DC101 and WHFS are actually owned by the same parent company. They are the only source for modern rock music in the Washington, DC area, and they play nothing but Rock Top 40 most of the time.
I run Black & White at work on a Win2k machine and at home on Win98. I runs, not without trouble of course, but playable.
On both systems I use a Razer Boomslang 2000, which of course has a higher refresh rate than you would believe. It really doesn't help that much. What is more important, from what I can tell, is how much time the processor has to spend onhandling other things (like graphics) and how much time it spends on getting input from the mouse.
I chose Hermetic long ago becuase of how I view most people's reaction to technology. So many people are simply flabergasted to learn that I didn't go to school to learn computers.
Why are people scared to play with their computers? Or the VCRs? Does your grandma know how the light gun in Duck Hunter(and similar games) worked? Would she care?
Hermetic knowledge is no longer about alchemy and summoning of spirits...
I am just a code monkey where I work, but we had a very similar problem when we migrated to Win2k over the last month or so. Here's what we ended up learning:
The BDC's call for a new "poll" (i can only tell you what was told to me...) every time one of the win2k BDC's goes down. The winner is the win2k system with the most... something, i don't remember, maybe hardware? lastest verions?
Catch: They also "poll" when they come back up. So the job of BCD can be constanly shifting.
We were have a very hard time when I was installing my Win2k workstation, then wrote a few bad loops that were taking down my win2k server...
Note that this is hearsay from a programmer, not a networker.
I currently have three mice at work.
It is on a W2K machine, but it works just as well in Win98. Since it is USB dependant, I have never been able to make it work in *nix.
With USB mice you can plug in a mouse in the USB slot and one in the PS/2 hole. I don't know if there is a limit, barring the 127(?) device limit on a USB chain. They all move the same pointer, however.
This can still be useful when the mice can have different sensitivity settings. One of my mice is the Razer Boomslang 2000 (order from ThinkGeek) that can be set to absurdly high responsiveness, which makes it unwieldy for graphics work, but great for gaming. The PS/2 mouse and the castrated mouse are both a lot easier to use for fine work, or when someone that can't handle the Razer sits at my desk.
I have long looked for a utility that would enable mutiple pointers so I would be able to use whichever hand wasn't typing to mouse with, but have never found anything that makes it look possible.
Of course, this is just my opinion, but I don't recall a whole lot of amazing breakthroughs in all of the relevent fields, you know?
Speech recognition is all fine and dandy, with a kick-ass system and a lot of time to train it but
reading lips? Get real.
What I find most depressing is the fact that Clarke, normally a vocal debunker of bogus crap such as this has been taken in and is lending his name to a truly crappy product.
This is not an internet con, but a con that happened on the internet. People get conned all the time, mostly older or gullible poor people ("lotteries are a tax on people with bad math skills" was a.sig I recently saw here), but also on the eager, greedy, and trusting.
That this happened on the internet is simply because the opprotunity was there, much like the telephone/mail scam artists that prey on the elderly all over the USA. More and more hoaxes, scams, and chain letters appear on the internet every day because of the speed and anonymity inherent in the tool. I think that the most important point of this story was that the man got caught, despite all of the advantages that an "internet con" has.
Your novels are generally wide ranging in settings and background enviroments, but you are almost universally known as the author of THHGTTG.
Have you found that you are typecast as a writer, since you are best known for the Hitchhiker trilogy, or do you think people (publishers) will read(publish) what you produce regardless of its subject matter?
She is not likely to be reading a Linux-centric web site. But since it is possible, I thought I would point out to everyone else how unlikely it would be for her to read my messsage.
I wrote a Cold Fusion script to rip the JenniCam picture and save it to disk with a timestamped name. I got about two weeks worth of images, taken every 15 minutes before it was taken down by my boss.
If I want pr0n, I know where to get it. If I want to see normal people doing normal things, this is the place to do it. The problem is most normal stuff is boring. (And having more than 1400 images I can promise you I have seen enough to know!) I enjoy jenni as a slashbox, but after wading through literally hundreds of shots of her sleeping, the few thong pics weren't worth it.
