I know it's a dumb question, but what exactly is the relation of this project with candlemaking ("chandler" is an archaic form of "candler," which is the occupation of candle making)?
My guess is that it runs (burns) slowly and functions (illuminates) poorly, but at least it's better than nothing...
more specifically, Al Gore qualified that later as voting on legislation to create DARPAnet, an ancestor of the Internet, not the Internet itself. DARPAnet evolved into ARPAnet and eventually into the Internet.
Anyhow, nothing he ever said could ever make up for the idiotic things the elder Bush's VP said http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dan_Quayle/ - even in context he sounded like an idiot, although a few of them I think he meant figuratively (like being a part of Europe).
And no, I'm not a Democrat troll, I haven't been happy with any President for either major party(including Reagan, whom I think was a great figurehead, but made some lousy decisions) - most of the candidates for major parties I like are nixed early on because they stray on some issues from party lines.
The US govenment (as well as local governments) want to make everyone into perfect people through regulation. They would censor anything immoral if they could, and they have repeatedly tried - prohibition, anti-pornography legislation, the drug war (and related punishments putting some drug crimes as a worse than homicide and rape, even though over 3/4 of drug offenders in prison have no history of violence), anti-video game legislation, etc.
In any case, this law was terrible and only meant to try to bring attention to the issue. It fined the child, not the parents or stores. It had no policing or enforcement measures and stores had no incentive to self-police (would you turn off customers by fining a kid? - your store would be ostracized). It didn't ban the kid from playing the game (even in the store), only purchasing the game. The ONLY part of the law that was useful in any way was the sign requirement defining the crime and punishment for breaking the law, which I consider a mild deterrent.
Oddly enough, even though Canadians use British English, most (that I know) use American object names - they'd say something like "I gave the pacifier to the kid in the stroller" rather than "I gave the dummy to the tot in the pram."
There are a lot of things that are feasible but not explainable in sci-fi, though - for instance, warp is feasible by manipulating space-time or possibly using an aspect of quantum mechanics (physics is way too far back, but I recall there was an unexplained phenomenon where quanta moves faster than the speed of light - I thought it was quantum tunneling, but that doesn't appear to be it). We don't have any idea how we would manipulate space-time, but one theory is you surround a ship with a bubble of fast time and float it on a bubble of slow (or normal) time (some say you need to also maintain a small conduit between them to avoid dimension hopping). I had heard this theorized before by a sci-fi buff and gamer (of all people) about 15 years ago, but just a few months ago another person had essentially the same theory in Popular Science.
There's a huge difference between "black box" technology and stuff that's impossible - like engine noises in space. God forbid anybody ever has "passive sonar" in space, like in Wing Commander. I wanted to shoot Chris in the head for that one (figuratively speaking - I'm not a psycho stalker yet;) ).
Yeah, and even though they aren't inter-compatible, Apple has essentially adopted COM (ActiveX) style components and even issues UUIDs to register the components (Linux has UUIDs, but as far as I know they don't use them for component registration - the ext2 fs uses them for file registration, for instance). I doubt they would do that if ActiveX was insecure in-of itself. It's when you start tacking ActiveX into something like a web browser when you start asking for trouble, since ActiveX was designed to be used in a trusted environment. Apple's Quicktime component is actually a COM (ActiveX) object that is scriptable with javascript (not VB).
ActiveX got its bad name when hackers found that they could stealth-install controls and basically take over the computer that way. I think the only change Microsoft made to fix that was to change the default security to ask if you want to install the control instead of always allowing them.
Personally, I dislike Microsoft mostly because of its anti-competitive practices, mostly in the past - like exclusive deals with manufacturers for cheaper DOS or Windows if they sell no other OS. I also dislike how they go after a company to crush it, then leave the industry for dead (like Netscape). At least there is no clear way for them to crush Google - they can't smother them by offering "free" products like they did to Netscape (and add $29 to the price of Windows, then claim it was an integrated feature because they were already in anti-trust problems due to the exclusive deal stuff). Microsoft has made a living by undercutting the competition and I don't see a clear attack path against Google. iTunes they may be able to compete in by offering.98 cent songs, so we'll have to see where that goes.
I don't hate MS for their products - I generally like Windows as far as OS's go, and I think MS Office is a great product (yes, I can list flaws by the hundreds, but it still is a great product). XBox and the 360 are even a pretty decent system as far as consoles go, and I don't really have any preference of XBox versus Playstation 2 (I haven't played a 360, so I have no opinion of that one). On the other hand MS-SQL should be scrap-heaped, IMO. The only good part of that product is the administrator console and even that isn't worth keeping the product for.
