Jealous of what, exactly? Kids sending SMS text at 100s the cost of an email, or simple IM? People paying hundreds of bucks to set themselves up for locked-in contracts?
I've been an Apple client since 1979. You want to know what pisses me off? Apple turning into a fucking toy company, and incrementally destroying NeXTSTEP. Apple spending time on bullshit iPhone screenshot shit, and hanging on to the HFS+ file system, which is actually incompatible with their lousy OS. Leopard is nothing but a resource-hungry POS.
I ride the bus and Light Rail, here in Minneapolis. I hear the ringtones and sometimes I glance around and every kid and person of color on the whole bus is playing Tetris, or fiddling with their fucking phones. When I see the voting returns, the top 10 TV shows by viewership and the voracious appetite in America for 'subjective' dispute of scientific facts, it's no wonder the country has reached a point where every successive 'decision' brings them closer to their own private armageddon. These people are wasting their fucking time on bullshit. Apple knows this, so yes, they pander to people with more money than brains.
And just so there's no mistake, my last four PowerBooks, and three Apple desktops, were gifts from my happy clients. Apple hasn't seen a nickel (outside of ONE recently-purchased keyboard), from me, since '94. And if Adobe ever ports to Linux, that's it for me, sayonara toy company, and back to work.
within the halls of Justice, they see online advertising as "a big deal" while most online denizens detest all forms of online advertising. OK, some of us allow Google's unobtrusive text-only ads through because they're not too annoying, but if that should change then they're blocked too.
realizing, of course, that we are better than everyone else, I nevertheless feel compelled to point out a couple things here:
99.9% of the Internet audience does not block their ads
ask them to intervene, or raise an issue, with their same-party rep on the Committee, specifically, the Majority member, or Minority member
Pardon me, one, I have never felt obliged to comment on my own letter before (and it is rather unpleasant, to be avoided, obviously, in the future). But when I said Majority and Minority 'member,' I should have written, "Majority 'leader' on the committee (known as the Chair), OR, the Minority party 'leader' on that committee, the second most powerful voice on the committee.
Depending on the issue and the Committee's Minority party leader's negotiating skills, the Minority leaders have been known to negotiate outcomes that were not the majority party's first goal.
Note to self: Try to refrain from writing any instructionally-oriented material when this close to 2 am. Check.
So, who investigates impropriety/corruption within the DOJ?
The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary.That committee's Hearing on Oversight of the Department of Justice went a long way towards Gonzalez's resignation.
Some of us old-timers believe that typed letters, on paper, in envelopes, are far preferable to email (this is debatable, though, always include your real name and address, either way). Many believe a neat, well-written printed letter has more impact. That's a judgment call, but it can make sense, given that email can be made to look pretty crisp, also.
And, avoid polemics, be courteous, to the point, and include specific supporting examples, etc.
The best tactic, with these bigger committees, is to write your own Congressperson or Senator, and ask them to intervene, or raise an issue, with their same-party rep on the Committee, specifically, the Majority member, or Minority member (whom you have also named, in full). It doesn't hurt to write the same Majority or Minority member, yourself, and, of course, if your Congressional/Senator rep is on the Committee, well there you go.
This area I may move to...appears indeed to have had Time-Warner subsumed by Comcast. Can you give me more details on where you problems with them are? What was your experience? Was this a consumer or business connection? What was the pricing? Service experience? Can you give more details on your experience? TIA!
Two parts of Minnesota, but my primary, most recent experience with Comcast taking over TW-Roadrunner areas, was right here in downtown Minneapolis.
I went from more than a clean MB down to 800KB, with artificial 'boosts' to 1MB down. Under TW I was getting 1300-1400 KBs per second, at night, regularly, for entire files. But Comcast was a serious drop, yet they advertised as being an improvement, but really, the improvement was an artificial boost for the first 5 MB of a file, IF the bandwidth was available. So, what they were actually saying was: Your throughput will be lower than the "up to" number we advertise, but, once in a while, we'll come up with short bursts of speed, that approach the advertised max.
And, as Groucho once said, I don't care how you slice it, it's still baloney, to me."
Some people will be fine with that. And I know a few people, in other markets, (Waterford, CT, for one), who get very good sustained throughput on their Comcast accounts.
The whole 'Powerboost' hype is only when available, and only for the first part of a large file. The TCP window isn't even open long enough to take advantage of it, for normal web surfing because most web servers are specifically set up to NOT saturate every customer's line (which is reasonable, obviously), and, as well, most pages get served as repeated HTTP Requests for every little image, spacer, etc, so, again, no burst window of opportunity. I saw this discrepancy between advertised vs. real life behaviour, all the time, I kid you not.
I don't run Bit-Torrent or any P2P stuff, at all, ever. But I used to. And the presence or potential presence of 'bursts' is not cool for those type of transfers, either. I think part of the reason for that might be the huge 'gap' between download vs. upload width. It's not that hard, with good servers on the remote end (capable of saturating any, multi-tap requesting IP) to actually overwhelm the upload stream, locally, with ACK packets. And when the uploading ACKs fall off, all hell can break loose. That can get messy, and the workaround is usually to self-manage (throttle) the incoming stream, on the User's own end, by user choice.
I saw degradation of real-world use parameters, from the second day after the TW-to-Comcast changeover, here in Minneapolis. It was depressing, but you know we're all troopers out here, and we deal with the situation as is, rather than 'as-wished', or, certainly in Comcast's case, 'as advertised'.
They have a 150 or something dollar a month plan now, that is basically a set bandwidth, with the same artificial 'boost', or doubling of bandwidth, that runs on the same exact principle of irregular, when-available, artificial temporary boosts. It is advertised "Up to 50Mb. Caveat emptor, that's what I say.
