Well, the last time I was in S.D., CA, they were trucking it south to Tiajuana in what looked like gasolene tankers, but which were cleaned out and used only for water. Several trucks were making 15 or 16 trips a day each from what I was told. Running 24/7.
Of course that was 45 years ago, no idea how they're doing it now.
Thats provided they actually look my friend, and its not in their monetary interest to actually look because they can make a hell of a lot more money for the legal profession if they don't.
You must understand how this works, and the only way we'll ever fix it is with an annual Bill Shakespear day.
First, let me lambast them (Einstein@Home, BOINC) for not having an email address for straightening out obvious fubars.
I downloaded the agent version 4.19 and ran it. It asked for an account key, which I haven't the foggiest where it might be, so I went back to the web page and tried to create a new account.
It throws me out because the account already exists. If thats the case, I can have it email me my forgotten account key, so I did that. Half an hour later, no key, so I repeated it a couple of times, 15 minutes later, still no key. So I went back and went around the mail me my key loop about 10 times, and finally received 8 copies, all identical of what is apparently my seti@home key!
However, since seti-3.0.8 needs boinc, I haven't upgraded seti so I'm still running seti-3.0.3.
So I'm between a rock and a hard place as that key will not allow me to log into the einstein project, but if I try to create a new account, theres already an existing account that the key they send me isn't valid for.
Like I said, where the rubber meets the road here, somebody has spilled a ton of ball point pen balls. Either merge these projects totally, or split them totally. In the meantime, I'm still running seti and happy as a clam. The only skin off anybodies nose here is BOINC's (& Einstein@Home), so until they manage to get it all in one sock, it will sit there taking up drive space until I decide I need to play space patrol.
Unforch, considering the total number of bodies that might be called planets orbiting the stars of this universe, and the fact that we only know of one life supporting planet for sure, you would have to admit that the one we know about, while very important to us (but not enough to stop the global warming causes) is most assuredly lost in the noise surrounding the digit 0, probably a decimal point followed by several thousand zero's before the first non-zero digit is found. And that, in the grand scheme of things is close enough to zero for all practical purposes. As an ex bro-in-law was fond of saying, its close enough for the girls I go with.
Well, I did run folding@home, for about 4 hours one day, on what is now my firewall box, a 500mhz K6-III. That was the best box I had at the time, and its still running seti. Why? Because seti stays at a nice of 19, and other than the cpu staying at 100%, the machine is 100% usable for other stuff, just as if seti wasn't running.
Normally, I had it setup to dial up and check the email at 1 hour intervals, but folding brought that machine to its knees begging for enough cycles to get the mail before the modem gave up as ppp was not negotiating a connection in anything like a timely manner. I tried for about half an hour to nice it up, but everytime it started a new loop the nice was back to 0 and nothing else that needed to be done was being done. So I shut it down & never restarted it. I don't know if the working dir even survives today. Drives in that machine have been shuffled around, and I cannot find the remains today.
I do recall sending an email asking if your folks could adjust the nice so I could have my machine back, but it went unanswered, probably into a black hole designed to suck up squawking emails. So I figured they really weren't that interested in the output of one old (I'm 70 now) mans machine. To me, at this time, its a shrug I guess.
Since then I've built 3 more machines, this one twice, putting the old cpu/memory out of here in a shop box to run a cnc app eventually when a video card died and took the mobo with it in this box, so this one now has a xp2800 in it. Supposedly 2x faster than the xp1400 that got reused in the shop box, but in reality, maybe, just maybe 30% faster. The xp1400 can actually run at 1400mhz, but the speed limit for this one is 2100mhz. It does 7 to 9 seti units a day, the 1400 did 5 to 7. Go figure, IMO the marketroids math is busted IMO, but thats off topic to here. The only diff is that this one runs on half the wattage that 1400 burns, gawd its hungry and hot.
this einstein-project is IMHO a little bit more worth to support than SETI, but those cancer-project is the one everybody should support (sorry, got no url right now)
I have been doing seti for nearly since it started, currently standing at 99.339% in overall rankings.
I do this mainly because my sci-fi reading goes all the way back to E.E. (Doc) Smith, which some of you might consider as the McGuffies Readers of the day and which is circa 60+ years back up the log now. One always hopes that his machine might be the one to raise its hand and holler, Hey Teach, I hear something.
But realisticly, after 5+ years, and the results of nearly 6 million people, coupled with the limited sky view of Aricebo, does tend to tell you after a while that the chances are someplace between point double ought zip and absolutely nothing. The data, I think, has been analysed several times by now, with no really outstanding candidate signals haveing been detected. Going over that same limited band of the sky, at the same limited band of frequencies, is beginning to grow old.
This gravity wave project is intrigueing, but I don't seem to be able to dl the BOINC client, mime type error I think at the BOINC site.
As far as the parent posters suggestion that we should be working on the cancer project, sorry but I'm enough of an open source advocate that my cycles will not be used for such a project wherein the output data is owned by some commercial entity, who if they get lucky will profit immensely from any discoveries so made. Likewise for the folding@home project. If the results are not to be public knowledge, able to benefit all manner of life, then screw 'em just like they'll screw me at the prescription counter for the product that may result.
