Spot on man. My one real gripe about Linux is the woeful lack of examples in the man pages. Everyone one of us is a newbie for some command and my time is precious I don't want to read about obscure shit when I only want to perform a simple task. Those of us here who are programmers, lets be honest would you rather wade through the obscure stuff or get the basic idea in 5 seconds from an example ?
When Star Wars first came out Time magazine considered it a modern version of The Wizard of Oz. Think, Tin Man (C3PO), Lion (Wookie) etc etc. Plus a lot of stuff from '40s serials. The last bit was how Lucas himself described it. And I *do* recall that Lucas after SW said that he intended to make nine movies in the series. 3 set 20 years before SW, 2 more sequels and 3 set 20 years later. I sincerely hope he doesn't continue it... oh the humanity.
Agree 100%. I recently saw "Planet of Storms" and it is magnificent. Too bad it was butchered into that piece of shite called "Planet of Prehistoric
Women" or some crap. No look at his stuff and marvel , no CGI here.. but the effects are outstanding. Saw a doco on his life and work recently (perhaps it was "The Star Dreamer", saw it on SBS), a real eye-opener. The way he invented techniques that would be reinvented by Kubrick for 2001 a decade or more later is revealing. Even the excerpt from the doco which shows his work that was a publicity piece for Sputnik shown by Walter Cronkite is amazing.
Am I the only one who didn't immediately think of Second Impact the disaster in Neon Genesis Evangelion that destroyed Antarctica and killed half the worlds population. But of course the 'impact' story was a fictional explanation for an event in a fictional anime... fiction within fiction.. is that like a double negative for reality. Must be, the proof is right there under the ice... heh heh.
Now if you jab the electrodes into your heart you might get 1.2A over your heart, and that will kill it. But the stabbing killed you first.
As was drummed into me repeatedly in my first year physics labs "it's not the volts that do the damage it's the current. And the most dangerous current is not Amps (which cause the heart to lock and then recover) but 100 mA or so which sends the heart into fibrillation... which you don't recover from when the juice is turned off". Although I wouldn't want to try it I think I'd have a better chance with with the 1.2 Amps than with say 120 mA. Yeah I know you said 0.25mA, but I just want to make people aware that just because it looks like a low voltage and only 100 mA doesn't make it safer than a larger current. Be careful.
Nah. People are just idiots, plain and simple. No fancy expanations required.
What's the big deal about firing up FF once and spending a whole 2-3 seconds for it to load? Or you can have IE start instantly over and over but be nuked by the next exploit. So why complain about a safe browser that loads in 3 seconds verses a piece of crap that loads in less than 1, especially when I consistently see Moz / FF load pages faster than IE. With FF / Moz I feel a lot safer and it loads plenty fast enough... and I feel even safer when I'm running them on Linux... but that's another story.
When I read that the strangest thought came into my head. Just bear with me for a sec. I was watching a doco some time recently about the nature of genocides and how they happen. A recurring factor is that the perpetrator usually views themselves as the victim and therefore is only defending themselves. Thus the Nazis thought they were only defending themselves against the Jews, the Serbs were only defending themselves against um everyone else, same in Rwanda. Now considering yourself to be the underdog when in fact you are NOT can lead to some pretty extreme abuses of your power. MS probably thinks it is justified in its (often extreme) actions.
Sigh. Let my old weary brain cells indulge in a little nostalgia for a second. You know I remember when MS was a geek's company. Geeks really liked MS. Though if you wanted a good compiler you used Borland or Watcom. MS may have been a company but they seemed to have a good attitude... they didn't mind too much that so many geeks didn't pay for DOS (if they had to pay they would have used something else), but since Windows came along... well... the relationship has soured... and the separation has become bitter and vengeful. Seeing as how the future has almost a determination to mock the past then maybe someday again MS will be regarded as a geek's company and the open source movement will hate IBM and drink toasts to Bill and Steve. Stranger things have happened.
We buy beer and milk in pints and mostly weigh in stones and pounds
and our road speed limits are in miles per hour.
