***Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is doubting even in the slightest that Saddam did this:***
Not so actually. Do a little research and you will find that the attack at Halabja was originally blamed on the US's enemy d'jour -- Iran. It was not refocused on Iraq until America's great and noble ally Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, an action that caused him to morph into "The Beast of Baghdad".
Most people who have looked at the issue are pretty sure that Saddam Hussein was responsible, but it is by no means the open and shut case that you present.
*** "Saddam had no WMD's"
It's funny, and hypocritical in the extreme how everybody keeps claiming that.***
Get a grip man. The fact that Iraq had WMDs in the early 1990s does not prove that it had them in 2003. In fact, it said it did not. International inspectors with pretty much unrestricted access to Iraqi facilities found none. And US investigators after the invasion found only a handful of chemical tipped artillery rounds of an obsolete type that Iraqi sources with no particular reason to lie said had been collected and destroyed prior to the 1991 Gulf War. If you've ever served in the military or worked for a large company, it'll be pretty clear to you how a few old artillery shells could have survived.
In point of fact, had Iraq had WMDs, it would surely have used them against US troops in 2003 -- probably with devastating affect.
People have been running PC electronics submerged in mineral oil for decades.
Advantages: 1. Not too hard to do 2. If push comes to shove, you can can probably burn the PC in your fireplace or other suitable container to keep warm. Or just because you are pissed at it.
Problems:
1. It's messy. 2. The oil tends to creep up any wires to the outside world (capillary action?) and eventually show up at the other end. 3. I'm not sure if non-gas tight connectors are used in modern PCs, but if they are, they may be a problem. 4. It's messy.
Linux (Konqueror anyway) has once again saved me apparently. Got the audio, but no video. But sometimes I like... want... the damn pictures. I get the message that voting for McCain means more of the same. Can't say that I want that. Will voting for Obama somehow lead me toward that great technological wonderland where technology actually works right all the time?
In any case, let me point out that McCain was the force behind the #$@(*&( Children's Internet Protection Act -- which pretty much forced tens of thousands of schools to install expensive, ineffective, idiosyncratic, and often buggy content filters. I'm sure he meant well. But he still screwed up. With better staff, and more administrative skills on his part, CIPA might not have happened or have been less of a mess. The guy -- like Bush -- is not a manager. We should limit his opportunities to make future mistakes by not putting him in charge of the US... or anything else.
Not being snarky, just curious if you meant 300 ohm twin lead? I've never encountered the use of Unshielded Twisted Pair for TV although it might work just fine.
In the real world a lot of rural and suburban dwellers take their own trash to the landfill. Many solid waste districts set aside usable gear of all sorts -- TVs, monitors, athletic equipment, books, to be picked up by anyone who wants it. It's called "Recycling".
***You have to realize that $400 will get you a very good used laptop or a reasonable new desktop and free software does everything you want to do.***
In the US, Walmart will be happy to sell you a fully functional Linux based Desktop PC for $200 USD plus a few bucks for shipping. It doesn't have quite enough horsepower to run Windows Vista and the Linux gOS is kind of reminiscent of the original release of Windows 95 (i.e. really buggy). But with a decent Linux distribution installed, it works fine. You will need a monitor -- maybe $15 at your local thrift shop. Possibly free at the landfill.
It's also cheap to run as the 1.5GHz VIA C7-D Processor pulls only 20W under full load.
Why would he care? He may not have the resources that the CIA does, but he is not without money, influence, or friends. I imagine that he can get a perfectly legitimate passport in any name he chooses from any of about 40 countries.
You sound like you actually know something about COBOL. I'm in no way shape or form a COBOL programmer. but a few times over the decades, I had occasion to look at some COBOL program or other in order to resolve some issue or other with code that it interfaced with.
May I ask a question? I can think of a whole lot of things to dislike about COBOL, but readability isn't one of them. On the whole, my impression is that it one of the easiest, if not the easiest, major computer language to follow. We're not talking write only stuff like APL, FORTH, Intel assembler language (if that mess of garbage deserves to be called a language), or even cryptic C, C++, or Java (there's another kind?).
How hard can it be for a reasonably intelligent team to plow through the code, find the section(s) that do the payroll calculations, force fit the results to $6.55 an hour, print a check and write a journal file so that the state can spend the next six months frantically trying to fix their applications in order to have the right numbers for W-2s in January?