There is, I would hope, a new way of doing such research that will meet these ideas, doing it openly, with the results being unencumbered by patents, and the products so developed then sold on the open market (but regulated by the FDA of course) by the time honored tradition of he who can do it the best, or cheapest, being the marketplace winner, with open competition between the makers for our dollars. The FDA's job then is like the agriculture dept folks, to make sure the process is being done by the proper methods, that being by way of testing the efficiency, and safety of the product at doing what it is being sold for.
But to bring that about, you are all I trust, aware that we will have to declare a Bill Shakespear day as an annual holiday.
The chances of that actually happening are also somewhere between point double ought zip and nothing in our present society.
Then, and only then, would I personally be interested in doing what amounts to free data processing for a commercially profitable entity.
Now, if they want to buy my cpu time at a rate that helps me pay the energy bill to run these machines, and a piece of the action (no RIAA bookkeeping to be allowed here folks, its a piece of the gross sales only, the internal expenses for that Lamborgini and the sexytary who wants a quarter of a mill just to have your baby are yours to control) then I might consider learning a different tune.
But I sure wouldn't sleep any better.
Now, if they would fix the mime type on the linux binary of BOINC, I'd dl it and take a look.
All I can do with firefox is to get it to output the binary data to firefox's screen, so the ability to do a preper download seems to be broken.
I've not had any problems of a.gz file doing that previously.
This gravity wave search rather intrigues me, but if I cannot dl the boinc manager, what good is it to do a linux version if the webmaster putting it up for dl hasn't the foggiest what a.gz file really is?
I just came back form about a half hours wading around in a site that apparently is off on a 56k dialup someplace.
To become eligible to buy the album, something I'd do out of curiosity and because I think the ARTIST should be supported by a method that purports to funnel the monies to the artist as opposed to funneling it thru the accounting dept of some faceless record company where any number of charges are made against the net sales of an album, whatever it takes to make sure they don't have to cut the artists a royalty check being the order of the day.
To continue with the first sentence above, one must open an account, complete with usernames and passwords. Somehow, it didn't like something and looped around to have me fix it, but when I fixed it, then it just loops forever asking me to login, something about an expired security certificate was being reported by my browser. And I was unable to get past that, so I never got a chance to drop my card and actually make the purchase.
FWIW, its $16.95 USD & probably a hefty shipping fee if that site is like most.
But I'm a little put off, not getting the chance to support what, from the sounds of things, must be a worthy artist to support, by buying her output.
If you are copying the mail here Ms. Schneider, grab a ball bat and go see your web designer, and don't leave until it works as intended. We really should be able to purchase it without all this 'membership' crap as long as our card has a sufficient line of credit to support the purchase. And I believe $30K+ should be enough to buy your cd unless you'd like to have a really really exclusive club that doesn't mind playing the starving artist scene for real.
I'm very happy for Ms Schneider's good fortune; her Grammy probably was voted for by people who actually heard her music and knew how exceptional it was..versus the at large catagories and normal areas where they play favorites...
So am I, but the underlying reason she got the award probably went against the grain of the diehard RIAA'ers, but the elective process overrode any perceived profit motive. That had to hurt the RIAA, real bad, and right where it hurts in their perception.
Those who voted the lady in were in all probability the majority of those votes that were cast in the jazz category. Why? Well, I haven't noticed a huge amount of new 'jazz' talent in the last 30 years, many of its true stars had their heyday 50+ years back up the log. But, to throw them out just because the RIAA didn't get its royalties out of the sales, limited to a quantity the RIAA isn't interested in, too small for them, would have been the scandal that would finally have gotten the regulators attention, and possibly expose to the general public the often dishonest accounting practices of the recording companies who pretty much own the RIAA. For Joe Sixpack, if its not on the 5:30 news, its not news.
Accounting practices that can sell 3 million copies of a cd, and then claim the artist still owes them $310,000 in production costs and maybe 3 million in advertising.
So my hats off to the lady, and I'd go to the site and buy a copy to support her talent, but/. has, as usual, seen to it the server is melted down already. Just my luck...
Hey, thats a good one. Prattlestar Galaxitive indeed. Chuckle...
Getting Analog out here in the toulies of WV does seem to be problematic though, I've not seen it on the stands in a good decade around here, and never got around to subscribing, which I shoulda. It may be on the racks at a downtown Clarksburg rag peddler, but I'll be damned if I have to go around there cause it seems as though the only meter you can find is busted and you cannot even put a coin into it, and its 3 blocks from where you need to go, but that doesn't stop you from collecting a ticket thats about 15 dollars now. Screw 'em and the camel that ride in on 'em. Typical example of howto run businesses away from your core downtown district by chaseing off their customers. WaldenBooks out in the mall doesn't carry it on the periodicals shelf. Which makes me a little sad as it was the best written and edited of all the sci-fi rags. And I don't recall seeing it at B&N either the last time I was in the one in GJ, CO.
First season? That was quite some years back, and it as so hackish and disconnected the first season that it became known as Gabblestar Ballactica in the press of the day. I don't recall whether it made it all the way thru the second season way back then, ISTR it got the plug pulled on it mid season or some such.
Agreed, this new incarnation does seem to be a lot better written than the decade+ old version, so thats an improvement. Heck, a workable story line is an improvement, but it would be nice if they'd have burned the costumes and hairdo's from the first one and came up with something truely fresh.
