People usually aren't even that concerned with what time it is. More often, they need to know how long it is until something happens... quitting time, the movie starting, whatever. If you know the movie starts at 8:00, you can tell with a quick glance at your analog watch that you've got about 5 minutes. With a digital watch you've got to read the number, process it, compare it... There's a reason why aircraft and racing cars still use analog gauges.
The summer after I graduated high school, I got a job with a miniatures casting company here in Dallas. Grenadier, I think. This was in 1978, and D&D was still something new and cool. Well, it was to me anyway.
So it's summer, Dallas, 100+ degrees outside. I'm inside a warehouse with no air conditioning, pouring molten tin/lead mixture into these heavy rubber molds to make miniatures. Have to wear work gloves and long pants for safety reasons. Got a nice hot flame going to keep the metal at the right temp. Calling it hot and uncomfortable would be an understatement.
Only two good things... we had a couple of fans to keep the air moving, and we got paid the princely sum of $4.50 an hour.
Advertising doesn't have to be annoying, but it needs to be effective. If annoying ads are the most effective, then that's what we'll be seeing. It doesn't matter how much consumers complain, or swear that they wont' visit a website again, or whatever... if annoying, intrusive ads continue to get more clicks then "polite" ones, we'll keep seeing them. Actions speak much louder then words in this case.
You can't be too careful when you're raiding the homes of suspected hackers. You know they all play those shooting games, like Earthquake and Counter Strike, so they're pretty much trained killers.
I had just installed our new cable modem the previous day, over my wifes mild objections. She just wasn't convinced that we needed all that speed.
Her best friend was visiting, and they were talking about this new song they'd heard on the drive over - "Sugar" by System of a Down. While they were arguing about whether they should buy the CD just to get that song, I went to my newly-installed Napster, downloaded it, and cranked the speakers.
They spent the next two hours remembering songs and asking me to download them. I went the next day to buy a router so that my wife could share the broadband connection on her computer. She bought the SOAD CD because she loved all their songs. I took her to see them live in Austin a year or so later.
And no more arguments that we didn't need all that bandwidth.
I have a card through my local credit union that can be used as a Visa credit card or as a debit card. It works the same way as far as my account is concerned, the charge won't be approved unless I have funds deposited to cover. It's just that one way I have to punch in my PIN, and the other way I have to sign a credit slip.
At least, that's the way it used to be. The CU announced a few months ago that as of 1/1/04 they'll be charging a flat 35 cent fee for all purchases made using the card as a debit card. So I can debit a purchase and pay the commission myself, or credit card it and let the merchant pay the CC transaction fee.
On the RFID thing, we had something similar here a couple of years ago. I live in the far north Dallas/Telecom corridor area, just a couple of blocks off the Bush Tollway. Virtually every car around here has a Tolltag, a little RFID chip that you fasten to the corner of your windshield. Having one lets you speed through all the toll booths, instead of having to slow down and pay each time. Costs are charged to your credit card. Our local McDonalds, which is on the tollway access road, had signs up a couple of years ago advertising that you could use their drive-through and charge it to your tolltag. I haven't seen the signs in a while, I don't know if it's been discontinued, or if they're just not promoting it as heavily.
As far as a theft risk... you'd have an easy time stealing tolltag codes. Just walk through any parking lot around here, and you'll have your choice of a few dozen tags. You could do it from a reasonable distance too, since the tollbooth readers pick it up from vehicles doing 60 mph at a distance of 10 or 20 feet. I haven't heard anything about a big business with stolen tag codes, though. It would be pretty easy for the tollway authority to track illegal usage. They already have cameras in place to catch people who drive through the tolltag lane without a valid tag. They could just take a picture of every car that goes through and save it for a couple of months. If a customer reports their tag stolen or disputes some charges, just pull up the photo of the car that went through the booth at that time, get the license plate number, and take it from there.
