They're really not fun when they're hot. I've been knocked out a few times by flyback voltage when working on monitors, and you always wake up with a pounding headache and aching muscles. Usually it was because someone handed me the UNINSULATED screwdriver by mistake, or because someone distracted me, or because I was too drunk to be making that kind of adjustment) Monochrome monitors (Herc, or those bastard Cornerstone 21's) are the worst. Most modern 15/17 inch VGA monitors hardly hurt at all. They're actually nicer than 120 vac, but I wouldn't want to hold on to the lead.
How do you draw the conclusion that we are due a huge, reversable climate change? At the moment, our best brains seem to be saying that the observed warming is due to the fact we're not quite out of the Ice age yet.
SuSe can also do minimalist installs easily. I've done installs (including X and basic X apps) in under 90 Mb. I've also done one totally stripped SuSe install in 51 Mb. (If I didn't use it EVERY log in, or it wasn't req'd for mpg123/cdparanoia, it wasn't installed).
RedHat is much trickier than it used to be on installs of the small variety.
However, I beleive Debian fits the criteria best. Offtopic: Can you still use the old
Then you are a better person than most and probably a better person than I. Its situations like this one that make me glad I didn't put that Criminal Justice degree to use.;-)
Don't be so critical. NTSecurity is a reputable site, and I have no doubt that it activly worries about the validity of content presented. In a side note, here's an alternate theory. The fellow in question is writing from Windows with a copy of Word. The spell checker in Word, as we all know, sucks badly 'out-of-the-box'.(although it has improved considerably) I can't check to be certain, (I don't own a Windows box, much less one with Office installed on it) but I don't think 'censored' is in the standard dictionary. How many times has Word 'autocorrect'ed words on you?
What happens when 'The Big Bad Evil Government(tm)' or 'The Big Bad Evil Corporation(tm)' comes knocking on my door to search it warrentless, or decides my property shoudn't be mine at all, but theirs? If its just me getting walked on, not much. They wrong me, I sue, I might even win. They decide to do this to a whole lot of people, what then? We shoot them. Dead, preferably.
The government has the responsibility to use its granted powers to serve the will of the people. We, the people, have the responsibility to make sure the government serves us. Owning a firearm and learning to use it properly is the only real way we can have this right.
'The Big Bad Evil Government' is a registered trademark of the People's Republic of China. 'The Big Bad Evil Corporation is a trademark of Microsoft.
You're both slightly wrong. When you go to get a government job, who do you think investigates your background? The FBI, of course! And when the FBI looks for 'Neko, Osu' in that big ol' Oracle database of theirs, what do you think comes up? 'Subject under investigation for subversion and/or collabaration in an act of treason'. Then FBI Field Agent John Smith slaps the application with his big red 'REJECTED' stamp, and you don't get to swab the floors in the Library of Congress for minimum wage. You see, the background check criteria include probability of a future criminal offense too.
Ask yourself this: If you were Field Agent Smith, would you pass someone with such a background, when many other qualified applicants exist with squeaky records? Would you want to take shit if said individual screwed up? I wouldn't, and neither would you. Hence we come to the conclusion that 'Investigation == No Government job', even if it isn't exactly legally mandated so.
On a side note, the FBI do take your driving record into consideration, perhaps too weightedly so. An associate of mine almost failed the background check over his bad record (ran two stop signs in one year) when his company bid on a crap programming job for one of the cabinet-level agencies. (Dept of Energy, I think..)
I know what you mean.. There is a comforting feeling to get that dose of 'Petrified/Grits' along with the regular commentary. Kind of like the moronic poking/prodding/slapping bit the Three Stooges did; Moe always won, Curly always got it the worst, and we always laughed.
I must say that 'Mr. Petrified' has gone above and beyond his usual effort for this one. He's moving beyond the standard one-line 'xxxx xxxxx NAKED AND PETRIFIED'. Either that, or we're seeing a new 'Mr. Petrified'.
