Well when humans become infected they quite often develop a fever to raise their body temperature to the point where it kills off the unwelcome guests.
So maybe the Earth has just had enough of us humans and is raising the temperature to kill us off too ?
It took a colleague at work 8 months to get AOL to close his account, to stop charging his creadit card and to give him his money back.
After the first couple of times it was fun to listen to him dealing with the retards on the phone but it wasn't time wasted as the rest of us learnt 242 new swear words (him to us: "could everyone please cover their ears for a few minutes as I'm just going to ring up AOL")
Hmmm... I'm willing to bet that IE7 improves over IE6 in the same way that involuntarily ejecting 1 pint of diarrhoea into your underwear improves on ejecting 2 pints.
Well yet another hair brained, illegal (more rootkitting ?) scheme from a bunch of idiots. "But they clicked yes on our EULA..."
Honestly the ludicrous schemes that the record companies keep coming up with to stop people listening to "their product" are simply proof positive that overindulgence in cocaine rots your brain and makes you into a paranoid, vindictive, crazy egomaniac. In the future business schools will use all these awful schemes as examples of how to kill off your own industry.
But once again the unsuspecting users will simply install it then will bitch and moan when they shortly thereafter find their Windows system is broken again. Yet another good reason for them to find an alternative.
Forget about desktop linux becoming "good enough for granma to install and use". It's crap like this which will kill off Windows for the home user.
Re:How to make sure your data is not readable
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Where I work our machines are leased and when it's time to have them replaced then, before returning them, I always wipe the drive by using a Knoppix CD.
To do this simply boot from the Knoppix CD, open a terminal and issue the following command:
shred -vz -n 30/dev/hda
Then it's just a metter of leaving the machine to it (this can take quite a while depending on the machines power)
Repeat as necessary for the number of drives in the box.
Of course the data may still be recoverable but this method's "good enough" for my purposes. It's also 100% more effort than most of the other people I work with use !
if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide
It's funny but the people who usually come out with this sort of statement (government officials etc.) are also rabidly against you seeing any of THEIR private data (e.g. full disclosure of personal income, campaign funding, spending etc. etc.)
Re:As if advertising wasn't bad enough already...
on
MIT Media Lab Fashions
·
· Score: 1
Not only that but the manufacturers will no doubt make special deals to show advertising from "trusted partners" on your clothes (said adverts being updated wirelessly whenever you go near a shop). Of course rules like the DMCA and its ilk will prevent you from interfering in this advertising !
The saddest thing about this post is that I am actually being serious.
Nine things I should know ? Sorry but there's only one thing I know about Nautilus and that's that I can't stand using it. My reasons:
1 The whole Spatial browsing idea. Yes you can turn it off (The is the first thing I do when I come across it) but it's a rotten idea. You can tell it's a rotten idea from the recent introduction of the "expanding folders" paradigm which is attempting to return "left hand " tree view functionality into the "single pane" spatial paradigm. Spatial browsing should have been left with the early MACs and the Atari, Amiga etc.
2 Poor keyboard support. My main gripe with Nautilus is that you can't navigate by pressing a key to "walk round objects whose name starts with a letter" as you can in Konqueror, Windows Explorer etc. etc. For me this makes finding files a complete pain in the arse. It's such basic obvious, useful functionality I can't believe it's missing.
3 Poor right mouse button support. Select some files and try to right click so you can select the "copy" option from the context menu. You can't. As soon as you right click then your current selection is discarded and the item nearest the mouse pointer is selected. This also has the added effect of changing the right click context menu. Great.
4 Similarly when you've got several files/directories on the clipboard and you want to paste them into a folder with a mouse click you can't. The right click once again selects an item etc. etc.
Personally I find Nautilus to be the single biggest impediment to me using Linux as my primary O/S. I run Ubuntu and for some reason Konqueror doesn't look quite right. But Nautilus sucks... it's as if the developers have never used a computer with a fully functional file manager.
And yes I have tried raising the issues on Bugzilla but my impression is that the Gnome developers aren't interested in adding functionality. They only seem to be interested in simplifying things as much as possible ("Oh that might be difficult for some users to use so we're not adding it...")
