Other than the Gulf to Bay World of Beer (which used to be my favorite store in the world), there's also a lot of fun to be had at the Dunedin brewery (it's on Douglas Ave just south of Main St). There's a gas station (I think a chevron) at the corner of Main St and Alt. 19 that has 101 varieties of beer... and Leuken's liquor store at Patricia and Main St. has a healthy selection at close to half the price that World of Beer charges for their brews!
Now I just need to find a place that'll ship me Molson XXX at a decent price and I'll be in heaven:)
In jr. high, there was a teacher at my school who ran the computer lab (a dozen Mac LC-II's)... He volunteered to come in early and ran a before-school computer club. It ultimately boiled down to most kids playing freeware network games over appletalk, while one or two of them wrote BASIC programs to do silly things. Not incredibly constructive, but fun... and it got the geeks together for the first time. This led into high school...
In high school, there were no clubs like this. I was taking drafting/architecture classes and spent a LOT of time in the art department. I ended up spending a year interning with a different art teacher, and we came up with this bright idea of creating a computer graphics class. So my intern class turned into a design project to help create this class. Somehow, we got the budget from the school to buy 15 tweaked-up (at the time) video-editing powermac's, an "old" amiga video toaster, and a low-end server. The first semester we ran a 2D graphics class that was extremely successful, and the second semester we ran a video course that did relatively-simple video editing. Just the first year alone brought together SO many geeks to collaborate on ideas and projects. You'd be amazed how many successful companies have been formed from that first group of students!
I graduated, but I hear that these days (5 years later) that teacher now spends 3/4 of her day on computer graphics classes! There's rumor of it becoming a "magnet school" for computer graphics. They do more advanced/realtime video editing (the morning announcements are on TV, with realtime production!!), as well as 3D rendering in the level-3 course.
In both cases, an interested teacher was necessary to sponsor the program and generally oversee it. Much of the time students can provide the creative ideas for the club/class to work on. Oh, also... Get some interested students together and have them ask their parents if their employer has older PC's they want to get rid of. The sponsoring teacher can ask the staff to do the same thing. A LOT of medium to large companies have a ton of computers that they'll donate in order to get a tax writeoff. This is an awesome way to get 50 machines (20 working, 20 half-working, 20 just for spare parts) for free, and you'd be amazed how many people are happy to do this. You can very easily get too many PCs!
And honestly... If you get a stack of P3-500's with 64mb RAM, you could build some COOL stuff in the club. Build a multi-subnet routed network (a little BSD firewall makes a KILLER simple router), just to learn how it works. A web server. How bout a MOSIX cluster of web servers? Now THAT would be a club I would've loved to join in high school... Instead, I just built it all in my room and turned it into a company (well, sort of...):)
Oh man... Yeah, My first x86 box was a Tandy 1000/TL for sure... It had the tandy-proprietary video (approximately EGA, but not exactly)... 8mhz 286 with the "slow.exe" program to make it run at 4.77mhz for compatibility with old, hard-clocked applications. 32mb MFM hard drive, DOS on ROM... 16540 UARTs that couldn't handle more than a 9600 baud modem, unless you threw an internal modem on with its own UART controller.
I actually furned my 1000/TL into a 28.8 BBS until the hard drive fried (about 4 months later)... Then I sold it for $40 (with a 14.4) to a kid who just wanted it to run Telix from floppy:)
What I remember the MOST though, is the monitor that came with that T1000/TL. Press the power button and watch EVERY light in the house dim, and the BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ of the capacitors MUST have given me a brain tumor. Good god, that thing used even more power than the 1988 Sun 19" monitor I *still* have and use:)
Close! I went with the integra gs-r, as the RSX wasn't out yet, and the TL type-s did not yet come with a manual transmission. That TL is trying *really* hard to be the next car on my wishlist.:)
Mmm.. interesting! I can see how that sort of logic could (in part) work... The more traditional pragmatist in me sort of likes the explaination.:)
However, my gut instinct tells me that this method of credit and liability trending is (1) highly prone to error, and (2) largely outdated, as the computerization of such information has (hopefully) led to significantly faster turnaround-times for credit data changes.
Though statistics was never my favorite math course, I see many hypothetical situations that would cause a false-positive red flag to be raised. For example, let's say that I was renting an apartment and the lease was about to expire. I decide I want to shop around and find a different apartment complex (perhaps closer to work, friends or family)... I file applications at 3 apartment complexes, decide on one, and move in. Lucky for me, I found the place of my dreams and my rent is $150 less per month than it was before. Now I have 3 credit checks on my record reflecting against me, even though I have $150 more per month to spend on something else. Two months later I go looking for a new car. I get screwed on my first loan application due to the prior credit checks, and have to go to some secondary loan place that charges higher interest rates. They approve me, but at some ridiculous 17% interest rate. All that drama, just because I wanted to go the extra mile and find a nice apartment that would save me some money...:/
Certainly, I don't expect the credit system (nor anything managed by misused statistics) to be perfect, but when such arbitrary (and perhaps unknown) criteria are passed against "my" credit data (at some credit company I don't know) and cause my financial liability to be artificially inflated, it gets under my skin. I don't feel that it's anywhere near right for me to pay for someone else's poor 'algorithms' (maybe 'numerology' is a better term?).
