Gee, that'd have most of the parts I'd need to build a propane-burning pipe organ, like the one that used to be at the now-defunct lhpo.com.
(search "large hot pipe organ" for some sites mentioning it)
The Voices keep sending images of Vincent Price in "The Abominable Dr. Phibes", where he was playing the pipe organ, except with the organ shooting columns of fire. Sometimes they send the five-note riff from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
On the one manipulator,
A) I don't have any place to put such a thing
B) I don't have any time to work on any new projects
C) I can't play the organ anyway
On the other manipulator,
A) it would be cool
B) it would be way cool
C) it would be way, way cool...
Anyway, most of those places have gone away now, leaving us with a CompUSA and a Best Buy. Best Buy is right out, due to some problems I'll describe another time. So I drove down to CompUseless, 30-odd miles away. My shopping list read:
- cheap ATI dual-head video board - USB 2.0 adapter card - 3.5" floppy disk cleanerSo I get there, wander the aisles... and though I'd bought an ATI dual-head board for $55 a few months ago, they now have no low-end boards at all, single or dual head. The cheapest video board on the shelves was $165. Um, no.
Next, USB adapter. The motherboard in my machine is USB 1, and almost all of my stuff is USB 2.0, and almost all of it is 2.0 only; not backward compatible. Just a few weeks ago I'd seen some PCI to USB paddle cards in the $35 range, which I was thinking was a bit on the expensive side. But since I'll be keeping the computer for general scutwork use when I eventually upgrade, I figured it made sense for it to be able to see my printer, my camera, and my MP3 player, all of which it's blind to at the moment. I've been using the laptop to deal with those. Anyway, no USB adapters, PCI or otherwise.
Over to the floppy drive area, then over to the floppy disk area, which are on opposite sides of the store, of course. They had some CD cleaners, but no floppy cleaners.
Once again, CompUselesss racks up a 100% zero score...
> > What matters is how they perform when under stress, most civilians just go > > thur just the basic *gun handling* type course. The tactical training > > classes, can make a huge difference in how people react under fire.Some years ago I took a combat pistol course. Most people in the class were using revolvers. The instructor made a point of making people dump their used brass on the ground and reload from whatever position they were in when they fired their last shot.
He said in the years he'd been a cop, he'd observed that people under stress tend to do as they're trained. Which is the point of training, after all. He related a couple of personal anecdotes as illustrations:
1) officer ejects his empties during an exchange of fire, looks around blankly for several seconds, then awkwardly puts the used brass in his pocket.
training: the range had a coffee can at each lane, and officers were required to put their used brass in it for reloading.
2) officer ejects his used brass, than *stands up* to reload
training: he'd been drilled on the procedure for swinging out the cylinder and handling the speed loader, but only from a standing position.
This all goes back to the "lizard brain" thing. Training programs the lizard, but while the lizard is very fast, it's dumber than a Democrat. If you train something stupid, you'll *do* something stupid.
The old Leatherman is downright petite compared to some of the monster multifunction knives I've seen.
I don't carry it on my belt. Though I can buy a permit to legally carry a .454 Casull or a full-auto submachine gun, the 2.75" knife blade is too deadly to be allowed within the city limits of the city of Jacksonville, which has a 2.5" blade law. No licenses, permits, exceptions, tolerance, or brains.
"This here's a MAC-11 submachine pistol with the extended magazine. I don't remember if I fired 49 shots... or 50. But tell me, punk. Do you feel lucky?"
The first time I saw a Leatherman I was astonished that the "default" configuration when you unfolded it was pliers. The knife blade was just one of the multifunction bits. But I admit to some jealousy when I saw a Smith & Wesson tool whose default was "vise grip."
> > I keep my Leatherman Wave on my "manpurse" (big old ass > > pack). I've gotten the hairy eyeball a few times as a result. > > I now put it in my pocket when I go anywhere people are likely > > to get paranoid about "weapons," like a concert or basketball > > game.I have one of the original Leatherman tools that my brother gave me. I used to carry it until the "no tolerance policy" jerkwads made it more hassle than it was worth. Now it stays in my computer toolkit. AB bought me a micro-Leatherman knockoff; maybe one by two inches, same tools, only smaller. It fits perfectly in my watch pocket, which is great, because I don't like heavy stuff flapping around in my pants pockets. I've been jacked up for the thing twice by the Metal Detector Gestapo, though. The only blade is 1" long.
At the City and County Court Building in LR, they'll even confiscate fingernail clippers. F'ing bozos...
> > As it is, the Leatherman was too expensive but all the > > doohickeys are really functional and I have gotten a lot > > of use out of it. Every day, as a matter of fact.The original Leatherman I have is *small* compared to most of the modern interpretations of the design. Some of the others have swelled up so large they're too awkward to carry, which defeats the whole Leatherman thing - it may not be the best tool, but it's always *there*.
> > My only complaint is that it only has a #1 Philips > > head, but 4 bladed driver heads. I could really use > > a #2.The Philips isn't quite a #1 on mine. One reason I hate what my Dad calls "crosspoint" screws - there are so many different kinds to choose from. (sigh) I have a cheap yellow-handled screwdriver that came with my Mutoh track drafting machine many years ago. It is, I believe, what the Japanese call a "purasu" pattern, which I'm sure is "plus" when mangled into Japanese. I keep it out of the way in a drawer, and when nothing else will work, there's a good chance the cheap Mutoh screwdriver will do the job.
