Sorry about the previous formatting, all the other forums I use have plain old text as the default entry method. Yes, I'm lazy, unobservant, and still complaining...welcome to Slashdot.
One question that I get a lot is "do I have enough memory to run x" (that's x as a variable, dingus)
I've found a lot of users don't understand the distinction between available virtual memory and storage memory. They look at the size of the executable for WebShots and think that's how much memory it takes up. They then click "My Computer", hop over to their hard drive, and see that they have 80GB free. Wheee, I can load all the Anne Geddes screensavers I want, plus that little purple ape and so on and so on.
As a side note, I really want an OS indicator for disk reads/writes so that my wife, mom, uncle, etc can tell at a glance where the bottleneck is on a system at any given moment. I've taught them how they can check the virtual memory and the processor utilization, but I got nothing for disk thrashing short of hoping they have a really loud HDD or a poorly-insulated case.
- I take my car in when the Maint Reqd light goes on. Funny thing, it's a yellow bubble-shaped light.
- Every time I take my car in they find something that they can replace that I didn't even know was broken. Luckily I bought the extended warranty. (wonder what they'd find if I didn't)
- Can't speak on Barbie mudflaps, though that's more homoerotic than a lightsaber duel on a magma floe.
- Every time I take my car in, they say it's going to take half an hour. An hour later they come and apologize saying it'll just be a few more minutes. I now bring a book, get some good reading done, and drink a lot of their free gourmet coffee.
Yep, that's about it.
Fame, Fortune, and all that goes with it...
on
Ask The Mythbusters
·
· Score: 1
You guys are somewhat more famous than you used to be as fx wizards, and I'm curious:
What's the coolest thing that's happened to you, that you can attribute to your fame with the show, since you've become more well-known? (ok, besides having hot Mythterns)
I don't know you from Adam, so I'm not sure if you know this or not, but "suka" is Polish for "bitch". The irony of the RIAA referring to the average person that way was not lost upon me.
--A young Professor runs around the lab, shrieking "EUREKA" at the top of his lungs and grinning like a madman.--
Grad Student: Hey Professor, what's going on? did you spill the bromochloride down your pants on accident again?
Professor: I have had, perhaps, the most wonderful epiphany. It's BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT I TELL YOU.
Grad Student: Okay, I'll bite. What is it?
Professor: You know the Tri-Delt Sorority next door, the one with all the hot women that wouldn't speak to us unles we paid them?
Grad Student: Yeah...
Professor: Well, we're going to pay them to talk dirty to us.
Grad Student: But we barely have enough for Ramen noodles. We cook them here and pack them in our underwear for heat at night. Where are we going to get money?
Professor: That's the genius of it! We'll come up with a grant proposal for a cognitive study about swearing! Then we just tell them we have to find some local subjects who swear a lot, and we're SO IN!!!
You know, I have T-mobile. Just about the only thing worse than having all of your worldly possessions ripped away from you in an instant would be the ability to call someone you love and say
"Hey Mom...I just wanted to say.....HELLO? ARE YOU THERE? YOU'RE CUTTING IN AND OUT HELLO? *click*"
Followed by the call to T-mo customer service:
"Hello, here's my info, umm, no I can't call you from a land line. Yes, I'll hold. Hello, here's my information. No, I don't have anything but this phone. Yes, I'll hold. Hello? *click*"
I'd have to respectfully disagree, except I'm so full of spite right now that it's very difficult to be respectful.
Your thinking is exactly the kind of heads-down gristmill crap that just about killed all of the intellectual curiosity out of me by the time I'd finished my third year of high school.
I'm still trying to piece together how this happened in my normally peace-loving mind, but when the stories came out about Columbine, I couldn't figure out how it hadn't happened sooner. Then I thought about it some more, and figured it was really unfair to the students, and probably some of the teachers. They should have gone shooting in the admin buildings during institute days. That might have sent the right message. It was the institution they hated, they just blamed the sock puppets.
Yes, we need reform, but if it's your way we might as well just put the shock collars on the sheep and whenever they express an errant thought just give them a good jolt. After all, this country was founded on shutting up an obeying.
As much as I'd love to condemn his actions, I started thinking about the first idea that came to my mind when I heard he was going to be locked away for awhile... something along the lines of a private collection to pay one of the bigger kids in juvey to beat the crap out of him daily.
Somebody help me reason out why I'm right and he's still wrong!;)
You can extradite him to the People's Republic of Texas, where they have a rich history of creative and fun punishments such as Stumping.