Although the desert itself is millions of years old, between 8000 and 2500BC (end of last ice age until the final retreat of the monsoons) the Sahara area was very fertile, which is what led to civilizations forming there. Such an air burst would have had to happen probably around 10000 - 11000 BC or earlier, and was likely found because the area was mostly grasslands, not desert. It's possible it happened between 2500BC and 1300BC (around when Tutankhamen died), but such an event likely would be documented since writing was common by then in that region.
optimizing by hand is near impossible these days - you not only have multiple pipelines you need to feed out-of-order instructions to, you've got multiple parallel processing units and often processors (int, float, vector/SIMD - even GPU).
Something like the for loop you described would be better done with thread pools if you want to take advantage of parallelism, but that isn't part of the C standard, so you get a bunch of different thread systems depending on platform (many support their own as well as POSIX, but some, like Windows, only really support their own). The problem is with C itself - it's designed for 1970s era processors and additional functionality was bolted on but has not become part of the definition over time. C should have a standard thread and structures for thread parallel-able code, for instance, but fat chance of seeing that anytime soon.
won't matter - with a high intensity laser, the beam will burn right thru it. Even the mirrors inside a laser can be damaged if the beam intensity gets too strong before it's released, which is one of the difficulties in producing a military grade laser.
incidentally, I made a similar argument in Battletech games I played as a kid with smoke - smoke reduce the effectiveness of laser weapons? These things burn thru battlemechs - what are a few particles in the air gonna do besides vaporize? I also argued that using visible light lasers was silly playing the MechWarrior RPG, but that didn't fly with the rules lawyers, either (I was sniping).
and speaking of missile command, you fired (nuclear?) ABMs in that game, not lasers, which is why they explode and can take out multiple missiles (er, dots), especially when you hit near a splitting MIRV. I far prefer the arcade game to the 2600 variant, however - the game just flows much better with a trackball.
this reminds me too much about the US's failure to adopt metric. I learned metric in school, then Reagan said it was too hard and forced everyone to go back and learn the English system again. If the US had stuck with it there would be no problem converting my generation and the generations to follow. Fortunately for me, the mixed learning makes it fairly easy for me to do most metric calculations in my head (I do it with F and C all the time when I talk to Europeans on IRC and rarely am off by more than a degree - remembering some good roots such as freezing and boiling points, 45C = 113F [I remember this from the old Midnight Oil Beds are Burning song, incidentally], 23C = 73F, and -40C = -40F).
I would hope that the German reform continues in education, as the only way to really adopt a change like this is to bring it up through the youth - adults are unlikely to make such a change on their own. When I learned the German alphabet pre-1996, the first few letters were pronounced ah, bay, say, dey, ay (or eh like a Canadian says it;) ), eff, gay. In a CD set based Standard German I've been studying to brush up for a trip this fall, it's ah, bee, see, dee, ee, eff, gee - which is a much closer phonetic pronunciation, IMO. Also, when I learned German, I was taught there was no official rule on the usage of the sharp S (ß) - it was simply a shorthand for ss.
I'd be fine with a better phonetic English as long as everyone did it and the spellings were consistent. I was forced to learn ITA (phonetics) in elementary school and it killed my spelling until after 3th grade, when my mom enrolled me in a language specific summer school to fix my broken spelling and keep me from being held back (to make matters worse, I had learned correct spelling in kindergarten, was transferred into an ITA school and told I was stupid because I couldn't learn the "correct" spellings for first grade, then transferred to a non-ITA school in third grade and essentially told I was stupid again because I spelled everything wrong again... sigh). Most of the people I know that had ITA can't spell to this day, even though most of them are extremely bright, otherwise (I'm pretty certain you can't get a doctorate in Physics from MIT if you're an idiot), so I am very much against teaching a phonetic language that is not going to be the standard language spellings.
ah. the old classic coffee cup holder - I've heard that one as far back as 1995-6 (when I worked tech support).
Other break room stories from back then:
old lady calls in and asks what the foot pedal is for (the mouse).
the guy that calls in desperate to get his computer working, but all he sees is a black screen. later he tells the support guy that they have a power outage. The support guy tells him to pack his computer up and send it back because he is too stupid to own a computer.
there were others, and most were from stupid people (I'd say about 15% of calls to tech support were stupid people, 80% were noobs).
