for you to help keep it going and I'm sure you'll have to play with resoltuions on the server to be legible on a handheld.
If the handheld screen is just too small, you could do the same thing on something old and crappy enough that you wouldn't mind parting from should it come to it.
CleanSoftware.org makes finding PDFCreator and many other (very) useful apps very easy to find. Many of you may recall the site was featured on an 'ask slashdot' about 2-3yrs back.
or if we didn't have enough keystrokes already, F6 and '..'
My minor in college was English and my focus was on 20th/21st century poetry. That said, I guarantee you that (real) poets never steal. Its an homage but only so long as the phrase in question is used in such a way as to make it "their own" (which is to say, in the simplest of terms, it holds a different meaning under the new context).
If the phrase is altered slightly, it's tpyically considered an allusion to another work.
The phrase can be both an homage and an allusuion when (typical) left unaltered and the phrase in question first has it's own unique meaning in the new context and gains further meaning from the original work.
This is all to say that a 'poet' that sues another poet for copyright infringmnet is no poet at all.
You might see if the folks in Detroit can help out. I imagine it'll take a little detective work to hunt down an email address, but having been through all of your same woes, I'd imagine they could lend some very helpful insight.
The goal is to understand the deeper structure of the social Web and how people are using it.
Translation: Watching people watching porn.
I can't speak for anyone else, but because of all this RIAA nonsense, I buy from the Artist's website, anymore. It's not a sure bet that I'll bypass the RIAA that way, but it's been my experiance that, for the most part, you will and also that more of the money you just spent goes directly to the artist.
The reasoin why I've downloaded (dramatically) fewer files is that I can get what I want the frist time via BitTorrent. I'm no longer sifting through hunderds of copies of an artist in an attempt to weed out poor encodes, damaged files, files made from radio recordings, etc. BitTorrent sites tell me the audio sorce, quality, format and at the same time give me the whole album so I can decide if I want to buy it (and if it innovative and good, I do buy. The Books is a good point-in-case for me), or delete the files off my drive. If a torrent is no good, it tends to die. If it is good, it tends to get re-seeded. I guess this is all just a long winded way of saying that there is a lot less guess-n-checking going on and as a result, fewer files being downlaoded.
Perhaps a bit off topic and very likely to get burried as this was posted a while ago... ...here's a link to How well Linux is working in detroit schools. The artical is a bit old, but it couldn't hurt to dial up another school official and find out a few things from basic, like how well the project is still going, to technial, like how exactly they've got their system set up. Can studetns still access their files regarless of what machine they sit in front of?
...Wiki Constitution.
Super Mario: When I'm stressed out, I like simple, and in terms of games it's hard to get more simple than 8 buttons and side scrolling. When I want a bit of a challenge, I go Mario 1 as the game doesn't respond how I expect and that ups the difficulty for me. the US version of Mario 2 didn't make it because that game is much more of a novelty for me. It's fun, enough, just too different from Mario 1, the REAL Mario 2, and mario 3.
If I'm looking for a little less challenge, I go Mario 3 and I'll warp to the levels I have the most fun with like the pipe and giant worlds. Plus, you've got to love that little boot you can hop around in.
Worms World Party: This is just a silly game. It's hard to play it and not laugh at least once. I was introduced to one of the older versions of this game by one of my college buddies. We'd turn on all weapons, up the move time to the maximum and ninja rope or super sheep for hours.
C&C Red Alert II: This is the second RTS I ever played and talk about a great one. The acting might be cheesy as hell, but troops respond just the way I want and how I tell them. Setting up a solid defense that takes care of itself is no problem at all which I like because it allows me to focus on my offense and saves me a lot of jumping around on the map.
Star Trek Armada: This is one of those games that never took off because there wasn't any driving force behind it to get it to take off; no new movie, TV Show, etc. The story line was compelling and shifted you through all the 4 avail. races. I first started playing this game as the demo and immediately wanted more. Sadly, my current computer has hardware compatibility issues with the game so I haven't played it in years, but there were a few interface options in this game that are missing in other RTS games. Unlike many RTSs, Strategy matters a lot more than just having a huge attack force. To destroy an enemy base, you really do have to find the weakest point, create a weak point with a first wave attack, or attack from multiple directions and have a diversity of ships or having a huge force won't make much of a difference.
Battle For Middle Earth: One of my co-workers selected this as a game to play at our monthly LAN parties as no one had played it before and we'd all be on the same learning curve. We all loved the game immediately. It's very well conceived and the limitations imposed force you to think strategy, not overwhelming force. The biggest problem we've had with the game is that when we play against each other, we stalemate, and when we play against the computer, we get bored.