There are a lot of co-factors, and, of course, my experience, even very accurately portrayed is only anecdotal. I saw the same issue after a TW-Comcast changeover down South. But again, there are others who would find the same situations tolerable, or even 'transparent' (as non-issues, in other words). But here in the Twin Cities I think it's a sad situation. I'm with Qwest, what can I say? As far as the issue of tech support goes, I never have trouble with ANY company's tech support people, because I see them as being people, like us, who don't need me to play I'm-smarter-than-you, or you're-ruining-my-life games,ever. On the rare occasions where I lose it, I go out of my way to apologize and explain. That, a little patience, and, of course, the ability to 'lower myself' and 'accept' reality, are very helpful in dealing with this stuff.
Oh man... I honestly hope I am wrong here, and that all goes well for you, but, if it does go well, send me an email. Because my experience, in several markets, limited to what happened when Comcast bought out the local Time-Warner franchise, has been disgusting, the kind of thing that might make a less-disciplined fellow attempt to pull his own teeth, bare-handed.
I 'm afraid you're in for a rude surprise. I actually hate Comcast, based, not an innuendo, or 'fashionable' consensus, but on personal experience, only. Good luck, I think you'll need it, unless the market you move into is one in which Comcast offers some huge-priced corporate plan of some kind.
I'd rather have slower link with unrestricted access than have a theoretically faster link that I can't use to do what I want.
I'll get modded down, redundant, but I really don't care because that goes straight to the heart of the matter.
I went from a Comcast cable Internet connect to Qwest DSL. Ironically, I was getting much wider, consistent throughput, while hopping on to an open wireless Comcast connection, in the same neighborhood (not leaving my place at all) as my Comcast connection was. I just couldn't deal with that.
So, I moved downtown into Minneapolis and switched to Qwest, on political grounds, and realizing I would take a hit in peak/burst bandwidth, but hopefully have a more consistent, even if slower, experience.
I had a tech out here to check out the actual wires, and we found a voltage drop at a frayed telephone terminal. Fixed it, measured down and up bandwidth on a scope, at the wire, after the modem, after the Vonage box, and online, through a test web site for Qwest techs. 7.6MB down, 876 or so up, at each and every tested segment.
So, what do I really have here? About 800 KB down, if it's the middle of the night, using multiple feeds off a Deutsche Telecom backbone from a RapidShare, etc. Okay, 800 KB is what, 5 6Mbits down? Is that right? So, where are the other two Mb's down? And why the huge discrepancies in basic throughputs at different, hard to gauge, (consistently) times of day, etc?
I see alerts, occasionally, that a page (which maybe downloaded to cache, 75 out of 76 items), has not opened because 'the connection to the server has been reset.' That sounds like an injected RST to me. Am I paranoid? What software can anyone recommend for me to monitor actual packets in an effort to establish what's up with my situation? (Windows or Mac), as I haven't been able to get this PowerBook to actually run Linux for several years (don't ask on that one, it's too insane to get a grip on). Thanks.
First, I want to say that I hope your brother made a full return to health and is doing well, and secondly, that I assume you are very proud of your father. Working people have been the backbone of all civilizations that ever amounted to anything.
But, you know, there are some 'cracks' in our system. I acquired a disease in Canada, from tainted blood, 15 years ago, and now that I have been back home in the States for 7 years, the virus went deadly on me. Through a bankruptcy of a company I worked for in Florida, and an extended period of serious unemployment in Upstate New York, I found myself having to shut down a new company of my own, in order to be clearly poor enough to qualify for Medical Assistance here in Minneapolis.
On the one hand, I am very grateful that the State has found a way to cover my chemotherapy. I'm indebted to them for that. But I should have been able to get some sort of affordable coverage AND continue to work. But that wasn't possible in NY, and furthermore, they wanted me to sue my ex-wife, who is 20 years separated, and the mother of my daughter, or NY State would turn me down. Which they did, twice. Minnesota, on the other hand, said my wife was in the clear as long as there was no joint property.
So, here I am, on very heavy chemo, living on $203 and $162 of food support, per month. It is tough, my friend, I kid you not. I am actually entitled to a payout, in a settlement of a class action, from the funds set up by the Canadian Red Cross, but need a lawyer to do the deal. I missed two payouts (the last being in 2004) already, due to my misreading of the days of qualification. I had thought it was from 1986 to 1990, but, in fact, it was from before 1986, or after 1990. I got my disease in the Vic, in Montreal, during 18 operations and 5 weeks in ICU, from December '92 to March '93.
The disease has been undetectable for four months now, but I still have 5 months of Interferon/Ribavirin to deal with yet. I consider myself very fortunate. But, in all honesty, I see room for improvement in the system, itself.
Shit, no mod points for +funny. Slashdot modders fucking suck:(.
Maybe sometimes, but in this case it's just evidence that guys need to start reading something besides WoW manuals, and stuff like that. Poe, of course, would be a fine place to start. And yeah, it was funny, too subtle for this crowd, except us geniuses./ducks:)
That's because morons like you, with vintage software... blah blah blah
This bona fide idiot gets a +5 Insightful? WTF! I can't tell the morons from the assholes, when the mods give guys like this a run for the money. Yeah, click on everything, that's a safe bet. What a schmuck.
No kidding. The one I like goes like this: Hit a webloc or URI in another app, and Firefox, my default browser, launches. Then an empty browser window opens, and a javascript alert box pops up and says: "There's an update", or "NoScript has an update", etc, right? So, I hit 'later' thinking get out of my way, and what happens? Nothing. The fucking app has already lost track of the webloc that launched it.
I'm just glad these guys aren't in avionics or some other mission-critical area of programming. Very glad.
Do modern day elephants and rhinoceroses suffer from insect infestations even tho they have thick skins?
Yes, they do. That's one of the main reasons they both roll in mud, so it will coat their skin, and offer some protection.
This is an issue that can clearly be seen in the lives and health of elephants, for example, who are part of the Circus business. If untreated by veterinarians, and deprived of mud (which they are, of course, at least during circus seasons), insects can actually drive an elephant insane.