-
personally, I never had any really funny stories, but I did have a guy I had to mute because I was cracking up - he called in all panicked and said "It's January 1 [1996] - do I have to make a backup before I turn my computer on?" After about 3 minutes on hold I got control of my laughter and was able to talk to him and tell him that while making a backup is important and recommended, nothing bad should happen on a specific date unless you somehow got a virus. I should have left that last part out, because then I had to make sure he had no virus. I first asked him if he used a modem (no) or non-commercial software (no) and then had him check the size of his boot block (chkdsk virus checking - worked better than most virus checkers back then, and it was OK) - everything checked out OK so I said it was unlikely he had a virus.
take it one step further - apply a gun to the person's temple. Nothing says honesty like "if you're lying to me I'm going to blow your f**king head off."
Yes, I've been in a situation close to that thanks to an apartment in college that had previously been tenanted (squatted in, I found out later) by a drug dealer. Seems the high (he confessed he'd done a speedball to get his courage up), at least somewhat-drunk (he had a cheap beer in hand), cigarette smoking man (and that unfiltered cigarette ash was coming awfully close to that beer hand at one point) wanted money the dealer owed him and didn't realize that the guy had been kicked out 2 months previous. After repeatedly having him tour and check every closet in that apartment and several unsteady moments where I told him to check his cigarette (he would not take his shifty eyes off of me and thought I was trying to trick him), I think he came down enough to realize that maybe I was telling the truth and made a beeline out of the place.
While I never saw/heard about that guy getting arrested, I did see the drug dealer he was looking for money from get arrested a couple of weeks later. Though I'd seen him before in the neighborhood, I hadn't identified him before the arrest - the revealing factor was him getting arrested with this pale white girl (he was very dark black - so it was yin and yang) with railroad tracks since she had repeatedly stopped by my place looking for her boyfriend when she was too wasted to remember he had been evicted.
I preferred the weird humor games Infocom games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the very strange Leather Goddesses of Phobos to the political ones like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity, but that's probably more personal taste (especially since most of those came out when I was in my tweens to early teens)
Anyhow, it was really all downhill after Adventure;)
Odd that they think cutscenes became popular with Ninja Gaiden (maybe on consoles?), since they were popular on computers before that game existed in games such as BC's Quest for Tires, Karateka, and Captain Goodnight and the Isles of Fear (which I think came out the same year as Gaiden).
actually, the standard joke is from the Simpson's episode where Abe Simpson said "My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I like it!" Some people (including me) started using furlongs per fortnight for distance and time. I'm just saying use the right one for the right units;)
personally, I have a much more negative opinion of unions, but I suppose it really depends on the particular union and the contract. I got hired onto a job in college that required being in the union but didn't get benefits and I earned minimum wage (an extremely short lived job, mind you - I quit a little over a month after starting).
My next job was non-union, paid $2 more per hour + benefits for anyone over 20 hours, but had a union forklift driver "...getting paid $18/hour + benefits to sit on his ass all day and gets overtime if he's one minute over 40" (actually, it may have been overtime or time and a half, not benefits, but it was something like that - 15 years and many dead brain cells later) I was involved in the incident that made a manager say (almost shout - he was pissed) those words - the forklift driver had refused to help slap shipping labels on packages and chose to stand around and wait while another guy the manager and I did it and loaded the packages onto the pallet for him (and the forklift was being used only to rush it to shipping - normally I'd have hauled it with a pallet jack). We made that shipment with seconds to spare, no thanks to the forklift guy (honestly, I think I coulda run the pallet jack as fast as the forklift moved - so he got 4 hours of overtime pay for basically doing nothing useful - he moved about 20 pallets to shipping, but a couple of lazy temps coulda done that with pallet jacks and still had time to help out).
A salaried manager always putting in 80-90 hour work weeks and willing to help on the floor for the success of the company if necessary vs a union forklift driver that does nothing extra and 40 hour weeks who could care less about the success of the company since he's guaranteed a job at the same pay and benefits anywhere he goes. Only in America.
Converting to and convincing the world to adopt IPv6 is probably most advantagious to the NSA, especially with IPv6 being outright beligerant about having any form of NAT (network address translation - the 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x domains designated for LANs) over IPv6 (though it's been done). IPsec's Authentication Header is actually designed to not work through NAT, which is why it is often ignored or re-encoded at the router. The idea of IPv6 is everyone gets a unique, identifiable address no matter where you are or how you connect. When you use the built in security transmission, you can guarantee transmissions from sender A were sent by sender A when sending encrypted data because the address in the header itself cannot be modified from start node to end node. If the routing is changed at all (like under NAT), the Authentication Header becomes invalid.