Messy? you bet. But if lives depended on the outcome, I'll bet that mostly correct paychecks could be in the mail within a week or two.
***Who in their right mind have a computer online with Windows 95/98 or ME on it?***
People who like their stuff to work the same way all the time. Not all of us think that a Red Queens Race (run as fast as you can to stay in the same place) is a particularly satisfactory way to live. In point of fact, while Windows 9 is not terribly secure, the real Microsoft Security disaster was NT based Windows with a gazillion insecure services running by default. The risk of getting zapped by a bad update in XT-Vista is probably higher than that of a Windows 9 PC behind an NAT router being infected with malware.
I finally switched to largely to Linux when it became usable and the list of things I wanted to do that I couldn't on Windows 9 started to grow. But I have to tell you that I do NOT think that Linux will prove to be as secure as folks think. It's the same architecture that didn't/doesn't work in NT based Windows and is IMHO protected from malware more by its meager market share than by its superb software. I hope I'm wrong. But I'd bet that I'm not.
***As stated in the original paragraph, "DOS is too old to consider"***
That's silly. If MSDOS/Freedos will do the job, why the hell would it be too old to consider? It's far more stable than later MS OSes and will boot nearly instantaneously. Moreover, it is the only PC OS that is almost simple enough to understand. A fair variety of software is available that will run under MSDOS with a DOS extender to provide access to memory above 1MB.
Next choice would be Windows 95 with all two dozen service packs. Or OSR2. It will boot faster than Windows 98 (Less crap) and will support a suprising amount of Windows software. I'm not entirely sure why, but enabling MSDOS disk caching will speed up Windows 95 boot by 10% or so.
It may be necessary to spend time tuning the BIOS, and maybe even reconfiguring IDE hard drives and CDROM drives. Some older BIOSes can take a loooooooong time -- like 30 seconds plus -- dealing with pathological IDE configurations.
Or Linux. I don't know if Slackware still has SlackZIP, but it's specifically intended to boot from MSDOS/Windows 9 environments -- which means that you can set it up to run as desired while still having a functioning OS, then replace the bootloader to boot directly to Linux.
One caution. Unless the operation has a generous people budget and no hardware budget or is going to deploy dozens of identical boxes, it is almost always going to be more cost effective to buy a prebuilt appliance than to roll your own.
I don't think DRM is an issue. I suspect that the problem you're having is due to HD Radio being a new technology. There is a fairly widely used analog technology called Subsidiary Carrier Audio that is used to transmit background music and similar stuff over FM stations piggybacked on the primary signal. The background music in your local supermarket is probably SCA. Since stations presumably can't do both SCA and HD Radio, the number of stations that can actually deploy HD Radio is limited. Not too many stations means not too much HD Radio equipment. OTOH, maybe HD Radio will catch on. I'm told that HD Radio fidelity is nothing to write home about, so maybe simply feeding your radio's speaker output into the microphone input to your sound card will work until more diverse HD radio equipment becomes available.
***Yes I can deal with./configure;make;make install just fine but not everyone can.***
So could I.
If it always worked. What caused me to give up on Slackware and switch to (yechh) Ubuntu was the relatively small number of applications available preconfigured for Slack. Maybe I just had a run of rotten luck, but it seemed to me that about 40% of the applications I attempted to./configure, make, make install wouldn't install. Entirely too often I had to find and decode a README file, and/or decode the make files(), and/or spend (an) hour(s) running Google searches in order to figure out how to actually install the program. I'm too old and stupid for that. At least on the scale required.
Then there is that dependency thing....
Don't get me wrong. It's better than Windows. But perfect it is not.
***I have a related question. How do they know that Eastern Laurentia had crinkle cut coastlines like Canada? Weren't they formed by glacial activity? How does that happen at the equator?***
As others have pointed out, the maps tend to be drawn with modern features in place to help with orientation and recognition. In point of fact, the East Coast of Laurentia probably didn't exist until 600-700 million years ago (evidence about the exact date is a bit contradictory) when one of the fractures in Rodinia separated Laurentia from Gondwanaland by opening up an ocean called the Iapetus Sea. The Iapetus subsequently closed in a complicated series of events starting about 460 million years ago and then opened up again on a sort of parallel line in the Triassic forming the modern Atlantic. We (think) we know where the East coast of Laurentia was because there is a quite distinctive geologic boundary called Emmon's (Logan's) Line that can be traced from Newfoundland to Georgia where Iapetus sea sediments were pushed up into/onto Laurentia as the Iapetus Sea closed. There are a couple of zigs and zags in Emmons line -- one NW of New York city and one SE of Montreal -- but mostly it follows the course of the Appalachian mountains and lies a bit West of the Easternmost range of the mountains.