So, Jenni, if you read Slashdot (she uses a Mac), I still watch, but in a passing a car wreck sort of way...
No matter what hardware you end up with, remember what you are asking it to do. It will be substantially slower than you are expecting, the same as compiling. For any non-trivial project, compile times become enormous. Doing conversions in Premiere, for example, from.mpeg to.avi (if you needed to, for some reason) , will take forever on any decent length film. As long as you remember to be patient, the systems you are looking at will be ok. If you want to do professional work, however, you need to go with an AVID system. They are brutally expensive, but it is what the pros in Hollywood use.
Most of the complaints about Portman and pants and what-not are silly in most respects. If you don't want to read them, set your threshhold to 1. Or higher. I have never seen a troll post unless I was moderating and viewing at -1.
I believe the theory that the trolls are just kids. They want attention (or like breaking windows and kicking cats, whatever) and use/. as a forum to vent their lonliness. They are rearely successful in disrupting actual conversation on/., and are more of a nuisance when meta-moderating than anything else.
The only thing that trolls really affect is moderation points, which is why a previos poster suggested that posts only be moderated up, and never down. That why the good stuff will rise, and no one wastes moderater points on lonely kids with nothing better to do. Or the first post weenies.
To test the lonely kids theory, let's try this: The last line of your post should be your age and what you do. You sacrifice some anonymity, but we will all see who the posers are.
To top all of this garbage off, why is it that Jon Katz' stories have the highest percentage of posts that don't make it to 1? I don't think he is so awful to deserve flaming every time he writes something. Occasionally, maybe, but every single time? Rarely (IIRC) does his threads have a higher than 3:1 signal/noise ratio, far below the average of the rest of/.'s stories. You can take Katz off your preferences if you don't like him. I'm sure he wishes he coud take you off of his.
I'm 24. I am a web designer with coldfusion, java, and some perl. I also suffer through help desk.
I think it is more interesting to note that this allows broadcasters to edit images on the fly. Silly things like billboards or advertising are not goiing to change the world, but there are further ramifications to this sort of tampering.
What would JFK's assisination look like with a shooter added in?
What would the missle strikes in Africa look like with incriminating evidence added in?
Or maybe a president and some young woman?
I know these sorts of images are already present to some degree, with many people believing in faked images or others believing images have been faked (the moon landing and Mars faces come to mind), but technology such as this has the potential of allowing someone like Ted Turner or the military to wield power over what we know.
Yes, I am paranoid. But I know what I can do, and I am not as smart as they are.
I have to go to work this morning, just to check everything out. Management decided to take all computer systems down: the servers, the digital phone network, the elevators (even though the building was locked yesterday afternoon), and the electroninc locks on the doors.
Obviously nothing went wrong, I have dialed into the server that I didn't bring down and it is fine. So, I get a day of comp time for going in and playing Unreal Tournament.
I'm On a Win98 box right now. I couldn't dial up either of my ISP's at first (I was freaking out!), but then I rebooted and everything seems ok. Sound, TV, Modem, Unreal Tournament...
We just got five of them in on Tuesday. I am not one of the lucky few to get one of them...
Me: "No sir, you can;t have your new computer." My boss: "Why not?" Me: "ZDNet says they might not boot. You may have to push the power button a second time. Dell even stopped shipping the systems." My Boss: "Oh, wow! Can we get it fixed?" Me: "I'll start working on it right away!" Me: Goes and installs Unreal Tournament on brand new 733Mhz desktop!:)
This may be useful to some people... But not me, I fear.
I have used mice. Trackballs, touchpads, touch screens, and a joystick once or twice. I have navigated with the keyboard and with voice controls.
All this crap, just because using a mouse is like pointing with a potato.
You know what? I still use the mouse. It is universal, so I don't feel wierd when I go to someone else's desk. (I have one luser who insists on using a touchpad on his desktop PC:( )
I hate to admit I like the mouse, but it is so useful in a basic sense that I would dread using anything else.
It does look cool, though. And would almost be worth it for the shock value.:)
I will by the Windows version as soon as it comes out. I have been playing the amazing demos as they have been released and am way too excited to sit on my hands waiting for the Linux port.
I may buy the Linux version if I get a chance, but I have to buy the Windows version immediately.