I've owned quite a few 'classic' cars: 68 Mercedes 280SE/8, 1976 Ford LTD, 1979 Camaro Berlinetta, etc. I think it comes down to the 'tweak' issue. Geeks like to tweak. 1970 Nova == tweakable. 1990 Mercury Sable == tweak_it_and_it_dies. If I wanted to, I could walk out to my Camaro and adjust a few hundred run-time parameters easily, from raw timing to how far the reverse position on my Hurst is from the tuning knob on the radio. About the only thing I can adjust on my 1992 Topaz is the radio station presets.
On a related subject. I've noticed that geeks often go for the '400hp rustbucket' over the less involved 'visually stunning stock'. In my case I can attribute it to my horrible lack of skill in body work. (I can rebuild a FMX, yet Bondo eludes me). I'm sure that isn't the case for all of us. What's the deal?
Perhaps you can reengineer the sensors. Had an 80's LTD that refused to run right after I fitted it for a hotter cam and a Holley. The air flow sensor, which the computer would not function without, thought the measurement it had was screwy and retarded the timing. Replacing the distributor with an aftermarket (or older) points-type unit wasn't feasable, nor was an aftermarket computer; No money left in my pocket. The sensor was simple enough, supplying a variable resistance to the computer. I simply added my own resistor to the sensor loop, and tweaked away.
You should see the sidewalk outside of my office the first nice day of spring.. BMW, Indian, Honda.... Seems half the IT staff rides. I prefer Detroit steel and big-block V-8's.. Nothing quite like looking at an Esprit or a Cobra and knowing you can take it.
Tron The classic, starring Jeff Bridges. I have a CAP disc copy of this I still watch! Geeks usually have the latest toys though, so buy the DVD. A George Romero (the Night of the Living Dead guy) movie might also work, depending on your flavour of geek.
Yes, I'm wandering away from books, but heres my last suggestion. Buy your geek some antique computer equipment. An Atari 800, an Altair, a PDPxx, etc. Even a Atari 2600 or a ColecoVision. I know I'd love a 'new' (to me) computer for Christmas! There are real plusses to this; the equipment is cheap, NOBODY expects a Tandy tablet in their stocking (please?), and it gives the geek bragging rights over their geek brethren.
Word of warning: If I get ONE more STUPID copy of 'Windows NT for Dummies', I will shoot the messenger and then shoot you. The joke is old! Enough already!
Please! Pour some scalding hot grits down your pants! It'll be fun for all of us! While you're at it, how about a nice big bottle of nitric acid? That'll leave some scars to show the chicks! (If it leaves any flesh-like substance intact at all!)
But don't forget that most hospitals don't have in-room internet connections yet, so I guess you won't be able to post to/. all day long..
(The first post was funny. The second was slightly funny. The third was tired. The fourth deserves punishment, even if it has been 'Hand-Crafted' to stay on-topic.)
I remember those days. For a while, I had a Epson(Olivetti) XT board with a V-20 (Siemens stamp, stolen out of a Wyse terminal) clocked to a whopping 23.2MHz. As a bare chip, I could only ever get it up to about 18MHz. A pair of smallish heatsinks stolen from a 12v power-supply and some Radio-Shack 'Heat-sink' compound are what made the final 5.2 MHz difference. I would have gone farther, but that was the fastest clock I could get out of the oscillator.
If I remember, the V-20 was designed for a 16MHz clock, but I may be wrong!
During my lean times,(when I couldn't afford the latest technological toy) I've done work at various Mom+Pop computer shops, and I can tell you that overclocking isn't exactly foreign to them. Granted, with the 'locked' (grin) PIIs and PIIIs, things have become a bit more difficult, but the practice remains. In one instance, a shop had orders for a dozen custom-built K6-2 450's. Unfortunatly, they were short four processors and didn't have time to order from their regular vendor. They substituted 350s, tagged the heatsink down with cyanoacrylate, and overclocked them. The owner figured when/if they came back with instability problems, he'd swap out for the correct chip, blame it on the customers inevitable Windows goff and cover his losses with the repair fee.
In another, a store was selling two identical K6-3 systems, both containing 400mhz processors, but labelling some as 400s and some as 450s. Plus, they were charging $70 more for the '450'.
I've also seen stores passing 66mhz SDRAM off for 100, and NON-PC-100 for PC-100. Some boards will run 66 well enough on a 100mhz bus (DFI, most MVP3 based, etc) and will sell those customers the slower memory at the faster price.