That's where they cut down a tree, soak the stump in gasoline, affix a certain irreplaceable part of you to the stump, then light a match and hand you a knife. It's usually reserved for men who can't seem to take No for an answer when it comes to women, but that's kinda like hacking, right?
I made the mistake of buying an iPaq (2215) with PocketPC 2003 on it. In the last two years, there have been ZERO improvements to IE, zero MS patches or updates to the UI, and absolutely no additons to Windows Mobile Media Player 9 for it. That really cool landscape feature that's coming out....won't work with my version and there is no planned ROM upgrade.
This is as much of a problem with Compaq/HP as with MS, to hear the MS guys tell the story. This *still* absolutely sucks. I don't care whose fault it is, I just want updates like I see for 2000 or XP; which isn't much but it is something. I expect it for the price I payed.
It's a neat GPS/MP3 Player/Digital Picture viewer, but the lack of updates just pisses me off.
Never ever again. Don't care what it'll do because I know they'll just let me down as far as continuing support.
What about Han you insensitive clod?
on
How Lightsabers Work
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Han used a lightsaber in Empire to cut open that tauntaun that he stuck Luke in. Looks like he was pretty precise with it. Han is midichlorian-less, AFAIK.
Now I will go and soak in bleach for awhile, in the hopes that if I wash enough of the dork smell off that my wife will come near me again.
My father works at Rush-Presbyterian in Chicago doing neurological monitoring for surgeries. There have been a lot of advances in using MagStim to detect motor neuron path issues, plus using it to treat behavioral and degenerative conditions.
There's also some companies that are looking into ways to lessen the amount of invasive procedures, but as of yet they're not mainstream AFAIK.
"In January, Stereotaxis received FDA approval for its new Niobe Magnetic Navigation System, which uses computer-controlled magnets, positioned external to the body, to steer catheters and guidewires throughout the cardiovascular system. The system works with Siemens' Axiom Artis dFC digital fluoroscopy system, which is used to visualize the devices as they are navigated. Stereotaxis says the catheter delivery system may eventually be used to steer DBS electrodes to a precise location in the brain."
This was Houston, right? Why didn't the girl just shoot the intruder? Everyone in Texas over the age of 4 carries a firearm, don't they?
911 is for *after* you dispense the justice. Then the cleanup crew comes and takes away the unfortunate fool who forgot which state he was in. "Why don't you go try that breaking and entering crap in California next time?"
Wonderful. Just what Novell needs, a homonym product with something already in their lineup.
Novell is actually really good at implementing good products and features, but their marketing and licensing sucks. I didn't think that used to matter, but trying to get CIO's and other pointy-hairs to put the product on the same playing field as M$ is annoyingly diffcult due to Novell's business-side ineptitude (or clever no-marketing strategy, you be the judge).
Microsoft has a product called Windows Sharepoint Portal Services, and a companion free product called Windows Sharepoint Services. It allows business units (read: pointy haired managers) to "create" their own webspaces. The file sharing (with revision history and check-in/check-out), discussion boards, and integrated web applets make it kind of handy. It gets IT out of the business of business-side communication. Anything that gets me out of marketing-drone-speak is cool with me, even if it is a hodge-podge instead of an elegant solution.
It'll be interesting what happens with the Sharepoint product line now that they've got their Groove on.
You know, I gave it some thought, and I'm happy that they're singling out tobacco products and taxing the crap out of them.
Call it what you like, I call it a pre-cancer tax, or a medicare premium, or whatever, but keep it. While they're at it I wish they'd do the same thing with fast food and alcohol. Make it more expensive to be shortsighted and hedonistic, spend everything now, and make the rest of us take care of your sorry ass when you eventually break down and are too poor to afford commercial medical coverage. It's selfish and stupid to think you have the right to enjoy yourself beyond your means, be it future or present means.
The real cool thing would be if they could use the "tax" to subsidize healthier food, do anti-drug campaigns, and to educate the underpriveleged, instead of misappropriating it like it is now.
No, I'm not against someone else's personal enjoyment, I'm against doing it on my dime. Which is precisely why I didn't vote for our current president.
You know, you had me and then you lost me. Chicago's strengths are many: the theatre, the commerce, the fine dining, the 3 days of Spring and Fall that preface blazingly hot Summers and Winters that get mayors either hired or fired.
I live in Chicago, and it's a place where you can get entire sides of beef relatively easily. Where the stockyards used to be there are now trendy restaurants, but the trends still lean towards a bit of gluttony. Eat enough at Gibsons or Weber Grill and they have wheelbarrow service out to your car.
