Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Not true in the least. Many of my friends work in companies where USB ports are disabled. Some have rules that don't allow executables to run from removable devices.
I wouldn't care to have a visitor to my house run an executable from one of my house computers, but I'd be happy to let them use a web browser. I would be hesitant to ask someone to run an EXE from my own thumb drive; seems rude, but I use a browser on others computers often.
I work in a place where SSH ports are blocked. What if you're visiting someone who has a Mac? At a kiosk in the airport? I'd guess your solution would work in more than half the machines you're likely to get to, but by no means even close to all.
Absolutely, congress is almost entirely to blame, in concert with the contractors. NASA itself is amazingly well-stocked with hard-working true believers that want to do good science and lead the way to knowledge and the frontier. But they're only allowed to do so inasmuch as it's good for the election; mostly, that means bringing more aerospace jobs into a congressman's district. It really needs to be somehow isolated from that situation.
NASA is a pork machine, with a side of election year razzle-dazzle.
I'm as big a fan of space exploration as there is, and my dearest desire for humanity is for us to stop spending so much time trying to kill each other and instead pursue our destiny in space.
But NASA isn't going to do it for us, not the way it's structured now.
Still, it's better than most anything else we've got.
I don't agree that a God is necessary to form a basis for moral absolutism.
My basic moral foundation is that all people should be free. Of course, "free" needs definition. I mean that each person should be able to rise to the level of their ability and desire. If a person is talented and desires to use that talent, they should be able to. Nobody should be punished for things they did not do, including being born a certain gender or color or of a certain family or ethnicity.
Lack of these rights is really the basis for a lot of the misery in the world today. The only other real source of anguish, IMHO, is power-hungry or control-hungry mental cases in positions of power.
I don't really believe that mankind will ever achieve this basic level of universal rights, but it's something to work for, and I don't appeal to any god to define or enforce it.
It's an evolutionary thing. Bower birds who have extraordinary displays obviously are SO successful that they have tons of time to mess with their display rather than being out looking for food. Cats with lustrous coats that are well groomed and well muscled obviously are keeping themselves fed and have time to groom, and therefore could easily feed a mate and children.
People who maintain a business look have the time and ability to groom themselves and buy nice clothes.
Watch some human studies documentaries sometime. I recommend "The Human Animal" in particular. When viewed from the outside, it's pretty amazing how well human activity looks just like the activity of any other animal, though sometimes there's perversion.
BTW, I just don't like having a beard. I wish someone would come out with a dipilatory cream that would keep my face hair from growing for months at a time. I don't like shaving, but I like having a beard less.
Nobody's going to buy a hard disk with the OS preinstalled either. People will buy machines with the OS preinstalled, but I've never seen a hard drive for sale with the OS on it. That wouldn't even work for a modern version of Windows unless the OS was loaded onto the hard drive in exactly the same machine configuration that it would eventually be installed in.
Actually the police in our area want people to call 911 for anything that might potentially be dangerous. That includes debris in the road, drunks causing trouble, etc. For the most part, if it's something if you want the cops or fire department to show up for, you dial 911.
In many rural areas, the police stations are not all manned 24 hours. 911 is routed to an on-duty dispatch officer, for the nearest station which is manned at that time. If you pick a police number and call that after hours, you may or may not get anyone. 911 will always get answered.
They visit the schools and scout meetings, and they tell the kids to dial 911 if they are scared, but remember that once they dial that number, a policeman WILL show up, they're required to roll a unit for every 911 call, so don't play around.
...and if they consult the database when they put the book back, so they know to put it back on the third stack to the left of the toilet in the upstairs bathroom.
That's odd. I took notes on paper, and recopied them on paper (I graduated in the 80s) and not only was it not a waste of time, it was one of the best uses of time I found, next to actually showing up in class.
I used to have a regular phone and a regular Verizon contract. It was my first mobile phone. What I found out during the 2 year contract was that I barely use a mobile. The coverage at my house stinks bad enough that I can't drop my landline anyway. Now I have a Virgin Mobile phone. The phone cost something like $20, and I only need to pump $5/month into it which buys $0.25/min time (reduces to $0.10/min after 10 minutes). Even at that, my balance creeps up every month; I don't even use $5/month.
