I'll be the middle of the road @Home user in this discussion. I've had it for 5 months, and am pretty happy over all. I wouldn't go back to dial-up for anything, but I've had problems as well. Mostly with nightly outages for the first month I had it, which have since been resolved. My only other gripes are that they limit you to a maximum of 3 IP addresses, and I need 4.
YMMV, as I'm on a node which had a total of five users, last time I checked. I've seen downloads of up to 120K/second, which is pretty damned fast. The uploads aren't speedy, but certainly better than dial-up and I'd estimate them at about 20-30K a second in my experience. I haven't tried to run many server apps off of it or anything, but I have no problems with the speed.
Okay, so Star Trek is a little off-topic, but I almost wonder if Paramount isn't doing the same thing with the Star Trek DVD's. I've been buying them slowly, for they're fairly expensive, and they have basically zero extra features! They've got the trailers and scene access, well, to quote Crow T. Robot, whoop-de-shit! I'm betting that Paramount wanted to cash in on the newness of the DVD format and all the geeks that are getting the DVD's, then a year from now, they'll release the 35th anniversary editions or somesuch, complete with commentaries, deleted scenes, making-of featurettes, etc. Will I buy those too? Yup, cuz I'm a fan, and I'll want that stuff, but I don't have to be happy about it. I got a Laserdisc player for free, and I'm having a good time collecting Laserdiscs of movies that aren't available on DVD (or are edited, like Roger Rabbit) they're available fairly cheaply on eBay too. Now what I'd really like, is for Paramount to release big sets of the ST:TNG episodes for DVD, much like Fox is doing with the X-Files Season One box set. As it is, I'm collecting the ST:TNG and Deep Space Nine laserdiscs, slowly but surely, having them on DVD would be a mixed blessing, as I'd then have to sell of my Laserdisc versions! ---
I'd like to see a grass roots effort in which a bunch of people just buy Apple Airports and the like, turn on DHCP and NAT, and hand out connections to everyone in range of their station. That way, anyone with an 802.11 equipped laptop, PDA, or even desktop could hook up wirelessly while in that area. I don't think it'd supplant the existing network, as I wouldn't give up my cable modem and "real" IP address for a NAT from a neighbor, but it'd be great for traveling.
It'd be really cool when the 802.11 Springboard module comes out for my Handspring Visor, imagine walking around the city, and being connected in various places.
I'm thinking of buying an Apple Airport for home, maybe I'll set mine up to let anyone with 802.11 use it. Anyone in and around my apartment building will have access... ---
I hear you there, I'm the Y2K dood for the College of Humanities & Fine Arts at the University of Northern Iowa, and I've got all of our systems taken care of except for ONE GUY, a Prof with a Pentium 120 running Windows 3.11 and a slew of old software. I've been trying to get his computer updated for a month and a half, to no avail, he's never available. I guess he'll have some fun when he gets back, it'll be interesting to have a test case to observe, if nothing else.:) ---
My god, that "fan" site is hilarious, they broke every rule of GOOD web page development, and it looks totally authentic, right down to the horrible, out-of-perspective transparent.gif and the annoying animated.gifs of the wrong background color! Amazing! ---
Don't forget those of us with UPS systems. The one under my desk at home doubles nicely as a foot-warmer as well. I keep a second one in the basement keeping the hub, cable modem, and NAT box up and running too, I can keep using the net for a good 15 minutes without power. ---
. The cable techs haven't changed much in the past 10 years, but the technology they are dealing with is barely in the grasp of most engineers.
Absolutely, the cable tech who came to my house to connect my cable modem was pretty clueless about how the whole thing worked, I got the impression that he'd basically gone to a couple of workshops the company (TCI now AT&T) put together. He really couldn't answer any of my questions about how it worked, and he didn't know what a cross-over cat 5 cable was.