I compare Real to Adobe. Both promote a proprietary file format. Adobe makes their file reader easy to obtain and install. It's easy to get, easy to install, unobtrusive. Adobe is content to make their money off of sales of the file creation software. I like Adobe.
Real has a free software viewer, but they hide it as well as they can and try to convince you to buy the pay version. Their viewer pretty much wants to move into your computer, take over everything, and sleep with your girlfriend. Real is trying to make money off the software that creates the file, and the software that reads it. I don't like Real.
Maybe they've changed, but I just visited their site and after 10 minutes of searching, still couldn't find the link to the free player. There's a premium player that will default to the free player after 14 days if I cancel it, but they want my credit information for that one. I don't think so.
I could, and perhaps I should, but I'm perfectly content with the way things are now. I should point out that extended family aren't banging my door down every time their computer hiccups. They usually go through conventional channels (tech support, internet, etc) and only call me if they're still stuck.
Last call was with a sister-in-law who had just spent 4 hours on the phone with Dell tech support trying to resolve a DVD playback issue. Their best advice was to wipe the hard drive and do an OS reinstall.
I do tech support for my extended family as well. Most of them (cousins, in-laws, friends of family, etc) offer to pay me when I spend some time fixing them up. I almost always refuse, but the fact that they recognize the value of my services is appreciated.
As for immediate family... parents, brother... nah, they get free tech support. Part of the reason I'm So Darn Smart is that my parents brought me up that way, and bought encyclopedias when I was young, and helped me with my homework and drove me to computer club and helped pay for college and and and and and and and....
I figure I could do 2 hours of tech support every day for the rest of my life and still not pay them back.
I agree the mod still needs some work, but this is still only version 0.3. I think they're doing pretty well when you consider where they started from.
My main problem with MTA is that there just isn't that much to do. The map is huge, and it seems like I spend most of my time just driving aimlessly, looking for someone to ram or kill or whatever. I'm hoping that once the netcode is stable, we'll see them introduce some team games. A version of CTF could be a lot of fun if it's implemented right. Some sort of pursuit mode would be fun too... make one player "it", have the rest of the players pursuing.
Yeah, PS/2 was the one that immediately came to my mind. Actually, I thought "Micro Channel", but they're pretty much interchangeable. IBM trying to set another standard, and not realizing that the rest of the PC industry was heading off in a completely different direction.
I was looking over the lists of most popular 2003 search requests for Yahoo and Google, and there weren't any real major surprises there, with one exception. Britney Spears is still pretty high on both lists (#1 for Google, #4 for Yahoo), and I was under the impression that she was already out the door and way down the block.
Which got me to wondering... how honest are these lists? We've read a lot of stories about the great pains Google goes through to score web pages so that a search request will return an unbiased list. But what about the requests themselves? Is Britney still that popular, or is there some massive bank of computers in some dark basement somewhere submitting her name over and over as a search request to drive her up the list?
Depends on how often you use the 4 and 5 buttons, I suppose. I hardly ever use them for just plain computing, and only a little more often for gaming. Usually it's just some obscure little-used function that I might nevertheless need to pull out in a big hurry.
What I'd really like to see is a mouse which has the wheel moved down to where my thumb rests. That just seems like a really easy and obvious place to locate it. I generally have my index finger on mouse1, and my middle finger on mouse2, so I have to move one of them to access the wheel on standard mice.
Yeah, I could retrain myself. I'm still using the keypad instead of the arrow keys for UpDownLeftRight, though, so I don't expect to get that part of my brain rewired for a while yet.
Why can't the wireless companies set up a way to allow the caller to pay the charges? Politicians would get more accurate surveys, wireless companies would get another revenue stream, polling companies would finally be able to reach those elusive cell-only customers... everyone wins!
Well okay, the consumer gets screwed with a bunch of survey calls that they don't want... but really, how important are the consumers anyway?