***So if you're an expert taking extraordinary measures, it's _possible_ to make Windows work properly.***
Probably not.
But I have to admit, that my old P166 with a fully patched Windows 95 ran quite well. If it had been possible to add USB support, I'd probably still be using it.
Guess I'm a victim of Windows burnout. I started out in 1995 genuinely liking Windows. But a decade of trying to keep that house of cards propped up and running on a hundred or so PCs soured me pretty thouroughly. I'm not wild about Linux, but I can live with it. And it is improving albeit not as quickly as I'd like. OTOH, I detest each new version of Windows more than the last. How can people possibly subject themselves to that thing? Do they spend their spare time -- assuming that they have any -- pounding thumbtacks into their foreheads?
***For the rest of us, the reboot/reinstall cycle is simpler.***
If you had told us in 1968 that in 2008, computer software would work so badly that periodic reinstalls would be a normal maintenance procedure, we'd have laughed at you. Silly us.
***If I spilled 1 gallon of H2 vs 1 gallon of gasoline I'd be a whole lot less careful. The H2 would be gone in an outdoor setting (or with an open garage) in a matter of seconds.***
Hydrogen in a garage is going to behave very much like natural gas (but without the mercaptans that give gas its odor). At least short term. It's going to rise and concentrate under the roof. Except that the range of explosive concentrations looks to be much broader for Hydrogen than for Natural Gas. Going to lose a few garages I fear should home Hydrogen refueling stations become practical.
The movies notwithstanding, accidentally igniting gasoline is not especially easy. That's why most automobile crashes -- even those that compromise the fuel system -- do not result in fires.
OK. Microsoft has once again put a bunch of users off the air -- tying up the clever and the lucky for a few minutes, and probably crippling many users for days. Not the first time. Won't be the last.
And what do Slashdot readers have to say? In about equal numbers:
Blame Microsoft
Blame the "Application"
That old favorite -- Blame the user.
OK geniuses. What, realistically, is the industry supposed to do in order to stop doing this sort of thing?
I don't know what the answer is. If I did, I'd be lining up staffing, capital, etc. But I'm 100% sure that it is not:
I can't imagine that you'll get down this far in the hundreds of replies, but I'd say for young readers:
Terry Prachett
Heinlein's juveniles
James Schmitz
Arthur C Clark
The first three or four Harry Potter books
Maybe The Hobbit. (But not LOTR which is waaaayyy too long)
And maybe if you come across a copy, the best Science Fiction novel no one has ever heard of -- Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee"
And I'd also start looking for suitable main stream fiction. By the time those kids go off to school you want them to know who Austen, Solzhenitsyn, Faulkner, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Swift, Voltaire et al are and to have read some of them. If you never give them anything but Science Fiction and Fantasy, their education will be left to schools -- which, for reasons that elude me -- tend to teach books that are guaranteed to turn anyone off of reading.
***Taking a boat across the Atlantic or Pacific is right out; even when there was still regular passenger service, it took more than a month to cross the Atlantic.***
Perhaps a little research? I believe that they quit booking passengers on HMS Mayflower sometime around 1620.
***Whoever said that never traveled through the midwest or the great plains. Or across an ocean.***
Maybe they didn't, but I have. The big liners took 5-6 days or so to cross the Atlantic. (The QE2 took 4days 16hrs on its maiden journey). Trains across the US take less (The SuperChief travelled between LA and Chicago in less than two days). My last cross country air trip took three days and was a hell of a lot less fun than either ship or rail. I'm not against air travel for long trips, but I think you overvalue your time and don't really appreciate how much misery you are voluntarily subjecting yourself to. Not that there's anything wrong with masochism you understand, but wouldn't hammering nails into your hand be faster and cheaper if all you want is a good dose of pain?