Flathead screws just aren't that common; I'd gladly trade a few for different types of "crosspoints", or even whatever the particular Torx size is that Compaq loves so much. But I suspect we get so many flathead blades because they're cheap to make and easy to package.
> > I got a 2xAAA Maglite along with mine, and I use it > > a lot more than I thought I would. It has become my > > primary flashlight, mainly because it is always there.My AAAA LED pencil light stays in my pocket next to my pen and tire gauge for the same reason. I use the thing every day, working on something. And it still has the same batteries it did when I got it.
The grinder has a three-phase motor for the wheel, a single-phase motor for the crankhead, and I'm not sure what the coolant pump is, but I think it's single phase. Half of the wiring hangs loosely behind the machine, and the rest goes through cast iron water pipes, and looks like it will be a MF to work with.
The machine was wired directly to a breaker panel before. While disconnecting it, I noticed the 20-odd-foot long main power cable didn't look so hot; the insulation was crumbly. I pulled off the covers of some of the access panels and *all* of the insulation is crumbly. Yeah, well, it's probably sixty years old. No problem, I'll just replace the wires before I move it into its permanent place.
Wrong.
The Ace Hardware store no longer carries wire at all. Well, they have some house wire in big spools out in the yard, but nothing else. The Sutherlands store, which used to have all kinds of stranded wire with one to four conductors, has ZERO stranded wire now; I've bought a lot over the years, for projects and extension cords. No more. I finally broke down and went to Lowe's, which had two almost-empty spools up on a top shelf. I got a "sales associate" to cut off four feet of 12/3 and four feet of 14/3. Eight bucks. Criminy... I needed some countersunk machine screws for a mill fixture this morning, and came up with zero for that, too.
Welcome to DaveWorld...
When the Ambassador showed up for each meeting, Hull, having read his instructions already, was either hostile or contemptuous during the meeting, and often had his reply already written out. Apparently the Ambassador never wondered how that came about... Hull was a poor negotiator anyway; every time the Japanese cabinet wired the Ambassador that terms were acceptable, Hull would add new demands. And finally, it all fell apart. Even with having all the Japanese diplomatic communications spread out in plain view wasn't enough to overcome the fact that Hull was a total asshole.
Toland's book puts much of the blame for starting the war on Hull, and Hull certainly had a lot to do with kicking the anthill over. But the Japanese had been preparing for the war since the late 1920s. Bill Mitchell went on a military tour of Japan and saw they weren't bothering to hide their preparations; Mitchell was court-martialed for going on the lecture circuit and trying to warn people after the Army and administration turned deaf ears to him. "Conduct unbecoming an officer" to disagree with the official policy of the US Government, which was to stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing was going to happen.
"The Chronicles of Riddick"
[sigh]
The camera work was razor-sharp. The angles were mostly steady, though there was some really crappy digital stutter work during a couple of fight scenes. The special effects were impressive as hell, though there were the usual problems with conservation of momentum.
The plot, on the other hand, was almost as ridiculous as "The Matrix", and the names... the bad guys are thanatic "Necromongers" from "Planet Crematoria." Give me a break while I ralph, here. Most of the backstory isn't filled in until quite late in the show, leaving you to guess what's going on. The entire sequence of events is... strange. I suspect it was laid out more with an eye to design of special effects than for plot. All the characters, including Diesel's, were empty cardboard cutouts. There was plenty of flash, but nothing to involve the viewer.
It wasn't a waste of time, but like so many others, it couldda been a contenda. All that money, and so little to show for it...
"Cypher"
This one reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock's earlier stuff. Large corporations brainwashing each others' employees to turn them into corporate spies. A bit slow in spots, but okay.
"And Now For Something Completely Different"
Antique Monty Python stuff, but I'd never seen the movie. I didn't realize there was more than one variant of "Dead Parrot Sketch." 1970s British humor, and rather short.
"Revenge of the Sith"
Lileks was right. They really *do* sound like they're reading cue cards. More expensive special effects. But... I had a hard time getting a handle on the movie. It's either a comedy, or a spoof on Star Wars, or something I don't quite understand; slapstick humor a'la Three Stooges doesn't seem to blend well with giant space battles. The poorly-animated robots reminded me of the marionettes in Disney's "The Black Hole." Considering how smooth the rest of the animation was, the jerky robot stuff was probably deliberate... but why?
What was it about? I don't even remember. It couldn't get into it far enough to care.
DaveWorld: out of tune with fashion...
And Motorola is something else, now... I can't remember what. Strangely, I'm finding it very hard to remember crap like that.
Somewhere, there are marketing execs thinking of tens of millions spent on brand recognition, pissed away by a stroke the pen. And they're getting into their bathtubs with nice new razor blades.
> Extra points when they request additional napkins.I *always* request additional napkins...
I was leaving one of the local Chinese places the other day, and a waitress pointed out that I had something on my shirt. I told her I was making a fashion statement. I could see her running it back into Chinese and chewing on it for a second before she got it...
