... MacBook Pro BSODed twice while installing various software. XP itself was installed by Tekserve in NYC before receipt of the computer. OS X itself was dead stable, OTOH, so I guess it all balances out:)
When I had an MS-DOS-based BBS (bulletin board system) in the early 90s, someone basically r00t3d it and created a bunch of files on the hard drive with names like "HA HA HA" and "YER FCKD". Took me a while to remove them, since the space character wasn't ASCII 32 (which isn't allowed in DOS filenames) but was ASCII 160 (IIRC, which was allowed). I couldn't just do DEL *.* since there were other important files in that directory.
Wildcards work just as well under cmd.exe. You can do cd pr*\mic* for example...
-b.
Re:While driving? Safety?
on
Talking iPods
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· Score: 1
That's why those steering-wheel remotes are nice. Big buttons with the basic features, built right into the sterring wheel.
Yeah, but I was thinking more like something like the dashboard of a Volvo 240. BIG dials for lights, fan, heat & A/C, thumb-sized buttons for air direction, old-fashioned rocker switches or large levers for everything else. The panel looks like it belongs in a Peterbuilt, but it's much more functional, intuitive, and easier to customize than the overdesigned interiors of cars today!
My first car - a 1980 Fiat Spider - had an interior with similarly good usability that even managed to look moderately pretty. So form can even be melded with function - it's just that too many auto companies choose not to.
-b.
Re:While driving? Safety?
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 1
You shouldn't need to press any controls from the beginning to end of your trip.
So, perhaps, a "I'm not really in the mood for this. NEXT!" Panic Button should be the only control on the thing?:)
Really the more useful part of this (for the average used) would be the blocking of known phish sites and/or typo correction, than the caching. And to be honest, I don't see that greate a value in it.
Nor I. AFA phish scams, I type the (bank or whatever) site name into the browser myself - I don't click on links asking for account information in emails. Typo correction? What's the big deal about getting an error message that the named site doesn't exist and for you to reenter the name? What if you were looking for macrosoft.com, whose DNS reg has expired, so you get routed to Micro$oft.com with no questions asked?
-b.
Re:While driving? Safety?
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 1
You missed out up/down volumne
Nope, that can be controlled by the car radio itself. Listening to an iPod through headphones while driving probably isn't too smart (nor legal most places).
Creating an interface that explicitly encourages use WHILE DRIVING is insane, and probably a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.
I'm surprised all of those companies that make car radios and CD changers are still in business. Speaking seriously, the best interface would probably be a 5-button remote.
(1) Play/Pause
(2) Next song
(3) Prev song
(4) Next playlist
(5) Prev playlist
I may add that the buttons should be *big* to allow their use while wearing gloves - the profusion of many tiny buttons is one of my peeves about newer cars!
Sites can periodically change their IPs. Is some kind of testing included in the caching app that makes sure that the cached IP numbers still work? And, even if the testing is periodic, will sites that change their IP numbers be broken longer than the usual propagation time of changes?
And they'dk *better* not cache *.homeip.net and *.dyndns.com.....
How is this different from what was going on 100 years ago when Irish, Italians, and other Europeans were encouraged to immigrate and fill low-wage factory jobs or drive spikes on the railroads?!
True - Indians and Latin Americans look a bit more different than the idealized image of an "American" - but they'll assimilate and be accepted in a few generations just like the earlier waves of immigrants.
Ohh, those silly Europeans... that kind of thing would never happen in the US!
Except that the Europeans are already doing it on a mass scale, albeit with different technology (number plate recognition cameras). See: the London congestion charge. We may be 'testing' this system, and it's unlikely to fly now, since the gas tax provides an equally-good solution while encouraging the purchase of more efficient vehicles (there's a big outcry about Middle Eastern oil use and/or global warming on now). If gas tax revenues are lost, they can always the raise the gas tax over a period of years to "keep up with inflation."
We already have tolls in some highways. If the highway from city A to city B is 100 kms long, we do not need a satellite to tell us that a car that went from A to B has run from 100 kms... maybe in USA it is different, but here in Europe that ride would be always of 100kms.
And as for a toll "for each kilometer a vehicle runs, in any road", we have taxes on gas for serve to mean a cost per kilometer/type of vehicle.
I'm aware of those objections to digital road tolling, and I agree with them. It doesn't mean that the government won't try to implement electronic tolling - government is always looking for new ways to take money from the people! Also, being able to track movements of cars (and, thus, people) is a nice side benefit.