I just scanned this thread all the way to the bottom, and I only have one comment.
This thread should be made required reading for anyone contemplating bringing Carly on board in a position of management high enough to be able to effect company policy or direction.
I think it would result in their rethinking on the thought of hiring her, rethinking to the extent that she gets told, sorry, but we're looking for someone with more forward looking ideas than *your* track record seems to show.
OTOH, if she invests her ill-gotten severance package wisely, I'd say she could turn herself into a lifetime party of one, and stay sloshed the rest of her life.
Maybe, just maybe, I'll eventually be able to call them with a warranty problem on a $5k printer, and actually get, A: someone who speaks english, B: someone familiar with the product and its warts, and C: my problem actually fixed.
Such has not been the case even with their high end printers and/or storage products since Carly was given the reins. In case you hadn't noticed, serviceing dealer accessability to parts is sufficiently restricted that even that $5000 printer on a maintainance contract can only be restored to productive use once.
Even then you will be forced to put it in a closet to muffle the screaching and squawling it makes when all those non-replaceable plastic bearings are worn beyond calling them a bearing. No human who has to be able to interact with anybody else, in person or on the phone, should have to listen to that, its like fingernails on a blackboard...
Then, and only then will HP be able to recover some of the PR ground lost under her watch. IMO they must recover some of that before the buying public will return to considering their brand name as being better than what we can buy from some cloner at WallyWorld.
My $0.02 is the starting bid here, do I hear $0.03?
Unforch, there is no "Dark side of the moon" in terms of a permanent dark side. Its day, and its night, are each nominally 2 weeks long. Yes, it maintains the same face toward the earth, but thats not the same else we wouldn't have the phases of the moon as the 'dark side' rotates around the moon as it rotates around the earth. -- Cheers, Gene
Now I wonder if the new hubble is cheaper story that ran here a day or 2 back wasn't just testing the water to see if it would mollify those of us that would automaticly scream foul if the hubble is allowed to die?
I wouldn't put it past NASA to try and lead us around by the nose to a conclusion that there might be a promise of another, even better telescope when they have no plans to do so, and no money in the budget.
Me, I'm selfish. At my age, I don't have time to piddle around another 20 years while they get around to doing it. If they could do it in 5 years, maybe I might have eyes enough to see its first light, but in 20, my borderline sugar will have blinded me, if not outright killed me with a heart attack, that goes with sugar I'm told. So for my own selfish reasons, I'd like to see this one refurbished one more time at least.
From observing the papers published that are based on its work in just the last year, its my opinion that the first 10-12 years was just exercize, learning how to use it to its fullest, and now we are actually using it for real research the last couple of years. I don't think it has made its most important scientific contribution to our knowledge yet!
I see idiots like this guy all the time. 'No I don't want to pay for Antiviral, Antispyware, Firewall, Backups, etc'
With all due respect for the windows sheeple (not too much mind you), anyone who gets caught in such a sorry web and loses their collective asses in such a deal is only really proving the old adage that PT Barnum was fond of quoteing.
"there's one born every minute"
Well, I don't pay for AntiViral, AntiSpyWare stuff. I don't need them, (generally speaking) with linux. In 8 years of running linux, I've seen one box rootkitted, we rebooted it, installed the fix, and cleaned it up, its next reboot was 9 months later when a power outage outlasted the ups. And I do use a firewall, and I do make backups every night.
This small 2 to 3 machine home system has only had 2 access attempts that actually got thru the router to my firewall, to get logged and shut down in the last 2 years!. And guess what? Both attempts came from my assigned dns server, owned by verizon and presumably running some sort of windows dns server. Because that address was known, it got past the router & its NAT. And thats as far as it got, stopped dead with one line in the log to indicate it happened.
And I do tend to stay up with security fixes unlike the windows sheeple who's probably running a windows box with a generated serial number that would probably bounce if he tried to dl the latest patches from Redmond. That actually doesn't seem to make a hell of a lot of difference, I was reading a message from someone yesterday that had just got thru re-imaging the drive on his sisters computer because it was full of crap and it was infected again less than 45 seconds after completing the boot sequence with the network cable plugged in. There's no way in hell a windows box can survive long enough to grab and install all the fixes when its been re-imaged by the distribution cd that came with the machine.
So when are all the diehard M$ fans finally going to get the message, and start a class action suit to recover their piece of the estimated 22 billion dollars a year that the M$ poor security was estimated to cost the public?
Seems like a hell of a good question to me.
That said, I don't want to hear about how good M$ is, or field any flames, they'll be deleted from my mailbox after I read enough here to get the tone of the message.
BUT, I will drive up to 20 miles one way with a kit of cd's and install linux on your box & spend a couple of hours afterwards drinking (& recycling) your beer, and answering as many questions as I have the knowledge to answer. And I'll leave my phone number in case something else needs an answer. That isn't saying I've got the answer, but chances are I know a place to go looking for the answer.
I'm inclined to think that a new Hubble, without the flawed mirror, which should give the new one a field of view much larger than the error corrected range of the existing Hubble has, is a worthwhile project. I've seen figures of 17 times the image area, and that is not something to sneeze at. I'm not a huge expert in optical matters, but the glasses put on Hubble to fix it cannot do anything but restrict its field of view rather seriously.
