Thanks, thats more along the lines of the sort of a post I was hoping to see. And like you, I'm not qualified, and too damned old to boot, but that sure doesn't stop me from envying the lucky person who does get that job. He will have a little insight when he comes away, of how a great mind works.
Which explains my confusion when a previous commentor here used the name George Lucas as the benefactor who originally endowed that chair. Henry Lucas, a 'Reverend', who actually did it in 1640 or so, is an entirely different fish from George, or even the Lucas Electric people who were best known for the quality of their parts in english vehicles of 50 years ago, earning them the honorary title of "Prince of Darkness" because they never worked.
Thanks for the link that clarifies that, I hadn't thought to look it up myself. Too tired at the time, I moved around 1500 lbs of building materials from my pickup in the front drive, to a small storage building in the middle of the back yard yesterday evening, and as I'll be 72 in 3 weeks, that about did me in. New ceiling and a hardwood floor for a 12x24 foot room. A 350 dollar honey-doo window project is turning into a 2500 dollar remodel project. With me doing all the labor. Here it is September already, 4th year of my retirement and for the 3rd year in a row my boats bottom is still dry. Terrible situation, bordering on spousal abuse even.:)
When did they rename it? George Lucas, if the same as the motion picture George Lucas, Star Wars anybody? Did George Lucas have the kind of money it takes to endow a "chair" at Cambridge, back when Stephan was named to it, some decades ago? I suppose its possible, I keep forgetting how long its been since the original movie.
With all due respect for relatively a juvenile comment like that, I can truthfully say that in 72 years I haven't felt I had to kiss any ass, and the only ones I've wiped were mine or on my loved ones when they weren't able. My ability to get the job done has gotten me far more profesional respect than any amount of so-called ass kissing ever could. Its also responsible for raises in salary I never asked for many times. To levels comparable to those in the top 10% of the industry in markets in the bottom half of it.
Now lets put this thread back where I started it, with respect for both the man and what he has done.
Chuckle, ten years in graduate school? One wag friend of mine once made the comment that he was a professional student sincve he was laying around for 2 years taking time filler classes until his future wife could graduate. It seemed to fit in that case, does it here?
Don't take me too serious, I could be jealous, of the people who do have that luxury, usually with daddy paying the bills. Me? I had a health problem that ran me out of school back in '48 or so, and I've been chaseing electrons and making them do usefull/entertaining/educational work since. And frankly, if I could replay it, there is only one thing I'd consider changing, and thats that my first wife had a stroke and died at age 34. She was a good woman...
I've had the pleasure of pure serendipity helping me out, having been at the right place, at the right time, to help do some interesting things, like being a bench tech at a smallish so-cal company that was building what was then the smallest tv camera around. So I had fingerprints on the innards of the tv cameras that were on the Trieste when it went down into the mohole back in the 60's. No cameras were there before, and no cameras have been there since, 37,000+ feet deep in the pacific, the deepest place in the worlds oceans. Was it fun? Damned betcha. Can others claim to have been there? Yes, about 10 people at that company, and an unknown number of sailors who were responsible for seeing to it the gondola of the Treiste didn't implode when the exterior pressure against that cast iron ball was up to around 18,000 psi. Since there were two small sailors in it at the time, it was probably sustained by all the praying.
There is more to this story, but its been related here at least twice already so I won't bore the old hands by repeating myself tonight.
That should never, ever be a carte blanche ticket to all the snipeing thats being done here, using off-color innuendo etc just in an attempt at seeming funny to the rest of the liliputian sized brains in this thread.
Oh wait, I forgot this IS/. where any sign of intelligence is quickly put to death in favor of yet another comment based on the plight of the geek who never gets laid...
Maybe I should leave, but I have this hope that occasionally, I might say something that might change a life for the better. Probably my mistake...
And so far, in the 26 messages posted, I have detected damned little respect for the perservereance and intelligence of the man, who does after all, hold the Issac Newton Chair in Mathematics at Cambridge, no small feat by itself. To me that apparent lack of respect is most sad.
Here we have a man, who perhaps because of his disability, is giving his brain exersize that the rest of his body will never get, a man who has contributed much to our knowledge of the universe, and who may yet deduce the causitive reason for the accelleration we are seeing of distant objects before he passes.
As for his passing, I'd imagine that his health is monitored at least 10 times more diligently than any of us do for ourselves. That will see to it that the age related degenerative things are kept in check as best we know how to do. However, the real monitoring is more likely concentrated on the treatment of bedsores and that sort of thing, as well as maintaining his immune system as best we (the medical professions 'we') can. However, he has a resident rn to handle the bedpanish and bedsores sorts of things, so those duties would not normally fall to the assistant.
