It doesn't surprise me at all that Lovecraft is at least somewhat a racist, as the early to mid 20th century was mostly segregated, and many people still viewed blacks as more of a servant class (having previously been slaves). The question is, was Lovecraft more-so than his peers?
I don't think Lovecraft was trying to associate skin color with evilness to be racist so much as to have the monsters be creatures of nightmares and darkness, which is a concept that has existed for thousands of years (a concept that is ironically promoted heavily by religion...). A creature of night would likely be colored black - like a bat, so they are camoflaged in their nighttime environment. Most of the creatures themselves were based on real creatures/concepts people had fears of, whether it be giant squid/octopi, dead-come-to-life (another religious inspired concept, as the reason for burying people 6 feet deep and putting a large stone on top of the grave was to keep the dead from coming back), bats (Nightgaunts), fish/sharks (Deep Ones, although that is also almost a fear of inbreeding), or creatures that appear out of nowhere (dimensional shamblers).
The pitch-black Nightgaunts, for instance, weren't really evil, but they were servants of a sort (they brought food [people in the story] to their masters). Ghouls (undead people) weren't always good, either, but they always had white, almost transparent skin (and were usually educated).
I know a reason, and I used it - OS X 10.1 had an older BSD layer that didn't a natd capable of forwarding IPSec packets. I downloaded the darwin code, patched natd to support the forwarding, and patched my system with the new natd. The core code for 10.2 came with a natd that supports IPSec forwarding, so I no longer need it, but had I been using Microsoft, I'd have needed to wait until the next OS rev, write all the code myself from scratch, or buy a commercial product. This patch took no more than 1/2 hour to write - essentially copy the pptp forwarding code and change the protocol number.
Yes, there are problems you can't fix with a proprietary GUI, but one thing that is forced by this is a somewhat consistent GUI (or copying one, like GNOME and KDE do). I've used at least 8 Unix variants (Linux, IRIX, SINUX/RUNIX, HP-UX, DUX, Solaris, OpenBSD, and the freeBSDish MacOS X), and only OpenWindows and Motif were consistent across most of them (IRIX being the exception, and I believe both OpenWindows and Motif are/were proprietary).
I think you're ignorant about OS X - the core is based entirely on BSD and is entirely open source under the APSL. BSD was the core behind NeXT as well, and that entire codebase is nearly intact (nearly, if not all of the BSD core programs and utilities are in OS X). The only difference other than the GUI not being XWindows based is that NeXT was POSIX certified (Apple is compliant, but not certified). If you want XWindows, you can use XFree86, which runs a whole lot nicer on top of OS X's windows than it does on top of Window's windows (such as Cygwin), in my experience.
There also is a link between heavy use in formative years (~12-18) years and suffering from depression or manic depression (I know of at least one such person, and she still smokes).
I personally don't smoke (anything), but my social circle is primarily artists and musicians, most of whom smoke pot at least once in a while. My personal drug of choice is caffeine and I've got some great addict rationalizations for it:P
I've also noticed the lack of motivation thing among some heavy pot smoking friends (with one exception - which happens to be the person with manic depression). The casual users don't appear to have this problem.
I use different OSes for different things. Just as I would never use Linux (or to a lesser extent, OS X) for games, I would never use Windows as a network entry point (firewall). It's too easy to compromise Windows security from applications run by a non-administrator. e-mail viruses are rare to non-existent on UNIX based hosts because they usually can't compromise the entire system unless you're running/reading as root. The virus may wipe out your user and data, but can't, for instance, format the C drive, unless the virus itself also compromises root.
Windows, on the other hand, makes some nice toolkits for application construction and has a much more consistent UI than Linux (to be fair, OS X also has a fairly consistent UI, except for application install). I personally don't like how any of them handle applications, although the start menu on windows and finder on mac are steps in the right direction. All tend to leave too many files visible (windows explorer, which is sometimes necessary to find little used application parts such as configuration modules) or difficult to quickly navigate (my opinion of OS X after a year of use and most Linux navigators). I think Apple is heading in the right direction with their.app bundles, but there still is work needed on navigation speed (I haven't found a finder view that can find deeply nested folders quickly, partially because I find the screen shifts harder to follow than the folder tree view of windows).
Funny how some writers get stuck in a Genre - I was going to mention some HP Lovecraft sci-fi, but I can't remember the names (most of his stuff was horror or horror-on-earth sci-fi).
I particularly liked a short he co-wrote about a bunch of non-fighting aliens that trapped a soldier hunting them in an invisible maze on mars. It interested me more than most Lovecraft because it was a psychological horror that was descriptive from the soldier's point of view, not a 3rd person point of view as in most Lovecraft.