The Euro-peons are thinking about using the Galileo system as part of an electronic road tolling scheme. Under the plan, each car/truck will eventually be equipped with a satellite receiver, record its location periodically (say, 1x/min) and "phone home" every so often. Charging will be based upon where and how far the car goes (maybe bonus fees for excess speed:( ). So, bearing in mind the surveillance potential of such a scheme, I'd think the best way to "crack" one of the Galileo satellites would be an ASAT missile...
And before anyone chimes in that the Europeans don't have the same potential to be repressive as the Americans; historically, some of the most repressive regimes have been European governments.
If the phone's capabilities were limited to just necessary family and emergency/taxi/etc contacts, it's a pretty sure bet these kids wouldn't be voicing and texting all that much during school hours - that probably being the main reason the admins don't WANT the kids to have the phones in the schools, no?
Simpler solution: if a kid is caught repeatedly texting or talking on a cell. during class hours, take the thing away and return it to the kid's parents after they come in to the principal's office. It worked with GameBoys in the 80s - no reason why it shouldn't work now. If kids are texting during school hours that aren't classes (like free periods, lunch/recess, in the halls between classes) - what's the big deal as long as they get to class on time? The purpose of school is to educate, not to be a tyranny with purely arbitrary rules!
Wasteful? If it's cheaper to make a good elsewhere and then ship it than to make it locally, it's more wasteful to produce that good locally.
Actually, US manufacturing could be a hell of a lot cheaper than it is now while maintaining our good standards of living. Sadly, our labor unions don't support increased automation, so we are forced to rely on cheap foreign drudge-labor, often in countries that aren't our friends.
Listed-number voicemail for the family's use too - no one else should need to leave a cell message for your kid if YOU'RE paying the bill. When they're old enough to afford their own cell phone bill then it becomes a different matter.
The cheapest cell plan is like $39.99 per month for about 450 minutes in the US. I find it hard to believe that a kid'd use that much time just calling family - the rest of the plan would go to waste. Why not allow the kid to use the remainder of the plan to call friends, etc? If the parents are paying the bill, they'll get to see the phone numbers dialed at the end of every month anyway.
There isn't much you can do when a few cops come into the classroom and tell everyone to put their phones on the desk and get out.
No, Officer Pigford, I am not giving you the unlock password. If you want to, you're more than welcome to arrest me and see what a judge has to say. After a town/school wastes a sufficient amount of time with many such cases involving *totally* blank cell phone memories, they might be less inclined to intrude on students' privacy.
requiring the usual unlock code to view contacts, etc.
If you enter the correct code, you get an "Invalid Code" message and get to view the real contact info.
Entering the wrong code gets you a "Correct Code" message and a blank contact list. Unless you retry within 60 sec, all of the data in the phone's NVRAM automatically gets fragged and overwritten with contacts named "F. U. Pig" and "A. Narchy".
Hey, I still do, because it's so easy! They're riding those bikes while rubbing their genitals against the saddle, wearing those ghey tight shorts (or moronic baggy ones) and stupid fugly helmets, taking up space on the roads for no reason at all.
I commute around NYC by bike, so "no reason at all" isn't always true. It's faster than walking, driving, or taking the subway; better exercise; and doesn't get you any parking tickets ever.
I hope by "bikers" you meant the people riding bicycles, not motorbikes. Those guys would kick my ass.
Talk to the motorbike people once in a while. They're actually pretty cool most of the time and many of them are geeks in their own way - they hack mechanical things instead of software.
-b. (who rides both types of bikes and enjoys it all)
Carriers have mostly succeeded in tying phone hardware to phone service. So you can't just go out and choose the best phone and then choose the best carrier
Assuming you have a GSM carrier (Cingular or T-Mob), you *can* move the SIM card to another phone. And there's a glut of "unlocked"[*] phones available on EBay and from online retailers, which will accept any SIM card. With CDMA that Verizon uses, of course, you actually have to *tell* the carrier that you're changing phones, since there aren't swappable SIM cards in that system. The phone that you get with the service? You can unlock the thing with a variety of 3rd party utilities and then sell it yourself on EBay.
you need to try and find some not-awful intersection of the two, and end up with a phone that has had many of its abilities intentionally disabled by the carrier.