The problem with the US NCLB isn't necessarily too much focus on the worst students. It's the fact that the system is focused around a series of standardized tests and the assumption that every subgroup in a school can and should improve their performance on those tests every year. In practice of course, some years, every school is blessed with subgroups that are -- by chance -- singularly incapable in math or some other area. But the school still is expected to show improvement over the scores the previous year when the analogous subgroup included two future Noble prize winners and an idiot savant who computes the square root of 16 digit numbers in his head. The system is, of course, an utter disaster. And our politicians don't understand why. They are pretty sure that it is somehow the fault of the schools.
Thanks for posting that. I know zero about Chinese culture, a bit about Japan. Any chance that the Chinese are simply making fun of us? The Japanese probably wouldn't do that (at least not in English and not before belting down a few drinks.) But the Chinese. I'm not sure they dislike us, but I doubt they respect us.
***I'd estimate that MAYBE one in 10,000 SUV owners have EVER used their vehicle under the off-road conditions for which it was originally designed. And even then 99% of the time they're back home shuffling kids to soccer and groceries from the store.***
That's perhaps a bit harsh, but these discussions always take me back to a moment many years ago when I was driving into San Diego on I-405. Over in the more lefterly lanes there is a cluster of five -- count them, five -- shiny urban assault vehicles that obviously have never seen an unpaved road ever. And in their midst is a battered, dust covered pickup truck with bald tires, a busted tail gate, a bale of hay on the bed and two guys with cowboy hats and faded shirts cruising along with the windows open -- presumably because the truck either has no air conditioning or it has been busted for a decade. What's wrong with this picture?
There are, one supposes, a few cases where the advantages of an SUV overcome their lousy handling, high center of gravity, awful fuel consumption, and the fact that vehicle size seems to be inversely correlated with driver intelligence -- at least when it comes to personal transportation.
Fine. Really.
The world should have maybe a fifty year supply of these vehicles if we count the ones currently on the road, in the showrooms, and in the manufacturing pipeline. Would it not make more sense to treat them as a resource to be conserved rather than a liability to be lived with? What I'm suggesting is that manufacturers quit making them and shut down the production lines in an orderly fashion. The ones actually on the road that aren't being used in an application where they make sense be bought at a fair price. The vehicles themselves be mothballed, stored someplace in the Mojave or Sahara and gradually be released to market over many decades.
That won't happen of course because the human race is far to silly, stupid, arrogant and poorly led to pull it off. But it seems worth thinking about why it won't happen or even considered as a desirable option.
I think that WinFS is probably off the list permanently. There was never a lot of information on it that I could find. But it wasn't -- except for one brief period in 2005 or so -- touted as a file system as we usually think of a file system (e.g. ext3 or NTFS). Instead, it seems to have been replacing heiarchial file system search and select with metadata search and select.
Not a bad idea with desktop system file counts in the hundreds of thousands. A better file search would be a good thing, I think. I, and most everyone else spends entirely too much time trying to find files.... If it had worked. My guess is that it didn't. And I'd further guess that's because the metadata (what kind of file, content, etc) proved to be too meager, erratic, and hard to work with for ordinary users.
If anyone actually knows, I'd like to hear about it. And so, I suspect, would others.
I don't think that any Unshielded Twisted Pair Ethernet will go 500m. At least not per spec. Losses, time delays, crosstalk or some combination thereof will probably cause trouble. Conceptually, you could put a few switches (repeaters) in the line and power them either via one of the power over ethernet technologies or a separate power line. I suspect a setup like that would be ugly to work with and failure prone. And I wouldn't wish an ethernet link that isn't working right on anyone.
I think that thicknet (10base5) ethernet will go 500m. Lord knows where one would find Thicknet gear nowdays. And of course, it's on 10Mbps, but that's a hell of a lot faster than a phone line (in fact, it's several times faster that a T1 line).
If there is line of sight, I think I'd go with wireless and directional antennae. You can get that going with the two ends of the link on the same table. Then you walk away with one end of the link and hope you can get to your cable access point before distance or whatever kills the link. At least that way, you know that both ends of the link are configured properly.