The new Chinese restaurant is heavily staffed with ethnic Chinese, mostly teens to mid 20s, who are still coming to grips with the English language. Some day I'll corner one and ask where they're from.
The food is somewhat below average, tending toward underspiced and overcooked. The place is *jammed* at lunch and evenings, and I'm pretty sure I know why. It's brightly lit, there are no radios or TVs, and the tables are spaced far enough apart you don't feel like you're wedged in a can of Vienna sausage. I go there sometimes on my once-a-week non-TV-dinner lunch, because it's quiet, bright enough to read comfortably, and I don't have people spilling onion soup down my neck as they try to wedge between tables. Pretty radical stuff, for a local restaurant.
Check this out: The damned water company screwed up my billing and turned my water off. I'm living back in the stone age out here. Granted, it's a stone age populated with electronics and various other forms of information technology, but the times they are a-changin'.There's a certain panache to sitting in a dark outhouse while wirelessly smurfing the Web.
I always wondered what happens to those fancy electric/compressed air toilets when the power goes off. Probably the same as the septic systems with the macerator pump - you're just out of luck until the electricity comes back on.
Putting something as vital as defecation into the claws of *two* utility monopolies seems unwise, somehow.
Which is a good link to a couple of delicate fabrications curently leaving the Solar System (Voyagers, obviously) and quite a lot of instrumentation and other oddities scattered about the Moon and Mars. I think you have to accept that achieving this demonstrated a certain style....?I saw the Apollo lander touch down on TV, broadcast live via satellite.
Then NASA threw up its hands, abandoned the permanent space station and the Mars program, and diverted most of its funds to maintaining its own bloated bureaucracy. The space program is close enough to dead so as not to matter.
When the far probes were launched, everyone expected we'd be following along not far behind, tearing up the scenery and abandoning our used landers and candy bar wrappers. Instead, NASA now concerns itself with ecology and ozone science. NASA's web sites are almost enough to make you cry; exactly how did their mission change to the study of South American tree frogs?
The far probes came to represent, not the beginning of something great, but the end of it.
NASA has the money, but the percentage going to hardware is in the single digits, and most of that is wasted.
I share your despair at the abandonment of space, if not to escape the "sullen bonds of earth" then what is the mission of humanity? Oh, obviously not to destroy the planet, but then?Yeah, but who gets to see space junk? At least you can drive out to Filton and watch a Concorde slowly reverting back to aluminum oxide.
The Gateway Arch and the Pyramid will doubtless be salvaged for their metal by future generations, who will probably attribute Rushmore and Crazy Horse to some obscure religious practice, which is what archeoanthropologists do for anything they don't understand, which, due to the nature of the field, is most things.
Heck, you couldn't even *start* carving something like Crazy Horse in the new Regulatory America. When Korczak Ziolkowski started the project in 1947, it was his mountain, his dynamite, and his jackhammer. Nowadays everyone from the EPA on down would have bureaucratic hysterics.
If we raise the money to build a hanger it may even outlast the railways...It would please me to no end to see Tranquility Base overrun with mouth-breathing morons with video cameras stuck to their heads, buying cheap Vietnamese and Pakistani souveneirs from tourist traps, and generally scattering trash and stupidity all over the place.
At http://rendell.server.org.uk/gol/tm.htm there is an interesting page: a guy named Paul Rendell has created a Turing machine. For those who don't know, a Turing machine is the simplest form of a general-purpose computer - essentially, it's a self-modifying list. Turing machines are so simple they're complicated to describe. They waste most of their time in overhead, but a Turing machine can be programmed to do anything a Von Neumann machine (like what you're probably reading this message on) will do.
Back in 1970, a guy named Conway invented a game called "Life." It was a set of simple rules governing the state of a cellular matrix; you might think of it as an incredibly primitive spreadsheet. The cells could be "alive" or "dead" depending on the condition of their neighbors. Conway found, iterating by hand, that certain starting patterns of cells would change shape, move across the matrix, or even split off chunks of themselves. Life jumpstarted the field now known as "cellular automata", a mathematical diversion with little practical application.
Rendell combined the two, and created a Turing machine that runs in a Life matrix. This is more amazing than it sounds; it is a computer whose elements are just a few simple rules governing the on/off state of cells in a matrix, plus the starting pattern. Yes, it's too small and simple to do anything useful, but extension consists simply of adding more cells.
I don't know why, but I got a huge kick out of Rendell's toy...
I had been slowly losing water for some time. I thought there was a leak under the motor somewhere; parking on grass made it hard to tell. It didn't vapor trail or get into the oil pan, so I'd been mostly ignoring it. But paranoia set in, and I got a plug wrench out from the shop and removed the plugs from the front two cylinders, the ones I welded the pressure tap bungs into. Turned the key... and got a bath as #1's angled plug hole doused my head and shoulders when the piston came up. I guess the cylinder was full.
[sigh] I went in and washed up, and went on to work. It's not a big job to fix it, but it was the first time all year I'd been able to take the thing to the track. Argh!
It was a movie. It had something to do with racing cars. I couldn't really tell much about it, because I had to keep my eyes averted since the camera was swinging, wobbling, stutter-cutting, bouncing up and down, and making weird little elliptical wobbles. All at once.