If I were 50 years younger, I'd kill for a chance at that job. Unforch, my experience level at 50 years ago wouldn't have allowed me to do what he needs done today. Without formal schooling, it does take a while to arrive at that point of having the knowledge needed.
In kilobytes? Of course I do, and it was almost 200 1978 dollars for an s-100 board with 4k of static ram, in kit form, and about another 80 for the s-100 buss backplane board and hookup cable. From Quest Electronics, who was at that time in the late 70's, selling an rca 1802 based board with a hex monitor in rom, a 1702 IIRC, and 256 bytes of ram, called the Super Elf. I used it to make a queue tone generator, and a replacement academy leaders video (made that myself, used 6 bytes of dma per television field to generate an 8.8 format countdown display 103 tv lines high.) I put a 6 volt gellcell battery on it for backup power so it wouldn't have to be reloaded everytime the power sneezed. But in that event, a broadcast audio cart had several copies of the software I wrote on it. This all worked with a Microtime made device called an automatic station break machine so that a full 1 to n spots long station break was, after setting up the sequence of tape machines to run and letting it queue the tapes up, a one push of a button operation. That little machine was still in use, doing the same thing, 11 years later when I last checked which was 1989 IIRC.
Funny thing about that 4k of static ram. The actual program used several lookup tables, but the whole thing, tables and all, fit into about 1100 bytes of ram. I still have a copy of the thing, on the original paper coding sheets, preserved in a gallon baggie, along with an audio cart copy of it, in my basement 'archives'.
Yeah, I remember kilobytes, and 4k was a huge anount of memory at the time.
So apparently they want younger (and probably more technical) people to read the contract so the 70+ people know what they're getting. Stupid, but it's not a rule without a reason.
I don't know as thats a 'stupid' qualifier or not, but here's my take on it.
Somebody 70+ is far more likely to read the fine print and decide that if the product comes with that many restrictions, maybe, just maybe, there's somebody else down the street a block selling a similar service without all those protect the lawyers ass provisions. Its been my experience that on an average level today, someone whose diploma is 50 years newer than mine, will not be a 'reader' because reading isn't fun (they learned wrongly though), so they fake it, and will take the peddlars word for it that its a good, no, great deal.
Its a sad comment on our times when they coldly, and calculatingly, prey on the older people in this manner, knowing they can get away with it if they can just convince the children, a much easier to do endeavor today.
More than one sales type has run afoul of this old fart and found its not the most pleasant way to spend a minute or two when my bull shit detector is clanging away in the background. Be honest with me, I'll weight the options and be at least as honest with you as you have been with me. Try to screw me, and its smoke out of both ears time in 500 milliseconds flat.
He should be forced to spend some time being 70. Fortunately he'll have a hard time avoiding this punishment (And the alternative would probably be worse...)
Chuckle. Yup, the only alternative to avoid that is to not make it to the age of 70. So I'd definitely say the alternative is worse.
I don't have a Best Buy locally, but have been in one about 400 miles north of me a couple of times. The first time I did spend a few bucks, but everything I got then was history in 6 months except a monitor, which somehow manages to look almost new 3 years later. The 2nd time I was in there, it was obvious they could have cared less that I was browsing in the higher end computer acccessories shelves, looking for a decent ($150 and up) set of speakers and a real mouse in the $70 and up category. After turning the boxes over to read the fine print on several items, and generally wasting close to half an hour, I walked out empty-handed, never having the pleasure of attracting a floor-walkers attention. I did stop at the register and registered a protest, the essence of which was that although I may look to be 70+ (I am), my credit card had a line of credit reaching halfway to the 6th digit, and my money bought a Big Mac just as quickly as anyones elses.
I came back home and bought the stuff I wanted from either CC or Staples, I don't recall which and its not important. B.B. lost a potential sale that could have reached $350 easily just because I was type-cast as an old fart with no money and likely no brains. Well, tell ya what, I'm proud to be an old fart with brains enough to run linux and make it do anything I want it to do, considering the alternative of slowly moldering away in an overpriced box nobody will see again till the rapture if indeed there is such a thing.
Are you listening, Best Buy? It is by such attitudes that your stock begins its inexorable fall to zip.
