I always expected the cells to go first. I was careful to avoid unnecessary writes. In the end, though, it was a known bug that killed the drive. Well, I didn't know about it, of course, until it was too late. If I'd known, I'd have updated the drive firmware to one that didn't have a catastrophic bug.
I replaced it with a Samsung. The RMA'd replacement OCZ is still sitting in its packet on my desk.
If you have an 'About...' item or a slash screen this seems like a good place to do it
A slash screen? Now I'm imagining a desktop application that starts up with a painstakingly-rendered airbrush-style image of Picard and Riker locked in a passionate kiss.
FWIW, GSM900 was never widely adopted in the UK, distributors instead preferring GSM1800. The 934 crowd never got their bandwidth back to this day.
That's not right, surely? The first UK GSM licences (Vodafone and Cellnet) were 900, followed some time later by one2one and Orange on 1800. (At university, I could always tell the people on one2one or Orange. They had loads of free minutes, but the networks were sparse and 1800 was more readily attenuated by masonry, so they had to stand outside in January to make phone calls.)
The first GSM phones in the UK were 900-only, too: if you were on an 1800 network, you needed to be sure to buy a dual-band phone.
Vodafone and Cellnet (or were they O2 by then? I forget) obtained 1800 licences quite a long time later, and added 1800 base stations too - and made a point of telling their customers that they'd get better service if they had dual-band handsets.
I've read the EOT spec. The DRM is trivally, hilariously bad:
This flag indicates that the FontData array and EUDCFotData array (if present) has been encrypted using an XOR algorithm using an XOR key of 0x50 on each byte of the font data. This happens on final data, after compression and subsetting. The font must be decrypted using the XOR key to accesses the font data.
In addition, whilst it is possible to embed only those glyphs needed, anyone who's using a CMS is realistically going to be embedding all the glyphs needed for the language anyway.
So why bother?
Motorbicycles are exempt anyway
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
Maybe that's why motorbicycles (that's what the law calls 'em) are excluded from the London Congestion Charge in the first place. That and the fact that they take up less space on the road.
In fact, theft from vending machines is a reasonably common occurrence in Japan (at least in Osaka, where I know someone who runs a few).
In addition, up until a few years ago, the (South) Korean 500 Won and Japanese 500 Yen coins were so similar that they could be used interchangeably in vending machines. Unfortunately for the machine owners, 500 Won is worth about 50 Yen! They've changed the composition of the Japanese coin now so that it can be differentiated.
I don't often need to do OCR, but I had passable results with Ocrad recently. Like some of the other respondents, I couldn't get much useful output from GOCR.
When I lived in Japan, I grew so annoyed by the concept of blood-type-based character predestination that I decided to have some fun with the idea. When Japanese people asked me my blood type, I replied 'C', and went on to explain (plausibly enough) that the reason they hadn't heard of it was that it occurred only in European populations. It worked most of the time, although I usually folded and admitted that there was no such thing after stringing them along a bit.
I'm no fan of MS: in fact, I don't even run Windows. However, I haven't had any problems with their phone staff.
I called Microsoft the other day to reactivate a computer I'd deloused and reimaged for a friend. I spoke to someone in Delhi who was helpful, charming, and spoke excellent American-inflected English - all at what must have been 04:00 local time for him. He got the details he needed and gave me an activation code without any messing around.
Perhaps I was just lucky, but my experience with MS's support staff has been very good - much better than with some of the other companies I have to call.
I really don't understand why they are bothering to put DRM on it: the entire BBC output is already available over-the-air in unencrypted digital form via digital television (MPEG2/DVB-T). Never mind the analogue hole: there's a gaping digital hole out there!
IE will use the W3C box model if you include an appropriate DOCTYPE in your page (as per the standards) thereby triggering "strict" rendering mode. The box model is only broken if you use"quirks" mode rendering.
As long as you don't put in an XML prolog or any whitespace at the start of the document, in which case the broken parser will ignore the DOCTYPE and IE will go back to 'quirks' mode.
I know, I know, it's not an option for everybody. I'm lucky enough to work in an all-Mac company, so I've been able to ignore IE entirely for the internal sales web application I'm working on. It was a moment of pure joy when I realised I don't have to worry about IE this time. I was able to strip out a load of JavaScript and replaced it with simpler and easier to maintain CSS2 rules. And my code and layouts work first time!
It's not an option for most people, but when you have the chance to do ignore IE, you realise what a terrible cancer it is on web development productivity.
