I gave up on firefox due to the excessively long timeouts when loading pages. For whatever odd reason it occasionally takes all day to load a page, and when this happens other tabs refuse to load either. I've had browsers with 15 tabs all spinning doing nothing and then all the sudden they all load.
This might be an IPv6 issue. It's common enough with ISP supplied routers which simply don't deal with IPv6 requests so those requests have to time out before an IPv4 one is submitted. To test this open about:config in firefox and change network.dns.disableIPv6 to true.
If that helps it might be an idea to disable IPv6 system wide by adding this to/etc/modprobe.conf (modules.conf on a 2.4 kernel):
I'm 35 and heard it just fine. This product probably discourages a lot of normal business as well.
I wonder if the fact that there was MP3 compression applied effected the sound. I'd rather hear an uncompressed version to be sure that I wasn't just perceiving some mpeg artefact.
...but ketchup smeared under the car door handles is just as funny.:)
D. M. S. O. Crypto Wonder Drug In vogue Some people say It cures arthritis Maybe that's why It keeps getting banned It's absorbed Directly through the skin Mix it with lemon juice Touch your fingertips You'll taste the lemon The police Started a riot Down at the courthouse Again Running amok Spilling blood Bashing heads I do my part Behind the lines Swabbing door handles of cop cars With D.M.S.O. Mixed with L.S.D.....
- Jello Biafra (No matter what the rest of Dead Kennedys say)
I can see a problem with desensitizing (is that a word?) the issue; if every little abuse by The Man is blown up for everyone to see, then normal sheeple will get tired of seeing it and tune it out; It would be in the best interest of Sheep everywhere possibly if only the really blatant stuff was screamed about.
Indeed... and the source for this story is highly questionable. The Daily Mail has a reputation for skewing all stories to get middle England grinding their teeth in frustration and anger. Example:
"Amy was scared bucketloads to be locked up in a cell knowing murderers and rapists have been sat in the same cells."
Why on earth are murderers and rapists being mentioned in this article? I doubt that's where this kid's train of thought was going. I know when I was 12 I had a very bare idea of what a rapist even was. She was thinking "Fuck! My batshit fucking loco, Daily Mail reading mother is gonna tear my fucking hair out!"
The real reason for this article (as you'll see in the comments) is to squak a damning endictment of Tony Blair's Britain (Just search for Blair on the page). The DM readership is ultra-conservative and even the right-wing Labour Party isn't right enough for them. We're talking about a paper which bemoaned the number of Jewish immigrants into Britain during the 30s and 40s - almost as bad an attitude as the Irish government's...
While I have no doubt these pigs lost control (it's not an unusual occurence) the DM is not a source I can trust one iota. A quick check on Google News suggests that this is the only paper covering the story so it might even just be made up from scratch.
"I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs" "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking..." "Wait a minute... There's one guy holding up both puppets!"
GO BACK TO BED, AMERICA. YOUR GOVERNMENT IS IN CONTROL.
Ah, but it's not. It needs to operate at various altitudes so there needs to be a way to allow the internal pressure to adjust since the head floats on a cushion of air. There's a small, carbon filtered hole in the disk's case (usually beside a sticker saying "Do not cover")
Why don't we just fucking give up on harddisks with moving parts and move to solid state
I wonder if this will lower the mean time to failure of these drives? I currently have some old 9G scsi disks that have been running daily since 1998/1999 and still work flawlessly. How much lube are they putting in these drives? It seems to me this could be bad thing(tm) put enough lube in for 3 years, and every 3 years sell new drives.
From TFA:
The lubricant reservoirs will be built to last the life of the disk.
Well, duh. I guess you could say "The disk will be built to last the life of the lubricant reservoirs":-)
It has now become common practice to boost the sound level of quieter passages so there is more sound power in the frequency range where the ear is sensitive.
Spot the ad break South Park, this evening, Paramount UK. Visibly higher amplitude.
Of course, she had no idea. So I'd ask her what programming languages she knew. Of course, she didn't know any languages. Gee, how I yearn for those days....