Ridiculous stuff like Moto is tolerated and sometimes even enjoyed, but it doesn't add or take away from the aggregate greatness of my town. It only adds to the "you can get anything here, sometimes even things you want" factor.
Your post has enough of Ayn Rand's tireless rhetoric to drown a small nation, but it lacks perspective and foresight. That you post it would indicate you agree with it, which is a slippery slope indeed.
There is room for this sort of "as rich as I can possibly get" notion as long as there is an opposing force. Not the notion of morality, kindness, or connectedness to your fellow man, but an actual force like a law, tax, etc. I doubt very highly that a majority of the richest people still feel tugs of morality, but some of them still respond to laws. Those of whom haven't bought ways around them.
That force can come in the form of a higher tax bracket for the rich, or some other means of a hard limit on personal wealth. I'm not sure who's objective enough to decide what that limit should be, but I would argue that it shouldn't be Rand.
I have an image of her as a baby, and her first and only word she's screaming is "MINE....MINE....MINE" over and over again.
Was that your first word too?
It boggles my mind how they can fairly pick categories knowing most of Ken's strengths and weaknesses by now. You could do it totally random, but if it came up with "Sports History" "Opera" and "Art" then people would cry foul and they'd lose their precious ratings.
Anyone from the inside have any idea how they really pick questsions in this case? I know they *say* they just pull them from a list of predetermined categories, and that works fine in all other cases, but I'm thinking they moderate for Ken in some way, either for or against him just slightly.
"So I never understood this, why does Poland seem to end up being the butt of jokes?"
Americans, once they're naturalized for more than 2 generations (sometimes even less), like to make fun of ethnic immigrants who will work harder for less money. Sometimes they don't even need to be immigrants, hence all of the Indian programmer jokes.
Personally, my favorite joke is when someone calls our Legal system a *Justice* system.
For Windows, Novell currently has two clients, one for 95/98 and one for NT/2000/XP. The "log into the server" part is a minor component, trivial in comparision to every thing else it does, ZENWorks integration for one.
*snip*
In the last few years, Novell has been pushing hard on a *clientless* interface (native file access) due to all of the support issues with Windows and the Novell client. I've done Novell server support now for 8 years, and served a backup support role for the poor guys on the desktop side. The Novell client, while useful, always introduces some instability and performance degradation to any Windows machine. Novell knows that, as should anyone who actually has kept up with their CNE.
*sigh* Five minutes to install, and a lifetime to support.
I can see a huge use for this in the private sector. Mom finds out junior is abusing her internet account. She takes away the token, and only provides it when junior behaves. Added bonus is that we don't have to deal with junior trying every 'sploit he can find.
Caveat: if junior is anything like me, he'll either do some social engineering and get another token issued, or find another way to get dialup. Of course, if junior's mom is anything like mine was, that won't be under the radar for that long. My biggest motivator from 7-15 was trying to outwit my parents.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry about the previous formatting, all the other forums I use have plain old text as the default entry method. Yes, I'm lazy, unobservant, and still complaining...welcome to Slashdot.
One question that I get a lot is "do I have enough memory to run x" (that's x as a variable, dingus) I've found a lot of users don't understand the distinction between available virtual memory and storage memory. They look at the size of the executable for WebShots and think that's how much memory it takes up. They then click "My Computer", hop over to their hard drive, and see that they have 80GB free. Wheee, I can load all the Anne Geddes screensavers I want, plus that little purple ape and so on and so on. As a side note, I really want an OS indicator for disk reads/writes so that my wife, mom, uncle, etc can tell at a glance where the bottleneck is on a system at any given moment. I've taught them how they can check the virtual memory and the processor utilization, but I got nothing for disk thrashing short of hoping they have a really loud HDD or a poorly-insulated case.
Dude, you own an Acura too!!??
- I take my car in when the Maint Reqd light goes on. Funny thing, it's a yellow bubble-shaped light.
- Every time I take my car in they find something that they can replace that I didn't even know was broken. Luckily I bought the extended warranty. (wonder what they'd find if I didn't)
- Can't speak on Barbie mudflaps, though that's more homoerotic than a lightsaber duel on a magma floe.
- Every time I take my car in, they say it's going to take half an hour. An hour later they come and apologize saying it'll just be a few more minutes. I now bring a book, get some good reading done, and drink a lot of their free gourmet coffee.
Yep, that's about it.
