Well, we do make sure that when we get a cat it gets spayed ASAP; a non-spayed cat is an easy recipe for trouble.
Concerning the diseases... I have yet to see a cat in the area that actually dies of something that doesn't run on gasoline. Of course I'm no specialist but I haven't heard of any cases of sick cats in the area yet - excluding injuries and worms.
As for the attacked animals... Well yeah, cats are predators. And yes, our cat is the dedicated enemy of all birds. Again (not being a specialist) I haven't heard of any andangered species that are threatened in their existence by cats. Plus, I think that in the ecosystem of a small town there should be a place for predators like cats. If the town's wildlife can't handle a few roaming cats there's something seriously wrong.
Besides, non-native? Until we god rid of all the forest we used to have wildcats (felis silvestris silvestris) all over the continent. We (Germany) still have a few of them in the mountain areas (except for the Alps). We also used to have lynxes, but they didn't live in North Germany.
It only seems expensive in comparison to cheap Dell boxes. But if you factor in the quality of the hardware you quickly realize that Apple computers are not such a bad deal.
And when you take a look at the laptop market you see that it's hard to find an IBM compatible laptop that's guaranteed to run some *nix flavor for the price of a 12" iBook. If you don't have the money to get yourself a ThinkPad or a different laptop with a good Linux track record (and you don't want to spend hours trying to get Linux - including WLAN - to work) an iBook can be a great choice.
I hope that the Intel iBooks will be out when mine dies. Having the power (and especially Wine compatibility) of an Intel processor with the cheapness of an iBook and OS X to boot would be really great.
Come on, now. Parents can't be expected to raise their kids, so why should they be expected to look after them? Really, the only thing that's missing is an artificial uterus capable of giving birth to in-vitro children so that the parents don't have to ever meet their offspring at all.
Not everyone lives in a city. Our cat runs free, as do most other cats in the neighbourhood. Given the fact that I live in of a small town* that's perfectly okay as long as one doesn't mind the occasional slaughtered bird on the doorstep (hey, it's supposed to be a present after all). Of course I wouldn't let a cat run around in a large city, but then again I'd probably not keep a cat there in the first place.
* In Germany, the town is considered rural; according to American standards it's probably a suburb - after all it's only 30 km (18.7 mi) from the next large city.
From what little info is in the press release, it doesn't sound like they're doing anything revolutionary, so I'm curious why they claim they can reduce gate leakage by so much.
For the same reason sites using standard HTML/CSS are sometimes expected to take the blame when IE fails to display them correctly. IE users are like Arthur Dent in one of the Hichhiker novels: They touch their leg and it hurts, then they touch their arm and it hurts, then they touch their face and it hurts. Most of them don't realize that indeed it's the hand that hurts.
They complain when they visit a site using perfectly valid HTML 4.01 Strict and IE's screwy box model messes up the layout. Of course it has to be the site's fault. Or they hear that image files that are malformed in a specific way can execute arbitrary code - of course it's the evil hackers who are at fault and not the fact that the browser's image code is badly written.
The problem surfaces on Google's site so it's Google's fault and Google is expected to do anything to fix it. I've heard this shit often enough from diehard IE fans (some of which go out of their way to find an IE-based browser that contains as many of the features of Opera without being Opera. They'd rather live in a dank cave than give up the IE rendering engine).
The next Slashdot stories will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see them early:
No Taxation Without Representation? (from the harbor-sized-tea-party dept.)
Babl Tower Causing Earthquakes? (from the where-do-all-these-confusing-languages-come-from dept.)
Wheel v1.0 released! (from the rolling-in-the-dough dept.)
Pangaea To Be Split Into Five Parts? (from the geological-monopolies dept.)
First Security Hole In Microsoft Windows Found (from the ancient-lore dept.)
There is indeed a connection. Few people know that Jerry Holkins is indeed a pseudonym for Claus VIII, who has decided to start a new Christmas-like campaign, this time without the involvement of elves. Penny Arcade was founded as a way to gather a large fan community as well as a strong presence in the internet, thus allowing Claus VIII/Jerry Holkins to get people to do the present logistics themselves, thus saving him a lot of work and trouble.
Penny Arcade is a collaboration between him and Mike Krahulik, the reincarnated Jesus of Nazareth, who also has a vested interest in making the Christmas season as merry as possible, because "I want people to be fucking happy about my birthday", as he put it in an interview. The occasional appearance of the biblical Jesus is seen as a subtle hint at Krahulik/Nazareth's real identity.
