All I can say is these people will pry my husband's-and-my DVD player and TV out of our cold, dead hands.
Ironically, in response to your comment about skipping intros, I just learned that our DVD player lets us do that, in a roundabout way anyways. As soon as you see the usual "FBI" screen, hit Stop,Menu,Play and the actual content usually starts right up.
Works at at least a few of our DVD's.
The ironic part? This is a SONY DVD player, which we (fortunately?) bought before the big rootkit scandal.
One thing I do worry about is that some movie release in the future will include some kind of software/firmware update, which could break this (probably unintended) feature. Is that possible with current generation players or releases?
If there is a god, He must have "disabled interrupts" a long time ago. or He's out executing stack code, by mistake...
Nonono you've got it all wrong. G-D isn't off in stack space, nor does He have interrupts masked.. He's just sitting in a WAIT loop. After all, since He's a perfect being, He's capable of avoiding running off into illegal memory. Biblically (er...), He's waiting for a higher-priority interrupt than the majority of the world's population has configured itself for. A few individuals managed to get to the top of the IRQ list (Miriam, Abraham), and even one or two made it all the way to NMI status (Moses comes to mind).
btw, if G-D dumps core, WHERE does He save it to?
That should be fairly obvious - He saves it as part of the Cosmic Microwave Background - there are still plenty of cold spots left to fill.
The real question should be, who does He call to deal with/debug that core?
--
Disclaimer - I'm Jewish, and by extension a believer, but even we can poke fun once in a while. A perfect being would presumeably have a good sense of humor too. Minor edits to the quoted text for religious reasons.
They care because everybody here who talks up linux has a dirty little secret: their windows partition.
Not on my box you won't. One linux partition, one swap, nothing else. No disk images, no ripped CD images, nothing. Not even a virtual machine.
The one they use when they need to get stuff done, like use photoshop or illustrator...
Learn to use The GIMP and you won't likely need Photoshop anymore unless you're a high-end professional. I've used it for everything from editing circuit board layouts to colorful full-page (US letter sized) flyers.
What you can do with a program is dependent more on your skillz than the program's features or popularity (provided of course said program has at least some basic minimum tools).
... or use a word processor that actually works...
What, Abiword and OOo/writer aren't good enough? What do you want to do, embed a video or soundbite into your printed document? If you want that stuff, use Impress instead.
... or a browser that works with their bank's website...
Bank of America's online banking site works fine with both Opera and Firefox, even with that odd sitekey thing they're using now. I'm sure other banks work just fine as well.
... or a play a game other than gnu chess...
...or Quake3 or a dozen other games? And what you can't run natively can probably be run under WINE, which last I knew did not require Windows.
... or print to that fancy new color laserjet down the hall.
Or to the fancy HP connected to my server at the other end of a piece of network cable? Oh, and I can scan *and* read memory cards too. Autofs is a nice invention...
Ok mods, have at it, but before you do look deep inside your hard drives and you'll see that what I say is true!:-)
Rather that mod you down, it's better that I just *shoot* you down instead.
Never mind the fact that like it or not, there is no right to privacy in the consitution.
Um.... sorry, but you are dead wrong here. Quoth the Bill of Rights:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
(Emphasis mine)
Like it or not, the Bill of Rights is a part of the constitution, it *does* guarantee my privacy up to the point where that information is needed to conduct a criminal investigation.
Searches of your private, personal information are conducted just as readily as a physical search of your home or car. As far as I am aware, there is no criminal investigation in progress regarding Google and their search results, just a research effort.
Whether the the word and spirit of the constitution is properly upheld is a whole other matter; most of us can probably agree where that's gotten us.
You've guessed the intended function exactly (plus there's that DAC chip also). You can't use a special-purpose DSP because no computer (and by extension, no single DSP chip) in the world to date can mimic a SID chip perfectly. In this case, it is necessary to be perfect, or as near as a real 6581 can get (owing to variance between runs of the chip, different revisions, etc).
For two double-sided panels about 4x5.5 inches in size, I would pay $38 + $12 S&H to have CustomPCB make them for me.
Using my PowerSID project as an example, that's enough PCB real estate to make either two main boards in the current design, or one main board and two secondary boards. Or, I could re-design the PowerSID like I want to, to cram *everything* into one of those 4x5.5 panels.
Add about $10 in parts to stuff and solder it and we're up to $60. Add the cost of the software, $1260. Even if it were $400 like I originally thought, that's still $460, all of which is expense.
Like I said, purely a hobby project. If someone wants to pay me to build them a board, I'll gladly do it and sell it at raw cost plus 10%, but the design will still be out there so anyone can use it, build it, update it (and send me updates I hope), re-implement it in a newer technology, or redesign it completely if they want. To me, that's the core priciple behind the FOSS movement.
See the boards at the top named "PowerSID"? Notice how I had to divide it into two? I want to re-release it as a one-board design, and clearly there's no way to cram all of those parts into a 3x4 inch board.
Similarly, notice the "Front Panel" design. Routed with 10 mil traces because I don't expect I could hand-make anything smaller, and it still barely fits on a 4x2 board. I would like to add more features, which is clearly not going to happen on that size of a board (the max size I could fit into my project is about 5.5x2.1 inches, which is too big for Eagle).
Is the fab shop you are using so low tech...
Quite the contrary - it's the technology itself that I'm putting on the board that's low-tech. You can't buy 6581 SID chips in SMD form.
Also, how many nets are we talking about here that you would need an autorouter?
About 200 for the "PowerSID" project. I use the autorouter because it saves a great deal of time when I'm revising the layout of a board to reduce the size (and save me and whoever wants to build one of these projects a little money). Signal quality isn't nearly as great a concern with my projects as it would be with, for example, a cellphone or a modern multi-GHz computer.
Are you using any BGA packages?