I now use that info when someone tries to sell me a mobile plan with hundreds of minutes/month; over the last 3 years, my average use has been about 8 minutes per month.
However, I do realize that the market for users like me is very small; if it weren't for teenagers and poor people to sell to, these services wouldn't exist at all for those of us who could afford a bigger phone & contract but don't really want it.
That's pretty funny. Nobody's denying them free speech. They can say all they want. Nobody's censoring their site. What they apparently fail to understand is that there's no constitutional right to BE LISTENED TO.
Besides, Google is not a public service. If they decide they don't want people promoting purple-and-green teddy bear love in their lobby, they can kick them out of the place. A website or a search engine is not a 'place of public accomodation' or a public location. No company would want that precident set; if it were, you'd have to allow your competitors to post whatever they wanted at your site.
If they want to be indexed higher, perhaps they should, oh, I dunno, PROVIDE NON-SUCKY CONTENT? The whole idea of Google is that they attempt to index the "goodness" of a site. It is by nature subjective and non-deterministic. They MUST change their algorithm fairly often, because so many people are figuring out what they do and cheating.
Google makes no contract with its users or indexed sites. If this place wants better placement, they can pay for google ads, or they can improve their content. Attempting to lawyer their way into better pagerank will not work, or at least, we'd better hope it won't work. If it did, Google would quickly become useless as every half-assed website with shitty content waved a lawyer at them and made them bump their pagerank.
Shred the application, but if it came with a postage-paid return envelope, take all the rest of the crap in there, and fold up the outer envelope as well, and maybe some sawdust and dust bunnies, and mail it back to them so they have to pay the postage. Make sure you shred the bit that had your name and address on it or they might give you a credit card anyway.
I don't really want them, but it's the only non-DRM format I can buy most music in. I won't touch anything with DRM because I won't be locked in to a specific piece of hardware or software to play the music that I bought the rights to play.
If they are selling only the "right to play on the hardware we say" then I ain't buying. Hear that sound, recording industry? That's my feet walking away with my dollars instead of giving some of them to you.
Dude, I remember when Microsoft was selling software on cassette tape. Somewhere around here I think I still have a copy of MASM for the TRS-80. I also remember when people were selling software on paper tape for the Altair out of Creative Computing, but I can't say I ever bought any of that software.
If they can prove he did this in order to hide evidence, they may have a case. However, for instance, I run "eraser" on a daily basis which scrubs all free space on all drives, plus slack space at the ends of files. I consider this simply standard operating procedure, because my computer does have sensitive data on it. In addition, I lock my machine when I leave, and all my data is held in an encrypted volume, so if someone reboots the machine to a boot CD or something, or steals the machine, they still get nothing. If I undertake these actions as a general course of business because I consider them to be simply part of trying to do my job and take security seriously, I think that's a lot harder to prosecute against.
I read mostly on my Palm. I tried on my old III, but the screen was too cruddy. The Tungsten E did it for me. The big problem, as others have said, is lack of content. I actually won't buy files that have DRM, which leaves me pretty much with Gutenberg and Baen Books for legal content. If I want to read anything else, I pretty much have to get a pirated copy from Usenet and then buy the paper to get legal. I would, I REALLY WOULD, give them money if they were providing what I wanted.
If they printed books that required you to read them through a special plastic sheet that was keyed to you personally, do you think they'd sell many books?
Yeah, GB-PVR too. I use the web interface to cruise the listings and resolve recording conflicts while eating lunch at work.
I tried to get Myth going but after 2 days of screwing around trying to all the hardware drivers working to the point where I could even start to install Myth, I gave up. So restored my Windows install to the machine, and had GB-PVR up in 10 minutes. It works very well.
I got bitten by a non-reversible upgrade from Microsoft. My XP laptop had Movie Maker, and when Windows Update brought it to 1.2, I started using the camcorder as a streaming capture device; analog video in, firewire out; no tape. Worked fine.
Then they released 2.0 on Windows Update.
Now, when I try to stream video through the camcorder, Movie Maker "helpfully" refuses to record; it pops up a dialog informing me of my "mistake" in trying to import from the camcorder with no tape in the deck.
There's no way to go back to 1.2. My XP has 1.0, I can install that, and from there I can update to 2.0. 1.2 isn't available anywhere.