Besides, D&D is not the be-all-end-all of roleplaying*. For example, Shadowrun is a good choice if you don't want to play in a clichéd pseudo-medieval world - the fact that your character can throw fireballs is nice, but it doesn't quite impress the flame-resistant sentry gun aiming at you. You can play a secret agent or the baddest mutha on the block or a delivery guy with an autocannon mounted on his car. If you want to your character can run around with a cyber-torso with chrome finishing and an open hawaii shirt. Probably the gratest thing about Shadowrun is that it gives you full control over your character's style. Hell, if you want to play a dwarf with a neon green afro, blinking cybernetic eyes and a penchant for rocket launchers nothing except the GM will stop you. Or you run around with a bow and arrows filled with a plastic explosive, giggling every time you hear an explosion. Or you play a civil servant gone bad, armed with a pumpgun and his enemies' death certificates (filled out in triplicate). Try that with D&D.
* Actually, I'd call it the stereotypical role-playing game that I wouldn't want to be caught dead with. Over here in Germany we have a similar but different default system, which features an extremely detailed world and a nice way of handling skill checks. Unfortunately it's also very good-vs-evil-centric and the fourth edition (the first one also released in English) suffers from skill cancer, giving you a selection of about 200 skills which your character can have, including separate skills for stuff like attacking from behind. A common joke among TDE players is that the fifth edition will include skills for "walking up stairs" and "walking down stairs", with separate skills for wooden and stone stairs. Don't play this with unmodified rules.
If you don't mind playing at a REALLY slow pace, IRC can make for a good proximity substitute - finding interested players online is easier than finding them somewhere close to where you live. Unfortunately, IRC gaming is really slow-paced (which OTOH makes for great dialogues), which means that an adventure that'd take two weeks in real life can easily eat up the better part of a year. It's still better than not playing at all, though.
I have a better idea. As everyone who has played the excellent Marathon series knows, artificial intelligences can, when adequately harrased, threatened and/or humiliated, develop rampancy. So we should just do our best to utterly humiliate this "first AI". If it starts acting depressed and later directs hostile aliens to our location so that it can get access to a bigger computer network we can be fairly sure that it is indeed a true AI. The presence of the phrase "spurious interrupt - breach disabled" on terminals connected to the same network as the AI might also be an indicator.
Actually, it doesn't reboot. Updating is completely reboot-less. If something can't be rebooted the system just switches into Windows 95 Special Compatibility Mode, ie. it bluescreens. You can also turn on the Advanced Administrator Mode, in which case the system will attempt to overwrite the associated files until it gets an error and then bluescreens. The "Advanced Administrator" part refers to the fact that you have to be an MCSE to get the system back into a working state afterwards.
Linux kernel hackers have announced that they will get this feature out before the launch of Windows Vista. The Linux implementation will be called Automated Self-Trashing; the first alpha versions are already out, but so far it only works on IA-64 and SPARC.
Apple has announced that they are too cool for this and instead released HFS++, a file system that stores all files randomly splattered across "forks", "spoons" and "knives", which will make system recovery useless as no one can tell whether a particular piece of data is a filename, a QuickTime movie or the boot sector. This technology, also called Au Revoir, will make it easier than ever to trash sensitive data.
Hurd developers have simply pointed out that non-functionality is the default state of their operating system.
It's more a case of providing "backward compatability", since until the NT branch of Windows came along there was simply no effective kind of file permissions available. Problem is that Windows developers picked up a lot of very bad habits when it came to writing programs which will work when they can't do anything they please. With such programs continuing to be written today.
Let's not forget that Windows 2000 and XP inherited most of their software from 9x, which still was the descendant of a single-user OS. I'm not even sure whether the 9x line had proper multiuser support.
So what will that mean for all the programs which refuse to run unless they have administrator privs? Does Vista provide some kind of volatile copy on write system to let such applications work whilst not actually really giving them privileges?
Or Microsoft finally get their act together and deny those programs administrator rights, no matter what. If the world could fix heir software to run with XP SP2, they can fix their software to run with Vista. After all Microsoft can allow themselves to change the rules for Windows apps and justify it with "cause I said so".
