Yessir! My Father, a Grandpa incidentally, switched from pen and paper design to CAD back in the 70s. Helped invent it really. I have no doubt his feedback on the early programs had an effect on how they work today. Oh, and no, they didn't have Windows. Fortran and Cobol. I remember trying to make heads or tails of his Fortran books when I was in high school, and the computer was something Mr. Spock got answers from.
Yes, in a word. IMNAL and I don't know Australian law, but the art of parody manages to thrive there as well as in the US. This isn't even really a question as much as a statement.
It is also typical of the new customer service model; "Your satisfaction guaranteed, or we'll sue you". Companies instead of answering the public or ignoring parody aggressively attack it. It's a step up from Mob tactics, but a short step.
Anecdotally, I get a terrible headache that lasts for hours if I talk even 30 seconds on a cell phone. I'm probably not typical, but I'm certain cell phones aren't as harmless as most folks (and regulatory agencies) think.
I was a long time newspaper reader. I picked up the habit when I was a paperboy, and it continued throughout my life. About ten years ago I realized that the only thing I was reading anymore was the comics and the feature page. The rest of the paper was pure dreck.
The local papers lost a reader that day. And it wasn't TV, it wasn't the Internet, it was purely a case of the quality of the product had dropped below my tolerance point.
I have since picked up several Internet sites as news sources, I prefer several for a more balanced view, and funny, but none are run by papers.
Mules can reproduce, or at least try very hard. There are three known cases of mules successfully breeding. The difficulty comes from the chromosome pair difference between donkeys and horses. Mules have all the parts and plenty of will.
Simple is not necessarily naive. At the most basic level what is life? What are the things that life does that non life does not? Eat and breed looks like that basic difference to me.
Metabolism and reproduction I do believe are the hallmarks of life. So catalysts are not alive, and plenty of catalysts exist. It has to eat something, and copy itself some how.
Well, it is possible. Life Jim, but not as we know it. What it does bring up is the star system with nothing but giant planets might have moons with life. Hey, it could happen.
Now if we could only be successful in finding intelligent life in Washington DC
I'm a classic end user. I installed Linux myself, use it myself with the occasional question to "tech support", my friends. It isn't rocket science. And no, not one machine. I have three installs on three different computers and one is a laptop. No that is not much compared to a pro. But once it was working, I stopped installing it. Installs are not my idea of fun. Installing Linux can be as hard as you make it, or as easy as you make it. That said.
The main cause of secure problems is stupid people. Laptops should be so locked down there users can barely do e-mail, or the user should be trained to not be stupid. Laptops must be treated as what they are, a door into your business. Businesses would not leave the physical doors unlocked, and they shouldn't leave the virtual doors unlocked.
I've got this on my things to do list right behind cleaning up the Earth crossing asteroids and preventing Yellowstone from erupting. Mind you this is right behind world hunger and the energy crisis. And once I have the gamma burst danger in control I'll tackle the tough one, Mid-east peace.
Yes, the possibility is real. Yes it could have happened in the past. It will happen again. Why should we worry about it?
This is the kind of thing I call Disasterbation. Like the recent run of "Yellowstone will kill us all" programs on the infortainment networks. Forgive me if finding a cheaper wireless rate is higher on my things to do list. Yes, we need to do something about the threats we can do something about. Those asteroids for example. That threat is within our ability to control if not yet within the public will to do something about it. I wonder how big a city has to be smacked before that will will exist?
I am of the opinion we should put our physical and mental energy into problems we can deal with.
Yep, I have a copy. One of the members of MDLUG dropped by at the December meeting with a stack of the disks. I dropped the Ubuntu Live disk in my Thinkpad 600X and rebooted. It kernal panicked in under 10 seconds. And it repeated the behavior the three times I tried it, even from a cold boot.
Now my thinkpad 600X is no one's power machine, but with 320 meg of ram it certainly met the requirements for the Ubuntu Live CD. The hadware is many years old and should not be a mystery either. SuSE 9.0 installed found eveything and it runs just dandy.
I still have the disks. The time has not presented itself to drop the Ubuntu Live CD in one of my more powerful desktop systems and see what happens. Hopefully something better than with my laptop. So on a slow day I'll give Ubuntu another chance. Hopefully it will not end up in my forgotten OS pile with Linsipre and Yellow Dog.
However, going on first impressions it has failed to make a good one.