Definitely not. BGA is impossible to solder by hand (unless you're lucky with the toaster oven method). I don't like to use components that can't be hand-soldered.
How many layers is the design?
Two.
Do you have any controlled impedance requirements? Differential pairs?
No. All TTL components (plus a little bit of analog, as in PowerSID).
To hand route a 3x4" shouldn't take long at all depending on density and layer count.
As many simple designs as I've done, nothing turned me off to hand-routing faster than this little ~2x2 inch thing I designed a few years ago. Manually moving traces around to cram another chip in (I realized a design flaw and had to correct it), and then trying to route new traces to that chip is a pain in the ass.
It is at this point that I wish Slashdot had a (-5, Clueless) mod setting (and of course allowed mod points to the same person who both submitted and writes comments into a particular story)... Shut your yap, use that scientific brain of yours (a prerequisite for a Slashdot user, I should think), and go learn something about transgendered persons. Oh, and pull that foot out of your mouth, that is me in the above-mentioned picture (a horrible picture, sure), and that IS my legal name (look it up in Lackawanna County, PA court records if you want).
Don't be so pessimistic. Some people give back to the community in forms other than cash and software. Maybe if [she] designs something useful, [she'll] share it with the world. Commercial tools present a high barrier for entry to the hobbyist, which discourages open source hardware.
And this is precisely why I asked about an open source replacement. It's one thing to pay for a product if you're going to use it to make money. It's a far different thing to expect to pay the same money for a product only to use it for hobby work.
I design gadgets for the Commodore 64/128, and a quick estimate shows that at the prices I've seen around the web in the last few days, I would spend more on the software alone than I would spend on making one production-ready unit of every board I've designed since I started fiddling with this stuff (that's only about 10 unique designs), and if I tried to sell, there's no way I'd ever break even. Several years ago there was a slim chance, but today, forget about it. Today, all of the stuff I write or design is free and open source, and stuff I have written in the past I have since declared free also (where the source code still exists). I think that fits anyone's definition of "giving back." I must stress - I do not program for Linux, just Commodore.
Oh, and to the other gentlemen who have mentioned auto-routing and other high-end features as being too much to ask of FOSS, let me see..
PCB, the very PCB editor I started with years ago, is a nice board editor with autorouter (which I have yet to use) and some other nice features, but that's only half of the needed setup.
KiCAD has a decent schematic editor, 3D viewer, and some other stuff, but it just has problems on my box (apparently poor integration, very slow board editor, crashy).
gEDA attempts to integrate PCB with schematic capture and other tools, but it's buggy on my setup (missing config files in Ubuntu, schematic doesn't get translated over to the board properly, no component-onto-board auto-place function to go with the schematic capture)
gschem2xpcb looks like it would fill in well to convert those gEDA/gSchem schematics over to PCB in a way similar to Eagle's autoplace feature, but this is just a stand-alone command-line program with only the one function, and the author seems have a major aversion to the GPL. *shrug*
The GIMP of course has tons of features and a really nice UI, and in particular it has vector graphics capabilities and multiple layers, but of course it's not adapted for PCB/schematic work.
Eagle, for this particular list, has wonderful parts libraries (for which utilities exist to convert these to other formats) and good integration between schematic and board, but it has some serious screen refresh bugs, plus the aforementioned 4x3 inch board size limit.
Along with these, every other open source program I've looked into has at least one of the features I need. I was just hoping for a program that combines all of these already-existing, already written features into one Eagle-killing FOSS program.
To us, its spelled out 'Yahweh', or YAH-way for pronunciation. Basically that was the name the Hebrews had for 'God' way back in the day.
You're wrong here.
First, as near as we can tell, YHVH is not just "a name for G-D," rather it is His real name. Any other name (including "G-D") is usually a context-sensative pseudonym, but all of His names are generally treated with the same respect.
Second, that word doesn't actually have a proper pronounciation anymore, the key has been lost for centuries, which is why it's now call the "Ineffible Name." The word is spelled Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey in Hebrew, but is hard to pronounce because of the Vav. While Yud and Hey behave as 'y' and 'h' do in English for the most part, Vav doesn't. Rather, in the middle of a word, it's pronounced as a long 'o' or long 'oo' ("loot"). At the beginning of a word, it usually takes on a normal 'v' sound. It's never used as a 'w'.
English speakers often use "Yahweh" because it's similar, but if I had to make a semi-educated guess, it's more likely that the Name should be pronounced "Yeh-oua."
Ok most of the comments I've read here seem fair, and I realize you were trying to be funny...but this one line (plus a couple of previous comments) bothers the shit out of me:
C) Tranies screwing up the numbers.
A few years ago a study was undertaken, in Norway I think it was, to determine once and for all if the brain of a male-to-female transsexual (TS) is as it is claimed to be: female. The study involved examining the hypothalamuses from several TS and non-TS brains (dead of course), and took into account such things as the effect of hormones (no short- or long-term effects were noted when I last looked into this study).
I don't know the *official* results of the study, but what I last saw indicated without a doubt that a TS, barring any physical diseases that may affect that region of brain, are indeed the sex they strive to become (i.e. male-to-female TS's, myself included, are female). Some religions are beginning to agree, if you want to take that route.
To assert otherwise is akin to saying that, for example, that a person born with no legs is not a biped.
Comments like yours make me embarassed to be on the 'net at all. We're geeks - one should be right to assume that we're all scientifically minded and, by extension, unbiased in our views and understanding of the way the world and things in it work. Comments like this really do show off how horribly wrong that assumption was.
Most people here have one or another vice, but I mean the C64 emulator. If there's one thing I'd pay $100 for, it's a laptop that has enough koyach to run Linux + VICE reasonably well, seeing as how no one seems to be interested in actually *making* a real laptop C64.:-)
Mods: This is meant as a joke.. It's funny. Laugh.
