Good riddance. I remember when PC Mag actually had useful information. Then it became an ultra-slick advertising delivery system, then it drank the Windows Kool-Aid. And so it bites the dust, though much of its competition went "ad-supported" (as if it made any difference) for a while before they died.
RIP:
...those were just the ones I read; at one time there was a magazine for every platform, OS, and major software package.
(and one that's still around, in name at least)
Computer Shopper (which used to be 3/4 inch thick, and among the ads,
had articles on wire-wrapping your own motherboard, or assembly language
programming, or...)
People blame it on "the internet", but the big die-off started long before that, when Ziff-Davis began their buyout of as much of the American magazine industry as they could get. Then they ironed out the differences among their "product line", which then made most of those "products" indistinguishable duplicates of each other, so they were then eliminated. "There can be only one."
> > In 1920 there were probably magazines that had articles about scraping > > bearing babbit or casting your own pistons, iron or aluminum, which is the > > better piston material?, winding your own starter motors and stuff like that. > > Sic transit gloria mundi.I'd read a magazine like that.
The point I'm trying to make is that there is a proven market for niche magazines, but they either get bought out by the Ziff or Primedia, or they run afoul of the distribution system - ANCO stocks almost all magazine racks in stores, and wossname for bookstores. So we're damned to lowest-common-denominator McMagazine drivel.
It has taken me a while to get comfortable with Amarok; its user interface is counterintuitive and user-unfriendly, which probably means it mimics some commercial product's interface. But anyway, the lyric downloader works okay, and it returned the cover art and lyrics:
E.T.I. ( Blue Oyster Cult) I hear the music daylight disc Three men in black said, "Don't report this... Ascension." and that's all they said Sickness now the hour of dread All praise He's found the awful truth Balthazar He's found the saucer news Wait! there's more! I'm in fairy rings and tower beds "Don't report this" three men said Books by blameless and by the dead King in yellow, the Queen in red All praise He's found the awful truth Balthazar He's found the saucer news Dead leaves always give up motion I no longer feel emotion When prophecy fails the falling notion Don't report this Agents of Fortune All praise He's found the awful truth Balthazar He's found the saucer newsMakes no sense at all, frankly, but it's hard to avoid singing along with the refrain. After listening to it a few times, I think the song was never finished; lots of times groups just use placeholder words with the right number of syllables while they're working on the music part.
There's a famous example of this - the clip that played at the end of every episode of "WKRP in Cincinnati." According to various web sites, it was a studio track laid down to get the feel of how the music would sound, with just a noise track instead of lyrics. And if you're a Black Sabbath fan, you probably know how the lyrics to some of their early songs evolved from their early days.
So, now that Konqueror can handle Youtube, I occasionally click around there. Today I found that some people use Youtube to store their music collections online; Youtube even has a playlist manager. After briefly wondering how Youtube manages to deal with the RIAA, I watched an elderly Three Dog Night slaughter "Road to Shambala." Besides looking like stereotypical perverts, they acted like they hated what they were doing and wanted it to be over. [shrug]
So I clicked on another link, and watched a disc spinning on a little portable record player, with the audio to "Mama Told Me Not To Come." Man, I don't think I've seen one of those crappy plastic 45-only portable-pitiable-picnic-players in decades...
Epiphany.
I'm slouched in my chair, drooling slightly from eight days on hydrocodone, watching a little black thingie spinning on a little yellow box.
To do this, I'm using a desktop with more power and storage than
existed in the whole world when Three Dog Night released that disc in
1970. Yeah, I'm listening to the spinning black thingie by an insane
Rube Goldberg lashup that beggars the imagination - hardware and
software video and audio standards, data compression, network protocols,
from analog signals in a plastic groove to raw digital bits to codecs to
disk storage to TCP/IP and HTTP to remote disk storage back to HTTP,
multiplex with an MPEG video clip and codecs and video hardware to
liquid crystal and digital back to analog audio, 35-odd years along...
only my speakers have made the technological journey unchanged.
Wikipedia says "Mama Told Me Not To Come" was originally written By
Randy Newman for Eric Burdon and the Animals in 1966. Newman did his
own version in 1970, and Three Dog Night did their cover in the same
year, and that quite a few other bands have also covered it.