A car thief once told me "There is no such thing as complete security. All your precautions are going to do is stop the incompetant, who aren't a danger anyway, and slow down the professionals, who won't be stopped at any rate." Or maybe it was my dad.
Either way, no amount of virus protection will stop all virii. This should not be seen as a setback for Dell, but be a time for rejoicing. Dell actually admitted that there was a problem, has attempted to correct it, and not tried to hide any of this from the public. All at great cost to themselves.
Many other computer companies would simply hush up a problem of this magnitude, but Dell deserves our praise for coming forward and correcting a problem publicly.
What with this and the recent stories about echelon, it is high time we started encrypting everything that we hold dear. Unfortuneately, we can't encrypt everything on the internet.
There was a story some time back about Freedom, a web encrption scheme that encrypts all communication between your PC and the servers you are communicating with. Does anyone have a link, or more info? I have lost mine since then.
I am a field tech/troubleshooter type guy in the Washington, D.C. area. We command fairly high salaries here because most of the population doesn't have a clue as to what they are doing.
Any "high tech" areas with a large percentage of people without computer skills is going to be the same way.
However, if I were to go to silicon valley or Seattle, or wherever there are a lot of really talented geeks, I wouldn't get paid squat, since my skills wouldn't be unique. Supply and demand, right?
The same goes for coders. An english-only programmer isn't going to find much work programming Malaysian software, you know? Or, a very good Malaysian tech isn't going to get a tech support job here in DC if he/she can't speak any english.
The only way to find out how much you will make is to ask. Be honest. Tell employers your story, and ask what a decent salary for a beginner should be. When you interview, ask for 20 percent more, and negotiate from there.
Slashdot Mirror
They are the only source for modern rock music in the Washington, DC area, and they play nothing but Rock Top 40 most of the time.
They sound the same because they are the same!
I run Black & White at work on a Win2k machine and at home on Win98. I runs, not without trouble of course, but playable.
On both systems I use a Razer Boomslang 2000, which of course has a higher refresh rate than you would believe. It really doesn't help that much. What is more important, from what I can tell, is how much time the processor has to spend onhandling other things (like graphics) and how much time it spends on getting input from the mouse.
I chose Hermetic long ago becuase of how I view most people's reaction to technology. So many people are simply flabergasted to learn that I didn't go to school to learn computers.
Why are people scared to play with their computers? Or the VCRs? Does your grandma know how the light gun in Duck Hunter(and similar games) worked? Would she care?
Hermetic knowledge is no longer about alchemy and summoning of spirits...
The BDC's call for a new "poll" (i can only tell you what was told to me...) every time one of the win2k BDC's goes down. The winner is the win2k system with the most... something, i don't remember, maybe hardware? lastest verions?
Catch: They also "poll" when they come back up. So the job of BCD can be constanly shifting.
We were have a very hard time when I was installing my Win2k workstation, then wrote a few bad loops that were taking down my win2k server...
Note that this is hearsay from a programmer, not a networker.
It is on a W2K machine, but it works just as well in Win98. Since it is USB dependant, I have never been able to make it work in *nix.
With USB mice you can plug in a mouse in the USB slot and one in the PS/2 hole. I don't know if there is a limit, barring the 127(?) device limit on a USB chain. They all move the same pointer, however.
This can still be useful when the mice can have different sensitivity settings. One of my mice is the Razer Boomslang 2000 (order from ThinkGeek) that can be set to absurdly high responsiveness, which makes it unwieldy for graphics work, but great for gaming. The PS/2 mouse and the castrated mouse are both a lot easier to use for fine work, or when someone that can't handle the Razer sits at my desk.
I have long looked for a utility that would enable mutiple pointers so I would be able to use whichever hand wasn't typing to mouse with, but have never found anything that makes it look possible.
Of course, this is just my opinion, but I don't recall a whole lot of amazing breakthroughs in all of the relevent fields, you know?
Speech recognition is all fine and dandy, with a kick-ass system and a lot of time to train it but
reading lips? Get real.
What I find most depressing is the fact that Clarke, normally a vocal debunker of bogus crap such as this has been taken in and is lending his name to a truly crappy product.