Well there's your problem (though pints of beer are available from some pubs... it was not a traditional unit here for beer). Australia made the change successfully. For a while both units were usable but after the 10 year period even the import or manufacture of rulers measured only in imperial were banned, all 'mileage' is in kilometres etc etc. People sometimes still refer to weights in stone, but rarely. The conversion of temperatures from Fahrenheit to Celsius was probably the most difficult for many to get used to, but it's all ancient history now. As for knots... they are still used and I can't see why they shouldn't be, the nautical mile is not a totally arbitrary value but is related to the circumference of the Earth and has (or had) a practical value.
However, I must say although I'm glad I don't have to deal with those godawful Imperial units anymore, there's no point getting worked up about metric vs Imperial since there are far more serious issues in the world than how you count a given distance.
Agree. I actually use a notepad like the notepad.exe icon. It's small, fits in my pocket etc. I follow the maxim that I believe Henry Ford used: write down the 5 most important tasks to complete that day, if you complete them you're doing well. When you start putting everything in then I find I just don't get much done... it has to be simple or fine grained.
Though for work programming projects (home programming is nowhere near as organised) I have a text file to-do list, as in 'vi', that is more formal and far more complex since the tasks are more long range than a single day or even week. It also acts as a diary of ideas about things to try out and the results so I can look back later, so I tend to add lots of notes to the items -- I find this very useful.
No, not a Tesla coil. I've read that Tesla did work on a "death ray" and other weapons but I think they were just theoretical... I don't know. But the reference I remember actually mentioned that the weapon was tested... I don't know what on. I presume it would have been abandoned because of the bulky battery tech of the time and the difficulty of producing a sufficiently intense collimated UV beam. Or else I just read death ray and electricity (a la Tesla) and worked out the UV stuff myself (I mean it was a long long time ago and I was just a kid)... damn shoulda patented it huh... heh heh (insert Evil Overlord wannabe laugh).
I wonder if someone can resolve a problem I have about this article. I have a vague memory about someone in the early 20th century building just such a UV taser. It was either Alexander Graham Bell or Tesla, though I think it in fact was Bell. I know Bell worked on a UV beam to successfully send sound directly to a remote human ear without a receiving device via modulated UV intensity, but I think he also worked on a taser thingy. Anyone know ?
While I'm not certain that I completely trust Microsoft on this
Repeat after me "conflict of interest". If MS sells anti-virus software then the more insecure the target of the viruses (MS software) then the more product they will sell. I know they are just trying to solve their security issues, but this dependency is worrying.
It's a pity that there is no moderation like "Funny Troll +1". I'd mod you up man. "Dennis Ritchie is excited about the switch"... pure brilliance. And VB/Linux... so obvious when you think about it.
Hmmm. Tempted to cut and paste this into a VB newsgroup... heh heh. I'm sure there'd be a groundswell of support. [insert evil sarcastic laugh]
It didn't help Menzies when people got wiff of the Brisbane Line argument which ran something like: "We'll let the Japanese invade the country to a latitude corresponding to Brisbane". Since I live in Brisbane I can only imagine how popular that suggestion was.
Yeah well if I want to connect up to the net I have to make sure I have a firewall (not a supplied application), and a current virus detector (not supplied) and patches patches and more fsckin' patches... all the time hoping I don't get creamed by Sasser or Blaster. THEN I have to get a new email client cos Outlook is total shit! Then better to get a browser without cobwebs and worm holes in it something like Firefox or Opera or Moz. Then I have to install an Office package while not blowing my budget, then if I want to do any development I have to search on the net for a compiler / interpreter. It doesn't even come with a decent text editor.. geees! OK... and THEN if you have any trouble with drivers you're screwed. And did I tell you my current install of Win2K is degrading ? Well yeah its getting 'old windows disease'... funny don't remember any unices acting like this. In fact my other partition with RH9 is perfectly fine and it is used far more often than Win2K.
I tolerated MS stuff in the old days of DOS cos dos was always hackable (and it desperately needed a lot of help), but windows isn't easily fixable.
Amen to that. I got it out on video years ago and it still haunts me, whereas Day After was just entertaining, in a twisted way. Coincidentally, I was digging through some books last night and came across a copy of "The Fate of the Earth", so I sat down and read my favourite part which is from about page 50 to 90. To summarise, in even a limited nuclear war 80% of the American population would die in the first few hours. If a full 10,000 megaton war was conducted (leaving 1,000 megatons for the USSR in reserve) then almost no-one in the US would survive, especially if there were some ground bursts on nuclear reactors. The only things to survive after the event would be grass and insects.