Come to Ireland, get a contract working for government.
I had fun working on VAX and Alpha Minicomputers - VMS has an actual interface you can use to, you know, run programs. The people there knew their stuff. All was good. Even the fact that most of my work involved COBOL didn't phase me too much. Then...
I was moved to another department with OS/390 - fuck TSO. Fuck it in its form-filling, counter-intuitive, non-interactive ass. The people there knew shit and reading manuals was seen as a sign of weakness (didn't stop me...) A variety of database frontends and terrible 4GLs were held together by a core of COBOL batch jobs. Maintaining this core was my job. The thing is, I had to stick to a small subset of COBOL (small as that toolset is to begin with) so the next dork to fill my seat could understand what I did (remember, no RTFM here). Tight standards and a completely non-technical set of analysts making my decisions for me... Ah, great days.
...computers are merely a tool that they must use to get their primary job done...
PEBKAC is what keeps people like you employed. Deal with it.
This is why I say there should be a barrier to computer ownership, just like with a car. Want to drive? Learn. Want to use a computer? Learn.
That's right, folks... It's bad car analogy time again.
Despite what you might believe, calling us up to find a file you downloaded to some location unknown is not the highlight of our day but rather a menial, tedious task that could easily be avoided if you just took a half hour to pick up a few basics. I am tech support for family and friends and it's mostly a pain in the arse... from the one who can't use a mouse, let alone a search engine, to the one who gets some virus every Friday it's all time I could be spending on far more interesting pursuits.
Would you call a mechanic to find a pack of cigarettes in your glove compartment? Would you call a plumber to clean your shower? If so then feel free to call someone who's spent their life studying to be the geek they are and ask them to fish out that file you were dilligent enough to lose or to yet again scan your machine for worms, viruses, trojans, spyware and other miscellaneous crap. I bet you tune out when they say "Just click this icon once a week and run a scan" too, don't you?
I think many of us are far too obliging. How many of us are free tech support for people who resist any attempt to explain how to avoid this problem in future? All it takes is the tiniest amount of effort not to glaze over while I say "This is bad. Do not do this." Take notes if you must. We had to.
How many professions are there where you can walk into a job without any concept of the functioning of the tools necessary to do that job? "I shouldn't need to learn to use a lathe. Just fix it when I mess up!" What do these people put on job applications... "Can click aimlessly around desktop for hours and sometimes get the desired result"?
Learning this stuff is not pointless. If you really want to look at it from the point of view that the computer is "just a tool" then learning about it will make you more efficient at your job. Promotion opportunities abound in offices for the one who never wastes time calling the geeks in the basement and has decent looking spreadsheets. Using the tool becomes less of a chore when you understand it a little. Who knows, you might even start enjoying yourself. Just keep in mind that our soul purpose on this planet is not to pick up after you when you make a boo-boo.
Writing games is typically the only thing that interests young would-be programmers, at least until they have developed a basic understanding of the language and realize the other possibilities.
Or they realise that writing games is mostly intense physics stuff and you'll spend more time sweating with a pencil and paper than switching between a text editor/web browser, looking like you're working really hard...:)
Cool. The thing is, learning languages isn't really the most important thing to consider when programming - languages can be picked up depending on requirements at any time. Once you know the fundamentals of one it's easy to pick up another.
The real art of programming comes from an understanding of algorithms and complexity. You can know every feature of a language but without the ability to apply it in an efficient manner that works it's not going to get you far. The focus on filling people's heads with syntax is a serious failing of many college courses. There should be more time spent on the fundamentals of programming theory with a single language being taught alongside to show how this theory is put into practice.
When you familiarise yourself with common methods for every day problems you'll start to notice ways to make your own solutions more elegant and efficient. You'll be able to tell which algorithm takes more operations to process some data set or which one requires more RAM... then you can implement it in any language that takes your fancy. To me, that's the important stuff in programming. You have all the time in the world to learn languages, but without this stuff it won't come to much.