In books and film, you need some dramatic aspect, but many times that's what bothers me the most about sci-fi. For instance Ensign Callum (I'm just making that up, don't bother to look him up) gets hit with a phaser on Star Trek. Callum survives and gets beamed aboard the med lab where he delivers his death speech "the... Klingons... *gasp* are down there *gasp* with human *gasp* *ack*" and dies. No attempt to revive him, no attempt to fix the wounds. This should be EASY medicine by Star Trek's time. At the very least, if they didn't hit him in the head, they should be able to keep him alive using artificial means. His death leaves part of a question unanswered, and makes the viewer question what's going on. Another away team is sent down.
I HATED the bad medicine in Star Trek (particularly in TNG) more than anything. Bad physics can sometimes be written around. Warp Drives are tech we don't understand (possibly quantum tunneling or time/space manipulation). Explosions and Sound in space are generated visual or mental effects because the military found it enhanced pilot's performance in the silence of space. Starfighters fly like atmospheric fighters because of inertial compensators. There really isn't a good excuse for bad medicine that I can think of, though. They can rebuild Picard after being changed to a Borg (including having an eye replaced), but can't fix Jorde's vision?!? AAARGGH! This is tech we probably will see in the next 50 years(either bio or cybernetic), not 500 years from now. At least they figured out how to fix his vision by one of the movies.
Strange - I don't consider Foundation among my favorites because it was such hard reading for the first 200 pages or so of the first book (so damn slow!). After that it was OK. Stranger in a Strange Land was pretty good, from what I remember (Jr High was so long ago...), but I think I liked Starship Troopers better. The movie, on the other hand... let's just leave it at *yech*. I don't remember much about Snow Crash, either, but I do remember I found it so boring that it took me 2 years to read (and as you said - it's a short read), so I can't count myself as a fan of Stephenson, although I haven't read any of his other works. Gibson's Neuromancer was a much better read, IMO. I can't really comment on 2001, as I've never read the book or seen the movie (I tried to watch the movie, but after 20 minutes of watching apes jump around, I gave up). I've heard it's much better if you're wasted when you see it (not worth it to me). I've also read a lot of Niven, but not Ringworld. Gaiman doesn't really write sci-fi - it's more modern fantasy (magic, myth and gods in our world). He's a good writer, but some of his writing are very, er, demented. His writings are well researched, which is why he has so much knowledge of classic myth (I know an aide doing research for him, and he has at least 2).
Last summer I had a colony move into my mailbox. I opened the box and there they were, moving in right on top of my mail, but mostly towards the back of the box. I dusted the queen, workers, and eggs off my junk mail and closed the box after getting over my initial repulsion (at least there weren't any fliers). The next morning I was going to evict them with a hose before the mailman arrived, but they had already moved out.
Did the bugs leave a forwarding address? They still owe me rent:)
I admit, I know nothing about consoles, but if they use encryption of any sort, it is illegal to decode the backup with anything other than the original decrypter (the console itself) by current US law (the still living DMCA). This is why many CD manufacturers want to sell encrypted CDs - you can't use them in your RIO because decrypting them without the original decryption device is illegal (changing them into a different format is legal, however, as long as you leave the encryption intact and that player has a legal decrypter). So far, this has held up in court.
Nintendo could claim their cartridge format is an encrypter, even if it doesn't use any sort of encryption software. This has been done in court, as well, but I don't remember what the results were (I think the suing company lost, though, which is good).
As for most EULA's, they state that if you use the software, you agree to the terms stated in the EULA, whether you've read them or not. I think if they could prove the EULA came with the package and you saw it, they would win in court (court has a tendency to favor prosecution, from my limited experience). Most PC software places the EULA in the installer exactly for this reason - so you can't claim you didn't see it. You might win if you claim you don't remember a EULA coming with that particular package (who does?) or that the legalese was too complex for you to understand (hey, it's worked before, but unfortunately not against the worst offender, the IRS).
I think the outlook for software dev in the US is looking increasingly dim. I've watched more and more layoffs at my company and more and more outsourcing to India to cut costs and keep up with development schedules. Most of the people I know who were laid off have not found a new job in the industry. Other Engineering (Electrical, Mechanical) careers are fairing much better because the dev work is done in the US and only the manufacturing in Asia. For instance, I was looking at a couple of med-tech companies ('cause I dislike working for anyone with "routine" layoffs) and all either one wants is EE majors (and most of these are for programming positions, because that's what my search hit on). Med-tech at least is mostly stuck in the US because our high prescription costs pay for the R&D here, and proximity to R&D is important for most of the rest of the industry. When I looked last week at available programming jobs, all I saw was a couple for COBOL and three senior positions that required 10-12 years of programming experience(which I don't have). At least the poster might be qualified for those.