Or, better yet, the use of submarine patents to extract licensing fees from the users, should be a federal offense, with at least the loss of the patent holders rights and placing it into the public domain the minute the standard is set and the patent is then exposed in order to extract licenseing fees therefrom. Standards should be adhered to, and I don't have a problem with that, but when the fact that the proponent of a method doesn't disclose to the working group setting this standard, the fact that this method is patented by a member company of the group until after the standard is published should trigger these punitive actions. Adhereing to a standard should never be grounds for collecting outragious licensing fees from all concerned as was the case with Faunhoffer and the mp3 debacle. Such deviousness during the standard setting process should also, IMNSHO, be a jail time in the federal lockup offense for all involved in the coverup.
I don't know... vanilla MPEG format, so we could all see them.
Ya know, I think I said that, but not quite so concisely. I always have to dress up the language a bit.:-)
But, doesn't this bring up the next question? If its an advertisement, designed to sell macs, why didn't they make sure it would display on everything else in common use today? Targetting a winderz user and his box is still targetting the majority platform, but the guys who actually use this stuff for gainfull employment production output, could well be useing a linux box running xara-lx.
Let me put it in perspective, I go back, clear back, to the first amiga lightwave, a package that showed the rest of the world what could be done by talented programmers and graphics artists. I'm not the artist that used it then, but I've seen enough of it as the CE at a tv station to understand that the rest of these wannabee's all took their first clues from lightwave. xara-lx is now, from the look I gave it the other day, at the stage of being comparable to the final lightwave released for the amiga. There is or was, a port to windows when the amiga market went south, but funny thing, i haven't heard of anyone actually useing it in years. It (xara-lx) WILL get even better, and all these other imitators had jolly well be hireing talented programmers if they don't want this FOSS program to eat their lunches. If that happens, which I think it will, then apple will have wasted yet another 20 million worth of tv time targetting the wrong audience, again. They seem to be hell bent on those sorts of mistakes historically.
I tried all 4 offered resolutions, but they all showed the opening frame and stopped on this linux box. Shame on Apple for using a format that doesn't work with all extant decoders.
If they wanted to preach to the mac only choir like that, why didn't the face the choir so we can see the asses they can be?
When do these people understrand that if they want everyone to see their ads, then they had damned well better make sure the ad runs ok on the targets machine regardless of its pedigree?
Why would it ever need a total re-write? The basic premise of how amanda works has not changed since the early 90's, so why would it ever need a full rewrite? That said, I have doubts that there is a single line of code in it that hasn't been rather well vetted in the last year.
As a long time amanda user, since the late 90's, which you obviously aren't and never have been, we've had far more trouble with the gnu folks screwing around in the tar srcs than we've ever had with the code for amanda proper. Amanda isn't anything but a manager/schedueler/accountant, issuing commands to the likes of tar and dump to do the heavy lifting. The GNU folks piddle around in tar and don't bother to cleanup after themselves and guess who catches hell, amanda. Thats bs. Much the same can be said of the dump versions about, but I don't use dump nor track them near as well as I do the various tars. Right now, the only unbroken tars around are 1.13-19, 1.13-25 and 1.15-1. 1.15-91, the current version (I think, maybe theres a newer one extant now), is a total disaster that almost works, read the archive of the list to see what havoc it has raised before calling a daily amanda user who was writing code for RCA 1802's cpu's without an assembler before you were a gleam in daddies eye a "fucking idiot", or giving amanda hell it doesn't deserve.
If you didn't have anything more constructive to say than to call me an idiot, then you should have just shut the hell up rather than publicly confirming my judgement. Which you've done rather nicely with your choice of expletives alone.
Not in the least bit interesting. Amanda is under constant development, and to say that it hasn't been touched since the 90's is an outright lie. You work for Veritas or Arkiea?
The current stable snapshot is amanda-2.5.0-20060424..tar.gz. And there are, sitting on my hard drive, about 12 versions of the next generation that will lead to a 2.5.1 release in a month or so.
Please put brain in gear and go check your so-called facts before spouting off in front of nearly a million/. readers and making yourself look like somebody with a commercial axe to grind, bad-mouthing the open source efforts because it might put another sale of outragiously priced but dis-functional backup software in your bottom line. Or worse yet, an idiot...
I'm somewhat surprised to see amanda being badmouthed here by this tool. It was mentioned on the amanda-users list a few months back that the amanda tree had been checked by coverity, and the 2 bugs coverity found were promptly fixed.
Thats not to say that as new features are added, new bugs haven't been too, but to actually call amanda a truely buggy application does stretch this users belief a wee bit. I'm currently running a 20060424 dated snapshot of the 2.5.0 tree, with no hiccups at all.
So I head off to boot my lappy to XP, something it hasn't done in weeks, run the updater, deselect the WGA option, and the sonofabitch installed it anyway.