I learned this the hard way. I say it here so you don't have to:)
Oh, and there's no shame in designing on paper... the day will come when you don't need to do it, but until then it does no harm. Jees, I sound like an old fart here. I'm in my 20s, I swear!
I'd be curious to see how shows like ER or House actually compare to real medicine. I wonder if its that much a crapshoot most of the time.
I'd bet they have some sort of consultant on staff to steer things in the approximate direction of vaguely accurate when it comes to medical matters. The thing about computers is everyone who's spent more than 20 seconds using a word processor thinks they have the whole thing licked. The writer sits down, clicks through their MS Word menus, mixes them with words they already know and you get...
"We have to save the format as a merge table in order to overwrite the CPU. A dot matrix algorithm should suffice to create a RAM. We could interface a webcam to the macro buffer for optimum field reference. Almost there... I just gotta get the font right..."
In fairness, I wouldn't have it any other way. Some geeks seem to get pissed off when they see wild inaccuracies in movies but it's provided us with hours of entertainment. If they got it all right all the time I don't think we'd have nearly as much fun.
Has Copycat been mentioned? Where a video file jumps off into the distance and the guy says "He must have hacked into her email account!"
The first time I heard the sound was the first run of "Die Hard" in a brand new theater. they started with closing the curtain, and sloooowly opening it accompanied by the sound. In the awed silence thast followed, I said loudly and distinctly "Big deal!".
Only time I ever yelled out in the cinema was after the intense, three minute trailer for Ransom. All sorts of booms, shouting, frantic behaviour and other madness... then the movie's expensively commissioned logo appears and that deep voice, you know the one, booms "RANSOM"
Don't tell them to do something you aren't prepared to help them do. If you want them to get a room, offer them a room, don't just expect them to be too terribly motivated by your missive.
because you claim that anyone who enjoys a form of entertainment that you don't personally enjoy must, therefore, be a foolish victim of a brainwashing scam
Are you trying to suggest that television isn't an important tool, perhaps the most powerful tool, in the arsenal of propagandists and marketeers? I'm not trying to insult those who watch TV, I'm just suggesting that there are more fruitful ways to spend your time. People are smart when given the chance. TV robs you blind of all opportunity to be engaged... It's a purely passive medium. Sit down, shut up and watch this - there's no other way to do TV... The Sky News text poll does not make the experience two-way.
Consider how many people look down upon those who *don't* watch TV...
I'm not looking down on anybody. Most everybody I know watches TV a lot of the time - my brother is one of the smartest people I've ever encountered and he watches what I would consider an inordinate amount of television. He does realise that the point of it is to titillate and satiate base consumer desires - I think he watches out of a morbid fascination rather than some desire to be entertained.
As for me, I've endeavoured to make my life something I can enjoy most of the time so at the end of the day I feel no need to numb my senses at the cathode ray teet - I'm already fairly entertained already by evening time and the rest of the time is my own. I mean, it's really my own time - not some advertiser's, not some ratings-chasing exec's, not some powerful lobbyist's...
Because you know that when TV channels sell advertising they're really making money off your time, right?...and you pay them for the privilege too.
And before anybody mods this funny, bear in mind I had a boss exactly like David Brent
We've all had that boss, or a boss with some elements of that character. He seemed to me like a composite of all the bosses Gervais had encountered in his time.
Great character - I did once have a boss who became intensely paranoid when the show aired that he was like Brent... Fortunately, he wasn't.
So stop railing on TV. If you don't like it, fine, but it's not some lower form of culture, only for the poor, dum serfs. To diss TV is not insightful, it's not some badge of honor ("I'm so educated, I don't even have a TV!"), it just makes you look like a jackass.
So the fact that I find it insulting and sitting in front of hour after hour of between advert filler gives me a headache is some sort of affectation designed to raise my profile in the eyes of people I'll never meet?
I don't have that sort of time...
The fact is, this bread and circus exists to prevent your average overworked wage slave from fully engaging their brains and realising how badly they're being fucked. If you must watch Friends then go ahead but don't call me elitist because I call it garbage. The fact that most entertainment has been fluff for as long as entertainment has existed doesn't make the current crop of tumblers and barkers any more compelling. Ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed watching foolish clowns? Well I don't.