Wow, you're clearly not replying to my original post, because you're waaaaay out in left field.
1. Yes, I didn't like the fact that they did credit checks. Yes, I did apply for the job, and I *did* change their hiring process. Apparently I was "special enough"...:)
2. Although I was not the original Ask Slashdot submitter, my position coincidentally involved managing another employee. Coincidence is good, but I like people who actually read posts much, much better.:)
3. I can't direct my own finances? I guess you didn't see in the parent post that I had and continue to have very good (in fact, flawless) credit.
4. How can I admit to having financial problems when I don't have any? Let's see, My only debt is my car (and I own other paid off vehicles)... it is worth about $5000 more than I owe, and I'm ahead on payments. Hrm... Unless 'the finance book' has been rewritten lately, that would be called equity, which is a very good thing, credit-wise. Go Acura!:)
5. My claim was that my good finances were my issue, as it is private, confidential information, and my prospective employer was not a credit agency or licensed for any sort of financial business. Requiring non-employment-related, legally-confidential information is unlawful, even in most at-will employment states. Gotta love that little thing called "right to privacy"!
6. When I apply for credit with an institution licensed to provide credit, it is understood and assumed that a credit check is required! Common sense! EUREKA!:)
Next time, try reading the parent post before you reply.:) I'd hate to have to smack anyone else with a cluebat today!
Yep - I've been in the same boat. A previous employer wanted to pull a credit report on me. Interestingly, I have very good credit, but I was planning on purchasing a new car soon and did not want to have unnecessary credit checks done, as some institutions like to use this as a perverse excuse to deny financing on a car.
My statement was very straightforward: "I will not sign this on the grounds that you do not have the right nor privelege to require this information for the sake of employment. If you care to push this issue further, I will schedule a court date at the County courthouse and we will deal with it there."
The employer backed off, and I worked there for nearly two years.
You would have REALLY shit if you saw the sort of privacy-invading NDA employment contract they tried to require of the programmers who were hired after me... Thankfully the first programmer through the door fought that NDA until it was toned down to a sane level (at maybe 10% its original potency).
1. Start with a 24" rack, 72" tall. Rip the doors off the front and back.
2. Get sheet-metal 24" trays to fit into the rack. Mount them every 2U, on both the front and back of the rack. Leave a few U open in the middle of the rack for your switch and KVM.
3. Contract a company to build you custom power supplies that are 1U tall, use 90w of power, and only have 1 ATX connector and 1 molex hookup for a hard drive.
4. Put two Tyan dual-PIII mini-ATX motherboards w/ onboard LAN and video side-by-side on each tray. Slap two 1ghz PIII's in there with good passive heatsinks. Add a small amount of RAM (128-256mb) and strap a 10-20gb hard drive to the free space on the tray using a velcro strap.
5. Cluster 'em up! Heat is a HUGE problem, even with using the relatively-cold PIII's instead of P4's or Athlon MP's.
After seeing the Ashburn facility in person a year or so ago, I figured out that it would have cost about $700 per node to build the cluster. Considering it was an approximately 960-node setup, it was most likely around $700,000 for the 1920-processor cluster. That's REALLY freakin' cheap!
1. Owen had VERY little interaction with the droids in AotC.
2. The droids are all named by their model number. In a universe, it's clear that there are likely millions of each model droid. There'd be no reason to think that a C3PO is the C3PO he dealt with about 20 years prior.
3. Droid memory erasures, as mentioned by many people.
4. If you watch the original film, Owen goes out of his way not to select C3PO or R2D2. It's Luke who's so damn adamant about getting C3PO, and they only get R2 because the other unit burnt out before it moved 50 feet... My thought is that he had some sort of subliminal memory of droids like these ones, and thus didn't like them. If memory serves, he actually bitches about them to Luke in Episode IV. He's also very pushy about Luke taking them up to Anchorhead to have their memories erased. Interesting.:)
Though I do like your comment about Padme and the oil bath.:)
Very good pick. I don't think many people saw that snuck-in presumption in Wall's statement. It's hard to blame Wall for it, as it's so commonly entrenched in the dialogue of the religious.
Okay. So let's say that 'morality', 'ethics', and 'good' exist in 'individuals', 'societies', and 'religions', inclusively, simultaneously... Would it be sensible to say that morality/ethics/good exists higher on the philosophical food chain than individuals, societies, and religion? After all, it's present in all of them, inclusively. This sort of behavior normally happens when the included concept sits above its subject on the totem pole.