I couldn't tell much from the soundtrack, because at random intervals unrelated to people talking, the producers queued up some LOUD FRENCH HEADBANGER RAP. For variety, the LOUD FRENCH HEADBANGER RAP sound bites repeated on either five or ten second intervals, like a super long play LP with a scratch. I kept stabbing the mute button while frantically working the volume control.
After about fifteen minutes of sitting in front of a movie I could neither watch nor listen to, I went to the bedroom and closed the door. AB finished watching it. She said it made her seasick, but that was okay, because it sucked anyway.
I can imagine the movie's original theater premiere, with stunned patrons blinking owlishly as they stagger out of the dark theater, with puke on their shirts and shoes...
If you were trying to interrogate prisoners of war, this movie would be even better than the "tortured rabbits" sound loops and strobe lights. However, unless your idea of entertainment involves hammering splinters under your own fingernails, DO NOT watch this movie.
It's a nice song, simple music, nice vocals, but the lyrics that are positively surreal:
"I can't keep up with what's been going on. I think my heart must just be slowing down. Among the human beings in their designer jeans am I the only one who hears the screams and the strangled cries of lawyers in love? God sends his spaceships to America, the beautiful. They land at six o'clock and there we are, the dutiful. Eating from TV trays, tuned in to to Happy Days waiting for World War Three while Jesus slaves to the mating calls of lawyers in love. Last night I watched the news from Washington, the Capitol. The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will. Now we've got all this room, we've even got the Moon and I hear the U.S.S.R. will be open soon as vacation land for lawyers in love."I dunno, I've always liked that song for some reason...
I've never encountered a more self-serving, delusional, farcical piece of garbage, and that includes both Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and Dwight Eisenhower's "Crusade in Europe." It's one long spew of treason, infighting, lying, and backstabbing, presented through a thick veil of justification. Every time I put it down, I felt like taking a bath.
One point of interest - he describes an attempt by his revolutionary group to contact Rommel and make a deal to help them take Cairo, then a brief mention of a half-German, half-Egyptian spy and an exotic dancer who lived in a houseboat. The attempt at treason is well-documented; a bunch of people went to jail for it. The spy and the dancer are just sort of tossed in there, not really connected to anything. However, they were part of the plot of Ken Follett's "The Key to Rebecca", a novel that came out *before* Sadat's book; I just happened to read Follett's novel a few months ago. (not bad, either)
The incident may be real, and novelized by Follett... but so much else in Sadat's "autobiography" is false or delusional, I have my doubts.
Sounds like a case for... active mirror stabilization!
An accelerometer, a solenoid with a weight, and some processing power, and you could detect when the mirror started to shake, and apply a counterforce to oppose it.
I think of all this neat stuff I could do, if I could touch any electronic components without letting the magic smoke out...
Okay, that worked. On to take the "training." This is, of course, the last day it can be done. I type the URL into Konqueror, log in... and get a block of header graphics over a blank page.
Uh-oh.
Okay, fire up Firefox. Turn on Java, Javascript, pop-ups, and all the other advertising-enablers. Same thing.
I viewed the page source. It's full of Java, style sheets, and stuff I don't know about. I don't actually see any relevant text in there; perhaps it's one of those files it seems to want to grab from somewhere else. Anyway, it's seriously broken, or it's somehow Microsoft-Internet-Explorer-only. I didn't notice the usual FrontPage warning in the header, though.
The only machine I have with Windows on it is my old laptop. But it's at the office at the other job, and it doesn't have a network card, and I don't have a dialup account any more. No help there.
Soo, I spend a couple of hours trying to get IE installed into Wine, unsuccessfully. It's supposed to work... I'm sure I had IE3 going in Wine years ago... but maybe it's an IE6 problem. I've already written IE6 DLLs all over the place during the install, so I'm leery about trying to install IE3 over it.
Win4Lin quit working a couple of years ago, and their support moved to one of those hateful web forums, and they quit responding to email. So much for that.
Hey, maybe I could fire up QEMU and get a copy of Windows running there? Downloaded the current version, installed it painlessly, and it came right up. Stuck the 98SE disc in the drive and let it install. A few virtual reboots, and there was Windows. Clicked on IE, and it couldn't find the network. Spent another two hours jerking around with that - everything seemed to be set up correctly, at least according to the QEMU docs - and after spending a couple of hours on that, I decided to park that project.
Okay, there's a 4 gig FAT32 partition sitting empty, I'll just install a freaking copy of Windows on that. I stick the disc in the drive, reboot, and wait for it to grind. It reboots... and then the machine comes back with "Disk I/O Error" and a screen of "99 99 99 99 99..."
SHIT.
Windows barfed and did *SOMETHING* to the partition tables on *BOTH* hard disks. SuSE's recovery tool couldn't even write to the Master Boot Record on hda.
In all fairness I have to admit that's the first time the Windows installer has done that to me, and I've installed Windows on a bunch of machines over the years. But of course this particular problem would come up during a crunch like this. Of course.
I'll spare you the tedious details, but I finally got the system repaired and back up. The clock has now ticked off a bit over 7 hours since I first tried to log on to that damned web site. Far from making a few bucks, this mess has *cost* me a chunk of billable hours.