Basically, IPv4 with NAT is the NSA's worst nightmare - you've got these hidden pocket networks that you can't trace down to an individual machine. With open wireless nodes, that means a terrorist could walk into a cafe and send a message to their cell and unless the NSA arrives when the message is being sent, they have no way of tracing it back to the sender once the sender disconnects.
OTOH, IPv6 as designed is a nightmare from a privacy standpoint and has huge potential for abuse. I for one don't trust my own government because they have completely tossed away civil liberties in their witch hunt for terrorists. Back in the '70s I remember the whole communism is everywhere paranoia, and I suspect that was even worse in the '50s with McCarthyism. The thing is, I remember in the '70s if you checked out certain books from the library (e.g. Hitler's Mein Kampf), the FBI immediately put a 'watch' on you (the freedom of information act revealed this practice). Do you want that level of paranoia returning? I think it already has. I suspect if you may visit an Al Qaida web site by link from a news site you're immediately investigated by the NSA as a suspected terrorist by an automated system. This is the same group that wanted to evaluate every phone conversation by every American by an automated system, so I don't think it's even vaguely beneath them. If anything, I'm probably under-paranoid because I don't feel I have anything to hide, though I don't want them snooping under old rocks (you brought [smoke] BOMB PLANS you found on a BBS to school when you were 13?!? definitely gonna grow up to be a terrorist).
furlongs (220 yards) per fortnight (14 days) is distance per time not distance per volume (so it's comparable to miles per hour, where 1 furlong per fortnight is approximately 0.00037202381 miles per hour)
a better estimate is furlongs per hogshead, and that's approximately 1585080.
if you don't trust their black hats, try it yourself download the beta install hack
I did notice that part of their security was deprecating the C API and creating a "secure" one with the same names but _ first (at least VC 2005 now gripes about the C API). Not sure what the difference is, but I've heard the new API does checking on the buffers for over/underflow.
my biggest grudge against Microsoft, however, is their shoddy OGL support and floating DirectX API. DX7-8 cool new features and faster, but you have to relearn the API. DX8-9 - cool new features and faster, but you have to relearn the API. DX9-10 cool new... aw screw it. I tried to keep a codebase of compatible OGL/DirectX code for 2 years before going all OGL.
you can also get the extreme cases - like that 1 (long) line of perl code DVD decoder.
In reality, I suspect the debug time on feature interoperability is a nightmare, and I'm speaking from personal experience on a large codebase here.
I write more new code on my open source project in a month than I did at my day job in a year, even when I was programming full time (due to reshuffling of resources and layoffs, I'm now doing Quality Assurance).
try better vodka (er, moonshine) and better coffee
I used to have an Irish coffee when I designated drove. That was all the alcohol I'd get for a night (basically 1 shot of whiskey), and it wasn't that bad. It certainly helped cover up the nasty substance that bar passed off as coffee (cream helps a lot with bitter coffee).
I've built about 2 dozen machines and I did cut myself once, on an ethernet card while mounting a large HSF on a CPU.
That HSF was a really poor design, IMO (especially when combined with that particular ABit Motherboard)- the wedges didn't have an actual hole and the thing was so big you had to apply pressure at a sharp angle. I had a different HSF from the same maker (Speeze) that I had no problems with. No visible blood in the computer, tho, I reacted too fast.
Sorry, but for some people it is a very bad problem. One of my college roommates lost his job, got kicked out of college and was breaking in to a college lab just to feed his 18 hour a day MUD addiction. He made our pittance $79/month rent (in an awful neighborhood, subsidized and near a soup kitchen) by buying and selling drugs (I think) and ate mostly ramen, which we'd managed to find at 5 cents a bag at a nearby grocer and bought them all (2 carts full).
That roommate was later diagnosed with ADHD and with drug treatment was able to break his addiction and has held down a job for about 2 years.
Anti-social is one thing - I used to spend 12-15 hours on a Friday-Saturday or Saturday-Sunday playing games, but not every weekend, and not every day. It didn't take over my life - at worst I lost a few hours of sleep (damn you, Civilization!), but I still made it to my job and usually made it to my morning classes. I had friends outside of the gamers and given a choice of going to a party with a girl I liked or playing games I would choose the party - my ex-roomie would choose the game (and I'm not kidding you - his MUD friends were more important to him than anything else).
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I know it's a dumb question, but what exactly is the relation of this project with candlemaking ("chandler" is an archaic form of "candler," which is the occupation of candle making)?