But in the time honoured tradition of open source I've given up on Nautilus and have started writing my own file manager using Mono (not being a proficient C# coder it'll take me a while) It'll probably be pretty crappy in general but it'll at least allow me to perform my file management in a sensible way.
On day the Gnome desktop will have been reduced to a single button and then you'll be happy;)
>Back then, when I pressed "record" on a tape recorder or the shutter button on a camera, it did what I wanted instantaneously.
Not only that but tape recorders usually had STEREO microphone inputs. Quite why modern soundcards all come with a MONO inpout is beyond me. You can always reduce stereo to mono but without a stereo input you can only record in stereo by first using an external mixer to feed the (hopefully) stereo line in.
Ah the march of progress... 2006 and we've gone back to mono recording.
And don't forget VME (Virtual Machine Environment) with it's concept of file generations whereby each time you change a file a new version of the file is created which differs only in it's generation number. The original file is also still there until you explicitly delete it (or use the "DELETE_FILE_GENERATIONS" cxommand to delete multiple old generations at once)
e.g. If you create a file called "Fred" by default it gets a generation number of 1 and you can refer to it either as "Fred" or "Fred(1)". Now when you edit this file the resulting output is saved as "Fred(2)". So now you can call "OPEN_FILE(Fred)" and you'll open "Fred(2)". However call "OPEN_FILE(Fred(1))" and you open "Fred(1)". Any amendments made to the file always result in a new generation of the file being created with a generation umber of "previous highest + 1".
Files can also be held in something akin to a directory called libraries and, you guessed it, these can have version numbers too (there are alos "Groups" which function more like directories as they don;t have generations)
Having worked with the VME file system for a number of years I'm afraid I found all the Windows/*NIX file systems terribly, terribly primitive. "What ? Only one generation of a file at any one time ? What happens if you wan't to recover from 10 edits ago ?"
It was indeed a fertility goddess named Oestre and the Hare was one of her symbols as it is one of the few animals that can become pregnant even whilst gestating.
"Eostre, the hare-headed Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring whose festival was celebrated in April, was believed to lay the egg of new life. As such, the hare was the original symbol of Easter until early Christians, wanting to get rid of all things pagan, replaced the hare with the rabbit."
See the same sort of thing on a nice compact page about the Green Man
And the eggs are there becuase of their obvious connection with birth/rebirth so as is usual with most Christian festivals all you need do is go back a few layers and you can find an earlier cultural event (e.g. Xmas and the old mid winter festivals)
Still, given the time I'm sure you could take Oestre back to an earlier deity etc. etc. right back to when the first hominids became conscious of the way new life tended to come forth in the spring.
And then of course there's dead Cthulhu lying dreaming in his house ar R'lyeh but that's another tale altogether:)
However personal choice of attire seems to be amongst the last bastions of acceptable discrimination.
And just why is it that the "acceptable standard" is always based around the preferred attire of a fat, middle aged, white man with no discernible dress sense and who's probably spent one half of his life being dressed by his mother and the other half being dressed by his wife ?
(And now I'm off on a good rant) Have you seen the fat fools in their golf wear ? or in the utterly embarassing "casual wear" they occasionally wear on the rare "team building" events in the pub ? The mind simply boggles... but hey it that's what floats their boat more power to 'em. (yeah I know I'm sterotyping heavily here but this is the mindset we're dealing with...)
Personally I look forward to the day when the mindless majority wake up to the idea that the packaging is not the contents, that people are all different, and that this is a GOOD THING. Diversity breeds innovation. Conformity breeds stagnation. We need suit wearing, small minded, twits as much as we need poinytailed, sandal wearing geeks. The two should just learn to see the good points in each other and get along... Or have a war when us geeks will seriously kick the suits asses (after all who invents all the good weaponry ?)
And people wonder why aliens never bother landing... when most humans can't even cope with members of our own species who have a different taste in haircut or pants.