I finally told him to run a cat 5 line to X point, plug in his laptop, let me make sure it works, then to leave and I'd take it from there. So he did that, I loaded Slashdot on his laptop (I was pretty sure this guy wouldn't have it cached) and sent him on his merry way. I set up my hub and ran some lines to my roomies' computers and was surfing half an hour later.
My point? This guy couldn't hook two computers to each other if he had to, he was a guy who knew how to hook up coax connections, and they gave him a laptop and taught him how to plug cat5 connections together. How hard would it be to get some people (college students?) with a basic understanding of networking? ---
Bad news, buddy. If your sister does carry this genetic predisposition for cancer, there's a pretty good chance that you've got it too. She'd have inherited it from her parents, and they're your parents too, so into the euthanasia chamber you go. It's for the good of the species, you know - gotta remove those "icky" genes before they damage yet another generation.
I'd say there's a 50-50 chance I've got it, if it's one gene. Of course things get more complicated if it's a double-recessive combination or something even funkier like a sex-linked characteristic. :) Just picking nits:)
Absolutely, many people don't understand that we've already altered the rules in natural selection so that they don't apply to us. These same people get up in arms at the thought of manipulating our genome. We're already manipulating it for the worse, why not manipulate it for the better?
How are we manipulating it for the worse? I'll use my sister as an example. My sister was diagnosed with cancer at the age of sixteen. She underwent surgery and radiation therapy as a followup measure. She'll have her (hopefully) clean five-year checkup next week, at which point she'll be officially "cured" of cancer. She's a normal college junior, whose only side-affects are a slightly crooked smile and a very small saliva gland (the cancer was under her chin, they peeled her whole face back to remove it, the photos are gross). How was this bad for the genome? Here's how:
Suppose that she got cancer because she carries a genetic predisposition for it (this is entirely possible). Now if she's been cured of this cancer and goes on to reproduce, she may pass this "bad" gene on to future children, who may not be so fortunate with the placement and treatment of their tumors. If she hadn't had surgery or radiation therapy, she may well not have survived long enough to reproduce, thereby removing her icky genes from the gene pool.
So what's the solution? Well, obviously we can't just not treat people who have diseases which may be genetic in origin, but we could sterilize them as a condition of their treatment. Now I'm not advocating this by any means, but if people are so gung-ho about maintaining natural selection, that's what they'd have to do.
The alternative is genetic engineering, or screening our gametes for "undesireable" traits. Yes, this could possibly lead to reduced genetic diversity, thereby making us more suscpetible to disease, but there are so many variations on the human form already that I doubt we're going to be overrun by homogenous Leonardo DiCaprio and Cindy Crawford look-alike offspring anytime soon as long as we stick to the basic principles of you only being allowed to reproduce with the best of what you already carry, or by doing it the old-fashioned way.
This sounds somewhat like the movie Gattaca (a great flick if you haven't seen it) but I'm not in favor of discriminating socially based on genetics by any means. The highest estimates of the genetic component of intelligence (for example) is 70%, that leaves at LEAST 30% to chance, environment, etc. I don't think our job interviews are going to consist of a blood-test anytime soon, as a blood test most likely wouldn't tell you of that unknown percentage, and we're not going to be even close to resolving nature vs. nurture anytime soon. ---
Speaking of Jesus Christ, I'm not trying to start any flamewar here, but I always smirk whenever I see the posters on campus advertising a meeting of "Campus Crusade for Christ". Now, speaking personally here, if I were trying to get people to join a Christian group, the last thing I'd want to bring to mind is the Crusades.
Well, maybe not the last thing, but it's only marginally better than "Campus Inquisition for Christ":) ---
Actually, he probably didn't void his warranty. Apple only has one-year warranties, and he said it was a first generation iMac. I assume he means the Bondi Blue ones. I don't know how Apple gets away with only offering one year when Gateway, Dell, Quantex, etc. all offer three-year warranties on their hardware. I've still got Pentium 166 machines under warranty. Gateway sends me 4 gig drives when their 2 gig drives fail, but I'm not complaining.