You don't even want me to get into the older horror stories, like the fellow who was substituting V chips and a manual clock tweak (in the customers old board) for a new 286. Or the woman who just couldn't sell a bunch of DX4-120 systems, so she stuck a sign reading 'Pentium 60 Closeout' and sold them fifty bucks cheaper than a REAL P60. This same woman just LOVED when the 5x86 came out; Now she could refit $20 DX2 MBs with 5x86-133's and truthfully label the computer as a '133mhz Pentium-Clone'.(Note the hyphen)
The post is now five and 1/2 hours old. Why, when these are on the 'front page' do they garner endless discussion, but yet die otherwise? Are we all too apathetic to click the YRO box in/box prefs? Perhaps splitting the topic off was premature and/or ill advised..
Whoa now! MSNBC constantly goes out of its way to point out MS faults. They indeed often overcompensate in their effort to be LESS biased than other, non-MS media ventures because of the affiliation. When something goes wrong in the DOJ trial, or some new MS fault is discovered, MSNBC usually has it first and are often the only major outlet to run it.
'Pointing your finger for no good reason is a good way to get it broken.' one of my elementary teachers.
Additionally, Allen has little, if nothing to do with MS these days. (Other than being a shareholder)
This says something really sick about the/. user population. As soon as the YRO stories are removed from the 'front page' spotlight, the are seen nevermore. This topic was posted quite a few minutes ago, and yet I am the first post.
Our rights should be one of our first and foremost worries, especially with the existant technology that makes it very easy for your rights to be trampled on without you ever knowing, and this damn knee-jerk Congress that I honestly think would like a police state.
Those who would give their rights for comfort deserve neither.
Your fine use of the English language clearly shows you to be of alternate extraction. However, one US-centric comment need not raise your ire to a stage such as this. Comments like that only serve to perpetuate the sterotype that we as 'foreigners' are stupid, insensitive, nose-in-the-air cads. Besides, most/. posters are 'American', as is the site itself. Don't like the company? I'm sure Argentina has an equivalent, perhaps even in a more familiar tongue. Go there, and leave us to/.
Unfortunatly, in order for your example to happen Torvalds and Cox would have to turn into blithering idiots. Coolness escalates the likelyhood of patch inclusion. If our vaulted tree-keepers ever get that way, I hope we do indeed fork.;-)
There is another possibility. If the team of ninja Foo programmers initiated cool changes at a much more rapid pace than the main Linux development tree, a fork could also result. Unfortunatly, I find it hard to believe that even the most targeted team of caffiene junkie, black magic wielding Ninjitsu programmers could ever outpace the main kernel, with several hundred programmers. (I think this falls under the 'blithering idiot' case to a certain extent.
If Gore's staffers were technically inclined, do you really think they'd let him get away with some of the stuff he says? No. They'd beat it into him through course after course of 'No, Al, say it THIS WAY.'
Who says we need a 'technically aware' staffer? Geeks sometimes grek the political process, and obviously the staffer knows a thing or two about presidential politics.
Anyone know if the 'Socialist' party is running a candidate? And who he/she/it might be?
Yes, it could 'read' text, VERY badly. There were also a variety of hardware add-ons for the Apple, most of them based on a Texas Instruments Digital Speech chip, with all the phonic elements in an EEPROM. I had something like that in my BigBlue XT; slid into an ISA slot and used a TSR to give you something to pipe into. You could understand it with a little training, even turned up full speed. (I think it would do up to ten elements a second; a little like saying a-b-c-d-e-f-g-h-i-j in one second)
Accessability features? Magnification:Set the console text mode to something huge. Utilize the CtrlAlt- combo in X. Braille terminals: There is a getty that likes them! text->speech: Festival, with a good voice, is great!
Note: I am not physically-challenged, so I really have no clue how well these would work for the average, say, blind guy.
Slashdot Mirror
They're really not fun when they're hot. I've been knocked out a few times by flyback voltage when working on monitors, and you always wake up with a pounding headache and aching muscles. Usually it was because someone handed me the UNINSULATED screwdriver by mistake, or because someone distracted me, or because I was too drunk to be making that kind of adjustment) Monochrome monitors (Herc, or those bastard Cornerstone 21's) are the worst. Most modern 15/17 inch VGA monitors hardly hurt at all. They're actually nicer than 120 vac, but I wouldn't want to hold on to the lead.