SCO's the corporate world's equivalent of those assholes you see with stretched earlobes, eight piercings in the bridge of their noses and tribal tattoos in place of their shaved eyebrows.
Now see here my good man, isn't that really selling those assholes you see with stretched earlobes, eight piercings in the bridge of their noses and tribal tattoos in place of their shaved eyebrows short in the respect department? Now, really. Comparing them to SCO? That is cold sir, cold I say.
Price is the thing I was looking for as well. I tried half a dozen retailer on ASUS' list and on not one could I find the system listed.
Oh, and I don't like the handler either. The suggestion to build it to stack with TV components is a good one. Ye olde slimline desktop would be perfect. Mix that with a nice big hard drive and MythTV and you have a system.
Posted over a foreman's desk in one of the factories I once worked in before the IT age.
I'm not allowed to run the Train
The whistle I can't blow.
I'm not allowed to say how far
The Train's allowed to go.
I'm not allowed ot blow off steam,
Or even clang the bell.
But let the Damn Thing jump the track, And see who catches HELL.
Nothing changes but the names and places. I have no doubt this, or a local variation thereof, is scribed on a rock somehwere in the Great Pyrimad
I thought they were supposed to prevent stuff like this... or is it a matter of "once the crime's been comitted, the damage is done permanently" so the law can't possibly compensate enough for the loss? Also, does it being probably international screw up the judicial process?
No "law" has ever protected anyone. The best a law can do is punish after the fact. The worse it can do is assume everyone is guilty and forbid an otherwise harmless or multi use technology or behavior to criminal and law-abider alike. This is assuming the public at large has no legit use for the forbidden thing, even if that is patently not the case, such as making DVD copying software illegal because "someone" might copy and sell movies. Which still will not keep this from happening. They are callled "criminals" becasue they break the law.
Therefore is is better to not have a law than to have a law. However even if there is a law, it cannot protect you. Laws have existed for thousands of years, and they have been willfully broken for thousands of years. I don't see a change in that trend.
I mean, seriously, I used to play MP3s on my old Pentium 100MHz, while doing other work with them... their hardware would have to be very limited to not be able to keep up with that.
Translation, they don't want to. I play MP3s on my 40 MHz Amiga, while doing other work with it. I would suspect the "hardware limtation" is a built in anti-mp3 layer in the chip.
I am not the happiest person with Sony. The last three things I bought from them, two I had to return for being broken out of the box, and the last is missing a simple feature my old Pioneer CD player had. Once it played a selection in shuffle, it didn't play it again. I only bought it becasue it holds 400 CDs. Then again, with the price of hard drives dropping, and the storage going up. 50 cents a gig last I looked. Just rip the CDs to wave and store the physical disks in the basement.
So you spent more on SuSe Pro then an OEM copy of Windows XP Home would have run you. But you complain that XP is overpriced. Shesh.
C|Net shopper.com
Windows XP home Edition. From: $157-$213
Windows XP Professional Edition, From: $176-$325
SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional Edition, From $46-$50
Now, what are you getting?
With XP home a crippled version of Pro. With Pro you get the OS, and a few toys. A few, Paint, notepad, IE etc. ONE Interface, a GUI with limited choices in the UI and a crippled CLI.
With SuSE Linux you get five CDs packed with software. Open Office, Gimp, sound and video editors, full development and sever tools, several web browsers, several mail programs, including the tools to be your own mail server. Not just software but interface. KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker, Blackbox, several consols for CLI with differing command sets and abilities. and more. The list goes on. I did a typical install and I having installed a fraction of the software I still have not pressed all the buttons and found out what everything does.
For the money alone, ignoring the security and reliability issues SuSE is a better value out of the box. A hell of a lot more bang for the software buck.
I installed SuSE linux, I bought it. I have yet to buy another piece of software. Thus far, a year into windows free, I have found a tool that came in the box for everything I needed to do.
Not just that but I get to choose the level of helping hand I want. Anything from a bare CLI to a number of tricked out GUI interfaces with the feature sets I want.
Yes, Grandma can install it too. For the internet and productivity minded, why buy windows?
The plot was right from the worse of the AD&D novels. The cinematography was of a quality that most high school film classes would grade a "D", or lower. The acting was so wooden they made the sets for the next no budget film from it. FX? It is to laugh, except they make you cry.
I paid money to see that Turkey, and I want my 94 minutes back, to Hell with the money. It wasn't even bad enough to be good, it was just bad.