They use water, in a pinch, to avoid large swarms, if they can. And the elephant will inhale dust into their trunks, in order to blow it back, to clear away and partially protect from bites. You see this a lot, when the elephants go into the water, and then emerge and gather up some dust, right away, to blow back onto their wet hides. They know dust plus water equals mud, somehow.
Where it gets extremely inhumane, and sometimes fatal, is in the circus and poorer zoo populations, where insects will gravitate to the elephants forehead area, and especially, between the eyes, because elephants are not likely to blow dust into their own eye areas, and very often, out of sight of the people who go to these places, the elephants not only have their legs chained together, they often have their trunks chained (basically 'pinned') to the ground, also, which obviously denies them their instinctive methods for dealing with pests. Without intervention this can drive them insane and/or kill them, depending on the severity of the situation, and what the health of the insects is like, at the time.
Elephants, despite their size, are very sensitive creatures. They are, after all, sentient beings, and girth is not usually related to pain and other emotions. In captivity they are already at a distinct disadvantage, in that they are very stressed, almost constantly, at not being in their own herd.
On the Mac you would have a hard time finding another browser that is so steadily going down the tubes, with every so-called new release or update (whatever buzzword they're using now
It failed to load the css stylesheet for Slashdot, just now, but a refresh, coming from another link on the style-butchered page brought up the CSS. If you're on another platform you cannot imagine what a huge pain in the ass it is.
So why use it, right? I mean, if you don't like it, use something you think is better. I know that, and I feel bad bitching, but I use the Web Developer add-on all the time, and on Qwest dsl, it's convenient to use FlashBlock.
The versions of web developer-like plugins for Safari, just suck; it's as simple as that. Otherwise I'd be on Safari. But it's far more proprietary-behaving than Firefox.
Let's face it, they set out to make a better browser that would feel 'comfy' to Windows Internet Explorer users, and they seem to have succeeded, I guess. But it is not a Mac thing, at all. I tend to gravitate towards apps that, if they are supposedly designed to work on multiple platforms, they try to pay at least some minor attention to the platform's API. Firefox fails on this count. I'd rather use IE in Windows 2000 Pro, any day of the week. And I would, if it wasn't for a shitload of Adobe apps on my Mac setup.
Why don't the Firefox developers just borrow somebody else's balls and say, "The Macintosh is too small of an installed footprint, so we don't give a shit." And that would be fine with me. I use an Apple, I, myself, am NOT Apple. And besides that, wanna know what I think? If Mozila/Firebox borrowed those balls and said, "We're sorry, we're really a Windows app..." I'll bet they'd have several hundred million more downloads, globally, for Windows OS. Think about it
If the new version is better on Linux and Windows, well I say congratulations. And I mean it, because I don't want other people's experience with software to be shitty, because I know what that's like. I get enough of that with fucking Apple OS.
If there's an evil web page open while I do that, the paste will own me.
That's why setting the Timestamp to Zero (in ENV) is so nifty. Your 'spy', which is really an opportunistic piggy-back rider on the window of time after a su or sudo (or giving an Installer 'admin' privileges, etc) misses the admin/root escalation time in your terminal by one clock and it's closed already. (zero sometimes really means zero). No simultaneous anything happening, all is sequential. So if the escalation has 'zero' lifetime, it's over for enemies that are just polling the OS with "Do we have admin access, or root?" with the environment set right, that question returns a zero, every time. I think this is, what, 35, or is it 40 year old Unix basic stuff?
OS X has a 5 minute window following privilege escalation, by default. That's about equal parts scary and stupid, I would think.
new anally-mounted turbo-prop with the latest beta of what's been referred to as a 'cloaking device.' In related news this morning, Haliburton announced that they had been awarded a no-bid contract to supply the US Olympics Aquatics canteen with 100 kilos, each, of refried beans and extremely cheap tamales. Jalapenos, originally part of the same contract, were struck from the deal after what were termed, 'surprises', disrupted the ladies afternoon practice heats."
A few weeks ago we got first word of NASA's plan...blahblah.."
Sure, water, right. Look, if the last sixty years has taught us anything, it's that, obviously, the US must have found some labor organizers and such, with no air defenses and a society, or so-called 'sovereign nation', that is too impoverished to defend themselves.
How can a company with $24B in sales, $3B in profit, and $40B in cash and assets (2007 figures) have a market cap of $160B?
A few factors. BUT the easiest explanation is that Market Cap, is simply the price of a company's stock at any given point in time, multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. It is NOT conjecture, speculation or a judgment call, at all; it is a simple case of math, with no relation to underlying technical or fundamental realities of the company.
I don't have the time/energy at the moment to type much. But the first reason is that the investment community is comfortable (so far) with the fact that AAPL trades at a much higher price/earnings ratio (earnings divided by shares outstanding) than any other company in their industry.
Another obvious factor is earnings per share. Apple creams the competition here, which also feeds the 'conventional' attitude (de facto 'comfort') towards the high p/e.
Apple is priced as a growth stock. So when there's obvious momentum (now, and for quite a while, actually) in Apple's gross sales, operating margin and earnings per share, [Sounds like 'Bingo!', no?] then of course their higher p/e is more easily rationalized.
However,if they got repriced as a value stock, say a major domo in there dies, or earnings per share and quarterly growth start slipping too much, then look out below. Then there's 'market risk' which is simply a case of being a healthy stock, in a Market that has been judged 'sick', never mind the details like p/e's and earnings per share.
But right now, and for a while, Their price/earnings ratio is at least double that of any competitor (I'm rounding off a bit, please don't quote me). I don't 'like' the company for personal reasons. But, to bring a company 'back' from abyss, and then not just 'hold market share', or simply survive, but to thrive the way they have. That's worthy of something like respect. You don't see that all the time, no kidding.
and now, the ipod brand is more famous than the walkman brand was in the 80's.
