Every year here in Canada we mint a 50-cent coin. I almost never see one outside of a collector's set, however. In fact, it's so unusual to see one in circulation I've seen cashiers refuse to believe they are real money.
Ironically, US coins are widely accepted in Canada. There are so many US pennies in any random pile of "Canadian" pennies that no one could be bothered to sort them out.
Also, although US dollars trade for more than Canadian dollars, it's not possible to obtain an exchange rate for coinage. The only way to cash in on those marginally more valuable US coins floating around is to take then down to the US and spend them there.
A bit of trivia that few people know is that Canadian and US coins "flip" differently. That is to say, if you orient the "heads" side of a coin like a portrait and want to see the reverse side correctly oriented, you would flip a Canadian coin about the "Y" axis, but flip a US coin about the "X" axis. Otherwise the reverse side will appear upside down.
it's gotten so bad that with most of the fake AV viruses we just freaking wipe the stupid PC immediately. Format and re-image and done. It's faster and easier.
Agreed - 100%. Today's malware can be so tenacious. You can waste hours battling an infection only to discover that none of the tools available can eradicate it. And THEN you give up, reformat and reinstall.
Now when I see one of these buggers that fights back hard, I go straight to a reinstall and get on with my life.
I don't care what Wikipedia labels it. I've been around since back in the day, and nobody went around saying "The X Windows System". We called it "X Windows". Maybe we weren't being 100% correct, but I'm pretty sure it was acceptable enough that nobody would have quoted us with a snide little "[sic]".
Does the FBI actually have the manpower and/or systems to effectively monitor the activities of 400,000 people? If not, they are are watering down their list and reducing its usefulness.
I just RTFA by Dvorak. It's not an article about whether or not Windows 7 is a good OS. It's a criticism of Microsoft's marketing over the past few years.
The gist of it is that Dvorak is disappointed that Microsoft now cc's him on generic marketing e-mails instead of sucking up to him personally, and he thinks their ad campaigns are lame.
Overall, there's not much condemnation of Windows 7, and certainly no specific criticisms. In fact, he concludes by writing:
In the end, Windows 7 is a big deal - but it should be an even bigger deal.
It's not that it's hard, per se. It's that I got used to having a single, stationary icon that I could click on repeatedly to navigate "up" one folder each time. (It's like typing.. in Unix). This habit was reinforced through 5 or 6 consecutive versions of Windows. It was quick, easy, and effective. When they took it away, I found it annoying, because for long time I kept wanting to click on it out of habit. So I learned Alt-UpArrow, and could once again navigate using the paradigm I was used to.
I'd be content with an "up-folder" icon. It drove me mad until I learned to type Alt-UpArrow.
I'd also love a "classic" search function. I don't want or need an index service running all the time, and there are too many hoops to jump through to search in non-indexed locations. On the odd occasion I need to search my entire drive for something, I can live with a little wait.
As for the new taskbar behaviour, I thought the Vista taskbar with Quick Launch toolbar was just fine.
Undoubtedly, many in the IT community will scoff at the thought of calling such a device a 'server.'
I call something a 'server' if it is providing one or more services to other computers. It has nothing to do with the hardware or operating system used.
I've often redeployed old 'desktop' computers in server roles. At that point they become 'servers', whether or not they sport features like high speed, large capacity or redundancy.
I'm replying a bit late on this, but it took a few days to obtain the information I was looking for.
Prompted by your comments, I began looking online for a list of regulations pertaining to how Blackjack (or "21") may be dealt in Nevada. This proved more difficult than I expected. I located extensive documentation on Nevada's gaming statutes and
regulations, but nothing specific about when dealers are permitted to shuffle.
