> > To make [a Furby] COO, you turn it upside down. >
Boy, for a second there I thought that "COO" meant "Chief Operating Officer" and that this was a play on the Cringely column about bad management killing tech companies that I just didn't get.
Whew... Time for coffee.
Don't tell me you think they only have books!
on
Libraries Are 31337
·
· Score: 1
> > Are you a parent? >
Yup, and we got to the library at least once a week. There's DVDs and VHS tapes that we can borrow free for a week (take that, Blockbuster & Mr. H. Wayne Huizenga!); there's PC's (feh) with software that I can use for try-before-you-buy; there's interlibrary loan for materials that'll _never_ be on the web (no matter how much I love Project Gutenberg, it still can't touch the stuff under copyright and some people will never OCR the WWII primary sources I'm looking for); there's free web access; there's copies of Consumer Reports (which geeks ought to read) that I can read without a subscription; there's passes for museums and the zoo that I can borrow for free to get reduced admission; and the annual used book sale -- it starts this Thursday! -- is a great source of books for a quarter each.
But before we had kids, did I still go to the library every week? Damn betcha I did, because there was *all this stuff* for free, in one place, and the people who ran it did their best to help me use every bit of it.
For example, I got a call on Sunday that I book I requested several weeks ago is now in; God knows where they scrounged up a copy, but I'm headed over tonight to pick it up. Three cheers for the Cumberland Library staff! I can even submit Reference Desk questions on the web at http://www.cumberlandlibrary.org/ !
> >...a part of the OS that was originally implemented...in 1902 by RMS or ESR or TMBG. >
I _love_ They Might Be Giants -- and that was *before* I knew they were kernel hackers! (They're pretty energetic for old guys, too.)
If anyone doubts the assertion of ships being destroyed in India, William Langewiesche wrote an apalling article about this in The Atlantic a couple of years ago:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/08/langewie sche.htm
(The photos of men cutting up cargo ships with "cutting torches running on cooking gas" will bring bell-like peals of joy to the heart of anyone who ever lit their toys on fire.) (Which, by the way, was *totally* not me. Robert did it,I only watched.)
I bought an iMac with a CRT this Summer, and I fully expected the analog video board to crap out -- which it did, less than a week before the complimentary 90 days of phone support ran out.
I called, got a case number and approval for a warranty repair [which I _know_ lasts a year, four times the free phone help], and then mailed in my AppleCare subscription card.
Why? Because three years worth of hardware support is worth it to me; while I used to do hardware support for these machines myself, I simply can't get the parts from Apple at all, much less have them installed & tested for free.
The service place called two days ago with an ETA for my repaired system, and Apple called last night to tell me that my free support was about to run out -- and would I be interested in buying some more?
Programmer's File Editor, while no longer under development, rules. Its home page is:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe/
But you can usually grab it from any of the commoon download sites.
If you prepare just the dough recipe, you can use it to make focaccia, which is useful for: 1) awesome sandwiches, and 2) impressing SO's/prents when served, with some olive oil for dipping, as an appetizer or side.
Just let the dough rise and then pull it into a whatever shape you like -- round like a pizza, square for cutting into snack-size sticks, or small sandwich-size blobs -- as long as it's between roughly a half inch and an inch thick. (Trial and error will teach you the best choice. In case of error, it'll probably still be OK for you to eat by yourself.)
Play a Lynnrd Syknnrd MP3 while you wait for the dough to rise again [rise agin...like the South...get it?]. Next, brush the dough with olive oil (a little of which can be poured on straight from the bottle and smooshed around with your hand if no one's watching) and sprinkle with any/all of the following: oregano, garlic, table salt or coarse kosher salt, black pepper, thyme, whatever. Bake the focaccia for eight to ten minutes or until it's golden and crusty, and then eat it dipped into not-the-cheapest olive oil at your local grocer's, or let it cool before slicing for sandwiches.
Clever readers will order a 4 ounce bag of pizza spices from Penzey's -- www.penzeys.com -- and use it on this focaccia, or to make their own pizzas, or just to improve the pre-made ones bought from the store or a delivery guy.
Some poor stiff types it up once and then it's sent out to the newspapers, et al., for them to use.
