You could perhaps download CD or DVD image and burn it yourself for those who need it? You don't have to order it.
This is what I do now. Travel with a laptop, a bunch of blank discs, and a set of commonly useful packages. (a mix of Windows binary/source packages and Linux, but lighter distros that run well on the typically older hardware I run into.) Doesn't help people I don't happen to meet, but every little bit helps, right?
Good to know, but I can't seem to find a package list of what, exactly, comes on those disks so it's difficult for me to determine just how relevant that is (new installations aside where it's somewhere between "fantastic" and "no down side" but I tend not to encounter these on my trips). Googling Ubuntu CD package list doesn't help either. Also, 10 weeks delivery time? The price is right, but if you need something now, advantage still goes to MS (or bootleg MS).
I've run into Access users in Africa who were hitting some limits and getting severely degraded performance. Sometimes (when appropriate) I suggest Postgres, but a common problem is that the people using Access don't have reliable Internet access (this is improving and certainly some parts of Africa are better than others in this regard) and would have a hard time obtaining Postgres because of this. The big advantage of Microsoft is that you can buy it on a disk.
Remember that story about how Don Knuth decided to take a year off to write TeX and finished 11 years later? Well I think it's safe to say based on this that DNF is going to be awesome.
My father had a physics course with monkeys. Every problem involved monkeys. My physics was uniformly dull in that regard, neither dinosaurs nor monkeys. The year after one class, though, the textbook was changed to one that was fond of pirates. Unfortunately, the textbook authors were not keen on making sure the problems actually had solutions so the instructors had to accept, "The pirates are drunk," as a correct answer.
Actually, that brewing temperature (I'm going to assume your figure is for a serving temperature and that the extraction temperature was really a little bit higher) is based on good research into solids extraction and taste preference. For a drip preparation, brewing coffee at cooler temperatures tastes under-extracted. It is possible to compensate for this somewhat by increasing the depth of the grounds bed or using a finer particle size. Both of these increase water resistance, causing the extraction time to increase, and this also introduces defects in the flavor. (Espresso, of course, can get away with the lower extraction temperature due to the higher pressure, so a reasonable compromise would be to just serve caffe americano prepared at whatever temperature by a robot.) In other words, McD was actually brewing the coffee correctly, as the then-president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America testified at the time.
That's not to say that there wasn't a problem here. That 2-7 seconds for third degree burns at 190 degrees is a real problem and one that can be addressed. Once coffee is served, it cools off fairly quickly. Once spilled, it cools off even faster assuming that it doesn't have the opportunity to pool. The fact is, good coffee is not safe to serve in a drive-through environment. Had she spilled the coffee in the store where there was some freedom of motion (rather than strapped into a seat in a small space), the burn would never have happened. So the choice is this: either serve lousy tasting coffee that wasn't brewed or stored correctly or stop serving coffee from the drive-through window.
When my sister was in high school she had two teachers who were chronic alcoholics (not that I don't see how the job could drive one to the drink). Nothing resembling teaching was going on in these classes. When she investigated the student complaint option, she asked about the procedure. This was:
1) Fill out a form which indicates who you are, who the complaint is against, and what the complaint is. Hand in the form. 2) Form is taken directly to the teacher the complaint is against. 3) Teacher fails student listed on the form.
I can't imagine the procedure for parental complaints was much better.
Yup, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't pay for YouTube. Now, if they set up some sort of system where you could tip the people who put up particularly neat stuff and skimmed a percentage off of that, I could see doing that.
You hit the nail on the head harder than you know. What you're asking for there is exactly what people who responded to the study I mentioned said. As a result, the world section over the years since then went from a full section down to (checks recent paper) about half the size of a post card (the rest of the page is ads, so it's easy to miss that it still exists). We got plenty of coverage when our mayor turned out to be a pedophile (we still have a couple more days before a new mayor gets elected, so we're currently mayor-free) and lately there's lots of coverage of which businesses are closing. Also, I'm being photographed and/or interviewed by someone with the paper pretty frequently (granted, that's not because I'm some monstrous criminal, corrupt public official, or am running businesses into the ground). To be fair, they're actually doing local coverage very well (a lot better than television was, though I can't say anything about that at the moment because storms killed my digital OTA tuner box [are there any tuner boxes out there that are capable of connecting to a 30 year old set that aren't garbage?] a couple weeks back and I haven't cared enough to replace it yet), but people still aren't buying it. Oh, and sorry your local offerings have so much spin; they aren't all like that but I've seen what happens when someone pretends that it's news to put out the left and the right side spin on something. It almost always just completely misses the point. Two sides to the story considered harmful.