It's sad, but we're watching the computer industry do just what the clothing industry did in the 80s - move to the cheap labor of Asia.
funny - I was going to say nearly the same thing (at least the beer part).
I thereby theorize that women get proportionally stupider the more beer they drink, while men get proportionally smarter (volume of living cells being used vs total cells).
I actually don't have any problem with case sensitive - I think there's a point where you're being too anal, and as long as opening and saving is done in the GUI without requiring typing, there shouldn't be any issues. If I save the file as Readme, I double-click it to open it and it stays Readme. Having 2 Readme files in the same place should never happen unless you accidentally save as README, but I think most people could figure that one out.
Then again, I also have problems with people scattering README files all over the file system, with no association whatsoever (README should go in a SEPARATE folder with the app if included with the app (although a README technically shouldn't be included with the App at all), not in the Applications folder or the Desktop, unless the README is about Applications or the Desktop.
Most installers have this right, now, but some early 10.0 installers... well, ew.
As for extensions to filenames, they've been a part of every Apple, although hidden in a resource, and a necessity for identifying the file to the OS. For the most part, they still remain hidden. For your above example, you should see three icons for dog with different pictures to identify the image format, not a file called dog.xxx (I know it doesn't always work this way, but that's the way it should work). While this may mean little to a user (it's dog), it means something if you're sending the picture via e-mail (send me the jpg image or I can't see it on my Amiga). The user should be able to identify the different format by the icon, not the extension.
Coding case insensitivity isn't hard, you insensitive clod (sorry, just read the polls:) - it just requires a bit more overhead because the core of the OS was designed for case sensitivity. It does require some careful coding for multibyte locales (you don't want to change the case for them).
The only thing I can think of for spell checking is that capitalization checks might get confused or possibly file is stored as a different name than what you see (ala Win95/98 with the Windows~1 names)
Can't help you much on packages, but can on a definition.
NURBS - Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline
Essentially, a NURBS surface is a mesh of B-Splines, and B-Splines are a way to represent a curve using knots and points (sometimes called control points or de Boor points). A B-Spline is similar to a Bezier curve (try it in Photoshop). The only difference is you add "knots" which force the curve to go through some fixed points. The first point and first knot are always the same, as are the last point and last knot (these are the "edges" of the mesh), so you need at least 3 points and two knots to make a B-Spline curve and 4 knots and 5 points to represent a mesh (if the B-splines share point between their curves, which not normal - 6 is normal - you end up with an hourglass shape).
The mesh itself is called non-uniform because the knots don't need to be equally spaced from one another. Rational means simply using real numbers not Imaginary.
There are numerous problems with NURBS surfaces, most of which you'll never worry about (us developer types do). There's a pretty good article on this by Intel
On the other hand, NURBS have the advantage of being able to remove knots and control points and scale performance for processors (sacrificing quality).
Interestingly (to me, at least), the points aren't called weighted control points anywhere (at least not from most google results I looked at), as they were in most texts when I took computer graphics in college. All weighted control points means is describing the points of the NURBS curve as a unit vector (vhat, v with the carat symbol on top) and a multiple (weight) of that vector, rather than the actual x,y,z of the point. The point formula was thus w*vhat, where vhat=v/Norm(v). That's probably technobabble to most people, so I'll shut up now:)
Only smaller companies use it, though, I suspect because of its reputation as a lower end (and thus less feature rich) CAD package. I don't know how much of that is true, but they certainly aren't treated as real competition in the industry.
Even Apple uses non-Apple boxes for most of their CAD work (and certainly not AutoCAD). With OS X there's always the possibility of a port of a major CAD package, though, especially from companies with BSD source branches. If someone proves that money can be had, I'm sure a port will be made.
From what I remember, Sid was a drummer that was moved to bass (because drums were filled) and later was more of just a miscreant, but that is beside the point -
The Sex Pistols had little to do with musicality and more to do with message, and they had a very powerful message in "God Save the Queen". Johnny Rotten (er, Lydon) was physically attacked because of that message, and the song was blacked out of the music charts because it was deemed too offensive. Other punk bands used that same style of message before music (the Dead Kennedys, for instance), while several offshoots just used the groove and power and dumped the political message, usually settling for a more conventional love-drugs-sex-rock and roll message (Surf punks... the only example I can think of at the moment is Agent Orange, and garage rockers such as Husker Du and the Replacements).