I worked at a shop in Boston where we did output for the weekly tv schedule booklet-thing for one of the local papers, and you could tell that the QuarkXPress pages were automatically-generated from where the errors were and other little things.
Whether it's sent to the publishers as a database file or CSV or some other thing, I can't be sure -- but no, there isn't any special breed of typists who learn to abbreviate show titles especially poorly.
I worked in an agency (Hi, Brian & Jen & Tanya!) where a guy was hired _because_ he had experience doing this kind of chop-shop work. Eventually it failed, he got booted, no one was surprised. This was tried because the guys at the top were cheap-skates and they got sold a bill of goods about how this was a "smart" way to manage resources. (They also laid off the tech support department en masse one day.)
The theory was that there'd be a couple of in-house staff near the top of each project (though not actually the leads) with everyone else on contract. Unfortunately, with no work coming in, the guy spun his wheels for a few months and eventually got the axe. In the mean time, the sole interactive CD-ROM project [yes, it was 1996] that we tried to do this way bogged down further and further, to the point that I don't think it ever actually shipped.
There's a realable -- i.e., directed at laymen -- book about engineering failures called "To Engineer is Human." It's a little chatty, but interesting nonetheless; it highlights a bunch of disasters and _why_ they happened.
That's the story you're talking about, right? The one where the genius developer Delos D. Harriman ignores the scoffs of everyone and manages to finance a trip to the moon? That's a great story.
There's plenty of chatter by Larry Niven about this here (despite all the cookies and pop-ups and junk): http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/larryniven/niv en_economics_000414.html
Believe the hype about the sheepskin: it's a key that opens doors no matter what's written on it.
I have an English degree, and I'm a sysadmin. Did we cover any of this during my course on the 18th Century English Novel? Prolly not, though I slept through big chunks of the thicker Penguin Classics. Did I choose that major because I wanted to be a high school English teacher? Uh, no thanks. However, in college I met a friend (hi, Cherie!) who got me a job that, six years later, had carried me past graduation (employed, with a little seniority) into a field that I later left (publishing) with exposure to lots of different stuff (hi, Miguel!).
My bosses were happy to stick me in any department in the company, and so I got to see everything. (Hi, you jerks who laid me off!) That breadth was useful when I was talking to prospective employers, and I got more and better interviews from other B.C. alumni when I went job-hunting. Far from decrying that bias, I used it to counter-balance my lack of a CompSci degree.
Now I have a decent job, close to home, doing something I like. Someday I'll get tired of doing system administration, but then I'll move on to something else. Not teaching English, mind you, but I'll still be "using" that degree.
You can actually get into the case of these systems whithout unracking them, unlike the Sun units I know (420R's and 280R's). Yeah, I know that an 85-lb., 4U Sun server that was pulled out of the rack like this would tip over onto me, but I might prefer that to un-racking it and re-racking it every time I go in the case: http://litterbox.zawodny.com/~jzawodn/pics/ irack/i ndex-6.html
Got kids?
An increasing number of technically astute, computer-buying people do -- and we don't want an LCD within reach of toddlers.
I was juuuust about to pick up the phone to order a 600 MHz iMac from MacWh*rehouse (hey, free RAM & free printer) when I saw this story, and now I'm very torn.
One of the reasons to have a computer in the house is to make sure the little ones are comfortable with technology before they head off to school without overwhelming them, and a nice, round iMac is just the thing. However, who wants to have to stick their iMac under the desk and use an aftermarket CRT just because a three year-old snapped the computer's neck?
(And yes, I am at an.edu, so I'm smug about being able to get one. Neener-neener.)
I'd like to suggest that the value of a book is often in the _having_of a book and not the _having had_ a book. That is, many books are of no value to me if I can't reread them in toto or look things up in them, either for pleasure or as a reference. In my opinion, the only books that carry their full value from owner to owner are "throw-away" entertainment, true crime stories, and other ephemera.
Economics may postulate that everyone gets full value from a re-sold book, but if I want to look up a fact or re-read a story that in a book that I sold when I was done with it, then I do not possess that value any more.
Then again, I was an English major, and economics always confused me.