I had the same problem with the Linksys card I bought my Dad for Christmas. Dropped it into his PII machine and Win98 wouldn't even detect the card. A little bit of time searching tech support revealed that the card needed a mobo that supports PCI bus mastering, whatever the hell that is. I was faced with getting a USB wireless card (which would have required an OS upgrade to XP or 2000) or a hardware upgrade.
Soooooo... bit the bullet. New mobo and processor and memory and video card. Merry Christmas, Dad!
Seriously. If my past experience is any guide, once you fix that horrible noisy mouse, she'll find something else to complain about. Probably that the monitor is too bright. Then once you've moved to a braille system, she'll claim she can hear the hum from the power supply, and so on, and so on...
Tell her the clicks are there, you can't do anything about 'em, and if they're really keeping her awake she can go sleep on the couch.
Well, it *is* Christmas. Maybe a few geeks are hoping Santa reads Slashdot...?
When Machrone penned his law in 1984, he was referring to solid, business-class computers. I have no idea what a bleeding-edge dream machine would have cost at the time, but it wouldn't have been cheap.
("The PC I want has a 286/12 processor, 4 floppy drives, 2 meg of RAM, and a pair of 10 meg hard drives!)
If my experience in the retail industry is any guide, probably half those systems work just fine, they were returned by consumers too stupid or lazy to spend five minutes figuring out what the problem was. Like a game disc in upside-down, or a power cord not seated properly.
Some of the reamaining consoles can be salvaged with a little cannibalizing... take a controller from a game with a fried mobo, match it with a console that works just fine but has a bad controller... you know the drill.
Then you sell the rest on EBay and advertise them as broken. Plenty of people will buy them for parts, or bid thinking that they can get a deal on a console hope they can repair it.
If the consoles weren't adequately secured because they were broken, and that's the reason the thieves were able to steal them... then the crime doesn't sound quite so stupid.
We lived in a duplex that was built in the 30's. Our problem was a lack of grounded outlets. There were plenty of two-prong outlets in each room, but only one grounded outlet per room, and they were in some odd places, like in the closet of the master bedroom. To get everything hooked up and plugged in, we had some nice bright orange heavy-duty extension cords snaking across the living room and down the hallway.
I was surprised that we never blew a fuse, even when we had two space heaters going, so I checked the fuse box. I guess someone else did have some problems, because every receptacle in there was filled with a 40 amp glass fuse. I asked an electrician friend about it, and he said that the wires in the walls would burn up before those fuses popped. So I complained to the landlord. She dismissed me, told me I didn't know what I was talking about and that her son had put the 40 amp fuses in the and everything was fine.
So I did a little more investigating, and figured out that three of the fuses in our box actually controlled some of the lights and outlets in the other side of the duplex. It was empty, and the landlord was showing it nearly every day, so I just unscrewed those fuses and left them out. Sure enough, half the lights didn't work, and she started promising the prospective tenants that she'd get them fixed. I screwed the fuses back in before her idiot son came over, so everything was working fine when he tested it. Then I unscrewed them again next time she tried to show the place.
She finally broke down and hired an electrician to look at things. He wound up rewiring about half the outlets, putting in new circuit breaker boxes, pretty much redoing the whole system. Probably cost her a lot of money, but I sure slept better at night.
I remember a passage in an old, old Apple DOS manual. One of the spiral bound dealies that was put out by Apple itself. I forget the exact context, but there were talking about Master/Slave floppy disks, explaining how the master disk had the boot files and the slave disk didn't. Then there was a comment that went something like "Though the master and slave disk look identical in their snazzy black plastic coats (not it's PLASTIC, not leather!), there's an important difference etc etc etc...
I always wondered how a kinky sex reference got into an incredibly dull and boring reference manual.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I was thinking. Anyone got a quick history?
Anyone else remember "pct in liar"?