***Holy scary cow. What do people think we did before dDase, Oracle, Access, etc for small localized non-relational data storage?***
As I recall, they did real work. But struggling with relational data bases and idiosyncratic GUI tools is much more fun apparently. (Access? Excel? Have these people ever actually tried to use them to handle a small database?). I'd rather have a root canal without anesthetic than use Access for a small job. Excel is loaded with whacky "features" that will lie in wait and trash your database unexpectedly. My favorite was a user who tried to cut and paste a ZIP code field only to find that Excel had thoughtfully incremented each and every ZIP code that was the same as the row above it by one... starting from the bottom of the paste area. i.e a bunch of 05452 fields now read 05452, 05453, 05454.... There are some posts earlier in the thread about the bizarre transformation that Excel may inflict on CSV file fields.
In fact there were some decent flat database tools in MSDOS that were straightforward and effective for data bases of small to moderate size -- up to a few thousand entries. Regretably, It's been too long and I no longer remember the names.
Slashdot Mirror
***Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is doubting even in the slightest that Saddam did this :***
Not so actually. Do a little research and you will find that the attack at Halabja was originally blamed on the US's enemy d'jour -- Iran. It was not refocused on Iraq until America's great and noble ally Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, an action that caused him to morph into "The Beast of Baghdad".
Most people who have looked at the issue are pretty sure that Saddam Hussein was responsible, but it is by no means the open and shut case that you present.
***
"Saddam had no WMD's"
It's funny, and hypocritical in the extreme how everybody keeps claiming that.***
Get a grip man. The fact that Iraq had WMDs in the early 1990s does not prove that it had them in 2003. In fact, it said it did not. International inspectors with pretty much unrestricted access to Iraqi facilities found none. And US investigators after the invasion found only a handful of chemical tipped artillery rounds of an obsolete type that Iraqi sources with no particular reason to lie said had been collected and destroyed prior to the 1991 Gulf War. If you've ever served in the military or worked for a large company, it'll be pretty clear to you how a few old artillery shells could have survived.
In point of fact, had Iraq had WMDs, it would surely have used them against US troops in 2003 -- probably with devastating affect.
People have been running PC electronics submerged in mineral oil for decades.
Advantages:
1. Not too hard to do
2. If push comes to shove, you can can probably burn the PC in your fireplace or other suitable container to keep warm. Or just because you are pissed at it.
Problems:
1. It's messy.
2. The oil tends to creep up any wires to the outside world (capillary action?) and eventually show up at the other end.
3. I'm not sure if non-gas tight connectors are used in modern PCs, but if they are, they may be a problem.
4. It's messy.
Did I mention that it is messy?
***Agreed. Great message. Terrible video.***
Linux (Konqueror anyway) has once again saved me apparently. Got the audio, but no video. But sometimes I like ... want ... the damn pictures. I get the message that voting for McCain means more of the same. Can't say that I want that. Will voting for Obama somehow lead me toward that great technological wonderland where technology actually works right all the time?
In any case, let me point out that McCain was the force behind the #$@(*&( Children's Internet Protection Act -- which pretty much forced tens of thousands of schools to install expensive, ineffective, idiosyncratic, and often buggy content filters. I'm sure he meant well. But he still screwed up. With better staff, and more administrative skills on his part, CIPA might not have happened or have been less of a mess. The guy -- like Bush -- is not a manager. We should limit his opportunities to make future mistakes by not putting him in charge of the US ... or anything else.
***as opposed to twisted pair***
Not being snarky, just curious if you meant 300 ohm twin lead? I've never encountered the use of Unshielded Twisted Pair for TV although it might work just fine.
In the real world a lot of rural and suburban dwellers take their own trash to the landfill. Many solid waste districts set aside usable gear of all sorts -- TVs, monitors, athletic equipment, books, to be picked up by anyone who wants it. It's called "Recycling".
***You have to realize that $400 will get you a very good used laptop or a reasonable new desktop and free software does everything you want to do.***
In the US, Walmart will be happy to sell you a fully functional Linux based Desktop PC for $200 USD plus a few bucks for shipping. It doesn't have quite enough horsepower to run Windows Vista and the Linux gOS is kind of reminiscent of the original release of Windows 95 (i.e. really buggy). But with a decent Linux distribution installed, it works fine. You will need a monitor -- maybe $15 at your local thrift shop. Possibly free at the landfill.