Here's how. I buy a song from a iTMS-like store and it's downloaded as normal. During the process, the file was also watermarked and digitally signed with your name, address, and credit card number, which was also appended to the file in plaintext.
Are you serious? I don't know about anyone else, but that kind of customer-hostile activity would make me more likely to obtain an unlicensed copy via murky channels, not less.
You make a mistake in insisting that language be logical. It isn't: usage morphs over time, and once-ungrammatical constructions become normal. Take, for example, the difference between 'I feel good' and 'I feel well.'
Would you say, "Microsoft are a company" or, "Microsoft is a company"?
I'd tend to say 'Microsoft is a company' in order to put the two sides into agreement. However, I'd also say 'Microsoft have been fined by the EU.' It's a matter of feeling and nuance, really.
Now it's your turn to point out some equally nonsensical language construct that is only used by us 'mericans.
Here's one where Americans often use a plural noun as if it were singular:
'That's a savings of $5!'
It sounds odd to my ears, but it's obviously very common in US usage.
Dell is a company, and as such, is a SINGULAR NOUN. Usage rules dictate that singular nouns are incompatible with plural verbs. Would you say "My mom are going to the store?" Of course not. Why, then, would you say "Dell are now shipping" ?
Learn some fucking English, people.
Learn to accept different regional usages. Where I come from, saying 'Dell are' is standard usage: 'Dell' is a collective noun and can be treated as a plural.
I use partimage off a CD for Windows or Linux partitions.
Given that, according to the link you gave, partimage's support for NTFS is experimental and for HFS beta, the grandparent's method of zeroing, dd'ing and compressing seems a safer bet if it's not one of the stable supported file systems.
Yes, yes, I'm sure that it will probably work, but sometimes you need to be sure. After all, a backup that won't restore properly isn't a lot of good.
In Japan, Apple's wireless networking products are branded as 'AirMac' instead of 'AirPort', as another company (IO-DATA, I think) has the trademark on 'AirPort' for its own WLAN range.
Perhaps Apple will have to use a different name for Front Row in the UK. 'Comfy Chair'?
(Slightly veering away from the topic) Mobile phones also annoy me in this regard. If I'm typing a message, browing a menu, or doing something else on my phone and someone calls, the phone switches straight into answering mode, in which the button I was just about to press has a completely different function. It's then a matter of complete chance whether I answer or reject the call, or send it to voice mail.
This problem could easily be solved: when the phone changes modes due to an event not initiated by the user, disable the buttons for a couple of seconds to allow the user to react to the change of state. Do any phones do this? I've not seen one that does.
One bus a day? You don't know you're born. I used to live in a place that had one bus every other day! That was in Gloucestershire, too - maybe that's not a coincidence.
Public transport in rural areas could be a lot better than it is in the UK; many parts of Europe manage to do it much more frequently and cheaply. I think it's an absence of political will and competence rather than financial constraints: there seems to be a congenital British inability to run public services well.
However, living in a rural area is also a choice for all but the most financially straitened. If you choose to live there, the lower population density is inevitably going to mean that there is less public transport.
What I would like to see is a more reasonable and less punitive taxation policy in the UK. At present, cars and fuel are heavily taxed to discourage their use. At the same time, the alternatives are impractical: buses are filthy, expensive, and unreliable; the train system is a basket case, and the operators are even putting up prices to discourage people from using them! One sometimes questions whether 'They' have any understanding of how their country works. People living in isolated areas will always need personal transportation of some kind, and it needs to be affordable. I sometimes wonder whether politicians don't think that people 'in the provinces' get around by pony and trap...
CLUE: stop all trying to live in one small space, duh
I can only speak for myself, but I think that most people who live in cities do so in full knowledge of the tradeoffs. They live there because they want to, just as, I assume, you live in Gloucestershire because you want to. The benefits and the drawbacks are both directly related to the density of development. Accommodation costs more, but public transport can be convenient and cheap, and one saves a lot of time by not having to travel long distances. One can save money by not buying, taxing, ensuring, and feeding a car. And many people choose to live in cities because they like living where there are plenty of other people.
Believe me, you really wouldn't like it if everyone in London took your advice and moved to the country: the South of England would be even more concreted-over and gridlocked than it is now, and there wouldn't really be any countryside left to speak of.
Slashdot Mirror
I always expected the cells to go first. I was careful to avoid unnecessary writes. In the end, though, it was a known bug that killed the drive. Well, I didn't know about it, of course, until it was too late. If I'd known, I'd have updated the drive firmware to one that didn't have a catastrophic bug.