What ? A government official that actually seems to show some understanding of these new fangled computers ? And why it's a good idea to get the source code for something they want to buy ?
This is the strangest thing I've seen this year...
have you tried to buy a stand-alone tuner lately? *sigh*
Well in the UK we can still easily buy tuners. Sadly the dollar rate means they'd probably be too expensive for you to import (assuming of course you're from the U.S.A. ?) but you can see a good selection at Richer Sounds
Admittedly most of them are missing Long Wave/Medium Wave/Short Wave etc. (i.e. all the good old bands:) but there's still a good FM/DAB Selection.
And no I don't work for them but I have bought most of my all black (fuck that cheap silver looking shite) hi-fi from them over the years.
My main reason for buying "no name" brands is simple. They usually work better.
For instance one of my mates had a Sony (Spits on floor in disgust) DVD player which cost him over £ 200 and was feature packed but was fussy as anything when it came to discs i.e. It wouldn't play most DVDRs, it didn't play XVid AVIs, it didn't like MP3s on a DVDR (happy on CDR though), it stalled on scratched pressed DVDs etc. etc.
In contrast the £ 29 "no name" DVD player I bought from ASDA will have a go at anything you put in it. It's not as feature packed, build quality isn't as good, the picture and audio are not quite as good (but not by that much), it's kind of ugly but who cares. It's game as hell. I've even though about putting one on my old 7" singles in there to see what it makes of it:)
Quite frankly I'd expect the complete opposite results as I'd expect the more expensive model to feature a superior drive mechanism and error correction algorithms etc. etc. but my (limited I know) experimentation has conclusively proved otherwise.
After we performed a small head to head test my mate sold the Sony at a car boot, bought one of the "no names" and is now "happy as Larry".
Coupled with the rate of technology turn over I'd say that unless you've got a specific "professional" requirement for a real top quality piece of kit get the "No name" version.
After all most of the basic components are churned out of the same factories anyway.
Ho ho ho. So can I look forward to an addition to the a href="http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php">Pirate Bays legal threats page ?.
P2P, torrents etc. are simply like having the best radio station and film channel in the world. It lets me try out stuff without spending my hard earned cash (an ever decreasing amount of which I have to spend on "non essentials" such as entertainment) so I know that I like something before I buy it.
Oh how the *AA dinosaurs futiley roared as the small furry mamalls took over their world:)
Notification framework popups ? NOOOOO !!!!!
on
A Look at GNOME 2.14
·
· Score: 1
The notification framework is a set of notification widgets that have been sorely lacking from GNOME for some time. Many applications can already take advantage of the notification framework if it is present. Many people find notification popups in other desktop environments irritating, so to prevent this GNOME is working on clearcut recommendations for its Human Interface Guidelines before GNOME 2.16.
Never mind your HIG "recommendations". All I require from this new "notification framework" is the option to globally shut the fucker off with no way for any app to override my preference thankyou very much.
Sorry I do not want to see popups on my machine(s) ever - no matter how "important" the developer feels they are. I don't even want to see one if it's telling me that my CPU is on fire or that my precious/data partition is being eaten by gremlins.
Irritating does not even begin to describe pop ups (of any description). If I've backgrounded a task I'll return to it when I feel like seeing how it's progressing. If I've received some new mail etc. etc. big deal. I'll check it when I feel like it. Popups are like having a hyper active kid suddenly appear screaming in your face.
Gnome devs: LEAVE THE CRAPPY WINDOWS XP "FEATURES" ALONE. They're crap in Windows and they'll be even crappier in Gnome.
Oh and did I mention I don't want f***** popups ? EVER.
Slashdot Mirror
> An intelligent mine
Heavens no ! You've obviously never seen Dark Star.
"Let there be light...."
Even better first read WASP by Eric Frank Russel. Then start putting up signs reading:
"Dirac Angestum Gesept.
The List Is Long."
Well when humans become infected they quite often develop a fever to raise their body temperature to the point where it kills off the unwelcome guests.
So maybe the Earth has just had enough of us humans and is raising the temperature to kill us off too ?