People usually aren't even that concerned with what time it is. More often, they need to know how long it is until something happens... quitting time, the movie starting, whatever. If you know the movie starts at 8:00, you can tell with a quick glance at your analog watch that you've got about 5 minutes. With a digital watch you've got to read the number, process it, compare it... There's a reason why aircraft and racing cars still use analog gauges.
The summer after I graduated high school, I got a job with a miniatures casting company here in Dallas. Grenadier, I think. This was in 1978, and D&D was still something new and cool. Well, it was to me anyway.
So it's summer, Dallas, 100+ degrees outside. I'm inside a warehouse with no air conditioning, pouring molten tin/lead mixture into these heavy rubber molds to make miniatures. Have to wear work gloves and long pants for safety reasons. Got a nice hot flame going to keep the metal at the right temp. Calling it hot and uncomfortable would be an understatement.
Only two good things... we had a couple of fans to keep the air moving, and we got paid the princely sum of $4.50 an hour.
Advertising doesn't have to be annoying, but it needs to be effective. If annoying ads are the most effective, then that's what we'll be seeing. It doesn't matter how much consumers complain, or swear that they wont' visit a website again, or whatever... if annoying, intrusive ads continue to get more clicks then "polite" ones, we'll keep seeing them. Actions speak much louder then words in this case.
Depends where you find the IP addy. If it's in an FTP client, you might have something.
You can't be too careful when you're raiding the homes of suspected hackers. You know they all play those shooting games, like Earthquake and Counter Strike, so they're pretty much trained killers.
Whoa shit!
Thanks for the warning... time to wipe all the hard drives and shred all my CDs.
Goddamn diabolically clever Secret Service...
I had just installed our new cable modem the previous day, over my wifes mild objections. She just wasn't convinced that we needed all that speed.
Her best friend was visiting, and they were talking about this new song they'd heard on the drive over - "Sugar" by System of a Down. While they were arguing about whether they should buy the CD just to get that song, I went to my newly-installed Napster, downloaded it, and cranked the speakers.
They spent the next two hours remembering songs and asking me to download them. I went the next day to buy a router so that my wife could share the broadband connection on her computer. She bought the SOAD CD because she loved all their songs. I took her to see them live in Austin a year or so later.
And no more arguments that we didn't need all that bandwidth.
I have a card through my local credit union that can be used as a Visa credit card or as a debit card. It works the same way as far as my account is concerned, the charge won't be approved unless I have funds deposited to cover. It's just that one way I have to punch in my PIN, and the other way I have to sign a credit slip.
At least, that's the way it used to be. The CU announced a few months ago that as of 1/1/04 they'll be charging a flat 35 cent fee for all purchases made using the card as a debit card. So I can debit a purchase and pay the commission myself, or credit card it and let the merchant pay the CC transaction fee.
On the RFID thing, we had something similar here a couple of years ago. I live in the far north Dallas/Telecom corridor area, just a couple of blocks off the Bush Tollway. Virtually every car around here has a Tolltag, a little RFID chip that you fasten to the corner of your windshield. Having one lets you speed through all the toll booths, instead of having to slow down and pay each time. Costs are charged to your credit card. Our local McDonalds, which is on the tollway access road, had signs up a couple of years ago advertising that you could use their drive-through and charge it to your tolltag. I haven't seen the signs in a while, I don't know if it's been discontinued, or if they're just not promoting it as heavily.
As far as a theft risk... you'd have an easy time stealing tolltag codes. Just walk through any parking lot around here, and you'll have your choice of a few dozen tags. You could do it from a reasonable distance too, since the tollbooth readers pick it up from vehicles doing 60 mph at a distance of 10 or 20 feet. I haven't heard anything about a big business with stolen tag codes, though. It would be pretty easy for the tollway authority to track illegal usage. They already have cameras in place to catch people who drive through the tolltag lane without a valid tag. They could just take a picture of every car that goes through and save it for a couple of months. If a customer reports their tag stolen or disputes some charges, just pull up the photo of the car that went through the booth at that time, get the license plate number, and take it from there.