With new imaging devices that are both larger, and potentially more sensitive by a factor of 20 or so, one figure I saw earlier tonight, the new one could very well break even more new ground in scientific research.
And I'd like to also remind those that think the James Webb scope to go up in about 5-6 years, as a Hubble replacement, is a highly false assumption as its sensors aren't really designed to cover visible light wavelengths. Each has its job, and the Webb cannot do what the Hubble is doing, and vice-versa. Both will make great contributions to our scientific knowledge.
One thing I'd like to see changed in the new Hubble is the gyroscopes. It seems to me that an optical gyro would not only be longer lasting than the mechanical units used now, but potentially far more accurate. Is there a technical problem with them that I am not aware of that makes the mechanical gyro the only useable method?
The reaction wheels that steer the existing Hubble seem to have been pretty dependable, so that weight at launch time is certainly justifiable and of course, unlike steering rockets, do not leave potentially damaging particulate matter in the orbital vicinity. They are also run from a replenishable power supply, the solar wings.
I'd also question the "from day one" approach to de-orbiting it by the planned attachment of the rocket motor designed to drop it in the pacific at the end of its life. Mechanical things in a vacuum tend to freeze up and not work after a while, and if the new one gives us a projected lifetime of 15 to 20 years, who is going to run up and fix it when it doesn't fire as planned? Good question that...
Its also a good question as to how do we replace the batteries which it will probably need at least 2, maybe 3 sets of them in its projected service life?
This seems like an ideal time to design in an easily changed by robotics cartridge carrier for the batteries, something a very simple minded robotic mission could do by designing into the side of the scope, the robots docking hooks, which when all are engaged, would automaticly position the rest of the robot to do the rest of the job autonomously.
I hope they do it, and I hope I live to see its results. Its my tax money, and I vote to do it, asap since I'm already 70.
With all due respect, I wasn't refering to anything in this case but the motherboard and cpu, and possibly the hard drives, since if they aren't up to snuff, they simply don't sign in at post time. The only problem I have with the escd display is the shortness of it timewise. You never have time to fully read its report, and grok what if anything may be wrong.
All the rest of what you are concerned with is subject to other, more specialized testing programs, like memtest86 for the ram health, and inadequate cooling of the cpu is pretty self explanatory by the crashing and lockups. lsusb, or lspci, either one can pretty well give you a health report on the rest of the hardware section by section.
Of course, if you managed to convince the manufacturer to sell you a computer without an operating system pre-installed, you had to pay an extra $10-$50 for that choice. Why? In order to be sure the computer worked in the first place, they had to install Windows to test the peripherals and other devices! Oh, did you want warranty support too? Sorry. "We don't support other operating systems."
Excuse me, but whoinhell needs to buy that? I buy the motherboard, the cpu, the memory, video and sound card, cpu cooler, front panel usb portage, case, psu, hard drives etc from maybe half a dozen places when I want to build a new machine. I can run a screwdriver and put it all together. That, and some uncommon sense called commen sense, are about all you really need to do it your way, without M$ ever getting its camels nose in the tent in the first place.
By way of defineing common sense, I'm 70, and have an 8th grade education.
The post (Power On Self Test) in the bios completing successfully is all the insurance that the hardware works you will *ever* need. The requirement that they had to install windows on the box to test it is pure, sometimes still warm, usually green, and found on the ground behind the male of the bovine specie.
This is commonly called Bull Shit by the non-M$ sheeple, and grounds to load up the shotgun by windows lover sheeple. Go figure, I gave up long ago.
As far as warranty is concerned, the mobo maker doesn't really care about a whole hell of a lot except the post output. If it won't 'post' then the mobo, or the cpu, has obviously gone to that great graveyard. Running mostly socket A stuff, I've always got a cpu that will fit the socket and cross-check the cpu thats in it. They don't care what os is running on it, other than they may not have a resident expert in "superdos-5.4.1.2" on staff to answer your stupid setup questions. Thats not their job anyway, their job is to make you a good motherboard, at a competitive price. And many do exactly that, for as low as a 50 dollar bill!
So the dealers trying to cover their collective asses from redmond driven retaliation should quit this FUD, because thats exactly what it is. The retaliation may well be real, and thats what double-you doesn't give a fat rats ass about, so that will no doubt continue until we get an administration that actually works for the people. We most certainly don't have that now, but thats another horserace entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the last time I was in S.D., CA, they were trucking it south to Tiajuana in what looked like gasolene tankers, but which were cleaned out and used only for water. Several trucks were making 15 or 16 trips a day each from what I was told. Running 24/7.
Of course that was 45 years ago, no idea how they're doing it now.
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Cheers, Gene
Can you find the door?
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Cheers, Gene
Thats provided they actually look my friend, and its not in their monetary interest to actually look because they can make a hell of a lot more money for the legal profession if they don't.
You must understand how this works, and the only way we'll ever fix it is with an annual Bill Shakespear day.
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Cheers, Gene
First, let me lambast them (Einstein@Home, BOINC) for not having an email address for straightening out obvious fubars.
I downloaded the agent version 4.19 and ran it. It asked for an account key, which I haven't the foggiest where it might be, so I went back to the web page and tried to create a new account.
