As word-processors go, the old text mode ones rocked. Wordstar was pretty decent and I used it quite a bit back in the day before moving to the pinnacle of word processing, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
I guess the only thing that would make G.R.R. Martin's statement even better is if he was using CP/M instead of DOS.;-)
You beat me to it, was going to mention that myself.
It's not like a simple search online wouldn't have found that name was already well established, but then I guess we're not in the USA and thus don't count.
In my 20 years of IT experience, I've had precisely two managers that would fit the optimistic description in the story. The rest have been a complete waste of oxygen and usually made life much harder than it needed to be.
Alas, the Dilbert Principle is the order of the day in most Enterprises.
So, out of curiosity, since I am on a Mac and using Safari as my main browser, I thought I'd see what was in the offending file. I have a in excess of 20 tabs open at the moment, a good deal of them to authenticated sites via https.
A quick test in Terminal like so:
$ strings LastSession.plist | grep -i pass
Produced 8 lines that matched, of which 6 matched on the word "passive" and the last two were urls that contained the word "ChangePassword". A more thorough search through the file did not produce any login credentials or passwords.
I should point out this is with the latest release version of Safari 7.0 (9537.71)
SWIFT is used by major banks in Australia too for various inter-bank transactions. It wouldn't surprise me if other countries also use the SWIFT systems.
Considering that most modern democratic nations in the western world tend to subscribe to the free-market capitalistic world-view, I really don't understand how mobile carriers get away with these exclusivity deals. Not only are they tantamount to a monopoly in a particular market, but they constitute collusion between the manufacturer and the carrier. Where are the consumer watchdogs ? Where are the anti-competition commissions ? Why isn't something being done about this anti-competitive behaviour ?
From experience we rarely get telemarketer calls after 8pm on weeknights, but we get plenty between 6 and 7pm weeknights.
Why make the weekends 5pm but not the weeknights, actually, why specify a time at all, I for one don't want to receive ANY telemarketer calls regardless of the time of day.
Yet another case of well meaning legislation caving to the interests of business.
My University's class registration page, for instance, pops up in a separate window. This window is blocked by popup blockers, so I have to provide them with an exception to sign up for classes.
Ok, I can see that would be annoying, but you've solved the problem already by putting in an exception to your blocker. Most pop-up blockers are able to do this, so I still wonder how blocking pop-ups could be construed as a problem to browsing. I'm guessing you don't want to see all the other pop-ups ?
flyingember asks: "With ad blocking becoming ever more popular among users, why do you block ads?
I block ads mainly because I don't want to see them, and I can. If I'm viewing a webpage for some specific information, I'm not visiting that webpage in order to view ads, esp. flashing, moving, annoying ads (eg punch the monkey and similar).
And with what?
I use Ad-Zap with Squid. i.e. I have an internal squid proxy on my home network and it uses the ad-zap plugin to remove any ads I don't want to see. Having said that, I allow Google-Ads, as they're just text and don't get in the way of what I'm reading, and are reasonably targetted to the content.
Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?
Not really. I don't watch TV (partly because of the ads and partly because it's full of crap and the bits that aren't are on at ridiculous hours of the night)
What about in a magazine?
Same again, magazine ads are just the same, annoying and unwanted (but at least they don't move).
Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
Spot on, haven't bought an industry magazine in years.
I'm specifically talking about the ads in a webpage, but even popup blockers can cause problems with me using a site."
How so ? how does an ad-blocker/pop-up blocker hinder your ability to read a page ?
Yes but Howard will, like he has every other time, roll over and show Bush his belly.
Let's face it, Australia's govt. is currently completely a pawn of the US Govt. and I'm not sure that changing to Labour would fix that (although it's got to be better than the current regime).
Agreed. So much so that my.org.au domain's are all hosted in Canada, which even after the exchange rate conversions is cheaper than hosting them here in Australia.
It's a sad state of affairs, but one that is driven mostly by economies of scale.
That may be, however, do you see the same Govt. that approved this agreement really doing anything that might be at all in Australia's benefits ? Especially if the US Govt. leans over and says "we'd prefer it if you did it/this/ way"
I'm sorrry, but naively believing the Howard Govt. would cross the US is laughable at best.
Once upon a time Australia, and in particular the Liberal Party did not pander to every whim of the US Govt., in fact, Australia's Govt. used to have a backbone.
It would seem this is no longer the case (well ok, it hasn't been the case for quite some time, but Mr Howard's Govt. has really taken the cake this last term).
