"Your erroneous pink rabbit has been ignored" when a particularly complex (and wrong in really bizarre ways) piece of RPG (can you do complex RPG?) was fed to it.
I reached for my news-paper on Monday and saw that they are teaching evolooshun without having the entire fossil record from the first genetic material to the present.
Actually, the better we understand the fossil record, the worse it looks for evolution. Recently, fish (and lampreys as well) were discovered in the Cambrian. Other (previously-) "index" fossils have had their range extended by up to an order of magnitude. Lucy is looking less and less human as time goes on. And still no missing links (worse, the link-candidates are steadily and thoroughly being disqualified faster than they turn up).
"We can't explain how all this stuff got here, so it must be God"
That is indeed a very lame argument, so how about this one:
Removing any essential part of even the relatively complex (billions of atoms) "simplest" standalone living forms like bacteria results in their death.
There is no way to form these things gradually, no component does anything even remotely like survive by itself, so they must have hit the ground running - which leaves us with the Panspermia cop-out (and how did the seeders come to exist? eh? eh?), or with somthing so like God that we can't tell the difference.
There are many showstopper arguments for God in chemistry and biology. Almost as many as in geology (e.g. Gentry's "tiny mysteries", turbidites), astronomy (quantum redshifts, titanic stellar structures), physics (too-neat constants, Sansbury's "subtrons"), history (Solomon, Jesus), archaeology (Nimrod, Hittites), paleontology (vertebrates in Cambrian, polystrates)...
...although why water should be considered a necessary precursor to life is a mystery, since its strongly polar molecules rip into anything organic (but not, as life now is, structured to cope with water) with great enthusiasm. One of the key parts of the methane-and-sparks experiments was a carefully designed trap to rescue any organic molecules before they were ripped apart again by the spark or dissolved and destroyed by any water that the spark formed.
There's somewhere between 30 and 200 (depending on who you trust more) oceans-full of water in earth's magmatic layers anyway. 70% of all volcanic output is dear old aqua.
The big mystery in Noah's flood is that it went down again (if earth were perfectly round, you'd be sitting under about 2km of water right now - good luck with breathing), not where all the water came from.
Finding substantial amounts of water in meteoric rock tells us something quite simple, and quite different to the reported quackery: the meteorite wasn't in space long enough for the water to escape.
Start with a frog in cold water (a nice, uncrowded, unhurried place). Heat (stress) very slowly. Perhaps the frog is thinking of other victims, "hey, maybe they should live in my pot, where it's cooler." All of our pots are getting warmer. The frog adjusts and adjusts to the slowly rising temperature (more frenetic social conditions) until it dies of heatstroke.
You may think that corporatism would be happier if the frog doesn't actually get cooked, just run at the thermal limit - but corporatism isn't collective bright enough to avoid killing off its customers (in the real world, bankrupting them or driving them nuts in one way or another).
And why do we let our frogs get cooked?
we're not paying attention (or in some cases not even aninetion);
we are continually having it drummed in that we are accidents, valueless, not important in and of ourselves and with a uniqueness which is only a mathematical curiosity, not a fundamental fact of life;
relativeism pervades everything. There are no permanent standards, or at least so we are frequently told (and shown); "nice guys finish last" is the message, and it is a false one.
It's for the Sony DSC-F505, but the directions are likely to help other USB camera owners as well.
If you're looking for a digital camera, BTW, don't go past the 505. It's light, well-balanced, fits everywhere, has automatic everything (and the automatics can each be totally switched off). One nice feature is that it can take shots in total silence. I believe the latest incarnation has 3.3 megapixels and just about brews your coffee as well.
If you have a relative with a sewing machine, there are two accessories I recommend having them make:
A simple square of black cloth (maybe 40cm a side) with a lens-sized hole near one edge, to help visibility in bright light.
a padded carrier (use "doona" stuffing) which velcroes around the camera and has a pocket alongside the lens for the black cloth and maybe spare SIMMs and batteries. Stitching a canvas carrying strap securely to/around the outside is good.
To play the devil's advocate, if an ISP sees a DDoS agains one client, and the removal of that client will allow hundreds of other clients to retain access, the ISP should remove the one for the good of the many.
"Oh, goody," say the black-hat bullies, "we can throw our weight around and get people kicked off the Internet. Let's do it again!"
You can't pacify a crocodile by throwing it steaks. I prefer using a javelin through the head, preferably from behind a nice strong fence.