You guys are somewhat more famous than you used to be as fx wizards, and I'm curious:
What's the coolest thing that's happened to you, that you can attribute to your fame with the show, since you've become more well-known? (ok, besides having hot Mythterns)
What's the lamest thing?
Gives a new meaning to the network being DOWN or having CRASHED, doesn't it?
:)
If they're ballons I wonder if they'll still call them Points of Presence (POP) or not.
I don't know you from Adam, so I'm not sure if you know this or not, but "suka" is Polish for "bitch". The irony of the RIAA referring to the average person that way was not lost upon me.
--A young Professor runs around the lab, shrieking "EUREKA" at the top of his lungs and grinning like a madman.--
Grad Student: Hey Professor, what's going on? did you spill the bromochloride down your pants on accident again?
Professor: I have had, perhaps, the most wonderful epiphany. It's BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT I TELL YOU.
Grad Student: Okay, I'll bite. What is it?
Professor: You know the Tri-Delt Sorority next door, the one with all the hot women that wouldn't speak to us unles we paid them?
Grad Student: Yeah...
Professor: Well, we're going to pay them to talk dirty to us.
Grad Student: But we barely have enough for Ramen noodles. We cook them here and pack them in our underwear for heat at night. Where are we going to get money?
Professor: That's the genius of it! We'll come up with a grant proposal for a cognitive study about swearing! Then we just tell them we have to find some local subjects who swear a lot, and we're SO IN!!!
Grad Student: It'll never work...
You know, I have T-mobile. Just about the only thing worse than having all of your worldly possessions ripped away from you in an instant would be the ability to call someone you love and say
..HELLO? ARE YOU THERE?
"Hey Mom...I just wanted to say...
YOU'RE CUTTING IN AND OUT
HELLO?
*click*"
Followed by the call to T-mo customer service:
"Hello, here's my info,
umm, no I can't call you from a land line.
Yes, I'll hold.
Hello, here's my information.
No, I don't have anything but this phone.
Yes, I'll hold.
Hello?
*click*"
Congrats, they just found a way to make it worse.
Maybe because it's not in NTSC yet?
I'd have to respectfully disagree, except I'm so full of spite right now that it's very difficult to be respectful.
Your thinking is exactly the kind of heads-down gristmill crap that just about killed all of the intellectual curiosity out of me by the time I'd finished my third year of high school.
I'm still trying to piece together how this happened in my normally peace-loving mind, but when the stories came out about Columbine, I couldn't figure out how it hadn't happened sooner. Then I thought about it some more, and figured it was really unfair to the students, and probably some of the teachers. They should have gone shooting in the admin buildings during institute days. That might have sent the right message. It was the institution they hated, they just blamed the sock puppets.
Yes, we need reform, but if it's your way we might as well just put the shock collars on the sheep and whenever they express an errant thought just give them a good jolt. After all, this country was founded on shutting up an obeying.
As much as I'd love to condemn his actions, I started thinking about the first idea that came to my mind when I heard he was going to be locked away for awhile... something along the lines of a private collection to pay one of the bigger kids in juvey to beat the crap out of him daily. Somebody help me reason out why I'm right and he's still wrong! ;)
You can extradite him to the People's Republic of Texas, where they have a rich history of creative and fun punishments such as Stumping.
That's where they cut down a tree, soak the stump in gasoline, affix a certain irreplaceable part of you to the stump, then light a match and hand you a knife. It's usually reserved for men who can't seem to take No for an answer when it comes to women, but that's kinda like hacking, right?
I made the mistake of buying an iPaq (2215) with PocketPC 2003 on it. In the last two years, there have been ZERO improvements to IE, zero MS patches or updates to the UI, and absolutely no additons to Windows Mobile Media Player 9 for it. That really cool landscape feature that's coming out....won't work with my version and there is no planned ROM upgrade.
This is as much of a problem with Compaq/HP as with MS, to hear the MS guys tell the story. This *still* absolutely sucks. I don't care whose fault it is, I just want updates like I see for 2000 or XP; which isn't much but it is something. I expect it for the price I payed.
It's a neat GPS/MP3 Player/Digital Picture viewer, but the lack of updates just pisses me off.
Never ever again. Don't care what it'll do because I know they'll just let me down as far as continuing support.
Now I will go and soak in bleach for awhile, in the hopes that if I wash enough of the dork smell off that my wife will come near me again.