The flip side is that there's nothing lost by modifying your Apple hardware after one year. I had a beige G3 233, and I overclocked it to 300 the day before the warranty expired. Apple sticks a big VOID sticker across the jumpers, and also uses a big plastic block of jumpers, so you have to go find some of the right size if you want to modify the settings. When I saw that, it pissed me off so much, I had to overclock it. ---
Yes, but there are some of us who desperately need the OSHA laws to make our workplace better. I am a support specialist at a public university, not the one my web page is at. Our "workroom", where my desk is, is about 20'x10', and contains three full-time people, with no partitions between us.
There is one window, which only one of us can see out of. The room is ONE electrical circuit, housing twelve computers and monitors, a switch, two mini-refrigerators, a host of laptops, lights for the workbench, fans to keep us cool because we can't even open our window to get rid of excess heat.
Our circuit is so overloaded, that we can't have all the monitors turned on at the same time (we have several servers in the room) without tripping the breaker. The wiring is a fire marshal's nightmare, now add in the fact that there may be from two to four students also working in the room at the same time, and you have a situation in which fire could easily break out, in which I have difficulty walking around all the chairs, equipment, etc. to get to my desk when I'm calm and not on fire.
So why don't I complain? Why doesn't the University give us more space? Well, when I do, they tell me that we'll get more space in two years, when another building is done being renovated, and that we just have to suffer for now. Our desks are hand-me-downs that were being thrown out, they're not even remotely ergonomic. Our chairs are the cheapest of the cheap office furniture, my cheap-o $128 chair from Staples that I use at home is twice as comfortable as my work chair. I've requested a Kinesis keyboard multiple times, but have had to use an old Microsoft Natural that I dug out of a closet, because I'm told we can't afford it in the budget.
In short, I'd love for ergonomics to be law. Every couple weeks, when I get fed up, I get very close to making an anonymous call to the fire marshal to have him inspect our office. I really don't dislike my supervisors, but I can't work in this environment for another two years, but this would at least force them to make some immediate changes or be fined.
It wouldn't get me an ergonomic keyboard, but I don't feel I should have to buy work equipment to do my job adequately. Should I also pay for my desk and chair? What about my computer I use? The phone bill? The power I consume? I think not. ---
My understanding was that the main reason for this was due to the Hardware Abstraction Layer, or HAL, in Windows NT. From what I understand, that was the biggest challenge with Win2K, making everything work right with all the consumer type hardware through the HAL. I don't think Microsoft intentionally "crippled" Windows NT for gaming purposes, since it costs more than Windows 9x, they just didn't anticipate the proliferation of 3D Hardware when they designed NT 4.0. ---
What's happening is that id is going to allow users to download the binaries necessary to play on a platform other than the one that they purchased. For instance, if I buy the Win32 version, I'll be able to download the binaries to let me play the game in Linux or on a Mac too. Carmack went on to say that they'd be holding off on releasing these binaries until after the Mac and Linux boxed versions had been available in stores, to keep people from buying Windows versions just to run on Linux, so that the number of sales of Windows copies isn't quite so large. ---
I don't know, in my freshman year of C programming at Iowa State University, Prof. Brearley started off the first day by saying "I don't really know C, but I've taught Pascal before, so I think I'll do okay." He went on to explain to the class what the backspace key was, he referred to it as "an inverted privy". Thank god grading was curved, I scored a C+ with 46% of the available points. If you can teach a C class at a major public university with that little knowledge, certainly you could write a book after two classes!
