Using Python would allow this fellow to achieve his goal of learning a new language, fast. He can then properly focus on the important things: program structure and gameplay.
And I'm talking about laying dark fiber. No need to connect at either end: just the raw cost of the fiber itself, tossed in a trench that's being dug for the connected copper anyway. When the time comes that the fiber is needed, it's there, and it cost bugger-all compared to the cost of digging new trenches.
For starters, fiber is cheaper than copper. Way cheaper. Cheaper than dirt, one might say: the expensive part about servicing homes is the digging required to bury the line.
For that reason alone, most telcos are installing fiber to new homes. It costs bugger-all to toss it in the trench along with the copper, and provides them insurance that if they ever need it, it's there.
IBM has some 200dpi LCDs. If those puppies were ever brought to an affordable price, and if ClearType were used, I think you'd find it nearly as readable as old-style (300dpi) laser printouts. IOW, just fine.
You mean like the old IBM ThinkPad keyboard, which had this nifty expanding mechanism. Folded, the keyboard "broke" in half along the 5TGB/6YHN keys, with the right-hand section sliding up and to the left (so that, were you to rip the LCD off, it'd look like a QWERTH or QWERTN keyboard.)
Opened, the moveable halves slide outward and together, creating a full-width keyboard, in a laptop that was less than a full keyboard width wide when folded. Very cool!
+ wages for at least six people involved in getting it to and from the plane. I think the knife was about fourteen bucks. I'm sure it cost the airline more than three bucks to handle it all.
I'm sure a lot of us have stories about the utter stupidity of so-called airport "security."
I fly once in a blue moon. As a result, I'm not exactly up-to-speed on the new security paranoia. I go to check in, and answer some silly questions, none of which include "are you carrying anything sharp -- a knife, nail clipper, knitting needles, that sort of thing?"
My luggage goes through. I waste an hour waiting to for the boarding call. It comes. I enter the security area. Toss my coat and carry-on onto the xray, and I'm about to walk through the metal detector. Then I remember my car keys. I step back, take 'em out, toss 'em into a tray.
The security guard just about shits herself. "Is that a knife?!" she asks. "Er, yah?" I reply. It's my little keychain knife. It's as sharp as a spoon and has a 1/2" blade. I use it for opening envelopes and potato chip bags.
Well, my god, you'd think it was the discovery of the century. She literally grabs them from my hand and goes frantic removing my knife from the key ring. Does not ask to look at them, does not ask if she can fuck with my property, and then hands me a bullshit line about either throwing it out or mailing it to myself. I got rude about that: it's not a cheap knife, and there's no post office in the airport.
It ended up being checked in as luggage, in an envelope and an enormous plastic bag. Must have cost the airline 3x what the knife was worth.
Anyway, the security bitch took my name. I suppose I'm in some database now as a badass, to be cavity-searched next time I come within a mile of an airport.
Now, what really pisses me off is the implied insult in the whole thing. They really think I'm stupid enough to believe that the security check has anything to do with making the plane safe!
I could have carried a 6" lexan dagger through the metal detector and they'd *NEVER* have known about it. I could have walked through with plastic explosive in my shoes. I could have run piano wire through my belt and used it as a garrot. I probably could have walked on with a glass bottle of Coke.
Or I could have snapped the pull-out handle off my carry-on luggage, and weilded two 16" long sharp-pointed metal sticks.
Or I could be trained in the martial arts, and way more dangerous than most anyone who is carrying a weapon.
(Or if I'd left the damn knife in my pocket, I'd probably have cleared the metal detector: it didn't detect my belt buckle, which contains about 10x the metal content of the knife!)
THERE IS NO FUCKING SECURITY ON AN AIRPLANE!
I am deeply insulted that the airlines are playing this stupid little game of pretending to make us safe by disposing of our nail clippers. That isn't improving our security at all. It's just an insult.