Punk really was the end of the corporate rock (stadium hard rock/metal - Boston, Styx, Queen, Pink Floyd etc.) and disco from most of the 70s and the start of a number of splinter movements, many offshoots of punk, and some became legit because of punk - speed metal, Goth, Ska, New Wave, Rap, synth-pop (80s rock), garage, surf punk. It was time for a change. Just as Heavy Metal (Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin) was a slap in the face for 60's folk movement, punk was a slap in the face for the big dance party of the 70s.
Actually, there is quite a bit you can do, since most of the actual web stuff is in the BSD layer. 10.1 is based on an older kernel, and 10.2 adds a lot to it. I'm not sure if all the additions really make it faster, but honestly, I don't know.
Type this on a macOS X box: sysctl -a
Some of these settings are sub-optimal for a server (at least with Jaguar, not necessarily OS X server). You could do something like this: sysctl -w kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=2097152 sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=262144
to increase your TCP buffers, for instance. I know there are more areas for performance tuning, but I don't know them well. Search for sysctl on the web and you're bound to find some.
One small problem - as seen in Superman (II?), Superman can zoom really fast around the globe and reverse time, go back to before Batman aquired said Kryptonite, and then beat the shit out of him.
That, coupled with X-ray vision, heat (laser)vision, super strength, invulernability, flight, well, he's kinda misbalanced.
If you want to go back to the original, "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound," fine, he's got super speed, invulernability, super jump, X-ray vision, and super strength. Still would put my money on him, as that "faster than a speeding bullet" means he can break the sound barrier, which probably would be enough to be able to take out batman.
Batman is a wuss - he's like Velma and Fred rolled into a single character, with Johnny Quest's foolhardy bravado, then given lots of money and stature within the city. He romps around the city in tights and rubber armor with a boy wonder... If you've ever read Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine's "How to be a Superhero" (NBM Books: 1992) (some excerpts here - probably among the funniest books I've ever read... but out of print) you'll have heard this before, but "People talk..."
About your dodging thing - what a wussy way out. Superman takes it like a man. He's probably faster than the Flash, as well as more powerful, he just doesn't flaunt his super-speed like that piss ant hero. Don't even get me going on Aquaman...
Enough knocking Wonder Woman - Wonder Woman has magic bracers that deflect bullets. Batman has... a utility belt. Wonder woman has an invisible plane to get around (at least in superfriends). Batman has... a nice car (but hey, it is jet powered...). Wonder Woman has a magic lasso that makes Batman passive and tell only the truth... Batman has... Robin!
geez - that tech was ignorant - Win2K and XP (and usually NT) don't require reboots either.
I had OS X and SUSE PPC linux dualboot (actually also 7,8,and 9, but I rarely use those) running on the machine I wanted to use ('cause it had a free PCI slot for my extra ethernet card [firewall]), and neither was supported by AT&T @Home, only Win95,98,2K and Mac OS 8-9. The tech (who actually was a Linux guy himself) set the machine up using MacOS 9 (he was required to do so to "authenticate" the ethernet card), and then let me strip all the relevant information and converted it to linux/OS X, deleting all the crap he installed. I'm now breaking a small chunk of the contract, though - No servers - bah! No NAT'd LAN? bah!
AT&T Broadband does something similar with their Cablemodems, but mainly to provide some security on the local loop (I think).
ifconfig provides a workaround if I have to swap cards, but so far I haven't needed it. I've wondered if this is exploitable, though - what happens if I report myself as a different user [e.g. MAC] on the local loop? -- I would have to hack the Cable Modem to recognize the new address, but I've been told this is quite easy (which is why I'm worried about it).
Finding the IPs on the local loop should be easy using ping and traceroute. Getting MAC addresses should be possible with arp (I think). The main issues I can think of is making sure the packets still get to the original owner (we wouldn't want any alarms going off at the victim's site), not reporting the fake address being up to AT&T (which I'm sure would set off alarms somewhere - 2 machines up with the same address), and hacking the cable modem. You could reduce this to just hacking the cable modem if you waited until they shut down, then connected claiming to be their machine.
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It doesn't surprise me at all that Lovecraft is at least somewhat a racist, as the early to mid 20th century was mostly segregated, and many people still viewed blacks as more of a servant class (having previously been slaves). The question is, was Lovecraft more-so than his peers?
I don't think Lovecraft was trying to associate skin color with evilness to be racist so much as to have the monsters be creatures of nightmares and darkness, which is a concept that has existed for thousands of years (a concept that is ironically promoted heavily by religion...). A creature of night would likely be colored black - like a bat, so they are camoflaged in their nighttime environment. Most of the creatures themselves were based on real creatures/concepts people had fears of, whether it be giant squid/octopi, dead-come-to-life (another religious inspired concept, as the reason for burying people 6 feet deep and putting a large stone on top of the grave was to keep the dead from coming back), bats (Nightgaunts), fish/sharks (Deep Ones, although that is also almost a fear of inbreeding), or creatures that appear out of nowhere (dimensional shamblers).
