I'm waiting for one-way implantable satelite radios. In a bad situation? *Insert Regime Here* secret police captured you and confiscated your laptop? All you need is a sharp knife and a local anathetic. And, in a pinch, you could do without the sharp knife or the anathetic. Hey, if it's your own government who's captured you you could at least upload your dying words to your dynDNS webserver (you DO have rsynch'd offsite offshore daily backups, right?)
Dude, that was seriously scary. Kind of like the high-school teenage sleepover - "I got a good one. There's this couple on a date and there's a serial killer on the lose and -" "A serial killer?" "Yeah this is serious let me talk!" "No, I got a good one. Home webserver, on a RAID-1 Fedora setup. Bloke thought his data was safe. l33t script kiddies came and went when they realized his DynDNS wasn't hosted on a Windows box. Storm clouds ominiously grumbled the future. A flash of lightning hits the main grid. No UPS and a crappy PSU. 8 gigs of unbacked up photos, lost. 500 megs of 120 hour+ game saves. Websites, php scripts. Letters. 30 gigs of music. Gone. Just like that." (Fellow geeks in the group scream).
On a serious note: I'm running an unbacked up RAID-1 as a network drive. All my home network machines store their documents their, I host friend's websites and my own, many movies and mp3's as well. I know it will go one day - either an rm -rf at 3 am (I KNEW I should have used Reiser...), a filesystem error after a powercut, or simple the cat urinating on the exposed mainboard. I should backup - and I will once I figure out a more elegant solution than DVD-Rs.
Back when I was a n00b and using hotmail, that used to happen so often that it's second-nature to ctrl-a, ctrl-c before I send off a webform. Any webform - I'm doing it, even writing this!
Wonderful, yet another product placement ad. This was very annoying because, this being slashdot, I was actually curious about building my own cell tower.
(Ignoring the slight flame in your post there but...) Yes, that's always the worry - that you stop recording to remember, and start living to record. OTOH, though, how many distinct memories do you have from 5 years ago? From last year? From last week? And how many memories from this year will you have in 50 years? One? If that? I'd rather run the risk (and it IS a risk!) of living to record, than the risk of completely forgetting everything!
memories are often tarnished when you photograph them That's where the photography courses come in! Most of the pictures in my gallery from my friends are absolute crap, I take pride in trying to take good pictures - not just random snaps. Sometimes, a boring or mundane event becomes immortalized this way as it looks better on camera than in real life! Is this what you meant by the event becomming a tourist attraction?
Since I got my first digital camera two years ago (which was on my phone) I've taken over 1200 photos (do the math!) for almost the same reason. To me, life is about living (cliched, sorry!). But human memory being what it is, when we forget what we've lived, what proof do we have that we lived it - it would be like we never did these things at all. Even the monotonous day-to-day stuff should be remembered because, as you say, it makes up 95% of our life.
Photographs and cameras can't change that of course, but they can help - just like keeping a diary, even if it's just a personal log of what you did that day. So if something happens - no matter how small - I always try and snap it so I can remember it later. And of course, sharing it with friends is a good plan - especially if half your friends live a world away (I'm a TCK, grew up abroad), and the other half were there anyway and want to download the images and show them to their friends...
But don't trust these (very valuable, IMO) fragements of your life to an anonymous web service! In 20 years, flikr could be bust, absorbed by some other company (and their free service discontinued, your photos deleted). I'd bet money they wont be around to show your great-grand-children. Add to that the time it take to upload each and every one of your photos... I don't see the point, to be honest! I run my own Apache webserver on Fedora, a custom rig that also routes traffic for my network. I've even written a PhP script that generates a gallery-listing of all images in a folder, and uses GD to create thumbnails. Comments can be submitted as well, and as the filesystem is the database, adding a new image is as easy as copying it into a directory (or creating a new directory (album) to hold it in!) Anyway, my point is that I trust online services like Xanga (blog), Geocities (Website), Flikr (photo) about as far as I can throw them. And I know that no matter weather I be running Windows Server, FreeBSD, for Fedora in 50 years time, I'd far rather be responsible for me own treasures than someone I've never even met!
My point is, yes, I completely agree with you, but dont trust some free webservice!
Like you, BSG is not available near me. Also like you, I've heard it's mustard. One of the monitors in my multimon setup is a TV, and the graphics card automaticly full-screens video.
Check out the *very* original - the David Lynch, with a young Patrick Stewart and horrendous CG. It's almost as old as the Ten Commandments (the film, not stones)!
Yet many people with acess to a keyboard and the internet 'intuitively' confuse themselves with real writers.
No, "real writers", such as this ALA man, are confusing them with us. I do not know a single blog whoose writer purports to be the next Shakespeare. Most of the blogs I read are of my friends, "needless and badly-written teenage angst", you say? Maybe, but when will CNN report on my best friend's midterm results?