I did, however, locate an e-mail address for general inquiries to the State Gaming Control Board, and e-mailed them the following question:
I’ve been searching online (to no avail) for a list of regulations on how casinos in Nevada are permitted conduct the game of “21” or “Blackjack”. Specifically, I’m trying to determine what (if any) regulations exist regarding when a dealer is permitted to shuffle the cards. Are dealers legally obligated to deal until they reach the “cut card” inserted in the stack of cards, or may dealers choose to re-shuffle the cards before reaching the cut card?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Today I received the following reply:
The Nevada Gaming Commission requires that all licensees who put up a licensed gambling game for play to the general public must have a set of house rules for each game. We do not spell out how they need to deal the game, but the rules must. If you have a problem at a licensee you can request to see their rules or ask a pit boss on what their rules are on dealing and shuffling. As most games are dealt according to industry standards they do not normally vary a lot. If you are playing on a single or double deck hand dealt game which usually is a higher minimum bet you might see they shuffle more if the casino thinks patrons on the table are counting cards. It is not illegal to count cards, but a licensee can detect it very easily and by shuffling more they remove any advantage a card counter might be getting.
(Name removed before posting online)
Special Agent, Enforcement Division
Nevada Gaming Control Board
So, the official word is that it is not "cheating" for dealers to reshuffle early.
It's a tad harsh to brand me a liar because my experience doesn't match up with yours. As I wrote quite clearly, this was based on my personal experience in Reno over 20 years ago. Maybe the laws were different then. Maybe the dealers were breaking the rules. Whatever the case, this is what happened when I was there.
Thinking back on it now, I recall they would also change the dealer if we were winning. Perhaps there is some loophole that they are allowed to reshuffle if a new dealer comes in?
It doesn't take any real skill to "count cards". There are easy-to-learn systems that only require incrementing or decrementing a running total in your head. They're by no means perfect, but given a favourable shuffle they can give you an edge. The strategy is to sit there making minimum bets until a favourable shuffle occurs.
In practice, here's what happens: Casinos deal from a multi-deck "shoe", which has a "cut card" inserted toward the bottom of the stack after shuffling. The cut card is there to ensure they never deal to the bottom of the stack. (If they did, there could be times that a player could bet with absolute certainty). However, they are under no obligation to keep dealing until they reach the cut card. A competent dealer can recognize a shuffle that would play out in your favour, just as well as you can. So whenever the count starts to swing in your favour, there's no need to "send over a burly dude in a bad suit". They simply shuffle the cards!
This is what a couple of friends and me learned when we tried to play a card-counting system in Reno back in the 80's.
Regarding pointer precision, it's easy to imagine a setting where long movements of one's finger result in short movements of the pointer on screen. Most mouse current mouse driver's have such a "speed" setting. Now consider implementing this in a multi-touch context. A pinching gesture with one hand, for example, could dynamically adjust the pointer "speed" as it's being positioned by the other hand. You could have almost arbitrary precision on demand.
Regarding the need for a keyboard, it's also easy to imagine a virtual keyboard overlaid on the touch area. The surface already detects presses of all ten fingers. It's simply a matter of defining which areas you want to correspond to which keys. This would enable several advantages. You could choose different keyboard layouts, remap keys and even scale the entire keyboard to suit the size of your hands.
You may wonder, how would you align your hands correctly on an invisible keyboard? Easy. Place all ten fingers in their starting positions and have the virtual keyboard align itself to YOU.
I got this from a friend, and while I can't prove or disprove its veracity, I like to believe it really happened:
Here in Vancouver there are often sightings of celebrities in town for the filming of some project. So one day several years ago, a fellow is walking along downtown and is amazed to see John Cleese walking toward him. This fellow happens to be a Monty Python fanatic. We all know the type; he can (and does) quote many of their skits verbatim.
So the story goes, as he sees his comedic idol walking toward him on the street, he is suddenly in a panic as to what he should say to him. As Cleese is about to walk past he blurts out "Is this the place for an argument"? Without pausing or missing a step, Cleese exclaims "I TOLD YOU ONCE"!
Boot up Windows on a new computer from Dell or Lenovo these days. The amount of crap loading in the background is mind boggling. I've run Task Manager on a Vista machine with no user-installed applications on it yet and seen upwards of 60 processes running.