I am not arguing or disagreeing, because I don't know what the case is. But is this verifiable from a survey or something? The only reason I ask is that I grew up during 50s/60s/70s and the Walkman was like Kleenex. I mean, I know the chemo is messing up my memory/recall to a degree, but I seem to remember the walkman as being synonymous with portable music devices back in the day. Sony was criticized heavily for having so many versions of it. I think their showroom in Tokyo had hundreds of Walkmans, that were all in production. Back in teeny-bopper Japan days (when people used these things called pens and pencils to make marks called 'drawings' and 'writing'), you could hit the Big Time, and become a has been, in about 8 days.
Sony did their level best to stay abreast of the styles etc coming up from the street. Apple, more accurately reflecting modern American marketing, imposes upon, rather than draws from, in order to keep costs down. That's how it appears to me. iTunes 7x had a fatal I/O operation with an external drive several days ago here at home, while my ten gig first gen iPod was plugged in, and totally destroyed the booting/reading/recognizing of my old iPod, for good.
iTunes, the app, is what... a file manager on the file side, a database on the lib side. And the stupid HFS+ incompatible with Unix-like systems file system looks its worst running with iTunes. If I was the guy who decided to keep the Finder 8 years ago, I would fucking kill myself, as a favor to the whole world. I've been an Apple client since '79, and I absolutely despise these people.
They turned it into a toy store, and destroyed NeXTSTEP, for no extra charge. At least they had the decency to drop "Computer" from the company's official name.
My clients buy me a new apple laptop every couple years. I stopped buying their shit when the Powerbook 150 was 'new'. Fuck those guys. I only use it because of Adobe. (and, yeah, fuck them, too)
I didn't know. Had to click on the links at the bottom to read a summary
Same here. at first I thought it had something to do with the Canadian Actor's union. (That's ACTRA, though.)
Of course standard operating procedure, in anything like professional journalism, compels the author/editor to show the non-abbreviated entity being referred to, at the first instance of the acronym's use in any article. And it does not matter how many people are assumed to 'know' the acronym, or not.
So, in an article about, say, ACTRA, you would see a sentence like this, near the top: "ACTRA (Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists) is a national organization of more than 21,000 professional performers working in the English-language recorded media."
See? That's not so difficult is it? Remember, even the most intelligent folks don't necessarily 'know everything'.
It boggles the mind that people still use it in the age of BitTorrent, but there it is.
I wouldn't trade Usenet access for BitTorrent in a thousand years.
With ten simultaneous feeds to a body of material that has been posted by recognized characters, and 'peer-reviewed' (a la "avoid this", etc) on the balance of big posts, and no worries that all the 'seeders' have the same 98% of the file, and we're gonna have to wait for some schmuck in the Ukraine to flip his box on to get the rest...
My Giganews account will saturate any number of feeds. No waiting for all the p2p horseshit. You can have BitTorrent. (and any other 'p2p' formats and apps out there, too).
I'm all for sharing, sure. That's what uploading to Usenet is for. But the 'sharing' aspect, and 'distributed' hosting aspect of BT (et al) sounds way better in theory than it works out in practice. Why? Because the p2p users can fuck up with anything, and there is no threaded commenting on posts, so bullshit can sit right along better versions of similar files. It's a crapshoot, and with the stupid prices and caps of shiity American bandwidth today, I can't afford to take big gambles on DVD-sized (38-CD sized, etc) downloads. The Usenet people know what to do with pnn files, so even in rare cases of partials mixed in with complete segments, it's all retrievable/reparable.
I DO like the idea of BitTorrent. Sharing is good. But the de facto situation with it, and adding in ISP (Comcast, etc) interference with packets, and for me it's a no-go deal. Do I think others should abandon BT because 'flipper' doesn't like it? Hell no. It's just not for me, that's all.
And I'm glad the ISPs are dropping their not-even-half-assed Usenet coverage. Hopefully we'll see fewer of the noobs with their "This post is incomplete on my server" (After which, glancing at the post 'details' we see it's from yet-Another verizon, comcast, whatever user).
So, hooray for getting Usenet off the ISPs, back in 'the dark' where the people who use it, understand it, and contribute, can do what we've always done: understand, use, contribute.
The one figurehead, 'boss', is the Attorney General, but the actual offices, comprised of other attorneys and staff, is known as the office of the attorneys general [attorneys=plural, 'general' being singular]. So, no, using the term 'generals' is not correct, at all.
Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place? (ie: any group with 'movie' in the title, and a reasonable amount of traffic.) Or maybe the retention of my IPS's servers is shit?
Probably a little of both. You can do searches for things like DVD, divx, VCD, etc.
I gamed the Earthlink 2GB max by constantly deleting and recreating 'new' 'alias' account names associated with my main account. They offered 5 users (like a 'family', I suppose) and I had 5 names. So, those 5 were good for ten GB, and as one or two or more of them reached their download saturation amount, I just dumped and reinvented. Worked very well, actually.
The newest films tend to come out as video handheld items. The other nice versions of newer things are all copies of the US and British film awards groups. The film companies issue 'screeners' so that all the academy members can see everthing without leaving their homes.
The best thing you can do is figure out your Usenet software app's "Search" and anti-spam filtering. This is serious hobby material, when one is fully-engaged in the pursuit of files..
If you have commercial Usenet you can also use Google and NZBdrop or other NZB collector, and you feed it a title that was posted elsewhere, and it then uses your, say, Giganews, access to fully saturate the max number of simultaneous feeds coming off the remote server to your machine. HTH
You need to weigh more than just telecom immunity when considering this vote.
Really? If that's the case, then why did president Bush say he would veto the bill if it didn't include the blanket amnesty for all crimes committed by the telecoms on behalf of the government? FISA already allowed an 'anything goes' situation, wherein the tap could be placed and a request filed several days after the fact.
My point is this: Why let Obama off the hook based on the lame excuse that we needed even looser rules governing the invasion of US citizens privacy, when the Administration came right out and said, "No telecom immunity = veto"
The whole rationale for the bill had nothing to do with the terrorists, so much as it has to do with the treasonous individuals who believe the President is above the law, and that he can order companies and individuals to break existing laws.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the President can order a citizen to do anything. And the Trials at Nuremberg supposedly settled that whole notion of "I was only following orders" or "The government asked me to do it" as a grounds for innocence.