1.0.7 was working flawlessly for me. I updated to 1.5, and now it seems, there are many different situations where the browser will appear to "lock-up" for several seconds at a time and using 100% cpu utilization. Has anyone else experienced this?
Yes, but I had this with 1.0.7 on OS X. I'm just test-driving 1.5 and it seems to have gone away (along with Fx hanging on every second start).
Also, still noticably missing, is the ability to tell the browser to over-ride the preferences of the webserver in terms of mime type vs. file extension. If I want.xyz files to open with XYZ_Application, I should be able to configure the web browser to open the file with the application, regardless of what MIME type the webserver may claim it is supposed to be.
True. Ever since I had to open a Powerpoint presentation Firefox wants to open each and every.doc file with the Office trial version, even though OS X has NeoOffice/J registered as the standard application. Quite annoying.
All in all, Fx 1.5 feels really nice. 1.0.7 never quite worked right on the Mac. For example, middle-clicking did nothing. At least on the Mac 1.5 is an improvement; I'll wait a bit until I put it on my Gentoo box (especially since not all extensions are ported yet and some are quite necessary on the Linux box).
Wow. I just finished downloading the OS X version, I mounted the image... And they managed to make the installation instructions simplistic even for OS X: With OS X you download your stuff as a mountable image and then usually drag the app into the appropriate folder. Some images have folder backgrounds. The Firefox 1.5 folder has a background telling the user to drag the app into their "Applications" folder - without using a single word besides "Firefox". Talk about user-friendliness...
Slashdot Mirror
Or Opera. Even though I don't like Opera, it's still better than IE.
Well, we do make sure that when we get a cat it gets spayed ASAP; a non-spayed cat is an easy recipe for trouble.
Concerning the diseases... I have yet to see a cat in the area that actually dies of something that doesn't run on gasoline. Of course I'm no specialist but I haven't heard of any cases of sick cats in the area yet - excluding injuries and worms.
As for the attacked animals... Well yeah, cats are predators. And yes, our cat is the dedicated enemy of all birds. Again (not being a specialist) I haven't heard of any andangered species that are threatened in their existence by cats. Plus, I think that in the ecosystem of a small town there should be a place for predators like cats. If the town's wildlife can't handle a few roaming cats there's something seriously wrong.
Besides, non-native? Until we god rid of all the forest we used to have wildcats (felis silvestris silvestris) all over the continent. We (Germany) still have a few of them in the mountain areas (except for the Alps). We also used to have lynxes, but they didn't live in North Germany.
And now tell me who's the most open-minded political organization on this planet.
An EU-sponsored sex ram program... Wow.
It only seems expensive in comparison to cheap Dell boxes. But if you factor in the quality of the hardware you quickly realize that Apple computers are not such a bad deal.
And when you take a look at the laptop market you see that it's hard to find an IBM compatible laptop that's guaranteed to run some *nix flavor for the price of a 12" iBook. If you don't have the money to get yourself a ThinkPad or a different laptop with a good Linux track record (and you don't want to spend hours trying to get Linux - including WLAN - to work) an iBook can be a great choice.
I hope that the Intel iBooks will be out when mine dies. Having the power (and especially Wine compatibility) of an Intel processor with the cheapness of an iBook and OS X to boot would be really great.
GMAFB. Apple's only had 30 years to build their market share, and to this very day, no one but Apple makes software for them.
/. story on that?
And Adobe. And Microsoft. And id. And Epic. And Maxis. And Bioware. And Interplay. And (of course) Bungie. And most of the projecs on SourceForge.
I must have been absent when Apple bought Microsoft. Care to dig out he
And how will the dog respond to a disembodied voice that seems to be coming from behind its head?
Hell, I'd just love to watch a dog wearing this while speaking "come over here" into the phone over and over...
1. Buy XBox 360
2. Affix Xbox 360 to dog
3. Connect XBox 360 with a wall/pole/etc. using a chain
You have just made your dog more secure and it might still be cheaper than a cellphone for canines.
Come on, now. Parents can't be expected to raise their kids, so why should they be expected to look after them? Really, the only thing that's missing is an artificial uterus capable of giving birth to in-vitro children so that the parents don't have to ever meet their offspring at all.
Not everyone lives in a city. Our cat runs free, as do most other cats in the neighbourhood. Given the fact that I live in of a small town* that's perfectly okay as long as one doesn't mind the occasional slaughtered bird on the doorstep (hey, it's supposed to be a present after all). Of course I wouldn't let a cat run around in a large city, but then again I'd probably not keep a cat there in the first place.
