Got to say I agree with this. I do avoid spoilers when it's something I know I really want to see or read, but I'm quite happy to take a quick summary, including the ending, for a lot of stuff that I'm not that bothered about but which come up in conversation all the time.
Often it's not the actual plot you need to know for the pop culture - it's just a little bit of context around the catchphrases or certain character quirks that are important (knowing how Yoda speaks important is).
There are a handful of unix libc implementations out there, so someone, in fact, did.
Additionally, have you ever heard of a derivative work?
So I wonder why noone ever reimplemented it in glibc?
I'm not sure you'd even have to look at the original code - it formed the basis of an RFC, and there can only be so many ways to code the implementation of that RFC - two, to be precise: with or without bugs;-)
Exactly. I wish they'd cut the entertainment stuff - there's no need for it, it's well covered by commercial channels if you want it.
News, quality documentaries, indie films noone else would bother with and minority sports events, with a few major sports events that are deemed culturally important. That's all the BBC should do, IMO.
The main killer features I found were all to do with web-based service integration - pulling in your Facebook/Google/yahoo contacts into a pool where you link them together, their IMAP IDLE support, and Google Calendars support. I've yet to see anything quite as impressive elsewhere.
Actually I hated the integration of contacts and don't use it now. When I want to make a phonecall I don't want to be wading through dozens of people I only know on Facebook. It just clutters the address book.
I grew up in the 80s when HIV was big news and - here in the UK - TV ads warning of the dangers of unsafe sex were aired. A whole generation seemed to have grown up paranoid (perhaps rightly) about unprotected sex.
That seems to have faded and it's now seen as largely a third world problem. It seems that teenagers and twenty somethings have drifted back into behaviour that predated the advent of AIDS - and more. It's like they've worked out that it's still unlikely to affect them as it hasn't really got a grip in their demographic.
Sadly that's led to a massive increase in other, albeit treatable, STDs.
They couldn't get much worse. I switched from BT after a long running problem and support that was stupid beyond belief.
First call, first question: "are you calling from the line you want to report the fault on?". Me: "Yes". Support: "Let me run a line test"... long pause... "oh, I can't do that it appears that your line is in use"
Appears? No shit Sherlock, I've just told you I'm using it to speak to you.
I then had an engineer come out, confirm the problem was at the exchange and go away telling me it would get fixed soon. Even so, every time I called to chase progress I had to go through the whole "have you tried switching your PC off and on again" crap - how, exactly, would that fix the problem at the exchange?
I never got the problem resolved. I cancelled and switched to another supplier after about 6 weeks of failing to get it fixed.
Mind you, Pipex were no better. They seemed to think that an IP address was not a prerequisite to browsing the web...
That's fairly crazy to me. If it's legal to keep and store data in paper records without a license, I see no reason why a computer should be treated differently - it's just a more efficient way of doing the same thing.
The restrictions should come in when you try to sell that data on - and again, should equally apply to data in any format. I should no more be able to sell my paper address book to an advertising firm than my electronic copy (not that my address book has anyone in it, but you get the idea...)
This isn't what GP was talking about. That's file modification time, not the date the photo was taken (which is data inside the image file, not in the filesystem about the file).
The filesystem time and the exif time should be the same when they're on the camera. Just pass -p to cp when you copy them over.
Yes, but when you edit the file (in Photoshop, say), the date taken stays the same and the filesystem timestamp changes.
It actually annoys me that Windows defaults to showing the exif date taken when it detects a directory of images - I'd much rather see the filesystem datestamp and sort by that, so I can see which I've already edited. I already organise the directory structure by date taken anyway.
I was going to say this needs to be modified by the probability of having a second child of the same gender; i.e. if you have one boy, does that increase the probability of the second child being a boy? But it turns out it doesn't (according to the first website I found, but hey, I'm not a professional researcher!).
There is, overall, apparently a 51% chance of having a boy, which marginally skews the result, but this apparently doesn't vary for subsequent children; i.e. there is no overall predisposition to having children of a certain gender (having children of an uncertain gender is a different matter, and just plain bad luck...)