I worked in the IT field for a matter of about four months, as a professional Linux sysadmin, overseeing a base of some 600 machines, many of which were co-located. I was fired, no reason given, just that it was "a business decision". I take that today to mean "You don't lie well enough for our needs". Read on.
I'll never work in the IT field again; it has been relegated to a hobby. The company I worked for will not be named here, there's no reason to trash them by name, no matter how much they pissed me off. Still, I learned a few valuable lessons while I was there. This kinda reads as a rule sheet for the manager to read before hiring me, or maybe I'm just ranting, but these things need to be said...
1. I started from a technologically low point in the ladder of IT as it stands now. As the employer, you knew I had never worked as a sysadmin, that Linux was my OS of choice *at home*, and that I do not program in the languages you used at your business. Don't expect me to be able to move from that low point to a seasoned expert on only four months. It just does not work that way.
2. Don't tell me I'm not doing enough, or I'm ignoring this or that part of my job, if I'm already buried in projects for your clients. I'm a geek, not a fucking magician. If I tell you I'm busy, it means I'm busy working on your clients' machines. Furthermore, if you as the manager are not a tech, then let me believe it - don't try to do my job for me!!
3. Don't try to make me feel intimiated or inferior to you just because you carry the title of manager. I don't care if you worked for Company X and they improved while you were there; you are NOT working for Company X now, and we are not the same people you dealt with there.
4. Don't bitch at me if I open a [perhaps previously iconified] window and head for Slashdot or IRC or even browse the web in general for a few seconds or even a few minutes, when I'm working on some client's machine at the same time.
5. Don't create mandatory meetings and expect me to willingly attend them, especially if they're held when I would normally be asleep. If you have something to say, you can always email it to me, or even drop by later and give me a quick heads'-up on those things I need to be involved in. If it doesn't relate to my job, I generally don't want to hear about it! I don't care how much money the company made, or even if you start to lose customers, unless I'm responsible or I'll be directly affected by it.
6. If I use the staff-wide mailing list to lodge a public complaint, don't tell me not to. I wouldn't have used that method if it weren't appropriate to do so. (In this case, I was injured by someone else's carelessness, and now I have a large, permanent scar on my leg to show for it).
7. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, EVER TELL ME TO LIE TO A CLIENT. Is that clear? I value my integrity, and it makes the company look *really* bad when some client calls you up, asks what's going on, and then calls your bluff. You know, clients actually DO read the literature your company produces, and they often remember those little promises and guarantees you make in said literature.
Better yet, try not putting me in that position to begin with - Fix the problem before it occurs! (yes, this problem was fixable).
8. Don't expect me to support a program/user environment, if the only person who can actually solve the problem the client is having, is the author of said program. Believe it or not, clients actually do call in asking why this or that function can't be altered in some certain way, or asking when the next release will be out. Repeatedly telling the client that I can't help them just pisses them off and makes ME as the individual tech look bad.
9. Related to #8; If the author of said program does not feel he needs to make himself available to his users, fine. Send him home and let him do his work remotely. If you won't do that, then don't expect me to pretend he isn't here wh
Hmm.. I think you only say that because you may be blind to the changes that have gone on in the past, and the changes that are currently going on.
The only changes that have taken place are the various revisions of the Christian "new testament", i.e. the KJV, NIV, and G-D only-knows-how-many-other-editions. The original Hebrew text of the Torah, as well as the Writings and Prohpets, are the same as they were the day they were finalized. Whether that happened in the 6th century CE or earlier is hard to say.
In the begining (well maybe not that long ago) there were some pretty big arguments over what things went into the bible. For example one of these things were the Apocrypha, which were out then in then out again. (Do I see a directors cut/special edition cut that includes the sections that were dropped?)
Why do you need a "director's cut" or even forsee that as a possibility? If you or anyone else wants to read from the books of the Apocrypha, go right ahead. They're not shunned or banned or anything, they're just not part of the official text of the Bible.
Let alone the translation from whatever to Greek to Latin to English.. to modern day English to ebonics (and I am sure there is one out there). Each translation will change the sense of the text depending on who it was who translated it. As a comparison... run something twice through babel fish and see what comes out.
And this is the big mistake people make; assuming that a text is valid just because someone else thinks it is. Proper, valid translations of the Bible, or for that matter any other text, can only be had if you start from the original language and translate it yourself, or otherwise obtain a first-generation modern translation. This is exactly why the "Stone Edition" of the Tanach (Torah, Prophets, Writings) is considered one of the most definitive translations; it is a first-generation translation, in modern english, with commentary from Rashi and others at the bottom of most pages.
I just found this interesting link The Pre-Reformation History of the Bible From 1,400 BC to 1,400 AD
I'll assume you've read the entirety of this article, as I have. That being the case, I feel compelled to point out numerous errors in that article.
The story of how we got the English language Bible is....
...totally irrelvant to begin with! The Bible was not written in English, it was *translated*.
...there is some scholarly evidence to indicate that the Old Testament Book of Job may actually be the oldest book in the Bible.
To the author of this page, what is your evidence? Prove it. Even if it is older, so what? There are hundreds of thousands of stories (Job is not historical, it is considered to be a work of fiction intended by it's author to make a point) which predate the Torah.
The Old Testament scriptures were written in ancient Hebrew, a language substantially different than the Hebrew of today.
Modern Hebrew is essentially the same language as it was in Biblical times, extended over the years to add words so that it may be used in modern business and casual conversation. Originally, anchient Hebrew was only capable of handling what existed back then.
Animals considered "unclean" by the Jews, such as pigs, were of course, never used to make scrolls.