At least that's the road I take. I have no qualms with religion, atheism, etc... They all are pretty accurate, given their point of view. I just have a hunch that there's a larger point of view available that can encompass them all. And perhaps it goes by the name 'good'.:)
Re:intersting, but one bigass plot hole
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0wnz0red
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· Score: 2
"Until further notice", he was on a 5-cheeseburger a day diet. It was a configured parameter of his metabolism. I'd wager to say he probably tweaked it to his liking once he started getting into the code.
You're definitely right about the food supply problem in somalia. The biological 'upgrades' expected in the story wouldn't do much good there, since people can't get the food to feed their metabolism. He might be able to cure AIDS, but that still doesn't help him open a McDonald's franchise there!
RedHat sells these exact drivers with their Enterprise Editions. RedHat's action is both deliberate and profitable. They are targeting and taking advantage of a lack of driver availability in other Linux distributions. It is indeed extremely rational.
I have made it painstakingly clear to Adaptec that I will not purchase or use their products again, and I haven't for the last two years. Promise appears to be a bit more cooperative to the driver development process, and I'll give them more time before I flat-out boycott them. Nonetheless, I have already voiced my concerns to them directly.
In the meantime, Alan Cox and members of the Linux-IDE team work away at open-source implementations of the FastTrak RAID, which is quite commendable... especially considering that RedHat is his employer.
Much agreed. Beyond the quality concerns of RedHat, their rather exclusive and standards-strongarming tool sets, I have really just one concern that drives me completely up the wall with RedHat: Hardware Vendors.
RedHat either largely supports or fails to discourage the act of Vendors creating proprietary, closed-source hardware drivers that run only on RedHat. This action may not last forever, but it lasts long enough that someone using a particular product with proprietary drivers is forced to use RedHat for a year or two before the driver goes totally open-source, thus locking-in that customer on RedHat products.
First case in point: Adaptec AACRAID support. AACRAID drivers were formerly only available for RedHat. For two years! For two years, if you wanted to run a system with AACRAID (which includes Dell PercRAID cards), you had to use RedHat. It wasn't until after Adaptec's drivers were leaked and some employees fired that Adaptec broke down and neglected to sue the pants off of people distributing open source drivers. Even after that, it took a good 9 months before those drivers were mature enough to use on anything remotely close to production hardware.
Today, Promise Technologies is doing the same thing with their FastTrak controllers. Yes, there IS kernel support for FastTrak software RAID. NO, it does NOT work with the new Promise cards on the market. Promise's binary drivers for RedHat, SuSE, and Caldera are the only ways to get the newer cards working. The situation for the SuperTrak series cards is even more annoying! They put out open-source drivers, but specifically send them out so that they'll only compile on RedHat kernels. Their documentation tells you that you can compile the driver on custom kernels, but leaves that entirely up to the skill of the person implementing the driver. They try to make themselves look good by open-sourcing the driver, but continue to lock-in customers to one OS vendor choice.
The Microsoft-ish behavior of RedHat is how they allow this closed-source driver lock-in to occur on their open-source platform, and don't encourage companies to support the entire open Linux platform. THAT is what gets them compared to Microsoft.
Add functionality and features, but NEVER make it difficult or tedious for the developer to get to the raw code. If your IDE allows you to stick Widget X on the screen, give the developer a very concise, direct way to mess with the true source code of Widget X. That's the biggest gripe I hear when it comes to those super-helpful IDE's.
Yes... It's a business-model problem that is dropping the quality of available mainstream music.
First, you have music distribution companies who will sign anyone who provides them a short-term spike in volume sales. Typically this will be 'musicians' who are trying to stay at the leading-edge of teeny-trends. Music quality generally sucks because the record companies get the highest return on investment from short-term trendies, not quality music.
Second... the modern radio payola system. In order to get your music on the radio, the radio station essentially buys the rights to play a particular new song on the radio. Reports say this can be at a price of $100,000 - $700,000 per song, per station! It's insane! The 'song vendors' that the stations go through will threaten to stop selling to them (or hike up their rates) if the station starts playing a lot of indie music. So the radio station, to keep its user base (and thus advertising profits) high will stick with the super-mainstream music. It really stifles the small and independent bands from getting their music on the air.
As far as Napster, GNUtella and other P2P systems go, I've found it most useful to find independent artists whose music isn't sold at all through the major vendors. I can easily find new mainstream music by turning on the radio and flipping channels. It's a hell of a lot harder to find good indie music, and that is the greatest offering that Napster gave me. I can't even count how many excellent bands I found by doing random searches for weird words on Napster and GNUtella. My best find ever was The Shizit - a Seattle digital hardcore duo (now a trio) with an absolutely awesome style and powerful political viewpoints. They're something like mixing Ministry, Fear Factory, Atari Teenage Riot, and Rage Against The Machine. They (and a number of other bands) had a lot of CDs purchased by me that would have otherwise never been sold, had it not been for P2P music-hunting.