And we're back to my original point... Friends is not my sort of comedy.
(in other words, it is possible to like high-falutin' stuff, and at the same time dig the low-brow. I hear Bergman was a fan of the TV show Dallas)
My taste isn't highbrow by any definition... Sure, I like the odd jazz record, Beckett play and the occasional Kielowski movie or three but most of the culture that, for want of a better term, floats my boat is either a rock album with guffaw-inducing scatalogical content (say, Zappa), a gory horror movie or an "obscene" comedy routine (but more Bill Hicks or Doug Stanhope than Andrew Dice-Clay!)
Either way, it's usually a little more intense than the broadcast prozac that constitutes most of television.
As for the Friends ep... I've definitely never seen that one. My rant was kind of inspired by a Henry Rollins bit - this was from around '98... Rollins was talking about how he only ever saw TV shows in hotel rooms and found it odd that the guys didn't talk about how "hot" all the girls where when they left the room, instead choosing to go with the "Jees... how about those shoes, guys?!" end of things. He also recognised that TV which was true to life would never be entertaining (could you imagine sitting down to watch "Your Shitty Job"?) but the fact that all of it was so insipid was really spitting on the minds of people who work hard to afford it.
TV shows are there to soften your head up so you'll easily absorb the quarter of the content that's just advertising. Stunning that they based a whole other episode on a pair of shoes... If that was my friends the conversation would go a little like:
- My shoes are slippy... how will I dance with my new bride? - Suck it up, big man. You can't dance to begin with and if you slip what's the worse that can happen... you fall over and still get laid tonight? Gosh, how upsetting that must be for you. What a dilemma.
Slashdot Mirror
This might be an IPv6 issue. It's common enough with ISP supplied routers which simply don't deal with IPv6 requests so those requests have to time out before an IPv4 one is submitted. To test this open about:config in firefox and change network.dns.disableIPv6 to true.
If that helps it might be an idea to disable IPv6 system wide by adding this to
alias net-pf-10 off
Good luck
D. M. S. O.
Crypto Wonder Drug
In vogue
Some people say
It cures arthritis
Maybe that's why
It keeps getting banned
It's absorbed
Directly through the skin
Mix it with lemon juice
Touch your fingertips
You'll taste the lemon
The police
Started a riot
Down at the courthouse
Again
Running amok
Spilling blood
Bashing heads
I do my part
Behind the lines
Swabbing door handles of cop cars
With D.M.S.O.
Mixed with L.S.D.....
- Jello Biafra (No matter what the rest of Dead Kennedys say)
Why on earth are murderers and rapists being mentioned in this article? I doubt that's where this kid's train of thought was going. I know when I was 12 I had a very bare idea of what a rapist even was. She was thinking "Fuck! My batshit fucking loco, Daily Mail reading mother is gonna tear my fucking hair out!"
The real reason for this article (as you'll see in the comments) is to squak a damning endictment of Tony Blair's Britain (Just search for Blair on the page). The DM readership is ultra-conservative and even the right-wing Labour Party isn't right enough for them. We're talking about a paper which bemoaned the number of Jewish immigrants into Britain during the 30s and 40s - almost as bad an attitude as the Irish government's...
While I have no doubt these pigs lost control (it's not an unusual occurence) the DM is not a source I can trust one iota. A quick check on Google News suggests that this is the only paper covering the story so it might even just be made up from scratch.
"I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs"
"I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking..."
"Wait a minute... There's one guy holding up both puppets!"
GO BACK TO BED, AMERICA. YOUR GOVERNMENT IS IN CONTROL.
We are. It's just taking some time.
Well, duh. I guess you could say "The disk will be built to last the life of the lubricant reservoirs"
Ha ha ha ha... oh wait, you're serious... Let me laugh even harder!
South Park, this evening, Paramount UK. Visibly higher amplitude.
They've always been very cheap and very expensive.
Can it tell you how much louder the ad break is than the show?