Oh well, it just gave me incentive to go out and find a different (non-Microsoft) program to do the capture.
You know how most places with rebates and such won't accept a PO box as a valid email address?
I'd be sorely tempted to say "no aol.com addresses" when people sign up for stuff. Just put a note on the signup page that says "due to AOL's policies, we can't guarantee that you will receive the email that we send to you, therefore an AOL.COM email address is not a reliable means of communication.
There certainly is nothing wrong with watt-hours as a measure of a battery. However, the article says it produces 45 watts, not 45 watt-hours. That may be a misprint, maybe it's supposed to say 45 watt-hours. But if so, it's pretty pathetic. My laptop's standard LiIon batteries have 66 watt-hours of capacity and weigh 1 KG at a guess. Certainly 1.7 KG noted in the story for these things.
I thought you were nuts, but it looks like you're right. I have a laptop battery here, and it says 14.8v, 4460 mAH, 66 Whr.
Note that it says 66 watt-hours, not 66 watts. I think you must have been mistaken in your original post saying the battery was sold as a 49 watt battery. Either that or the marketing department is lazy/ignorant.
I would also note that this is pretty weird notation. I think it's the first time I've seen batteries rated by watt-hours rather than amp-hours. I guess it would make sense if you assumed that the laptops could take a wide variety of input voltages and step them efficiently to the voltage they needed. If that was the case, a 12 volt 4000 mAH battery would be rated the same as a 24 volt 2000 mAH battery, or a 48v 500 mAH battery, and they would last the same amount of runtime.
Interesting. My Dell laptop is about 3.5 years old, no problems. We have about 100 of them here at work, no unusual death tolls, just 2 or 3 over the course of a few years. Most of the people here at work also have Dell laptops, I haven't heard any great outcry.
I was looking at Thinkpads, but I didn't like the premium. So far, my still-working Dell is showing that to be a good decision.
I think kids in college are a different story though. In my experience, they tend to beat the crap out of things.
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Not true in the least. Many of my friends work in companies where USB ports are disabled. Some have rules that don't allow executables to run from removable devices.
I wouldn't care to have a visitor to my house run an executable from one of my house computers, but I'd be happy to let them use a web browser. I would be hesitant to ask someone to run an EXE from my own thumb drive; seems rude, but I use a browser on others computers often.
I work in a place where SSH ports are blocked. What if you're visiting someone who has a Mac? At a kiosk in the airport? I'd guess your solution would work in more than half the machines you're likely to get to, but by no means even close to all.
Absolutely, congress is almost entirely to blame, in concert with the contractors. NASA itself is amazingly well-stocked with hard-working true believers that want to do good science and lead the way to knowledge and the frontier. But they're only allowed to do so inasmuch as it's good for the election; mostly, that means bringing more aerospace jobs into a congressman's district. It really needs to be somehow isolated from that situation.
NASA is a pork machine, with a side of election year razzle-dazzle.
I'm as big a fan of space exploration as there is, and my dearest desire for humanity is for us to stop spending so much time trying to kill each other and instead pursue our destiny in space.
But NASA isn't going to do it for us, not the way it's structured now.
Still, it's better than most anything else we've got.
I don't agree that a God is necessary to form a basis for moral absolutism.
My basic moral foundation is that all people should be free. Of course, "free" needs definition. I mean that each person should be able to rise to the level of their ability and desire. If a person is talented and desires to use that talent, they should be able to. Nobody should be punished for things they did not do, including being born a certain gender or color or of a certain family or ethnicity.
Lack of these rights is really the basis for a lot of the misery in the world today. The only other real source of anguish, IMHO, is power-hungry or control-hungry mental cases in positions of power.
I don't really believe that mankind will ever achieve this basic level of universal rights, but it's something to work for, and I don't appeal to any god to define or enforce it.
It's an evolutionary thing. Bower birds who have extraordinary displays obviously are SO successful that they have tons of time to mess with their display rather than being out looking for food. Cats with lustrous coats that are well groomed and well muscled obviously are keeping themselves fed and have time to groom, and therefore could easily feed a mate and children.
People who maintain a business look have the time and ability to groom themselves and buy nice clothes.