I haven't tried a 4.0preX kernel yet. There's a few things that you need to get besides the later kernel (which is absolutely necessary for the Sony camera).
Forgot to mention (don't know of this helped), I downloaded the latest drivers from http://linux.3dfx.com/ (if you want to rebuild from source, you save about 17MB of download, ie about halve it, but need about 400MB free on/usr/src/ and several hours (K6-II-300+64M)).
This is being typed from Netscape on my Banshee, which uses the same drivers as the Voodoo3. My (Banshee, crappy monitor) config is at http://firestation.fdns.net/~leonb/XF86Config-4
The config as installed did not work. I did XFree86 -configure as root and edited the/root/XF86Config.new file from there, testing with XFree86 -xf86config/root/XF86Config.new (which the -configure option tells you to do). When I was satsfied wit my changes, I cp'ed it over the top of/etc/X11/XF86Config-4, made it world-readable and all was well.
If it were more stable you could smell the hay
on
Mandrake 7.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
XFree86 v4 works better, faster and cheaper (less CPU cycles) on my Banshee, S3 (hawk, spit) and SiS6326 (hawk, spit) cards than 3.3.6 (Mandrake 7.0) ever did (not that it ever crashed, but, for example, I can now run the SiS with all acceleration on and bzflag works in a window in realtime), although I had to muck around with the config to make my Banshee happy.
It has up-to-date patched (black-hats nick off) versions of the network stuff. And lots of new toys. Lots of stuff fixed besides the installer.
xkobo works, but (especially in double-size mode) schlurps up *heaps* of X resources, really needs rewriting.
ALSA. *3* IDEs. Roxen. XFree86 V4. SDL and some apps for it. Updated PySol (now over 300 games). QT-2. Eterm on the KDE menus (which are all much better organised). ixterm. Gphoto. Roby. ocaml. oscope. QCAD. Lotsa other stuff.
Still on GIMP 1.0.4 though, would like to see that updated.
Well into two CDs' worth in Cooker now, makes over 2G in/usr when installed. "Praise the Lord for fat uplinks!" (-:
I use Sun Sparc Solaris at home, with StartOffice for WP. My wife loves it!
Ditto Mandrake Linux. The only downer for her is that some of her (Windows) games and educational CDs won't work with it - a number which is steadily decreasing as WINE grows.
After WINE's next traumatic growth spurt (multiple emulation processes) settles down, I expect that they all will work. It's not exactly MS-free, but... she's now accustomed to walking away from her machine in the middle of something and coming back to it three days later. Save? Nah! It'll still be there.
It's going to be personally amusing when she does that with Windows apps.
Her sister runs Windows and is perennially griping about "it crashed in the middle of" or "it crashes whenever I load..., how can I get my work back?" (strings <file.pub >rescued.txt)
For whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
"For whereas my forebears put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke: my father chastised you with Word, but I will chastise you with Outlook."
You could start by switching off so-called "smart" quotes in yor own Microsoft software. An even better step would be to use software other than Microsoft's to post with...
On the other hand, having question-marks appear every time Microsot's name is mentioned has a warped kind subliminal appeal... (-:
Why would anyone waste time and resources on such a thing?
Once bitten, twice shy. People do it so that they don't have to experience their reason(s) for hating Microsoft again. Daily, in some cases.
I despise Microsoft in a detached professional manner because I've re-installed Windows on various machines more times than I care to count. As well as annoying, that quickly gets expensive.
I also despise them in a personal manner for the many man-months of my own work lost from time to time in Word or Windows crashes.
what blew me away was Gnome's Gnumeric, a spreadsheet which has all the benefits of having been designed by MS without the drawbacks of having been implemented by them!
Most (if not all) of Microsoft's products are bought or (more or less) stolen, not designed in-house, starting from Q-DOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System"; yes, that's really where MS-DOS started - and finished). IE, possibly their core product, used to be SpyGlass. Access runs at finite speed because of technology gutted from FoxBASE Pro. Significant pieces of NT are spelling-error compatible with DEC's MICA O/S and other pieces simply reek of OS/2. Perhaps MS-Bob was designed in house?
How about "a spreadsheet which has all the benefits of having been bought by MS without the drawbacks of having actually been bought by them"?
Currently you can get a pretty MS-less office with StarOffice. There are some people who really like it.
And there are others who have tried SIAG Office and some of the other alternatives, and who like a finite response time in 32M or less of RAM. (-:
SO's big advanatge is that it looks and feel the way MS wanted Office to look and feel.