It's also cheap to run as the 1.5GHz VIA C7-D Processor pulls only 20W under full load.
***Osama should be pleased...***
Why would he care? He may not have the resources that the CIA does, but he is not without money, influence, or friends. I imagine that he can get a perfectly legitimate passport in any name he chooses from any of about 40 countries.
You sound like you actually know something about COBOL. I'm in no way shape or form a COBOL programmer. but a few times over the decades, I had occasion to look at some COBOL program or other in order to resolve some issue or other with code that it interfaced with.
May I ask a question? I can think of a whole lot of things to dislike about COBOL, but readability isn't one of them. On the whole, my impression is that it one of the easiest, if not the easiest, major computer language to follow. We're not talking write only stuff like APL, FORTH, Intel assembler language (if that mess of garbage deserves to be called a language), or even cryptic C, C++, or Java (there's another kind?).
How hard can it be for a reasonably intelligent team to plow through the code, find the section(s) that do the payroll calculations, force fit the results to $6.55 an hour, print a check and write a journal file so that the state can spend the next six months frantically trying to fix their applications in order to have the right numbers for W-2s in January?
Messy? you bet. But if lives depended on the outcome, I'll bet that mostly correct paychecks could be in the mail within a week or two.
People who like their stuff to work the same way all the time. Not all of us think that a Red Queens Race (run as fast as you can to stay in the same place) is a particularly satisfactory way to live. In point of fact, while Windows 9 is not terribly secure, the real Microsoft Security disaster was NT based Windows with a gazillion insecure services running by default. The risk of getting zapped by a bad update in XT-Vista is probably higher than that of a Windows 9 PC behind an NAT router being infected with malware.
I finally switched to largely to Linux when it became usable and the list of things I wanted to do that I couldn't on Windows 9 started to grow. But I have to tell you that I do NOT think that Linux will prove to be as secure as folks think. It's the same architecture that didn't/doesn't work in NT based Windows and is IMHO protected from malware more by its meager market share than by its superb software. I hope I'm wrong. But I'd bet that I'm not.
That's silly. If MSDOS/Freedos will do the job, why the hell would it be too old to consider? It's far more stable than later MS OSes and will boot nearly instantaneously. Moreover, it is the only PC OS that is almost simple enough to understand. A fair variety of software is available that will run under MSDOS with a DOS extender to provide access to memory above 1MB.
Next choice would be Windows 95 with all two dozen service packs. Or OSR2. It will boot faster than Windows 98 (Less crap) and will support a suprising amount of Windows software. I'm not entirely sure why, but enabling MSDOS disk caching will speed up Windows 95 boot by 10% or so.
It may be necessary to spend time tuning the BIOS, and maybe even reconfiguring IDE hard drives and CDROM drives. Some older BIOSes can take a loooooooong time -- like 30 seconds plus -- dealing with pathological IDE configurations.
Or Linux. I don't know if Slackware still has SlackZIP, but it's specifically intended to boot from MSDOS/Windows 9 environments -- which means that you can set it up to run as desired while still having a functioning OS, then replace the bootloader to boot directly to Linux.
One caution. Unless the operation has a generous people budget and no hardware budget or is going to deploy dozens of identical boxes, it is almost always going to be more cost effective to buy a prebuilt appliance than to roll your own.
I don't think DRM is an issue. I suspect that the problem you're having is due to HD Radio being a new technology. There is a fairly widely used analog technology called Subsidiary Carrier Audio that is used to transmit background music and similar stuff over FM stations piggybacked on the primary signal. The background music in your local supermarket is probably SCA. Since stations presumably can't do both SCA and HD Radio, the number of stations that can actually deploy HD Radio is limited. Not too many stations means not too much HD Radio equipment. OTOH, maybe HD Radio will catch on. I'm told that HD Radio fidelity is nothing to write home about, so maybe simply feeding your radio's speaker output into the microphone input to your sound card will work until more diverse HD radio equipment becomes available.
So could I.
If it always worked. What caused me to give up on Slackware and switch to (yechh) Ubuntu was the relatively small number of applications available preconfigured for Slack. Maybe I just had a run of rotten luck, but it seemed to me that about 40% of the applications I attempted to ./configure, make, make install wouldn't install. Entirely too often I had to find and decode a README file, and/or decode the make files(), and/or spend (an) hour(s) running Google searches in order to figure out how to actually install the program. I'm too old and stupid for that. At least on the scale required.