It took a colleague at work 8 months to get AOL to close his account, to stop charging his creadit card and to give him his money back.
After the first couple of times it was fun to listen to him dealing with the retards on the phone but it wasn't time wasted as the rest of us learnt 242 new swear words (him to us: "could everyone please cover their ears for a few minutes as I'm just going to ring up AOL")
Hmmm... I'm willing to bet that IE7 improves over IE6 in the same way that involuntarily ejecting 1 pint of diarrhoea into your underwear improves on ejecting 2 pints.
I resolved to never ever buy something that runs on Steam again
Bugger and here's me with a nice traction engine for you...
Well yet another hair brained, illegal (more rootkitting ?) scheme from a bunch of idiots. "But they clicked yes on our EULA..."
Honestly the ludicrous schemes that the record companies keep coming up with to stop people listening to "their product" are simply proof positive that overindulgence in cocaine rots your brain and makes you into a paranoid, vindictive, crazy egomaniac. In the future business schools will use all these awful schemes as examples of how to kill off your own industry.
But once again the unsuspecting users will simply install it then will bitch and moan when they shortly thereafter find their Windows system is broken again. Yet another good reason for them to find an alternative.
Forget about desktop linux becoming "good enough for granma to install and use". It's crap like this which will kill off Windows for the home user.
Where I work our machines are leased and when it's time to have them replaced then, before returning them, I always wipe the drive by using a Knoppix CD.
/dev/hda
To do this simply boot from the Knoppix CD, open a terminal and issue the following command:
shred -vz -n 30
Then it's just a metter of leaving the machine to it (this can take quite a while depending on the machines power)
Repeat as necessary for the number of drives in the box.
Of course the data may still be recoverable but this method's "good enough" for my purposes. It's also 100% more effort than most of the other people I work with use !
if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide
It's funny but the people who usually come out with this sort of statement (government officials etc.) are also rabidly against you seeing any of THEIR private data (e.g. full disclosure of personal income, campaign funding, spending etc. etc.)
Not only that but the manufacturers will no doubt make special deals to show advertising from "trusted partners" on your clothes (said adverts being updated wirelessly whenever you go near a shop). Of course rules like the DMCA and its ilk will prevent you from interfering in this advertising !
The saddest thing about this post is that I am actually being serious.
Nine things I should know ? Sorry but there's only one thing I know about Nautilus and that's that I can't stand using it. My reasons:
;)
1 The whole Spatial browsing idea. Yes you can turn it off (The is the first thing I do when I come across it) but it's a rotten idea. You can tell it's a rotten idea from the recent introduction of the "expanding folders" paradigm which is attempting to return "left hand " tree view functionality into the "single pane" spatial paradigm. Spatial browsing should have been left with the early MACs and the Atari, Amiga etc.
2 Poor keyboard support. My main gripe with Nautilus is that you can't navigate by pressing a key to "walk round objects whose name starts with a letter" as you can in Konqueror, Windows Explorer etc. etc. For me this makes finding files a complete pain in the arse. It's such basic obvious, useful functionality I can't believe it's missing.
3 Poor right mouse button support. Select some files and try to right click so you can select the "copy" option from the context menu. You can't. As soon as you right click then your current selection is discarded and the item nearest the mouse pointer is selected. This also has the added effect of changing the right click context menu. Great.
4 Similarly when you've got several files/directories on the clipboard and you want to paste them into a folder with a mouse click you can't. The right click once again selects an item etc. etc.
Personally I find Nautilus to be the single biggest impediment to me using Linux as my primary O/S. I run Ubuntu and for some reason Konqueror doesn't look quite right. But Nautilus sucks... it's as if the developers have never used a computer with a fully functional file manager.
And yes I have tried raising the issues on Bugzilla but my impression is that the Gnome developers aren't interested in adding functionality. They only seem to be interested in simplifying things as much as possible ("Oh that might be difficult for some users to use so we're not adding it...")
But in the time honoured tradition of open source I've given up on Nautilus and have started writing my own file manager using Mono (not being a proficient C# coder it'll take me a while) It'll probably be pretty crappy in general but it'll at least allow me to perform my file management in a sensible way.