* In Germany, the town is considered rural; according to American standards it's probably a suburb - after all it's only 30 km (18.7 mi) from the next large city.
From what little info is in the press release, it doesn't sound like they're doing anything revolutionary, so I'm curious why they claim they can reduce gate leakage by so much.
Potty training?
For the same reason sites using standard HTML/CSS are sometimes expected to take the blame when IE fails to display them correctly. IE users are like Arthur Dent in one of the Hichhiker novels: They touch their leg and it hurts, then they touch their arm and it hurts, then they touch their face and it hurts. Most of them don't realize that indeed it's the hand that hurts.
They complain when they visit a site using perfectly valid HTML 4.01 Strict and IE's screwy box model messes up the layout. Of course it has to be the site's fault. Or they hear that image files that are malformed in a specific way can execute arbitrary code - of course it's the evil hackers who are at fault and not the fact that the browser's image code is badly written.
The problem surfaces on Google's site so it's Google's fault and Google is expected to do anything to fix it. I've heard this shit often enough from diehard IE fans (some of which go out of their way to find an IE-based browser that contains as many of the features of Opera without being Opera. They'd rather live in a dank cave than give up the IE rendering engine).
The next Slashdot stories will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see them early:
No Taxation Without Representation? (from the harbor-sized-tea-party dept.)
Babl Tower Causing Earthquakes? (from the where-do-all-these-confusing-languages-come-from dept.)
Wheel v1.0 released! (from the rolling-in-the-dough dept.)
Pangaea To Be Split Into Five Parts? (from the geological-monopolies dept.)
First Security Hole In Microsoft Windows Found (from the ancient-lore dept.)
This fake history stuff sounds a lot like http://elothtes.pbwiki.com/
There is indeed a connection. Few people know that Jerry Holkins is indeed a pseudonym for Claus VIII, who has decided to start a new Christmas-like campaign, this time without the involvement of elves. Penny Arcade was founded as a way to gather a large fan community as well as a strong presence in the internet, thus allowing Claus VIII/Jerry Holkins to get people to do the present logistics themselves, thus saving him a lot of work and trouble.
Penny Arcade is a collaboration between him and Mike Krahulik, the reincarnated Jesus of Nazareth, who also has a vested interest in making the Christmas season as merry as possible, because "I want people to be fucking happy about my birthday", as he put it in an interview. The occasional appearance of the biblical Jesus is seen as a subtle hint at Krahulik/Nazareth's real identity.
Marathon has been open source for some time now.
Besides, D&D is not the be-all-end-all of roleplaying*. For example, Shadowrun is a good choice if you don't want to play in a clichéd pseudo-medieval world - the fact that your character can throw fireballs is nice, but it doesn't quite impress the flame-resistant sentry gun aiming at you. You can play a secret agent or the baddest mutha on the block or a delivery guy with an autocannon mounted on his car. If you want to your character can run around with a cyber-torso with chrome finishing and an open hawaii shirt. Probably the gratest thing about Shadowrun is that it gives you full control over your character's style. Hell, if you want to play a dwarf with a neon green afro, blinking cybernetic eyes and a penchant for rocket launchers nothing except the GM will stop you. Or you run around with a bow and arrows filled with a plastic explosive, giggling every time you hear an explosion. Or you play a civil servant gone bad, armed with a pumpgun and his enemies' death certificates (filled out in triplicate). Try that with D&D.
* Actually, I'd call it the stereotypical role-playing game that I wouldn't want to be caught dead with. Over here in Germany we have a similar but different default system, which features an extremely detailed world and a nice way of handling skill checks. Unfortunately it's also very good-vs-evil-centric and the fourth edition (the first one also released in English) suffers from skill cancer, giving you a selection of about 200 skills which your character can have, including separate skills for stuff like attacking from behind. A common joke among TDE players is that the fifth edition will include skills for "walking up stairs" and "walking down stairs", with separate skills for wooden and stone stairs. Don't play this with unmodified rules.
If you don't mind playing at a REALLY slow pace, IRC can make for a good proximity substitute - finding interested players online is easier than finding them somewhere close to where you live. Unfortunately, IRC gaming is really slow-paced (which OTOH makes for great dialogues), which means that an adventure that'd take two weeks in real life can easily eat up the better part of a year. It's still better than not playing at all, though.