ARGH!
> > The 1918 bug killed between 30 to 40 million worldwide.World War I was a *big* war; even bigger than WW2. In 1914 there were still practicing physicians who didn't believe in germs, sanitation was almost nonexistent at the fronts, crop destruction had large percentages of the populations living with dietary deficiencies or on the edge of starvation, et cetera. This is not a generally healthy situation. If you've ever picked up a bug while traveling, imagine the conditions in the troopships where conscripts were hot-bunking for weeks or months. Then there was the sheer variety of bugs to pick from - the French Empire was vast, and there were troops from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Senegal, Algeria, and even French Polynesia fighting in the trenches. The British Empire was at its height, pulling in troops from Canada, Australia, India, the West Indies, British Africa, and other places. Germany still had overseas posessions at the time, and drew on them as well. All of Europe was involved, of course, and the United States, and parts of South America.
After mixing everybody up, they were summarily shipped back home. For American conscripts, conditions on the return voyage were little short of criminal - they were transported as cargo on passenger liners, padlocked down in unventilated holds, with little or no light, no adequate sanitary facilities, and watered and slopped like animals. There were riots and at least one hijacking after some of them got rightfully fed up with it. A fair number died en route. Just another one of the things the history books like to sweep under the carpet with nobody's looking. (Billy Mitchell made his political bones by taking command of the troops in one of those ships, doing what he could to improve conditions, and treating them as human beings instead of criminals or POWs)
Given the circumstances, it's a wonder "The Influenza" wasn't worse. There was a series of much smaller plagues in Europe and the USSR after WW2, but improved conditions for the troops and the invention of practical antibiotics kept things under control in the English-speaking areas, at least. China and Malaya got hammered pretty hard by disease after WW2, but there wasn't enough government there to keep useful records during that time.
The Spanish, French, Portuguese, and British had put up with steady losses of troops and colonists due to disease in their Pacific colonies ever since establishing their presences there. The Allied troops in WW2 lost only a tiny percentage to disease by contrast, despite conditions not dramatically better than those of the conquistadores. The reason: an amazing new chemical called "DDT", which eliminated the major vectors the local diseases were transmitted by. The usual numbers tossed about for that theater, in the pre-DDT (and sulfa, and penicillin) days, was about the same losses through disease as in combat. A whole lot of American, Canadian, and Australian soldiers lived to go home, thanks to the currently-unloved services of DDT.
A glory-grabbing lawyer (Gere) offers his services pro bono to an altar boy charged with killing a Catholic bishop.
The movie has rock-solid camera work. The acting is no better than mediocre for the most part. And its two hours and eleven minutes long. After the first hour I was wondering when the freakin' thing was going to be over. Not much happens, and that at a pace best described as "ponderous."
The most annoying part was, the movie didn't make sense. The altar boy was in fact guilty. He stabbed the bishop 78 times, then hid in the bushes near his residence until the police came. Then he took off running, and was captured.
We find the altar boy had been "forced" to make pornographic movies by the bishop. This put forth as the reason why he killed the bishop. A nice heterosexual three-way would seem more like the average 19-year-old male's idea of heaven than a reason to kill someone. Just keep the poon coming, amen.
The lawyer gets the boy off by showing he was not mentally competent, as in having a split personality. At the end, we find out there was no split personality at all. So we're left with no motive at all for the crime, nor reason for the boy to stay at the crime scene.
There was some stuff about the bishop's involvement in some investments for the church which had gone bad, and something about some community (or gang, it was hard to tell which) organization and some property management, and some other stuff that turned out to have no bearing on the rest of the movie and went nowhere, but I guess it helped fill 131 minutes.
I do have to admit Gere's performance as a sleazy lawyer was outstanding. Even though it was just pixels dancing behind the glass of the TV screen, I had the urge to check my wallet every time it showed his face. Of course, Richard Gere looks like that most of the time anyway...
1-to-5 rating : 0. Don't waste your time. Take a nap or something. Clean the bathtub. Stare at the wall for 131 minutes. You don't need to infect your brain with this turkey.
>> They don't have a clue how to use a typewriter.
> Uh....right.... > > As if they couldn't figure out something that looks just like the > keyboard they've come to know and love....For an electric, you still have to figure out which lever unloads the carriage so you can adjust the paper, which control handles the impact pressure, how to set the left and right stops, how to set the end-of-form indicator, how to set tab stops... none of these were marked on my old Smith-Corona electric.
For a manual, keyboarding is utterly different from a PC. Not only is it longer travel, but you have to maintain correct pressures on the keys to make even imprints. For some machines, pressures had to be different on different keys.
No backspacing over mistakes with a typewriter, either. Even if you used paint or transfer film, your error was always visible to anyone who looked.
(I know how to use a slide rule, too)
The first season *rocked*. The characters were good, the plot lines were taut and sometimes complex, many characters and situations were set up obviously for future use; the series was supposed to run for five years, and the Shadow War was coming. I particularly liked the retro sets, uniforms, and overall style; it looked a lot like "Forbidden Planet." Which was cool; cheap out on the sets and let the characters and plots carry the load.