It throws me out because the account already exists. If thats the case, I can have it email me my forgotten account key, so I did that. Half an hour later, no key, so I repeated it a couple of times, 15 minutes later, still no key. So I went back and went around the mail me my key loop about 10 times, and finally received 8 copies, all identical of what is apparently my seti@home key!
However, since seti-3.0.8 needs boinc, I haven't upgraded seti so I'm still running seti-3.0.3.
So I'm between a rock and a hard place as that key will not allow me to log into the einstein project, but if I try to create a new account, theres already an existing account that the key they send me isn't valid for.
Like I said, where the rubber meets the road here, somebody has spilled a ton of ball point pen balls. Either merge these projects totally, or split them totally. In the meantime, I'm still running seti and happy as a clam. The only skin off anybodies nose here is BOINC's (& Einstein@Home), so until they manage to get it all in one sock, it will sit there taking up drive space until I decide I need to play space patrol.
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No Cheers, Gene
Unforch, considering the total number of bodies that might be called planets orbiting the stars of this universe, and the fact that we only know of one life supporting planet for sure, you would have to admit that the one we know about, while very important to us (but not enough to stop the global warming causes) is most assuredly lost in the noise surrounding the digit 0, probably a decimal point followed by several thousand zero's before the first non-zero digit is found. And that, in the grand scheme of things is close enough to zero for all practical purposes. As an ex bro-in-law was fond of saying, its close enough for the girls I go with.
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Cheers, Gene
Well, I did run folding@home, for about 4 hours one day, on what is now my firewall box, a 500mhz K6-III. That was the best box I had at the time, and its still running seti. Why? Because seti stays at a nice of 19, and other than the cpu staying at 100%, the machine is 100% usable for other stuff, just as if seti wasn't running.
Normally, I had it setup to dial up and check the email at 1 hour intervals, but folding brought that machine to its knees begging for enough cycles to get the mail before the modem gave up as ppp was not negotiating a connection in anything like a timely manner. I tried for about half an hour to nice it up, but everytime it started a new loop the nice was back to 0 and nothing else that needed to be done was being done. So I shut it down & never restarted it. I don't know if the working dir even survives today. Drives in that machine have been shuffled around, and I cannot find the remains today.
I do recall sending an email asking if your folks could adjust the nice so I could have my machine back, but it went unanswered, probably into a black hole designed to suck up squawking emails. So I figured they really weren't that interested in the output of one old (I'm 70 now) mans machine. To me, at this time, its a shrug I guess.
Since then I've built 3 more machines, this one twice, putting the old cpu/memory out of here in a shop box to run a cnc app eventually when a video card died and took the mobo with it in this box, so this one now has a xp2800 in it. Supposedly 2x faster than the xp1400 that got reused in the shop box, but in reality, maybe, just maybe 30% faster. The xp1400 can actually run at 1400mhz, but the speed limit for this one is 2100mhz. It does 7 to 9 seti units a day, the 1400 did 5 to 7. Go figure, IMO the marketroids math is busted IMO, but thats off topic to here. The only diff is that this one runs on half the wattage that 1400 burns, gawd its hungry and hot.
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Cheers, Gene
There are a *lot* of people crunching work for SETI@Home (and several tens of thousands on SETI@Home II).
TBE, as of right now, 5,357,872 total users according to the stats page I'm looking at with another browser right now...
Your 'tens of thousands' is a wee bit of an understatement.
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Cheers, Gene
this einstein-project is IMHO a little bit more worth to support than SETI, but those cancer-project is the one everybody should support (sorry, got no url right now)
I have been doing seti for nearly since it started, currently standing at 99.339% in overall rankings.
I do this mainly because my sci-fi reading goes all the way back to E.E. (Doc) Smith, which some of you might consider as the McGuffies Readers of the day and which is circa 60+ years back up the log now. One always hopes that his machine might be the one to raise its hand and holler, Hey Teach, I hear something.
But realisticly, after 5+ years, and the results of nearly 6 million people, coupled with the limited sky view of Aricebo, does tend to tell you after a while that the chances are someplace between point double ought zip and absolutely nothing. The data, I think, has been analysed several times by now, with no really outstanding candidate signals haveing been detected. Going over that same limited band of the sky, at the same limited band of frequencies, is beginning to grow old.
This gravity wave project is intrigueing, but I don't seem to be able to dl the BOINC client, mime type error I think at the BOINC site.
As far as the parent posters suggestion that we should be working on the cancer project, sorry but I'm enough of an open source advocate that my cycles will not be used for such a project wherein the output data is owned by some commercial entity, who if they get lucky will profit immensely from any discoveries so made. Likewise for the folding@home project. If the results are not to be public knowledge, able to benefit all manner of life, then screw 'em just like they'll screw me at the prescription counter for the product that may result.
There is, I would hope, a new way of doing such research that will meet these ideas, doing it openly, with the results being unencumbered by patents, and the products so developed then sold on the open market (but regulated by the FDA of course) by the time honored tradition of he who can do it the best, or cheapest, being the marketplace winner, with open competition between the makers for our dollars. The FDA's job then is like the agriculture dept folks, to make sure the process is being done by the proper methods, that being by way of testing the efficiency, and safety of the product at doing what it is being sold for.