I've made it to DC now, but while there were some terminals throughout the airport. They've got these things called "Service Centers", where basically you can have a little cubicle with a power outlet and a phone with a datajack. I just plugged in the 'ol Sony VAIO, swiped my credit card through the reader, and dialed into the University I work for to check my mail, look at the work piling up in my tasks database for when I get back, and read Slashdot while waiting for my plane. They do charge $0.25 U.S. per minute for the long distance, but that's not bad at all compared to the $2.99 a minute that those in-flight phones charge! ---
Am I the only one who read this and thought "The Boy Scouts of America are monitoring this stuff now? Wow, things have changed a lot since I was in scouting." Of course, BSA could stand for Black Student Alliance too, that's what it called at Iowa State University, anyhow. Do I get bonus moderation points for posting this from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport while I wait for my connecting flight to D.C.? ---
I hear people gripe about IE taking down their shell all the time, when really the solution is pretty simple.
In your Tools->Internet Options dialog box, check the item called "Launch internet browser in a separate process" then if IE crashes, only IE crashes, and not your shell. ---
I'm not 100% certain on this, but back when I had a roaming IE profile, it was on an NT4 server. Basically, if you have an NT 4 domain, you can set up your profile to be a roaming one.
This is actually pretty handy, if you use a lot of different NT workstations, as it allows you to have the same desktop/start menu/Internet Explorer preferences/Outlook or Outlook Express settings/ no matter where you log in at. When I administered an NT4 domain for a while, I used this so I could easily check my e-mail regardless of where I was in the domain. It's a shame more products don't use it, it's a very handy feature. ---
Actually, I was listening to "Weekend All Things Considered" on National Public Radio yesterday, and apparently we're actually having _fewer_ than the average number of 7.0+ quakes this year. It just seems like more because they've been close together and in relatively populated areas. I mean, how much news is it if a 7.5 quake strikes in the boonies of Elbonia? Not much. ---
Well take the time to make an account if you want your questions answered. I hate to see "anonymous source" used in any journalistic publication, having an "anonymous interviewer" is even sillier. It's one thing to protect your identity if you're revealing confidential information, but how much "secret" information are you risking by posing a question? Very little.
I don't know if I'm a genetic freak or what, but caffeine really doesn't have a noticeable effect on me at all.
I do notice, that if I go an entire day without having any, I'll get a headache at about 3 p.m. so I generally will have at least one coke with lunch or something.
Yes, I know this is a sign of addiction.:)
However, it never makes me feel "wired" and I don't feel tired if I don't have it. I can drink a liter of Pepsi and go straight to bed with no trouble, either. I don't consume an abnormally large amount either, during a typical day, I'll probably have 2 cans of Coke/Pepsi at work, and maybe another one with lunch, that's it. It doesn't bother me to have none during the day, if anything, the sugar in a non-caffeinated soda makes me feel just as good as a caffeinated one.
If it matters, I'm fairly "resistant" to most drugs I've used. I rarely get hangovers, I recover from general anesthesia very quickly with no sickness, and my dentist now uses nitrous oxide on me because the novocaine doesn't numb me.
The real downside is that I usually wind up taking about twice the "reccomended" dosage of any over-the-counter drug, so it actually has some effect on me.
To put this back on topic, is there anyone else who doesn't get any kick from caffeine? Even Vivarin or those bizarre guarana drinks don't do much to affect me either way.
I'd take my old Boy Scout manual, what a fabulous book! I still use it all the time as a reference for knots, first aid, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. I'm not sure exactly how useful it'd be in the tropical setting, but it's a must-have every time I go camping.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. " -Robert A. Heinlein
This doesn't surprise me at all, considering Heinlein did a great portion of the editing on Niven and Pournelle's book, and made several suggestions to them that they used throughout its writing.
I took Latin my last year in college, and only then could I truly understand and appreciate that scene in Life of Brian. One of my professors taught almost exactly like that, forcing you to go through those stupid charts in your head until you spit out the right ending to the word.