Every person in Congress should be arrested, by the military, and held pending trials (also by the military). The Congress and Courts are all in the same boat, aiding and abetting the destruction of the Constitution, and other felonious crimes. The military people take an oath to protect the Constitution from enemies both within and without. So, where are the generals? Fifty or sixty hangings and several hundred guys behind bars for life would seriously encourage future elected officials to take their oaths seriously.
As for Obama, I knew he was a phony right from the start, no surprise there.
Slashdot Mirror
Jealous of what, exactly? Kids sending SMS text at 100s the cost of an email, or simple IM? People paying hundreds of bucks to set themselves up for locked-in contracts?
I've been an Apple client since 1979. You want to know what pisses me off? Apple turning into a fucking toy company, and incrementally destroying NeXTSTEP. Apple spending time on bullshit iPhone screenshot shit, and hanging on to the HFS+ file system, which is actually incompatible with their lousy OS. Leopard is nothing but a resource-hungry POS.
I ride the bus and Light Rail, here in Minneapolis. I hear the ringtones and sometimes I glance around and every kid and person of color on the whole bus is playing Tetris, or fiddling with their fucking phones. When I see the voting returns, the top 10 TV shows by viewership and the voracious appetite in America for 'subjective' dispute of scientific facts, it's no wonder the country has reached a point where every successive 'decision' brings them closer to their own private armageddon. These people are wasting their fucking time on bullshit. Apple knows this, so yes, they pander to people with more money than brains.
And just so there's no mistake, my last four PowerBooks, and three Apple desktops, were gifts from my happy clients. Apple hasn't seen a nickel (outside of ONE recently-purchased keyboard), from me, since '94. And if Adobe ever ports to Linux, that's it for me, sayonara toy company, and back to work.
Trolling much?
realizing, of course, that we are better than everyone else, I nevertheless feel compelled to point out a couple things here:
Pardon me, one, I have never felt obliged to comment on my own letter before (and it is rather unpleasant, to be avoided, obviously, in the future). But when I said Majority and Minority 'member,' I should have written, "Majority 'leader' on the committee (known as the Chair), OR, the Minority party 'leader' on that committee, the second most powerful voice on the committee.
Depending on the issue and the Committee's Minority party leader's negotiating skills, the Minority leaders have been known to negotiate outcomes that were not the majority party's first goal.
Note to self: Try to refrain from writing any instructionally-oriented material when this close to 2 am. Check.
The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary.That committee's Hearing on Oversight of the Department of Justice went a long way towards Gonzalez's resignation.
Some of us old-timers believe that typed letters, on paper, in envelopes, are far preferable to email (this is debatable, though, always include your real name and address, either way). Many believe a neat, well-written printed letter has more impact. That's a judgment call, but it can make sense, given that email can be made to look pretty crisp, also.
And, avoid polemics, be courteous, to the point, and include specific supporting examples, etc.
The best tactic, with these bigger committees, is to write your own Congressperson or Senator, and ask them to intervene, or raise an issue, with their same-party rep on the Committee, specifically, the Majority member, or Minority member (whom you have also named, in full). It doesn't hurt to write the same Majority or Minority member, yourself, and, of course, if your Congressional/Senator rep is on the Committee, well there you go.
Two parts of Minnesota, but my primary, most recent experience with Comcast taking over TW-Roadrunner areas, was right here in downtown Minneapolis.
I went from more than a clean MB down to 800KB, with artificial 'boosts' to 1MB down. Under TW I was getting 1300-1400 KBs per second, at night, regularly, for entire files. But Comcast was a serious drop, yet they advertised as being an improvement, but really, the improvement was an artificial boost for the first 5 MB of a file, IF the bandwidth was available. So, what they were actually saying was: Your throughput will be lower than the "up to" number we advertise, but, once in a while, we'll come up with short bursts of speed, that approach the advertised max.
And, as Groucho once said, I don't care how you slice it, it's still baloney, to me."
Some people will be fine with that. And I know a few people, in other markets, (Waterford, CT, for one), who get very good sustained throughput on their Comcast accounts.
The whole 'Powerboost' hype is only when available, and only for the first part of a large file. The TCP window isn't even open long enough to take advantage of it, for normal web surfing because most web servers are specifically set up to NOT saturate every customer's line (which is reasonable, obviously), and, as well, most pages get served as repeated HTTP Requests for every little image, spacer, etc, so, again, no burst window of opportunity. I saw this discrepancy between advertised vs. real life behaviour, all the time, I kid you not.
I don't run Bit-Torrent or any P2P stuff, at all, ever. But I used to. And the presence or potential presence of 'bursts' is not cool for those type of transfers, either. I think part of the reason for that might be the huge 'gap' between download vs. upload width. It's not that hard, with good servers on the remote end (capable of saturating any, multi-tap requesting IP) to actually overwhelm the upload stream, locally, with ACK packets. And when the uploading ACKs fall off, all hell can break loose. That can get messy, and the workaround is usually to self-manage (throttle) the incoming stream, on the User's own end, by user choice.
I saw degradation of real-world use parameters, from the second day after the TW-to-Comcast changeover, here in Minneapolis. It was depressing, but you know we're all troopers out here, and we deal with the situation as is, rather than 'as-wished', or, certainly in Comcast's case, 'as advertised'.
They have a 150 or something dollar a month plan now, that is basically a set bandwidth, with the same artificial 'boost', or doubling of bandwidth, that runs on the same exact principle of irregular, when-available, artificial temporary boosts. It is advertised "Up to 50Mb. Caveat emptor, that's what I say.