I'm also PO'd that the check-in desk isn't suggesting to passengers that they think about any sharp objects that might be confiscated, and consder checking them in with the luggage.
And I'd like to slap the bitch that was so rude about it all. I'm going through a small-town Canadian airport, riding a piddling small jet, and I'm carring a piddling small knife. It wasn't the find of the century: it was an obvious mistake, and she should have politely asked me to step aside and remove the knife myself.
It also pisses me off that the best I can do is gripe about it all here on Slashdot, because if I go to the airport and talk to her supervisor, I'll probably be filed in some freaking Interpol database as Dr. Evil.
Ok, your turn: what's your airport security horror story?
If you're using one of those cassette-case-with-a-wire adapters, the ones that you stuff into the deck as if it were a real cassette tape, you're taking a painful sound quality hit. IMO, YMMV, particularly if you've damaged your hearing already.
If consumer feedback got BBC to change... then consumer feedback would help get NPR and CBC (Radio Canada) and VoA and suchlike to change.
Take the time to send an email to the public radio stations for Canada, Australia, USA, Germany, France, and so on. It'd be seriously *great* if they all used Ogg streaming media!
"Unfortunately, you the viewer have demonstrated an unfortunate reluctance to immerse yourself in 30-120 minute blocks of advertisements."
Er, no. There are many people who are willing to do exactly that. Hence Infomercials, The Shopping Channel, and Ron Popeil. And the damndest thing is... it works! The crap that those programs sell sells like freakin' hotcakes!
I believe the old adage "You can never overestimate the stupidity of the American public " would have to apply here.
" 'corporations exist to make profit
unions exist to help people?'
Unions exists to make a profit at the expense of people they are pretending to help."
What he said.
I firmly believe unions are a necessary thing in most corporations, because I've seen all too often how employees are screwed-over by their employer when it's convienent, and particularly when the employer needs to blame someone.
But at the same time, I've seen a lot of greed and sloth in the unions. My current beef is with a union that insists that all union employees travelling to union functions must fly Air Canada... commonly at 5x to 10x the cost of using WestJet.
Air Canada is a fucking pig of an airline, subsisting on government bailouts, predatory pricing when there's competition, and monopoly pricing when there isn't competition. It's management is overpaid and undercompetent, and it shafts its employees as much as possible.
WestJet is a fantastic airline, efficiently run with great bennies for its employees, and smart and savvy management. It has great prices and great service.
But AC is union, and WestJet isn't unionized. So the other large unions insist that AC be used. Rewarding the worst airline in Canada, and at a great cost to the employees they represent.
That's stupid beyond belief. That is how a union can act as a corporation: screwing its members for the sake of some idiotic idealized advantage, instead of behaving sensibly.
Sure, here's some firestarter: how many patches did Microsoft release for its OS and core applications (MSIE, Office, Outlook, servers, etc); and how many were released for the BSD market; and how many for Linux?
What really sucks is when you have to pay for an OS, because the apps you need are only available via that route. I'd love to use Linux... but it doesn't have the applications I need.:-(
My beef was with your saying that Microsoft had defended Windows just as poorly as Kleenex has. That's not true: Kleenex has defended their brand extremely well. Microsoft has not.
Slashdot Mirror
Advertising companies don't care whether or not what they do is effective: all they care about is whether their clients believe that it's effective.
It's a con game.
Especially considering that, say, Python already has MP libraries. A research paper from UO, another fellow who's trod this path before, several MUD/MOO/MP libraries and games, Merchant Empire, Twisted, Eve, and so on.
Using Python would allow this fellow to achieve his goal of learning a new language, fast. He can then properly focus on the important things: program structure and gameplay.
The cost of fiber to the home was on-par with copper two years ago. It can only have become cheaper since then.
And I'm talking about laying dark fiber. No need to connect at either end: just the raw cost of the fiber itself, tossed in a trench that's being dug for the connected copper anyway. When the time comes that the fiber is needed, it's there, and it cost bugger-all compared to the cost of digging new trenches.