This is not an internet con, but a con that happened on the internet. People get conned all the time, mostly older or gullible poor people ("lotteries are a tax on people with bad math skills" was a .sig I recently saw here), but also on the eager, greedy, and trusting.
That this happened on the internet is simply because the opprotunity was there, much like the telephone/mail scam artists that prey on the elderly all over the USA. More and more hoaxes, scams, and chain letters appear on the internet every day because of the speed and anonymity inherent in the tool. I think that the most important point of this story was that the man got caught, despite all of the advantages that an "internet con" has.
Your novels are generally wide ranging in settings and background enviroments, but you are almost universally known as the author of THHGTTG.
Have you found that you are typecast as a writer, since you are best known for the Hitchhiker trilogy, or do you think people (publishers) will read(publish) what you produce regardless of its subject matter?
She is not likely to be reading a Linux-centric web site.
But since it is possible, I thought I would point out to everyone else how unlikely it would be for her to read my messsage.
I wrote a Cold Fusion script to rip the JenniCam picture and save it to disk with a timestamped name. I got about two weeks worth of images, taken every 15 minutes before it was taken down by my boss.
If I want pr0n, I know where to get it. If I want to see normal people doing normal things, this is the place to do it. The problem is most normal stuff is boring. (And having more than 1400 images I can promise you I have seen enough to know!) I enjoy jenni as a slashbox, but after wading through literally hundreds of shots of her sleeping, the few thong pics weren't worth it.
So, Jenni, if you read Slashdot (she uses a Mac), I still watch, but in a passing a car wreck sort of way...
No matter what hardware you end up with, remember what you are asking it to do. .mpeg to .avi (if you needed to, for some reason) , will take forever on any decent length film. As long as you remember to be patient, the systems you are looking at will be ok.
It will be substantially slower than you are expecting, the same as compiling. For any non-trivial project, compile times become enormous. Doing conversions in Premiere, for example, from
If you want to do professional work, however, you need to go with an AVID system. They are brutally expensive, but it is what the pros in Hollywood use.
Most of the complaints about Portman and pants and what-not are silly in most respects. If you don't want to read them, set your threshhold to 1. Or higher. I have never seen a troll post unless I was moderating and viewing at -1.
/. as a forum to vent their lonliness. They are rearely successful in disrupting actual conversation on /., and are more of a nuisance when meta-moderating than anything else.
/.'s stories. You can take Katz off your preferences if you don't like him. I'm sure he wishes he coud take you off of his.
I believe the theory that the trolls are just kids. They want attention (or like breaking windows and kicking cats, whatever) and use
The only thing that trolls really affect is moderation points, which is why a previos poster suggested that posts only be moderated up, and never down. That why the good stuff will rise, and no one wastes moderater points on lonely kids with nothing better to do. Or the first post weenies.
To test the lonely kids theory, let's try this: The last line of your post should be your age and what you do. You sacrifice some anonymity, but we will all see who the posers are.
To top all of this garbage off, why is it that Jon Katz' stories have the highest percentage of posts that don't make it to 1? I don't think he is so awful to deserve flaming every time he writes something. Occasionally, maybe, but every single time? Rarely (IIRC) does his threads have a higher than 3:1 signal/noise ratio, far below the average of the rest of
I'm 24. I am a web designer with coldfusion, java, and some perl. I also suffer through help desk.
I think it is more interesting to note that this allows broadcasters to edit images on the fly. Silly things like billboards or advertising are not goiing to change the world, but there are further ramifications to this sort of tampering.
What would JFK's assisination look like with a shooter added in?
What would the missle strikes in Africa look like with incriminating evidence added in?
Or maybe a president and some young woman?
I know these sorts of images are already present to some degree, with many people believing in faked images or others believing images have been faked (the moon landing and Mars faces come to mind), but technology such as this has the potential of allowing someone like Ted Turner or the military to wield power over what we know.
Yes, I am paranoid. But I know what I can do, and I am not as smart as they are.
IIRC he began to show symptoms and was diagnosed in his twentys.
Read the book.
I have to go to work this morning, just to check everything out.