...and I'm on the ceiling, fingernails in plaster.
South Park on Paramount is about the worst viewing experience I know of... I could swear the show's volume decreases as it goes on, then:
HI! I'M BARRY SCOTT! *BANG* AND THE SHIT'S OFF THE WALLS!
"Got that file for you, dad... Here's the bill - I think you'll find it quite reasonable."
I had fun working on VAX and Alpha Minicomputers - VMS has an actual interface you can use to, you know, run programs. The people there knew their stuff. All was good. Even the fact that most of my work involved COBOL didn't phase me too much. Then...
I was moved to another department with OS/390 - fuck TSO. Fuck it in its form-filling, counter-intuitive, non-interactive ass. The people there knew shit and reading manuals was seen as a sign of weakness (didn't stop me...) A variety of database frontends and terrible 4GLs were held together by a core of COBOL batch jobs. Maintaining this core was my job. The thing is, I had to stick to a small subset of COBOL (small as that toolset is to begin with) so the next dork to fill my seat could understand what I did (remember, no RTFM here). Tight standards and a completely non-technical set of analysts making my decisions for me... Ah, great days.
Didn't last long there for some reason.
That's right, folks... It's bad car analogy time again.
Despite what you might believe, calling us up to find a file you downloaded to some location unknown is not the highlight of our day but rather a menial, tedious task that could easily be avoided if you just took a half hour to pick up a few basics. I am tech support for family and friends and it's mostly a pain in the arse... from the one who can't use a mouse, let alone a search engine, to the one who gets some virus every Friday it's all time I could be spending on far more interesting pursuits.
Would you call a mechanic to find a pack of cigarettes in your glove compartment? Would you call a plumber to clean your shower? If so then feel free to call someone who's spent their life studying to be the geek they are and ask them to fish out that file you were dilligent enough to lose or to yet again scan your machine for worms, viruses, trojans, spyware and other miscellaneous crap. I bet you tune out when they say "Just click this icon once a week and run a scan" too, don't you?
I think many of us are far too obliging. How many of us are free tech support for people who resist any attempt to explain how to avoid this problem in future? All it takes is the tiniest amount of effort not to glaze over while I say "This is bad. Do not do this." Take notes if you must. We had to.
How many professions are there where you can walk into a job without any concept of the functioning of the tools necessary to do that job? "I shouldn't need to learn to use a lathe. Just fix it when I mess up!" What do these people put on job applications... "Can click aimlessly around desktop for hours and sometimes get the desired result"?
Learning this stuff is not pointless. If you really want to look at it from the point of view that the computer is "just a tool" then learning about it will make you more efficient at your job. Promotion opportunities abound in offices for the one who never wastes time calling the geeks in the basement and has decent looking spreadsheets. Using the tool becomes less of a chore when you understand it a little. Who knows, you might even start enjoying yourself. Just keep in mind that our soul purpose on this planet is not to pick up after you when you make a boo-boo.
Cool. The thing is, learning languages isn't really the most important thing to consider when programming - languages can be picked up depending on requirements at any time. Once you know the fundamentals of one it's easy to pick up another.
The real art of programming comes from an understanding of algorithms and complexity. You can know every feature of a language but without the ability to apply it in an efficient manner that works it's not going to get you far. The focus on filling people's heads with syntax is a serious failing of many college courses. There should be more time spent on the fundamentals of programming theory with a single language being taught alongside to show how this theory is put into practice.
When you familiarise yourself with common methods for every day problems you'll start to notice ways to make your own solutions more elegant and efficient. You'll be able to tell which algorithm takes more operations to process some data set or which one requires more RAM... then you can implement it in any language that takes your fancy. To me, that's the important stuff in programming. You have all the time in the world to learn languages, but without this stuff it won't come to much.
I learned this the hard way. I say it here so you don't have to
Luckily there is as much free help on algorithms out there as there is on any programming language. I just found a decent looking algorithms tutorial collection and there's also the Dictionary of Algorithms and Data structures. Hmmm... looks like I found some weekend reading material!