No, no, the grandparent makes sense AFAIK (of course, IANAXenobiologist, or theoretical physicicist, or astronomer). Well, at the very least, it's the beggining of good SF.
To answer your question, a Type I civilisation is a term used by scientists (and SF writers) to classify a civilisation's technological development.
A Type I civilisation can harness and manipulate the energies of an entire planet. They may be able to control the weather, for example, or harness it to create energy for themselves. In Star Trek, the UFP is bordering on Type I, although they'd never admit it.
A Type II Civilisation, in contrast, can manipulate the energies of an entire Solar System. They may build Dyson Spheres to harness a sun's energies, or use some other method we are currently unaware of.
Finally, a Type III civilisation is capable of harnessing the energies of an entire galaxy, or energy vast enough to be equivilent to the energy in a galaxy - roughly what the grandparent is talking about.
(Shameless coppied off the Net from a quick Google search)
On this scale, one may now rank the different propulsion systems available to different types of civilizations:
Type 0
Chemical rockets
Ionic engines
Fission power
EM propulsion (rail guns)
The thing is that the espresso machine measures out exactly the same amount of coffee every time into a short glass. Milk gets steamed for a minutue or so until it's, what, 70 degrees C? The machine then turns off automaticly. You ask for a tall latte, they'll pour in a single shot of espresso, add milk, and use a large spoon to make sure the foam doesn't go in with it. When you ask for a cappuchino, it's the same process, only the spoon is used to make it roughly 50% milk, 50% foam.
SO really the problem is, as the only variables that can be changed are foam or milk, if you ask them for less foam, they have to give more milk. And vice-versa.
I'm not sure where you live, but here extra shots are 15p per shot... (45 cents maybe?) Myself, I always hate to give customers a single shot because I always think the coffee looks terribly weak. I ussually try to give them a little extra, but sometimes that's not possible.
No, I don't have a TV in the bathroom. I want one though, or more accurately, an audrey (or somesuch) so I can listen to music and weirdos like you (;-)) can decide to watch TV through the network...
Actually, don't worry about TV jacks, worry about LAN (Cat5, fiber, whatever) cables (as I'm sure other people are saying). That way you can pipe TV into any room using a MythTV setup.
Include the bathhroom(s). You may be one of the few people who likes to listen to Greensleaves in the bath.
I'd go for NetBSD myself, but whatever OS you use it really won't do any good unless you use HTCPCP - that protocal was really designed for this kind of application...
If you order cappuccino at starbucks, you're gonna get a "starbucks style cappuccino" anyway, a single shot of espresso with 2,682 gallons of foam/milk. You can barely taste the coffee.
So why dont you ask for it with a double -- or tripple -- shot of espresso, eh?
In the past they used detection vehicles, which tune in to a specific frequency that is automaticly output by all TVs, by a device that is called the local oscillator. It's then a simple matter to cross-refference "Houses With a TV", with "Houses Paying TV Liscence Tax". The ones that arenn't paying tax get a visit...
That was in the past. Nowadays it's simpler, quicker, and cheaper to check all a list of all homes in the UK against homes with a TV liscence. If you don't have a licence, you're suspected of dodging the licence fee.
In the past they used detection vehicles, which tune in to a specific frequency that is automaticly output by all TVs, by a device that is called the local oscillator. It's then a simple matter to cross-refference "Houses With a TV", with "Houses Paying TV Liscence Tax". The ones that arenn't paying tax get a visit...
That was in the past. Nowadays it's simpler, quicker, and cheaper to check all a list of all homes in the UK against homes with a TV liscence. If you don't have a licence, you're suspected of dodging the licence fee. This isn't actually too harsh, as every single person I know has a TV. (Do you know anyone who doesn't?)
You don't have to pay the fee, though, especially if you dont have a TV. If you do have a TV set but use it for games, or for DVDs, you don't need a licence either.
http://www.tvlicensing.biz is a very good resource for more infomation. If you do find yourself in a situation where you have to deal with the TVLA, contact the Citizen's Advice Bureau, as they will provide much better advice than slashdot, or the Net.
Wanna know what I think? 50p a day for one of the world's best public TV services really isn't bad. Add that to the other BBC projects such as their massive website and their radio services, and their intitiative to digitise their archives and make them available for viewing... it's one of the few things that makes me proud to be British...
I'm with you, man. I used to use Opera religeosly until FF showed up. It was awesome - a browser as fast as Opera, that didn't ask me what to do with text files and looked like IE. Now, I used FF all the time. Again, not a zealot, but so easy to become one...