Oh, and to the sibling post: sorry, but the Internet doesn't do national and international news better than a good newspaper. It does niche interest coverage better what with custom feeds and sites like this one, but there's tremendous value in a good newspaper in bringing in the interesting stories without readers needing to know or be interested enough to find the online coverage and presenting them in an easy to discover way. I haven't seen a news site yet that has the presentation of the quantity of stories in a good newspaper done anywhere near as well. Were it not for seeing it in the Chicago Tribune, I probably wouldn't know that Malawi was a hotspot of vampire activity (sure, you can Google that, but would you if you didn't know the story was there?).
What I fear, as one of those ever dwindling numbers who still read newspapers (and listen to the radio, and use the Internet, and...), is that it may be too late. Not because the newspapers have been heading down hill long enough that people aren't willing to even give them a chance anymore (though there's that), but because the people running the newspapers have forgotten what a really good newspaper looks like.
My local paper tried to match the product they sold to the market demand several years ago. They did a study, found out what the market thought it wanted, implemented the changes. The result sucks and it hasn't helped the company financials one bit. Sorry, but the market is lousy at communicating what it wants. If you give customers what they want, they'll buy it, but if you give them what they ask for, most of the time (the 'most' is to allow for that tiny portion of customers who really do know what they want and the small probability of a business noticing which ones those are) you'll be out of business before you know it.
Oddly enough, sometimes the language and library versions that are easily available (and I agree, should be the first place you look for these things) are just ever so slightly completely wrong for working with what you've already written. It wasn't that long ago (within the last couple years) that I ran into a sorting/searching problem where my options were: use a different structure for either the record or the record set (rewriting a lot of otherwise perfectly good code in the process), or write my own sorting/searching routine. Before coming to that conclusion I spent a couple days trying to coerce the appropriate library function into handling things correctly. Now, it may have been some deficiency on either my part or on the part of the documentation that prevented me from seeing the right way to do it, but I had spent enough time on it and the MIX code from Knuth Vol. 2 translates beautifully into C++ with iterators (Program B comes to 19 LOC, including single braces as a line). Now, it's not optimal for the application (it's the same algorithm as the library function I was trying to use) but it works correctly and it's fast enough to keep until I get around to writing something better.
It might already be gone. I, too, once had a page on GeoCities, so I decided to look into it. Searching for it, Google couldn't find it (but it seems Google Books likes to interpret the old long s as an f). Fine tuning my search pulled up one hit: a Usenet post with a link to the page in the.sig. So, I take this, and I go to the wayback machine. Put in the URL, and I get two versions, both from the year 2000 (well after I had stopped updating the site). Clicking the links, both were unavailable. The content at the URL itself, of course, is long gone. I looked in a couple other places as well and as near as I can tell, that set of pages is fully and permanently gone from the Internet and this project can do nothing to change that.
Okay, it turns out that I do have a full copy on an old computer. If I hooked a pair of modems up to it and a more modern machine, I could get it back and theoretically put it back on the Internet, but that won't be happening any time soon. So take a Google. You might not have to write that check out after all.
My first Linux experience was when a friend was trying to install it and for whatever reason just couldn't get it to work. At the time I was a Mac person who had played around with a lot of different things, but my friend figured that since I was writing software (never mind that writing software and using software are pretty different skill sets) maybe I might be able to help. So, knowing nothing about how to install Linux, I asked him to show me what he had done. He put in the first Slackware disk, started the computer, went through the installation, and... it just worked. At the end, he had a working computer running Linux. A few days later he told me what he did differently. He accidentally deleted the partition with Windows. Oops, but he learned that he didn't need that after all.
And this extension in the length of copyright terms quite frankly was pure theft, stolen from the American people as a consequence of loss of materials promised to the public domain and as a consequence of the loss of jobs advancing American culture based on such materials.
(sorry for hijacking your argument, but I wanted to post this and you had the best segue to it at the time)
The complaint against the Arial example was that Arial was a bad font. The person who gave the example was emphasizing the boring aspect and wanted an example of a good, boring font that most people would recognize by name. That's why I suggested Helvetica for the example. I never said that Helvetica was a bad font, just that it is boring. For many purposes, boring is what you want. That said, I would question the credibility of any article describing a sans serif font as nearly perfect. Serifs are not (okay, should not be) mere superfluous decorations.
I was fine with the Arial example, but perhaps Helvetica would be a better choice. Still boring enough for income tax forms and I think still commonly installed on systems.
It wasn't endless summer, it was eternal September. As in the month when students got their first computer and decided to let the Internet know that they knew nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what I do now. Travel with a laptop, a bunch of blank discs, and a set of commonly useful packages. (a mix of Windows binary/source packages and Linux, but lighter distros that run well on the typically older hardware I run into.) Doesn't help people I don't happen to meet, but every little bit helps, right?