Well, I was careful to link to a tasteful picture. :*)
It's those damn Pusher Robots, I tell you! They say they're here to protect us from the terrible secrets of space, they say it has a terrible power!
But don't believe them! Don't believe them! Look what happened to Grandma!
Optical fibre to the home is not overkill.
For starters, fiber is cheaper than copper. Way cheaper. Cheaper than dirt, one might say: the expensive part about servicing homes is the digging required to bury the line.
For that reason alone, most telcos are installing fiber to new homes. It costs bugger-all to toss it in the trench along with the copper, and provides them insurance that if they ever need it, it's there.
That's not overkill: that's smart planning.
IBM has some 200dpi LCDs. If those puppies were ever brought to an affordable price, and if ClearType were used, I think you'd find it nearly as readable as old-style (300dpi) laser printouts. IOW, just fine.
You mean like the old IBM ThinkPad keyboard, which had this nifty expanding mechanism. Folded, the keyboard "broke" in half along the 5TGB/6YHN keys, with the right-hand section sliding up and to the left (so that, were you to rip the LCD off, it'd look like a QWERTH or QWERTN keyboard.)
Opened, the moveable halves slide outward and together, creating a full-width keyboard, in a laptop that was less than a full keyboard width wide when folded. Very cool!
"if you have a history of drinking, lying and cheating you won't be going into space anytime soon, no matter how much money you have."
Hell, that kills *all* the markets.
You don't get $30 million by being a nice guy.
+ wages for at least six people involved in getting it to and from the plane. I think the knife was about fourteen bucks. I'm sure it cost the airline more than three bucks to handle it all.
I'm sure a lot of us have stories about the utter stupidity of so-called airport "security."
I fly once in a blue moon. As a result, I'm not exactly up-to-speed on the new security paranoia. I go to check in, and answer some silly questions, none of which include "are you carrying anything sharp -- a knife, nail clipper, knitting needles, that sort of thing?"
My luggage goes through. I waste an hour waiting to for the boarding call. It comes. I enter the security area. Toss my coat and carry-on onto the xray, and I'm about to walk through the metal detector. Then I remember my car keys. I step back, take 'em out, toss 'em into a tray.
The security guard just about shits herself. "Is that a knife?!" she asks. "Er, yah?" I reply. It's my little keychain knife. It's as sharp as a spoon and has a 1/2" blade. I use it for opening envelopes and potato chip bags.
Well, my god, you'd think it was the discovery of the century. She literally grabs them from my hand and goes frantic removing my knife from the key ring. Does not ask to look at them, does not ask if she can fuck with my property, and then hands me a bullshit line about either throwing it out or mailing it to myself. I got rude about that: it's not a cheap knife, and there's no post office in the airport.
It ended up being checked in as luggage, in an envelope and an enormous plastic bag. Must have cost the airline 3x what the knife was worth.
Anyway, the security bitch took my name. I suppose I'm in some database now as a badass, to be cavity-searched next time I come within a mile of an airport.
Now, what really pisses me off is the implied insult in the whole thing. They really think I'm stupid enough to believe that the security check has anything to do with making the plane safe!
I could have carried a 6" lexan dagger through the metal detector and they'd *NEVER* have known about it. I could have walked through with plastic explosive in my shoes. I could have run piano wire through my belt and used it as a garrot. I probably could have walked on with a glass bottle of Coke.
Or I could have snapped the pull-out handle off my carry-on luggage, and weilded two 16" long sharp-pointed metal sticks.
Or I could be trained in the martial arts, and way more dangerous than most anyone who is carrying a weapon.
(Or if I'd left the damn knife in my pocket, I'd probably have cleared the metal detector: it didn't detect my belt buckle, which contains about 10x the metal content of the knife!)
THERE IS NO FUCKING SECURITY ON AN AIRPLANE!