Is there no end to the microsoft perfidity?
Oh, wait, this is/., and that makes me look like a nubie, which I hardly am, and you all know that. IMO, the inbreeding in Redmond has reached the point of no return, and I'm thinking of reclaiming the space the XP install uses for something usefull.
Crazy. Depends on what the kids were doing ofcourse, but in the sue their asses off category I totally agree with that tactic. Someone needs to be taught some basic, common sense manners.
As for damages the kids might have done if it was a reasonably healthy cherry tree and they were killing it, then both sides should be sueing, because the owner of the tree is certainly due damages also. The kids themselves should have to make recompense, split maybe 50-50 with their parents, who obviously were a little slacking in parenting skills or this wouldn't have taken place in the first place. Perhaps to plant a replacement tree and nurture it till its as big as the one they killed? Not out of line were I the judge.
Note that this doesn't change the first paragraph, they were way out of line with the DNA testing etc. Sue for destruction of the samples and for punitive, as much as they can get. Both sides are in the wrong here IMNSHO.
Someone whom I can't recall said something to the effect that "if sense was so common, how come common sense is in such short supply?"
Better yet, if there is a 3rd candidate, and hes not a certified nut that you know of, vote for him. Anyone whose part of the republicrat machine needs to be sitting on the curb with a tin cup. We're not gonna fix it any other way.
"The big question now is: how much worse can it get?" Wrong. The big question is what are we going to do to stop this. It's our government, dammit.
The only way is to clean house, senate, and white house all in the same general election. Otherwise the old boy network continues uninterrupted because at the end of the day, the party affiliation doesn't mean as much as just maintaining the so-called elite group in power.
The last time around I couldn't stomach either of the republicrat parties candidates, gave it a bit of thought & voted libertarian. ISTR My wife felt the same way & voted green. So they got one vote each in our home county. Big fscking deal. OTOH, if enough of us have had it with these lying jerks to do something about it, THEN WE CAN FIX IT. BUT, WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO GET OFF OUR COLLECTIVE FAT ASSES AND DO IT! DON'T JUST VOTE IN THE LESSOR OF THE 2 MAIN EVILS, VOTE IN SOMEONE WHO HONESTLY THINKS AS WE DO, THAT THE POLICE STATE GEORGE ORWELL DESCRIBED IN '1984' HAS GONE FAR ENOUGH AND ITS TIME TO SWING THAT PENDULUM THE OTHER WAY. And I frankly don't give a damn if a few wanna be Ken Lay's jump out of 40th floor windows as things get back to an even keel.
Go talk to the candidates face to face, and if you cannot get that close, then they are too damned paranoid and don't deserve your vote. I've stood literally nose to nose with the govenor of this state, telling him his pet project was going down in flames (and it did) but neither of us had any worries about that nose to nose confrontation. He is an honest, approachable human being that despite our differences, got my vote the last time based on his performance in that situation.
Participation in the political process is what this country was founded on, and those that sit as couch warmers, and base your votes on party lines, what Bill OReilly says, or other mainstream media propaganda artists, fully deserve the traitorous, sell out to the highest bidder, representation you'll get. This may be the last time we get a chance to fix things because if it continues with the present erosion of private, personal freedoms at the present rate, you won't recognize the election as a democratic process by 2012 unless you are one of the sheeple we denigrate here on/. so often...
The choice is ours to make, and we should make it as wisely as we can. We, as a whole, voted ourselves into this box, and hopefully we can vote our way out of it. We at least owe the republic a try at fixing it.
So help me, this is funny. Those most common lament I hear on/. is that nobody is gettin any.
Perhaps the complainers aren't doing it right, I'm 71, and early stage 2 diabetic, a roundabout way of saying that it takes 20mg of levitra to keep me from peeing on my shoes. But I have a cooperative missus and I'm still getting all I want even w/o the chemical help. Its a two way street kids. Whats the excuse for the rest of you younger geeks?
Slashdot Mirror
All I can say is ooops! Thanks for the correction, I had that one coming.
--
Cheers, Gene
Thanks, thats more along the lines of the sort of a post I was hoping to see. And like you, I'm not qualified, and too damned old to boot, but that sure doesn't stop me from envying the lucky person who does get that job. He will have a little insight when he comes away, of how a great mind works.
--
Cheers, Gene
Which explains my confusion when a previous commentor here used the name George Lucas as the benefactor who originally endowed that chair. Henry Lucas, a 'Reverend', who actually did it in 1640 or so, is an entirely different fish from George, or even the Lucas Electric people who were best known for the quality of their parts in english vehicles of 50 years ago, earning them the honorary title of "Prince of Darkness" because they never worked.