There are a lot of co-factors, and, of course, my experience, even very accurately portrayed is only anecdotal. I saw the same issue after a TW-Comcast changeover down South. But again, there are others who would find the same situations tolerable, or even 'transparent' (as non-issues, in other words). But here in the Twin Cities I think it's a sad situation. I'm with Qwest, what can I say? As far as the issue of tech support goes, I never have trouble with ANY company's tech support people, because I see them as being people, like us, who don't need me to play I'm-smarter-than-you, or you're-ruining-my-life games,ever. On the rare occasions where I lose it, I go out of my way to apologize and explain. That, a little patience, and, of course, the ability to 'lower myself' and 'accept' reality, are very helpful in dealing with this stuff.
Oh man... I honestly hope I am wrong here, and that all goes well for you, but, if it does go well, send me an email. Because my experience, in several markets, limited to what happened when Comcast bought out the local Time-Warner franchise, has been disgusting, the kind of thing that might make a less-disciplined fellow attempt to pull his own teeth, bare-handed.
I 'm afraid you're in for a rude surprise. I actually hate Comcast, based, not an innuendo, or 'fashionable' consensus, but on personal experience, only. Good luck, I think you'll need it, unless the market you move into is one in which Comcast offers some huge-priced corporate plan of some kind.
I'll get modded down, redundant, but I really don't care because that goes straight to the heart of the matter.
I went from a Comcast cable Internet connect to Qwest DSL. Ironically, I was getting much wider, consistent throughput, while hopping on to an open wireless Comcast connection, in the same neighborhood (not leaving my place at all) as my Comcast connection was. I just couldn't deal with that.
So, I moved downtown into Minneapolis and switched to Qwest, on political grounds, and realizing I would take a hit in peak/burst bandwidth, but hopefully have a more consistent, even if slower, experience.
I had a tech out here to check out the actual wires, and we found a voltage drop at a frayed telephone terminal. Fixed it, measured down and up bandwidth on a scope, at the wire, after the modem, after the Vonage box, and online, through a test web site for Qwest techs. 7.6MB down, 876 or so up, at each and every tested segment.
So, what do I really have here? About 800 KB down, if it's the middle of the night, using multiple feeds off a Deutsche Telecom backbone from a RapidShare, etc. Okay, 800 KB is what, 5 6Mbits down? Is that right? So, where are the other two Mb's down? And why the huge discrepancies in basic throughputs at different, hard to gauge, (consistently) times of day, etc?
I see alerts, occasionally, that a page (which maybe downloaded to cache, 75 out of 76 items), has not opened because 'the connection to the server has been reset.' That sounds like an injected RST to me. Am I paranoid? What software can anyone recommend for me to monitor actual packets in an effort to establish what's up with my situation? (Windows or Mac), as I haven't been able to get this PowerBook to actually run Linux for several years (don't ask on that one, it's too insane to get a grip on). Thanks.
First, I want to say that I hope your brother made a full return to health and is doing well, and secondly, that I assume you are very proud of your father. Working people have been the backbone of all civilizations that ever amounted to anything.
But, you know, there are some 'cracks' in our system. I acquired a disease in Canada, from tainted blood, 15 years ago, and now that I have been back home in the States for 7 years, the virus went deadly on me. Through a bankruptcy of a company I worked for in Florida, and an extended period of serious unemployment in Upstate New York, I found myself having to shut down a new company of my own, in order to be clearly poor enough to qualify for Medical Assistance here in Minneapolis.
On the one hand, I am very grateful that the State has found a way to cover my chemotherapy. I'm indebted to them for that. But I should have been able to get some sort of affordable coverage AND continue to work. But that wasn't possible in NY, and furthermore, they wanted me to sue my ex-wife, who is 20 years separated, and the mother of my daughter, or NY State would turn me down. Which they did, twice. Minnesota, on the other hand, said my wife was in the clear as long as there was no joint property.
So, here I am, on very heavy chemo, living on $203 and $162 of food support, per month. It is tough, my friend, I kid you not. I am actually entitled to a payout, in a settlement of a class action, from the funds set up by the Canadian Red Cross, but need a lawyer to do the deal. I missed two payouts (the last being in 2004) already, due to my misreading of the days of qualification. I had thought it was from 1986 to 1990, but, in fact, it was from before 1986, or after 1990. I got my disease in the Vic, in Montreal, during 18 operations and 5 weeks in ICU, from December '92 to March '93.
The disease has been undetectable for four months now, but I still have 5 months of Interferon/Ribavirin to deal with yet. I consider myself very fortunate. But, in all honesty, I see room for improvement in the system, itself.
Maybe sometimes, but in this case it's just evidence that guys need to start reading something besides WoW manuals, and stuff like that. Poe, of course, would be a fine place to start. And yeah, it was funny, too subtle for this crowd, except us geniuses. /ducks :)
This bona fide idiot gets a +5 Insightful? WTF! I can't tell the morons from the assholes, when the mods give guys like this a run for the money. Yeah, click on everything, that's a safe bet. What a schmuck.
No kidding. The one I like goes like this: Hit a webloc or URI in another app, and Firefox, my default browser, launches. Then an empty browser window opens, and a javascript alert box pops up and says: "There's an update", or "NoScript has an update", etc, right? So, I hit 'later' thinking get out of my way, and what happens? Nothing. The fucking app has already lost track of the webloc that launched it.
I'm just glad these guys aren't in avionics or some other mission-critical area of programming. Very glad.
Yes, they do. That's one of the main reasons they both roll in mud, so it will coat their skin, and offer some protection.
This is an issue that can clearly be seen in the lives and health of elephants, for example, who are part of the Circus business. If untreated by veterinarians, and deprived of mud (which they are, of course, at least during circus seasons), insects can actually drive an elephant insane.
They use water, in a pinch, to avoid large swarms, if they can. And the elephant will inhale dust into their trunks, in order to blow it back, to clear away and partially protect from bites. You see this a lot, when the elephants go into the water, and then emerge and gather up some dust, right away, to blow back onto their wet hides. They know dust plus water equals mud, somehow.