Management decided to take all computer systems down: the servers, the digital phone network, the elevators (even though the building was locked yesterday afternoon), and the electroninc locks on the doors.
Obviously nothing went wrong, I have dialed into the server that I didn't bring down and it is fine. So, I get a day of comp time for going in and playing Unreal Tournament.
Y2K: The biggest hoax ever.
I'm On a Win98 box right now. I couldn't dial up either of my ISP's at first (I was freaking out!), but then I rebooted and everything seems ok. Sound, TV, Modem, Unreal Tournament...
All is well.
We just got five of them in on Tuesday. I am not one of the lucky few to get one of them...
:)
Me: "No sir, you can;t have your new computer."
My boss: "Why not?"
Me: "ZDNet says they might not boot. You may have to push the power button a second time. Dell even stopped shipping the systems."
My Boss: "Oh, wow! Can we get it fixed?"
Me: "I'll start working on it right away!"
Me: Goes and installs Unreal Tournament on brand new 733Mhz desktop!
Now that is a boycott worth paying attention to. It would be impossible for Intel to ignore the possibility of using the entire European market.
Could this actually be under the "Your Rights Online" heading?
Does anyone know if the MS ball-less mouse (I forget its real name...) is Linux-happy? I assume it is, but I just want to make sure...
That's what I want. And a real modem. And a supported video card.
DSL would be nice, or cable modem. Neither are really options right where I live...
A flat screen monitor would be wonderful.
More RAM.
Basically any buzzword-noun would be a great joy to recieve for Christmas.
This is, of course, to be expected. All cracking is illegal even if nothing is broken! This guy just hit the wrong site and got caught.
You must suffer the consequences of your actions, and cracking the White House site is a bad idea...
This may be useful to some people...
:( )
:)
But not me, I fear.
I have used mice. Trackballs, touchpads, touch screens, and a joystick once or twice. I have navigated with the keyboard and with voice controls.
All this crap, just because using a mouse is like pointing with a potato.
You know what? I still use the mouse. It is universal, so I don't feel wierd when I go to someone else's desk. (I have one luser who insists on using a touchpad on his desktop PC
I hate to admit I like the mouse, but it is so useful in a basic sense that I would dread using anything else.
It does look cool, though. And would almost be worth it for the shock value.
I will by the Windows version as soon as it comes out. I have been playing the amazing demos as they have been released and am way too excited to sit on my hands waiting for the Linux port.
I may buy the Linux version if I get a chance, but I have to buy the Windows version immediately.
A car thief once told me "There is no such thing as complete security. All your precautions are going to do is stop the incompetant, who aren't a danger anyway, and slow down the professionals, who won't be stopped at any rate." Or maybe it was my dad.
Either way, no amount of virus protection will stop all virii. This should not be seen as a setback for Dell, but be a time for rejoicing. Dell actually admitted that there was a problem, has attempted to correct it, and not tried to hide any of this from the public. All at great cost to themselves.
Many other computer companies would simply hush up a problem of this magnitude, but Dell deserves our praise for coming forward and correcting a problem publicly.
What with this and the recent stories about echelon, it is high time we started encrypting everything that we hold dear. Unfortuneately, we can't encrypt everything on the internet.
There was a story some time back about Freedom, a web encrption scheme that encrypts all communication between your PC and the servers you are communicating with. Does anyone have a link, or more info? I have lost mine since then.
This question has doubful useability...
I am a field tech/troubleshooter type guy in the Washington, D.C. area. We command fairly high salaries here because most of the population doesn't have a clue as to what they are doing.
Any "high tech" areas with a large percentage of people without computer skills is going to be the same way.
However, if I were to go to silicon valley or Seattle, or wherever there are a lot of really talented geeks, I wouldn't get paid squat, since my skills wouldn't be unique. Supply and demand, right?
The same goes for coders. An english-only programmer isn't going to find much work programming Malaysian software, you know? Or, a very good Malaysian tech isn't going to get a tech support job here in DC if he/she can't speak any english.
The only way to find out how much you will make is to ask. Be honest. Tell employers your story, and ask what a decent salary for a beginner should be. When you interview, ask for 20 percent more, and negotiate from there.