By the time you load a common suite of applications, you'll have added a crapload more autostart processes that load "speed launch" programs, check for Java updates, update your antivirus definitions, monitor which browser is set as default, etc. It's one thing to see the desktop appear. It's another thing to wait another 4 minutes until the machine stops trashing enough to use it.
I've seen quick-start options in BIOS for years. What I'd like to see if for every damn software maker to stop adding cruft that needlessly requires memory allocation, CPU cycles and disk I/O the second my computer starts up. When I want to run your damn program, I'll start it myself, and if it takes three seconds longer to load because I haven't been running your speed-launch application since boot, I'll live with it.
Are you nuts? Modern hard drives do all sorts of internal magic to present a flawless interface externally, like geometry virtualization, spare sector mapping (sometimes), and retry algorithms that try every combination of head alignment, early/late timing, etc.
When you get to the point that a hard drive reports a single hard error, there is something seriously wrong with that drive. Consider it an early warning. Copy the data off asap and replace the drive.
I have had many drives replaced by manufacturers due to a single-sector error. Not once has a manufacturer suggested that the drive might be "OK".
First, I was stunned Ubuntu would be misguided enough to enable IPv6 in their desktop distro by default, when less than 1% of ISPs support it, and most consumer networking equipment either doesn't support it or doesn't have it enabled by default.
IPv6 is also on by default in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. It's not really "stunning" to see it enabled these days.
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We have a coin of our own that is not always accepted, whereas we readily accept US (foreign) coins.
You don't see the irony in that?
Every year here in Canada we mint a 50-cent coin. I almost never see one outside of a collector's set, however. In fact, it's so unusual to see one in circulation I've seen cashiers refuse to believe they are real money.
Ironically, US coins are widely accepted in Canada. There are so many US pennies in any random pile of "Canadian" pennies that no one could be bothered to sort them out.
Also, although US dollars trade for more than Canadian dollars, it's not possible to obtain an exchange rate for coinage. The only way to cash in on those marginally more valuable US coins floating around is to take then down to the US and spend them there.
A bit of trivia that few people know is that Canadian and US coins "flip" differently. That is to say, if you orient the "heads" side of a coin like a portrait and want to see the reverse side correctly oriented, you would flip a Canadian coin about the "Y" axis, but flip a US coin about the "X" axis. Otherwise the reverse side will appear upside down.
What you should do is create a dedicated lane that is controlled entirely by computer...
If you had bothered to RTFA, you might have noticed this statement:
We're looking at what it would take to get platooning on public highways without making big changes to the public highways themselves.
They're not claiming this is the best or only way to do this. They're specifically looking for a solution that would work on existing highways.
it's gotten so bad that with most of the fake AV viruses we just freaking wipe the stupid PC immediately. Format and re-image and done. It's faster and easier.
Agreed - 100%. Today's malware can be so tenacious. You can waste hours battling an infection only to discover that none of the tools available can eradicate it. And THEN you give up, reformat and reinstall.
Now when I see one of these buggers that fights back hard, I go straight to a reinstall and get on with my life.
We didn't pronounce the hyphen.
I don't care what Wikipedia labels it. I've been around since back in the day, and nobody went around saying "The X Windows System". We called it "X Windows". Maybe we weren't being 100% correct, but I'm pretty sure it was acceptable enough that nobody would have quoted us with a snide little "[sic]".
It's been called X-Windows for a long time. Longer than the term "X11" has been around. It's not a misuse of Microsoft's Windows® brand name.
Does the FBI actually have the manpower and /or systems to effectively monitor the activities of 400,000 people? If not, they are are watering down their list and reducing its usefulness.
I just RTFA by Dvorak. It's not an article about whether or not Windows 7 is a good OS. It's a criticism of Microsoft's marketing over the past few years.
The gist of it is that Dvorak is disappointed that Microsoft now cc's him on generic marketing e-mails instead of sucking up to him personally, and he thinks their ad campaigns are lame.