Anyway, that's the story we want to tell, we can do better than M$ is, we don't want to clone, we want to make our own stuff. At least I do. Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer...:-)
So write text, do graphic design, run an index site, hand out CDs at trade shows, review things. Whatever works for you. Things that the programmers will do "later." Ahuk, ahuk, ahuk.
Want things to do? Get a ray-tracer or GIMP and make some decent tiles for xpuyopuyo or xjewel. Write a tutorial for dia. Put together a set of web-page templates that might some day get integrated into a FrontPage replacement. Something "trivial" and "safe" like that. Then extend your skills into areas you enjoy - or heck, just keep doing "trivial" things. They all need doing by somebody!
"And YOU...! Make the tea!" -- Monty Python,/The Crimson Assurance Company/
Look, I'm not taking issue with the other things you said, but just get it that people are not stupid.
This much is true. About 10% of my clients actually read help and manuals. The results are... disturbing... for the we-know-what-you-want camp.
Maybe all them [...] just have something better to do with their time [...] ie. they have a life.
"I have no life. I really like it that way. I'm happy."
That's a direct quote of a friend of mine (female, pretty, not at all witless - but wouldn't know which end of the mouse to push the cheese into and isn't interested in finding out). She made the statement a year ago and is still happy.
You don't need to "have a life" to be uninterested in computers. QED. (-:
I also can't figure out how to make only *PART* of a page columnized in StarOffice - I have to resort to using tables.
In 5.1, it can't be done. Columns are part of the _page_ formatting, not of sections or even paragraphs. On the other hand, tables are much more flexible and consistent than in Word.
I haven't tried it yet in 5.2beta but I strongly suspect it will have been one of the things that they fixed.
When exporting from a presentation which links to images, all the links are converted to embeds, and the end result is one monster file
For portability, avoid the more amazing (read: distracting) effects, and export it as HTML. StarOffice is noticeably better at exporting to HTML than Office is (but although much improved, this is still, uh, "a field rich with opportunities for improvement").
You can use xl2html if you just want to make HTML which you can then search using a conventional engine, or it should be simple to hack the back end of xl2html if you want it to spit the spreadsheet out as SQL.
The latter option would only be truly useful if the spreadsheets were all similar, or fell into a few similar sets. That being the case, a little forethought will allow you to do stats and graphing operations on the entire dataset that'll send the boss's eyebrows whizzing into his hairline.
If you define "functional" as useful, rather than the more esoteric AI term, LISP does seem to be functional. It passes the FSF test of being able to send mail. Someone's even written a window manager in which all of the config and fanciness is LISP.
Yes, you can also do this in PERL, but it's a constant discipline not to do it in write-only fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
"Your erroneous pink rabbit has been ignored" when a particularly complex (and wrong in really bizarre ways) piece of RPG (can you do complex RPG?) was fed to it.
I reached for my news-paper on Monday and saw that they are teaching evolooshun without having the entire fossil record from the first genetic material to the present.
Actually, the better we understand the fossil record, the worse it looks for evolution. Recently, fish (and lampreys as well) were discovered in the Cambrian. Other (previously-) "index" fossils have had their range extended by up to an order of magnitude. Lucy is looking less and less human as time goes on. And still no missing links (worse, the link-candidates are steadily and thoroughly being disqualified faster than they turn up).
That is indeed a very lame argument, so how about this one:
There are many showstopper arguments for God in chemistry and biology. Almost as many as in geology (e.g. Gentry's "tiny mysteries", turbidites), astronomy (quantum redshifts, titanic stellar structures), physics (too-neat constants, Sansbury's "subtrons"), history (Solomon, Jesus), archaeology (Nimrod, Hittites), paleontology (vertebrates in Cambrian, polystrates)...
Drop that prejudice, we've got you covered! (-:
...although why water should be considered a necessary precursor to life is a mystery, since its strongly polar molecules rip into anything organic (but not, as life now is, structured to cope with water) with great enthusiasm. One of the key parts of the methane-and-sparks experiments was a carefully designed trap to rescue any organic molecules before they were ripped apart again by the spark or dissolved and destroyed by any water that the spark formed.
There's somewhere between 30 and 200 (depending on who you trust more) oceans-full of water in earth's magmatic layers anyway. 70% of all volcanic output is dear old aqua.
The big mystery in Noah's flood is that it went down again (if earth were perfectly round, you'd be sitting under about 2km of water right now - good luck with breathing), not where all the water came from.
Finding substantial amounts of water in meteoric rock tells us something quite simple, and quite different to the reported quackery: the meteorite wasn't in space long enough for the water to escape.