I am deeply insulted that the airlines are playing this stupid little game of pretending to make us safe by disposing of our nail clippers. That isn't improving our security at all. It's just an insult.
I'm also PO'd that the check-in desk isn't suggesting to passengers that they think about any sharp objects that might be confiscated, and consder checking them in with the luggage.
And I'd like to slap the bitch that was so rude about it all. I'm going through a small-town Canadian airport, riding a piddling small jet, and I'm carring a piddling small knife. It wasn't the find of the century: it was an obvious mistake, and she should have politely asked me to step aside and remove the knife myself.
It also pisses me off that the best I can do is gripe about it all here on Slashdot, because if I go to the airport and talk to her supervisor, I'll probably be filed in some freaking Interpol database as Dr. Evil.
Ok, your turn: what's your airport security horror story?
If you're using one of those cassette-case-with-a-wire adapters, the ones that you stuff into the deck as if it were a real cassette tape, you're taking a painful sound quality hit. IMO, YMMV, particularly if you've damaged your hearing already.
If consumer feedback got BBC to change... then consumer feedback would help get NPR and CBC (Radio Canada) and VoA and suchlike to change.
Take the time to send an email to the public radio stations for Canada, Australia, USA, Germany, France, and so on. It'd be seriously *great* if they all used Ogg streaming media!
"Unfortunately, you the viewer have demonstrated an unfortunate reluctance to immerse yourself in 30-120 minute blocks of advertisements."
Er, no. There are many people who are willing to do exactly that. Hence Infomercials, The Shopping Channel, and Ron Popeil. And the damndest thing is... it works! The crap that those programs sell sells like freakin' hotcakes!
I believe the old adage "You can never overestimate the stupidity of the American public " would have to apply here.
Funny. By your mneumonic, I'd have typed chmod -a og...
Those would be a Linux-driven cluster of hamsters, eh?
Yah, but does she have Britney's tits?
What he said, plus a professional page layout program. And TeX doesn't cut it: it's powerful, but a P.I.T.A. I want WYSIWYG.
" 'corporations exist to make profit
unions exist to help people?'
Unions exists to make a profit at the expense of people they are pretending to help."
What he said.
I firmly believe unions are a necessary thing in most corporations, because I've seen all too often how employees are screwed-over by their employer when it's convienent, and particularly when the employer needs to blame someone.
But at the same time, I've seen a lot of greed and sloth in the unions. My current beef is with a union that insists that all union employees travelling to union functions must fly Air Canada... commonly at 5x to 10x the cost of using WestJet.
Air Canada is a fucking pig of an airline, subsisting on government bailouts, predatory pricing when there's competition, and monopoly pricing when there isn't competition. It's management is overpaid and undercompetent, and it shafts its employees as much as possible.
WestJet is a fantastic airline, efficiently run with great bennies for its employees, and smart and savvy management. It has great prices and great service.
But AC is union, and WestJet isn't unionized. So the other large unions insist that AC be used. Rewarding the worst airline in Canada, and at a great cost to the employees they represent.
That's stupid beyond belief. That is how a union can act as a corporation: screwing its members for the sake of some idiotic idealized advantage, instead of behaving sensibly.
Sure, here's some firestarter: how many patches did Microsoft release for its OS and core applications (MSIE, Office, Outlook, servers, etc); and how many were released for the BSD market; and how many for Linux?
It'll be an interesting comparison.
What really sucks is when you have to pay for an OS, because the apps you need are only available via that route. I'd love to use Linux... but it doesn't have the applications I need. :-(
People say "corporations and unions" as if they were different things.
IMO, when a union is large enough to hold any sort of political power, it is a corporation.
(It was only too late that they understood the gravity of the situation...)
"This is going to be fun!"
Yah, that's what they all said... until some dummy switched off the planet's gravity. Whoopsie!
My beef was with your saying that Microsoft had defended Windows just as poorly as Kleenex has. That's not true: Kleenex has defended their brand extremely well. Microsoft has not.