The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy recieved not from its own carrier but from those around it, It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. the practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes like this : "I refuse to prove that I exist", says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But", says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear", says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh that was easy" says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
So there's a guy with a skinhead and a T-shirt walking along and you're behind him.
A cute little kitty cat comes up to him and starts rubbing round his ankles, being friendly. You're shocked and dismayed when he grins wickedly and kicks the sweet little cat.
You are still behind him when you see a small dog panting and wagging its tail, obviously pleased to see a human. This awful man kicks the puppy. Again, your shock and dismay is palpable, but you already have his number, you knew he wasn't a nice guy.
You see him walk up to a rabbit, what do you think he will do to it?
Fool me once, you're a funny guy.
Fool me twice, you're an asshole and I'll not have anything more to do with you.
If I'm stupid enough to interact with you a third time I deserve everything I get.
I like your thinking, and appreciate where you're coming from.
Yes, letting them use those bonfires to buy crap old-guard companies like Nokia (the phone department, leave the wellington boots alone!) is funny to watch.
How many billinos of man-hours and $CURRENCYs have been wasted to blue screens of mirth and spent on the WIntel upgrade cycle?
Watching them flail around like a terminator in hot steel, buying here, litigating there and failing all over the place is the saving grace of having MS in the marketplace. Laughing at your friends who decided that an HTC Desire HD was the wrong choice when they could have an HTC WP7 after you'd told them for years to stay away from Microsoft is just gravy to me.
Sooner or later we're going to take the Google out of Android and have delicious Open Free private safe unintrusive Linux devices (EEE Transformer with Arch Linux? FAP!) and Microsoft will have a portfolio of companies that could have open sourced, but missed the boat and drowned in their own reluctance to change.
My Sister came back from Tenerife raving about it and saying how useful it was, so I checked the permissions. I wouldn't dare install it to my Android, even without the bait and switch.
I wonder if radio stations have used real people to ascertain the number of listeners who reach for the channel change button (on the remote, or on the steering column, with the mouse or actually getting up and walking over to the radio to push a button) when those fucking Go Compare commercials come on?
Focus groups and the like are one thing, but I was in a taxi the other day and as soon as that commercial came on the driver turned the radio over to another station. I remember because we had a conversation about how some adverts make you flick round the competition even though the intent of the ad is to annoy you into remembering the product.
I'm a bit of a geek (well, duh) and I keep the TV remote in reach at all times so that I can kill the noise when the ads come on. I always mute the TV and when someone (like my Sister) says something like "simples" or "it's not a hen" I have no idea what she is talking about.
Pariah for not being a part of the commercial culture!
No, I disagree. The point of Android is to get people relying on Google and their services.
No matter which version of Android you're using, they have your info. They know what apps you run, where you are, what networks you connect to, they have the ability to use your phone like they were holding it in their hands, they keep the keys to your credit chip in the next version.
Who cares who makes the phones or how many they sell? That isn't Google's problem. Being able to backport the latest version of Android, or its features is a non-issue for Google.
The problem comes when Canonical, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Sony or Cisco decide that they can run their own servers to let users who replace Android with a GNU/Linux phone distro connect to and sync with.
This is what Google fears. Linux on phones without Dalvik and without them having the keys to your world run through their servers every few minutes.
And if I sound a little paranoid just drink this Kool Aid:
They only want to use all that information to serve you the right adverts in a form you won't block and which are relevant to you.
I think it means that stories tagged "slashvertisement" are filtered from all your pages.
As I suspect is the case with GP, and yourself, ABP takes care of the commercials for IBM, Dell, Xerox and HP that used to take up a square of contentless space on the front page before pointing ads to 127.0.0.1.
You'll probably find that it installs itself inyour VirtualBox-OSE machine with Windows in it for when you want to run Photoshop.
Then you can use it in seamless mode and you have a proper sandbox for your MS product that can be rolled back to a snapshot after every browsing session.
I always thought that MSI stood for "Microsoft's Stupid Installer".
Yes, it is slightly more complex than the Nullsoft installer that I remember a lot of Windows programs shipping with, but I was always partial to a little llama action.
I download a lot of Arch Linux packages and Linux ISOs over both http and BitTorrent.
On the "up to" 10Mb service I average 1.2MB a sec.
I hate phorm, I hate traffic shaping p2p but I love the speed. My ADSL was prone to errors and couldn't manage anything like 10Mb/1.2MB even on a good day.
In the last week I've downloaded 12GB of... archive material and uploaded 4.2GB.
I seed until 2.0 but it takes a whole lot longer to upload than to download.
You mean all those features that Firefox set out to remove from SeaMonkey because it was too bloody bloated and develop a nice fast browser that just browsed and let you add your own bloatware to after they had made it good at what it did?
Wow, it's like people forget what Phoenix was forked for...