Start with a frog in cold water (a nice, uncrowded, unhurried place). Heat (stress) very slowly. Perhaps the frog is thinking of other victims, "hey, maybe they should live in my pot, where it's cooler." All of our pots are getting warmer. The frog adjusts and adjusts to the slowly rising temperature (more frenetic social conditions) until it dies of heatstroke.
You may think that corporatism would be happier if the frog doesn't actually get cooked, just run at the thermal limit - but corporatism isn't collective bright enough to avoid killing off its customers (in the real world, bankrupting them or driving them nuts in one way or another).
And why do we let our frogs get cooked?
It's for the Sony DSC-F505, but the directions are likely to help other USB camera owners as well.
If you're looking for a digital camera, BTW, don't go past the 505. It's light, well-balanced, fits everywhere, has automatic everything (and the automatics can each be totally switched off). One nice feature is that it can take shots in total silence. I believe the latest incarnation has 3.3 megapixels and just about brews your coffee as well.
If you have a relative with a sewing machine, there are two accessories I recommend having them make:
To play the devil's advocate, if an ISP sees a DDoS agains one client, and the removal of that client will allow hundreds of other clients to retain access, the ISP should remove the one for the good of the many.
"Oh, goody," say the black-hat bullies, "we can throw our weight around and get people kicked off the Internet. Let's do it again!"
You can't pacify a crocodile by throwing it steaks. I prefer using a javelin through the head, preferably from behind a nice strong fence.
Sync, mount the ReiserFS partition readonly and switch off journalling. ---***OOOM!---
I haven't tried a 4.0preX kernel yet. There's a few things that you need to get besides the later kernel (which is absolutely necessary for the Sony camera).
Searching for the page again now...
Forgot to mention (don't know of this helped), I downloaded the latest drivers from http://linux.3dfx.com/ (if you want to rebuild from source, you save about 17MB of download, ie about halve it, but need about 400MB free on /usr/src/ and several hours (K6-II-300+64M)).
This is being typed from Netscape on my Banshee, which uses the same drivers as the Voodoo3. My (Banshee, crappy monitor) config is at http://firestation.fdns.net/~leonb/XF86Config-4
/root/XF86Config.new file from there, testing with XFree86 -xf86config /root/XF86Config.new (which the -configure option tells you to do). When I was satsfied wit my changes, I cp'ed it over the top of /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, made it world-readable and all was well.
The config as installed did not work. I did XFree86 -configure as root and edited the
XFree86 v4 works better, faster and cheaper (less CPU cycles) on my Banshee, S3 (hawk, spit) and SiS6326 (hawk, spit) cards than 3.3.6 (Mandrake 7.0) ever did (not that it ever crashed, but, for example, I can now run the SiS with all acceleration on and bzflag works in a window in realtime), although I had to muck around with the config to make my Banshee happy.
It has up-to-date patched (black-hats nick off) versions of the network stuff. And lots of new toys. Lots of stuff fixed besides the installer.
xkobo works, but (especially in double-size mode) schlurps up *heaps* of X resources, really needs rewriting.
There is no announcement yet.
Perhaps they shuld use a truly private directory on the mirrows, then mv it across on the third stroke.
Prepare TWO blank CDs and write yourself a full Cooker. It's worth it.
ALSA. *3* IDEs. Roxen. XFree86 V4. SDL and some apps for it. Updated PySol (now over 300 games). QT-2. Eterm on the KDE menus (which are all much better organised). ixterm. Gphoto. Roby. ocaml. oscope. QCAD. Lotsa other stuff.
/usr when installed. "Praise the Lord for fat uplinks!" (-:
Still on GIMP 1.0.4 though, would like to see that updated.
Well into two CDs' worth in Cooker now, makes over 2G in
I use Sun Sparc Solaris at home, with StartOffice for WP. My wife loves it!
..., how can I get my work back?" (strings <file.pub >rescued.txt)
Ditto Mandrake Linux. The only downer for her is that some of her (Windows) games and educational CDs won't work with it - a number which is steadily decreasing as WINE grows.
After WINE's next traumatic growth spurt (multiple emulation processes) settles down, I expect that they all will work. It's not exactly MS-free, but... she's now accustomed to walking away from her machine in the middle of something and coming back to it three days later. Save? Nah! It'll still be there.
It's going to be personally amusing when she does that with Windows apps.