The pig may have been considered unclean (and still is), not because of any particular belief, but because it was directed in the Torah: "...and the pig, for its hoof is split and its hoof is completely separated, but it does not chew its cud -- it is unclean to you" (Leviticus 11:7)
Somehow the verse that follows that (that the carcass shall not be touched) has been either superceded or overlooked, as it is
So, to you Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. backslashdot, here's a little clue: every language but English is phonetic. No other language has stupid rules where Y is 'sometimes' a vowel - where C is sometimes K - where "tongue" is pronounced "tung"
While this statement, and my reply here, is off-topic, I have to point something out - there is at least one other language that fits this category: Hebrew.
I'm not a scholar, just learning some of it as part of my conversion to Judaism. Here are the facts:
Alef: Assumes any long or short vowel sound, depending on the word.
Bet/Vet: B or V (local dialect, usually B these days)
Vav: V, long U, or long O depending on the word and/or it's position in the word.
Yud: Y or I
Kaf/Chaf: K or gutteral cH/kH (as in Channukah)
Ayin: Same function as Alef.
Sin/Shin: S or Sh
Sav/Tav: S or T (usually T these days)
Each of these uses one glyph for all of their variants (hence, eight glyphs and a total of 19 distinct sounds). Modern Hebrew says to use a standardised set of diacritic marks on these characters, but this isn't always the case.
Most of these can have one or two additional diacritics below them to add a vowel sound and/or a split-second glottal stop.
TFA doesn't really say exactly what the drug does, but it looks like it simply masks or relieves the symptoms of sleep deprivation.
As a long-time sufferer of obstructive sleep apnea (got the official diagnosis today in fact, after 15 or more years suffering from it), and showing all of the symptoms of it including extreme weight gain, lack of coordination, restlessness , ittitability, fatigue, and so on, I think I speak for everyone here - I'd much rather correct the problem of sleep deprivation itself than take some drug that claims to restore my mental state (in the case of depression: Zoloft, anyone?)
The few pills I take every day are already enough - stop typing to shove MORE chemicals down my throat that only take care of the symptoms, and start fixing the problem at the source. That's where our research needs to be focused, for *any* condition that needs corrected.
If the problem is lack of sleep because of lack of time or deadlines or something, then maybe a change of career or priorities is needed. But if it's medical, then corrective *action* is needed. I had to get totally out of the working world because I couldn't handle it anymore, and it was literally killing me. Is it really so hard then, to keep your job and just adjust your lifestyle to make more time for sleep?
... As a parent of a type 1 diabetic, it's hard to not take the misinformation too seriously when I see that my 5 year old faces a future of seizures (from too low blood sugar) or blindness, amputation, kidney failure, and painful neuropathies...
I feel the same way as you (and presumeably everyone else here) in hoping for a cure. Frankly, I think the money (*) is being spent incorrectly. Do we really need more than we have now with blood sugar trends, A1C, kidney tests (creatanine), and so on? Assuming it cost a load of money (*) to research using an MRI to test for diabetes, was this particular research really necessary? Am I just missing something?
My fiance (Abe) is a Type-II Insulin-dependent diabetic (a rare combo apparently). Our theory as to how he became diabetic is genetics, he is the third child of RH-positive parents, which supposedly is a recipe for disaster where health is concerned.
He was born with perthes disease (which was eliminated in childhood), suffers from peripheral neuropathy, except instead of pain it's over-sensativity, glaucoma (which doctors recently have said is not diabetes-related; I don't buy it), kidney disease (less than 50% capacity now), as well as some other more minor issues (sexual dysfunction, skin/healing issues, etc). He's been officially diabetic for about 25 years, and in that time he has learned to tell when his sugar is too high or too low just by how he feels (he gets sluggish, bitchy when it's high, and very tired, eyes blurry when it's too low). Better control of his sugar has helped reverse some of the damage his body has taken. Maybe we will still have a chance to grow old together; I hope to G-D we do.
I presume you don't have a form of Medicare for your child yet (isn't that supposed to be available to diabetics regardless of age?), but if you do, there are companies that will help you defray the cost of strips, lancets, and monitors. NationsHealth, Artex Medical, Liberty Medical all come to mind, my fiance uses NationsHealth.
...And about saving the taxpayers money, well they are close to a cure for type 1, but since it's underfunded...
When the word "money" is introduced into the topic of health care, all logic goes out the window. (*)
... and the stem cell issues it will take far longer than it should.
This wouldn't be such a problem if the religious zealots in this oh-so-great country of ours would get their heads out of thier collective asses and stop restricting that which is clearly beneficial to mankind. (Disclaimer: I am a firm believer in G-D, but not of the mainstream religion of this country).
... I have to stab my boy's fingers about 15 times a day - those strips are a buck each. Not to mention the 6K pump, hundreds of dollars in consumables for the pump every month, and the much more likely frequent hospital visits.
My fiancee tests 3-4 times a day generally, and uses regular injectables (Lantus in the morning to provide a basal dose, and Novolog/Humalog fast-acting type, adjusted on a per-meal basis). He used to use Humilin or similar 70/30 mix, but this regimen he is on now has lead to much better sugar control.
If you don't already have the pump, you should do as much research as possible (including a fair sampling of the negative reports, which tend to be more truthful than positive ones); we have recently learned that a pump is no better than injectables where it comes to actual control, although they are certainly a little more convenient. Abe's endocrinologist agrees with that assessment, and does not recommend using the pump at all except in extreme cases where control just can't be had using injectables.
Best of luck on treating your child, I hope a solution is found soon.
Depending on what's being looked at and why, I wouldn't expect a person to be punished for just looking at something. In your example, of course the hypothetical angel shouldn't be punished - he was obviously researching something. It's all about intent, not the act of just looking.
On the other hand, I don't and will never support the actions of a person who looks at that stuff the way this guy supposedly did. Furthermore, as someone else said here, if you pay to look at something like that (didn't notice if the guy in the article did), you certainly deserve to be suitably repremanded for helping to support the person who created the obscene material, unless of course it's for research purposes, fighting crime, and the like.