Some haikus for filtering!
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Haiku vs Spam
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· Score: 5, Funny
This is a spam mail please erase this from Inbox Don't need viagra
this is for my friend always so nice and helpful no pyramid scheme
i hate christine hall and her trafficmagnet site send me endless spam
amazon dot com stop sending me newsletters I'm illiterate
So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish was about as utopian as Adams' 'trilogy' got. Arthur Dent returning to Earth, hooking up with a girl, committing some very peculiar (but amusing) lewd acts, and finally taking off again into space to continue his adventures! And add to that Ford Prefect's obsession with Earth-nostalgia in classic films, and that leaves us with the most feel-good book of the Hitchhiker's 'Trilogy'.:) I'd think of it as an Utopian novel, all in all.
This is the number one reason why I stopped using ATI products once the Mach64 chips came out. Their driver support has always been slow, incomplete, and crippling to their hardware. For many products, downloading even ORIGINAL drivers was impossible, and one would have to order a $4.99 CD of the original, old, buggy, broken drivers. Some products they made (PCI TV Wonder) were left completely unsupported, and never got correct driver support for anything above Windows 98 original release.
Despite their recent excellent showings in hardware, I too refuse to buy ATI because their driver support is, at the very least, a complete insult to the sensibilities of even a modest geek. For that reason I'll continue using my NVIDIA card until it burns out (which will be as soon as the fan stops spinning), and then I'll go and buy their latest and greatest. At least their drivers are generously provided and updated, sometimes on a weekly basis.
Although little SPARC IPX's (the most common desktop of the 40mhz variety) are slow for compiling stuff, it's still amazing how much they do with their megahertz!
I have an IPX with 48mb RAM that used to do NAT for the LAN, outside DNS (~200,000 req's/day), run scheduled backend maintenance scripts, AND act as an X terminal to my main machine... where it could do a number of XMMS plugins at 30fps across the network! The machine was amazingly responsive, even over SSH, with all this junk running:)
These days it's sitting idle, as I had to steal its second NIC for a faster DNS server... but I can't justify getting rid of it, since it can do 8Mbps as a fully stateful, scrubbing firewall:)
Great little machines (Especially for under $100 on Ebay)!
Haha! YES! Oh man how I used to play that game. Come home from Jr. High and play for like 2 hours straight on the numpad, get up to like level 24 and then get whooped. I probably could have beaten level 24, but the tendons in my wrist would burn from overuse... And I was too proud to hit caps-lock and pause the game, thus negating the option of saving your high score. Having 3 slicers on your tail was no one's idea of fun.:P
They never released it as a stand-alone game, but that will always stand in my memory as one of the most entertaining games of the early 90's.
I remember that there's a common problem with the electrical systems on boats - Since the "ground" is just the hull of the boat, and it has to discharge through the salt water, there's an abnormally-significant problem with corrosion of metal electrical contacts on a lot of salt-water vessels. I have no idea what effect this would have on a computer, and don't have any intentions of finding out anytime soon.:)
Manufactured, intellectualized mathematics is a human creation. We have invented it to represent "patterns" we see in reality around us. Mathematics is not the parent of these patterns - The patterns are the parent of mathematics.
What this means is that your brain is "speaking" the native language of reality-math, which explains why it does so many motor-activities with ease, but can't add two 5-digit numbers (manufactured math) without a good deal of thought.
Misunderstanding the foundations of math is what's whoopin' ya right now. The problem is an extremely common problem, especially among the scientist-mentality people (myself included!)... It springs from a bigger problem: misunderstanding the foundations of our cultural metaphysics. subject-object dualism (upon which all of western culture was built) is a human invention as well, not fully (or even decently) describing the ultimately superior reality that we perceive as being subordinate to subject-object dualism.
Whoa, that is COOL! Just checked out and played with BBIagent.... and that is the freakin' best little web-managed firewall system I've seen to date. Wow.
Though I won't use it myself (i've become pretty skilled with the BSD pf), I know a ton of people who will absolutely love this. Absolutely awesome. Thank you for posting this!
I didn't intend an elitist attitude about this... I guess I was hoping to show that the goals and success of Linux can be met as well, if not better, if we don't strive for mass marketshare.