My guess is that it runs (burns) slowly and functions (illuminates) poorly, but at least it's better than nothing...
more specifically, Al Gore qualified that later as voting on legislation to create DARPAnet, an ancestor of the Internet, not the Internet itself. DARPAnet evolved into ARPAnet and eventually into the Internet.
Anyhow, nothing he ever said could ever make up for the idiotic things the elder Bush's VP said http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dan_Quayle/ - even in context he sounded like an idiot, although a few of them I think he meant figuratively (like being a part of Europe).
And no, I'm not a Democrat troll, I haven't been happy with any President for either major party(including Reagan, whom I think was a great figurehead, but made some lousy decisions) - most of the candidates for major parties I like are nixed early on because they stray on some issues from party lines.
I stand corrected.
;)
I'm American - I couldn't find Canada on a map if I tried
The US govenment (as well as local governments) want to make everyone into perfect people through regulation. They would censor anything immoral if they could, and they have repeatedly tried - prohibition, anti-pornography legislation, the drug war (and related punishments putting some drug crimes as a worse than homicide and rape, even though over 3/4 of drug offenders in prison have no history of violence), anti-video game legislation, etc.
In any case, this law was terrible and only meant to try to bring attention to the issue. It fined the child, not the parents or stores. It had no policing or enforcement measures and stores had no incentive to self-police (would you turn off customers by fining a kid? - your store would be ostracized). It didn't ban the kid from playing the game (even in the store), only purchasing the game. The ONLY part of the law that was useful in any way was the sign requirement defining the crime and punishment for breaking the law, which I consider a mild deterrent.
No, that's just because you and practically every other American don't know English (British). Not that I'm any better.
. htm
http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/jones/differences
Oddly enough, even though Canadians use British English, most (that I know) use American object names - they'd say something like "I gave the pacifier to the kid in the stroller" rather than "I gave the dummy to the tot in the pram."
Star Wars is a Space Opera, not Sci-Fi, yes.
;) ).
There are a lot of things that are feasible but not explainable in sci-fi, though - for instance, warp is feasible by manipulating space-time or possibly using an aspect of quantum mechanics (physics is way too far back, but I recall there was an unexplained phenomenon where quanta moves faster than the speed of light - I thought it was quantum tunneling, but that doesn't appear to be it). We don't have any idea how we would manipulate space-time, but one theory is you surround a ship with a bubble of fast time and float it on a bubble of slow (or normal) time (some say you need to also maintain a small conduit between them to avoid dimension hopping). I had heard this theorized before by a sci-fi buff and gamer (of all people) about 15 years ago, but just a few months ago another person had essentially the same theory in Popular Science.
There's a huge difference between "black box" technology and stuff that's impossible - like engine noises in space. God forbid anybody ever has "passive sonar" in space, like in Wing Commander. I wanted to shoot Chris in the head for that one (figuratively speaking - I'm not a psycho stalker yet
Yeah, and even though they aren't inter-compatible, Apple has essentially adopted COM (ActiveX) style components and even issues UUIDs to register the components (Linux has UUIDs, but as far as I know they don't use them for component registration - the ext2 fs uses them for file registration, for instance). I doubt they would do that if ActiveX was insecure in-of itself. It's when you start tacking ActiveX into something like a web browser when you start asking for trouble, since ActiveX was designed to be used in a trusted environment. Apple's Quicktime component is actually a COM (ActiveX) object that is scriptable with javascript (not VB).
.98 cent songs, so we'll have to see where that goes.
ActiveX got its bad name when hackers found that they could stealth-install controls and basically take over the computer that way. I think the only change Microsoft made to fix that was to change the default security to ask if you want to install the control instead of always allowing them.
Personally, I dislike Microsoft mostly because of its anti-competitive practices, mostly in the past - like exclusive deals with manufacturers for cheaper DOS or Windows if they sell no other OS. I also dislike how they go after a company to crush it, then leave the industry for dead (like Netscape). At least there is no clear way for them to crush Google - they can't smother them by offering "free" products like they did to Netscape (and add $29 to the price of Windows, then claim it was an integrated feature because they were already in anti-trust problems due to the exclusive deal stuff). Microsoft has made a living by undercutting the competition and I don't see a clear attack path against Google. iTunes they may be able to compete in by offering
I don't hate MS for their products - I generally like Windows as far as OS's go, and I think MS Office is a great product (yes, I can list flaws by the hundreds, but it still is a great product). XBox and the 360 are even a pretty decent system as far as consoles go, and I don't really have any preference of XBox versus Playstation 2 (I haven't played a 360, so I have no opinion of that one). On the other hand MS-SQL should be scrap-heaped, IMO. The only good part of that product is the administrator console and even that isn't worth keeping the product for.