Thankfully, the second semester I had a much more lenient (British) professor, who himself could have probably been a member of Monty Python, he was hilarious, and didn't really care if we memorized pages of charts, as long as we could translate a story with relative clarity.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll be the middle of the road @Home user in this discussion. I've had it for 5 months, and am pretty happy over all. I wouldn't go back to dial-up for anything, but I've had problems as well. Mostly with nightly outages for the first month I had it, which have since been resolved. My only other gripes are that they limit you to a maximum of 3 IP addresses, and I need 4.
YMMV, as I'm on a node which had a total of five users, last time I checked. I've seen downloads of up to 120K/second, which is pretty damned fast. The uploads aren't speedy, but certainly better than dial-up and I'd estimate them at about 20-30K a second in my experience. I haven't tried to run many server apps off of it or anything, but I have no problems with the speed.
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Okay, so Star Trek is a little off-topic, but I almost wonder if Paramount isn't doing the same thing with the Star Trek DVD's. I've been buying them slowly, for they're fairly expensive, and they have basically zero extra features! They've got the trailers and scene access, well, to quote Crow T. Robot, whoop-de-shit! I'm betting that Paramount wanted to cash in on the newness of the DVD format and all the geeks that are getting the DVD's, then a year from now, they'll release the 35th anniversary editions or somesuch, complete with commentaries, deleted scenes, making-of featurettes, etc. Will I buy those too? Yup, cuz I'm a fan, and I'll want that stuff, but I don't have to be happy about it. I got a Laserdisc player for free, and I'm having a good time collecting Laserdiscs of movies that aren't available on DVD (or are edited, like Roger Rabbit) they're available fairly cheaply on eBay too. Now what I'd really like, is for Paramount to release big sets of the ST:TNG episodes for DVD, much like Fox is doing with the X-Files Season One box set. As it is, I'm collecting the ST:TNG and Deep Space Nine laserdiscs, slowly but surely, having them on DVD would be a mixed blessing, as I'd then have to sell of my Laserdisc versions!
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I'd like to see a grass roots effort in which a bunch of people just buy Apple Airports and the like, turn on DHCP and NAT, and hand out connections to everyone in range of their station. That way, anyone with an 802.11 equipped laptop, PDA, or even desktop could hook up wirelessly while in that area. I don't think it'd supplant the existing network, as I wouldn't give up my cable modem and "real" IP address for a NAT from a neighbor, but it'd be great for traveling.
It'd be really cool when the 802.11 Springboard module comes out for my Handspring Visor, imagine walking around the city, and being connected in various places.
I'm thinking of buying an Apple Airport for home, maybe I'll set mine up to let anyone with 802.11 use it. Anyone in and around my apartment building will have access...
---
I hear you there, I'm the Y2K dood for the College of Humanities & Fine Arts at the University of Northern Iowa, and I've got all of our systems taken care of except for ONE GUY, a Prof with a Pentium 120 running Windows 3.11 and a slew of old software. I've been trying to get his computer updated for a month and a half, to no avail, he's never available. I guess he'll have some fun when he gets back, it'll be interesting to have a test case to observe, if nothing else. :)
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My god, that "fan" site is hilarious, they broke every rule of GOOD web page development, and it looks totally authentic, right down to the horrible, out-of-perspective transparent .gif and the annoying animated .gifs of the wrong background color! Amazing!
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Don't forget those of us with UPS systems. The one under my desk at home doubles nicely as a foot-warmer as well. I keep a second one in the basement keeping the hub, cable modem, and NAT box up and running too, I can keep using the net for a good 15 minutes without power.
---
. The cable techs haven't changed much in the past 10 years, but the technology they are dealing with is barely in the grasp of most engineers.
Absolutely, the cable tech who came to my house to connect my cable modem was pretty clueless about how the whole thing worked, I got the impression that he'd basically gone to a couple of workshops the company (TCI now AT&T) put together. He really couldn't answer any of my questions about how it worked, and he didn't know what a cross-over cat 5 cable was.