The need for device driver support, Applications, choice of development OS, and sane legislation is self-evident. This is fueled more by Linux' promotion and adoption of standards than by market share. As far as games go, that's a pretty cutthroat market... As people better understand the need for standards-compliance, these needs will naturally follow. Market share will naturally follow as well, while we more efficiently spend our time working on the quality and standards-compliance of Linux. I think there's a better way of divvying up the time we spend working on Linux than the proposals given in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than the Gulf to Bay World of Beer (which used to be my favorite store in the world), there's also a lot of fun to be had at the Dunedin brewery (it's on Douglas Ave just south of Main St). There's a gas station (I think a chevron) at the corner of Main St and Alt. 19 that has 101 varieties of beer... and Leuken's liquor store at Patricia and Main St. has a healthy selection at close to half the price that World of Beer charges for their brews!
:)
Now I just need to find a place that'll ship me Molson XXX at a decent price and I'll be in heaven
In jr. high, there was a teacher at my school who ran the computer lab (a dozen Mac LC-II's)... He volunteered to come in early and ran a before-school computer club. It ultimately boiled down to most kids playing freeware network games over appletalk, while one or two of them wrote BASIC programs to do silly things. Not incredibly constructive, but fun... and it got the geeks together for the first time. This led into high school...
:)
In high school, there were no clubs like this. I was taking drafting/architecture classes and spent a LOT of time in the art department. I ended up spending a year interning with a different art teacher, and we came up with this bright idea of creating a computer graphics class. So my intern class turned into a design project to help create this class. Somehow, we got the budget from the school to buy 15 tweaked-up (at the time) video-editing powermac's, an "old" amiga video toaster, and a low-end server. The first semester we ran a 2D graphics class that was extremely successful, and the second semester we ran a video course that did relatively-simple video editing. Just the first year alone brought together SO many geeks to collaborate on ideas and projects. You'd be amazed how many successful companies have been formed from that first group of students!
I graduated, but I hear that these days (5 years later) that teacher now spends 3/4 of her day on computer graphics classes! There's rumor of it becoming a "magnet school" for computer graphics. They do more advanced/realtime video editing (the morning announcements are on TV, with realtime production!!), as well as 3D rendering in the level-3 course.
In both cases, an interested teacher was necessary to sponsor the program and generally oversee it. Much of the time students can provide the creative ideas for the club/class to work on. Oh, also... Get some interested students together and have them ask their parents if their employer has older PC's they want to get rid of. The sponsoring teacher can ask the staff to do the same thing. A LOT of medium to large companies have a ton of computers that they'll donate in order to get a tax writeoff. This is an awesome way to get 50 machines (20 working, 20 half-working, 20 just for spare parts) for free, and you'd be amazed how many people are happy to do this. You can very easily get too many PCs!
And honestly... If you get a stack of P3-500's with 64mb RAM, you could build some COOL stuff in the club. Build a multi-subnet routed network (a little BSD firewall makes a KILLER simple router), just to learn how it works. A web server. How bout a MOSIX cluster of web servers? Now THAT would be a club I would've loved to join in high school... Instead, I just built it all in my room and turned it into a company (well, sort of...)
Oh man... Yeah, My first x86 box was a Tandy 1000/TL for sure... It had the tandy-proprietary video (approximately EGA, but not exactly)... 8mhz 286 with the "slow.exe" program to make it run at 4.77mhz for compatibility with old, hard-clocked applications. 32mb MFM hard drive, DOS on ROM... 16540 UARTs that couldn't handle more than a 9600 baud modem, unless you threw an internal modem on with its own UART controller.
:)
:)
I actually furned my 1000/TL into a 28.8 BBS until the hard drive fried (about 4 months later)... Then I sold it for $40 (with a 14.4) to a kid who just wanted it to run Telix from floppy
What I remember the MOST though, is the monitor that came with that T1000/TL. Press the power button and watch EVERY light in the house dim, and the BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ of the capacitors MUST have given me a brain tumor. Good god, that thing used even more power than the 1988 Sun 19" monitor I *still* have and use
Close! I went with the integra gs-r, as the RSX wasn't out yet, and the TL type-s did not yet come with a manual transmission. That TL is trying *really* hard to be the next car on my wishlist. :)
Mmm.. interesting! I can see how that sort of logic could (in part) work... The more traditional pragmatist in me sort of likes the explaination. :)
:/
However, my gut instinct tells me that this method of credit and liability trending is (1) highly prone to error, and (2) largely outdated, as the computerization of such information has (hopefully) led to significantly faster turnaround-times for credit data changes.
Though statistics was never my favorite math course, I see many hypothetical situations that would cause a false-positive red flag to be raised. For example, let's say that I was renting an apartment and the lease was about to expire. I decide I want to shop around and find a different apartment complex (perhaps closer to work, friends or family)... I file applications at 3 apartment complexes, decide on one, and move in. Lucky for me, I found the place of my dreams and my rent is $150 less per month than it was before. Now I have 3 credit checks on my record reflecting against me, even though I have $150 more per month to spend on something else. Two months later I go looking for a new car. I get screwed on my first loan application due to the prior credit checks, and have to go to some secondary loan place that charges higher interest rates. They approve me, but at some ridiculous 17% interest rate. All that drama, just because I wanted to go the extra mile and find a nice apartment that would save me some money...