Just stop adding crap to Firefox and tighten up the code, remove the bugs and have the rendering engine improve to keep pace with new developments in HTML (non)standards.
Or you could put an HTML editor, IRC and mail client in there and see how many people didn't know they actually wanted Netscape Navigator and accidentally downloaded Firefox lol
I hate the idea of a "~" sarcasm mark as much as the next guy, but it seems that the post you were being sarcastic to might have benefitted from one to point out that it too was being funny.
"It was that bad then?" as opposed to "Is that bad then?"
However, I'm merely being pedantic; your interpretation may have been the one the author was attempting to convey.
I'm so annoyed at my Toshiba for pasting crap every time I type on it, but I'm also too busy doing things to edit the policy for it to disable middle clicking on a device that doesn't have a third button.
Who on earth thought that having a mouse pad that is flush with the palmrest was a good idea?
Add to that, sometimes the damn thing won't move properly and you're left with give me back my nipple! Come back IBM all is forgiven!
Nobody has any interest in it was the most salient point of my post.
The clock isn't a problem waiting for a solution. Unless you count the fact that most Americans (in my experience) are unable to take 12 away from the afternoon/evening/night hours on a clock and work out what the old fashioned time is.
Ten years ago I had the Swatch sponsored ".beat" applet on my website and not more than 5 people out of every thousand clicked on it to see what it was.
How did old farts (oh, people the age we are now) cope with changing over to decimalisation in the 70s? Badly; we still use miles and some people use inches and pounds (lbs, not £). I was taught in metric at school, but I had to learn about the old stuff when I started work because the time needed to change something like that is apparently more than 40 years. I imagine time would take even longer even if they were to start teaching it in schools tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
BABEL FISH :
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy recieved not from its own carrier but from those around it, It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. the practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes like this : "I refuse to prove that I exist", says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But", says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear", says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh that was easy" says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
So there's a guy with a skinhead and a T-shirt walking along and you're behind him.
A cute little kitty cat comes up to him and starts rubbing round his ankles, being friendly. You're shocked and dismayed when he grins wickedly and kicks the sweet little cat.
You are still behind him when you see a small dog panting and wagging its tail, obviously pleased to see a human. This awful man kicks the puppy. Again, your shock and dismay is palpable, but you already have his number, you knew he wasn't a nice guy.
You see him walk up to a rabbit, what do you think he will do to it?
Fool me once, you're a funny guy.
Fool me twice, you're an asshole and I'll not have anything more to do with you.
If I'm stupid enough to interact with you a third time I deserve everything I get.
Fuck you Sony. Have a crap day.
I like your thinking, and appreciate where you're coming from.
Yes, letting them use those bonfires to buy crap old-guard companies like Nokia (the phone department, leave the wellington boots alone!) is funny to watch.
How many billinos of man-hours and $CURRENCYs have been wasted to blue screens of mirth and spent on the WIntel upgrade cycle?
Watching them flail around like a terminator in hot steel, buying here, litigating there and failing all over the place is the saving grace of having MS in the marketplace. Laughing at your friends who decided that an HTC Desire HD was the wrong choice when they could have an HTC WP7 after you'd told them for years to stay away from Microsoft is just gravy to me.
Sooner or later we're going to take the Google out of Android and have delicious Open Free private safe unintrusive Linux devices (EEE Transformer with Arch Linux? FAP!) and Microsoft will have a portfolio of companies that could have open sourced, but missed the boat and drowned in their own reluctance to change.
First year FREE! ($1.99/year after)
Source: http://www.appbrain.com/app/whatsapp-messenger/com.whatsapp
My Sister came back from Tenerife raving about it and saying how useful it was, so I checked the permissions. I wouldn't dare install it to my Android, even without the bait and switch.
exiv2 rm *
.JPG or .DNG.
* because there might be a mixture of images that I'm due to upload somewhere or other.
From my camera (CHDK FTW!) they are all
Novell, the owner of SUSE Linux?
...and bankrolled by Microsoft?
And your mortgages/savings are held by bankers who did what with your money?
Give E17 a try.
I've been using it for a while now after upgrading from LXDE.
I wonder if radio stations have used real people to ascertain the number of listeners who reach for the channel change button (on the remote, or on the steering column, with the mouse or actually getting up and walking over to the radio to push a button) when those fucking Go Compare commercials come on?
Focus groups and the like are one thing, but I was in a taxi the other day and as soon as that commercial came on the driver turned the radio over to another station. I remember because we had a conversation about how some adverts make you flick round the competition even though the intent of the ad is to annoy you into remembering the product.
I'm a bit of a geek (well, duh) and I keep the TV remote in reach at all times so that I can kill the noise when the ads come on. I always mute the TV and when someone (like my Sister) says something like "simples" or "it's not a hen" I have no idea what she is talking about.
Pariah for not being a part of the commercial culture!