I finally told him to run a cat 5 line to X point, plug in his laptop, let me make sure it works, then to leave and I'd take it from there. So he did that, I loaded Slashdot on his laptop (I was pretty sure this guy wouldn't have it cached) and sent him on his merry way. I set up my hub and ran some lines to my roomies' computers and was surfing half an hour later.
My point? This guy couldn't hook two computers to each other if he had to, he was a guy who knew how to hook up coax connections, and they gave him a laptop and taught him how to plug cat5 connections together. How hard would it be to get some people (college students?) with a basic understanding of networking?
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Bad news, buddy. If your sister does carry this genetic predisposition for cancer, there's a pretty good chance that you've got it too. She'd have inherited it from her parents, and they're your parents too, so into the euthanasia chamber you go. It's for the good of the species, you know - gotta remove those "icky" genes before they damage yet another generation.
:)
I'd say there's a 50-50 chance I've got it, if it's one gene. Of course things get more complicated if it's a double-recessive combination or something even funkier like a sex-linked characteristic.
:)
Just picking nits
---
Absolutely, many people don't understand that we've already altered the rules in natural selection so that they don't apply to us. These same people get up in arms at the thought of manipulating our genome. We're already manipulating it for the worse, why not manipulate it for the better?
How are we manipulating it for the worse? I'll use my sister as an example. My sister was diagnosed with cancer at the age of sixteen. She underwent surgery and radiation therapy as a followup measure. She'll have her (hopefully) clean five-year checkup next week, at which point she'll be officially "cured" of cancer. She's a normal college junior, whose only side-affects are a slightly crooked smile and a very small saliva gland (the cancer was under her chin, they peeled her whole face back to remove it, the photos are gross). How was this bad for the genome? Here's how:
Suppose that she got cancer because she carries a genetic predisposition for it (this is entirely possible). Now if she's been cured of this cancer and goes on to reproduce, she may pass this "bad" gene on to future children, who may not be so fortunate with the placement and treatment of their tumors. If she hadn't had surgery or radiation therapy, she may well not have survived long enough to reproduce, thereby removing her icky genes from the gene pool.
So what's the solution? Well, obviously we can't just not treat people who have diseases which may be genetic in origin, but we could sterilize them as a condition of their treatment. Now I'm not advocating this by any means, but if people are so gung-ho about maintaining natural selection, that's what they'd have to do.
The alternative is genetic engineering, or screening our gametes for "undesireable" traits. Yes, this could possibly lead to reduced genetic diversity, thereby making us more suscpetible to disease, but there are so many variations on the human form already that I doubt we're going to be overrun by homogenous Leonardo DiCaprio and Cindy Crawford look-alike offspring anytime soon as long as we stick to the basic principles of you only being allowed to reproduce with the best of what you already carry, or by doing it the old-fashioned way.
This sounds somewhat like the movie Gattaca (a great flick if you haven't seen it) but I'm not in favor of discriminating socially based on genetics by any means. The highest estimates of the genetic component of intelligence (for example) is 70%, that leaves at LEAST 30% to chance, environment, etc. I don't think our job interviews are going to consist of a blood-test anytime soon, as a blood test most likely wouldn't tell you of that unknown percentage, and we're not going to be even close to resolving nature vs. nurture anytime soon.
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Speaking of Jesus Christ, I'm not trying to start any flamewar here, but I always smirk whenever I see the posters on campus advertising a meeting of "Campus Crusade for Christ". Now, speaking personally here, if I were trying to get people to join a Christian group, the last thing I'd want to bring to mind is the Crusades.
:)
Well, maybe not the last thing, but it's only marginally better than "Campus Inquisition for Christ"
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Actually, he probably didn't void his warranty. Apple only has one-year warranties, and he said it was a first generation iMac. I assume he means the Bondi Blue ones. I don't know how Apple gets away with only offering one year when Gateway, Dell, Quantex, etc. all offer three-year warranties on their hardware. I've still got Pentium 166 machines under warranty. Gateway sends me 4 gig drives when their 2 gig drives fail, but I'm not complaining.