But to bring that about, you are all I trust, aware that we will have to declare a Bill Shakespear day as an annual holiday.
The chances of that actually happening are also somewhere between point double ought zip and nothing in our present society.
Then, and only then, would I personally be interested in doing what amounts to free data processing for a commercially profitable entity.
Now, if they want to buy my cpu time at a rate that helps me pay the energy bill to run these machines, and a piece of the action (no RIAA bookkeeping to be allowed here folks, its a piece of the gross sales only, the internal expenses for that Lamborgini and the sexytary who wants a quarter of a mill just to have your baby are yours to control) then I might consider learning a different tune.
But I sure wouldn't sleep any better.
Now, if they would fix the mime type on the linux binary of BOINC, I'd dl it and take a look.
Cheers, Gene
All I can do with firefox is to get it to output the binary data to firefox's screen, so the ability to do a preper download seems to be broken.
.gz file doing that previously.
.gz file really is?
I've not had any problems of a
This gravity wave search rather intrigues me, but if I cannot dl the boinc manager, what good is it to do a linux version if the webmaster putting it up for dl hasn't the foggiest what a
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Cheers, Gene
you should rethink your position as a cat owner
When are you all going to get it straight that you do not 'own' a cat? Its impossible. because the cat will never aknowledge it.
OTOH, the cat may own you...
while (!learned) {
To a dog, you are the Master;
To a cat, you are just staff;
}
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Cheers, Gene
I just came back form about a half hours wading around in a site that apparently is off on a 56k dialup someplace.
To become eligible to buy the album, something I'd do out of curiosity and because I think the ARTIST should be supported by a method that purports to funnel the monies to the artist as opposed to funneling it thru the accounting dept of some faceless record company where any number of charges are made against the net sales of an album, whatever it takes to make sure they don't have to cut the artists a royalty check being the order of the day.
To continue with the first sentence above, one must open an account, complete with usernames and passwords. Somehow, it didn't like something and looped around to have me fix it, but when I fixed it, then it just loops forever asking me to login, something about an expired security certificate was being reported by my browser. And I was unable to get past that, so I never got a chance to drop my card and actually make the purchase.
FWIW, its $16.95 USD & probably a hefty shipping fee if that site is like most.
But I'm a little put off, not getting the chance to support what, from the sounds of things, must be a worthy artist to support, by buying her output.
If you are copying the mail here Ms. Schneider, grab a ball bat and go see your web designer, and don't leave until it works as intended. We really should be able to purchase it without all this 'membership' crap as long as our card has a sufficient line of credit to support the purchase. And I believe $30K+ should be enough to buy your cd unless you'd like to have a really really exclusive club that doesn't mind playing the starving artist scene for real.
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Cheers, Gene
I'm very happy for Ms Schneider's good fortune; her Grammy probably was voted for by people who actually heard her music and knew how exceptional it was..versus the at large catagories and normal areas where they play favorites...
/. has, as usual, seen to it the server is melted down already. Just my luck...
So am I, but the underlying reason she got the award probably went against the grain of the diehard RIAA'ers, but the elective process overrode any perceived profit motive. That had to hurt the RIAA, real bad, and right where it hurts in their perception.
Those who voted the lady in were in all probability the majority of those votes that were cast in the jazz category. Why? Well, I haven't noticed a huge amount of new 'jazz' talent in the last 30 years, many of its true stars had their heyday 50+ years back up the log. But, to throw them out just because the RIAA didn't get its royalties out of the sales, limited to a quantity the RIAA isn't interested in, too small for them, would have been the scandal that would finally have gotten the regulators attention, and possibly expose to the general public the often dishonest accounting practices of the recording companies who pretty much own the RIAA. For Joe Sixpack, if its not on the 5:30 news, its not news.
Accounting practices that can sell 3 million copies of a cd, and then claim the artist still owes them $310,000 in production costs and maybe 3 million in advertising.
So my hats off to the lady, and I'd go to the site and buy a copy to support her talent, but
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Cheers, Gene
Hey, thats a good one. Prattlestar Galaxitive indeed. Chuckle...
Getting Analog out here in the toulies of WV does seem to be problematic though, I've not seen it on the stands in a good decade around here, and never got around to subscribing, which I shoulda. It may be on the racks at a downtown Clarksburg rag peddler, but I'll be damned if I have to go around there cause it seems as though the only meter you can find is busted and you cannot even put a coin into it, and its 3 blocks from where you need to go, but that doesn't stop you from collecting a ticket thats about 15 dollars now. Screw 'em and the camel that ride in on 'em. Typical example of howto run businesses away from your core downtown district by chaseing off their customers. WaldenBooks out in the mall doesn't carry it on the periodicals shelf. Which makes me a little sad as it was the best written and edited of all the sci-fi rags. And I don't recall seeing it at B&N either the last time I was in the one in GJ, CO.
Is it still around?
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Cheers, Gene
Indeed it is, sorry I mentioned it, but was just setting the 'first season' for that name straight.
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Cheers, Gene
at least the first season was good.
First season? That was quite some years back, and it as so hackish and disconnected the first season that it became known as Gabblestar Ballactica in the press of the day. I don't recall whether it made it all the way thru the second season way back then, ISTR it got the plug pulled on it mid season or some such.