There are things I consider profane or repulsive, and child porn is certainly one of them, but my comment was addressed at the question of whether or not the "average" sexual offender (who actually DID something in the real world) should be marked as a criminal. I say they should be, and punishment should fit the crime. It's not about some pervert who gets his jollies looking at pictures on the web late at night.
I'm tired of seeing sex offenders (so called "perverts") being stuck in prison and then released back into society. These people do not need prison time, they arent criminals (except by law), they are persons with _mental disabilities_!
Ok normally I'd keep my proverbial mouth shut on this, but this time I have to speak up. I am a victim of a sexual predator: Rape (technically sodomy), for some FOUR YEARS, starting when I was around FIVE years old, by a man who was well endowed at the time, in the back door and orally. More information can be found on my website (don't waste your time trying to draw any conclusions about my sexuality, that has been dealt with professionally; it is not related.)
It IS a crime, whether or not these people have some kind of mental disability. It's not about being able to connect sex or acts thereof to the emotions and mental state they yield - it's about keeping your G-D damned penis in your pants where it belongs! You can't sit there and tell the rest of us that the criminal has no control over what he does - it still takes effort to pull your pants down or click a mouse (especially for four hours straight). If you're that much in need of relief, go masturbate or something! Or crawl in bed with your wife, if she's in the mood! Or hire a hooker FFS!
You try living for around 25 years with the memories invoked by the crime in question. Do you know what it's like to smell ordinary body/hand lotion and nearly throw up each time because of what it was used for back then, or to go into convulsions from a(n unwanted) memory of the TASTE of semen? How about crying your heart out more than once a week from the emotional scars he left? How about getting sexually aroused during the normal course of lying with your (future) husband only to fall into a deep depression and lose the moment because of the memories?
Counselling indeed. It isn't the criminals who need counseling, it's the victims who need it. Do I sound bitter? You bet I am. Do I need counseling after 25 years? Probably. Punish the offenders to the fullest extent of the law; do not spare the rod! CUT IT OFF or send them to the electric chair/gas chamber/injection table. Stop wasting MY TAX DOLLARS to support these sick bastards while they sit in jail!
The few women I know in the IT field seem to have gotten into it for the money [...] rather than because they like working with computers. Now the money's gone, so are they. [...] What matters is not the male:female ratio, but that somebody with the requisite talent is able to pursue a career in a field without being artificially held back on the basis of their sex.
That is the reason I got into IT - that's where the money was at the time. At a time when I was struggling financially, I was offered a job as a Linux sysadmin, in another state. I accepted it, figuring I had a skill I could use in the real world. The reality was that I was stressed most of the time, bitchy, and combined with the fact that I don't know any modern programming languages (unless you consider HTML to be a programming language), I obviously did not do very well at it.
What I do know is customer service. As someone else pointed out here, that seems to be one of the things women are good at. Not to sound stereotypical, but maybe that person is right?
All of this might have something to do with the fact that like a lot of women (and men) my age, I was brought up in the 8-bit era of computing, and learned the programming and computing skills that were common at the time. I *do* like working with computers; give me a 6502 and an assembler (and some time to re-acquaint myself with that form code; I'm pretty rusty) and I'm comfortable.
If programmers, sysadmins, and the like are all just expendable business resources now and not getting the kind of recognition they used to get in previous decades, who wants the associated headache anyway? Where's the fun in it?
I think I'll just go back to hiding behind my C64.:-/
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Ironically, in response to your comment about skipping intros, I just learned that our DVD player lets us do that, in a roundabout way anyways. As soon as you see the usual "FBI" screen, hit Stop,Menu,Play and the actual content usually starts right up.
Works at at least a few of our DVD's.
The ironic part? This is a SONY DVD player, which we (fortunately?) bought before the big rootkit scandal.
One thing I do worry about is that some movie release in the future will include some kind of software/firmware update, which could break this (probably unintended) feature. Is that possible with current generation players or releases?
Nonono you've got it all wrong. G-D isn't off in stack space, nor does He have interrupts masked.. He's just sitting in a WAIT loop. After all, since He's a perfect being, He's capable of avoiding running off into illegal memory. Biblically (er...), He's waiting for a higher-priority interrupt than the majority of the world's population has configured itself for. A few individuals managed to get to the top of the IRQ list (Miriam, Abraham), and even one or two made it all the way to NMI status (Moses comes to mind).
That should be fairly obvious - He saves it as part of the Cosmic Microwave Background - there are still plenty of cold spots left to fill.
The real question should be, who does He call to deal with/debug that core?
--
Disclaimer - I'm Jewish, and by extension a believer, but even we can poke fun once in a while. A perfect being would presumeably have a good sense of humor too. Minor edits to the quoted text for religious reasons.
Not on my box you won't. One linux partition, one swap, nothing else. No disk images, no ripped CD images, nothing. Not even a virtual machine.
Learn to use The GIMP and you won't likely need Photoshop anymore unless you're a high-end professional. I've used it for everything from editing circuit board layouts to colorful full-page (US letter sized) flyers.
What you can do with a program is dependent more on your skillz than the program's features or popularity (provided of course said program has at least some basic minimum tools).
What, Abiword and OOo/writer aren't good enough? What do you want to do, embed a video or soundbite into your printed document? If you want that stuff, use Impress instead.
Bank of America's online banking site works fine with both Opera and Firefox, even with that odd sitekey thing they're using now. I'm sure other banks work just fine as well.
Or to the fancy HP connected to my server at the other end of a piece of network cable? Oh, and I can scan *and* read memory cards too. Autofs is a nice invention...
Rather that mod you down, it's better that I just *shoot* you down instead.
Um.... sorry, but you are dead wrong here. Quoth the Bill of Rights:
(Emphasis mine)
Like it or not, the Bill of Rights is a part of the constitution, it *does* guarantee my privacy up to the point where that information is needed to conduct a criminal investigation.