:)
Thanks for the link that clarifies that, I hadn't thought to look it up myself. Too tired at the time, I moved around 1500 lbs of building materials from my pickup in the front drive, to a small storage building in the middle of the back yard yesterday evening, and as I'll be 72 in 3 weeks, that about did me in. New ceiling and a hardwood floor for a 12x24 foot room. A 350 dollar honey-doo window project is turning into a 2500 dollar remodel project. With me doing all the labor. Here it is September already, 4th year of my retirement and for the 3rd year in a row my boats bottom is still dry. Terrible situation, bordering on spousal abuse even.
--
Cheers, Gene
When did they rename it? George Lucas, if the same as the motion picture George Lucas, Star Wars anybody? Did George Lucas have the kind of money it takes to endow a "chair" at Cambridge, back when Stephan was named to it, some decades ago? I suppose its possible, I keep forgetting how long its been since the original movie.
--
Cheers, Gene
With all due respect for relatively a juvenile comment like that, I can truthfully say that in 72 years I haven't felt I had to kiss any ass, and the only ones I've wiped were mine or on my loved ones when they weren't able. My ability to get the job done has gotten me far more profesional respect than any amount of so-called ass kissing ever could. Its also responsible for raises in salary I never asked for many times. To levels comparable to those in the top 10% of the industry in markets in the bottom half of it.
Now lets put this thread back where I started it, with respect for both the man and what he has done.
--
Cheers, Gene
Chuckle, ten years in graduate school? One wag friend of mine once made the comment that he was a professional student sincve he was laying around for 2 years taking time filler classes until his future wife could graduate. It seemed to fit in that case, does it here?
Don't take me too serious, I could be jealous, of the people who do have that luxury, usually with daddy paying the bills. Me? I had a health problem that ran me out of school back in '48 or so, and I've been chaseing electrons and making them do usefull/entertaining/educational work since. And frankly, if I could replay it, there is only one thing I'd consider changing, and thats that my first wife had a stroke and died at age 34. She was a good woman...
I've had the pleasure of pure serendipity helping me out, having been at the right place, at the right time, to help do some interesting things, like being a bench tech at a smallish so-cal company that was building what was then the smallest tv camera around. So I had fingerprints on the innards of the tv cameras that were on the Trieste when it went down into the mohole back in the 60's. No cameras were there before, and no cameras have been there since, 37,000+ feet deep in the pacific, the deepest place in the worlds oceans. Was it fun? Damned betcha. Can others claim to have been there? Yes, about 10 people at that company, and an unknown number of sailors who were responsible for seeing to it the gondola of the Treiste didn't implode when the exterior pressure against that cast iron ball was up to around 18,000 psi. Since there were two small sailors in it at the time, it was probably sustained by all the praying.
There is more to this story, but its been related here at least twice already so I won't bore the old hands by repeating myself tonight.
--
Cheers, Gene
That should never, ever be a carte blanche ticket to all the snipeing thats being done here, using off-color innuendo etc just in an attempt at seeming funny to the rest of the liliputian sized brains in this thread.
/. where any sign of intelligence is quickly put to death in favor of yet another comment based on the plight of the geek who never gets laid...
Oh wait, I forgot this IS
Maybe I should leave, but I have this hope that occasionally, I might say something that might change a life for the better. Probably my mistake...
--
Cheers anyway, Gene
And so far, in the 26 messages posted, I have detected damned little respect for the perservereance and intelligence of the man, who does after all, hold the Issac Newton Chair in Mathematics at Cambridge, no small feat by itself. To me that apparent lack of respect is most sad.
Here we have a man, who perhaps because of his disability, is giving his brain exersize that the rest of his body will never get, a man who has contributed much to our knowledge of the universe, and who may yet deduce the causitive reason for the accelleration we are seeing of distant objects before he passes.
As for his passing, I'd imagine that his health is monitored at least 10 times more diligently than any of us do for ourselves. That will see to it that the age related degenerative things are kept in check as best we know how to do. However, the real monitoring is more likely concentrated on the treatment of bedsores and that sort of thing, as well as maintaining his immune system as best we (the medical professions 'we') can. However, he has a resident rn to handle the bedpanish and bedsores sorts of things, so those duties would not normally fall to the assistant.
If I were 50 years younger, I'd kill for a chance at that job. Unforch, my experience level at 50 years ago wouldn't have allowed me to do what he needs done today. Without formal schooling, it does take a while to arrive at that point of having the knowledge needed.