Runners up:
Othello: You either squish your opponent, or get squished. There's no middle ground and as a result, the game has lost its novelty.
World of Warcraft: Really, it's just too new to me and I don't yet know if it really falls under 'comfort' although I do have a lot of fun with this game and it's nice to have something that my girlfriend will play as well.
Max Payne: Simply put, I overplayed the fist one and by that I mean that not enough bathroom, food and sleep breaks occurred. That, combined with the fact that playing on a laptop on my lap, did weird things with my body temprature and I ended up feeling a little ill when playing the game. There is still a little hint of that memory, however, I don't use a laptop anymore and I think if I played again, there would be some question as to BFME or Max Payne.
Based on parent, I decided to dig a little deeper and unfortunatly, I was unable to find anything from a site that I would deem 'trustworthy' (read: unbiased). Most everything I read was on webpages/webistes that were poorly put together and nothing that seemed like a creditable news source. ...that said, I'd look into them, but I'd be wary of most of what I found.
I haven't looked into windmills myself as I'm still living the apartment life, but I've a friend who has read up on the matter some and raves about the vertical axis windmill and all the benifits thereof. Were I in a position to consider it, I'd start with these.
Haha. Uranus has a polyp.
...agreed. So, "...bigger cry babies." then.
I agree with parent. Have we REALLY forgotten our IE/Netscape history so quickly? Microsoft is following their exact same vendor lock-in strategy now as they did then. Integrate the new product with the old and to make matters worse they're doing that instead of 'fixing' the original product (namely windows).
I'll be the first to say that XP was a huge improvement and that worm-spread was much reduced. I'll also say that I'm a developer myself and I understand that saying 'write it securely' is a hell of a lot easier than actually doing it. So, lets give MS the benefit of the doubt and presume that they're writing their OS even more securely than before. What are we left with, then? A very expensive to write program integrated with the OS for free. I'll again point out my parallel with IE, which was also a very expensive to write program integrated with the OS for free.
Now maybe I'm mistaken in my understanding that the anti-virus software is part of the default installation and if it is, my argument is admittedly all shot to hell and that Symantec and McAfee are big cry-babies. Given Microsoft's history, however, I doubt it.
I just did a quick page search on the comments. Have we all really forgotten about the sequal to Alien titled Aliens where our bad-ass Ripley pwns our favorite acid-for-blood monster in such a suit?
I see a lot of people saying, effectively, that long=good but I don't think that they've missed the real problem. There are many games that simply lack a way to intuit what should be done. Things like ladders in pitch black corners have huge potential to make the game boring and even frustrating. A good game should be like a good GUI where to go and what to do next should be easy to deduce. When one has paced all the corners of the room, investigated every item and used all your ammo shooting boxes, grills and barrels one only hopes explodes and no means of exit has presented itself, it not only makes the game long, but very boring as well.
Effectively what I'm saying is that long may be good, but also, long can easily be bad.
I'm aware of the anatomical differences between a crab and a turtle, but could Sony not just flip Gamera on his back and attack his weak point for massive damage?
...as an individual who has watched several Gamera movies, thanks to the ingenious Joel Hodgson and the not so lovely Sandy Frank, I have concluded that you are male, Japanese, are sitting in front of your computer with two comrades (one male one female), are wearing disturbingly short shorts, and that you are approximately 7 years of age.
I'm amazed that the USB Fondu pot didn't make the list!
I had a similar problem to the OP except mine was that I lacked the constitution to back up on a regular basis and when I did back up, it was rarely to the same place twice. This resulted in many partial backups and differing versions of the same file which got confusing and messy. My solution was to buy my buddy's old 1ghz AMD Thunderbird, a nice fat hard drive and install Linux making sure Samba was included. Three times a week (read: crontab), the Linux box in my closet runs a script (I don't guarantee linked is bug free) that uses smbclient to log into my WinXP machine. Now, my script TARs all the files, but it could be easily rewritten to simply copy.
the COWON iAudio 6 outstrips both iPod and Scandisk products (imo). It's bound to be a bit more pricy but word has it that it's better than my iAudio X5 and the extra price there seems well worth it to me.
...found this on Digg yesterday and tweaked the colors in photoshop to make a 10x7 desktop. Assuming anyone cares, I can host larger versions as well. Just be sure to specify the exact dimentions you want.