It is never a good day to quit smoking, is it?
How do you draw the conclusion that we are due a huge, reversable climate change? At the moment, our best brains seem to be saying that the observed warming is due to the fact we're not quite out of the Ice age yet.
/. clipped the comment for some strange reason. The last line should have read:
Can you still use the old Slackware 97 type installer? Has it even changed? I loved that thing!
SuSe can also do minimalist installs easily. I've done installs (including X and basic X apps) in under 90 Mb. I've also done one totally stripped SuSe install in 51 Mb. (If I didn't use it EVERY log in, or it wasn't req'd for mpg123/cdparanoia, it wasn't installed).
RedHat is much trickier than it used to be on installs of the small variety.
However, I beleive Debian fits the criteria best.
Offtopic: Can you still use the old
Then you are a better person than most and probably a better person than I. Its situations like this one that make me glad I didn't put that Criminal Justice degree to use. ;-)
Don't be so critical. NTSecurity is a reputable site, and I have no doubt that it activly worries about the validity of content presented. In a side note, here's an alternate theory. The fellow in question is writing from Windows with a copy of Word. The spell checker in Word, as we all know, sucks badly 'out-of-the-box'.(although it has improved considerably) I can't check to be certain, (I don't own a Windows box, much less one with Office installed on it) but I don't think 'censored' is in the standard dictionary. How many times has Word 'autocorrect'ed words on you?
What happens when 'The Big Bad Evil Government(tm)' or 'The Big Bad Evil Corporation(tm)' comes knocking on my door to search it warrentless, or decides my property shoudn't be mine at all, but theirs? If its just me getting walked on, not much. They wrong me, I sue, I might even win. They decide to do this to a whole lot of people, what then?
We shoot them.
Dead, preferably.
The government has the responsibility to use its granted powers to serve the will of the people. We, the people, have the responsibility to make sure the government serves us. Owning a firearm and learning to use it properly is the only real way we can have this right.
'The Big Bad Evil Government' is a registered trademark of the People's Republic of China. 'The Big Bad Evil Corporation is a trademark of Microsoft.
You're both slightly wrong. When you go to get a government job, who do you think investigates your background? The FBI, of course! And when the FBI looks for 'Neko, Osu' in that big ol' Oracle database of theirs, what do you think comes up? 'Subject under investigation for subversion and/or collabaration in an act of treason'. Then FBI Field Agent John Smith slaps the application with his big red 'REJECTED' stamp, and you don't get to swab the floors in the Library of Congress for minimum wage. You see, the background check criteria include probability of a future criminal offense too.
Ask yourself this: If you were Field Agent Smith, would you pass someone with such a background, when many other qualified applicants exist with squeaky records? Would you want to take shit if said individual screwed up? I wouldn't, and neither would you. Hence we come to the conclusion that 'Investigation == No Government job', even if it isn't exactly legally mandated so.
On a side note, the FBI do take your driving record into consideration, perhaps too weightedly so. An associate of mine almost failed the background check over his bad record (ran two stop signs in one year) when his company bid on a crap programming job for one of the cabinet-level agencies. (Dept of Energy, I think..)
I know what you mean.. There is a comforting feeling to get that dose of 'Petrified/Grits' along with the regular commentary. Kind of like the moronic poking/prodding/slapping bit the Three Stooges did; Moe always won, Curly always got it the worst, and we always laughed.
I must say that 'Mr. Petrified' has gone above and beyond his usual effort for this one. He's moving beyond the standard one-line 'xxxx xxxxx NAKED AND PETRIFIED'. Either that, or we're seeing a new 'Mr. Petrified'.
Keep up the good work!
I've owned quite a few 'classic' cars: 68 Mercedes 280SE/8, 1976 Ford LTD, 1979 Camaro Berlinetta, etc. I think it comes down to the 'tweak' issue. Geeks like to tweak. 1970 Nova == tweakable. 1990 Mercury Sable == tweak_it_and_it_dies. If I wanted to, I could walk out to my Camaro and adjust a few hundred run-time parameters easily, from raw timing to how far the reverse position on my Hurst is from the tuning knob on the radio. About the only thing I can adjust on my 1992 Topaz is the radio station presets.