Certainly, I don't expect the credit system (nor anything managed by misused statistics) to be perfect, but when such arbitrary (and perhaps unknown) criteria are passed against "my" credit data (at some credit company I don't know) and cause my financial liability to be artificially inflated, it gets under my skin. I don't feel that it's anywhere near right for me to pay for someone else's poor 'algorithms' (maybe 'numerology' is a better term?).
Wow, you're clearly not replying to my original post, because you're waaaaay out in left field.
:)
:)
:)
:)
:) I'd hate to have to smack anyone else with a cluebat today!
1. Yes, I didn't like the fact that they did credit checks. Yes, I did apply for the job, and I *did* change their hiring process. Apparently I was "special enough"...
2. Although I was not the original Ask Slashdot submitter, my position coincidentally involved managing another employee. Coincidence is good, but I like people who actually read posts much, much better.
3. I can't direct my own finances? I guess you didn't see in the parent post that I had and continue to have very good (in fact, flawless) credit.
4. How can I admit to having financial problems when I don't have any? Let's see, My only debt is my car (and I own other paid off vehicles)... it is worth about $5000 more than I owe, and I'm ahead on payments. Hrm... Unless 'the finance book' has been rewritten lately, that would be called equity, which is a very good thing, credit-wise. Go Acura!
5. My claim was that my good finances were my issue, as it is private, confidential information, and my prospective employer was not a credit agency or licensed for any sort of financial business. Requiring non-employment-related, legally-confidential information is unlawful, even in most at-will employment states. Gotta love that little thing called "right to privacy"!
6. When I apply for credit with an institution licensed to provide credit, it is understood and assumed that a credit check is required! Common sense! EUREKA!
Next time, try reading the parent post before you reply.
Yep - I've been in the same boat. A previous employer wanted to pull a credit report on me. Interestingly, I have very good credit, but I was planning on purchasing a new car soon and did not want to have unnecessary credit checks done, as some institutions like to use this as a perverse excuse to deny financing on a car.
My statement was very straightforward: "I will not sign this on the grounds that you do not have the right nor privelege to require this information for the sake of employment. If you care to push this issue further, I will schedule a court date at the County courthouse and we will deal with it there."
The employer backed off, and I worked there for nearly two years. You would have REALLY shit if you saw the sort of privacy-invading NDA employment contract they tried to require of the programmers who were hired after me... Thankfully the first programmer through the door fought that NDA until it was toned down to a sane level (at maybe 10% its original potency).
1. Start with a 24" rack, 72" tall. Rip the doors off the front and back.
2. Get sheet-metal 24" trays to fit into the rack. Mount them every 2U, on both the front and back of the rack. Leave a few U open in the middle of the rack for your switch and KVM.
3. Contract a company to build you custom power supplies that are 1U tall, use 90w of power, and only have 1 ATX connector and 1 molex hookup for a hard drive.
4. Put two Tyan dual-PIII mini-ATX motherboards w/ onboard LAN and video side-by-side on each tray. Slap two 1ghz PIII's in there with good passive heatsinks. Add a small amount of RAM (128-256mb) and strap a 10-20gb hard drive to the free space on the tray using a velcro strap.
5. Cluster 'em up! Heat is a HUGE problem, even with using the relatively-cold PIII's instead of P4's or Athlon MP's.
After seeing the Ashburn facility in person a year or so ago, I figured out that it would have cost about $700 per node to build the cluster. Considering it was an approximately 960-node setup, it was most likely around $700,000 for the 1920-processor cluster. That's REALLY freakin' cheap!
1. Owen had VERY little interaction with the droids in AotC. :)
:)
2. The droids are all named by their model number. In a universe, it's clear that there are likely millions of each model droid. There'd be no reason to think that a C3PO is the C3PO he dealt with about 20 years prior.
3. Droid memory erasures, as mentioned by many people.
4. If you watch the original film, Owen goes out of his way not to select C3PO or R2D2. It's Luke who's so damn adamant about getting C3PO, and they only get R2 because the other unit burnt out before it moved 50 feet... My thought is that he had some sort of subliminal memory of droids like these ones, and thus didn't like them. If memory serves, he actually bitches about them to Luke in Episode IV. He's also very pushy about Luke taking them up to Anchorhead to have their memories erased. Interesting.
Though I do like your comment about Padme and the oil bath.
Very good pick. I don't think many people saw that snuck-in presumption in Wall's statement. It's hard to blame Wall for it, as it's so commonly entrenched in the dialogue of the religious.