Again, online retailers to the rescue. You can buy phones from Europe with factory firmware installed. Look for a phone that also does 850 MHz - otherwise you'll have weak signals in some places. The only problem with this approach is that factory firmware sometimes isn't optimised to work well with the carrier - i.e. I used a Siemens SK65 phone with Cingular for a while and you weren't able to set the delay before a call went to voicemail and also voicemail notifications were slightly screwed up. (Good phone otherwise, except for the lack of 850MHz capability!)
-b.
[*]- US cell carriers "lock" their phones so they only accept *their* SIM cards until an unlock key is entered or new firmware is loaded. You can generally get the unlock codes from them after your 1- or 2-year initial agreement expires. (Use the excuse that you're going to a remote area of Upper Tadjikistan with no service;)
You've got to be kidding me. Timothy McVeigh used enough explosive to destroy a SOLID building in Kansas City (sic). How much wout it take to destroy a tunnel?
A lot more than you think - the OKC building wasn't lined with steel sections that are probably half a foot thick, held in compression by the surrounding rock. That's not to say that an explosion in the tunnel would be a minor event - the blast itself would kill or injure a lot of people in the tunnel, plus critical systems like ventilation and pumps would be gutted. This isn't even mentioning the shock and disruptive value of the event: who would want to use any of the tunnels into NYC afterwards?
... if terrorists were to blow up all the roads and bridges in New York City, they'd be doing everybody a favor.
Have you ever actually tried driving on them?
I don't know - they seem to work pretty well, at least in the City proper and NJ. If anything, traffic in the DC area seems to be about 5x worse... Long Island is something else, but that can be solved by avoiding the place like the plague as I do.
Slashdot Mirror
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Yeah, but I was thinking more like something like the dashboard of a Volvo 240. BIG dials for lights, fan, heat & A/C, thumb-sized buttons for air direction, old-fashioned rocker switches or large levers for everything else. The panel looks like it belongs in a Peterbuilt, but it's much more functional, intuitive, and easier to customize than the overdesigned interiors of cars today!
My first car - a 1980 Fiat Spider - had an interior with similarly good usability that even managed to look moderately pretty. So form can even be melded with function - it's just that too many auto companies choose not to.
-b.
So, perhaps, a "I'm not really in the mood for this. NEXT!" Panic Button should be the only control on the thing? :)
-b.
Nor I. AFA phish scams, I type the (bank or whatever) site name into the browser myself - I don't click on links asking for account information in emails. Typo correction? What's the big deal about getting an error message that the named site doesn't exist and for you to reenter the name? What if you were looking for macrosoft.com, whose DNS reg has expired, so you get routed to Micro$oft.com with no questions asked?
-b.
Nope, that can be controlled by the car radio itself. Listening to an iPod through headphones while driving probably isn't too smart (nor legal most places).
-b.
I'm surprised all of those companies that make car radios and CD changers are still in business. Speaking seriously, the best interface would probably be a 5-button remote.
(1) Play/Pause
(2) Next song
(3) Prev song
(4) Next playlist
(5) Prev playlist
I may add that the buttons should be *big* to allow their use while wearing gloves - the profusion of many tiny buttons is one of my peeves about newer cars!
-b.
And they'dk *better* not cache *.homeip.net and *.dyndns.com.....
-b.
How is this different from what was going on 100 years ago when Irish, Italians, and other Europeans were encouraged to immigrate and fill low-wage factory jobs or drive spikes on the railroads?!
True - Indians and Latin Americans look a bit more different than the idealized image of an "American" - but they'll assimilate and be accepted in a few generations just like the earlier waves of immigrants.
-b.
Just be careful whilst going around turns. You tend to look really silly weaving around a turn with sidecar imitating a pogo stick :)
-b.
Except that the Europeans are already doing it on a mass scale, albeit with different technology (number plate recognition cameras). See: the London congestion charge. We may be 'testing' this system, and it's unlikely to fly now, since the gas tax provides an equally-good solution while encouraging the purchase of more efficient vehicles (there's a big outcry about Middle Eastern oil use and/or global warming on now). If gas tax revenues are lost, they can always the raise the gas tax over a period of years to "keep up with inflation."
-b.
And as for a toll "for each kilometer a vehicle runs, in any road", we have taxes on gas for serve to mean a cost per kilometer/type of vehicle.
I'm aware of those objections to digital road tolling, and I agree with them. It doesn't mean that the government won't try to implement electronic tolling - government is always looking for new ways to take money from the people! Also, being able to track movements of cars (and, thus, people) is a nice side benefit.
http://www.mapflow.com/press23-dto_armas.htm
-b.