On day the Gnome desktop will have been reduced to a single button and then you'll be happy
Ho hum, c'est la Vie.
>Back then, when I pressed "record" on a tape recorder or the shutter button on a camera, it did what I wanted instantaneously.
Not only that but tape recorders usually had STEREO microphone inputs. Quite why modern soundcards all come with a MONO inpout is beyond me. You can always reduce stereo to mono but without a stereo input you can only record in stereo by first using an external mixer to feed the (hopefully) stereo line in.
Ah the march of progress... 2006 and we've gone back to mono recording.
Personally I think it'll turn out to be part of a stage set for the KLF
So the interesting question is has it been discarded ? or is it under construction ?
And don't forget VME (Virtual Machine Environment) with it's concept of file generations whereby each time you change a file a new version of the file is created which differs only in it's generation number. The original file is also still there until you explicitly delete it (or use the "DELETE_FILE_GENERATIONS" cxommand to delete multiple old generations at once)
e.g. If you create a file called "Fred" by default it gets a generation number of 1 and you can refer to it either as "Fred" or "Fred(1)". Now when you edit this file the resulting output is saved as "Fred(2)". So now you can call "OPEN_FILE(Fred)" and you'll open "Fred(2)". However call "OPEN_FILE(Fred(1))" and you open "Fred(1)". Any amendments made to the file always result in a new generation of the file being created with a generation umber of "previous highest + 1".
Files can also be held in something akin to a directory called libraries and, you guessed it, these can have version numbers too (there are alos "Groups" which function more like directories as they don;t have generations)
Having worked with the VME file system for a number of years I'm afraid I found all the Windows/*NIX file systems terribly, terribly primitive. "What ? Only one generation of a file at any one time ? What happens if you wan't to recover from 10 edits ago ?"
Makes source code version control a breeeze too.
Thanks a lot. I just spat water all over my keyboard (we've run out of cofee) !
> *drools*
Ah, you must be one of those Gnome users I keep reading about
It was indeed a fertility goddess named Oestre and the Hare was one of her symbols as it is one of the few animals that can become pregnant even whilst gestating.
:)
Or to quote from the BBC:
"Eostre, the hare-headed Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring whose festival was celebrated in April, was believed to lay the egg of new life. As such, the hare was the original symbol of Easter until early Christians, wanting to get rid of all things pagan, replaced the hare with the rabbit."
See the same sort of thing on a nice compact page about the Green Man
And the eggs are there becuase of their obvious connection with birth/rebirth so as is usual with most Christian festivals all you need do is go back a few layers and you can find an earlier cultural event (e.g. Xmas and the old mid winter festivals)
Still, given the time I'm sure you could take Oestre back to an earlier deity etc. etc. right back to when the first hominids became conscious of the way new life tended to come forth in the spring.
And then of course there's dead Cthulhu lying dreaming in his house ar R'lyeh but that's another tale altogether
In most "advanced" human cultures it's illegal to discriminate on the grounds of:
1 Race.
2 Skin Colour.
3 Sex.
4 Sexual orientation.
5 Physical Disability.
7 Age.
However personal choice of attire seems to be amongst the last bastions of acceptable discrimination.
And just why is it that the "acceptable standard" is always based around the preferred attire of a fat, middle aged, white man with no discernible dress sense and who's probably spent one half of his life being dressed by his mother and the other half being dressed by his wife ?
(And now I'm off on a good rant) Have you seen the fat fools in their golf wear ? or in the utterly embarassing "casual wear" they occasionally wear on the rare "team building" events in the pub ? The mind simply boggles... but hey it that's what floats their boat more power to 'em. (yeah I know I'm sterotyping heavily here but this is the mindset we're dealing with...)
Personally I look forward to the day when the mindless majority wake up to the idea that the packaging is not the contents, that people are all different, and that this is a GOOD THING. Diversity breeds innovation. Conformity breeds stagnation. We need suit wearing, small minded, twits as much as we need poinytailed, sandal wearing geeks. The two should just learn to see the good points in each other and get along... Or have a war when us geeks will seriously kick the suits asses (after all who invents all the good weaponry ?)