Where it gets extremely inhumane, and sometimes fatal, is in the circus and poorer zoo populations, where insects will gravitate to the elephants forehead area, and especially, between the eyes, because elephants are not likely to blow dust into their own eye areas, and very often, out of sight of the people who go to these places, the elephants not only have their legs chained together, they often have their trunks chained (basically 'pinned') to the ground, also, which obviously denies them their instinctive methods for dealing with pests. Without intervention this can drive them insane and/or kill them, depending on the severity of the situation, and what the health of the insects is like, at the time.
Elephants, despite their size, are very sensitive creatures. They are, after all, sentient beings, and girth is not usually related to pain and other emotions. In captivity they are already at a distinct disadvantage, in that they are very stressed, almost constantly, at not being in their own herd.
On the Mac you would have a hard time finding another browser that is so steadily going down the tubes, with every so-called new release or update (whatever buzzword they're using now
It failed to load the css stylesheet for Slashdot, just now, but a refresh, coming from another link on the style-butchered page brought up the CSS. If you're on another platform you cannot imagine what a huge pain in the ass it is.
So why use it, right? I mean, if you don't like it, use something you think is better. I know that, and I feel bad bitching, but I use the Web Developer add-on all the time, and on Qwest dsl, it's convenient to use FlashBlock.
The versions of web developer-like plugins for Safari, just suck; it's as simple as that. Otherwise I'd be on Safari. But it's far more proprietary-behaving than Firefox.
Let's face it, they set out to make a better browser that would feel 'comfy' to Windows Internet Explorer users, and they seem to have succeeded, I guess. But it is not a Mac thing, at all. I tend to gravitate towards apps that, if they are supposedly designed to work on multiple platforms, they try to pay at least some minor attention to the platform's API. Firefox fails on this count. I'd rather use IE in Windows 2000 Pro, any day of the week. And I would, if it wasn't for a shitload of Adobe apps on my Mac setup.
Why don't the Firefox developers just borrow somebody else's balls and say, "The Macintosh is too small of an installed footprint, so we don't give a shit." And that would be fine with me. I use an Apple, I, myself, am NOT Apple. And besides that, wanna know what I think? If Mozila/Firebox borrowed those balls and said, "We're sorry, we're really a Windows app..." I'll bet they'd have several hundred million more downloads, globally, for Windows OS. Think about it
If the new version is better on Linux and Windows, well I say congratulations. And I mean it, because I don't want other people's experience with software to be shitty, because I know what that's like. I get enough of that with fucking Apple OS.
That's why setting the Timestamp to Zero (in ENV) is so nifty. Your 'spy', which is really an opportunistic piggy-back rider on the window of time after a su or sudo (or giving an Installer 'admin' privileges, etc) misses the admin/root escalation time in your terminal by one clock and it's closed already. (zero sometimes really means zero). No simultaneous anything happening, all is sequential. So if the escalation has 'zero' lifetime, it's over for enemies that are just polling the OS with "Do we have admin access, or root?" with the environment set right, that question returns a zero, every time. I think this is, what, 35, or is it 40 year old Unix basic stuff?
OS X has a 5 minute window following privilege escalation, by default. That's about equal parts scary and stupid, I would think.
I'll bet, but on the other hand, it's probably a case of bye bye dingleberries, forever.
new anally-mounted turbo-prop with the latest beta of what's been referred to as a 'cloaking device.' In related news this morning, Haliburton announced that they had been awarded a no-bid contract to supply the US Olympics Aquatics canteen with 100 kilos, each, of refried beans and extremely cheap tamales. Jalapenos, originally part of the same contract, were struck from the deal after what were termed, 'surprises', disrupted the ladies afternoon practice heats."
Sure, water, right. Look, if the last sixty years has taught us anything, it's that, obviously, the US must have found some labor organizers and such, with no air defenses and a society, or so-called 'sovereign nation', that is too impoverished to defend themselves.
A few factors. BUT the easiest explanation is that Market Cap, is simply the price of a company's stock at any given point in time, multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. It is NOT conjecture, speculation or a judgment call, at all; it is a simple case of math, with no relation to underlying technical or fundamental realities of the company.
I don't have the time/energy at the moment to type much. But the first reason is that the investment community is comfortable (so far) with the fact that AAPL trades at a much higher price/earnings ratio (earnings divided by shares outstanding) than any other company in their industry.
Another obvious factor is earnings per share. Apple creams the competition here, which also feeds the 'conventional' attitude (de facto 'comfort') towards the high p/e.
Apple is priced as a growth stock. So when there's obvious momentum (now, and for quite a while, actually) in Apple's gross sales, operating margin and earnings per share, [Sounds like 'Bingo!', no?] then of course their higher p/e is more easily rationalized.
However,if they got repriced as a value stock, say a major domo in there dies, or earnings per share and quarterly growth start slipping too much, then look out below. Then there's 'market risk' which is simply a case of being a healthy stock, in a Market that has been judged 'sick', never mind the details like p/e's and earnings per share.
But right now, and for a while, Their price/earnings ratio is at least double that of any competitor (I'm rounding off a bit, please don't quote me). I don't 'like' the company for personal reasons. But, to bring a company 'back' from abyss, and then not just 'hold market share', or simply survive, but to thrive the way they have. That's worthy of something like respect. You don't see that all the time, no kidding.
I am not arguing or disagreeing, because I don't know what the case is. But is this verifiable from a survey or something? The only reason I ask is that I grew up during 50s/60s/70s and the Walkman was like Kleenex. I mean, I know the chemo is messing up my memory/recall to a degree, but I seem to remember the walkman as being synonymous with portable music devices back in the day. Sony was criticized heavily for having so many versions of it. I think their showroom in Tokyo had hundreds of Walkmans, that were all in production. Back in teeny-bopper Japan days (when people used these things called pens and pencils to make marks called 'drawings' and 'writing'), you could hit the Big Time, and become a has been, in about 8 days.