On a related subject. I've noticed that geeks often go for the '400hp rustbucket' over the less involved 'visually stunning stock'. In my case I can attribute it to my horrible lack of skill in body work. (I can rebuild a FMX, yet Bondo eludes me). I'm sure that isn't the case for all of us. What's the deal?
Perhaps you can reengineer the sensors. Had an 80's LTD that refused to run right after I fitted it for a hotter cam and a Holley. The air flow sensor, which the computer would not function without, thought the measurement it had was screwy and retarded the timing. Replacing the distributor with an aftermarket (or older) points-type unit wasn't feasable, nor was an aftermarket computer; No money left in my pocket. The sensor was simple enough, supplying a variable resistance to the computer. I simply added my own resistor to the sensor loop, and tweaked away.
You should see the sidewalk outside of my office the first nice day of spring.. BMW, Indian, Honda.... Seems half the IT staff rides. I prefer Detroit steel and big-block V-8's.. Nothing quite like looking at an Esprit or a Cobra and knowing you can take it.
Some more book suggestions:
The Blind Watchmaker -- Richard Dawkins
The expanded title of the book is 'Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.' That says it all.
A Brief History of Time
Call it an introduction the Universe.
User Friendly, the book.
Do I need to explain the geek-significance?
Tron
The classic, starring Jeff Bridges. I have a CAP disc copy of this I still watch! Geeks usually have the latest toys though, so buy the DVD. A George Romero (the Night of the Living Dead guy) movie might also work, depending on your flavour of geek.
Yes, I'm wandering away from books, but heres my last suggestion. Buy your geek some antique computer equipment. An Atari 800, an Altair, a PDPxx, etc. Even a Atari 2600 or a ColecoVision. I know I'd love a 'new' (to me) computer for Christmas! There are real plusses to this; the equipment is cheap, NOBODY expects a Tandy tablet in their stocking (please?), and it gives the geek bragging rights over their geek brethren.
Word of warning: If I get ONE more STUPID copy of 'Windows NT for Dummies', I will shoot the messenger and then shoot you. The joke is old! Enough already!
Please! Pour some scalding hot grits down your pants! It'll be fun for all of us! While you're at it, how about a nice big bottle of nitric acid? That'll leave some scars to show the chicks! (If it leaves any flesh-like substance intact at all!)
/. all day long..
But don't forget that most hospitals don't have in-room internet connections yet, so I guess you won't be able to post to
(The first post was funny. The second was slightly funny. The third was tired. The fourth deserves punishment, even if it has been 'Hand-Crafted' to stay on-topic.)
I remember those days. For a while, I had a Epson(Olivetti) XT board with a V-20 (Siemens stamp, stolen out of a Wyse terminal) clocked to a whopping 23.2MHz. As a bare chip, I could only ever get it up to about 18MHz. A pair of smallish heatsinks stolen from a 12v power-supply and some Radio-Shack 'Heat-sink' compound are what made the final 5.2 MHz difference. I would have gone farther, but that was the fastest clock I could get out of the oscillator.
If I remember, the V-20 was designed for a 16MHz clock, but I may be wrong!
During my lean times,(when I couldn't afford the latest technological toy) I've done work at various Mom+Pop computer shops, and I can tell you that overclocking isn't exactly foreign to them. Granted, with the 'locked' (grin) PIIs and PIIIs, things have become a bit more difficult, but the practice remains. In one instance, a shop had orders for a dozen custom-built K6-2 450's. Unfortunatly, they were short four processors and didn't have time to order from their regular vendor. They substituted 350s, tagged the heatsink down with cyanoacrylate, and overclocked them. The owner figured when/if they came back with instability problems, he'd swap out for the correct chip, blame it on the customers inevitable Windows goff and cover his losses with the repair fee.
In another, a store was selling two identical K6-3 systems, both containing 400mhz processors, but labelling some as 400s and some as 450s. Plus, they were charging $70 more for the '450'.
I've also seen stores passing 66mhz SDRAM off for 100, and NON-PC-100 for PC-100. Some boards will run 66 well enough on a 100mhz bus (DFI, most MVP3 based, etc) and will sell those customers the slower memory at the faster price.