Bloody stupid name if you ask me ...
I mean they even spelled it properly and everything.
The point of Android is to sell phones
No, I disagree. The point of Android is to get people relying on Google and their services.
No matter which version of Android you're using, they have your info. They know what apps you run, where you are, what networks you connect to, they have the ability to use your phone like they were holding it in their hands, they keep the keys to your credit chip in the next version.
Who cares who makes the phones or how many they sell? That isn't Google's problem. Being able to backport the latest version of Android, or its features is a non-issue for Google.
The problem comes when Canonical, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Sony or Cisco decide that they can run their own servers to let users who replace Android with a GNU/Linux phone distro connect to and sync with.
This is what Google fears. Linux on phones without Dalvik and without them having the keys to your world run through their servers every few minutes.
And if I sound a little paranoid just drink this Kool Aid:
They only want to use all that information to serve you the right adverts in a form you won't block and which are relevant to you.
So as Firefox is to Ice Weasel, Android will be to Cyborg?
Cyborg because it's Android with a human element, not a corporate one.
Is that a real award?
I think it means that stories tagged "slashvertisement" are filtered from all your pages.
As I suspect is the case with GP, and yourself, ABP takes care of the commercials for IBM, Dell, Xerox and HP that used to take up a square of contentless space on the front page before pointing ads to 127.0.0.1.
You'll probably find that it installs itself inyour VirtualBox-OSE machine with Windows in it for when you want to run Photoshop.
Then you can use it in seamless mode and you have a proper sandbox for your MS product that can be rolled back to a snapshot after every browsing session.
The only way anything MS goes on my boxen.
I always thought that MSI stood for "Microsoft's Stupid Installer".
Yes, it is slightly more complex than the Nullsoft installer that I remember a lot of Windows programs shipping with, but I was always partial to a little llama action.
The problem, THE problem with encrypting your hard drive is that you add another set of complications in case of filesystem corruption.
I know we all use Linux here and that it never crashes, but you just try and fsck a filesystem after typing candlejack, it can't be
You mean like trying to decipher Kenny from South Park's words?
...
I wonder what my kids would compare it to
I use this to play games.
Haven't had much in the way of arm waving in the last ten years.
I'm not a hard core gamer though, and the trade offs between accuracy and comfort suit me just fine.
I download a lot of Arch Linux packages and Linux ISOs over both http and BitTorrent.
... archive material and uploaded 4.2GB.
On the "up to" 10Mb service I average 1.2MB a sec.
I hate phorm, I hate traffic shaping p2p but I love the speed. My ADSL was prone to errors and couldn't manage anything like 10Mb/1.2MB even on a good day. In the last week I've downloaded 12GB of
I seed until 2.0 but it takes a whole lot longer to upload than to download.
You mean all those features that Firefox set out to remove from SeaMonkey because it was too bloody bloated and develop a nice fast browser that just browsed and let you add your own bloatware to after they had made it good at what it did?
...
Wow, it's like people forget what Phoenix was forked for
Just stop adding crap to Firefox and tighten up the code, remove the bugs and have the rendering engine improve to keep pace with new developments in HTML (non)standards.
Or you could put an HTML editor, IRC and mail client in there and see how many people didn't know they actually wanted Netscape Navigator and accidentally downloaded Firefox lol
I hate the idea of a "~" sarcasm mark as much as the next guy, but it seems that the post you were being sarcastic to might have benefitted from one to point out that it too was being funny.
"It was that bad then?" as opposed to "Is that bad then?"
However, I'm merely being pedantic; your interpretation may have been the one the author was attempting to convey.
I'm so annoyed at my Toshiba for pasting crap every time I type on it, but I'm also too busy doing things to edit the policy for it to disable middle clicking on a device that doesn't have a third button.
Who on earth thought that having a mouse pad that is flush with the palmrest was a good idea?
Add to that, sometimes the damn thing won't move properly and you're left with give me back my nipple! Come back IBM all is forgiven!
Yours looks like this to me (UTF8 or en_GB):
when theyÃ(TM)re blowing
To quote myself "It's weird".
Nobody has any interest in it was the most salient point of my post.
The clock isn't a problem waiting for a solution. Unless you count the fact that most Americans (in my experience) are unable to take 12 away from the afternoon/evening/night hours on a clock and work out what the old fashioned time is.
Because it's weird.
Ten years ago I had the Swatch sponsored ".beat" applet on my website and not more than 5 people out of every thousand clicked on it to see what it was.
How did old farts (oh, people the age we are now) cope with changing over to decimalisation in the 70s? Badly; we still use miles and some people use inches and pounds (lbs, not £). I was taught in metric at school, but I had to learn about the old stuff when I started work because the time needed to change something like that is apparently more than 40 years. I imagine time would take even longer even if they were to start teaching it in schools tomorrow.