The flip side is that there's nothing lost by modifying your Apple hardware after one year. I had a beige G3 233, and I overclocked it to 300 the day before the warranty expired. Apple sticks a big VOID sticker across the jumpers, and also uses a big plastic block of jumpers, so you have to go find some of the right size if you want to modify the settings. When I saw that, it pissed me off so much, I had to overclock it.
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Yes, but there are some of us who desperately need the OSHA laws to make our workplace better. I am a support specialist at a public university, not the one my web page is at. Our "workroom", where my desk is, is about 20'x10', and contains three full-time people, with no partitions between us.
There is one window, which only one of us can see out of. The room is ONE electrical circuit, housing twelve computers and monitors, a switch, two mini-refrigerators, a host of laptops, lights for the workbench, fans to keep us cool because we can't even open our window to get rid of excess heat.
Our circuit is so overloaded, that we can't have all the monitors turned on at the same time (we have several servers in the room) without tripping the breaker. The wiring is a fire marshal's nightmare, now add in the fact that there may be from two to four students also working in the room at the same time, and you have a situation in which fire could easily break out, in which I have difficulty walking around all the chairs, equipment, etc. to get to my desk when I'm calm and not on fire.
So why don't I complain? Why doesn't the University give us more space? Well, when I do, they tell me that we'll get more space in two years, when another building is done being renovated, and that we just have to suffer for now. Our desks are hand-me-downs that were being thrown out, they're not even remotely ergonomic. Our chairs are the cheapest of the cheap office furniture, my cheap-o $128 chair from Staples that I use at home is twice as comfortable as my work chair. I've requested a Kinesis keyboard multiple times, but have had to use an old Microsoft Natural that I dug out of a closet, because I'm told we can't afford it in the budget.
In short, I'd love for ergonomics to be law. Every couple weeks, when I get fed up, I get very close to making an anonymous call to the fire marshal to have him inspect our office. I really don't dislike my supervisors, but I can't work in this environment for another two years, but this would at least force them to make some immediate changes or be fined.
It wouldn't get me an ergonomic keyboard, but I don't feel I should have to buy work equipment to do my job adequately. Should I also pay for my desk and chair? What about my computer I use? The phone bill? The power I consume? I think not.
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My understanding was that the main reason for this was due to the Hardware Abstraction Layer, or HAL, in Windows NT. From what I understand, that was the biggest challenge with Win2K, making everything work right with all the consumer type hardware through the HAL. I don't think Microsoft intentionally "crippled" Windows NT for gaming purposes, since it costs more than Windows 9x, they just didn't anticipate the proliferation of 3D Hardware when they designed NT 4.0.
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What's happening is that id is going to allow users to download the binaries necessary to play on a platform other than the one that they purchased. For instance, if I buy the Win32 version, I'll be able to download the binaries to let me play the game in Linux or on a Mac too. Carmack went on to say that they'd be holding off on releasing these binaries until after the Mac and Linux boxed versions had been available in stores, to keep people from buying Windows versions just to run on Linux, so that the number of sales of Windows copies isn't quite so large.
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I don't know, in my freshman year of C programming at Iowa State University, Prof. Brearley started off the first day by saying "I don't really know C, but I've taught Pascal before, so I think I'll do okay." He went on to explain to the class what the backspace key was, he referred to it as "an inverted privy". Thank god grading was curved, I scored a C+ with 46% of the available points. If you can teach a C class at a major public university with that little knowledge, certainly you could write a book after two classes!
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I've made it to DC now, but while there were some terminals throughout the airport. They've got these things called "Service Centers", where basically you can have a little cubicle with a power outlet and a phone with a datajack. I just plugged in the 'ol Sony VAIO, swiped my credit card through the reader, and dialed into the University I work for to check my mail, look at the work piling up in my tasks database for when I get back, and read Slashdot while waiting for my plane. They do charge $0.25 U.S. per minute for the long distance, but that's not bad at all compared to the $2.99 a minute that those in-flight phones charge!