:)
Okay. So let's say that 'morality', 'ethics', and 'good' exist in 'individuals', 'societies', and 'religions', inclusively, simultaneously... Would it be sensible to say that morality/ethics/good exists higher on the philosophical food chain than individuals, societies, and religion? After all, it's present in all of them, inclusively. This sort of behavior normally happens when the included concept sits above its subject on the totem pole.
At least that's the road I take. I have no qualms with religion, atheism, etc... They all are pretty accurate, given their point of view. I just have a hunch that there's a larger point of view available that can encompass them all. And perhaps it goes by the name 'good'.
"Until further notice", he was on a 5-cheeseburger a day diet. It was a configured parameter of his metabolism. I'd wager to say he probably tweaked it to his liking once he started getting into the code.
You're definitely right about the food supply problem in somalia. The biological 'upgrades' expected in the story wouldn't do much good there, since people can't get the food to feed their metabolism. He might be able to cure AIDS, but that still doesn't help him open a McDonald's franchise there!
RedHat sells these exact drivers with their Enterprise Editions. RedHat's action is both deliberate and profitable. They are targeting and taking advantage of a lack of driver availability in other Linux distributions. It is indeed extremely rational.
I have made it painstakingly clear to Adaptec that I will not purchase or use their products again, and I haven't for the last two years. Promise appears to be a bit more cooperative to the driver development process, and I'll give them more time before I flat-out boycott them. Nonetheless, I have already voiced my concerns to them directly.
In the meantime, Alan Cox and members of the Linux-IDE team work away at open-source implementations of the FastTrak RAID, which is quite commendable... especially considering that RedHat is his employer.
Much agreed. Beyond the quality concerns of RedHat, their rather exclusive and standards-strongarming tool sets, I have really just one concern that drives me completely up the wall with RedHat: Hardware Vendors.
RedHat either largely supports or fails to discourage the act of Vendors creating proprietary, closed-source hardware drivers that run only on RedHat. This action may not last forever, but it lasts long enough that someone using a particular product with proprietary drivers is forced to use RedHat for a year or two before the driver goes totally open-source, thus locking-in that customer on RedHat products.
First case in point: Adaptec AACRAID support. AACRAID drivers were formerly only available for RedHat. For two years! For two years, if you wanted to run a system with AACRAID (which includes Dell PercRAID cards), you had to use RedHat. It wasn't until after Adaptec's drivers were leaked and some employees fired that Adaptec broke down and neglected to sue the pants off of people distributing open source drivers. Even after that, it took a good 9 months before those drivers were mature enough to use on anything remotely close to production hardware.
Today, Promise Technologies is doing the same thing with their FastTrak controllers. Yes, there IS kernel support for FastTrak software RAID. NO, it does NOT work with the new Promise cards on the market. Promise's binary drivers for RedHat, SuSE, and Caldera are the only ways to get the newer cards working. The situation for the SuperTrak series cards is even more annoying! They put out open-source drivers, but specifically send them out so that they'll only compile on RedHat kernels. Their documentation tells you that you can compile the driver on custom kernels, but leaves that entirely up to the skill of the person implementing the driver. They try to make themselves look good by open-sourcing the driver, but continue to lock-in customers to one OS vendor choice.
The Microsoft-ish behavior of RedHat is how they allow this closed-source driver lock-in to occur on their open-source platform, and don't encourage companies to support the entire open Linux platform. THAT is what gets them compared to Microsoft.
Add functionality and features, but NEVER make it difficult or tedious for the developer to get to the raw code. If your IDE allows you to stick Widget X on the screen, give the developer a very concise, direct way to mess with the true source code of Widget X. That's the biggest gripe I hear when it comes to those super-helpful IDE's.
Yes... It's a business-model problem that is dropping the quality of available mainstream music. First, you have music distribution companies who will sign anyone who provides them a short-term spike in volume sales. Typically this will be 'musicians' who are trying to stay at the leading-edge of teeny-trends. Music quality generally sucks because the record companies get the highest return on investment from short-term trendies, not quality music. Second... the modern radio payola system. In order to get your music on the radio, the radio station essentially buys the rights to play a particular new song on the radio. Reports say this can be at a price of $100,000 - $700,000 per song, per station! It's insane! The 'song vendors' that the stations go through will threaten to stop selling to them (or hike up their rates) if the station starts playing a lot of indie music. So the radio station, to keep its user base (and thus advertising profits) high will stick with the super-mainstream music. It really stifles the small and independent bands from getting their music on the air.
As far as Napster, GNUtella and other P2P systems go, I've found it most useful to find independent artists whose music isn't sold at all through the major vendors. I can easily find new mainstream music by turning on the radio and flipping channels. It's a hell of a lot harder to find good indie music, and that is the greatest offering that Napster gave me. I can't even count how many excellent bands I found by doing random searches for weird words on Napster and GNUtella. My best find ever was The Shizit - a Seattle digital hardcore duo (now a trio) with an absolutely awesome style and powerful political viewpoints. They're something like mixing Ministry, Fear Factory, Atari Teenage Riot, and Rage Against The Machine. They (and a number of other bands) had a lot of CDs purchased by me that would have otherwise never been sold, had it not been for P2P music-hunting.