Agreed, this new incarnation does seem to be a lot better written than the decade+ old version, so thats an improvement. Heck, a workable story line is an improvement, but it would be nice if they'd have burned the costumes and hairdo's from the first one and came up with something truely fresh.
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Cheers, Gene
I just scanned this thread all the way to the bottom, and I only have one comment.
This thread should be made required reading for anyone contemplating bringing Carly on board in a position of management high enough to be able to effect company policy or direction.
I think it would result in their rethinking on the thought of hiring her, rethinking to the extent that she gets told, sorry, but we're looking for someone with more forward looking ideas than *your* track record seems to show.
OTOH, if she invests her ill-gotten severance package wisely, I'd say she could turn herself into a lifetime party of one, and stay sloshed the rest of her life.
Maybe, just maybe, I'll eventually be able to call them with a warranty problem on a $5k printer, and actually get, A: someone who speaks english, B: someone familiar with the product and its warts, and C: my problem actually fixed.
Such has not been the case even with their high end printers and/or storage products since Carly was given the reins. In case you hadn't noticed, serviceing dealer accessability to parts is sufficiently restricted that even that $5000 printer on a maintainance contract can only be restored to productive use once.
Even then you will be forced to put it in a closet to muffle the screaching and squawling it makes when all those non-replaceable plastic bearings are worn beyond calling them a bearing. No human who has to be able to interact with anybody else, in person or on the phone, should have to listen to that, its like fingernails on a blackboard...
Then, and only then will HP be able to recover some of the PR ground lost under her watch. IMO they must recover some of that before the buying public will return to considering their brand name as being better than what we can buy from some cloner at WallyWorld.
My $0.02 is the starting bid here, do I hear $0.03?
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Cheers, Gene
Unforch, there is no "Dark side of the moon" in terms of a permanent dark side. Its day, and its night, are each nominally 2 weeks long. Yes, it maintains the same face toward the earth, but thats not the same else we wouldn't have the phases of the moon as the 'dark side' rotates around the moon as it rotates around the earth.
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Cheers, Gene
Now I wonder if the new hubble is cheaper story that ran here a day or 2 back wasn't just testing the water to see if it would mollify those of us that would automaticly scream foul if the hubble is allowed to die?
I wouldn't put it past NASA to try and lead us around by the nose to a conclusion that there might be a promise of another, even better telescope when they have no plans to do so, and no money in the budget.
Me, I'm selfish. At my age, I don't have time to piddle around another 20 years while they get around to doing it. If they could do it in 5 years, maybe I might have eyes enough to see its first light, but in 20, my borderline sugar will have blinded me, if not outright killed me with a heart attack, that goes with sugar I'm told. So for my own selfish reasons, I'd like to see this one refurbished one more time at least.
From observing the papers published that are based on its work in just the last year, its my opinion that the first 10-12 years was just exercize, learning how to use it to its fullest, and now we are actually using it for real research the last couple of years. I don't think it has made its most important scientific contribution to our knowledge yet!
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Sadly, no cheers tonight, Gene
So it *IS* free as in beer? I'm so confused.
yup, thats the price of admission to the linux world. That, and a willingness to actually learn something.
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Cheers, Gene
I see idiots like this guy all the time. 'No I don't want to pay for Antiviral, Antispyware, Firewall, Backups, etc'
With all due respect for the windows sheeple (not too much mind you), anyone who gets caught in such a sorry web and loses their collective asses in such a deal is only really proving the old adage that PT Barnum was fond of quoteing.
"there's one born every minute"
Well, I don't pay for AntiViral, AntiSpyWare stuff. I don't need them, (generally speaking) with linux. In 8 years of running linux, I've seen one box rootkitted, we rebooted it, installed the fix, and cleaned it up, its next reboot was 9 months later when a power outage outlasted the ups. And I do use a firewall, and I do make backups every night.
This small 2 to 3 machine home system has only had 2 access attempts that actually got thru the router to my firewall, to get logged and shut down in the last 2 years!. And guess what? Both attempts came from my assigned dns server, owned by verizon and presumably running some sort of windows dns server. Because that address was known, it got past the router & its NAT. And thats as far as it got, stopped dead with one line in the log to indicate it happened.
And I do tend to stay up with security fixes unlike the windows sheeple who's probably running a windows box with a generated serial number that would probably bounce if he tried to dl the latest patches from Redmond. That actually doesn't seem to make a hell of a lot of difference, I was reading a message from someone yesterday that had just got thru re-imaging the drive on his sisters computer because it was full of crap and it was infected again less than 45 seconds after completing the boot sequence with the network cable plugged in. There's no way in hell a windows box can survive long enough to grab and install all the fixes when its been re-imaged by the distribution cd that came with the machine.
So when are all the diehard M$ fans finally going to get the message, and start a class action suit to recover their piece of the estimated 22 billion dollars a year that the M$ poor security was estimated to cost the public?
Seems like a hell of a good question to me.
That said, I don't want to hear about how good M$ is, or field any flames, they'll be deleted from my mailbox after I read enough here to get the tone of the message.