Although the desert itself is millions of years old, between 8000 and 2500BC (end of last ice age until the final retreat of the monsoons) the Sahara area was very fertile, which is what led to civilizations forming there. Such an air burst would have had to happen probably around 10000 - 11000 BC or earlier, and was likely found because the area was mostly grasslands, not desert. It's possible it happened between 2500BC and 1300BC (around when Tutankhamen died), but such an event likely would be documented since writing was common by then in that region.
optimizing by hand is near impossible these days - you not only have multiple pipelines you need to feed out-of-order instructions to, you've got multiple parallel processing units and often processors (int, float, vector/SIMD - even GPU).
Something like the for loop you described would be better done with thread pools if you want to take advantage of parallelism, but that isn't part of the C standard, so you get a bunch of different thread systems depending on platform (many support their own as well as POSIX, but some, like Windows, only really support their own). The problem is with C itself - it's designed for 1970s era processors and additional functionality was bolted on but has not become part of the definition over time. C should have a standard thread and structures for thread parallel-able code, for instance, but fat chance of seeing that anytime soon.
won't matter - with a high intensity laser, the beam will burn right thru it. Even the mirrors inside a laser can be damaged if the beam intensity gets too strong before it's released, which is one of the difficulties in producing a military grade laser.
incidentally, I made a similar argument in Battletech games I played as a kid with smoke - smoke reduce the effectiveness of laser weapons? These things burn thru battlemechs - what are a few particles in the air gonna do besides vaporize? I also argued that using visible light lasers was silly playing the MechWarrior RPG, but that didn't fly with the rules lawyers, either (I was sniping).
and speaking of missile command, you fired (nuclear?) ABMs in that game, not lasers, which is why they explode and can take out multiple missiles (er, dots), especially when you hit near a splitting MIRV. I far prefer the arcade game to the 2600 variant, however - the game just flows much better with a trackball.
this reminds me too much about the US's failure to adopt metric. I learned metric in school, then Reagan said it was too hard and forced everyone to go back and learn the English system again. If the US had stuck with it there would be no problem converting my generation and the generations to follow. Fortunately for me, the mixed learning makes it fairly easy for me to do most metric calculations in my head (I do it with F and C all the time when I talk to Europeans on IRC and rarely am off by more than a degree - remembering some good roots such as freezing and boiling points, 45C = 113F [I remember this from the old Midnight Oil Beds are Burning song, incidentally], 23C = 73F, and -40C = -40F).
;) ), eff, gay. In a CD set based Standard German I've been studying to brush up for a trip this fall, it's ah, bee, see, dee, ee, eff, gee - which is a much closer phonetic pronunciation, IMO. Also, when I learned German, I was taught there was no official rule on the usage of the sharp S (ß) - it was simply a shorthand for ss.
I would hope that the German reform continues in education, as the only way to really adopt a change like this is to bring it up through the youth - adults are unlikely to make such a change on their own. When I learned the German alphabet pre-1996, the first few letters were pronounced ah, bay, say, dey, ay (or eh like a Canadian says it
I'd be fine with a better phonetic English as long as everyone did it and the spellings were consistent. I was forced to learn ITA (phonetics) in elementary school and it killed my spelling until after 3th grade, when my mom enrolled me in a language specific summer school to fix my broken spelling and keep me from being held back (to make matters worse, I had learned correct spelling in kindergarten, was transferred into an ITA school and told I was stupid because I couldn't learn the "correct" spellings for first grade, then transferred to a non-ITA school in third grade and essentially told I was stupid again because I spelled everything wrong again... sigh). Most of the people I know that had ITA can't spell to this day, even though most of them are extremely bright, otherwise (I'm pretty certain you can't get a doctorate in Physics from MIT if you're an idiot), so I am very much against teaching a phonetic language that is not going to be the standard language spellings.
ah. the old classic coffee cup holder - I've heard that one as far back as 1995-6 (when I worked tech support).
Other break room stories from back then:
old lady calls in and asks what the foot pedal is for (the mouse).
the guy that calls in desperate to get his computer working, but all he sees is a black screen. later he tells the support guy that they have a power outage. The support guy tells him to pack his computer up and send it back because he is too stupid to own a computer.
there were others, and most were from stupid people (I'd say about 15% of calls to tech support were stupid people, 80% were noobs).