Searches of your private, personal information are conducted just as readily as a physical search of your home or car. As far as I am aware, there is no criminal investigation in progress regarding Google and their search results, just a research effort.
Whether the the word and spirit of the constitution is properly upheld is a whole other matter; most of us can probably agree where that's gotten us.
Great, now the yearly USENET C64 vs. Spectrum flamewar has finally migrated to Slashdot. Is nothing sacred anymore? :-)
You've guessed the intended function exactly (plus there's that DAC chip also). You can't use a special-purpose DSP because no computer (and by extension, no single DSP chip) in the world to date can mimic a SID chip perfectly. In this case, it is necessary to be perfect, or as near as a real 6581 can get (owing to variance between runs of the chip, different revisions, etc).
Using my PowerSID project as an example, that's enough PCB real estate to make either two main boards in the current design, or one main board and two secondary boards. Or, I could re-design the PowerSID like I want to, to cram *everything* into one of those 4x5.5 panels.
Add about $10 in parts to stuff and solder it and we're up to $60. Add the cost of the software, $1260. Even if it were $400 like I originally thought, that's still $460, all of which is expense.
Like I said, purely a hobby project. If someone wants to pay me to build them a board, I'll gladly do it and sell it at raw cost plus 10%, but the design will still be out there so anyone can use it, build it, update it (and send me updates I hope), re-implement it in a newer technology, or redesign it completely if they want. To me, that's the core priciple behind the FOSS movement.
I should have been a little more specific, but I wanted to keep the summary fairly short. Take a look at this page:
My Projects Page
See the boards at the top named "PowerSID"? Notice how I had to divide it into two? I want to re-release it as a one-board design, and clearly there's no way to cram all of those parts into a 3x4 inch board.
Similarly, notice the "Front Panel" design. Routed with 10 mil traces because I don't expect I could hand-make anything smaller, and it still barely fits on a 4x2 board. I would like to add more features, which is clearly not going to happen on that size of a board (the max size I could fit into my project is about 5.5x2.1 inches, which is too big for Eagle).
Is the fab shop you are using so low tech...
Quite the contrary - it's the technology itself that I'm putting on the board that's low-tech. You can't buy 6581 SID chips in SMD form.
Also, how many nets are we talking about here that you would need an autorouter?
About 200 for the "PowerSID" project. I use the autorouter because it saves a great deal of time when I'm revising the layout of a board to reduce the size (and save me and whoever wants to build one of these projects a little money). Signal quality isn't nearly as great a concern with my projects as it would be with, for example, a cellphone or a modern multi-GHz computer.
Are you using any BGA packages?
Definitely not. BGA is impossible to solder by hand (unless you're lucky with the toaster oven method). I don't like to use components that can't be hand-soldered.
How many layers is the design?
Two.
Do you have any controlled impedance requirements? Differential pairs?
No. All TTL components (plus a little bit of analog, as in PowerSID).
To hand route a 3x4" shouldn't take long at all depending on density and layer count.
As many simple designs as I've done, nothing turned me off to hand-routing faster than this little ~2x2 inch thing I designed a few years ago. Manually moving traces around to cram another chip in (I realized a design flaw and had to correct it), and then trying to route new traces to that chip is a pain in the ass.
It is at this point that I wish Slashdot had a (-5, Clueless) mod setting (and of course allowed mod points to the same person who both submitted and writes comments into a particular story)... Shut your yap, use that scientific brain of yours (a prerequisite for a Slashdot user, I should think), and go learn something about transgendered persons. Oh, and pull that foot out of your mouth, that is me in the above-mentioned picture (a horrible picture, sure), and that IS my legal name (look it up in Lackawanna County, PA court records if you want).
And this is precisely why I asked about an open source replacement. It's one thing to pay for a product if you're going to use it to make money. It's a far different thing to expect to pay the same money for a product only to use it for hobby work.
I design gadgets for the Commodore 64/128, and a quick estimate shows that at the prices I've seen around the web in the last few days, I would spend more on the software alone than I would spend on making one production-ready unit of every board I've designed since I started fiddling with this stuff (that's only about 10 unique designs), and if I tried to sell, there's no way I'd ever break even. Several years ago there was a slim chance, but today, forget about it. Today, all of the stuff I write or design is free and open source, and stuff I have written in the past I have since declared free also (where the source code still exists). I think that fits anyone's definition of "giving back." I must stress - I do not program for Linux, just Commodore.
Oh, and to the other gentlemen who have mentioned auto-routing and other high-end features as being too much to ask of FOSS, let me see..
Along with these, every other open source program I've looked into has at least one of the features I need. I was just hoping for a program that combines all of these already-existing, already written features into one Eagle-killing FOSS program.
You're wrong here.
First, as near as we can tell, YHVH is not just "a name for G-D," rather it is His real name. Any other name (including "G-D") is usually a context-sensative pseudonym, but all of His names are generally treated with the same respect.
Second, that word doesn't actually have a proper pronounciation anymore, the key has been lost for centuries, which is why it's now call the "Ineffible Name." The word is spelled Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey in Hebrew, but is hard to pronounce because of the Vav. While Yud and Hey behave as 'y' and 'h' do in English for the most part, Vav doesn't. Rather, in the middle of a word, it's pronounced as a long 'o' or long 'oo' ("loot"). At the beginning of a word, it usually takes on a normal 'v' sound. It's never used as a 'w'.
English speakers often use "Yahweh" because it's similar, but if I had to make a semi-educated guess, it's more likely that the Name should be pronounced "Yeh-oua."
I guess this gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "eat shit!" :-)
So then the 'sad puppy dog' face really *is* a weapon!
And to think all these years I just used it to get my way ;)
C) Tranies screwing up the numbers.