--
Cheers, Gene
In kilobytes? Of course I do, and it was almost 200 1978 dollars for an s-100 board with 4k of static ram, in kit form, and about another 80 for the s-100 buss backplane board and hookup cable. From Quest Electronics, who was at that time in the late 70's, selling an rca 1802 based board with a hex monitor in rom, a 1702 IIRC, and 256 bytes of ram, called the Super Elf. I used it to make a queue tone generator, and a replacement academy leaders video (made that myself, used 6 bytes of dma per television field to generate an 8.8 format countdown display 103 tv lines high.) I put a 6 volt gellcell battery on it for backup power so it wouldn't have to be reloaded everytime the power sneezed. But in that event, a broadcast audio cart had several copies of the software I wrote on it. This all worked with a Microtime made device called an automatic station break machine so that a full 1 to n spots long station break was, after setting up the sequence of tape machines to run and letting it queue the tapes up, a one push of a button operation. That little machine was still in use, doing the same thing, 11 years later when I last checked which was 1989 IIRC.
Funny thing about that 4k of static ram. The actual program used several lookup tables, but the whole thing, tables and all, fit into about 1100 bytes of ram. I still have a copy of the thing, on the original paper coding sheets, preserved in a gallon baggie, along with an audio cart copy of it, in my basement 'archives'.
Yeah, I remember kilobytes, and 4k was a huge anount of memory at the time.
--
Cheers, Gene
So apparently they want younger (and probably more technical) people to read the contract so the 70+ people know what they're getting. Stupid, but it's not a rule without a reason.
I don't know as thats a 'stupid' qualifier or not, but here's my take on it.
Somebody 70+ is far more likely to read the fine print and decide that if the product comes with that many restrictions, maybe, just maybe, there's somebody else down the street a block selling a similar service without all those protect the lawyers ass provisions. Its been my experience that on an average level today, someone whose diploma is 50 years newer than mine, will not be a 'reader' because reading isn't fun (they learned wrongly though), so they fake it, and will take the peddlars word for it that its a good, no, great deal.
Its a sad comment on our times when they coldly, and calculatingly, prey on the older people in this manner, knowing they can get away with it if they can just convince the children, a much easier to do endeavor today.
More than one sales type has run afoul of this old fart and found its not the most pleasant way to spend a minute or two when my bull shit detector is clanging away in the background. Be honest with me, I'll weight the options and be at least as honest with you as you have been with me. Try to screw me, and its smoke out of both ears time in 500 milliseconds flat.
--
Cheers, Gene
He should be forced to spend some time being 70. Fortunately he'll have a hard time avoiding this punishment (And the alternative would probably be worse...)
Chuckle. Yup, the only alternative to avoid that is to not make it to the age of 70. So I'd definitely say the alternative is worse.
I don't have a Best Buy locally, but have been in one about 400 miles north of me a couple of times. The first time I did spend a few bucks, but everything I got then was history in 6 months except a monitor, which somehow manages to look almost new 3 years later. The 2nd time I was in there, it was obvious they could have cared less that I was browsing in the higher end computer acccessories shelves, looking for a decent ($150 and up) set of speakers and a real mouse in the $70 and up category. After turning the boxes over to read the fine print on several items, and generally wasting close to half an hour, I walked out empty-handed, never having the pleasure of attracting a floor-walkers attention. I did stop at the register and registered a protest, the essence of which was that although I may look to be 70+ (I am), my credit card had a line of credit reaching halfway to the 6th digit, and my money bought a Big Mac just as quickly as anyones elses.
I came back home and bought the stuff I wanted from either CC or Staples, I don't recall which and its not important. B.B. lost a potential sale that could have reached $350 easily just because I was type-cast as an old fart with no money and likely no brains. Well, tell ya what, I'm proud to be an old fart with brains enough to run linux and make it do anything I want it to do, considering the alternative of slowly moldering away in an overpriced box nobody will see again till the rapture if indeed there is such a thing.
Are you listening, Best Buy? It is by such attitudes that your stock begins its inexorable fall to zip.
--
Cheers, Gene
Or, better yet, the use of submarine patents to extract licensing fees from the users, should be a federal offense, with at least the loss of the patent holders rights and placing it into the public domain the minute the standard is set and the patent is then exposed in order to extract licenseing fees therefrom. Standards should be adhered to, and I don't have a problem with that, but when the fact that the proponent of a method doesn't disclose to the working group setting this standard, the fact that this method is patented by a member company of the group until after the standard is published should trigger these punitive actions. Adhereing to a standard should never be grounds for collecting outragious licensing fees from all concerned as was the case with Faunhoffer and the mp3 debacle. Such deviousness during the standard setting process should also, IMNSHO, be a jail time in the federal lockup offense for all involved in the coverup.