You don't even want me to get into the older horror stories, like the fellow who was substituting V chips and a manual clock tweak (in the customers old board) for a new 286. Or the woman who just couldn't sell a bunch of DX4-120 systems, so she stuck a sign reading 'Pentium 60 Closeout' and sold them fifty bucks cheaper than a REAL P60. This same woman just LOVED when the 5x86 came out; Now she could refit $20 DX2 MBs with 5x86-133's and truthfully label the computer as a '133mhz Pentium-Clone'.(Note the hyphen)
The post is now five and 1/2 hours old. Why, when these are on the 'front page' do they garner endless discussion, but yet die otherwise? Are we all too apathetic to click the YRO box in /box prefs? Perhaps splitting the topic off was premature and/or ill advised..
Whoa now! MSNBC constantly goes out of its way to point out MS faults. They indeed often overcompensate in their effort to be LESS biased than other, non-MS media ventures because of the affiliation. When something goes wrong in the DOJ trial, or some new MS fault is discovered, MSNBC usually has it first and are often the only major outlet to run it.
'Pointing your finger for no good reason is a good way to get it broken.' one of my elementary teachers.
Additionally, Allen has little, if nothing to do with MS these days. (Other than being a shareholder)
This says something really sick about the /. user population. As soon as the YRO stories are removed from the 'front page' spotlight, the are seen nevermore. This topic was posted quite a few minutes ago, and yet I am the first post.
Our rights should be one of our first and foremost worries, especially with the existant technology that makes it very easy for your rights to be trampled on without you ever knowing, and this damn knee-jerk Congress that I honestly think would like a police state.
Those who would give their rights for comfort deserve neither.
Your fine use of the English language clearly shows you to be of alternate extraction. However, one US-centric comment need not raise your ire to a stage such as this. Comments like that only serve to perpetuate the sterotype that we as 'foreigners' are stupid, insensitive, nose-in-the-air cads. Besides, most /. posters are 'American', as is the site itself. Don't like the company? I'm sure Argentina has an equivalent, perhaps even in a more familiar tongue. Go there, and leave us to /.
Unfortunatly, in order for your example to happen Torvalds and Cox would have to turn into blithering idiots. Coolness escalates the likelyhood of patch inclusion. If our vaulted tree-keepers ever get that way, I hope we do indeed fork. ;-)
There is another possibility. If the team of ninja Foo programmers initiated cool changes at a much more rapid pace than the main Linux development tree, a fork could also result. Unfortunatly, I find it hard to believe that even the most targeted team of caffiene junkie, black magic wielding Ninjitsu programmers could ever outpace the main kernel, with several hundred programmers. (I think this falls under the 'blithering idiot' case to a certain extent.
If Gore's staffers were technically inclined, do you really think they'd let him get away with some of the stuff he says? No. They'd beat it into him through course after course of 'No, Al, say it THIS WAY.'
Who says we need a 'technically aware' staffer? Geeks sometimes grek the political process, and obviously the staffer knows a thing or two about presidential politics.
Anyone know if the 'Socialist' party is running a candidate? And who he/she/it might be?
Yes, it could 'read' text, VERY badly. There were also a variety of hardware add-ons for the Apple, most of them based on a Texas Instruments Digital Speech chip, with all the phonic elements in an EEPROM. I had something like that in my BigBlue XT; slid into an ISA slot and used a TSR to give you something to pipe into. You could understand it with a little training, even turned up full speed. (I think it would do up to ten elements a second; a little like saying a-b-c-d-e-f-g-h-i-j in one second)
Accessability features?
Magnification:Set the console text mode to something huge. Utilize the CtrlAlt- combo in X.
Braille terminals: There is a getty that likes them!
text->speech: Festival, with a good voice, is great!
Note: I am not physically-challenged, so I really have no clue how well these would work for the average, say, blind guy.
When I saw the headline, for a fleeting moment I had a vision:
Mickey Mouse, shorts around his ankles, being spanked over Janet Reno's knee.
Didn't Go.com's 'Executive-Vice-Weenie' type get busted for interstate traffiking in kiddie porn?