The second season... yes, the replacement of the captain with a new guy was due to the first guy quitting, and the show has to go on. But I felt like throwing things at the TV screen whenever Bruce Boxleitner was visible. Which was quite often. The sonovabitch *smiled* all the freaking time, no matter what the situation was, appropriate or inappropriate. I guess that saved him from actually learning how to use facial expressions. The shows weren't bad, as long as you don't mind Smiling Bruce doing his wooden Indian thing.
Third season... we ramp up to the Shadow War, pretty much a continuation of the second season.
Fourth season... three or four episodes, the war is over, thankyouverymuch. All of the lead-ins, plot twists, and hanging situations, starting back in the early first season, are aborted. "Ah, Captain, but it would have been *glorious*!" Is there anyone out there to whom this would be a spoiler? The butler did it, and the bad guys up and left. The End. For the rest of the fourth season they futz around with some "war aftermath" plotlines; about that time, it became a chore to sit through them. But, going on the advice of a bunch of people who said it got better later, I stuck with it.
Fifth season, not much happens... just the long, long decline to cancellation. No attempt to go out with a bang, or just cut it off cleanly somewhere - Straczynski evidently wanted everyone to die of boredom. It was a close call.
I followed along episode by episode on the midwinter.com fan site, which is impressive as hell. I noticed that during the fourth season, the midwinter maintainer evidently lost a lot of interest in the series too.
The first three seasons are damned good. There are a few good ones in the last two, but none good enough to sit through the rest to see. From the comments by Straczynski collected on the midwinter site, Straczynski was a head case. Since he sometimes contributed directly to the site himself, I expect they're not too far off the mark. Ego and contariness, and locking antlers with Warner Brothers, and an obvious case of "my way or the highway." He couldn't do exactly what he wanted, so he went to "work to rule" and let it die.
Anyway, it was an interesting 125-odd episodes. Thanks to Joe Felix, Mike Lentz, and Sixto Bernal for the loan of their DVDs and tapes.
There are lots of places with the same old names - London, Houston, etc. Then there are some oddballs. But why are there *six* towns named Black Oak, and five named Cross Roads?
Now I understand why the Post Office is so hard-ass about ZIP codes.
A few picturesque-sounding towns, and some multiples:
Agnos Alabam Back Gate Bald Knob Bauxite Ben Hur Beverage Town Bexar Birdeye Black Oak (2) Blue Ball Blue Eye Bodcaw Bright Star (2) Cozahome Cross Roads (5) Eros Evening Shade (2) Evening Star (2) Fairview (2) Fifty Six Figure Five Fountain Lake (2) Greasy Corner Harmon (2) Hempwallace Highland (2) Hogeye Hooker (2) Jenny Lind Lake Dick Little Flock Lost Bridge Village Midway (4) Morning Star (2) New Hope (2) Nimrod Oak Grove (6) Oil Trough Ozone Pencil Bluff Pelsor Penjur Pickens (2) Pleasant Valley (2) Pontoon Rag Town Republican Rob Roy Salem (3) Seaton Dump Sellers Store Shady Grove (2) Smackover Snowball Stacy (2) Sulphur Springs (2) Vimy Ridge War Eagle Weiner WelcomeHmm. Forty-Nine isn't listed any more. Neither is Spadra Park. Looking at the list, I'm fairly sure there are some others MIA.
War is never imperative.
-- McCoy, "Balance of Terror", stardate 1709.2
Simulacron-3 : ~/txt/b2000
[ronin]
Quotes like this remind me that that show was filmed in the late '60s,
when saying such things was fashionable.
Just in the recent time before 1967, the citizenry of Russia, Korea, Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Malaya, the Philippines, Hawaii, Okinawa, Ethiopia, Egypt, Israel, England, Burma, Romania, Hungary, the USSR, Greece, and at least a dozen other countries might not have agreed.
War is *never* imperative, as long as you're willing to roll over and grease up. But a lot of people didn't like the idea of becoming "surplus population", slaves, or second-class citizens under the reign of the Kaiser, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan, just to name the major belligerents.
Somehow the idea still persists that somehow all that unpleasantness could have been avoided had the bad guys been properly appeased.
> http://developer.apple.com/documentation
...for those who keep saying "but OS X isn't BSD!"
Darwin (FreeBSD) is the kernel. Instead of using the X Window system, Apple uses "Quartz" as a window manager. Darwin and Quartz together make up the "OS X" product... but according to Apple's web site, you don't have to run Quartz. You can run X if you want; wherupon OS X magically becomes "Unix." Apple even provides X for you if you want.
Okay.
According to Apple, "the Mac OS X native windowing and display subsystem, Quartz, is based on the Portable Document Format (PDF). Quartz consists of a lightweight window server as well as a graphics rendering library for two-dimensional shapes. The window server features device-independent color and pixel depth, layered compositing, and buffered windows. The rendering model is PDF based."
Wonderful. PDF is about as desirable as colon cancer, so let's turn it into a window manager... at least Sun's "Display PostScript" made a demented kind of sense, back in the 1980s... and yes, I know there's "PostScript" somewhere in the PDF spec, whatever that is today.
What I really wanted to do was to download a copy of Darwin to set up in VMware, just to play with. But all I found was http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4.9.x86/ which is just a long list of files to download. "Some assembly required." I'm sure someone, somewhere has some build scripts. Maybe someday I'll get the urge to go looking for them.