A few years ago a study was undertaken, in Norway I think it was, to determine once and for all if the brain of a male-to-female transsexual (TS) is as it is claimed to be: female. The study involved examining the hypothalamuses from several TS and non-TS brains (dead of course), and took into account such things as the effect of hormones (no short- or long-term effects were noted when I last looked into this study).
I don't know the *official* results of the study, but what I last saw indicated without a doubt that a TS, barring any physical diseases that may affect that region of brain, are indeed the sex they strive to become (i.e. male-to-female TS's, myself included, are female). Some religions are beginning to agree, if you want to take that route.
To assert otherwise is akin to saying that, for example, that a person born with no legs is not a biped.
Comments like yours make me embarassed to be on the 'net at all. We're geeks - one should be right to assume that we're all scientifically minded and, by extension, unbiased in our views and understanding of the way the world and things in it work. Comments like this really do show off how horribly wrong that assumption was.
Mods: This is meant as a joke.. It's funny. Laugh.
I'll never work in the IT field again; it has been relegated to a hobby. The company I worked for will not be named here, there's no reason to trash them by name, no matter how much they pissed me off. Still, I learned a few valuable lessons while I was there. This kinda reads as a rule sheet for the manager to read before hiring me, or maybe I'm just ranting, but these things need to be said...
1. I started from a technologically low point in the ladder of IT as it stands now. As the employer, you knew I had never worked as a sysadmin, that Linux was my OS of choice *at home*, and that I do not program in the languages you used at your business. Don't expect me to be able to move from that low point to a seasoned expert on only four months. It just does not work that way.
2. Don't tell me I'm not doing enough, or I'm ignoring this or that part of my job, if I'm already buried in projects for your clients. I'm a geek, not a fucking magician. If I tell you I'm busy, it means I'm busy working on your clients' machines. Furthermore, if you as the manager are not a tech, then let me believe it - don't try to do my job for me!!
3. Don't try to make me feel intimiated or inferior to you just because you carry the title of manager. I don't care if you worked for Company X and they improved while you were there; you are NOT working for Company X now, and we are not the same people you dealt with there.
4. Don't bitch at me if I open a [perhaps previously iconified] window and head for Slashdot or IRC or even browse the web in general for a few seconds or even a few minutes, when I'm working on some client's machine at the same time.
5. Don't create mandatory meetings and expect me to willingly attend them, especially if they're held when I would normally be asleep. If you have something to say, you can always email it to me, or even drop by later and give me a quick heads'-up on those things I need to be involved in. If it doesn't relate to my job, I generally don't want to hear about it! I don't care how much money the company made, or even if you start to lose customers, unless I'm responsible or I'll be directly affected by it.
6. If I use the staff-wide mailing list to lodge a public complaint, don't tell me not to. I wouldn't have used that method if it weren't appropriate to do so. (In this case, I was injured by someone else's carelessness, and now I have a large, permanent scar on my leg to show for it).
7. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, EVER TELL ME TO LIE TO A CLIENT. Is that clear? I value my integrity, and it makes the company look *really* bad when some client calls you up, asks what's going on, and then calls your bluff. You know, clients actually DO read the literature your company produces, and they often remember those little promises and guarantees you make in said literature.
Better yet, try not putting me in that position to begin with - Fix the problem before it occurs! (yes, this problem was fixable).
8. Don't expect me to support a program/user environment, if the only person who can actually solve the problem the client is having, is the author of said program. Believe it or not, clients actually do call in asking why this or that function can't be altered in some certain way, or asking when the next release will be out. Repeatedly telling the client that I can't help them just pisses them off and makes ME as the individual tech look bad.
9. Related to #8; If the author of said program does not feel he needs to make himself available to his users, fine. Send him home and let him do his work remotely. If you won't do that, then don't expect me to pretend he isn't here wh
The only changes that have taken place are the various revisions of the Christian "new testament", i.e. the KJV, NIV, and G-D only-knows-how-many-other-editions. The original Hebrew text of the Torah, as well as the Writings and Prohpets, are the same as they were the day they were finalized. Whether that happened in the 6th century CE or earlier is hard to say.
In the begining (well maybe not that long ago) there were some pretty big arguments over what things went into the bible. For example one of these things were the Apocrypha, which were out then in then out again. (Do I see a directors cut/special edition cut that includes the sections that were dropped?)
Why do you need a "director's cut" or even forsee that as a possibility? If you or anyone else wants to read from the books of the Apocrypha, go right ahead. They're not shunned or banned or anything, they're just not part of the official text of the Bible.
Let alone the translation from whatever to Greek to Latin to English .. to modern day English to ebonics (and I am sure there is one out there). Each translation will change the sense of the text depending on who it was who translated it. As a comparison ... run something twice through babel fish and see what comes out.
And this is the big mistake people make; assuming that a text is valid just because someone else thinks it is. Proper, valid translations of the Bible, or for that matter any other text, can only be had if you start from the original language and translate it yourself, or otherwise obtain a first-generation modern translation. This is exactly why the "Stone Edition" of the Tanach (Torah, Prophets, Writings) is considered one of the most definitive translations; it is a first-generation translation, in modern english, with commentary from Rashi and others at the bottom of most pages.
I just found this interesting link The Pre-Reformation History of the Bible From 1,400 BC to 1,400 AD
I'll assume you've read the entirety of this article, as I have. That being the case, I feel compelled to point out numerous errors in that article.
To the author of this page, what is your evidence? Prove it. Even if it is older, so what? There are hundreds of thousands of stories (Job is not historical, it is considered to be a work of fiction intended by it's author to make a point) which predate the Torah.
Modern Hebrew is essentially the same language as it was in Biblical times, extended over the years to add words so that it may be used in modern business and casual conversation. Originally, anchient Hebrew was only capable of handling what existed back then.