One of the other factors that makes the service so appealing to me is I trust Google, unlike Microsoft or Yahoo, to not sell my email address. When the company who gave you the email address is handing it out to the spammers (or spamming the box themselves), something is wrong.
Like many computer users I have a couple of hotmail accounts for spam catching. I go in once a week and flush it out. I don't read any of it I just flush it out.
I created one address as a joke, I sent one mail, got the reaction I wanted, and promptly forgot about it. Well, when the week rolled around I check it and sure enough, it caught nearly as much spam as my advertised address. Some of it within hours of the creation.
I was reading about the U.S. airforce's SAGE systems a while ago. They built a couple of dozen of these tube-based computers that consumed ~1 megawatt each. The last ones weren't taken offline until the 1980s.
I know a fellow that worked on the SAGE machines. Maintainace was constant thing. Some tube or another was always blowing out. They had to track it down and replace it. They did get to do fun things. Like programing it to print a banner that said "Merry Christmas" Took six weeks of flipping switches and turning keys.
Make sure you tell you keyboard and mouse how much you love them and polish your flat screen with the greatest love. The good old days, weren't
Slashdot Mirror
Hurricane Name list. I don't think anyone suggested it.
Yessir! My Father, a Grandpa incidentally, switched from pen and paper design to CAD back in the 70s. Helped invent it really. I have no doubt his feedback on the early programs had an effect on how they work today. Oh, and no, they didn't have Windows. Fortran and Cobol. I remember trying to make heads or tails of his Fortran books when I was in high school, and the computer was something Mr. Spock got answers from.
It is also typical of the new customer service model; "Your satisfaction guaranteed, or we'll sue you". Companies instead of answering the public or ignoring parody aggressively attack it. It's a step up from Mob tactics, but a short step.
Beat me to that one with the exact wording.
Turn down the volume.
I was a long time newspaper reader. I picked up the habit when I was a paperboy, and it continued throughout my life. About ten years ago I realized that the only thing I was reading anymore was the comics and the feature page. The rest of the paper was pure dreck.
The local papers lost a reader that day. And it wasn't TV, it wasn't the Internet, it was purely a case of the quality of the product had dropped below my tolerance point.
I have since picked up several Internet sites as news sources, I prefer several for a more balanced view, and funny, but none are run by papers.
Simple is not necessarily naive. At the most basic level what is life? What are the things that life does that non life does not? Eat and breed looks like that basic difference to me.
Metabolism and reproduction I do believe are the hallmarks of life. So catalysts are not alive, and plenty of catalysts exist. It has to eat something, and copy itself some how.
Now if we could only be successful in finding intelligent life in Washington DC
The main cause of secure problems is stupid people. Laptops should be so locked down there users can barely do e-mail, or the user should be trained to not be stupid. Laptops must be treated as what they are, a door into your business. Businesses would not leave the physical doors unlocked, and they shouldn't leave the virtual doors unlocked.
Yes, the possibility is real. Yes it could have happened in the past. It will happen again. Why should we worry about it?
This is the kind of thing I call Disasterbation. Like the recent run of "Yellowstone will kill us all" programs on the infortainment networks. Forgive me if finding a cheaper wireless rate is higher on my things to do list. Yes, we need to do something about the threats we can do something about. Those asteroids for example. That threat is within our ability to control if not yet within the public will to do something about it. I wonder how big a city has to be smacked before that will will exist?
I am of the opinion we should put our physical and mental energy into problems we can deal with.
Now my thinkpad 600X is no one's power machine, but with 320 meg of ram it certainly met the requirements for the Ubuntu Live CD. The hadware is many years old and should not be a mystery either. SuSE 9.0 installed found eveything and it runs just dandy.
I still have the disks. The time has not presented itself to drop the Ubuntu Live CD in one of my more powerful desktop systems and see what happens. Hopefully something better than with my laptop. So on a slow day I'll give Ubuntu another chance. Hopefully it will not end up in my forgotten OS pile with Linsipre and Yellow Dog.
However, going on first impressions it has failed to make a good one.
Now see here my good man, isn't that really selling those assholes you see with stretched earlobes, eight piercings in the bridge of their noses and tribal tattoos in place of their shaved eyebrows short in the respect department? Now, really. Comparing them to SCO? That is cold sir, cold I say.
Price is the thing I was looking for as well. I tried half a dozen retailer on ASUS' list and on not one could I find the system listed.