BUT, I will drive up to 20 miles one way with a kit of cd's and install linux on your box & spend a couple of hours afterwards drinking (& recycling) your beer, and answering as many questions as I have the knowledge to answer. And I'll leave my phone number in case something else needs an answer. That isn't saying I've got the answer, but chances are I know a place to go looking for the answer.
Hows that for a deal?
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Cheers, Gene
I'm inclined to think that a new Hubble, without the flawed mirror, which should give the new one a field of view much larger than the error corrected range of the existing Hubble has, is a worthwhile project. I've seen figures of 17 times the image area, and that is not something to sneeze at. I'm not a huge expert in optical matters, but the glasses put on Hubble to fix it cannot do anything but restrict its field of view rather seriously.
With new imaging devices that are both larger, and potentially more sensitive by a factor of 20 or so, one figure I saw earlier tonight, the new one could very well break even more new ground in scientific research.
And I'd like to also remind those that think the James Webb scope to go up in about 5-6 years, as a Hubble replacement, is a highly false assumption as its sensors aren't really designed to cover visible light wavelengths. Each has its job, and the Webb cannot do what the Hubble is doing, and vice-versa. Both will make great contributions to our scientific knowledge.
One thing I'd like to see changed in the new Hubble is the gyroscopes. It seems to me that an optical gyro would not only be longer lasting than the mechanical units used now, but potentially far more accurate. Is there a technical problem with them that I am not aware of that makes the mechanical gyro the only useable method?
The reaction wheels that steer the existing Hubble seem to have been pretty dependable, so that weight at launch time is certainly justifiable and of course, unlike steering rockets, do not leave potentially damaging particulate matter in the orbital vicinity. They are also run from a replenishable power supply, the solar wings.
I'd also question the "from day one" approach to de-orbiting it by the planned attachment of the rocket motor designed to drop it in the pacific at the end of its life. Mechanical things in a vacuum tend to freeze up and not work after a while, and if the new one gives us a projected lifetime of 15 to 20 years, who is going to run up and fix it when it doesn't fire as planned? Good question that...
Its also a good question as to how do we replace the batteries which it will probably need at least 2, maybe 3 sets of them in its projected service life?
This seems like an ideal time to design in an easily changed by robotics cartridge carrier for the batteries, something a very simple minded robotic mission could do by designing into the side of the scope, the robots docking hooks, which when all are engaged, would automaticly position the rest of the robot to do the rest of the job autonomously.
I hope they do it, and I hope I live to see its results. Its my tax money, and I vote to do it, asap since I'm already 70.
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Cheers, Gene
Possibly. In any event, its still excrement.
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Cheers, Gene
Chuckle, yeah I blew it there didn't I. But OTOH, you did get the message.
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Cheers, Gene
With all due respect, I wasn't refering to anything in this case but the motherboard and cpu, and possibly the hard drives, since if they aren't up to snuff, they simply don't sign in at post time. The only problem I have with the escd display is the shortness of it timewise. You never have time to fully read its report, and grok what if anything may be wrong.
All the rest of what you are concerned with is subject to other, more specialized testing programs, like memtest86 for the ram health, and inadequate cooling of the cpu is pretty self explanatory by the crashing and lockups. lsusb, or lspci, either one can pretty well give you a health report on the rest of the hardware section by section.
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Cheers, Gene
Of course, if you managed to convince the manufacturer to sell you a computer without an operating system pre-installed, you had to pay an extra $10-$50 for that choice. Why? In order to be sure the computer worked in the first place, they had to install Windows to test the peripherals and other devices! Oh, did you want warranty support too? Sorry. "We don't support other operating systems."
Excuse me, but whoinhell needs to buy that? I buy the motherboard, the cpu, the memory, video and sound card, cpu cooler, front panel usb portage, case, psu, hard drives etc from maybe half a dozen places when I want to build a new machine. I can run a screwdriver and put it all together. That, and some uncommon sense called commen sense, are about all you really need to do it your way, without M$ ever getting its camels nose in the tent in the first place.
By way of defineing common sense, I'm 70, and have an 8th grade education.
The post (Power On Self Test) in the bios completing successfully is all the insurance that the hardware works you will *ever* need. The requirement that they had to install windows on the box to test it is pure, sometimes still warm, usually green, and found on the ground behind the male of the bovine specie.
This is commonly called Bull Shit by the non-M$ sheeple, and grounds to load up the shotgun by windows lover sheeple. Go figure, I gave up long ago.
As far as warranty is concerned, the mobo maker doesn't really care about a whole hell of a lot except the post output. If it won't 'post' then the mobo, or the cpu, has obviously gone to that great graveyard. Running mostly socket A stuff, I've always got a cpu that will fit the socket and cross-check the cpu thats in it.
They don't care what os is running on it, other than they may not have a resident expert in "superdos-5.4.1.2" on staff to answer your stupid setup questions. Thats not their job anyway, their job is to make you a good motherboard, at a competitive price. And many do exactly that, for as low as a 50 dollar bill!
So the dealers trying to cover their collective asses from redmond driven retaliation should quit this FUD, because thats exactly what it is. The retaliation may well be real, and thats what double-you doesn't give a fat rats ass about, so that will no doubt continue until we get an administration that actually works for the people. We most certainly don't have that now, but thats another horserace entirely.
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Cheers, gene
Proudly M$ free since forever.