Watch some human studies documentaries sometime. I recommend "The Human Animal" in particular. When viewed from the outside, it's pretty amazing how well human activity looks just like the activity of any other animal, though sometimes there's perversion.
BTW, I just don't like having a beard. I wish someone would come out with a dipilatory cream that would keep my face hair from growing for months at a time. I don't like shaving, but I like having a beard less.
Nobody's going to buy a hard disk with the OS preinstalled either. People will buy machines with the OS preinstalled, but I've never seen a hard drive for sale with the OS on it. That wouldn't even work for a modern version of Windows unless the OS was loaded onto the hard drive in exactly the same machine configuration that it would eventually be installed in.
Actually the police in our area want people to call 911 for anything that might potentially be dangerous. That includes debris in the road, drunks causing trouble, etc. For the most part, if it's something if you want the cops or fire department to show up for, you dial 911.
In many rural areas, the police stations are not all manned 24 hours. 911 is routed to an on-duty dispatch officer, for the nearest station which is manned at that time. If you pick a police number and call that after hours, you may or may not get anyone. 911 will always get answered.
They visit the schools and scout meetings, and they tell the kids to dial 911 if they are scared, but remember that once they dial that number, a policeman WILL show up, they're required to roll a unit for every 911 call, so don't play around.
...and if they consult the database when they put the book back, so they know to put it back on the third stack to the left of the toilet in the upstairs bathroom.
That's odd. I took notes on paper, and recopied them on paper (I graduated in the 80s) and not only was it not a waste of time, it was one of the best uses of time I found, next to actually showing up in class.
I used to have a regular phone and a regular Verizon contract. It was my first mobile phone.
What I found out during the 2 year contract was that I barely use a mobile. The coverage at my house stinks bad enough that I can't drop my landline anyway.
Now I have a Virgin Mobile phone. The phone cost something like $20, and I only need to pump $5/month into it which buys $0.25/min time (reduces to $0.10/min after 10 minutes). Even at that, my balance creeps up every month; I don't even use $5/month.
I now use that info when someone tries to sell me a mobile plan with hundreds of minutes/month; over the last 3 years, my average use has been about 8 minutes per month.
However, I do realize that the market for users like me is very small; if it weren't for teenagers and poor people to sell to, these services wouldn't exist at all for those of us who could afford a bigger phone & contract but don't really want it.
That's pretty funny. Nobody's denying them free speech. They can say all they want. Nobody's censoring their site. What they apparently fail to understand is that there's no constitutional right to BE LISTENED TO.
Besides, Google is not a public service. If they decide they don't want people promoting purple-and-green teddy bear love in their lobby, they can kick them out of the place. A website or a search engine is not a 'place of public accomodation' or a public location. No company would want that precident set; if it were, you'd have to allow your competitors to post whatever they wanted at your site.
If they want to be indexed higher, perhaps they should, oh, I dunno, PROVIDE NON-SUCKY CONTENT? The whole idea of Google is that they attempt to index the "goodness" of a site. It is by nature subjective and non-deterministic. They MUST change their algorithm fairly often, because so many people are figuring out what they do and cheating.
Google makes no contract with its users or indexed sites. If this place wants better placement, they can pay for google ads, or they can improve their content. Attempting to lawyer their way into better pagerank will not work, or at least, we'd better hope it won't work. If it did, Google would quickly become useless as every half-assed website with shitty content waved a lawyer at them and made them bump their pagerank.
Shred the application, but if it came with a postage-paid return envelope, take all the rest of the crap in there, and fold up the outer envelope as well, and maybe some sawdust and dust bunnies, and mail it back to them so they have to pay the postage. Make sure you shred the bit that had your name and address on it or they might give you a credit card anyway.
Something to do while watching movies.
I don't really want them, but it's the only non-DRM format I can buy most music in. I won't touch anything with DRM because I won't be locked in to a specific piece of hardware or software to play the music that I bought the rights to play.
If they are selling only the "right to play on the hardware we say" then I ain't buying. Hear that sound, recording industry? That's my feet walking away with my dollars instead of giving some of them to you.
Dude, I remember when Microsoft was selling software on cassette tape. Somewhere around here I think I still have a copy of MASM for the TRS-80.
I also remember when people were selling software on paper tape for the Altair out of Creative Computing, but I can't say I ever bought any of that software.