I compare Real to Adobe. Both promote a proprietary file format. Adobe makes their file reader easy to obtain and install. It's easy to get, easy to install, unobtrusive. Adobe is content to make their money off of sales of the file creation software. I like Adobe.
Real has a free software viewer, but they hide it as well as they can and try to convince you to buy the pay version. Their viewer pretty much wants to move into your computer, take over everything, and sleep with your girlfriend. Real is trying to make money off the software that creates the file, and the software that reads it. I don't like Real.
Maybe they've changed, but I just visited their site and after 10 minutes of searching, still couldn't find the link to the free player. There's a premium player that will default to the free player after 14 days if I cancel it, but they want my credit information for that one. I don't think so.
I could, and perhaps I should, but I'm perfectly content with the way things are now. I should point out that extended family aren't banging my door down every time their computer hiccups. They usually go through conventional channels (tech support, internet, etc) and only call me if they're still stuck.
Last call was with a sister-in-law who had just spent 4 hours on the phone with Dell tech support trying to resolve a DVD playback issue. Their best advice was to wipe the hard drive and do an OS reinstall.
I do tech support for my extended family as well. Most of them (cousins, in-laws, friends of family, etc) offer to pay me when I spend some time fixing them up. I almost always refuse, but the fact that they recognize the value of my services is appreciated.
As for immediate family... parents, brother... nah, they get free tech support. Part of the reason I'm So Darn Smart is that my parents brought me up that way, and bought encyclopedias when I was young, and helped me with my homework and drove me to computer club and helped pay for college and and and and and and and....
I figure I could do 2 hours of tech support every day for the rest of my life and still not pay them back.
I agree the mod still needs some work, but this is still only version 0.3. I think they're doing pretty well when you consider where they started from.
My main problem with MTA is that there just isn't that much to do. The map is huge, and it seems like I spend most of my time just driving aimlessly, looking for someone to ram or kill or whatever. I'm hoping that once the netcode is stable, we'll see them introduce some team games. A version of CTF could be a lot of fun if it's implemented right. Some sort of pursuit mode would be fun too... make one player "it", have the rest of the players pursuing.
Yeah, PS/2 was the one that immediately came to my mind. Actually, I thought "Micro Channel", but they're pretty much interchangeable. IBM trying to set another standard, and not realizing that the rest of the PC industry was heading off in a completely different direction.
I was looking over the lists of most popular 2003 search requests for Yahoo and Google, and there weren't any real major surprises there, with one exception. Britney Spears is still pretty high on both lists (#1 for Google, #4 for Yahoo), and I was under the impression that she was already out the door and way down the block.
Which got me to wondering... how honest are these lists? We've read a lot of stories about the great pains Google goes through to score web pages so that a search request will return an unbiased list. But what about the requests themselves? Is Britney still that popular, or is there some massive bank of computers in some dark basement somewhere submitting her name over and over as a search request to drive her up the list?
Depends on how often you use the 4 and 5 buttons, I suppose. I hardly ever use them for just plain computing, and only a little more often for gaming. Usually it's just some obscure little-used function that I might nevertheless need to pull out in a big hurry.
What I'd really like to see is a mouse which has the wheel moved down to where my thumb rests. That just seems like a really easy and obvious place to locate it. I generally have my index finger on mouse1, and my middle finger on mouse2, so I have to move one of them to access the wheel on standard mice.
Yeah, I could retrain myself. I'm still using the keypad instead of the arrow keys for UpDownLeftRight, though, so I don't expect to get that part of my brain rewired for a while yet.
Why can't the wireless companies set up a way to allow the caller to pay the charges? Politicians would get more accurate surveys, wireless companies would get another revenue stream, polling companies would finally be able to reach those elusive cell-only customers... everyone wins!
Well okay, the consumer gets screwed with a bunch of survey calls that they don't want... but really, how important are the consumers anyway?