Good to know, but I can't seem to find a package list of what, exactly, comes on those disks so it's difficult for me to determine just how relevant that is (new installations aside where it's somewhere between "fantastic" and "no down side" but I tend not to encounter these on my trips). Googling Ubuntu CD package list doesn't help either. Also, 10 weeks delivery time? The price is right, but if you need something now, advantage still goes to MS (or bootleg MS).
I've run into Access users in Africa who were hitting some limits and getting severely degraded performance. Sometimes (when appropriate) I suggest Postgres, but a common problem is that the people using Access don't have reliable Internet access (this is improving and certainly some parts of Africa are better than others in this regard) and would have a hard time obtaining Postgres because of this. The big advantage of Microsoft is that you can buy it on a disk.
Remember that story about how Don Knuth decided to take a year off to write TeX and finished 11 years later? Well I think it's safe to say based on this that DNF is going to be awesome.
No, I don't post AC. But you can hate me anyway. You'll note that my link lets you earn badges for getting the achievements.
If you like achievements, I recommend Achievement Unlocked (the poor elephant...).
My father had a physics course with monkeys. Every problem involved monkeys. My physics was uniformly dull in that regard, neither dinosaurs nor monkeys. The year after one class, though, the textbook was changed to one that was fond of pirates. Unfortunately, the textbook authors were not keen on making sure the problems actually had solutions so the instructors had to accept, "The pirates are drunk," as a correct answer.
Congressional staffers with mod points?
That depends. If my (hypothetical) car gets stolen, can I just call the police and have it promptly returned?
Actually, that brewing temperature (I'm going to assume your figure is for a serving temperature and that the extraction temperature was really a little bit higher) is based on good research into solids extraction and taste preference. For a drip preparation, brewing coffee at cooler temperatures tastes under-extracted. It is possible to compensate for this somewhat by increasing the depth of the grounds bed or using a finer particle size. Both of these increase water resistance, causing the extraction time to increase, and this also introduces defects in the flavor. (Espresso, of course, can get away with the lower extraction temperature due to the higher pressure, so a reasonable compromise would be to just serve caffe americano prepared at whatever temperature by a robot.) In other words, McD was actually brewing the coffee correctly, as the then-president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America testified at the time.
That's not to say that there wasn't a problem here. That 2-7 seconds for third degree burns at 190 degrees is a real problem and one that can be addressed. Once coffee is served, it cools off fairly quickly. Once spilled, it cools off even faster assuming that it doesn't have the opportunity to pool. The fact is, good coffee is not safe to serve in a drive-through environment. Had she spilled the coffee in the store where there was some freedom of motion (rather than strapped into a seat in a small space), the burn would never have happened. So the choice is this: either serve lousy tasting coffee that wasn't brewed or stored correctly or stop serving coffee from the drive-through window.
Well what did they expect, trying to host it on an Amiga?
When my sister was in high school she had two teachers who were chronic alcoholics (not that I don't see how the job could drive one to the drink). Nothing resembling teaching was going on in these classes. When she investigated the student complaint option, she asked about the procedure. This was:
1) Fill out a form which indicates who you are, who the complaint is against, and what the complaint is. Hand in the form.
2) Form is taken directly to the teacher the complaint is against.
3) Teacher fails student listed on the form.
I can't imagine the procedure for parental complaints was much better.
Yup, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't pay for YouTube. Now, if they set up some sort of system where you could tip the people who put up particularly neat stuff and skimmed a percentage off of that, I could see doing that.
You hit the nail on the head harder than you know. What you're asking for there is exactly what people who responded to the study I mentioned said. As a result, the world section over the years since then went from a full section down to (checks recent paper) about half the size of a post card (the rest of the page is ads, so it's easy to miss that it still exists). We got plenty of coverage when our mayor turned out to be a pedophile (we still have a couple more days before a new mayor gets elected, so we're currently mayor-free) and lately there's lots of coverage of which businesses are closing. Also, I'm being photographed and/or interviewed by someone with the paper pretty frequently (granted, that's not because I'm some monstrous criminal, corrupt public official, or am running businesses into the ground). To be fair, they're actually doing local coverage very well (a lot better than television was, though I can't say anything about that at the moment because storms killed my digital OTA tuner box [are there any tuner boxes out there that are capable of connecting to a 30 year old set that aren't garbage?] a couple weeks back and I haven't cared enough to replace it yet), but people still aren't buying it. Oh, and sorry your local offerings have so much spin; they aren't all like that but I've seen what happens when someone pretends that it's news to put out the left and the right side spin on something. It almost always just completely misses the point. Two sides to the story considered harmful.