The pig may have been considered unclean (and still is), not because of any particular belief, but because it was directed in the Torah: "...and the pig, for its hoof is split and its hoof is completely separated, but it does not chew its cud -- it is unclean to you" (Leviticus 11:7)
Somehow the verse that follows that (that the carcass shall not be touched) has been either superceded or overlooked, as it is
While this statement, and my reply here, is off-topic, I have to point something out - there is at least one other language that fits this category: Hebrew.
I'm not a scholar, just learning some of it as part of my conversion to Judaism. Here are the facts:
Alef: Assumes any long or short vowel sound, depending on the word.
Bet/Vet: B or V (local dialect, usually B these days)
Vav: V, long U, or long O depending on the word and/or it's position in the word.
Yud: Y or I
Kaf/Chaf: K or gutteral cH/kH (as in Channukah)
Ayin: Same function as Alef.
Sin/Shin: S or Sh
Sav/Tav: S or T (usually T these days)
Each of these uses one glyph for all of their variants (hence, eight glyphs and a total of 19 distinct sounds). Modern Hebrew says to use a standardised set of diacritic marks on these characters, but this isn't always the case.
Most of these can have one or two additional diacritics below them to add a vowel sound and/or a split-second glottal stop.
Clear as mud?
As a long-time sufferer of obstructive sleep apnea (got the official diagnosis today in fact, after 15 or more years suffering from it), and showing all of the symptoms of it including extreme weight gain, lack of coordination, restlessness , ittitability, fatigue, and so on, I think I speak for everyone here - I'd much rather correct the problem of sleep deprivation itself than take some drug that claims to restore my mental state (in the case of depression: Zoloft, anyone?)
The few pills I take every day are already enough - stop typing to shove MORE chemicals down my throat that only take care of the symptoms, and start fixing the problem at the source. That's where our research needs to be focused, for *any* condition that needs corrected.
If the problem is lack of sleep because of lack of time or deadlines or something, then maybe a change of career or priorities is needed. But if it's medical, then corrective *action* is needed. I had to get totally out of the working world because I couldn't handle it anymore, and it was literally killing me. Is it really so hard then, to keep your job and just adjust your lifestyle to make more time for sleep?
---
(*) "Money"
We call those "overrated", "flamebait", and "troll" respectively. :-)
On the other hand, I don't and will never support the actions of a person who looks at that stuff the way this guy supposedly did. Furthermore, as someone else said here, if you pay to look at something like that (didn't notice if the guy in the article did), you certainly deserve to be suitably repremanded for helping to support the person who created the obscene material, unless of course it's for research purposes, fighting crime, and the like.
There are things I consider profane or repulsive, and child porn is certainly one of them, but my comment was addressed at the question of whether or not the "average" sexual offender (who actually DID something in the real world) should be marked as a criminal. I say they should be, and punishment should fit the crime. It's not about some pervert who gets his jollies looking at pictures on the web late at night.
Ok normally I'd keep my proverbial mouth shut on this, but this time I have to speak up. I am a victim of a sexual predator: Rape (technically sodomy), for some FOUR YEARS, starting when I was around FIVE years old, by a man who was well endowed at the time, in the back door and orally. More information can be found on my website (don't waste your time trying to draw any conclusions about my sexuality, that has been dealt with professionally; it is not related.)
It IS a crime, whether or not these people have some kind of mental disability. It's not about being able to connect sex or acts thereof to the emotions and mental state they yield - it's about keeping your G-D damned penis in your pants where it belongs! You can't sit there and tell the rest of us that the criminal has no control over what he does - it still takes effort to pull your pants down or click a mouse (especially for four hours straight). If you're that much in need of relief, go masturbate or something! Or crawl in bed with your wife, if she's in the mood! Or hire a hooker FFS!
You try living for around 25 years with the memories invoked by the crime in question. Do you know what it's like to smell ordinary body/hand lotion and nearly throw up each time because of what it was used for back then, or to go into convulsions from a(n unwanted) memory of the TASTE of semen? How about crying your heart out more than once a week from the emotional scars he left? How about getting sexually aroused during the normal course of lying with your (future) husband only to fall into a deep depression and lose the moment because of the memories?
Counselling indeed. It isn't the criminals who need counseling, it's the victims who need it. Do I sound bitter? You bet I am. Do I need counseling after 25 years? Probably. Punish the offenders to the fullest extent of the law; do not spare the rod! CUT IT OFF or send them to the electric chair/gas chamber/injection table. Stop wasting MY TAX DOLLARS to support these sick bastards while they sit in jail!
That is the reason I got into IT - that's where the money was at the time. At a time when I was struggling financially, I was offered a job as a Linux sysadmin, in another state. I accepted it, figuring I had a skill I could use in the real world. The reality was that I was stressed most of the time, bitchy, and combined with the fact that I don't know any modern programming languages (unless you consider HTML to be a programming language), I obviously did not do very well at it.
What I do know is customer service. As someone else pointed out here, that seems to be one of the things women are good at. Not to sound stereotypical, but maybe that person is right?
All of this might have something to do with the fact that like a lot of women (and men) my age, I was brought up in the 8-bit era of computing, and learned the programming and computing skills that were common at the time. I *do* like working with computers; give me a 6502 and an assembler (and some time to re-acquaint myself with that form code; I'm pretty rusty) and I'm comfortable.
If programmers, sysadmins, and the like are all just expendable business resources now and not getting the kind of recognition they used to get in previous decades, who wants the associated headache anyway? Where's the fun in it?
I think I'll just go back to hiding behind my C64. :-/
I had no idea that there were CompactFlash cards that exceeded 8 gigs, let alone ones that large that were that cheap!
(The old CMD hard drive could store about 4 GB using standard 50-pin SCSI drives, IDE64 can do 8 GB I believe, using ordinary IDE disks)