I moseyed over to freebsd.org and did a search on "darwin", but all it returned was a few press releases, the last dated 2004.
Googling "darwin download iso" got a hit on Apple's web site for a downloadable version, but it's a PowerPC binary from 2002. Hm.
>> >> lot of other countries, and although making bank notes different sizes >> >> sounds a little dicey to me, >> Any type of folks that have machine readers, (casinos come to mind), are >> going to stomp that idea into the ground. Or at least pitch a fit... It >> sounds thoughtful though.Making them different sizes is stupid.
I had two ideas about this, long ago.
1) They sell little widgets to blind people that are supposed to identify paper money. They took several minutes per bill and the accuracy wasn't so hot. My idea was to print a bar code on each bill, containing the denomination and serial number. This would have been trivially simple to do, and would have satisfied the "What's in it for me?" principle - any business that dealt with baskets of paper money would be able to let their machines read the barcodes and sort money as fast as it could go through the rollers. The principal objection was some kind of paranoid reaction to the entire idea of bar codes in general.
2) slightly more complicated, but requiring no end-user equipment - punch some holes in the bills. No holes in a hundred, one hole for a fifty, three for a twenty, etc. You could feel the holes with your fingers... and you should shine a light through for automatic sorting. Patching a hole to increase the denomination would be difficult, particularly if the pattern or spacing was different for each denomination. The objection to that one was that it was "ridiculous."
The definition of "artificial intelligence" has changed a bit over the intervening decades, but it's still a very interesting test.
Some years ago, I was alarmed to discover that the majority of the people on the various mailing lists and newsgroups I was in could not pass the Turing test.
>> And to clarify my question - I don't give a damn about the current >> laws, I want to know right from wrong. Sound off.If only it were so easy to determine right and wrong.
I have a pretty good grip on personal right and wrong. I have greatly simplified my life by mostly doing what I think is right and avoiding what I think is wrong. I don't play the gray area weasel game.
Other people and more complex problems can quickly turn into no-win scenarios. Then they morph into "justice", in the sense of what is just, as opposed to "right." And then they may turn into issues of law.
And for those who think that law and justice may be related, let me refer you to that esteemed member of the United States Supreme Court, a personage who had a lifetime appointment to *make* law as well as decide it, William O. Douglas, who once instructed his court, "This is a court of law, not a court of justice."
"Be careful what you ask for, you might get it." - anonymous
"Do not call upp what you cannot put downe." - H.P. Lovecraft. "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward"
>>teenagers and young adults who are too young to have >>experienced France's lightning surrender to the Germans in 1940The French High Command had only one military plan in the 1930s - complete mobilization of country, combined with a "no retreat" policy that turned out, of course, to be suicidal. When the Premier-of-the-month (few leaders of the Third Republic lasted more than a few months) wanted to do something about the Nazis stomping back into the border zones, invading Czechoslovakia, etc., they were told there were no available options between total war and sending a stiff diplomatic note. So everyone knew what was coming, and nobody could do anything about it, just like watching a bad horror movie for the third time.
Shirer's "The Fall of the Third Republic" goes into tedious detail, but the root cause lay in how the Third Republic's constitutional structure had made the military largely independent of the government, which was a very weak Parliamentary system with an insanely rapid turnover in ministers. The Third Republic was basically an oligarchy in that most of those ministers were drawn from a smallish pool and were usually recycled into various posts over and over, but no one of them could stay there long enough to do anything of importance. Separation of the military from such a thing was probably good, except there was no feedback between the military and any outside organization, so the military became more and more conservative, narrow-minded, and out of touch with reality.
The French High Command had only one plan, and like most plans, it did not survive contact with the enemy.
Browsing about the Web, I had once encountered something called ReactOS, which billed itself as a freeware clone of XP. I checked and the web site is still there, and it looks like it's being actively supported. I downloaded a copy and fired it up in VMware. A few moments later it came up. Looks like the old Windows 95 interface. Click around, everything seems to work okay.
Hmm. Reverse-engineering XP would be quite a trick, but the "classic" user interface makes the squirrels wonder if ReactOS isn't something a bit simpler than it makes out to be. Say... Wine, running over one of the 32-bit DOSes? That's not to disparage the work they've done; the baroque Windows device driver interface would be quite a job, and then there'd be the matter of the drivers themselves, almost all copyrighted by Microsoft or the vendors. But then, Linux drivers could be ported, for most things... I'm going to keep an eye on this program. Wine is guaranteed to run Microsoft Office, which is "the computer" to most people, and it runs OpenOffice just fine.
The "I Hate Microsoft" people will probably be interested, but I can see where there might be interest from admins who would want to detach from the licensing, security, and upgrade expense problems with Windows. If all your users need is "Office" and something Windows-like to run it on, ReactOS looks good.
Of course, I was a major DR-DOS fan back in the day...