The pitch-black Nightgaunts, for instance, weren't really evil, but they were servants of a sort (they brought food [people in the story] to their masters). Ghouls (undead people) weren't always good, either, but they always had white, almost transparent skin (and were usually educated).
would that be the "printing improvements" thing mentioned?
I'd heard 10.2.3 was out, but I had a bunch of windows up that I wasn't willing to bring down until this morning, so I'm just getting the update now.
This is nitpicking, but, G3's are supported on OS X, so you'd have to drop back to a 604 or earlier, or an upgraded 604 (which isn't supported).
Why make some of the code open source?
I know a reason, and I used it - OS X 10.1 had an older BSD layer that didn't a natd capable of forwarding IPSec packets. I downloaded the darwin code, patched natd to support the forwarding, and patched my system with the new natd. The core code for 10.2 came with a natd that supports IPSec forwarding, so I no longer need it, but had I been using Microsoft, I'd have needed to wait until the next OS rev, write all the code myself from scratch, or buy a commercial product. This patch took no more than 1/2 hour to write - essentially copy the pptp forwarding code and change the protocol number.
Yes, there are problems you can't fix with a proprietary GUI, but one thing that is forced by this is a somewhat consistent GUI (or copying one, like GNOME and KDE do). I've used at least 8 Unix variants (Linux, IRIX, SINUX/RUNIX, HP-UX, DUX, Solaris, OpenBSD, and the freeBSDish MacOS X), and only OpenWindows and Motif were consistent across most of them (IRIX being the exception, and I believe both OpenWindows and Motif are/were proprietary).
I think you're ignorant about OS X - the core is based entirely on BSD and is entirely open source under the APSL. BSD was the core behind NeXT as well, and that entire codebase is nearly intact (nearly, if not all of the BSD core programs and utilities are in OS X). The only difference other than the GUI not being XWindows based is that NeXT was POSIX certified (Apple is compliant, but not certified). If you want XWindows, you can use XFree86, which runs a whole lot nicer on top of OS X's windows than it does on top of Window's windows (such as Cygwin), in my experience.
There also is a link between heavy use in formative years (~12-18) years and suffering from depression or manic depression (I know of at least one such person, and she still smokes).
:P
I personally don't smoke (anything), but my social circle is primarily artists and musicians, most of whom smoke pot at least once in a while. My personal drug of choice is caffeine and I've got some great addict rationalizations for it
I've also noticed the lack of motivation thing among some heavy pot smoking friends (with one exception - which happens to be the person with manic depression). The casual users don't appear to have this problem.
I use different OSes for different things. Just as I would never use Linux (or to a lesser extent, OS X) for games, I would never use Windows as a network entry point (firewall). It's too easy to compromise Windows security from applications run by a non-administrator. e-mail viruses are rare to non-existent on UNIX based hosts because they usually can't compromise the entire system unless you're running/reading as root. The virus may wipe out your user and data, but can't, for instance, format the C drive, unless the virus itself also compromises root.
.app bundles, but there still is work needed on navigation speed (I haven't found a finder view that can find deeply nested folders quickly, partially because I find the screen shifts harder to follow than the folder tree view of windows).
Windows, on the other hand, makes some nice toolkits for application construction and has a much more consistent UI than Linux (to be fair, OS X also has a fairly consistent UI, except for application install). I personally don't like how any of them handle applications, although the start menu on windows and finder on mac are steps in the right direction. All tend to leave too many files visible (windows explorer, which is sometimes necessary to find little used application parts such as configuration modules) or difficult to quickly navigate (my opinion of OS X after a year of use and most Linux navigators). I think Apple is heading in the right direction with their
Funny how some writers get stuck in a Genre - I was going to mention some HP Lovecraft sci-fi, but I can't remember the names (most of his stuff was horror or horror-on-earth sci-fi).
I particularly liked a short he co-wrote about a bunch of non-fighting aliens that trapped a soldier hunting them in an invisible maze on mars. It interested me more than most Lovecraft because it was a psychological horror that was descriptive from the soldier's point of view, not a 3rd person point of view as in most Lovecraft.