Oh, and I don't like the handler either. The suggestion to build it to stack with TV components is a good one. Ye olde slimline desktop would be perfect. Mix that with a nice big hard drive and MythTV and you have a system.
Now, if there was only TV worth watching.
Or, would that be, "reds"?
I'm not allowed to run the Train
The whistle I can't blow.
I'm not allowed to say how far
The Train's allowed to go.
I'm not allowed ot blow off steam,
Or even clang the bell.
But let the Damn Thing jump the track,
And see who catches HELL.
Nothing changes but the names and places. I have no doubt this, or a local variation thereof, is scribed on a rock somehwere in the Great Pyrimad
No "law" has ever protected anyone. The best a law can do is punish after the fact. The worse it can do is assume everyone is guilty and forbid an otherwise harmless or multi use technology or behavior to criminal and law-abider alike. This is assuming the public at large has no legit use for the forbidden thing, even if that is patently not the case, such as making DVD copying software illegal because "someone" might copy and sell movies. Which still will not keep this from happening. They are callled "criminals" becasue they break the law.
Therefore is is better to not have a law than to have a law. However even if there is a law, it cannot protect you. Laws have existed for thousands of years, and they have been willfully broken for thousands of years. I don't see a change in that trend.
Translation, they don't want to. I play MP3s on my 40 MHz Amiga, while doing other work with it. I would suspect the "hardware limtation" is a built in anti-mp3 layer in the chip.
I am not the happiest person with Sony. The last three things I bought from them, two I had to return for being broken out of the box, and the last is missing a simple feature my old Pioneer CD player had. Once it played a selection in shuffle, it didn't play it again. I only bought it becasue it holds 400 CDs. Then again, with the price of hard drives dropping, and the storage going up. 50 cents a gig last I looked. Just rip the CDs to wave and store the physical disks in the basement.
C|Net shopper.com
Windows XP home Edition. From: $157-$213
Windows XP Professional Edition, From: $176-$325
SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional Edition, From $46-$50
Now, what are you getting?
With XP home a crippled version of Pro. With Pro you get the OS, and a few toys. A few, Paint, notepad, IE etc. ONE Interface, a GUI with limited choices in the UI and a crippled CLI.
With SuSE Linux you get five CDs packed with software. Open Office, Gimp, sound and video editors, full development and sever tools, several web browsers, several mail programs, including the tools to be your own mail server. Not just software but interface. KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker, Blackbox, several consols for CLI with differing command sets and abilities. and more. The list goes on. I did a typical install and I having installed a fraction of the software I still have not pressed all the buttons and found out what everything does.
For the money alone, ignoring the security and reliability issues SuSE is a better value out of the box. A hell of a lot more bang for the software buck.
I installed SuSE linux, I bought it. I have yet to buy another piece of software. Thus far, a year into windows free, I have found a tool that came in the box for everything I needed to do.
Not just that but I get to choose the level of helping hand I want. Anything from a bare CLI to a number of tricked out GUI interfaces with the feature sets I want.
Yes, Grandma can install it too. For the internet and productivity minded, why buy windows?
The plot was right from the worse of the AD&D novels. The cinematography was of a quality that most high school film classes would grade a "D", or lower. The acting was so wooden they made the sets for the next no budget film from it. FX? It is to laugh, except they make you cry.
I paid money to see that Turkey, and I want my 94 minutes back, to Hell with the money. It wasn't even bad enough to be good, it was just bad.
Oh, and just so it is known they are NOT paying 37c a piece. They have a business reply bulk rate, you can bet on it.
That said, money is money, and money spent to get blank survays back would be a bear. I wouldn't even print the survey side. Just the reply side.
Like many computer users I have a couple of hotmail accounts for spam catching. I go in once a week and flush it out. I don't read any of it I just flush it out.
I created one address as a joke, I sent one mail, got the reaction I wanted, and promptly forgot about it. Well, when the week rolled around I check it and sure enough, it caught nearly as much spam as my advertised address. Some of it within hours of the creation.
But we all know what hotmail is for, don't we.
Science Fiction is always a better reflector of the present than it is a light shed on the future.
I know a fellow that worked on the SAGE machines. Maintainace was constant thing. Some tube or another was always blowing out. They had to track it down and replace it. They did get to do fun things. Like programing it to print a banner that said "Merry Christmas" Took six weeks of flipping switches and turning keys. Make sure you tell you keyboard and mouse how much you love them and polish your flat screen with the greatest love. The good old days, weren't