Then there is that dependency thing ....
Don't get me wrong. It's better than Windows. But perfect it is not.
As others have pointed out, the maps tend to be drawn with modern features in place to help with orientation and recognition. In point of fact, the East Coast of Laurentia probably didn't exist until 600-700 million years ago (evidence about the exact date is a bit contradictory) when one of the fractures in Rodinia separated Laurentia from Gondwanaland by opening up an ocean called the Iapetus Sea. The Iapetus subsequently closed in a complicated series of events starting about 460 million years ago and then opened up again on a sort of parallel line in the Triassic forming the modern Atlantic. We (think) we know where the East coast of Laurentia was because there is a quite distinctive geologic boundary called Emmon's (Logan's) Line that can be traced from Newfoundland to Georgia where Iapetus sea sediments were pushed up into/onto Laurentia as the Iapetus Sea closed. There are a couple of zigs and zags in Emmons line -- one NW of New York city and one SE of Montreal -- but mostly it follows the course of the Appalachian mountains and lies a bit West of the Easternmost range of the mountains.
Probably not.
But I have to admit, that my old P166 with a fully patched Windows 95 ran quite well. If it had been possible to add USB support, I'd probably still be using it.
Guess I'm a victim of Windows burnout. I started out in 1995 genuinely liking Windows. But a decade of trying to keep that house of cards propped up and running on a hundred or so PCs soured me pretty thouroughly. I'm not wild about Linux, but I can live with it. And it is improving albeit not as quickly as I'd like. OTOH, I detest each new version of Windows more than the last. How can people possibly subject themselves to that thing? Do they spend their spare time -- assuming that they have any -- pounding thumbtacks into their foreheads?
***For the rest of us, the reboot/reinstall cycle is simpler.***
If you had told us in 1968 that in 2008, computer software would work so badly that periodic reinstalls would be a normal maintenance procedure, we'd have laughed at you. Silly us.
Hydrogen in a garage is going to behave very much like natural gas (but without the mercaptans that give gas its odor). At least short term. It's going to rise and concentrate under the roof. Except that the range of explosive concentrations looks to be much broader for Hydrogen than for Natural Gas. Going to lose a few garages I fear should home Hydrogen refueling stations become practical. The movies notwithstanding, accidentally igniting gasoline is not especially easy. That's why most automobile crashes -- even those that compromise the fuel system -- do not result in fires.
And what do Slashdot readers have to say? In about equal numbers:
OK geniuses. What, realistically, is the industry supposed to do in order to stop doing this sort of thing?
I don't know what the answer is. If I did, I'd be lining up staffing, capital, etc. But I'm 100% sure that it is not:
Terry Prachett
Heinlein's juveniles
James Schmitz
Arthur C Clark
The first three or four Harry Potter books
Maybe The Hobbit. (But not LOTR which is waaaayyy too long)
And maybe if you come across a copy, the best Science Fiction novel no one has ever heard of -- Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee"
And I'd also start looking for suitable main stream fiction. By the time those kids go off to school you want them to know who Austen, Solzhenitsyn, Faulkner, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Swift, Voltaire et al are and to have read some of them. If you never give them anything but Science Fiction and Fantasy, their education will be left to schools -- which, for reasons that elude me -- tend to teach books that are guaranteed to turn anyone off of reading.
***Taking a boat across the Atlantic or Pacific is right out; even when there was still regular passenger service, it took more than a month to cross the Atlantic.***
Perhaps a little research? I believe that they quit booking passengers on HMS Mayflower sometime around 1620.
***Whoever said that never traveled through the midwest or the great plains. Or across an ocean.***
Maybe they didn't, but I have. The big liners took 5-6 days or so to cross the Atlantic. (The QE2 took 4days 16hrs on its maiden journey). Trains across the US take less (The SuperChief travelled between LA and Chicago in less than two days). My last cross country air trip took three days and was a hell of a lot less fun than either ship or rail. I'm not against air travel for long trips, but I think you overvalue your time and don't really appreciate how much misery you are voluntarily subjecting yourself to. Not that there's anything wrong with masochism you understand, but wouldn't hammering nails into your hand be faster and cheaper if all you want is a good dose of pain?