In books and film, you need some dramatic aspect, but many times that's what bothers me the most about sci-fi. For instance Ensign Callum (I'm just making that up, don't bother to look him up) gets hit with a phaser on Star Trek. Callum survives and gets beamed aboard the med lab where he delivers his death speech "the... Klingons... *gasp* are down there *gasp* with human *gasp* *ack*" and dies. No attempt to revive him, no attempt to fix the wounds. This should be EASY medicine by Star Trek's time. At the very least, if they didn't hit him in the head, they should be able to keep him alive using artificial means. His death leaves part of a question unanswered, and makes the viewer question what's going on. Another away team is sent down.
I HATED the bad medicine in Star Trek (particularly in TNG) more than anything. Bad physics can sometimes be written around. Warp Drives are tech we don't understand (possibly quantum tunneling or time/space manipulation). Explosions and Sound in space are generated visual or mental effects because the military found it enhanced pilot's performance in the silence of space. Starfighters fly like atmospheric fighters because of inertial compensators. There really isn't a good excuse for bad medicine that I can think of, though. They can rebuild Picard after being changed to a Borg (including having an eye replaced), but can't fix Jorde's vision?!? AAARGGH! This is tech we probably will see in the next 50 years(either bio or cybernetic), not 500 years from now. At least they figured out how to fix his vision by one of the movies.
Strange - I don't consider Foundation among my favorites because it was such hard reading for the first 200 pages or so of the first book (so damn slow!). After that it was OK. Stranger in a Strange Land was pretty good, from what I remember (Jr High was so long ago...), but I think I liked Starship Troopers better. The movie, on the other hand... let's just leave it at *yech*. I don't remember much about Snow Crash, either, but I do remember I found it so boring that it took me 2 years to read (and as you said - it's a short read), so I can't count myself as a fan of Stephenson, although I haven't read any of his other works. Gibson's Neuromancer was a much better read, IMO. I can't really comment on 2001, as I've never read the book or seen the movie (I tried to watch the movie, but after 20 minutes of watching apes jump around, I gave up). I've heard it's much better if you're wasted when you see it (not worth it to me). I've also read a lot of Niven, but not Ringworld. Gaiman doesn't really write sci-fi - it's more modern fantasy (magic, myth and gods in our world). He's a good writer, but some of his writing are very, er, demented. His writings are well researched, which is why he has so much knowledge of classic myth (I know an aide doing research for him, and he has at least 2).
Last summer I had a colony move into my mailbox. I opened the box and there they were, moving in right on top of my mail, but mostly towards the back of the box. I dusted the queen, workers, and eggs off my junk mail and closed the box after getting over my initial repulsion (at least there weren't any fliers). The next morning I was going to evict them with a hose before the mailman arrived, but they had already moved out.
:)
Did the bugs leave a forwarding address? They still owe me rent
I admit, I know nothing about consoles, but if they use encryption of any sort, it is illegal to decode the backup with anything other than the original decrypter (the console itself) by current US law (the still living DMCA). This is why many CD manufacturers want to sell encrypted CDs - you can't use them in your RIO because decrypting them without the original decryption device is illegal (changing them into a different format is legal, however, as long as you leave the encryption intact and that player has a legal decrypter). So far, this has held up in court.
Nintendo could claim their cartridge format is an encrypter, even if it doesn't use any sort of encryption software. This has been done in court, as well, but I don't remember what the results were (I think the suing company lost, though, which is good).
As for most EULA's, they state that if you use the software, you agree to the terms stated in the EULA, whether you've read them or not. I think if they could prove the EULA came with the package and you saw it, they would win in court (court has a tendency to favor prosecution, from my limited experience). Most PC software places the EULA in the installer exactly for this reason - so you can't claim you didn't see it. You might win if you claim you don't remember a EULA coming with that particular package (who does?) or that the legalese was too complex for you to understand (hey, it's worked before, but unfortunately not against the worst offender, the IRS).
I think the outlook for software dev in the US is looking increasingly dim. I've watched more and more layoffs at my company and more and more outsourcing to India to cut costs and keep up with development schedules. Most of the people I know who were laid off have not found a new job in the industry. Other Engineering (Electrical, Mechanical) careers are fairing much better because the dev work is done in the US and only the manufacturing in Asia. For instance, I was looking at a couple of med-tech companies ('cause I dislike working for anyone with "routine" layoffs) and all either one wants is EE majors (and most of these are for programming positions, because that's what my search hit on). Med-tech at least is mostly stuck in the US because our high prescription costs pay for the R&D here, and proximity to R&D is important for most of the rest of the industry. When I looked last week at available programming jobs, all I saw was a couple for COBOL and three senior positions that required 10-12 years of programming experience(which I don't have). At least the poster might be qualified for those.