Over twenty years later, the tape still sits on the shelf, degraded until it looks like black and white cartoons, with nearly inaudible audio. We wound up tossing most of our older tapes because they'd overprinted or simply crapped out. So I was glad to find a DVD release of the movie!
Unfortunately, the asswipes who did the DVD release apparently used a VHS copy of the original film; there was noticeable audio and video fuzz. Still, it was better than what I had. The problem was, the assholes added REALLY LOUD TRANCE MUSIC all through it; about a sixty second loop that went over and over and over and over and over and over and ... I gave up watching after a while; it was too loud for me to pick the voices out of a lot of it. AB watched it through.
I don't know of any way to remove this unwanted addition, which basically ruined the movie. And the use of trance synth loops in a "hardboiled detective" genre movie is moronic, like the EARTHQUAKE LEVEL (c)RAP MUSIC in "3000 Miles to Graceland."
I guess you're shit out of luck if you want to see the original movie. If you have ears good enough to pick the voices out through the LOUD TRANCE MUSIC LOOPS you might find the movie interesting; solid camera angles, low key humor, and thoroughly well done; better than most of the genre it imitated.
So far I've discovered Lazarus primarily supports the Win32 platform, and I've discovered several bugs in the Linus version, some of which have been known and not addressed for years. Things like the TMenu component. Works fine under Windows, only partially under Linux... but a menu component is a pretty basic thing. On the other hand, the Windows stuff all works fine under Wine, so I'm still moving along. Eventually they'll probably fix the native Linux components.
I installed Delphi 1.0 under Wine, which works fine, as far as I can tell. I havent't tried any of the BDE database stuff yet, though. I did that to get access to the help system. The one in Lazarus links you to the project help files on Sourceforge, which are HTMLed into bitlets, and too tedious to put up with when it takes Sourceforge five or more seconds to respond to a page request.
Lazarus tries hard to look like Delphi, but a later version than the one I have. I've been going through my old Delphi books, though, and most things seem to be close enough. It's probably no worse using a Delphi 2 book with Lazarus than with Delphi 6, based on prior experience with different tool versions...
I've been sidetracked to the FreePascal project. I had no idea it was so close to Turbo Pascal, or that there was so much code written for it. I went from Turbo Pascal 3.02 to 5.5 to Borland Pascal 7, but I simply haven't had any need to write any command-line stuff in a long time.
Turns out FreePascal can do that, too. Lazarus is a FreePascal application; in fact, it uses FreePascal to rebuild itself when you add modules. But while Lazarus tries hard to look like Delphi, there are other GUI windowing managers out there that are simpler - they just have a form and component palette, and map things directly to X or Win32 standard API calls. I've been playing with a few of them. And the freakin' menu component works properly in both OSs in all of them...
> > The only things that's "Linux" about it is the kernel. All the above > > can be built on a lot of other kernels, the only difference is the > > system ABI and the kernel. A lot of anally retentive developers have > > taken to calling "Linux" as "GNU/Linux" since it's technically a GNU > > OS running on a Linux kernel (there's also GNU/Hurd, GNU/Mach, etc...)Stallman and his GNU/Linux propaganda can kiss my ass, even if Debian knuckled under.
I just checked Hurd again last week. Still doesn't work on any real hardware, web site not updated in a year, last bug report, even bash wouldn't run. Which is all too bad, because microkernel is the correct way, and Linux' giant-sack-O-shit paradigm is a dead end.
Minix, on the other hand, does work, but nobody is working on it. I can't figure it out; heck, if you were sharp you could write some shims to use Linux device drivers directly. Tannenbaum says there's a 20% performance hit for the microkernel. The Butt-O-Meter says I lost more than that between Linux kernel 2.6.8 and 2.6.25.
I looked at FreeBSD and openSolaris, but I don't see any benefit there.
> > I also get to hear stories from friends that are social workers. OMG, this > > is one sick world...and when a social worker can tell it's an obvious lie > > they still must go through the whole ordeal. they aren't allowe to think > > for themsleves. all the responsibility, but no power to actually DO > > anything...Sure. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Zimmerman, but maybe you'll like Treblinka; after all, there are a lot of Jews there. Don't blame me, I'm just following orders."