I agree that Gmail is so far ahead of its webmail competition such as Yahoo and Hotmail. The biggest feature, however, is Gmail's junk filter. Nary a piece of junkmail gets into my inbox and false positives are exceedingly rare. However, it's pretty disconcerting if this success is due to their understanding of your behaviors. Haha. The Gmail interface is very quick and efficient.
Probably mainly a volume thing, and Google's search algorithms. Google handles such a high volume of mail that it will pick up on new spam very quickly; if it sees the same mail going to thousands of unrelated inboxes, good chance it's spam. Only web based systems can do that - a local spam filter can't know what's happening to other users elsewhere. Google's is probably better than Yahoo or Hotmail because it does search and pattern matching better.
For a fair price, 500mb can be fine - especially if you have access to genuinely unlimited, or cheaper, broadband at home via wifi. But even then I believe that companies should make it very clear to you, via SMS/Email/phone calls etc if you're approaching, or exceeding, your limits, especially if you have to pay for it.
For example, Virgin Mobile in the UK charge £2 per meg over their `unlimited` 1gb plan, which is laughable.
And O2 give you access to BT Cloud wi-fi as part of their deal, which includes hotspots at the likes of McDonalds, Starbucks and Wetherspoon pubs. I presume that won't be metered, so even out and about you have plenty of options in addition to 3G (albeit with major security concerns - I wouldn't use public wifi for anything other than casual browsing...)
The trouble with O2 is just how slow their 3G is... I'm amazed anyone get actually get near these limits.
I've been a computer user literally longer than I can remember, and the idea of having a tablet that can also have cron jobs and shell scripts running in the background is delicious. But no, dude, don't yell at the Norms for being Normal. Give it a year or two and there will be some kind of really excellent Linux tablet that does everything a geek could ever want. You don't have to try to turn this one into that miracle product. Just let it be.
If HP do a WebOS tablet and leave it as open as the Pre phone, that'll be it. The Pre runs linux, you can get root on it with a really simple procedure and cron is available.
Who would've predicted 20 years ago that a Conservative government is now more liberal than a labour one.
I would. My gut feel is that the Conservatives are more comfortable being in charge than Labour, and therefore don't feel the need to micromanage the country. You could look at it another way; they don't really care what the plebs are getting up to, so don't feel the need to keep a close eye on them.
Certainly they claim to believe in free market, laissez faire economics, and small government, which would be incompatible with the surveillance state that Labour was building.
You learn something new every day - I remember being taught that the Sale of Goods Act applied only to purchases made by consumers - i.e. that it was purely consumer protection legislation. Business to business sales were not covered (usual breach of contract litigation would, of course, still be possible).
Just googled it, and it does appear that I was taught wrong - it does apply to business purchases.
I needed a lightweight, long battery life device mainly for better browsing than a smartphone while travelling. I like to be able to type emails on a proper(ish) keyboard, same for web forums.
I do a lot of photography and the 250GB harddrive is ideal to back up my compact flash cards and quick preview my shots - I used to use a dedicated Epson view for that.
It has HyperSpace, which is a boot option that takes you into a cut down linux system - it boots faster, uses less battery and is therefore a handy option when all you want is to browse.
Initial thoughts are that it's not that quick, but I also ordered a 1GB upgrade and when that arrives it should improve the Windows 7 performance (yes, Windows. Suits me. Sorry). Battery life seems good - I reckon the 11hrs quoted might be ambitious, but my experience so far says I should get 8 or 9 from normal use, including WiFi. Sticking a 3G USB dongle on will probably drain it quite a bit quicker...
If you are in the UK you don't need to worry about warranty; I have recently discovered the Sale of Goods Act, which means with or without warranty they would have to replace it because it is less than 6 years old.
Er, no, no exactly.
Not sure where you get the six years from. It will depend on what is considered to be a normal, expected life span for the item. Only if it breaks down in less time than would be expected as normal are you possibly covered by the act. I would suspect that six years would be considered excessive for an electronic device.