It's sad, but we're watching the computer industry do just what the clothing industry did in the 80s - move to the cheap labor of Asia.
I could be that smart... if only I'd, like, read books and stuff instead of Slashdot.
Men would be more apt to measuring another area of their body and claiming it is 5 inches in diameter... I'm one of them.
btw, hope you don't get brain cancer from all the rads you pumped through your skull. What were you thinking?!?
funny - I was going to say nearly the same thing (at least the beer part).
I thereby theorize that women get proportionally stupider the more beer they drink, while men get proportionally smarter (volume of living cells being used vs total cells).
I actually don't have any problem with case sensitive - I think there's a point where you're being too anal, and as long as opening and saving is done in the GUI without requiring typing, there shouldn't be any issues. If I save the file as Readme, I double-click it to open it and it stays Readme. Having 2 Readme files in the same place should never happen unless you accidentally save as README, but I think most people could figure that one out.
:)
Then again, I also have problems with people scattering README files all over the file system, with no association whatsoever (README should go in a SEPARATE folder with the app if included with the app (although a README technically shouldn't be included with the App at all), not in the Applications folder or the Desktop, unless the README is about Applications or the Desktop.
Most installers have this right, now, but some early 10.0 installers... well, ew.
As for extensions to filenames, they've been a part of every Apple, although hidden in a resource, and a necessity for identifying the file to the OS. For the most part, they still remain hidden. For your above example, you should see three icons for dog with different pictures to identify the image format, not a file called dog.xxx (I know it doesn't always work this way, but that's the way it should work). While this may mean little to a user (it's dog), it means something if you're sending the picture via e-mail (send me the jpg image or I can't see it on my Amiga). The user should be able to identify the different format by the icon, not the extension.
Coding case insensitivity isn't hard, you insensitive clod (sorry, just read the polls
- it just requires a bit more overhead because the core of the OS was designed for case sensitivity. It does require some careful coding for multibyte locales (you don't want to change the case for them).
The only thing I can think of for spell checking is that capitalization checks might get confused or possibly file is stored as a different name than what you see (ala Win95/98 with the Windows~1 names)
Can't help you much on packages, but can on a definition.
:)
NURBS - Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline
Essentially, a NURBS surface is a mesh of B-Splines, and B-Splines are a way to represent a curve using knots and points (sometimes called control points or de Boor points). A B-Spline is similar to a Bezier curve (try it in Photoshop). The only difference is you add "knots" which force the curve to go through some fixed points. The first point and first knot are always the same, as are the last point and last knot (these are the "edges" of the mesh), so you need at least 3 points and two knots to make a B-Spline curve and 4 knots and 5 points to represent a mesh (if the B-splines share point between their curves, which not normal - 6 is normal - you end up with an hourglass shape).
The mesh itself is called non-uniform because the knots don't need to be equally spaced from one another. Rational means simply using real numbers not Imaginary.
here's a picture of a B-spline
There are numerous problems with NURBS surfaces, most of which you'll never worry about (us developer types do). There's a pretty good article on this by Intel
On the other hand, NURBS have the advantage of being able to remove knots and control points and scale performance for processors (sacrificing quality).
Interestingly (to me, at least), the points aren't called weighted control points anywhere (at least not from most google results I looked at), as they were in most texts when I took computer graphics in college. All weighted control points means is describing the points of the NURBS curve as a unit vector (vhat, v with the carat symbol on top) and a multiple (weight) of that vector, rather than the actual x,y,z of the point. The point formula was thus w*vhat, where vhat=v/Norm(v). That's probably technobabble to most people, so I'll shut up now
Only smaller companies use it, though, I suspect because of its reputation as a lower end (and thus less feature rich) CAD package. I don't know how much of that is true, but they certainly aren't treated as real competition in the industry.
Even Apple uses non-Apple boxes for most of their CAD work (and certainly not AutoCAD). With OS X there's always the possibility of a port of a major CAD package, though, especially from companies with BSD source branches. If someone proves that money can be had, I'm sure a port will be made.
From what I remember, Sid was a drummer that was moved to bass (because drums were filled) and later was more of just a miscreant, but that is beside the point -
The Sex Pistols had little to do with musicality and more to do with message, and they had a very powerful message in "God Save the Queen". Johnny Rotten (er, Lydon) was physically attacked because of that message, and the song was blacked out of the music charts because it was deemed too offensive. Other punk bands used that same style of message before music (the Dead Kennedys, for instance), while several offshoots just used the groove and power and dumped the political message, usually settling for a more conventional love-drugs-sex-rock and roll message (Surf punks... the only example I can think of at the moment is Agent Orange, and garage rockers such as Husker Du and the Replacements).