Cheery reading. Pick it up some day. Just reading the effects of a 1 megaton air burst is bad then realise that for a city like New York maybe a dozen or so weapons would be used to carpet nuke the city.
Or flood a salt lake. Salt lakes are pretty much dead. Yeah I know some bacteria survive in the salt crystals... but who cares, extremophiles aren't going to go extinct are they ? The big problem is the water not the location. A desert is nice an all, but the insolation and evaporation are high and water is at a premium anyway. Perhaps pump in sea water ? I mean it is a salt lake after all. Not everywhere of course has a salt lake near the sea (Lake Eyre in South Australia was what I was thinking about locally), I don't know a similar candidate(s) in the US.
Also I wonder just how efficient the conversion will be: operating this "farm", harvesting and "cracking" the algae requires energy.
The Club of Rome wrote Limits to Growth in the early '70s. Just google around for references to it. It has been widely dismissed by the right wing as having failed to predict things, which I've always thought as odd since its predictions were for the 21st century not the 20th (a seeming victory of ideology over logic). And they actually match up quite well with Hubbert's Peak considering when it was written... in fact I would say they are more optimistic than Hubbert as far as the date goes. Their gloomiest prediction, that caused an immense amount of opposition, was of a spectacular 'die off' in the mid 21st century i.e. a global catastrophe. Rather than ignore this stuff, I wish people would take it to heart since 'planning for the future' is one thing humans do quite well as individuals and if done on a global scale may actually get us out of this mess.
Years ago I read "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" after seeing a documentary called "The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem ?" by one of the authors. This is basically the origin of the background of "The Da Vinci Code" from what I know of it, though I haven't read that book. The documentary showed some amazing codes that had been coded into gravestones and other places in particular places, including the painting by Poussin, which contained hidden messages. Anyway, getting back to this stuff: the inscription discussed was shown in the book underneath a mirror image reproduction of the very mysterious painting of Poussin. BTW, the tomb in the painting actually exists and was found by the doco makers not far from the source of the mystery, the town of Rennes le Chateau. Anyway, marvellous story, but I don't believe the stuff about the bloodline etc... just stretching the evidence too far I think. But wonderful stuff, especially if you're into conspiracies, codes etc... if you liked Cryptonomicon then this kind of stuff is for you.
"The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" however does not include the amazing codes etc. A big pity since they were fascinating. One I particularly liked was a copy of the Lord's Prayer in latin that when you noticed the slight misplacement of various letters spelt a message... and formed a pentagram as well (I vaguely remember that the letter was to or from Poussin). Or the hidden spaces in hollow columns with parchments and the mysterious figures at the chapel at Rennes le Chateau... hmmm. Lots of fun.
One of the suggestions for "Et in Arcadia ego" was that it was an anagram since the phrase is not correct Latin anyway. One suggested anagram translates as "Begone! Behold I conceal the secrets of God"... eh (shrug). Note also that Arcadia was also part of the Hidden Stream symbolism that described a secret stream of knowledge underneath Christendom... hence the the painting combined with the unstranslated letters was not picked randomly as an interesting puzzle, there is an air of genuine mystery about it.
Why do you call it the French system when everyone else in the world calls it metric ? Is it because you want to appeal to prejudice rather than logic to win the argument ?
As for calories. Calorie is not an SI unit, the Joule is. I don't think you know what you are talking bout. And yeah I know the advantages of the powers of 2 in various Imperial units, OK for a feudal economy not for an industrial one.
BTW, I'm old enough to have been taught the Imperial system in great detail at school. As a result when I first saw the metric system I took it to heart instantly.. when the country (Australia) went metric I was overjoyed.
You forgot to add broken. I've been trying to write some CSS stuff that looks even half reasonable on Windows when it just f**kin works in Moz / Firfox.
Slashdot Mirror
Spot on man. My one real gripe about Linux is the woeful lack of examples in the man pages. Everyone one of us is a newbie for some command and my time is precious I don't want to read about obscure shit when I only want to perform a simple task. Those of us here who are programmers, lets be honest would you rather wade through the obscure stuff or get the basic idea in 5 seconds from an example ?