Nobody *makes* social workers hound people they feel are innocent; by doing so, they are personally to blame, not just "the system." If they're being told to do something they feel is wrong, and they do it anyway, then they're wrong too. Quit the damned job and do something else.
> > I suppose If Jesus walked among us today, he'd be burned at the stake for > > Wizardry after turning water into wine.Jesus vs. the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms... Jesus better bring his big stick!
-- (Terry Pratchett, The Truth)
> My Brother printer wastes ink every night, cleaning nozzles. > I figured if I turned it off, it wouldn't. Nope, if it's > plugged in, it does the ngihtly clean.That's because almost nothing actually turns off with the switch any more. Televisions were first; the old "instant-on" TVs managed the trick by being on all the time, sucking up 300 watts or so, and blanking the tube. Then came all sorts of consumer electronics that just goes into some kind of "sleep mode" instead of turning off.
And people wonder why their electric bills are so high...
>> And of course Obama's going to tax all those coal-fired >> generating stations out of business. That is somewhat worrisome to me.Even if we conquer Canada, there's not enough hydro to meet demands. Nobody wants windmills in their back yard, solar is still too costly, nobody wants tide motors on their beaches. And Lord save us from evil nasty NUCULAR PAHRR, which will turn all our children into screaming, snot-gobbling mutants.
Last I looked *most* of our electricity came from coal. I don't think even Osama can generate enough hot air to replace that.
> > Uh... The proper answer would be to completely stop using th > >e SSN for anything other than SS....as is required by the original Social Security Act; use of the SSN for other purposes of identification was prohibited. That's largely ignored now, though.
Something I've found annoying lately is the new TV-speak where you leave the last word off of a phrase. "I want to go with." "What is your email?" "What is your social?"
They asked me the last one at work one time; after a moment my blank look clued my supervisor in that I hadn't the least idea what she was talking about.
I generally don't even bother to answer things like "what is your email?" The few times I do, it's "Thunderbird."
He clicked on the first thing he saw, which was this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzFpg271sm8
I noted the name and watched it through when I got home. YouTube; where they feature drunken gangbangers stuffing beans up their nose on their blurry cellphone. Then nine and a half minutes of something like this, a short movie, a genre noted mainly for self-important art students wasting film on really bad acting, then giving each other awards for it.
"World Builder" is almost all CGI, but apparently the guy who did it does it for a living, and did the short to show off. I wish I could find an mpeg of it somewhere, that I could zoom a bit larger; YouTube videos are about the size of a file card on my display.
Stupid: M has changed sex, and Felix Leiter went from a tall blond to a chunky mulatto.
Stupid: the bad guys have a meeting via radio, while scattered about the crowd at an opera. Eh? What?
Stupid: Bond has apparently forgotten all the basics of tradecraft, like "how to enter a room when you're pretty sure there's a bad guy in there, and you're supposed to capture him and question him."
Stupid: Jumps in locale; something is happening, and then they're somewhere else, in a different country, with some entirely different sequence of events going on, like there was a chunk of movie snipped out. Continuity was never big in Bond movies, but I kept waiting for them to explain what happened, and they never did.
Stupid: some stuff just happens for no particular reason, to keep the action level up. Still can't complain too much, they've been making Bond movies for half a century now, they could claim "traditional".
Stupid: at the end, we have a giant concrete building (hotel? I was never sure), with cheap Bolivian concrete that burned real good. And when you shoot glass windows, they explode with big fireballs. Damned Bolivian building materials, everything either burns or explodes when you shoot it... it just kept getting worse and worse. "The stupid, it hurts!"
No individual stupid is that bad in itself, but stupid is like cumulative radiation poisoning; it just builds up on previous stupid.
Once again, we have a movie that died in the cutting room. Google says "Quantum of Solace" cost an Obama-eqsue 230 million dollars to make. But long after I've forgotten this movie, I'll remember the art movie I mentioned earlier...