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personally, I never had any really funny stories, but I did have a guy I had to mute because I was cracking up - he called in all panicked and said "It's January 1 [1996] - do I have to make a backup before I turn my computer on?" After about 3 minutes on hold I got control of my laughter and was able to talk to him and tell him that while making a backup is important and recommended, nothing bad should happen on a specific date unless you somehow got a virus. I should have left that last part out, because then I had to make sure he had no virus. I first asked him if he used a modem (no) or non-commercial software (no) and then had him check the size of his boot block (chkdsk virus checking - worked better than most virus checkers back then, and it was OK) - everything checked out OK so I said it was unlikely he had a virus.
take it one step further - apply a gun to the person's temple. Nothing says honesty like "if you're lying to me I'm going to blow your f**king head off."
Yes, I've been in a situation close to that thanks to an apartment in college that had previously been tenanted (squatted in, I found out later) by a drug dealer. Seems the high (he confessed he'd done a speedball to get his courage up), at least somewhat-drunk (he had a cheap beer in hand), cigarette smoking man (and that unfiltered cigarette ash was coming awfully close to that beer hand at one point) wanted money the dealer owed him and didn't realize that the guy had been kicked out 2 months previous. After repeatedly having him tour and check every closet in that apartment and several unsteady moments where I told him to check his cigarette (he would not take his shifty eyes off of me and thought I was trying to trick him), I think he came down enough to realize that maybe I was telling the truth and made a beeline out of the place.
While I never saw/heard about that guy getting arrested, I did see the drug dealer he was looking for money from get arrested a couple of weeks later. Though I'd seen him before in the neighborhood, I hadn't identified him before the arrest - the revealing factor was him getting arrested with this pale white girl (he was very dark black - so it was yin and yang) with railroad tracks since she had repeatedly stopped by my place looking for her boyfriend when she was too wasted to remember he had been evicted.
I preferred the weird humor games Infocom games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the very strange Leather Goddesses of Phobos to the political ones like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity, but that's probably more personal taste (especially since most of those came out when I was in my tweens to early teens)
;)
Anyhow, it was really all downhill after Adventure
Odd that they think cutscenes became popular with Ninja Gaiden (maybe on consoles?), since they were popular on computers before that game existed in games such as BC's Quest for Tires, Karateka, and Captain Goodnight and the Isles of Fear (which I think came out the same year as Gaiden).
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
actually, the standard joke is from the Simpson's episode where Abe Simpson said "My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I like it!" Some people (including me) started using furlongs per fortnight for distance and time. I'm just saying use the right one for the right units ;)
personally, I have a much more negative opinion of unions, but I suppose it really depends on the particular union and the contract. I got hired onto a job in college that required being in the union but didn't get benefits and I earned minimum wage (an extremely short lived job, mind you - I quit a little over a month after starting).
My next job was non-union, paid $2 more per hour + benefits for anyone over 20 hours, but had a union forklift driver "...getting paid $18/hour + benefits to sit on his ass all day and gets overtime if he's one minute over 40" (actually, it may have been overtime or time and a half, not benefits, but it was something like that - 15 years and many dead brain cells later) I was involved in the incident that made a manager say (almost shout - he was pissed) those words - the forklift driver had refused to help slap shipping labels on packages and chose to stand around and wait while another guy the manager and I did it and loaded the packages onto the pallet for him (and the forklift was being used only to rush it to shipping - normally I'd have hauled it with a pallet jack). We made that shipment with seconds to spare, no thanks to the forklift guy (honestly, I think I coulda run the pallet jack as fast as the forklift moved - so he got 4 hours of overtime pay for basically doing nothing useful - he moved about 20 pallets to shipping, but a couple of lazy temps coulda done that with pallet jacks and still had time to help out).
A salaried manager always putting in 80-90 hour work weeks and willing to help on the floor for the success of the company if necessary vs a union forklift driver that does nothing extra and 40 hour weeks who could care less about the success of the company since he's guaranteed a job at the same pay and benefits anywhere he goes. Only in America.
Converting to and convincing the world to adopt IPv6 is probably most advantagious to the NSA, especially with IPv6 being outright beligerant about having any form of NAT (network address translation - the 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x domains designated for LANs) over IPv6 (though it's been done). IPsec's Authentication Header is actually designed to not work through NAT, which is why it is often ignored or re-encoded at the router. The idea of IPv6 is everyone gets a unique, identifiable address no matter where you are or how you connect. When you use the built in security transmission, you can guarantee transmissions from sender A were sent by sender A when sending encrypted data because the address in the header itself cannot be modified from start node to end node. If the routing is changed at all (like under NAT), the Authentication Header becomes invalid.