As in
Isn't this just 'trickle down economics' all over again. Which BTW doesn't work!
When Star Wars first came out Time magazine considered it a modern version of The Wizard of Oz. Think, Tin Man (C3PO), Lion (Wookie) etc etc. Plus a lot of stuff from '40s serials. The last bit was how Lucas himself described it. And I *do* recall that Lucas after SW said that he intended to make nine movies in the series. 3 set 20 years before SW, 2 more sequels and 3 set 20 years later. I sincerely hope he doesn't continue it ... oh the humanity.
Agree 100%. I recently saw "Planet of Storms" and it is magnificent. Too bad it was butchered into that piece of shite called "Planet of Prehistoric Women" or some crap. No look at his stuff and marvel , no CGI here .. but the effects are outstanding. Saw a doco on his life and work recently (perhaps it was "The Star Dreamer", saw it on SBS), a real eye-opener. The way he invented techniques that would be reinvented by Kubrick for 2001 a decade or more later is revealing. Even the excerpt from the doco which shows his work that was a publicity piece for Sputnik shown by Walter Cronkite is amazing.
Am I the only one who didn't immediately think of Second Impact the disaster in Neon Genesis Evangelion that destroyed Antarctica and killed half the worlds population. But of course the 'impact' story was a fictional explanation for an event in a fictional anime ... fiction within fiction .. is that like a double negative for reality. Must be, the proof is right there under the ice ... heh heh.
Now if you jab the electrodes into your heart you might get 1.2A over your heart, and that will kill it. But the stabbing killed you first.
As was drummed into me repeatedly in my first year physics labs "it's not the volts that do the damage it's the current. And the most dangerous current is not Amps (which cause the heart to lock and then recover) but 100 mA or so which sends the heart into fibrillation ... which you don't recover from when the juice is turned off". Although I wouldn't want to try it I think I'd have a better chance with with the 1.2 Amps than with say 120 mA. Yeah I know you said 0.25mA, but I just want to make people aware that just because it looks like a low voltage and only 100 mA doesn't make it safer than a larger current. Be careful.
Nah. People are just idiots, plain and simple. No fancy expanations required.
What's the big deal about firing up FF once and spending a whole 2-3 seconds for it to load? Or you can have IE start instantly over and over but be nuked by the next exploit. So why complain about a safe browser that loads in 3 seconds verses a piece of crap that loads in less than 1, especially when I consistently see Moz / FF load pages faster than IE. With FF / Moz I feel a lot safer and it loads plenty fast enough ... and I feel even safer when I'm running them on Linux ... but that's another story.
Microsoft the underdog
Yeah. Hmmm.
When I read that the strangest thought came into my head. Just bear with me for a sec. I was watching a doco some time recently about the nature of genocides and how they happen. A recurring factor is that the perpetrator usually views themselves as the victim and therefore is only defending themselves. Thus the Nazis thought they were only defending themselves against the Jews, the Serbs were only defending themselves against um everyone else, same in Rwanda. Now considering yourself to be the underdog when in fact you are NOT can lead to some pretty extreme abuses of your power. MS probably thinks it is justified in its (often extreme) actions.
Sigh. Let my old weary brain cells indulge in a little nostalgia for a second. You know I remember when MS was a geek's company. Geeks really liked MS. Though if you wanted a good compiler you used Borland or Watcom. MS may have been a company but they seemed to have a good attitude ... they didn't mind too much that so many geeks didn't pay for DOS (if they had to pay they would have used something else), but since Windows came along ... well ... the relationship has soured ... and the separation has become bitter and vengeful. Seeing as how the future has almost a determination to mock the past then maybe someday again MS will be regarded as a geek's company and the open source movement will hate IBM and drink toasts to Bill and Steve. Stranger things have happened.
We buy beer and milk in pints and mostly weigh in stones and pounds
and our road speed limits are in miles per hour.
Well there's your problem (though pints of beer are available from some pubs ... it was not a traditional unit here for beer). Australia made the change successfully. For a while both units were usable but after the 10 year period even the import or manufacture of rulers measured only in imperial were banned, all 'mileage' is in kilometres etc etc. People sometimes still refer to weights in stone, but rarely. The conversion of temperatures from Fahrenheit to Celsius was probably the most difficult for many to get used to, but it's all ancient history now. As for knots ... they are still used and I can't see why they shouldn't be, the nautical mile is not a totally arbitrary value but is related to the circumference of the Earth and has (or had) a practical value.