> > Alice trusts Frank, who trusts Trent, who trusts Eve, who trusts Andrew, > who trusts Bob. This many levels of displacement is probably enough > to cover the population of the United States. >
If you could get one of Kevin Bacon's friends on-board, it'd be a sure thing.
Does anyone know of a Linux or *BSD distribution that'll run on my PowerBook 1400?
I have heard that MkLinux will do so (relying on the serial port for networking, or something), but I'd really prefer something that lets me use external SCSI devices, as I only have the floppy drive Expansion Bay unit.
The Atlantic Monthly covered this a month ago.
on
Open Source Intelligence
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The Atlantic Monthly magazine covered this a month ago in a story that's on the web at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/02/fallows. htm
And why should anyone be surprised that they're using common sense _as well as_ your spare CPU cycles to find out what's going on outside those smoked-glass windows?
A fifth-grader, printing out _that_ many pages? Even if the clever little devil manages to munge the size of the text, it's still going to take a mountain of paper, and once they run the black ink cartridge dry, dad's gonna be *pissed*...
I agree, though, that boots of the text would be available everywhere in a day.
In honor of my brother (from whom I first heard this, though he could have ripped it off) I present John's Ominutile Justification: "Sure it's stupid, but chicks dig it."
Ripping off the "Unix Rosetta Stone" web page and putting it into a printed format small enough to hide in a laptop bag would be nifty. Same for some of the books (pub. by New Riders and ORA and I forget who else) about how to do stuff on another platform that you already know how to do on your favorite platform -- they're collections of sign-posts, means for extending your knowledge from an area where you feel comfortable into areas where you're still learning.
And though people will make fun of me for this, Peachpit Press books are fantastic because they provide counter-examples from two platforms or applications side-by-side to illustrate a point.
>
> Buying into BeOS is like learning Latin: it's cool and all...
>
Good point -- but perhaps instead of being just cool or an amusement, people will study BeOS, like they study Latin, in order to help them learn other stuff. Consider this analogy: study_BeOS:understand_another_OS::learn_Latin:lear n_another_romance_language
Slashdot Mirror
The plural of Neuros should be "neuroses."
>
> To make [a Furby] COO, you turn it upside down.
>
Boy, for a second there I thought that "COO" meant "Chief Operating Officer" and that this was a play on the Cringely column about bad management killing tech companies that I just didn't get.
Whew... Time for coffee.
>
> Are you a parent?
>
Yup, and we got to the library at least once a week. There's DVDs and VHS tapes that we can borrow free for a week (take that, Blockbuster & Mr. H. Wayne Huizenga!); there's PC's (feh) with software that I can use for try-before-you-buy; there's interlibrary loan for materials that'll _never_ be on the web (no matter how much I love Project Gutenberg, it still can't touch the stuff under copyright and some people will never OCR the WWII primary sources I'm looking for); there's free web access; there's copies of Consumer Reports (which geeks ought to read) that I can read without a subscription; there's passes for museums and the zoo that I can borrow for free to get reduced admission; and the annual used book sale -- it starts this Thursday! -- is a great source of books for a quarter each.
But before we had kids, did I still go to the library every week? Damn betcha I did, because there was *all this stuff* for free, in one place, and the people who ran it did their best to help me use every bit of it.
For example, I got a call on Sunday that I book I requested several weeks ago is now in; God knows where they scrounged up a copy, but I'm headed over tonight to pick it up. Three cheers for the Cumberland Library staff! I can even submit Reference Desk questions on the web at http://www.cumberlandlibrary.org/ !
> ...a part of the OS that was originally implemented...in 1902 by RMS or ESR or TMBG.
>
>
I _love_ They Might Be Giants -- and that was *before* I knew they were kernel hackers! (They're pretty energetic for old guys, too.)
If anyone doubts the assertion of ships being destroyed in India, William Langewiesche wrote an apalling article about this in The Atlantic a couple of years ago:e sche.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/08/langewi
(The photos of men cutting up cargo ships with "cutting torches running on cooking gas" will bring bell-like peals of joy to the heart of anyone who ever lit their toys on fire.) (Which, by the way, was *totally* not me. Robert did it,I only watched.)