I had the same problem with the Linksys card I bought my Dad for Christmas. Dropped it into his PII machine and Win98 wouldn't even detect the card. A little bit of time searching tech support revealed that the card needed a mobo that supports PCI bus mastering, whatever the hell that is. I was faced with getting a USB wireless card (which would have required an OS upgrade to XP or 2000) or a hardware upgrade.
Soooooo... bit the bullet. New mobo and processor and memory and video card. Merry Christmas, Dad!
Seriously. If my past experience is any guide, once you fix that horrible noisy mouse, she'll find something else to complain about. Probably that the monitor is too bright. Then once you've moved to a braille system, she'll claim she can hear the hum from the power supply, and so on, and so on...
Tell her the clicks are there, you can't do anything about 'em, and if they're really keeping her awake she can go sleep on the couch.
Well, it *is* Christmas. Maybe a few geeks are hoping Santa reads Slashdot...?
When Machrone penned his law in 1984, he was referring to solid, business-class computers. I have no idea what a bleeding-edge dream machine would have cost at the time, but it wouldn't have been cheap.
("The PC I want has a 286/12 processor, 4 floppy drives, 2 meg of RAM, and a pair of 10 meg hard drives!)
As in Bill, editor of PC Magazine.
"The computer you want to buy will always cost $5000"
Now you could get 10 PC's for that.
If my experience in the retail industry is any guide, probably half those systems work just fine, they were returned by consumers too stupid or lazy to spend five minutes figuring out what the problem was. Like a game disc in upside-down, or a power cord not seated properly.
Some of the reamaining consoles can be salvaged with a little cannibalizing... take a controller from a game with a fried mobo, match it with a console that works just fine but has a bad controller... you know the drill.
Then you sell the rest on EBay and advertise them as broken. Plenty of people will buy them for parts, or bid thinking that they can get a deal on a console hope they can repair it.
If the consoles weren't adequately secured because they were broken, and that's the reason the thieves were able to steal them... then the crime doesn't sound quite so stupid.
We lived in a duplex that was built in the 30's. Our problem was a lack of grounded outlets. There were plenty of two-prong outlets in each room, but only one grounded outlet per room, and they were in some odd places, like in the closet of the master bedroom. To get everything hooked up and plugged in, we had some nice bright orange heavy-duty extension cords snaking across the living room and down the hallway.
I was surprised that we never blew a fuse, even when we had two space heaters going, so I checked the fuse box. I guess someone else did have some problems, because every receptacle in there was filled with a 40 amp glass fuse. I asked an electrician friend about it, and he said that the wires in the walls would burn up before those fuses popped. So I complained to the landlord.
She dismissed me, told me I didn't know what I was talking about and that her son had put the 40 amp fuses in the and everything was fine.
So I did a little more investigating, and figured out that three of the fuses in our box actually controlled some of the lights and outlets in the other side of the duplex. It was empty, and the landlord was showing it nearly every day, so I just unscrewed those fuses and left them out. Sure enough, half the lights didn't work, and she started promising the prospective tenants that she'd get them fixed. I screwed the fuses back in before her idiot son came over, so everything was working fine when he tested it. Then I unscrewed them again next time she tried to show the place.
She finally broke down and hired an electrician to look at things. He wound up rewiring about half the outlets, putting in new circuit breaker boxes, pretty much redoing the whole system. Probably cost her a lot of money, but I sure slept better at night.
I remember a passage in an old, old Apple DOS manual. One of the spiral bound dealies that was put out by Apple itself. I forget the exact context, but there were talking about Master/Slave floppy disks, explaining how the master disk had the boot files and the slave disk didn't. Then there was a comment that went something like "Though the master and slave disk look identical in their snazzy black plastic coats (not it's PLASTIC, not leather!), there's an important difference etc etc etc...
I always wondered how a kinky sex reference got into an incredibly dull and boring reference manual.