However, I must say although I'm glad I don't have to deal with those godawful Imperial units anymore, there's no point getting worked up about metric vs Imperial since there are far more serious issues in the world than how you count a given distance.
Agree. I actually use a notepad like the notepad.exe icon. It's small, fits in my pocket etc. I follow the maxim that I believe Henry Ford used: write down the 5 most important tasks to complete that day, if you complete them you're doing well. When you start putting everything in then I find I just don't get much done ... it has to be simple or fine grained.
Though for work programming projects (home programming is nowhere near as organised) I have a text file to-do list, as in 'vi', that is more formal and far more complex since the tasks are more long range than a single day or even week. It also acts as a diary of ideas about things to try out and the results so I can look back later, so I tend to add lots of notes to the items -- I find this very useful.
No, not a Tesla coil. I've read that Tesla did work on a "death ray" and other weapons but I think they were just theoretical ... I don't know. But the reference I remember actually mentioned that the weapon was tested ... I don't know what on. I presume it would have been abandoned because of the bulky battery tech of the time and the difficulty of producing a sufficiently intense collimated UV beam. Or else I just read death ray and electricity (a la Tesla) and worked out the UV stuff myself (I mean it was a long long time ago and I was just a kid) ... damn shoulda patented it huh ... heh heh (insert Evil Overlord wannabe laugh).
Dead right about stupid. Hasn't this same strategy been tried for CD's and been an absolute failure ?
I wonder if someone can resolve a problem I have about this article. I have a vague memory about someone in the early 20th century building just such a UV taser. It was either Alexander Graham Bell or Tesla, though I think it in fact was Bell. I know Bell worked on a UV beam to successfully send sound directly to a remote human ear without a receiving device via modulated UV intensity, but I think he also worked on a taser thingy. Anyone know ?
While I'm not certain that I completely trust Microsoft on this
Repeat after me "conflict of interest". If MS sells anti-virus software then the more insecure the target of the viruses (MS software) then the more product they will sell. I know they are just trying to solve their security issues, but this dependency is worrying.
It's a pity that there is no moderation like "Funny Troll +1". I'd mod you up man. "Dennis Ritchie is excited about the switch" ... pure brilliance. And VB/Linux ... so obvious when you think about it.
Hmmm. Tempted to cut and paste this into a VB newsgroup ... heh heh. I'm sure there'd be a groundswell of support. [insert evil sarcastic laugh]
No mod points right now. Could someone mod this up so we can finally get a fast version of win OOo ?
It didn't help Menzies when people got wiff of the Brisbane Line argument which ran something like: "We'll let the Japanese invade the country to a latitude corresponding to Brisbane". Since I live in Brisbane I can only imagine how popular that suggestion was.
<rant>
Yeah well if I want to connect up to the net I have to make sure I have a firewall (not a supplied application), and a current virus detector (not supplied) and patches patches and more fsckin' patches ... all the time hoping I don't get creamed by Sasser or Blaster. THEN I have to get a new email client cos Outlook is total shit! Then better to get a browser without cobwebs and worm holes in it something like Firefox or Opera or Moz. Then I have to install an Office package while not blowing my budget, then if I want to do any development I have to search on the net for a compiler / interpreter. It doesn't even come with a decent text editor .. geees! OK ... and THEN if you have any trouble with drivers you're screwed. And did I tell you my current install of Win2K is degrading ? Well yeah its getting 'old windows disease' ... funny don't remember any unices acting like this. In fact my other partition with RH9 is perfectly fine and it is used far more often than Win2K.
I tolerated MS stuff in the old days of DOS cos dos was always hackable (and it desperately needed a lot of help), but windows isn't easily fixable.
Windows is simply bad karma.
</rant>
Ahh ... feel better now.