All that is bad, but the rows of keys are shifted slightly in relation to each other, left to right. I finally had to get my old keyboard out and compare them one over the other. 22 years, I know where the frickin' keys are. But they're shifted a few mm either way on the new one. Many keystrokes are done sliding across the corners of the keycaps, not directly on the middle... and now I'm hitting the wrong keys sometimes.
The keyboard is also highly curved... the wrong way. It's dished, which means I have to rock my wrists back for a straighter shot at the top row, because the long-travel IBM mechanical keyswitches bind slightly when struck obliquely. If the keyboard was curved, it should have been the other way, with the natural curl of my fingers. With this curvature, it might have been suitable for typing in my lap, but that's now something I do often.
The bizarre ergonomics of keyboards and mice are strong arguments that the people who think the Grey Aliens are secretly running things just might be on to something...
(1) An object in motion will always be headed in the wrong direction.
(2) An object at rest will always be in the wrong place.
(3) The energy required to change either one of these states will always be more than you wish to expend, but never so much as to make the task totally impossible.
Google returned "Ace Auto Sales" at "8000 Warden Road" and a North Little Rock phone number. She called, and found that Ace Auto Sales had moved to the other side of town three years ago and didn't know anything about it.
The flyer was MTV-ized to the point I had difficulty reading it; specifically, I couldn't figure out what they were trying to sell, or where. Which, presumably, they could have found out by calling the 800 number...
Generally stuff like this promises you "pre-approved credit", quotes for discount insurance, or other things where it would be reasonable to answer fairly detailed questions about your work and credit history. You return the form or click "send" and the information goes straight into someone's targeted-marketing database, to be sold to anyone who comes up with money. And you provided it all to them voluntarily.
The State of Arkansas sells its DMV records; if you buy a new or late model car, you'll get bombed with junk mail from insurance and extended warranty sellers. After closing on the crack house, I discovered the Pulaski County Court sells deed transfer information; I'm getting "refinance your mortgage" junk mail now.
I first ran into this when I (briefly) attended the state university; there was trouble to start with, since they wanted a tremendous amount of personal information, which even back in 1985 I considered was none of their damned business. UALR *aggressively* markets student data; we got 5-10 pieces of junk mail a day for years, mostly credit card applications. It's easy to see when young adults can get nose-deep in debt before they even get out of school...
-- (Terry Pratchett, Mort)
> > And nowadays, 20 years later, it is easily associated with Viagra.I remember when all the Viagra spam started hitting the net. It took me several months to figure out what the stuff was for, since I don't have a TV.
Around here, "Viagra" sounds like something you'd buy in 55-gallon drums, to spray on your soybeans...
> > IIRC, a small town near Stuttgart. But there is no doubt they may have > > been displaced many times due to the war.Stuttgart? Uh, yeah, one of the other Stuttgarts.
One thing I noticed while traveling the state is there is remarkably little imagination regarding place names. Arkansas has Stuttgart, London, Moscow, Tokyo, etc. But it also has four towns named "Walnut Grove" and - I kid you not - TWENTY-ONE towns named "Oak Grove." Not to mention, a lot of these places seem to change their names regularly.
No wonder the Post Office is hard-assed about ZIP codes... that's not even considering all of these towns seem to use the same street naming system - numbers east-west, plants north-south. "4th and Pine" could be an address anywhere in America.
That floored me. The first thing I thought of was ZIP codes, but it took maybe fifteen minutes of searching to find that ZIP codes have nothing whatever to do with city or county lines, whereas the taxes *do* follow those lines. For example, my Dad has the same ZIP code I do, but he doesn't even live in the same county...
The actual mainframe data includes location codes that come from the US Department of Census, which has downloadable files cross-connecting those to city and county. Each customer record now has the census code as a field, so I can update them as the rates change.
I'd bet $100 my customer is the only company in the state that's charging the correct tax for each and every sale. I told the owner he might contact the state and see how much they'd be willing to pay to license our database. The Department of Finance and Administration is telling people to go by ZIP code; that's telling people something that's going to get their dick caught in their zipper once the auditors come in.
> > A police report says 54-year-old Middletown police Chief Greg Schwarber > > was preparing to clean his Glock .45-caliber pistol on Friday and didn't > > realize the gun was still loaded.Step 1: remove magazine and clear chamber
"cleaning" is the usual excuse for "I was playing with it and fscked up." Lots of people get hurt cleaning guns, might be better to leave them dirty...