Overall, there's not much condemnation of Windows 7, and certainly no specific criticisms. In fact, he concludes by writing:
In the end, Windows 7 is a big deal - but it should be an even bigger deal.
Again, he is criticizing their marketing.
is online banking.
It's not that it's hard, per se. It's that I got used to having a single, stationary icon that I could click on repeatedly to navigate "up" one folder each time. (It's like typing .. in Unix). This habit was reinforced through 5 or 6 consecutive versions of Windows. It was quick, easy, and effective. When they took it away, I found it annoying, because for long time I kept wanting to click on it out of habit. So I learned Alt-UpArrow, and could once again navigate using the paradigm I was used to.
YMMV.
I'd be content with an "up-folder" icon. It drove me mad until I learned to type Alt-UpArrow.
I'd also love a "classic" search function. I don't want or need an index service running all the time, and there are too many hoops to jump through to search in non-indexed locations. On the odd occasion I need to search my entire drive for something, I can live with a little wait.
As for the new taskbar behaviour, I thought the Vista taskbar with Quick Launch toolbar was just fine.
Undoubtedly, many in the IT community will scoff at the thought of calling such a device a 'server.'
I call something a 'server' if it is providing one or more services to other computers. It has nothing to do with the hardware or operating system used.
I've often redeployed old 'desktop' computers in server roles. At that point they become 'servers', whether or not they sport features like high speed, large capacity or redundancy.
I'm replying a bit late on this, but it took a few days to obtain the information I was looking for.
Prompted by your comments, I began looking online for a list of regulations pertaining to how Blackjack (or "21") may be dealt in Nevada. This proved more difficult than I expected. I located extensive documentation on Nevada's gaming statutes and regulations, but nothing specific about when dealers are permitted to shuffle.
I did, however, locate an e-mail address for general inquiries to the State Gaming Control Board, and e-mailed them the following question:
I’ve been searching online (to no avail) for a list of regulations on how casinos in Nevada are permitted conduct the game of “21” or “Blackjack”. Specifically, I’m trying to determine what (if any) regulations exist regarding when a dealer is permitted to shuffle the cards. Are dealers legally obligated to deal until they reach the “cut card” inserted in the stack of cards, or may dealers choose to re-shuffle the cards before reaching the cut card?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Today I received the following reply:
The Nevada Gaming Commission requires that all licensees who put up a licensed gambling game for play to the general public must have a set of house rules for each game. We do not spell out how they need to deal the game, but the rules must. If you have a problem at a licensee you can request to see their rules or ask a pit boss on what their rules are on dealing and shuffling. As most games are dealt according to industry standards they do not normally vary a lot. If you are playing on a single or double deck hand dealt game which usually is a higher minimum bet you might see they shuffle more if the casino thinks patrons on the table are counting cards. It is not illegal to count cards, but a licensee can detect it very easily and by shuffling more they remove any advantage a card counter might be getting.
(Name removed before posting online)
Special Agent, Enforcement Division
Nevada Gaming Control Board
So, the official word is that it is not "cheating" for dealers to reshuffle early.
OpenBSD's FAQ explains their choices regarding ISO images.
I like to install OpenBSD from a floppy image - only 1.44 MB! I then choose an FTP mirror and install whatever parts I want on the fly.
This is totally untrue.
It's a tad harsh to brand me a liar because my experience doesn't match up with yours. As I wrote quite clearly, this was based on my personal experience in Reno over 20 years ago. Maybe the laws were different then. Maybe the dealers were breaking the rules. Whatever the case, this is what happened when I was there.
Thinking back on it now, I recall they would also change the dealer if we were winning. Perhaps there is some loophole that they are allowed to reshuffle if a new dealer comes in?
It doesn't take any real skill to "count cards". There are easy-to-learn systems that only require incrementing or decrementing a running total in your head. They're by no means perfect, but given a favourable shuffle they can give you an edge. The strategy is to sit there making minimum bets until a favourable shuffle occurs.