Basically, IPv4 with NAT is the NSA's worst nightmare - you've got these hidden pocket networks that you can't trace down to an individual machine. With open wireless nodes, that means a terrorist could walk into a cafe and send a message to their cell and unless the NSA arrives when the message is being sent, they have no way of tracing it back to the sender once the sender disconnects.
OTOH, IPv6 as designed is a nightmare from a privacy standpoint and has huge potential for abuse. I for one don't trust my own government because they have completely tossed away civil liberties in their witch hunt for terrorists. Back in the '70s I remember the whole communism is everywhere paranoia, and I suspect that was even worse in the '50s with McCarthyism. The thing is, I remember in the '70s if you checked out certain books from the library (e.g. Hitler's Mein Kampf), the FBI immediately put a 'watch' on you (the freedom of information act revealed this practice). Do you want that level of paranoia returning? I think it already has. I suspect if you may visit an Al Qaida web site by link from a news site you're immediately investigated by the NSA as a suspected terrorist by an automated system. This is the same group that wanted to evaluate every phone conversation by every American by an automated system, so I don't think it's even vaguely beneath them. If anything, I'm probably under-paranoid because I don't feel I have anything to hide, though I don't want them snooping under old rocks (you brought [smoke] BOMB PLANS you found on a BBS to school when you were 13?!? definitely gonna grow up to be a terrorist).
furlongs (220 yards) per fortnight (14 days) is distance per time not distance per volume (so it's comparable to miles per hour, where 1 furlong per fortnight is approximately 0.00037202381 miles per hour)
a better estimate is furlongs per hogshead, and that's approximately 1585080.
if you don't trust their black hats, try it yourself
... aw screw it. I tried to keep a codebase of compatible OGL/DirectX code for 2 years before going all OGL.
download the beta
install
hack
I did notice that part of their security was deprecating the C API and creating a "secure" one with the same names but _ first (at least VC 2005 now gripes about the C API). Not sure what the difference is, but I've heard the new API does checking on the buffers for over/underflow.
my biggest grudge against Microsoft, however, is their shoddy OGL support and floating DirectX API. DX7-8 cool new features and faster, but you have to relearn the API. DX8-9 - cool new features and faster, but you have to relearn the API. DX9-10 cool new
you can also get the extreme cases - like that 1 (long) line of perl code DVD decoder.
In reality, I suspect the debug time on feature interoperability is a nightmare, and I'm speaking from personal experience on a large codebase here.
I write more new code on my open source project in a month than I did at my day job in a year, even when I was programming full time (due to reshuffling of resources and layoffs, I'm now doing Quality Assurance).
try better vodka (er, moonshine) and better coffee
I used to have an Irish coffee when I designated drove. That was all the alcohol I'd get for a night (basically 1 shot of whiskey), and it wasn't that bad. It certainly helped cover up the nasty substance that bar passed off as coffee (cream helps a lot with bitter coffee).
Sounds like you've been to my aunt's house lately - I keep mistaking that stuff for tea.
She keeps mistaking my coffee for stew, so I guess we're even.
I've built about 2 dozen machines and I did cut myself once, on an ethernet card while mounting a large HSF on a CPU.
That HSF was a really poor design, IMO (especially when combined with that particular ABit Motherboard)- the wedges didn't have an actual hole and the thing was so big you had to apply pressure at a sharp angle. I had a different HSF from the same maker (Speeze) that I had no problems with. No visible blood in the computer, tho, I reacted too fast.
damn you, now I'm Jones'n for a level.
Sorry, but for some people it is a very bad problem. One of my college roommates lost his job, got kicked out of college and was breaking in to a college lab just to feed his 18 hour a day MUD addiction. He made our pittance $79/month rent (in an awful neighborhood, subsidized and near a soup kitchen) by buying and selling drugs (I think) and ate mostly ramen, which we'd managed to find at 5 cents a bag at a nearby grocer and bought them all (2 carts full).
That roommate was later diagnosed with ADHD and with drug treatment was able to break his addiction and has held down a job for about 2 years.
Anti-social is one thing - I used to spend 12-15 hours on a Friday-Saturday or Saturday-Sunday playing games, but not every weekend, and not every day. It didn't take over my life - at worst I lost a few hours of sleep (damn you, Civilization!), but I still made it to my job and usually made it to my morning classes. I had friends outside of the gamers and given a choice of going to a party with a girl I liked or playing games I would choose the party - my ex-roomie would choose the game (and I'm not kidding you - his MUD friends were more important to him than anything else).