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Am I the only one who read this and thought "The Boy Scouts of America are monitoring this stuff now? Wow, things have changed a lot since I was in scouting." Of course, BSA could stand for Black Student Alliance too, that's what it called at Iowa State University, anyhow. Do I get bonus moderation points for posting this from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport while I wait for my connecting flight to D.C.?
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I hear people gripe about IE taking down their shell all the time, when really the solution is pretty simple.
In your Tools->Internet Options dialog box, check the item called "Launch internet browser in a separate process" then if IE crashes, only IE crashes, and not your shell.
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I'm not 100% certain on this, but back when I had a roaming IE profile, it was on an NT4 server. Basically, if you have an NT 4 domain, you can set up your profile to be a roaming one.
This is actually pretty handy, if you use a lot of different NT workstations, as it allows you to have the same desktop/start menu/Internet Explorer preferences/Outlook or Outlook Express settings/ no matter where you log in at. When I administered an NT4 domain for a while, I used this so I could easily check my e-mail regardless of where I was in the domain. It's a shame more products don't use it, it's a very handy feature.
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Actually, I was listening to "Weekend All Things Considered" on National Public Radio yesterday, and apparently we're actually having _fewer_ than the average number of 7.0+ quakes this year. It just seems like more because they've been close together and in relatively populated areas. I mean, how much news is it if a 7.5 quake strikes in the boonies of Elbonia? Not much.
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Well take the time to make an account if you want your questions answered. I hate to see "anonymous source" used in any journalistic publication, having an "anonymous interviewer" is even sillier. It's one thing to protect your identity if you're revealing confidential information, but how much "secret" information are you risking by posing a question? Very little.
I don't know if I'm a genetic freak or what, but caffeine really doesn't have a noticeable effect on me at all.
:)
I do notice, that if I go an entire day without having any, I'll get a headache at about 3 p.m. so I generally will have at least one coke with lunch or something.
Yes, I know this is a sign of addiction.
However, it never makes me feel "wired" and I don't feel tired if I don't have it. I can drink a liter of Pepsi and go straight to bed with no trouble, either. I don't consume an abnormally large amount either, during a typical day, I'll probably have 2 cans of Coke/Pepsi at work, and maybe another one with lunch, that's it. It doesn't bother me to have none during the day, if anything, the sugar in a non-caffeinated soda makes me feel just as good as a caffeinated one.
If it matters, I'm fairly "resistant" to most drugs I've used. I rarely get hangovers, I recover from general anesthesia very quickly with no sickness, and my dentist now uses nitrous oxide on me because the novocaine doesn't numb me.
The real downside is that I usually wind up taking about twice the "reccomended" dosage of any over-the-counter drug, so it actually has some effect on me.
To put this back on topic, is there anyone else who doesn't get any kick from caffeine? Even Vivarin or those bizarre guarana drinks don't do much to affect me either way.
I'd take my old Boy Scout manual, what a fabulous book! I still use it all the time as a reference for knots, first aid, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. I'm not sure exactly how useful it'd be in the tropical setting, but it's a must-have every time I go camping.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. "
-Robert A. Heinlein
This doesn't surprise me at all, considering Heinlein did a great portion of the editing on Niven and Pournelle's book, and made several suggestions to them that they used throughout its writing.
I took Latin my last year in college, and only then could I truly understand and appreciate that scene in Life of Brian. One of my professors taught almost exactly like that, forcing you to go through those stupid charts in your head until you spit out the right ending to the word.
Thankfully, the second semester I had a much more lenient (British) professor, who himself could have probably been a member of Monty Python, he was hilarious, and didn't really care if we memorized pages of charts, as long as we could translate a story with relative clarity.