Amen to that. I got it out on video years ago and it still haunts me, whereas Day After was just entertaining, in a twisted way. Coincidentally, I was digging through some books last night and came across a copy of "The Fate of the Earth", so I sat down and read my favourite part which is from about page 50 to 90. To summarise, in even a limited nuclear war 80% of the American population would die in the first few hours. If a full 10,000 megaton war was conducted (leaving 1,000 megatons for the USSR in reserve) then almost no-one in the US would survive, especially if there were some ground bursts on nuclear reactors. The only things to survive after the event would be grass and insects.
Cheery reading. Pick it up some day. Just reading the effects of a 1 megaton air burst is bad then realise that for a city like New York maybe a dozen or so weapons would be used to carpet nuke the city.
Enough to give you the willies.
Or flood a salt lake. Salt lakes are pretty much dead. Yeah I know some bacteria survive in the salt crystals ... but who cares, extremophiles aren't going to go extinct are they ? The big problem is the water not the location. A desert is nice an all, but the insolation and evaporation are high and water is at a premium anyway. Perhaps pump in sea water ? I mean it is a salt lake after all. Not everywhere of course has a salt lake near the sea (Lake Eyre in South Australia was what I was thinking about locally), I don't know a similar candidate(s) in the US.
Also I wonder just how efficient the conversion will be: operating this "farm", harvesting and "cracking" the algae requires energy.
The Club of Rome wrote Limits to Growth in the early '70s. Just google around for references to it. It has been widely dismissed by the right wing as having failed to predict things, which I've always thought as odd since its predictions were for the 21st century not the 20th (a seeming victory of ideology over logic). And they actually match up quite well with Hubbert's Peak considering when it was written ... in fact I would say they are more optimistic than Hubbert as far as the date goes. Their gloomiest prediction, that caused an immense amount of opposition, was of a spectacular 'die off' in the mid 21st century i.e. a global catastrophe. Rather than ignore this stuff, I wish people would take it to heart since 'planning for the future' is one thing humans do quite well as individuals and if done on a global scale may actually get us out of this mess.
You of course are referring to the upcoming D9L series.
Years ago I read "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" after seeing a documentary called "The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem ?" by one of the authors. This is basically the origin of the background of "The Da Vinci Code" from what I know of it, though I haven't read that book. The documentary showed some amazing codes that had been coded into gravestones and other places in particular places, including the painting by Poussin, which contained hidden messages. Anyway, getting back to this stuff: the inscription discussed was shown in the book underneath a mirror image reproduction of the very mysterious painting of Poussin. BTW, the tomb in the painting actually exists and was found by the doco makers not far from the source of the mystery, the town of Rennes le Chateau. Anyway, marvellous story, but I don't believe the stuff about the bloodline etc ... just stretching the evidence too far I think. But wonderful stuff, especially if you're into conspiracies, codes etc ... if you liked Cryptonomicon then this kind of stuff is for you.
"The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" however does not include the amazing codes etc. A big pity since they were fascinating. One I particularly liked was a copy of the Lord's Prayer in latin that when you noticed the slight misplacement of various letters spelt a message ... and formed a pentagram as well (I vaguely remember that the letter was to or from Poussin). Or the hidden spaces in hollow columns with parchments and the mysterious figures at the chapel at Rennes le Chateau ... hmmm. Lots of fun.
One of the suggestions for "Et in Arcadia ego" was that it was an anagram since the phrase is not correct Latin anyway. One suggested anagram translates as "Begone! Behold I conceal the secrets of God" ... eh (shrug). Note also that Arcadia was also part of the Hidden Stream symbolism that described a secret stream of knowledge underneath Christendom ... hence the the painting combined with the unstranslated letters was not picked randomly as an interesting puzzle, there is an air of genuine mystery about it.
Why do you call it the French system when everyone else in the world calls it metric ? Is it because you want to appeal to prejudice rather than logic to win the argument ?
As for calories. Calorie is not an SI unit, the Joule is. I don't think you know what you are talking bout. And yeah I know the advantages of the powers of 2 in various Imperial units, OK for a feudal economy not for an industrial one.
BTW, I'm old enough to have been taught the Imperial system in great detail at school. As a result when I first saw the metric system I took it to heart instantly .. when the country (Australia) went metric I was overjoyed.
slow, bloated and buggy
You forgot to add broken. I've been trying to write some CSS stuff that looks even half reasonable on Windows when it just f**kin works in Moz / Firfox.