I have a better idea. As everyone who has played the excellent Marathon series knows, artificial intelligences can, when adequately harrased, threatened and/or humiliated, develop rampancy. So we should just do our best to utterly humiliate this "first AI". If it starts acting depressed and later directs hostile aliens to our location so that it can get access to a bigger computer network we can be fairly sure that it is indeed a true AI. The presence of the phrase "spurious interrupt - breach disabled" on terminals connected to the same network as the AI might also be an indicator.
Actually, it doesn't reboot. Updating is completely reboot-less. If something can't be rebooted the system just switches into Windows 95 Special Compatibility Mode, ie. it bluescreens. You can also turn on the Advanced Administrator Mode, in which case the system will attempt to overwrite the associated files until it gets an error and then bluescreens. The "Advanced Administrator" part refers to the fact that you have to be an MCSE to get the system back into a working state afterwards.
Linux kernel hackers have announced that they will get this feature out before the launch of Windows Vista. The Linux implementation will be called Automated Self-Trashing; the first alpha versions are already out, but so far it only works on IA-64 and SPARC.
Apple has announced that they are too cool for this and instead released HFS++, a file system that stores all files randomly splattered across "forks", "spoons" and "knives", which will make system recovery useless as no one can tell whether a particular piece of data is a filename, a QuickTime movie or the boot sector. This technology, also called Au Revoir, will make it easier than ever to trash sensitive data.
Hurd developers have simply pointed out that non-functionality is the default state of their operating system.
Please, keep the links to crackpot sites to yourself. The CIA, tsk - next you'll tell us that ARPA invented the Internet.
It's more a case of providing "backward compatability", since until the NT branch of Windows came along there was simply no effective kind of file permissions available. Problem is that Windows developers picked up a lot of very bad habits when it came to writing programs which will work when they can't do anything they please. With such programs continuing to be written today.
Let's not forget that Windows 2000 and XP inherited most of their software from 9x, which still was the descendant of a single-user OS. I'm not even sure whether the 9x line had proper multiuser support.
So what will that mean for all the programs which refuse to run unless they have administrator privs? Does Vista provide some kind of volatile copy on write system to let such applications work whilst not actually really giving them privileges?
Or Microsoft finally get their act together and deny those programs administrator rights, no matter what. If the world could fix heir software to run with XP SP2, they can fix their software to run with Vista. After all Microsoft can allow themselves to change the rules for Windows apps and justify it with "cause I said so".
I find it perfectly fitting to compare the number of desktop Linux users to the number of Audio DVDs... ;)
1.0.7 was working flawlessly for me. I updated to 1.5, and now it seems, there are many different situations where the browser will appear to "lock-up" for several seconds at a time and using 100% cpu utilization. Has anyone else experienced this?
.xyz files to open with XYZ_Application, I should be able to configure the web browser to open the file with the application, regardless of what MIME type the webserver may claim it is supposed to be.
.doc file with the Office trial version, even though OS X has NeoOffice/J registered as the standard application. Quite annoying.
Yes, but I had this with 1.0.7 on OS X. I'm just test-driving 1.5 and it seems to have gone away (along with Fx hanging on every second start).
Also, still noticably missing, is the ability to tell the browser to over-ride the preferences of the webserver in terms of mime type vs. file extension. If I want
True. Ever since I had to open a Powerpoint presentation Firefox wants to open each and every
All in all, Fx 1.5 feels really nice. 1.0.7 never quite worked right on the Mac. For example, middle-clicking did nothing. At least on the Mac 1.5 is an improvement; I'll wait a bit until I put it on my Gentoo box (especially since not all extensions are ported yet and some are quite necessary on the Linux box).
And I have done an analysis that shows that Firefox has a lower TCO than Linux.
No, occasionally they have to reboot to load the new kernel.
Between 8 and 35 k/s. Ho-hum.
Wow. I just finished downloading the OS X version, I mounted the image... And they managed to make the installation instructions simplistic even for OS X: With OS X you download your stuff as a mountable image and then usually drag the app into the appropriate folder. Some images have folder backgrounds. The Firefox 1.5 folder has a background telling the user to drag the app into their "Applications" folder - without using a single word besides "Firefox". Talk about user-friendliness...