Punk really was the end of the corporate rock (stadium hard rock/metal - Boston, Styx, Queen, Pink Floyd etc.) and disco from most of the 70s and the start of a number of splinter movements, many offshoots of punk, and some became legit because of punk - speed metal, Goth, Ska, New Wave, Rap, synth-pop (80s rock), garage, surf punk. It was time for a change. Just as Heavy Metal (Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin) was a slap in the face for 60's folk movement, punk was a slap in the face for the big dance party of the 70s.
Actually, there is quite a bit you can do, since most of the actual web stuff is in the BSD layer. 10.1 is based on an older kernel, and 10.2 adds a lot to it. I'm not sure if all the additions really make it faster, but honestly, I don't know.
Type this on a macOS X box:
sysctl -a
Some of these settings are sub-optimal for a server (at least with Jaguar, not necessarily OS X server). You could do something like this:
sysctl -w kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=2097152
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=262144
to increase your TCP buffers, for instance. I know there are more areas for performance tuning, but I don't know them well. Search for sysctl on the web and you're bound to find some.
One small problem - as seen in Superman (II?), Superman can zoom really fast around the globe and reverse time, go back to before Batman aquired said Kryptonite, and then beat the shit out of him.
That, coupled with X-ray vision, heat (laser)vision, super strength, invulernability, flight, well, he's kinda misbalanced.
If you want to go back to the original, "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound," fine, he's got super speed, invulernability, super jump, X-ray vision, and super strength. Still would put my money on him, as that "faster than a speeding bullet" means he can break the sound barrier, which probably would be enough to be able to take out batman.
Batman is a wuss - he's like Velma and Fred rolled into a single character, with Johnny Quest's foolhardy bravado, then given lots of money and stature within the city. He romps around the city in tights and rubber armor with a boy wonder... If you've ever read Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine's "How to be a Superhero" (NBM Books: 1992) (some excerpts here - probably among the funniest books I've ever read... but out of print) you'll have heard this before, but "People talk..."
About your dodging thing - what a wussy way out. Superman takes it like a man. He's probably faster than the Flash, as well as more powerful, he just doesn't flaunt his super-speed like that piss ant hero. Don't even get me going on Aquaman...
Enough knocking Wonder Woman - Wonder Woman has magic bracers that deflect bullets. Batman has... a utility belt. Wonder woman has an invisible plane to get around (at least in superfriends). Batman has... a nice car (but hey, it is jet powered...). Wonder Woman has a magic lasso that makes Batman passive and tell only the truth... Batman has... Robin!
geez - that tech was ignorant - Win2K and XP (and usually NT) don't require reboots either.
I had OS X and SUSE PPC linux dualboot (actually also 7,8,and 9, but I rarely use those) running on the machine I wanted to use ('cause it had a free PCI slot for my extra ethernet card [firewall]), and neither was supported by AT&T @Home, only Win95,98,2K and Mac OS 8-9. The tech (who actually was a Linux guy himself) set the machine up using MacOS 9 (he was required to do so to "authenticate" the ethernet card), and then let me strip all the relevant information and converted it to linux/OS X, deleting all the crap he installed. I'm now breaking a small chunk of the contract, though - No servers - bah! No NAT'd LAN? bah!
Do you have kadmind4 installed, though?
I have access to several boxes, all with Kerberos 5 on them, but none of them have kadmind4 (not in any bin directories or in inetd, at least).
If you do have kadmind4, go to CIAC.
Specifically, go here
AT&T Broadband does something similar with their Cablemodems, but mainly to provide some security on the local loop (I think).
ifconfig provides a workaround if I have to swap cards, but so far I haven't needed it. I've wondered if this is exploitable, though - what happens if I report myself as a different user [e.g. MAC] on the local loop? -- I would have to hack the Cable Modem to recognize the new address, but I've been told this is quite easy (which is why I'm worried about it).
Finding the IPs on the local loop should be easy using ping and traceroute. Getting MAC addresses should be possible with arp (I think). The main issues I can think of is making sure the packets still get to the original owner (we wouldn't want any alarms going off at the victim's site), not reporting the fake address being up to AT&T (which I'm sure would set off alarms somewhere - 2 machines up with the same address), and hacking the cable modem. You could reduce this to just hacking the cable modem if you waited until they shut down, then connected claiming to be their machine.
If he's running OS X, he can use ifconfig to set his MAC (as mentioned by numerous people).
Gameranger may also have been blocking a parent IP or domain.
sure -
;)
This explains why red-headed stepchildren need more severe beatings
Where the heck did that "beaten like a red-headed stepchild" thing come from, anyway?