--
Cheers, Gene
I don't know... vanilla MPEG format, so we could all see them.
:-)
Ya know, I think I said that, but not quite so concisely. I always have to dress up the language a bit.
But, doesn't this bring up the next question? If its an advertisement, designed to sell macs, why didn't they make sure it would display on everything else in common use today? Targetting a winderz user and his box is still targetting the majority platform, but the guys who actually use this stuff for gainfull employment production output, could well be useing a linux box running xara-lx.
Let me put it in perspective, I go back, clear back, to the first amiga lightwave, a package that showed the rest of the world what could be done by talented programmers and graphics artists. I'm not the artist that used it then, but I've seen enough of it as the CE at a tv station to understand that the rest of these wannabee's all took their first clues from lightwave. xara-lx is now, from the look I gave it the other day, at the stage of being comparable to the final lightwave released for the amiga. There is or was, a port to windows when the amiga market went south, but funny thing, i haven't heard of anyone actually useing it in years. It (xara-lx) WILL get even better, and all these other imitators had jolly well be hireing talented programmers if they don't want this FOSS program to eat their lunches. If that happens, which I think it will, then apple will have wasted yet another 20 million worth of tv time targetting the wrong audience, again. They seem to be hell bent on those sorts of mistakes historically.
--
Cheers, Gene
I tried all 4 offered resolutions, but they all showed the opening frame and stopped on this linux box. Shame on Apple for using a format that doesn't work with all extant decoders.
If they wanted to preach to the mac only choir like that, why didn't the face the choir so we can see the asses they can be?
When do these people understrand that if they want everyone to see their ads, then they had damned well better make sure the ad runs ok on the targets machine regardless of its pedigree?
--
Cheers, Gene
Why would it ever need a total re-write? The basic premise of how amanda works has not changed since the early 90's, so why would it ever need a full rewrite? That said, I have doubts that there is a single line of code in it that hasn't been rather well vetted in the last year.
As a long time amanda user, since the late 90's, which you obviously aren't and never have been, we've had far more trouble with the gnu folks screwing around in the tar srcs than we've ever had with the code for amanda proper. Amanda isn't anything but a manager/schedueler/accountant, issuing commands to the likes of tar and dump to do the heavy lifting. The GNU folks piddle around in tar and don't bother to cleanup after themselves and guess who catches hell, amanda. Thats bs. Much the same can be said of the dump versions about, but I don't use dump nor track them near as well as I do the various tars. Right now, the only unbroken tars around are 1.13-19, 1.13-25 and 1.15-1. 1.15-91, the current version (I think, maybe theres a newer one extant now), is a total disaster that almost works, read the archive of the list to see what havoc it has raised before calling a daily amanda user who was writing code for RCA 1802's cpu's without an assembler before you were a gleam in daddies eye a "fucking idiot", or giving amanda hell it doesn't deserve.
If you didn't have anything more constructive to say than to call me an idiot, then you should have just shut the hell up rather than publicly confirming my judgement. Which you've done rather nicely with your choice of expletives alone.
--
Cheers, Gene
Not in the least bit interesting. Amanda is under constant development, and to say that it hasn't been touched since the 90's is an outright lie. You work for Veritas or Arkiea?
/. readers and making yourself look like somebody with a commercial axe to grind, bad-mouthing the open source efforts because it might put another sale of outragiously priced but dis-functional backup software in your bottom line. Or worse yet, an idiot...
The current stable snapshot is amanda-2.5.0-20060424..tar.gz. And there are, sitting on my hard drive, about 12 versions of the next generation that will lead to a 2.5.1 release in a month or so.
Please put brain in gear and go check your so-called facts before spouting off in front of nearly a million
--
Cheers, Gene
Thank you for that link, it rather nicely confirms that at the time amanda was inspected last, it was clean.
--
Cheers, Gene
I'm somewhat surprised to see amanda being badmouthed here by this tool. It was mentioned on the amanda-users list a few months back that the amanda tree had been checked by coverity, and the 2 bugs coverity found were promptly fixed.
Thats not to say that as new features are added, new bugs haven't been too, but to actually call amanda a truely buggy application does stretch this users belief a wee bit. I'm currently running a 20060424 dated snapshot of the 2.5.0 tree, with no hiccups at all.
--
Cheers, Gene
So I head off to boot my lappy to XP, something it hasn't done in weeks, run the updater, deselect the WGA option, and the sonofabitch installed it anyway.