And, yes, on my machine (AthlonXP 2400+, 512MB), it's the fastest, followed shortly by Opera (except for loading time - Opera's slow there, but not as slow as IE), and trailing so distantly the blue IE looks more like a cloud on the horizon, is the world's [least] favorite browser.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm waiting for one-way implantable satelite radios. In a bad situation? *Insert Regime Here* secret police captured you and confiscated your laptop? All you need is a sharp knife and a local anathetic. And, in a pinch, you could do without the sharp knife or the anathetic. Hey, if it's your own government who's captured you you could at least upload your dying words to your dynDNS webserver (you DO have rsynch'd offsite offshore daily backups, right?)
(Mostly from Nancy Kress' "Beggars and Choosers")
Dude, that was seriously scary. Kind of like the high-school teenage sleepover - "I got a good one. There's this couple on a date and there's a serial killer on the lose and -" "A serial killer?" "Yeah this is serious let me talk!" "No, I got a good one. Home webserver, on a RAID-1 Fedora setup. Bloke thought his data was safe. l33t script kiddies came and went when they realized his DynDNS wasn't hosted on a Windows box. Storm clouds ominiously grumbled the future. A flash of lightning hits the main grid. No UPS and a crappy PSU. 8 gigs of unbacked up photos, lost. 500 megs of 120 hour+ game saves. Websites, php scripts. Letters. 30 gigs of music. Gone. Just like that." (Fellow geeks in the group scream).
On a serious note: I'm running an unbacked up RAID-1 as a network drive. All my home network machines store their documents their, I host friend's websites and my own, many movies and mp3's as well. I know it will go one day - either an rm -rf at 3 am (I KNEW I should have used Reiser...), a filesystem error after a powercut, or simple the cat urinating on the exposed mainboard. I should backup - and I will once I figure out a more elegant solution than DVD-Rs.
I dont wanna think about it, TBH.
Back when I was a n00b and using hotmail, that used to happen so often that it's second-nature to ctrl-a, ctrl-c before I send off a webform. Any webform - I'm doing it, even writing this!
I wonder how long before they merge with the CIA and become the Central Intelligence Corporation...
(It's a joke.)
Wonderful, yet another product placement ad. This was very annoying because, this being slashdot, I was actually curious about building my own cell tower.
By far and away the most popular regular Mensa meeting in London, England is the pub crawl.
Yes, but then again England isn't exactly the best place to do anything else, is it?
(Ignoring the slight flame in your post there but...) Yes, that's always the worry - that you stop recording to remember, and start living to record. OTOH, though, how many distinct memories do you have from 5 years ago? From last year? From last week? And how many memories from this year will you have in 50 years? One? If that? I'd rather run the risk (and it IS a risk!) of living to record, than the risk of completely forgetting everything!
memories are often tarnished when you photograph them That's where the photography courses come in! Most of the pictures in my gallery from my friends are absolute crap, I take pride in trying to take good pictures - not just random snaps. Sometimes, a boring or mundane event becomes immortalized this way as it looks better on camera than in real life! Is this what you meant by the event becomming a tourist attraction?
double-plus-ungood!
Funniest/scariest thing I've read all day!
Completely agreed! (See my other post here )
Since I got my first digital camera two years ago (which was on my phone) I've taken over 1200 photos (do the math!) for almost the same reason. To me, life is about living (cliched, sorry!). But human memory being what it is, when we forget what we've lived, what proof do we have that we lived it - it would be like we never did these things at all. Even the monotonous day-to-day stuff should be remembered because, as you say, it makes up 95% of our life.
Photographs and cameras can't change that of course, but they can help - just like keeping a diary, even if it's just a personal log of what you did that day. So if something happens - no matter how small - I always try and snap it so I can remember it later. And of course, sharing it with friends is a good plan - especially if half your friends live a world away (I'm a TCK, grew up abroad), and the other half were there anyway and want to download the images and show them to their friends...
But don't trust these (very valuable, IMO) fragements of your life to an anonymous web service! In 20 years, flikr could be bust, absorbed by some other company (and their free service discontinued, your photos deleted). I'd bet money they wont be around to show your great-grand-children. Add to that the time it take to upload each and every one of your photos... I don't see the point, to be honest! I run my own Apache webserver on Fedora, a custom rig that also routes traffic for my network. I've even written a PhP script that generates a gallery-listing of all images in a folder, and uses GD to create thumbnails. Comments can be submitted as well, and as the filesystem is the database, adding a new image is as easy as copying it into a directory (or creating a new directory (album) to hold it in!) Anyway, my point is that I trust online services like Xanga (blog), Geocities (Website), Flikr (photo) about as far as I can throw them. And I know that no matter weather I be running Windows Server, FreeBSD, for Fedora in 50 years time, I'd far rather be responsible for me own treasures than someone I've never even met!
My point is, yes, I completely agree with you, but dont trust some free webservice!
Daniel
Somerset, UK
DJCF.Sytes.Net, DJCF.Sytes.Net/gallery
Agreed, although I do have a friend who always - and I do mean always - wins. So I'd say not completely luck.