An "Encyclopedia" article on monetary standards written by a fifteen year-old on a bet made in the back of school bus that he couldn't work mentions of both John Maynard Keynes and Jenna Jameson into the same article.
I quoted Milton Friedman extensively in one of my degree level essays, citing as my source "The Collected Playboy Interviews", as it was the most convenient source for the soundbite quotes I wanted to use. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.
I was kind of missing the fact that you keep getting modded as funny and taking you at face value. I'm bored, I'll carry on doing so for a while.
If women aren't being coerced into it, and there are guys that abuse them, they have a very simple option...
If you're serious, I kind of suspect you live in the PC world of academe (as your sig suggests). Have you ever met, and spoken to, any strippers or prostitutes? Quite a few of them would be rather patronised by your disgust.
Shame on you, CmdrTaco, for posting this. Shame on the organisation behind it for creating it. And every one of you assholes who immediately started joking about it, you disgust me.
Why? Seriously.
I'm genuinely ambivalent about even the world's oldest profession, of which this is arguably a very mild version. It doesn't disgust me, it's been around forever and seems to be a part of human nature.
As long as noone's being forced into it, I don't have a problem with it. There are plenty of dysfunctional relationships out there, and it sometimes seems like a straightforward paid transaction is more honest.
Pretty much applies to any paid-for interaction with the opposite sex. Strip clubs are a classic example. Get your ego stroked, made to feel like everything you say is of vast interest to the stunning woman you're talking to. Go home on cloud 9, wake up feeling depressed and slightly dirty.
But I'm just guessing, ya know. No personal experience to back it up. Honest *cough*
Slashdot Mirror
Got to say I agree with this. I do avoid spoilers when it's something I know I really want to see or read, but I'm quite happy to take a quick summary, including the ending, for a lot of stuff that I'm not that bothered about but which come up in conversation all the time.
Often it's not the actual plot you need to know for the pop culture - it's just a little bit of context around the catchphrases or certain character quirks that are important (knowing how Yoda speaks important is).
Seriously, did you just compare a visit to a hooker with a longer term emotional attachment?
It won't be that, but done right it can be like having a friend with benefits where you just happen to pay for the benefits.
* cough * apparently.
Hell, it's late in the thread, noone's going to read this, so let's just say I know from personal experience.
>
There are a handful of unix libc implementations out there, so someone, in fact, did.
Additionally, have you ever heard of a derivative work?
So I wonder why noone ever reimplemented it in glibc?
I'm not sure you'd even have to look at the original code - it formed the basis of an RFC, and there can only be so many ways to code the implementation of that RFC - two, to be precise: with or without bugs ;-)
Exactly. I wish they'd cut the entertainment stuff - there's no need for it, it's well covered by commercial channels if you want it.
News, quality documentaries, indie films noone else would bother with and minority sports events, with a few major sports events that are deemed culturally important. That's all the BBC should do, IMO.
The main killer features I found were all to do with web-based service integration - pulling in your Facebook/Google/yahoo contacts into a pool where you link them together, their IMAP IDLE support, and Google Calendars support. I've yet to see anything quite as impressive elsewhere.
Actually I hated the integration of contacts and don't use it now. When I want to make a phonecall I don't want to be wading through dozens of people I only know on Facebook. It just clutters the address book.
I grew up in the 80s when HIV was big news and - here in the UK - TV ads warning of the dangers of unsafe sex were aired. A whole generation seemed to have grown up paranoid (perhaps rightly) about unprotected sex.
That seems to have faded and it's now seen as largely a third world problem. It seems that teenagers and twenty somethings have drifted back into behaviour that predated the advent of AIDS - and more. It's like they've worked out that it's still unlikely to affect them as it hasn't really got a grip in their demographic.
Sadly that's led to a massive increase in other, albeit treatable, STDs.
They couldn't get much worse. I switched from BT after a long running problem and support that was stupid beyond belief.
First call, first question: "are you calling from the line you want to report the fault on?".
Me: "Yes".
Support: "Let me run a line test"... long pause... "oh, I can't do that it appears that your line is in use"
Appears? No shit Sherlock, I've just told you I'm using it to speak to you.