I'm exceptionally glad I put Liberal last in the recent Queensland elections. Roll on the National elections!
In the meantime, is there seriously anything we can do to stop this ?
The usability of a Linux desktop just isn't anywhere near the level of a Mac from a Joe Bloggs perspective.
The inroads linux has made against commerical Unices are in the server environment and on the odd midrange desktop. This is not the market Macs live in (except the xServe).
When Linux is easy and intuitive enough for the average Joe, when it has a consistent look and feel across applications, then it might make moves into the Mac desktop arena.
Sun has it's own slew of faulty hardware. We've had countless CPUs replaced, a couple of motherboards and had the console port go on a few machines too. Sun, like any hardware manufacturer has problems, it just hurts more when your $25k Sun box has a dead CPU.
You can't just hook line out to line in and expect a decent result. You need some decent software as well. this guy makes a living doing decent conversions. If it was truly as easy as you say, he'd be out of business.
Well he sure as hell doesn't make a living from Web Design, that site is just plain aweful.
A similar, but non-linux solution is to use the extremely useful Griffon Technology iMic (USB audio) and their software, Final Vinyl on MacOS X (not everyone runs x86 hardware).
F.V. allows you to rip to wav or aiff and allows you to split tracks based on cue marks. It includes built in RIAA filtering and auto or manual gain and equalisation.
You just plug the iMic into you USB port on your Mac, plug the turntable directly into the iMic's input socket (well, ok, with an RCA to 3.5mm plug adapter), setup your preferred gain in F.V. and off you go.
I recently bought an old G3 PowerBook (WallStreet) 233 (Series II) for my wife. It came with 64Mb of RAM and a 2Gb HDD, and seems to run OS X 10.1 quite well (all things considered).
I ran YellowDog 2.3 on it for a few days to see how it performed, and in general, it ran pretty well too.
OS X 10.2 however would not install (or maybe it would but after waiting over an hour and not getting past the first two dialogs, I gave up - I presume this was more to do with the pitiful amount of RAM more than anything else).
Another worthy organisation along the same lines as mentioned in the article is ComputerBank Australia.
They take old hardware, repair/refurbish it, install Debian on it and distribute it to the needy. A better description is availble on their website (linked above).
The NAB have come leaps and bounds from their initial offering (a Java based applet that, unfortunately wasn't platform independant) to a https (ssl) based solution that works reasonably well on just about any browser with decent JavaScript support. (OmniWeb notably does not work fantastically). I've tested with IE, Mozilla 1.0/1.1/1.2b, Chimera, Konqueror, Opera (just works), and a couple of others - doesn't work with Lynx though.
Slashdot Mirror
As word-processors go, the old text mode ones rocked. Wordstar was pretty decent and I used it quite a bit back in the day before moving to the pinnacle of word processing, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
I guess the only thing that would make G.R.R. Martin's statement even better is if he was using CP/M instead of DOS. ;-)
You beat me to it, was going to mention that myself.
It's not like a simple search online wouldn't have found that name was already well established, but then I guess we're not in the USA and thus don't count.
In my 20 years of IT experience, I've had precisely two managers that would fit the optimistic description in the story. The rest have been a complete waste of oxygen and usually made life much harder than it needed to be.
Alas, the Dilbert Principle is the order of the day in most Enterprises.
So, out of curiosity, since I am on a Mac and using Safari as my main browser, I thought I'd see what was in the offending file. I have a in excess of 20 tabs open at the moment, a good deal of them to authenticated sites via https.
A quick test in Terminal like so:
$ strings LastSession.plist | grep -i pass
Produced 8 lines that matched, of which 6 matched on the word "passive" and the last two were urls that contained the word "ChangePassword". A more thorough search through the file did not produce any login credentials or passwords.
I should point out this is with the latest release version of Safari 7.0 (9537.71)
SWIFT is used by major banks in Australia too for various inter-bank transactions. It wouldn't surprise me if other countries also use the SWIFT systems.
Considering that most modern democratic nations in the western world tend to subscribe to the free-market capitalistic world-view, I really don't understand how mobile carriers get away with these exclusivity deals. Not only are they tantamount to a monopoly in a particular market, but they constitute collusion between the manufacturer and the carrier.
Where are the consumer watchdogs ? Where are the anti-competition commissions ? Why isn't something being done about this anti-competitive behaviour ?