Oh, and there's no shame in designing on paper... the day will come when you don't need to do it, but until then it does no harm. Jees, I sound like an old fart here. I'm in my 20s, I swear!
"We have to save the format as a merge table in order to overwrite the CPU. A dot matrix algorithm should suffice to create a RAM. We could interface a webcam to the macro buffer for optimum field reference. Almost there... I just gotta get the font right..."
In fairness, I wouldn't have it any other way. Some geeks seem to get pissed off when they see wild inaccuracies in movies but it's provided us with hours of entertainment. If they got it all right all the time I don't think we'd have nearly as much fun.
Has Copycat been mentioned? Where a video file jumps off into the distance and the guy says "He must have hacked into her email account!"
Genius.
Only time I ever yelled out in the cinema was after the intense, three minute trailer for Ransom. All sorts of booms, shouting, frantic behaviour and other madness... then the movie's expensively commissioned logo appears and that deep voice, you know the one, booms "RANSOM"
"He gets him back in the end!"
*satisfying ripple of laughter ensues*
Are you trying to suggest that television isn't an important tool, perhaps the most powerful tool, in the arsenal of propagandists and marketeers? I'm not trying to insult those who watch TV, I'm just suggesting that there are more fruitful ways to spend your time. People are smart when given the chance. TV robs you blind of all opportunity to be engaged... It's a purely passive medium. Sit down, shut up and watch this - there's no other way to do TV... The Sky News text poll does not make the experience two-way.
I'm not looking down on anybody. Most everybody I know watches TV a lot of the time - my brother is one of the smartest people I've ever encountered and he watches what I would consider an inordinate amount of television. He does realise that the point of it is to titillate and satiate base consumer desires - I think he watches out of a morbid fascination rather than some desire to be entertained.
As for me, I've endeavoured to make my life something I can enjoy most of the time so at the end of the day I feel no need to numb my senses at the cathode ray teet - I'm already fairly entertained already by evening time and the rest of the time is my own. I mean, it's really my own time - not some advertiser's, not some ratings-chasing exec's, not some powerful lobbyist's...
Because you know that when TV channels sell advertising they're really making money off your time, right?
We've all had that boss, or a boss with some elements of that character. He seemed to me like a composite of all the bosses Gervais had encountered in his time.
Great character - I did once have a boss who became intensely paranoid when the show aired that he was like Brent... Fortunately, he wasn't.
So the fact that I find it insulting and sitting in front of hour after hour of between advert filler gives me a headache is some sort of affectation designed to raise my profile in the eyes of people I'll never meet?
I don't have that sort of time...
The fact is, this bread and circus exists to prevent your average overworked wage slave from fully engaging their brains and realising how badly they're being fucked. If you must watch Friends then go ahead but don't call me elitist because I call it garbage. The fact that most entertainment has been fluff for as long as entertainment has existed doesn't make the current crop of tumblers and barkers any more compelling. Ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed watching foolish clowns? Well I don't.
And we're back to my original point... Friends is not my sort of comedy.
Either way, it's usually a little more intense than the broadcast prozac that constitutes most of television.
As for the Friends ep... I've definitely never seen that one. My rant was kind of inspired by a Henry Rollins bit - this was from around '98... Rollins was talking about how he only ever saw TV shows in hotel rooms and found it odd that the guys didn't talk about how "hot" all the girls where when they left the room, instead choosing to go with the "Jees... how about those shoes, guys?!" end of things. He also recognised that TV which was true to life would never be entertaining (could you imagine sitting down to watch "Your Shitty Job"?) but the fact that all of it was so insipid was really spitting on the minds of people who work hard to afford it.
TV shows are there to soften your head up so you'll easily absorb the quarter of the content that's just advertising. Stunning that they based a whole other episode on a pair of shoes... If that was my friends the conversation would go a little like:
- My shoes are slippy... how will I dance with my new bride?
- Suck it up, big man. You can't dance to begin with and if you slip what's the worse that can happen... you fall over and still get laid tonight? Gosh, how upsetting that must be for you. What a dilemma.