I then had an engineer come out, confirm the problem was at the exchange and go away telling me it would get fixed soon. Even so, every time I called to chase progress I had to go through the whole "have you tried switching your PC off and on again" crap - how, exactly, would that fix the problem at the exchange?
I never got the problem resolved. I cancelled and switched to another supplier after about 6 weeks of failing to get it fixed.
Mind you, Pipex were no better. They seemed to think that an IP address was not a prerequisite to browsing the web...
That's fairly crazy to me. If it's legal to keep and store data in paper records without a license, I see no reason why a computer should be treated differently - it's just a more efficient way of doing the same thing.
The restrictions should come in when you try to sell that data on - and again, should equally apply to data in any format. I should no more be able to sell my paper address book to an advertising firm than my electronic copy (not that my address book has anyone in it, but you get the idea...)
This isn't what GP was talking about. That's file modification time, not the date the photo was taken (which is data inside the image file, not in the filesystem about the file).
The filesystem time and the exif time should be the same when they're on the camera. Just pass -p to cp when you copy them over.
Yes, but when you edit the file (in Photoshop, say), the date taken stays the same and the filesystem timestamp changes.
It actually annoys me that Windows defaults to showing the exif date taken when it detects a directory of images - I'd much rather see the filesystem datestamp and sort by that, so I can see which I've already edited. I already organise the directory structure by date taken anyway.
You can probably do the same thing with opposite sex friends too.
Yeah, like we've got any of those.
Or even same sex friends for that matter.
There will always be someone who thinks their entertainment of choice is superior to yours..
My choice of entertainment is photography. Specifically taking fine art images of the female nude.
I like to think that beats Farmville.
I was going to say this needs to be modified by the probability of having a second child of the same gender; i.e. if you have one boy, does that increase the probability of the second child being a boy? But it turns out it doesn't (according to the first website I found, but hey, I'm not a professional researcher!).
There is, overall, apparently a 51% chance of having a boy, which marginally skews the result, but this apparently doesn't vary for subsequent children; i.e. there is no overall predisposition to having children of a certain gender (having children of an uncertain gender is a different matter, and just plain bad luck...)
I agree that Gmail is so far ahead of its webmail competition such as Yahoo and Hotmail. The biggest feature, however, is Gmail's junk filter. Nary a piece of junkmail gets into my inbox and false positives are exceedingly rare. However, it's pretty disconcerting if this success is due to their understanding of your behaviors. Haha. The Gmail interface is very quick and efficient.
Probably mainly a volume thing, and Google's search algorithms. Google handles such a high volume of mail that it will pick up on new spam very quickly; if it sees the same mail going to thousands of unrelated inboxes, good chance it's spam. Only web based systems can do that - a local spam filter can't know what's happening to other users elsewhere. Google's is probably better than Yahoo or Hotmail because it does search and pattern matching better.
For a fair price, 500mb can be fine - especially if you have access to genuinely unlimited, or cheaper, broadband at home via wifi. But even then I believe that companies should make it very clear to you, via SMS/Email/phone calls etc if you're approaching, or exceeding, your limits, especially if you have to pay for it.
For example, Virgin Mobile in the UK charge £2 per meg over their `unlimited` 1gb plan, which is laughable.
And O2 give you access to BT Cloud wi-fi as part of their deal, which includes hotspots at the likes of McDonalds, Starbucks and Wetherspoon pubs. I presume that won't be metered, so even out and about you have plenty of options in addition to 3G (albeit with major security concerns - I wouldn't use public wifi for anything other than casual browsing...)
The trouble with O2 is just how slow their 3G is... I'm amazed anyone get actually get near these limits.
I've been a computer user literally longer than I can remember, and the idea of having a tablet that can also have cron jobs and shell scripts running in the background is delicious. But no, dude, don't yell at the Norms for being Normal. Give it a year or two and there will be some kind of really excellent Linux tablet that does everything a geek could ever want. You don't have to try to turn this one into that miracle product. Just let it be.
If HP do a WebOS tablet and leave it as open as the Pre phone, that'll be it. The Pre runs linux, you can get root on it with a really simple procedure and cron is available.