I bought an iMac with a CRT this Summer, and I fully expected the analog video board to crap out -- which it did, less than a week before the complimentary 90 days of phone support ran out.
I called, got a case number and approval for a warranty repair [which I _know_ lasts a year, four times the free phone help], and then mailed in my AppleCare subscription card.
Why? Because three years worth of hardware support is worth it to me; while I used to do hardware support for these machines myself, I simply can't get the parts from Apple at all, much less have them installed & tested for free.
The service place called two days ago with an ETA for my repaired system, and Apple called last night to tell me that my free support was about to run out -- and would I be interested in buying some more?
Programmer's File Editor, while no longer under development, rules. Its home page is:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe/
But you can usually grab it from any of the commoon download sites.
If you prepare just the dough recipe, you can use it to make focaccia, which is useful for: 1) awesome sandwiches, and 2) impressing SO's/prents when served, with some olive oil for dipping, as an appetizer or side.
Just let the dough rise and then pull it into a whatever shape you like -- round like a pizza, square for cutting into snack-size sticks, or small sandwich-size blobs -- as long as it's between roughly a half inch and an inch thick. (Trial and error will teach you the best choice. In case of error, it'll probably still be OK for you to eat by yourself.)
Play a Lynnrd Syknnrd MP3 while you wait for the dough to rise again [rise agin...like the South...get it?]. Next, brush the dough with olive oil (a little of which can be poured on straight from the bottle and smooshed around with your hand if no one's watching) and sprinkle with any/all of the following: oregano, garlic, table salt or coarse kosher salt, black pepper, thyme, whatever. Bake the focaccia for eight to ten minutes or until it's golden and crusty, and then eat it dipped into not-the-cheapest olive oil at your local grocer's, or let it cool before slicing for sandwiches.
Clever readers will order a 4 ounce bag of pizza spices from Penzey's -- www.penzeys.com -- and use it on this focaccia, or to make their own pizzas, or just to improve the pre-made ones bought from the store or a delivery guy.
Some poor stiff types it up once and then it's sent out to the newspapers, et al., for them to use.
I worked at a shop in Boston where we did output for the weekly tv schedule booklet-thing for one of the local papers, and you could tell that the QuarkXPress pages were automatically-generated from where the errors were and other little things.
Whether it's sent to the publishers as a database file or CSV or some other thing, I can't be sure -- but no, there isn't any special breed of typists who learn to abbreviate show titles especially poorly.
I worked in an agency (Hi, Brian & Jen & Tanya!) where a guy was hired _because_ he had experience doing this kind of chop-shop work. Eventually it failed, he got booted, no one was surprised. This was tried because the guys at the top were cheap-skates and they got sold a bill of goods about how this was a "smart" way to manage resources. (They also laid off the tech support department en masse one day.)
The theory was that there'd be a couple of in-house staff near the top of each project (though not actually the leads) with everyone else on contract. Unfortunately, with no work coming in, the guy spun his wheels for a few months and eventually got the axe. In the mean time, the sole interactive CD-ROM project [yes, it was 1996] that we tried to do this way bogged down further and further, to the point that I don't think it ever actually shipped.
There's a realable -- i.e., directed at laymen -- book about engineering failures called "To Engineer is Human." It's a little chatty, but interesting nonetheless; it highlights a bunch of disasters and _why_ they happened.
That's the story you're talking about, right? The one where the genius developer Delos D. Harriman ignores the scoffs of everyone and manages to finance a trip to the moon? That's a great story.v en_economics_000414.html
There's plenty of chatter by Larry Niven about this here (despite all the cookies and pop-ups and junk): http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/larryniven/ni
Believe the hype about the sheepskin: it's a key that opens doors no matter what's written on it.
I have an English degree, and I'm a sysadmin. Did we cover any of this during my course on the 18th Century English Novel? Prolly not, though I slept through big chunks of the thicker Penguin Classics. Did I choose that major because I wanted to be a high school English teacher? Uh, no thanks. However, in college I met a friend (hi, Cherie!) who got me a job that, six years later, had carried me past graduation (employed, with a little seniority) into a field that I later left (publishing) with exposure to lots of different stuff (hi, Miguel!).