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So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish was about as utopian as Adams' 'trilogy' got. Arthur Dent returning to Earth, hooking up with a girl, committing some very peculiar (but amusing) lewd acts, and finally taking off again into space to continue his adventures! And add to that Ford Prefect's obsession with Earth-nostalgia in classic films, and that leaves us with the most feel-good book of the Hitchhiker's 'Trilogy'. :) I'd think of it as an Utopian novel, all in all.
This is the number one reason why I stopped using ATI products once the Mach64 chips came out. Their driver support has always been slow, incomplete, and crippling to their hardware. For many products, downloading even ORIGINAL drivers was impossible, and one would have to order a $4.99 CD of the original, old, buggy, broken drivers. Some products they made (PCI TV Wonder) were left completely unsupported, and never got correct driver support for anything above Windows 98 original release.
Despite their recent excellent showings in hardware, I too refuse to buy ATI because their driver support is, at the very least, a complete insult to the sensibilities of even a modest geek. For that reason I'll continue using my NVIDIA card until it burns out (which will be as soon as the fan stops spinning), and then I'll go and buy their latest and greatest. At least their drivers are generously provided and updated, sometimes on a weekly basis.
[H]ardOCP Also has a review and benchmarks. Good stuff from the [H]ard crew.
Although little SPARC IPX's (the most common desktop of the 40mhz variety) are slow for compiling stuff, it's still amazing how much they do with their megahertz!
:)
:)
Great little machines (Especially for under $100 on Ebay)!
I have an IPX with 48mb RAM that used to do NAT for the LAN, outside DNS (~200,000 req's/day), run scheduled backend maintenance scripts, AND act as an X terminal to my main machine... where it could do a number of XMMS plugins at 30fps across the network! The machine was amazingly responsive, even over SSH, with all this junk running
These days it's sitting idle, as I had to steal its second NIC for a faster DNS server... but I can't justify getting rid of it, since it can do 8Mbps as a fully stateful, scrubbing firewall
Haha! YES! Oh man how I used to play that game. Come home from Jr. High and play for like 2 hours straight on the numpad, get up to like level 24 and then get whooped. I probably could have beaten level 24, but the tendons in my wrist would burn from overuse... And I was too proud to hit caps-lock and pause the game, thus negating the option of saving your high score. Having 3 slicers on your tail was no one's idea of fun. :P
They never released it as a stand-alone game, but that will always stand in my memory as one of the most entertaining games of the early 90's.
I remember that there's a common problem with the electrical systems on boats - Since the "ground" is just the hull of the boat, and it has to discharge through the salt water, there's an abnormally-significant problem with corrosion of metal electrical contacts on a lot of salt-water vessels. I have no idea what effect this would have on a computer, and don't have any intentions of finding out anytime soon. :)
Your terminology is boxing you in on this.
Manufactured, intellectualized mathematics is a human creation. We have invented it to represent "patterns" we see in reality around us. Mathematics is not the parent of these patterns - The patterns are the parent of mathematics.
What this means is that your brain is "speaking" the native language of reality-math, which explains why it does so many motor-activities with ease, but can't add two 5-digit numbers (manufactured math) without a good deal of thought.
Misunderstanding the foundations of math is what's whoopin' ya right now. The problem is an extremely common problem, especially among the scientist-mentality people (myself included!)... It springs from a bigger problem: misunderstanding the foundations of our cultural metaphysics. subject-object dualism (upon which all of western culture was built) is a human invention as well, not fully (or even decently) describing the ultimately superior reality that we perceive as being subordinate to subject-object dualism.
Whoa, that is COOL! Just checked out and played with BBIagent.... and that is the freakin' best little web-managed firewall system I've seen to date. Wow.
Though I won't use it myself (i've become pretty skilled with the BSD pf), I know a ton of people who will absolutely love this. Absolutely awesome. Thank you for posting this!
I didn't intend an elitist attitude about this... I guess I was hoping to show that the goals and success of Linux can be met as well, if not better, if we don't strive for mass marketshare.
The need for device driver support, Applications, choice of development OS, and sane legislation is self-evident. This is fueled more by Linux' promotion and adoption of standards than by market share. As far as games go, that's a pretty cutthroat market... As people better understand the need for standards-compliance, these needs will naturally follow. Market share will naturally follow as well, while we more efficiently spend our time working on the quality and standards-compliance of Linux. I think there's a better way of divvying up the time we spend working on Linux than the proposals given in the article.