> > The hospital had no record of Schwarber being treated or admitted. A > > home phone number for him couldn't be found."These aren't the records you're looking for... move along."
-- Terry Pratchett, Discworld
> > "How To Make Better Teachers" > > > > First, why isn't it "How To Make Teachers Better"?In DaveWorld, the question would be "Why are we still employing these jerks if they're not doing the job we hired them for?"
I remember the PAC crap from years ago. "Give us more money and we will be better teachers," Hello, we're already paying you to be the best teacher you can be; what you're saying is "I'm not doing my job, but you might be able to bribe me to play like I am."
Many schools already have cops or security guards in the classrooms; fire the teachers and let the fuzz count the roll and collect the papers. They'd probably do a hell of a lot better job.
>> but health care spending in the US was $2.3 >> trillion in 2007, so I'm not sure the premise is valid. > Total cost, I wouldn't argue. Healthcare for everyone else uninsured? > I very much doubt it was anywhere near that much. If you didn't watch > the video, you couldn't get the point. RicIn think before we have nationalized health care we should have nationalized food - why not? Food is a more basic need then health care. If health care is a right, then food should be. Nationalize it all - the farms, the food processors, the distribution network, the grocery stores. No prices on anything in the store, no matter what you have in your cart, you just pay a $15 "co-pay". If that's a better system for health care then why not food?
Someone posted a link to this guy's site: http://www.ferfal.blogspot.com/
He's a guy living in Argentina, which apparently has had a bunch of trouble in the last few years. I was impressed with his thinking.
> > The government's unprecedented concession - filed Nov. 9 and sealed to > > protect the plaintiff's identity -Eh? Wot?
The identity of the PLAINTIFF needs to be hidden?!
I've never been quite comfortable with unrecorded testimony, but when even the identity of the plaintiff is secret, that comes perilously close of Star Chamber proceedings, where the only thing that came out was the sentence.
> > ... and to think it's easy enough to scare people paranoid about their > > health to ask why they think finding a good doctor is any easier than > > finding a good mechanic..."What do you call the guy who graduated last in his class in medical school?"
"Doctor."
> > This extrapolates to 1 million hours of constant running as the > > life. That's about 125 years of steady running!One of those BBC Dibnah documentaties I mentioned the other day has a section on a water pumping station in London. It has the last two James Watt low-pressure steam engines, installed in the late 1800s. They're marvels of brass and oak, polished to a fare-thee-well, and installed in a cathedral-like building with stained-glass windows, carved columns, and painted tile. I guess they were a major investment back in the day, so they might as well *look* expensive, too.
They're over a hundred years old, relics of the dawn of the Industrial Age, and they're in perfect working order. The City of London took them offline because their efficiency is low compared to the amount of coal they consume, but they fire them up regularly for exhibitions.
They're crosshead horizontals with the end of the connecting rod on big brass sliders; the stroke is something like fifteen feet. That's technology you can watch for hours of mindless entertainment. slip... clack! slip... clack!
People think of steam technology as antiquated, but it's married to the atom; a nuclear power plant just replaces coal or oil with uranium and the rest of the setup is basically the same.
> > Americans drive more than 5 billion miles a day, which accounts for > > about 40 percent of US oil consumptionNumbers like this are why I usually skip right past statistics. Other sources claim 50% of fuel production going to the US Air Force and commercial airlines, others claim 35% of fuel oil going to electrical generation, others 20% for manufacture of plastics... any way I swing the cat, I come up with way more than 100%.
>> "If you had 15 or 20 per cent more efficiency, you're going to save >> >> about $200 a year without sacrificing anything." > > You sacrifice the enjoyment of driving...Screw that. I'll pay my $200 more, > > complain about it, and use as much damn throttle as I want to...That $200 is four tanks of gas for most people, at $3-ish.
Four tanks per year. Wow, that $200 would pay for... one tire, for a lot of cars. One "tune up" at the dealer. Two nights in a motel. Half of a fancy cellular phone.
$200 just doesn't go all that far nowadays.
Of course, so does falling down a flight of stairs. "