And people wonder why aliens never bother landing... when most humans can't even cope with members of our own species who have a different taste in haircut or pants.
Pah.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
-- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
Good to see IBM are still employing the same fortune tellers.
Much like the Spanish inquisition nobody expects the next big thing.
What ? A government official that actually seems to show some understanding of these new fangled computers ? And why it's a good idea to get the source code for something they want to buy ?
This is the strangest thing I've seen this year...
have you tried to buy a stand-alone tuner lately? *sigh*
:) but there's still a good FM/DAB Selection.
Well in the UK we can still easily buy tuners. Sadly the dollar rate means they'd probably be too expensive for you to import (assuming of course you're from the U.S.A. ?) but you can see a good selection at Richer Sounds
Admittedly most of them are missing Long Wave/Medium Wave/Short Wave etc. (i.e. all the good old bands
And no I don't work for them but I have bought most of my all black (fuck that cheap silver looking shite) hi-fi from them over the years.
My main reason for buying "no name" brands is simple. They usually work better.
:)
For instance one of my mates had a Sony (Spits on floor in disgust) DVD player which cost him over £ 200 and was feature packed but was fussy as anything when it came to discs i.e. It wouldn't play most DVDRs, it didn't play XVid AVIs, it didn't like MP3s on a DVDR (happy on CDR though), it stalled on scratched pressed DVDs etc. etc.
In contrast the £ 29 "no name" DVD player I bought from ASDA will have a go at anything you put in it. It's not as feature packed, build quality isn't as good, the picture and audio are not quite as good (but not by that much), it's kind of ugly but who cares. It's game as hell. I've even though about putting one on my old 7" singles in there to see what it makes of it
Quite frankly I'd expect the complete opposite results as I'd expect the more expensive model to feature a superior drive mechanism and error correction algorithms etc. etc. but my (limited I know) experimentation has conclusively proved otherwise.
After we performed a small head to head test my mate sold the Sony at a car boot, bought one of the "no names" and is now "happy as Larry".
Coupled with the rate of technology turn over I'd say that unless you've got a specific "professional" requirement for a real top quality piece of kit get the "No name" version.
After all most of the basic components are churned out of the same factories anyway.
Incompetence trumps diabolical planning every time
:)
Which is just as it should be
Hail Eris ! All hail Discordia !!!
Ho ho ho. So can I look forward to an addition to the a href="http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php">Pirate Bays legal threats page ?.
:)
P2P, torrents etc. are simply like having the best radio station and film channel in the world. It lets me try out stuff without spending my hard earned cash (an ever decreasing amount of which I have to spend on "non essentials" such as entertainment) so I know that I like something before I buy it.
Oh how the *AA dinosaurs futiley roared as the small furry mamalls took over their world
The notification framework is a set of notification widgets that have been sorely lacking from GNOME for some time. Many applications can already take advantage of the notification framework if it is present. Many people find notification popups in other desktop environments irritating, so to prevent this GNOME is working on clearcut recommendations for its Human Interface Guidelines before GNOME 2.16.
/data partition is being eaten by gremlins.
Never mind your HIG "recommendations". All I require from this new "notification framework" is the option to globally shut the fucker off with no way for any app to override my preference thankyou very much.
Sorry I do not want to see popups on my machine(s) ever - no matter how "important" the developer feels they are. I don't even want to see one if it's telling me that my CPU is on fire or that my precious
Irritating does not even begin to describe pop ups (of any description). If I've backgrounded a task I'll return to it when I feel like seeing how it's progressing. If I've received some new mail etc. etc. big deal. I'll check it when I feel like it. Popups are like having a hyper active kid suddenly appear screaming in your face.
Gnome devs: LEAVE THE CRAPPY WINDOWS XP "FEATURES" ALONE. They're crap in Windows and they'll be even crappier in Gnome.
Oh and did I mention I don't want f***** popups ? EVER.