Oh, and to the sibling post: sorry, but the Internet doesn't do national and international news better than a good newspaper. It does niche interest coverage better what with custom feeds and sites like this one, but there's tremendous value in a good newspaper in bringing in the interesting stories without readers needing to know or be interested enough to find the online coverage and presenting them in an easy to discover way. I haven't seen a news site yet that has the presentation of the quantity of stories in a good newspaper done anywhere near as well. Were it not for seeing it in the Chicago Tribune, I probably wouldn't know that Malawi was a hotspot of vampire activity (sure, you can Google that, but would you if you didn't know the story was there?).
What I fear, as one of those ever dwindling numbers who still read newspapers (and listen to the radio, and use the Internet, and...), is that it may be too late. Not because the newspapers have been heading down hill long enough that people aren't willing to even give them a chance anymore (though there's that), but because the people running the newspapers have forgotten what a really good newspaper looks like.
My local paper tried to match the product they sold to the market demand several years ago. They did a study, found out what the market thought it wanted, implemented the changes. The result sucks and it hasn't helped the company financials one bit. Sorry, but the market is lousy at communicating what it wants. If you give customers what they want, they'll buy it, but if you give them what they ask for, most of the time (the 'most' is to allow for that tiny portion of customers who really do know what they want and the small probability of a business noticing which ones those are) you'll be out of business before you know it.
2/12? Most people would just write that as 1/6, but I guess that doesn't sound as impressive?
Oddly enough, sometimes the language and library versions that are easily available (and I agree, should be the first place you look for these things) are just ever so slightly completely wrong for working with what you've already written. It wasn't that long ago (within the last couple years) that I ran into a sorting/searching problem where my options were: use a different structure for either the record or the record set (rewriting a lot of otherwise perfectly good code in the process), or write my own sorting/searching routine. Before coming to that conclusion I spent a couple days trying to coerce the appropriate library function into handling things correctly. Now, it may have been some deficiency on either my part or on the part of the documentation that prevented me from seeing the right way to do it, but I had spent enough time on it and the MIX code from Knuth Vol. 2 translates beautifully into C++ with iterators (Program B comes to 19 LOC, including single braces as a line). Now, it's not optimal for the application (it's the same algorithm as the library function I was trying to use) but it works correctly and it's fast enough to keep until I get around to writing something better.
It might already be gone. I, too, once had a page on GeoCities, so I decided to look into it. Searching for it, Google couldn't find it (but it seems Google Books likes to interpret the old long s as an f). Fine tuning my search pulled up one hit: a Usenet post with a link to the page in the .sig. So, I take this, and I go to the wayback machine. Put in the URL, and I get two versions, both from the year 2000 (well after I had stopped updating the site). Clicking the links, both were unavailable. The content at the URL itself, of course, is long gone. I looked in a couple other places as well and as near as I can tell, that set of pages is fully and permanently gone from the Internet and this project can do nothing to change that.
Okay, it turns out that I do have a full copy on an old computer. If I hooked a pair of modems up to it and a more modern machine, I could get it back and theoretically put it back on the Internet, but that won't be happening any time soon. So take a Google. You might not have to write that check out after all.
My first Linux experience was when a friend was trying to install it and for whatever reason just couldn't get it to work. At the time I was a Mac person who had played around with a lot of different things, but my friend figured that since I was writing software (never mind that writing software and using software are pretty different skill sets) maybe I might be able to help. So, knowing nothing about how to install Linux, I asked him to show me what he had done. He put in the first Slackware disk, started the computer, went through the installation, and... it just worked. At the end, he had a working computer running Linux. A few days later he told me what he did differently. He accidentally deleted the partition with Windows. Oops, but he learned that he didn't need that after all.
And this extension in the length of copyright terms quite frankly was pure theft, stolen from the American people as a consequence of loss of materials promised to the public domain and as a consequence of the loss of jobs advancing American culture based on such materials.
(sorry for hijacking your argument, but I wanted to post this and you had the best segue to it at the time)
We probably aren't in disagreement. My reply was mainly to your
Just don't like people crediting me with opinions I don't hold and didn't state.
The complaint against the Arial example was that Arial was a bad font. The person who gave the example was emphasizing the boring aspect and wanted an example of a good, boring font that most people would recognize by name. That's why I suggested Helvetica for the example. I never said that Helvetica was a bad font, just that it is boring. For many purposes, boring is what you want. That said, I would question the credibility of any article describing a sans serif font as nearly perfect. Serifs are not (okay, should not be) mere superfluous decorations.
I was fine with the Arial example, but perhaps Helvetica would be a better choice. Still boring enough for income tax forms and I think still commonly installed on systems.
It wasn't endless summer, it was eternal September. As in the month when students got their first computer and decided to let the Internet know that they knew nothing.
If it's lower-case i internet as in your post, then yes, two or more connected networks make an internet.