You mean it didn't?
How do you explain John Howard then ?
From experience we rarely get telemarketer calls after 8pm on weeknights, but we get plenty between 6 and 7pm weeknights.
Why make the weekends 5pm but not the weeknights, actually, why specify a time at all, I for one don't want to receive ANY telemarketer calls regardless of the time of day.
Yet another case of well meaning legislation caving to the interests of business.
WTF? How is Statistical Data Analysis a patentable process ?
For crying out loud, it's basic mathematics and data mining, not some new inventive device/process.
ZTerm is what you're after.
http://homepage.mac.com/dalverson/zterm/
Works a treat, even with USB->Serial adapters.
Dave
Yes but Howard will, like he has every other time, roll over and show Bush his belly.
Let's face it, Australia's govt. is currently completely a pawn of the US Govt. and I'm not sure that changing to Labour would fix that (although it's got to be better than the current regime).
Agreed. So much so that my .org.au domain's are all hosted in Canada, which even after the exchange rate conversions is cheaper than hosting them here in Australia.
It's a sad state of affairs, but one that is driven mostly by economies of scale.
That may be, however, do you see the same Govt. that approved this agreement really doing anything that might be at all in Australia's benefits ? Especially if the US Govt. leans over and says "we'd prefer it if you did it /this/ way"
I'm sorrry, but naively believing the Howard Govt. would cross the US is laughable at best.
Once upon a time Australia, and in particular the Liberal Party did not pander to every whim of the US Govt., in fact, Australia's Govt. used to have a backbone.
It would seem this is no longer the case (well ok, it hasn't been the case for quite some time, but Mr Howard's Govt. has really taken the cake this last term).
I'm exceptionally glad I put Liberal last in the recent Queensland elections. Roll on the National elections!
In the meantime, is there seriously anything we can do to stop this ?
This site: http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/
Shows price comparisons for a lot of Australian ISPs.
I'm with Optus cable and currently have a 6Gb data cap for $69.95 (Australian) per month.
The usability of a Linux desktop just isn't anywhere near the level of a Mac from a Joe Bloggs perspective.
The inroads linux has made against commerical Unices are in the server environment and on the odd midrange desktop. This is not the market Macs live in (except the xServe).
When Linux is easy and intuitive enough for the average Joe, when it has a consistent look and feel across applications, then it might make moves into the Mac desktop arena.
Bollocks.
Sun has it's own slew of faulty hardware. We've had countless CPUs replaced, a couple of motherboards and had the console port go on a few machines too. Sun, like any hardware manufacturer has problems, it just hurts more when your $25k Sun box has a dead CPU.
Tell that to the myriad of fools from Austin who post to au.forsale (or other au. news groups), assuming it applies to them.
Dave
Well he sure as hell doesn't make a living from Web Design, that site is just plain aweful.
A similar, but non-linux solution is to use the extremely useful Griffon Technology iMic (USB audio) and their software, Final Vinyl on MacOS X (not everyone runs x86 hardware).
F.V. allows you to rip to wav or aiff and allows you to split tracks based on cue marks. It includes built in RIAA filtering and auto or manual gain and equalisation.
You just plug the iMic into you USB port on your Mac, plug the turntable directly into the iMic's input socket (well, ok, with an RCA to 3.5mm plug adapter), setup your preferred gain in F.V. and off you go.
I recently bought an old G3 PowerBook (WallStreet) 233 (Series II) for my wife. It came with 64Mb of RAM and a 2Gb HDD, and seems to run OS X 10.1 quite well (all things considered).
I ran YellowDog 2.3 on it for a few days to see how it performed, and in general, it ran pretty well too.
OS X 10.2 however would not install (or maybe it would but after waiting over an hour and not getting past the first two dialogs, I gave up - I presume this was more to do with the pitiful amount of RAM more than anything else).
Another worthy organisation along the same lines as mentioned in the article is ComputerBank Australia.
They take old hardware, repair/refurbish it, install Debian on it and distribute it to the needy. A better description is availble on their website (linked above).
The NAB have come leaps and bounds from their initial offering (a Java based applet that, unfortunately wasn't platform independant) to a https (ssl) based solution that works reasonably well on just about any browser with decent JavaScript support. (OmniWeb notably does not work fantastically). I've tested with IE, Mozilla 1.0/1.1/1.2b, Chimera, Konqueror, Opera (just works), and a couple of others - doesn't work with Lynx though.