In practice, here's what happens: Casinos deal from a multi-deck "shoe", which has a "cut card" inserted toward the bottom of the stack after shuffling. The cut card is there to ensure they never deal to the bottom of the stack. (If they did, there could be times that a player could bet with absolute certainty). However, they are under no obligation to keep dealing until they reach the cut card. A competent dealer can recognize a shuffle that would play out in your favour, just as well as you can. So whenever the count starts to swing in your favour, there's no need to "send over a burly dude in a bad suit". They simply shuffle the cards!
This is what a couple of friends and me learned when we tried to play a card-counting system in Reno back in the 80's.
Regarding pointer precision, it's easy to imagine a setting where long movements of one's finger result in short movements of the pointer on screen. Most mouse current mouse driver's have such a "speed" setting. Now consider implementing this in a multi-touch context. A pinching gesture with one hand, for example, could dynamically adjust the pointer "speed" as it's being positioned by the other hand. You could have almost arbitrary precision on demand.
Regarding the need for a keyboard, it's also easy to imagine a virtual keyboard overlaid on the touch area. The surface already detects presses of all ten fingers. It's simply a matter of defining which areas you want to correspond to which keys. This would enable several advantages. You could choose different keyboard layouts, remap keys and even scale the entire keyboard to suit the size of your hands.
You may wonder, how would you align your hands correctly on an invisible keyboard? Easy. Place all ten fingers in their starting positions and have the virtual keyboard align itself to YOU.
I got this from a friend, and while I can't prove or disprove its veracity, I like to believe it really happened:
Here in Vancouver there are often sightings of celebrities in town for the filming of some project. So one day several years ago, a fellow is walking along downtown and is amazed to see John Cleese walking toward him. This fellow happens to be a Monty Python fanatic. We all know the type; he can (and does) quote many of their skits verbatim.
So the story goes, as he sees his comedic idol walking toward him on the street, he is suddenly in a panic as to what he should say to him. As Cleese is about to walk past he blurts out "Is this the place for an argument"? Without pausing or missing a step, Cleese exclaims "I TOLD YOU ONCE"!
Boot up Windows on a new computer from Dell or Lenovo these days. The amount of crap loading in the background is mind boggling. I've run Task Manager on a Vista machine with no user-installed applications on it yet and seen upwards of 60 processes running.
By the time you load a common suite of applications, you'll have added a crapload more autostart processes that load "speed launch" programs, check for Java updates, update your antivirus definitions, monitor which browser is set as default, etc. It's one thing to see the desktop appear. It's another thing to wait another 4 minutes until the machine stops trashing enough to use it.
I've seen quick-start options in BIOS for years. What I'd like to see if for every damn software maker to stop adding cruft that needlessly requires memory allocation, CPU cycles and disk I/O the second my computer starts up. When I want to run your damn program, I'll start it myself, and if it takes three seconds longer to load because I haven't been running your speed-launch application since boot, I'll live with it.
Are you nuts? Modern hard drives do all sorts of internal magic to present a flawless interface externally, like geometry virtualization, spare sector mapping (sometimes), and retry algorithms that try every combination of head alignment, early/late timing, etc.
When you get to the point that a hard drive reports a single hard error, there is something seriously wrong with that drive. Consider it an early warning. Copy the data off asap and replace the drive.
I have had many drives replaced by manufacturers due to a single-sector error. Not once has a manufacturer suggested that the drive might be "OK".
Duh.
The 64-bit installation has twice as many bits to install.
First, I was stunned Ubuntu would be misguided enough to enable IPv6 in their desktop distro by default, when less than 1% of ISPs support it, and most consumer networking equipment either doesn't support it or doesn't have it enabled by default.
IPv6 is also on by default in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. It's not really "stunning" to see it enabled these days.
Roll your files up into a tar or cpio archive, then save that file onto whatever filesystem you like.
He said OSX doesn't have native write support for NTFS.