I tried User Mode Linux on the FC6 box. Download, install, and it pops up with a command prompt. Slick. You can load XNest and export an X desktop to your main machine if you want. I didn't try that. UML is a fork of Linux that runs as an application in userspace, that is, you just load it as a program; it doesn't have root/admin access to anything. And why would you want such a thing? The guys who write hardware device drivers and kernel modifications use the hell out of it; if it crashes, you just open another copy. And it turns out many of the web hosting companies use it, running multiple copies to give "shell" access to users. UML is pretty basic; it doesn't come with any of the goodies that make a "distribution." It's just a tool.
There's another fork called CoLinux, which is the same basic thing, except it runs Linux as a Windows console application. A friend is having a hard time making the jump from Windows to Linux; he's addicted to some software that only runs on Windows. Now he has both. There are a lot of ways of doing that - VMware will let you run Windows on Linux, or Linux on Windows - but CoLinux is much more thrifty with system resources, apparently. Or make that "was", there haven't been any updates in a long time, and the CoLinux page on SourceForge says the developer has abandoned it.
Back over ten years ago there were some guys who started an emulator called "Wine." It is an emulator that makes Windows programs think they're running on Windows, but it's really translating all the system calls to their Linux equivalents and passing them to Linux. Sun and IBM kicked in a bunch of programming effort and some cash, and Wine grew to be fairly stable. There are a couple of commercial ports of it. Wine is *guaranteed* compatible with Microsoft Office and a bunch of Microsoft products; at that point its backers decided it was done and pulled out. The original developers are still working on it, adding extensions for newer versions of Windows.
I have a copy of Wine configured, of course. And as luck would have it, a bunch of my stuff *doesn't* run under Wine. So I have a commercial product called Win4Lin, which is a descendant of the SCO product called "Merge", which let you run DOS programs under SCO Units. (And SCO, you might remember, was once a subsidiary division of Microsoft...) Win4Lin is an emulator and toolset; you stick your Windows CD in, it grinds away, and installs a real copy of Windows (95 through XP) on your system, running in a virtual machine. There's no noticeable speed degradation, and Windows compatibility is, of course, 100%. Still, there are a few programs I've encountered that give Win4Lin indigestion, so... I have the ancient P200 with Windows. I reach over and push the button, wait a while, and then fire up VNC. VNC is a "remote desktop" application; it lets you share Windows or X desktops back and forth, either way. It just exports the screen and keystrokes; your program actually runs on the remote machine. Can't get much more "compatible" than that.
I have a copy of Minix 3 configured. Minix is what Linux started out as; tiny. It's designed primarily for thinks like routers, cellular phones, etc. It's *really* bare-bones, but it's as capable as the old SCO systems I used to administer. Minix runs in its own virtual machine; a program called DOSBox, which was originally written to let people play DOS-based games on Linux.
Newer versions of the Linux kernel have virtualization stuff built in, which is interesting. I haven't played with any of those, yet.
The old Windows box used to be my "canary" box. I was always paranoid about malware when I ran Windows, and I had an extra computer I tried out every new program on before it would make it to my main machine. It has a web browser on it, and a CD burner. Its main use lately has been for emergencies, when I hosed an upgrade or new distribution install on the Linux box. My old 1.8 motherboard has "compatibility issues"; it won't run Windows 2000 either!
Sometimes I wish I had more time, and a longer attention span...
> > 10 Reasons You Don't Need Vista Today > > > > 3. Vista is Crazy Expensive > > Vista is the most expensive consumer operating system we've ever seen. > > Let's take a look at the pricing. Home Basic, which doesn't include the > > fancy Aero Glass interface, costs a whopping $200 for a full version. Home > > Premium costs $40 more, and Ultimate costs an astounding $400.This guy hasn't been around very long.
The ghetto NT3.51 version was $495, and the "server" version, which had a lot more than just "server" stuff, was $995 and $1195; I forget the difference between the versions. MS/OS2 and IBM OS/2 were right on up there. And the retail price for DOS 5.0 was $195.
Digital Research wanted $495 for CP/M back in the early '80s. And even DOS got expensive when you figured DOS, the 4DOS command shell, the Hyperdisk disk cache, 386MAX, and DESQview, which was what I was running...
Microsoft Word (for DOS!) was $495 back in the day, and early versions of Office were either $795 or $995; I could probably dig out one of my old magazines and look, but the prices were so far out there I had no interest anyway.
Going through a pile of Dr. Dobbs Journals going back to 1986, I noticed that a lot of programming stuff used to be expensive. In the 1980s, lots of products for $1000, $2000, or even $4000 per seat; "programming environments" from TI and IBM that I didn't even remember. But a lot of C compilers were a several hundred dollars per copy, and some toolkits more than that. Then there was a whole raft of stuff in the $100 range; Turbo Pascal, various C compilers, a couple of Unix workalikes, etc.
Prices in general dropped some through the mid '90s. I didn't have many issues after 1996 or so.
As a beginner, I found many of the articles in those magazines to be hard to understand or simply incomprehensible. 20 years later, I still find many of those articles incomprehensible. With the benefit of experience, I find that many are simply incomplete, and others are... weird. I suspect some of it was due to overzealous editing, others... I dunno. I saved a few pages of odds and ends that looked like they might be useful someday, in a pile to punch holes and put them in binders. The rest went into the trash. It was an interesting trip down Memory Lane, but I really didn't see any use storing stuff like "The Upcoming ANSI C Standard" or "Serial Programming for the Amiga".