I replaced it with a Samsung. The RMA'd replacement OCZ is still sitting in its packet on my desk.
If you have an 'About...' item or a slash screen this seems like a good place to do it
A slash screen? Now I'm imagining a desktop application that starts up with a painstakingly-rendered airbrush-style image of Picard and Riker locked in a passionate kiss.
And now you probably are, too. I'm so sorry.
FWIW, GSM900 was never widely adopted in the UK, distributors instead preferring GSM1800. The 934 crowd never got their bandwidth back to this day.
That's not right, surely? The first UK GSM licences (Vodafone and Cellnet) were 900, followed some time later by one2one and Orange on 1800. (At university, I could always tell the people on one2one or Orange. They had loads of free minutes, but the networks were sparse and 1800 was more readily attenuated by masonry, so they had to stand outside in January to make phone calls.)
The first GSM phones in the UK were 900-only, too: if you were on an 1800 network, you needed to be sure to buy a dual-band phone.
Vodafone and Cellnet (or were they O2 by then? I forget) obtained 1800 licences quite a long time later, and added 1800 base stations too - and made a point of telling their customers that they'd get better service if they had dual-band handsets.
900 is still in use - and operators are allowed to use both 900 and 1800 for UMTS now [PDF]. How widely, though, I don't know.
I've read the EOT spec. The DRM is trivally, hilariously bad:
In addition, whilst it is possible to embed only those glyphs needed, anyone who's using a CMS is realistically going to be embedding all the glyphs needed for the language anyway.
So why bother?
Maybe that's why motorbicycles (that's what the law calls 'em) are excluded from the London Congestion Charge in the first place. That and the fact that they take up less space on the road.
In fact, theft from vending machines is a reasonably common occurrence in Japan (at least in Osaka, where I know someone who runs a few).
In addition, up until a few years ago, the (South) Korean 500 Won and Japanese 500 Yen coins were so similar that they could be used interchangeably in vending machines. Unfortunately for the machine owners, 500 Won is worth about 50 Yen! They've changed the composition of the Japanese coin now so that it can be differentiated.
As someone who doesn't use Windows: knowing that the hardware works with Linux. Not sending any money to MS is also a plus.
I don't often need to do OCR, but I had passable results with Ocrad recently. Like some of the other respondents, I couldn't get much useful output from GOCR.
When I lived in Japan, I grew so annoyed by the concept of blood-type-based character predestination that I decided to have some fun with the idea. When Japanese people asked me my blood type, I replied 'C', and went on to explain (plausibly enough) that the reason they hadn't heard of it was that it occurred only in European populations. It worked most of the time, although I usually folded and admitted that there was no such thing after stringing them along a bit.
I'm no fan of MS: in fact, I don't even run Windows. However, I haven't had any problems with their phone staff.
I called Microsoft the other day to reactivate a computer I'd deloused and reimaged for a friend. I spoke to someone in Delhi who was helpful, charming, and spoke excellent American-inflected English - all at what must have been 04:00 local time for him. He got the details he needed and gave me an activation code without any messing around.
Perhaps I was just lucky, but my experience with MS's support staff has been very good - much better than with some of the other companies I have to call.
I really don't understand why they are bothering to put DRM on it: the entire BBC output is already available over-the-air in unencrypted digital form via digital television (MPEG2/DVB-T). Never mind the analogue hole: there's a gaping digital hole out there!
People are "healthy." Food is "healthful."
Interestingly, that distinction doesn't hold in British English, where both people and foods can be 'healthy', and 'healthful' is never used.
Apart from kanji, which are spelled like Old Chinese used to sound, as misheard by Japanese people!
What, you mean like 'circ-leh'?
As long as you don't put in an XML prolog or any whitespace at the start of the document, in which case the broken parser will ignore the DOCTYPE and IE will go back to 'quirks' mode.
Did they fix that in IE7, by the way?
You missed an option:
5. Develop to standards and ignore IE.
I know, I know, it's not an option for everybody. I'm lucky enough to work in an all-Mac company, so I've been able to ignore IE entirely for the internal sales web application I'm working on. It was a moment of pure joy when I realised I don't have to worry about IE this time. I was able to strip out a load of JavaScript and replaced it with simpler and easier to maintain CSS2 rules. And my code and layouts work first time!
It's not an option for most people, but when you have the chance to do ignore IE, you realise what a terrible cancer it is on web development productivity.
I used Skype on a flight somewhere over Siberia (on Lufthansa's Frankfurt-Osaka route). It worked fine, with quite tolerable latency.