My bosses were happy to stick me in any department in the company, and so I got to see everything. (Hi, you jerks who laid me off!) That breadth was useful when I was talking to prospective employers, and I got more and better interviews from other B.C. alumni when I went job-hunting. Far from decrying that bias, I used it to counter-balance my lack of a CompSci degree.
Now I have a decent job, close to home, doing something I like. Someday I'll get tired of doing system administration, but then I'll move on to something else. Not teaching English, mind you, but I'll still be "using" that degree.
You can actually get into the case of these systems whithout unracking them, unlike the Sun units I know (420R's and 280R's). Yeah, I know that an 85-lb., 4U Sun server that was pulled out of the rack like this would tip over onto me, but I might prefer that to un-racking it and re-racking it every time I go in the case:/ irack/i ndex-6.html
http://litterbox.zawodny.com/~jzawodn/pics
Got kids? .edu, so I'm smug about being able to get one. Neener-neener.)
An increasing number of technically astute, computer-buying people do -- and we don't want an LCD within reach of toddlers.
I was juuuust about to pick up the phone to order a 600 MHz iMac from MacWh*rehouse (hey, free RAM & free printer) when I saw this story, and now I'm very torn.
One of the reasons to have a computer in the house is to make sure the little ones are comfortable with technology before they head off to school without overwhelming them, and a nice, round iMac is just the thing. However, who wants to have to stick their iMac under the desk and use an aftermarket CRT just because a three year-old snapped the computer's neck?
(And yes, I am at an
How about "war parking"?
I'd like to suggest that the value of a book is often in the _having_of a book and not the _having had_ a book. That is, many books are of no value to me if I can't reread them in toto or look things up in them, either for pleasure or as a reference. In my opinion, the only books that carry their full value from owner to owner are "throw-away" entertainment, true crime stories, and other ephemera.
Economics may postulate that everyone gets full value from a re-sold book, but if I want to look up a fact or re-read a story that in a book that I sold when I was done with it, then I do not possess that value any more.
Then again, I was an English major, and economics always confused me.
>
> Alice trusts Frank, who trusts Trent, who trusts Eve, who trusts Andrew,
> who trusts Bob. This many levels of displacement is probably enough
> to cover the population of the United States.
>
If you could get one of Kevin Bacon's friends on-board, it'd be a sure thing.
Golly, I bet they could be used to power a spell-checker, and perhaps a grammar-checker can be added once they've been perfected!
Does anyone know of a Linux or *BSD distribution that'll run on my PowerBook 1400?
I have heard that MkLinux will do so (relying on the serial port for networking, or something), but I'd really prefer something that lets me use external SCSI devices, as I only have the floppy drive Expansion Bay unit.
The Atlantic Monthly magazine covered this a month ago in a story that's on the web at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/02/fallows. htm
And why should anyone be surprised that they're using common sense _as well as_ your spare CPU cycles to find out what's going on outside those smoked-glass windows?
A fifth-grader, printing out _that_ many pages? Even if the clever little devil manages to munge the size of the text, it's still going to take a mountain of paper, and once they run the black ink cartridge dry, dad's gonna be *pissed*...
I agree, though, that boots of the text would be available everywhere in a day.
In honor of my brother (from whom I first heard this, though he could have ripped it off) I present John's Ominutile Justification: "Sure it's stupid, but chicks dig it."
Ripping off the "Unix Rosetta Stone" web page and putting it into a printed format small enough to hide in a laptop bag would be nifty. Same for some of the books (pub. by New Riders and ORA and I forget who else) about how to do stuff on another platform that you already know how to do on your favorite platform -- they're collections of sign-posts, means for extending your knowledge from an area where you feel comfortable into areas where you're still learning.
And though people will make fun of me for this, Peachpit Press books are fantastic because they provide counter-examples from two platforms or applications side-by-side to illustrate a point.
>r n_another_romance_language
> Buying into BeOS is like learning Latin: it's cool and all...
>
Good point -- but perhaps instead of being just cool or an amusement, people will study BeOS, like they study Latin, in order to help them learn other stuff. Consider this analogy: study_BeOS:understand_another_OS::learn_Latin:lea