The problem with the US NCLB isn't necessarily too much focus on the worst students. It's the fact that the system is focused around a series of standardized tests and the assumption that every subgroup in a school can and should improve their performance on those tests every year. In practice of course, some years, every school is blessed with subgroups that are -- by chance -- singularly incapable in math or some other area. But the school still is expected to show improvement over the scores the previous year when the analogous subgroup included two future Noble prize winners and an idiot savant who computes the square root of 16 digit numbers in his head. The system is, of course, an utter disaster. And our politicians don't understand why. They are pretty sure that it is somehow the fault of the schools.
Thanks for posting that. I know zero about Chinese culture, a bit about Japan. Any chance that the Chinese are simply making fun of us? The Japanese probably wouldn't do that (at least not in English and not before belting down a few drinks.) But the Chinese. I'm not sure they dislike us, but I doubt they respect us.
That's perhaps a bit harsh, but these discussions always take me back to a moment many years ago when I was driving into San Diego on I-405. Over in the more lefterly lanes there is a cluster of five -- count them, five -- shiny urban assault vehicles that obviously have never seen an unpaved road ever. And in their midst is a battered, dust covered pickup truck with bald tires, a busted tail gate, a bale of hay on the bed and two guys with cowboy hats and faded shirts cruising along with the windows open -- presumably because the truck either has no air conditioning or it has been busted for a decade. What's wrong with this picture?
Fine. Really.
The world should have maybe a fifty year supply of these vehicles if we count the ones currently on the road, in the showrooms, and in the manufacturing pipeline. Would it not make more sense to treat them as a resource to be conserved rather than a liability to be lived with? What I'm suggesting is that manufacturers quit making them and shut down the production lines in an orderly fashion. The ones actually on the road that aren't being used in an application where they make sense be bought at a fair price. The vehicles themselves be mothballed, stored someplace in the Mojave or Sahara and gradually be released to market over many decades.
That won't happen of course because the human race is far to silly, stupid, arrogant and poorly led to pull it off. But it seems worth thinking about why it won't happen or even considered as a desirable option.
I think that WinFS is probably off the list permanently. There was never a lot of information on it that I could find. But it wasn't -- except for one brief period in 2005 or so -- touted as a file system as we usually think of a file system (e.g. ext3 or NTFS). Instead, it seems to have been replacing heiarchial file system search and select with metadata search and select.
... If it had worked. My guess is that it didn't. And I'd further guess that's because the metadata (what kind of file, content, etc) proved to be too meager, erratic, and hard to work with for ordinary users.
Not a bad idea with desktop system file counts in the hundreds of thousands. A better file search would be a good thing, I think. I, and most everyone else spends entirely too much time trying to find files.
If anyone actually knows, I'd like to hear about it. And so, I suspect, would others.
I think that thicknet (10base5) ethernet will go 500m. Lord knows where one would find Thicknet gear nowdays. And of course, it's on 10Mbps, but that's a hell of a lot faster than a phone line (in fact, it's several times faster that a T1 line).
If there is line of sight, I think I'd go with wireless and directional antennae. You can get that going with the two ends of the link on the same table. Then you walk away with one end of the link and hope you can get to your cable access point before distance or whatever kills the link. At least that way, you know that both ends of the link are configured properly.
***Holy scary cow. What do people think we did before dDase, Oracle, Access, etc for small localized non-relational data storage?***
As I recall, they did real work. But struggling with relational data bases and idiosyncratic GUI tools is much more fun apparently. (Access? Excel? Have these people ever actually tried to use them to handle a small database?). I'd rather have a root canal without anesthetic than use Access for a small job. Excel is loaded with whacky "features" that will lie in wait and trash your database unexpectedly. My favorite was a user who tried to cut and paste a ZIP code field only to find that Excel had thoughtfully incremented each and every ZIP code that was the same as the row above it by one ... starting from the bottom of the paste area. i.e a bunch of 05452 fields now read 05452, 05453, 05454 .... There are some posts earlier in the thread about the bizarre transformation that Excel may inflict on CSV file fields.
In fact there were some decent flat database tools in MSDOS that were straightforward and effective for data bases of small to moderate size -- up to a few thousand entries. Regretably, It's been too long and I no longer remember the names.