If they can prove he did this in order to hide evidence, they may have a case.
However, for instance, I run "eraser" on a daily basis which scrubs all free space on all drives, plus slack space at the ends of files. I consider this simply standard operating procedure, because my computer does have sensitive data on it. In addition, I lock my machine when I leave, and all my data is held in an encrypted volume, so if someone reboots the machine to a boot CD or something, or steals the machine, they still get nothing.
If I undertake these actions as a general course of business because I consider them to be simply part of trying to do my job and take security seriously, I think that's a lot harder to prosecute against.
I read mostly on my Palm. I tried on my old III, but the screen was too cruddy.
The Tungsten E did it for me.
The big problem, as others have said, is lack of content. I actually won't buy files that have DRM, which leaves me pretty much with Gutenberg and Baen Books for legal content.
If I want to read anything else, I pretty much have to get a pirated copy from Usenet and then buy the paper to get legal. I would, I REALLY WOULD, give them money if they were providing what I wanted.
If they printed books that required you to read them through a special plastic sheet that was keyed to you personally, do you think they'd sell many books?
You get excess thermal energy every time you burn something, or eat a candy bar. You must have a wide definition of magic.
Yeah, GB-PVR too. I use the web interface to cruise the listings and resolve recording conflicts while eating lunch at work.
I tried to get Myth going but after 2 days of screwing around trying to all the hardware drivers working to the point where I could even start to install Myth, I gave up. So restored my Windows install to the machine, and had GB-PVR up in 10 minutes. It works very well.
I got bitten by a non-reversible upgrade from Microsoft. My XP laptop had Movie Maker, and when Windows Update brought it to 1.2, I started using the camcorder as a streaming capture device; analog video in, firewire out; no tape. Worked fine.
Then they released 2.0 on Windows Update.
Now, when I try to stream video through the camcorder, Movie Maker "helpfully" refuses to record; it pops up a dialog informing me of my "mistake" in trying to import from the camcorder with no tape in the deck.
There's no way to go back to 1.2. My XP has 1.0, I can install that, and from there I can update to 2.0. 1.2 isn't available anywhere.
Oh well, it just gave me incentive to go out and find a different (non-Microsoft) program to do the capture.
You know how most places with rebates and such won't accept a PO box as a valid email address?
I'd be sorely tempted to say "no aol.com addresses" when people sign up for stuff. Just put a note on the signup page that says "due to AOL's policies, we can't guarantee that you will receive the email that we send to you, therefore an AOL.COM email address is not a reliable means of communication.
that was supposed to be "less than" 1 kg, and "less than" 1.7 kg. HTML ate my LTs
There certainly is nothing wrong with watt-hours as a measure of a battery.
However, the article says it produces 45 watts, not 45 watt-hours.
That may be a misprint, maybe it's supposed to say 45 watt-hours. But if so, it's pretty pathetic. My laptop's standard LiIon batteries have 66 watt-hours of capacity and weigh 1 KG at a guess. Certainly 1.7 KG noted in the story for these things.
I thought you were nuts, but it looks like you're right. I have a laptop battery here, and it says 14.8v, 4460 mAH, 66 Whr.
Note that it says 66 watt-hours, not 66 watts. I think you must have been mistaken in your original post saying the battery was sold as a 49 watt battery. Either that or the marketing department is lazy/ignorant.
I would also note that this is pretty weird notation. I think it's the first time I've seen batteries rated by watt-hours rather than amp-hours. I guess it would make sense if you assumed that the laptops could take a wide variety of input voltages and step them efficiently to the voltage they needed. If that was the case, a 12 volt 4000 mAH battery would be rated the same as a 24 volt 2000 mAH battery, or a 48v 500 mAH battery, and they would last the same amount of runtime.
This footage was actually shown on the Science Channel special on Tesla a month or two ago.
Interesting. My Dell laptop is about 3.5 years old, no problems. We have about 100 of them here at work, no unusual death tolls, just 2 or 3 over the course of a few years. Most of the people here at work also have Dell laptops, I haven't heard any great outcry.
I was looking at Thinkpads, but I didn't like the premium. So far, my still-working Dell is showing that to be a good decision.
I think kids in college are a different story though. In my experience, they tend to beat the crap out of things.