Her sister runs Windows and is perennially griping about "it crashed in the middle of" or "it crashes whenever I load
For whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
"For whereas my forebears put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke: my father chastised you with Word, but I will chastise you with Outlook."
deal with Microsoft?s abuse
You could start by switching off so-called "smart" quotes in yor own Microsoft software. An even better step would be to use software other than Microsoft's to post with...
On the other hand, having question-marks appear every time Microsot's name is mentioned has a warped kind subliminal appeal... (-:
Why would anyone waste time and resources on such a thing?
Once bitten, twice shy. People do it so that they don't have to experience their reason(s) for hating Microsoft again. Daily, in some cases.
I despise Microsoft in a detached professional manner because I've re-installed Windows on various machines more times than I care to count. As well as annoying, that quickly gets expensive.
I also despise them in a personal manner for the many man-months of my own work lost from time to time in Word or Windows crashes.
Thank you, I've had enough.
what blew me away was Gnome's Gnumeric, a spreadsheet which has all the benefits of having been designed by MS without the drawbacks of having been implemented by them!
Most (if not all) of Microsoft's products are bought or (more or less) stolen, not designed in-house, starting from Q-DOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System"; yes, that's really where MS-DOS started - and finished). IE, possibly their core product, used to be SpyGlass. Access runs at finite speed because of technology gutted from FoxBASE Pro. Significant pieces of NT are spelling-error compatible with DEC's MICA O/S and other pieces simply reek of OS/2. Perhaps MS-Bob was designed in house?
How about "a spreadsheet which has all the benefits of having been bought by MS without the drawbacks of having actually been bought by them"?
Currently you can get a pretty MS-less office with StarOffice. There are some people who really like it.
And there are others who have tried SIAG Office and some of the other alternatives, and who like a finite response time in 32M or less of RAM. (-:
SO's big advanatge is that it looks and feel the way MS wanted Office to look and feel.
Anyway, that's the story we want to tell, we can do better than M$ is, we don't want to clone, we want to make our own stuff. At least I do. Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer... :-)
/The Crimson Assurance Company/
So write text, do graphic design, run an index site, hand out CDs at trade shows, review things. Whatever works for you. Things that the programmers will do "later." Ahuk, ahuk, ahuk.
Want things to do? Get a ray-tracer or GIMP and make some decent tiles for xpuyopuyo or xjewel. Write a tutorial for dia. Put together a set of web-page templates that might some day get integrated into a FrontPage replacement. Something "trivial" and "safe" like that. Then extend your skills into areas you enjoy - or heck, just keep doing "trivial" things. They all need doing by somebody!
"And YOU...! Make the tea!" -- Monty Python,
Look, I'm not taking issue with the other things you said, but just get it that people are not stupid.
This much is true. About 10% of my clients actually read help and manuals. The results are... disturbing... for the we-know-what-you-want camp.
Maybe all them [...] just have something better to do with their time [...] ie. they have a life.
"I have no life. I really like it that way. I'm happy."
That's a direct quote of a friend of mine (female, pretty, not at all witless - but wouldn't know which end of the mouse to push the cheese into and isn't interested in finding out). She made the statement a year ago and is still happy.
You don't need to "have a life" to be uninterested in computers. QED. (-:
I also can't figure out how to make only *PART* of a page columnized in StarOffice - I have to resort to using tables.
In 5.1, it can't be done. Columns are part of the _page_ formatting, not of sections or even paragraphs. On the other hand, tables are much more flexible and consistent than in Word.
I haven't tried it yet in 5.2beta but I strongly suspect it will have been one of the things that they fixed.
When exporting from a presentation which links to images, all the links are converted to embeds, and the end result is one monster file
For portability, avoid the more amazing (read: distracting) effects, and export it as HTML. StarOffice is noticeably better at exporting to HTML than Office is (but although much improved, this is still, uh, "a field rich with opportunities for improvement").
You can use xl2html if you just want to make HTML which you can then search using a conventional engine, or it should be simple to hack the back end of xl2html if you want it to spit the spreadsheet out as SQL.
The latter option would only be truly useful if the spreadsheets were all similar, or fell into a few similar sets. That being the case, a little forethought will allow you to do stats and graphing operations on the entire dataset that'll send the boss's eyebrows whizzing into his hairline.
If you define "functional" as useful, rather than the more esoteric AI term, LISP does seem to be functional. It passes the FSF test of being able to send mail. Someone's even written a window manager in which all of the config and fanciness is LISP.
Yes, you can also do this in PERL, but it's a constant discipline not to do it in write-only fashion.