Los Angeles? Yeah, they could use some water, what with them complaining about drought every other year :)
-b.
And before anyone chimes in that the Europeans don't have the same potential to be repressive as the Americans; historically, some of the most repressive regimes have been European governments.
-b.
Simpler solution: if a kid is caught repeatedly texting or talking on a cell. during class hours, take the thing away and return it to the kid's parents after they come in to the principal's office. It worked with GameBoys in the 80s - no reason why it shouldn't work now. If kids are texting during school hours that aren't classes (like free periods, lunch/recess, in the halls between classes) - what's the big deal as long as they get to class on time? The purpose of school is to educate, not to be a tyranny with purely arbitrary rules!
-b.
Actually, US manufacturing could be a hell of a lot cheaper than it is now while maintaining our good standards of living. Sadly, our labor unions don't support increased automation, so we are forced to rely on cheap foreign drudge-labor, often in countries that aren't our friends.
-b.
The cheapest cell plan is like $39.99 per month for about 450 minutes in the US. I find it hard to believe that a kid'd use that much time just calling family - the rest of the plan would go to waste. Why not allow the kid to use the remainder of the plan to call friends, etc? If the parents are paying the bill, they'll get to see the phone numbers dialed at the end of every month anyway.
-b.
No, Officer Pigford, I am not giving you the unlock password. If you want to, you're more than welcome to arrest me and see what a judge has to say. After a town/school wastes a sufficient amount of time with many such cases involving *totally* blank cell phone memories, they might be less inclined to intrude on students' privacy.
-b.
If you enter the correct code, you get an "Invalid Code" message and get to view the real contact info.
Entering the wrong code gets you a "Correct Code" message and a blank contact list. Unless you retry within 60 sec, all of the data in the phone's NVRAM automatically gets fragged and overwritten with contacts named "F. U. Pig" and "A. Narchy".
-b.
I commute around NYC by bike, so "no reason at all" isn't always true. It's faster than walking, driving, or taking the subway; better exercise; and doesn't get you any parking tickets ever.
I hope by "bikers" you meant the people riding bicycles, not motorbikes. Those guys would kick my ass.
Talk to the motorbike people once in a while. They're actually pretty cool most of the time and many of them are geeks in their own way - they hack mechanical things instead of software.
-b. (who rides both types of bikes and enjoys it all)
Assuming you have a GSM carrier (Cingular or T-Mob), you *can* move the SIM card to another phone. And there's a glut of "unlocked"[*] phones available on EBay and from online retailers, which will accept any SIM card. With CDMA that Verizon uses, of course, you actually have to *tell* the carrier that you're changing phones, since there aren't swappable SIM cards in that system. The phone that you get with the service? You can unlock the thing with a variety of 3rd party utilities and then sell it yourself on EBay.
you need to try and find some not-awful intersection of the two, and end up with a phone that has had many of its abilities intentionally disabled by the carrier.
Again, online retailers to the rescue. You can buy phones from Europe with factory firmware installed. Look for a phone that also does 850 MHz - otherwise you'll have weak signals in some places. The only problem with this approach is that factory firmware sometimes isn't optimised to work well with the carrier - i.e. I used a Siemens SK65 phone with Cingular for a while and you weren't able to set the delay before a call went to voicemail and also voicemail notifications were slightly screwed up. (Good phone otherwise, except for the lack of 850MHz capability!)
-b.
[*]- US cell carriers "lock" their phones so they only accept *their* SIM cards until an unlock key is entered or new firmware is loaded. You can generally get the unlock codes from them after your 1- or 2-year initial agreement expires. (Use the excuse that you're going to a remote area of Upper Tadjikistan with no service ;)
True; living in the suburps and commuting to NYC sucks :)
-b.
A lot more than you think - the OKC building wasn't lined with steel sections that are probably half a foot thick, held in compression by the surrounding rock. That's not to say that an explosion in the tunnel would be a minor event - the blast itself would kill or injure a lot of people in the tunnel, plus critical systems like ventilation and pumps would be gutted. This isn't even mentioning the shock and disruptive value of the event: who would want to use any of the tunnels into NYC afterwards?
-b.
Have you ever actually tried driving on them?
I don't know - they seem to work pretty well, at least in the City proper and NJ. If anything, traffic in the DC area seems to be about 5x worse... Long Island is something else, but that can be solved by avoiding the place like the plague as I do.
-b.