/., and that makes me look like a nubie, which I hardly am, and you all know that. IMO, the inbreeding in Redmond has reached the point of no return, and I'm thinking of reclaiming the space the XP install uses for something usefull.
Is there no end to the microsoft perfidity?
Oh, wait, this is
--
No Cheers this time, Gene
Crazy. Depends on what the kids were doing ofcourse, but in the sue their asses off category I totally agree with that tactic. Someone needs to be taught some basic, common sense manners.
As for damages the kids might have done if it was a reasonably healthy cherry tree and they were killing it, then both sides should be sueing, because the owner of the tree is certainly due damages also. The kids themselves should have to make recompense, split maybe 50-50 with their parents, who obviously were a little slacking in parenting skills or this wouldn't have taken place in the first place. Perhaps to plant a replacement tree and nurture it till its as big as the one they killed? Not out of line were I the judge.
Note that this doesn't change the first paragraph, they were way out of line with the DNA testing etc. Sue for destruction of the samples and for punitive, as much as they can get. Both sides are in the wrong here IMNSHO.
Someone whom I can't recall said something to the effect that "if sense was so common, how come common sense is in such short supply?"
--
No Cheers on this one, Gene
Better yet, if there is a 3rd candidate, and hes not a certified nut that you know of, vote for him. Anyone whose part of the republicrat machine needs to be sitting on the curb with a tin cup. We're not gonna fix it any other way.
--
Cheers, Gene
"The big question now is: how much worse can it get?" Wrong. The big question is what are we going to do to stop this. It's our government, dammit.
/. so often...
The only way is to clean house, senate, and white house all in the same general election. Otherwise the old boy network continues uninterrupted because at the end of the day, the party affiliation doesn't mean as much as just maintaining the so-called elite group in power.
The last time around I couldn't stomach either of the republicrat parties candidates, gave it a bit of thought & voted libertarian. ISTR My wife felt the same way & voted green. So they got one vote each in our home county. Big fscking deal. OTOH, if enough of us have had it with these lying jerks to do something about it, THEN WE CAN FIX IT. BUT, WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO GET OFF OUR COLLECTIVE FAT ASSES AND DO IT! DON'T JUST VOTE IN THE LESSOR OF THE 2 MAIN EVILS, VOTE IN SOMEONE WHO HONESTLY THINKS AS WE DO, THAT THE POLICE STATE GEORGE ORWELL DESCRIBED IN '1984' HAS GONE FAR ENOUGH AND ITS TIME TO SWING THAT PENDULUM THE OTHER WAY. And I frankly don't give a damn if a few wanna be Ken Lay's jump out of 40th floor windows as things get back to an even keel.
Go talk to the candidates face to face, and if you cannot get that close, then they are too damned paranoid and don't deserve your vote. I've stood literally nose to nose with the govenor of this state, telling him his pet project was going down in flames (and it did) but neither of us had any worries about that nose to nose confrontation. He is an honest, approachable human being that despite our differences, got my vote the last time based on his performance in that situation.
Participation in the political process is what this country was founded on, and those that sit as couch warmers, and base your votes on party lines, what Bill OReilly says, or other mainstream media propaganda artists, fully deserve the traitorous, sell out to the highest bidder, representation you'll get. This may be the last time we get a chance to fix things because if it continues with the present erosion of private, personal freedoms at the present rate, you won't recognize the election as a democratic process by 2012 unless you are one of the sheeple we denigrate here on
The choice is ours to make, and we should make it as wisely as we can. We, as a whole, voted ourselves into this box, and hopefully we can vote our way out of it. We at least owe the republic a try at fixing it.
--
Cheers, Gene
So help me, this is funny. Those most common lament I hear on /. is that nobody is gettin any.
Perhaps the complainers aren't doing it right, I'm 71, and early stage 2 diabetic, a roundabout way of saying that it takes 20mg of levitra to keep me from peeing on my shoes. But I have a cooperative missus and I'm still getting all I want even w/o the chemical help. Its a two way street kids. Whats the excuse for the rest of you younger geeks?
--
Cheers, Gene
eight is something the desktop market does not need
Just thinking about that give me a sense of dejavu. How many years ago was it that Bill said 640k ought to be enough for anybody?
Same song, different verse, and more likely than not, that phrase will be humorously memorialized in the same manner as Bills offhand remark.
--
Cheers, Gene
Mod. Parent. Up. Way up. That is THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT of this little exersize in prevarication by Justice.
When you all decide to open the 4th box of liberty, let me know 5 minutes ahead so I can join in the 'fun'.
--
Cheers, Gene