Sony did their level best to stay abreast of the styles etc coming up from the street. Apple, more accurately reflecting modern American marketing, imposes upon, rather than draws from, in order to keep costs down. That's how it appears to me. iTunes 7x had a fatal I/O operation with an external drive several days ago here at home, while my ten gig first gen iPod was plugged in, and totally destroyed the booting/reading/recognizing of my old iPod, for good.
iTunes, the app, is what... a file manager on the file side, a database on the lib side. And the stupid HFS+ incompatible with Unix-like systems file system looks its worst running with iTunes. If I was the guy who decided to keep the Finder 8 years ago, I would fucking kill myself, as a favor to the whole world. I've been an Apple client since '79, and I absolutely despise these people.
They turned it into a toy store, and destroyed NeXTSTEP, for no extra charge. At least they had the decency to drop "Computer" from the company's official name.
My clients buy me a new apple laptop every couple years. I stopped buying their shit when the Powerbook 150 was 'new'. Fuck those guys. I only use it because of Adobe. (and, yeah, fuck them, too)
..and everything, but, what's that sms'd exchange going to cost the hero? I have a rough over/under of 5,000..
Same here. at first I thought it had something to do with the Canadian Actor's union. (That's ACTRA, though.)
Of course standard operating procedure, in anything like professional journalism, compels the author/editor to show the non-abbreviated entity being referred to, at the first instance of the acronym's use in any article. And it does not matter how many people are assumed to 'know' the acronym, or not.
So, in an article about, say, ACTRA, you would see a sentence like this, near the top:
"ACTRA (Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists) is a national organization of more than 21,000 professional performers working in the English-language recorded media."
See? That's not so difficult is it? Remember, even the most intelligent folks don't necessarily 'know everything'.
Re: USENET:
I wouldn't trade Usenet access for BitTorrent in a thousand years.
With ten simultaneous feeds to a body of material that has been posted by recognized characters, and 'peer-reviewed' (a la "avoid this", etc) on the balance of big posts, and no worries that all the 'seeders' have the same 98% of the file, and we're gonna have to wait for some schmuck in the Ukraine to flip his box on to get the rest...
My Giganews account will saturate any number of feeds. No waiting for all the p2p horseshit. You can have BitTorrent. (and any other 'p2p' formats and apps out there, too).
I'm all for sharing, sure. That's what uploading to Usenet is for. But the 'sharing' aspect, and 'distributed' hosting aspect of BT (et al) sounds way better in theory than it works out in practice. Why? Because the p2p users can fuck up with anything, and there is no threaded commenting on posts, so bullshit can sit right along better versions of similar files. It's a crapshoot, and with the stupid prices and caps of shiity American bandwidth today, I can't afford to take big gambles on DVD-sized (38-CD sized, etc) downloads. The Usenet people know what to do with pnn files, so even in rare cases of partials mixed in with complete segments, it's all retrievable/reparable.
I DO like the idea of BitTorrent. Sharing is good. But the de facto situation with it, and adding in ISP (Comcast, etc) interference with packets, and for me it's a no-go deal. Do I think others should abandon BT because 'flipper' doesn't like it? Hell no. It's just not for me, that's all.
And I'm glad the ISPs are dropping their not-even-half-assed Usenet coverage. Hopefully we'll see fewer of the noobs with their "This post is incomplete on my server" (After which, glancing at the post 'details' we see it's from yet-Another verizon, comcast, whatever user).
So, hooray for getting Usenet off the ISPs, back in 'the dark' where the people who use it, understand it, and contribute, can do what we've always done: understand, use, contribute.
The one figurehead, 'boss', is the Attorney General, but the actual offices, comprised of other attorneys and staff, is known as the office of the attorneys general [attorneys=plural, 'general' being singular]. So, no, using the term 'generals' is not correct, at all.
Probably a little of both. You can do searches for things like DVD, divx, VCD, etc.
I gamed the Earthlink 2GB max by constantly deleting and recreating 'new' 'alias' account names associated with my main account. They offered 5 users (like a 'family', I suppose) and I had 5 names. So, those 5 were good for ten GB, and as one or two or more of them reached their download saturation amount, I just dumped and reinvented. Worked very well, actually.
The newest films tend to come out as video handheld items. The other nice versions of newer things are all copies of the US and British film awards groups. The film companies issue 'screeners' so that all the academy members can see everthing without leaving their homes.
The best thing you can do is figure out your Usenet software app's "Search" and anti-spam filtering. This is serious hobby material, when one is fully-engaged in the pursuit of files..
If you have commercial Usenet you can also use Google and NZBdrop or other NZB collector, and you feed it a title that was posted elsewhere, and it then uses your, say, Giganews, access to fully saturate the max number of simultaneous feeds coming off the remote server to your machine. HTH
Really? If that's the case, then why did president Bush say he would veto the bill if it didn't include the blanket amnesty for all crimes committed by the telecoms on behalf of the government? FISA already allowed an 'anything goes' situation, wherein the tap could be placed and a request filed several days after the fact.
My point is this: Why let Obama off the hook based on the lame excuse that we needed even looser rules governing the invasion of US citizens privacy, when the Administration came right out and said, "No telecom immunity = veto"
The whole rationale for the bill had nothing to do with the terrorists, so much as it has to do with the treasonous individuals who believe the President is above the law, and that he can order companies and individuals to break existing laws.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the President can order a citizen to do anything. And the Trials at Nuremberg supposedly settled that whole notion of "I was only following orders" or "The government asked me to do it" as a grounds for innocence.
Every person in Congress should be arrested, by the military, and held pending trials (also by the military). The Congress and Courts are all in the same boat, aiding and abetting the destruction of the Constitution, and other felonious crimes. The military people take an oath to protect the Constitution from enemies both within and without. So, where are the generals? Fifty or sixty hangings and several hundred guys behind bars for life would seriously encourage future elected officials to take their oaths seriously.
As for Obama, I knew he was a phony right from the start, no surprise there.