Here's how. I buy a song from a iTMS-like store and it's downloaded as normal. During the process, the file was also watermarked and digitally signed with your name, address, and credit card number, which was also appended to the file in plaintext.
Are you serious? I don't know about anyone else, but that kind of customer-hostile activity would make me more likely to obtain an unlicensed copy via murky channels, not less.
You make a mistake in insisting that language be logical. It isn't: usage morphs over time, and once-ungrammatical constructions become normal. Take, for example, the difference between 'I feel good' and 'I feel well.'
Would you say, "Microsoft are a company" or, "Microsoft is a company"?
I'd tend to say 'Microsoft is a company' in order to put the two sides into agreement. However, I'd also say 'Microsoft have been fined by the EU.' It's a matter of feeling and nuance, really.
Now it's your turn to point out some equally nonsensical language construct that is only used by us 'mericans.
Here's one where Americans often use a plural noun as if it were singular:
'That's a savings of $5!'
It sounds odd to my ears, but it's obviously very common in US usage.
Dell is a company, and as such, is a SINGULAR NOUN. Usage rules dictate that singular nouns are incompatible with plural verbs. Would you say "My mom are going to the store?" Of course not. Why, then, would you say "Dell are now shipping" ?
Learn some fucking English, people.
Learn to accept different regional usages. Where I come from, saying 'Dell are' is standard usage: 'Dell' is a collective noun and can be treated as a plural.
I use partimage off a CD for Windows or Linux partitions.
Given that, according to the link you gave, partimage's support for NTFS is experimental and for HFS beta, the grandparent's method of zeroing, dd'ing and compressing seems a safer bet if it's not one of the stable supported file systems.
Yes, yes, I'm sure that it will probably work, but sometimes you need to be sure. After all, a backup that won't restore properly isn't a lot of good.
In Japan, Apple's wireless networking products are branded as 'AirMac' instead of 'AirPort', as another company (IO-DATA, I think) has the trademark on 'AirPort' for its own WLAN range.
Perhaps Apple will have to use a different name for Front Row in the UK. 'Comfy Chair'?
They are also thinking of getting into the music arena, possibly with portable MP3 players, but analysts say this is just crazy.
I hear that it will have lower capacity than its competitors, and lack wireless. As that's lame, no one will buy it.
(Slightly veering away from the topic) Mobile phones also annoy me in this regard. If I'm typing a message, browing a menu, or doing something else on my phone and someone calls, the phone switches straight into answering mode, in which the button I was just about to press has a completely different function. It's then a matter of complete chance whether I answer or reject the call, or send it to voice mail.
This problem could easily be solved: when the phone changes modes due to an event not initiated by the user, disable the buttons for a couple of seconds to allow the user to react to the change of state. Do any phones do this? I've not seen one that does.
One bus a day? You don't know you're born. I used to live in a place that had one bus every other day! That was in Gloucestershire, too - maybe that's not a coincidence.
Public transport in rural areas could be a lot better than it is in the UK; many parts of Europe manage to do it much more frequently and cheaply. I think it's an absence of political will and competence rather than financial constraints: there seems to be a congenital British inability to run public services well.
However, living in a rural area is also a choice for all but the most financially straitened. If you choose to live there, the lower population density is inevitably going to mean that there is less public transport.
What I would like to see is a more reasonable and less punitive taxation policy in the UK. At present, cars and fuel are heavily taxed to discourage their use. At the same time, the alternatives are impractical: buses are filthy, expensive, and unreliable; the train system is a basket case, and the operators are even putting up prices to discourage people from using them! One sometimes questions whether 'They' have any understanding of how their country works. People living in isolated areas will always need personal transportation of some kind, and it needs to be affordable. I sometimes wonder whether politicians don't think that people 'in the provinces' get around by pony and trap...
CLUE: stop all trying to live in one small space, duh
I can only speak for myself, but I think that most people who live in cities do so in full knowledge of the tradeoffs. They live there because they want to, just as, I assume, you live in Gloucestershire because you want to. The benefits and the drawbacks are both directly related to the density of development. Accommodation costs more, but public transport can be convenient and cheap, and one saves a lot of time by not having to travel long distances. One can save money by not buying, taxing, ensuring, and feeding a car. And many people choose to live in cities because they like living where there are plenty of other people.
Believe me, you really wouldn't like it if everyone in London took your advice and moved to the country: the South of England would be even more concreted-over and gridlocked than it is now, and there wouldn't really be any countryside left to speak of.