Although, still too much luck for me. Try Diplomacy!
Like you, BSG is not available near me. Also like you, I've heard it's mustard. One of the monitors in my multimon setup is a TV, and the graphics card automaticly full-screens video.
Bloody useful, that!
a faithful recreation of Dune!
Check out the *very* original - the David Lynch, with a young Patrick Stewart and horrendous CG. It's almost as old as the Ten Commandments (the film, not stones)!
But it's good...
Yet many people with acess to a keyboard and the internet 'intuitively' confuse themselves with real writers.
No, "real writers", such as this ALA man, are confusing them with us. I do not know a single blog whoose writer purports to be the next Shakespeare. Most of the blogs I read are of my friends, "needless and badly-written teenage angst", you say? Maybe, but when will CNN report on my best friend's midterm results?
To answer your question, a Type I civilisation is a term used by scientists (and SF writers) to classify a civilisation's technological development.
(Shameless coppied off the Net from a quick Google search)
On this scale, one may now rank the different propulsion systems available to different types of civilizations:
Type 0
Chemical rockets
Ionic engines
Fission power
EM propulsion (rail guns)
Type I
Ram-jet fusion engines
Photonic drive
Type II
Antimatter drive
Von Neumann nano probes
Type III
Planck energy propulsion
The thing is that the espresso machine measures out exactly the same amount of coffee every time into a short glass. Milk gets steamed for a minutue or so until it's, what, 70 degrees C? The machine then turns off automaticly. You ask for a tall latte, they'll pour in a single shot of espresso, add milk, and use a large spoon to make sure the foam doesn't go in with it. When you ask for a cappuchino, it's the same process, only the spoon is used to make it roughly 50% milk, 50% foam.
SO really the problem is, as the only variables that can be changed are foam or milk, if you ask them for less foam, they have to give more milk. And vice-versa.
I'm not sure where you live, but here extra shots are 15p per shot... (45 cents maybe?) Myself, I always hate to give customers a single shot because I always think the coffee looks terribly weak. I ussually try to give them a little extra, but sometimes that's not possible.
No, I don't have a TV in the bathroom. I want one though, or more accurately, an audrey (or somesuch) so I can listen to music and weirdos like you (;-)) can decide to watch TV through the network...
I love reading in the bath, but too often my book gets wet, and anyway, it's quicker to take a shower.
Actually, don't worry about TV jacks, worry about LAN (Cat5, fiber, whatever) cables (as I'm sure other people are saying). That way you can pipe TV into any room using a MythTV setup.
Include the bathhroom(s). You may be one of the few people who likes to listen to Greensleaves in the bath.
I'd go for NetBSD myself, but whatever OS you use it really won't do any good unless you use HTCPCP - that protocal was really designed for this kind of application...
So why dont you ask for it with a double -- or tripple -- shot of espresso, eh?
That was in the past. Nowadays it's simpler, quicker, and cheaper to check all a list of all homes in the UK against homes with a TV liscence. If you don't have a licence, you're suspected of dodging the licence fee.
More infomation
In the past they used detection vehicles, which tune in to a specific frequency that is automaticly output by all TVs, by a device that is called the local oscillator. It's then a simple matter to cross-refference "Houses With a TV", with "Houses Paying TV Liscence Tax". The ones that arenn't paying tax get a visit...
That was in the past. Nowadays it's simpler, quicker, and cheaper to check all a list of all homes in the UK against homes with a TV liscence. If you don't have a licence, you're suspected of dodging the licence fee. This isn't actually too harsh, as every single person I know has a TV. (Do you know anyone who doesn't?)
You don't have to pay the fee, though, especially if you dont have a TV. If you do have a TV set but use it for games, or for DVDs, you don't need a licence either.
http://www.tvlicensing.biz is a very good resource for more infomation. If you do find yourself in a situation where you have to deal with the TVLA, contact the Citizen's Advice Bureau, as they will provide much better advice than slashdot, or the Net.
Wanna know what I think? 50p a day for one of the world's best public TV services really isn't bad. Add that to the other BBC projects such as their massive website and their radio services, and their intitiative to digitise their archives and make them available for viewing... it's one of the few things that makes me proud to be British...
Erm wouldn't that be Opera? ;-)
I'm with you, man. I used to use Opera religeosly until FF showed up. It was awesome - a browser as fast as Opera, that didn't ask me what to do with text files and looked like IE. Now, I used FF all the time. Again, not a zealot, but so easy to become one...
And, yes, on my machine (AthlonXP 2400+, 512MB), it's the fastest, followed shortly by Opera (except for loading time - Opera's slow there, but not as slow as IE), and trailing so distantly the blue IE looks more like a cloud on the horizon, is the world's [least] favorite browser.