Who would've predicted 20 years ago that a Conservative government is now more liberal than a labour one.
I would. My gut feel is that the Conservatives are more comfortable being in charge than Labour, and therefore don't feel the need to micromanage the country. You could look at it another way; they don't really care what the plebs are getting up to, so don't feel the need to keep a close eye on them.
Certainly they claim to believe in free market, laissez faire economics, and small government, which would be incompatible with the surveillance state that Labour was building.
You learn something new every day - I remember being taught that the Sale of Goods Act applied only to purchases made by consumers - i.e. that it was purely consumer protection legislation. Business to business sales were not covered (usual breach of contract litigation would, of course, still be possible).
Just googled it, and it does appear that I was taught wrong - it does apply to business purchases.
Well, I just bought a Samsung netbook.
I needed a lightweight, long battery life device mainly for better browsing than a smartphone while travelling. I like to be able to type emails on a proper(ish) keyboard, same for web forums.
I do a lot of photography and the 250GB harddrive is ideal to back up my compact flash cards and quick preview my shots - I used to use a dedicated Epson view for that.
It has HyperSpace, which is a boot option that takes you into a cut down linux system - it boots faster, uses less battery and is therefore a handy option when all you want is to browse.
Initial thoughts are that it's not that quick, but I also ordered a 1GB upgrade and when that arrives it should improve the Windows 7 performance (yes, Windows. Suits me. Sorry). Battery life seems good - I reckon the 11hrs quoted might be ambitious, but my experience so far says I should get 8 or 9 from normal use, including WiFi. Sticking a 3G USB dongle on will probably drain it quite a bit quicker...
It was also under £300.
Absolutely no reason I'd want an iPad.
If you are in the UK you don't need to worry about warranty; I have recently discovered the Sale of Goods Act, which means with or without warranty they would have to replace it because it is less than 6 years old.
Er, no, no exactly.
Not sure where you get the six years from. It will depend on what is considered to be a normal, expected life span for the item. Only if it breaks down in less time than would be expected as normal are you possibly covered by the act. I would suspect that six years would be considered excessive for an electronic device.
An "Encyclopedia" article on monetary standards written by a fifteen year-old on a bet made in the back of school bus that he couldn't work mentions of both John Maynard Keynes and Jenna Jameson into the same article.
I quoted Milton Friedman extensively in one of my degree level essays, citing as my source "The Collected Playboy Interviews", as it was the most convenient source for the soundbite quotes I wanted to use. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.
Notepad. Cut. Paste.
(or, if you prefer, some odd combination of hitting esc and 10dd or some finger stretching combo of ctrl+meta+wtf )
I was kind of missing the fact that you keep getting modded as funny and taking you at face value. I'm bored, I'll carry on doing so for a while.
If women aren't being coerced into it, and there are guys that abuse them, they have a very simple option...
If you're serious, I kind of suspect you live in the PC world of academe (as your sig suggests). Have you ever met, and spoken to, any strippers or prostitutes? Quite a few of them would be rather patronised by your disgust.
...but it's not.
Shame on you, CmdrTaco, for posting this. Shame on the organisation behind it for creating it. And every one of you assholes who immediately started joking about it, you disgust me.
Why? Seriously.
I'm genuinely ambivalent about even the world's oldest profession, of which this is arguably a very mild version. It doesn't disgust me, it's been around forever and seems to be a part of human nature.
As long as noone's being forced into it, I don't have a problem with it. There are plenty of dysfunctional relationships out there, and it sometimes seems like a straightforward paid transaction is more honest.
Pretty much applies to any paid-for interaction with the opposite sex. Strip clubs are a classic example. Get your ego stroked, made to feel like everything you say is of vast interest to the stunning woman you're talking to. Go home on cloud 9, wake up feeling depressed and slightly dirty.
But I'm just guessing, ya know. No personal experience to back it up. Honest *cough*
To be fair, I bet most of those Craigslist entries last more than 10 minutes.
Bragging, eh? I reckon your average geek would be lucky to last 10 seconds...