There's also some companies that are looking into ways to lessen the amount of invasive procedures, but as of yet they're not mainstream AFAIK.
http://www.neurotechreports.com/pages/neurosurgery .html
From TFA:
"In January, Stereotaxis received FDA approval for its new Niobe Magnetic Navigation System, which uses computer-controlled magnets, positioned external to the body, to steer catheters and guidewires throughout the cardiovascular system. The system works with Siemens' Axiom Artis dFC digital fluoroscopy system, which is used to visualize the devices as they are navigated. Stereotaxis says the catheter delivery system may eventually be used to steer DBS electrodes to a precise location in the brain."
911 is for *after* you dispense the justice. Then the cleanup crew comes and takes away the unfortunate fool who forgot which state he was in. "Why don't you go try that breaking and entering crap in California next time?"
Novell is actually really good at implementing good products and features, but their marketing and licensing sucks. I didn't think that used to matter, but trying to get CIO's and other pointy-hairs to put the product on the same playing field as M$ is annoyingly diffcult due to Novell's business-side ineptitude (or clever no-marketing strategy, you be the judge).
It'll be interesting what happens with the Sharepoint product line now that they've got their Groove on.
jb
Call it what you like, I call it a pre-cancer tax, or a medicare premium, or whatever, but keep it. While they're at it I wish they'd do the same thing with fast food and alcohol. Make it more expensive to be shortsighted and hedonistic, spend everything now, and make the rest of us take care of your sorry ass when you eventually break down and are too poor to afford commercial medical coverage. It's selfish and stupid to think you have the right to enjoy yourself beyond your means, be it future or present means.
The real cool thing would be if they could use the "tax" to subsidize healthier food, do anti-drug campaigns, and to educate the underpriveleged, instead of misappropriating it like it is now.
No, I'm not against someone else's personal enjoyment, I'm against doing it on my dime. Which is precisely why I didn't vote for our current president.
You know, you had me and then you lost me. Chicago's strengths are many: the theatre, the commerce, the fine dining, the 3 days of Spring and Fall that preface blazingly hot Summers and Winters that get mayors either hired or fired.
I live in Chicago, and it's a place where you can get entire sides of beef relatively easily. Where the stockyards used to be there are now trendy restaurants, but the trends still lean towards a bit of gluttony. Eat enough at Gibsons or Weber Grill and they have wheelbarrow service out to your car.
Ridiculous stuff like Moto is tolerated and sometimes even enjoyed, but it doesn't add or take away from the aggregate greatness of my town. It only adds to the "you can get anything here, sometimes even things you want" factor.
Your post has enough of Ayn Rand's tireless rhetoric to drown a small nation, but it lacks perspective and foresight. That you post it would indicate you agree with it, which is a slippery slope indeed. There is room for this sort of "as rich as I can possibly get" notion as long as there is an opposing force. Not the notion of morality, kindness, or connectedness to your fellow man, but an actual force like a law, tax, etc. I doubt very highly that a majority of the richest people still feel tugs of morality, but some of them still respond to laws. Those of whom haven't bought ways around them. That force can come in the form of a higher tax bracket for the rich, or some other means of a hard limit on personal wealth. I'm not sure who's objective enough to decide what that limit should be, but I would argue that it shouldn't be Rand. I have an image of her as a baby, and her first and only word she's screaming is "MINE....MINE....MINE" over and over again. Was that your first word too?
Anyone from the inside have any idea how they really pick questsions in this case? I know they *say* they just pull them from a list of predetermined categories, and that works fine in all other cases, but I'm thinking they moderate for Ken in some way, either for or against him just slightly.
Americans, once they're naturalized for more than 2 generations (sometimes even less), like to make fun of ethnic immigrants who will work harder for less money. Sometimes they don't even need to be immigrants, hence all of the Indian programmer jokes.
Personally, my favorite joke is when someone calls our Legal system a *Justice* system.
*snip*
For Windows, Novell currently has two clients, one for 95/98 and one for NT/2000/XP. The "log into the server" part is a minor component, trivial in comparision to every thing else it does, ZENWorks integration for one.
*snip*
In the last few years, Novell has been pushing hard on a *clientless* interface (native file access) due to all of the support issues with Windows and the Novell client. I've done Novell server support now for 8 years, and served a backup support role for the poor guys on the desktop side. The Novell client, while useful, always introduces some instability and performance degradation to any Windows machine. Novell knows that, as should anyone who actually has kept up with their CNE.
*sigh* Five minutes to install, and a lifetime to support.
Caveat: if junior is anything like me, he'll either do some social engineering and get another token issued, or find another way to get dialup. Of course, if junior's mom is anything like mine was, that won't be under the radar for that long. My biggest motivator from 7-15 was trying to outwit my parents.