8/27    would you do christina ricci? why or why not? just curious.
        \_ not.  im married and my wife is more attractive.

8/27    got bored dealing with virus mail. --jon /csua/bin/mw.new
        \_ what's that thing for? you people don't go in much for
           comments huh. don't think i'll hire you... (not that I can yet but)
           \_ relieving my aching tired boredom, duh. --jon

8/28    Required reading:
        http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com
        \_ this is great, thanks. - rory
        \_ no "blog" is required reading.

8/28    Censor censor censor!  Join the army and mark things!

8/27    I don't need a lecture on how stupid I was for buying a timeshare,
        but I just want to know what are some good ways to sell a timeshare?
        Thanks for your help.
        \_ Find a bigger sucker than you were.

8/27    Add this to the Clinton historical legacy:
        http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59136-2003Aug28?language=printer
        \_ you mean the Kissinger legacy? get a clue

8/27    Explosions, albeit small, at Chiron. Choppers, cops, road flares. See
        SFGate or try to bumrush the cops yourself if you're at Pixar.
        \_ Why would I bumrush the cops?  WTF are you talking about?

8/27    Silly question. How many of you are about 5'9"? I'm guessing at least
        a few since this is about the average height for white adult
        males. Now the real question: what size pants do you wear? I find
        that 31x28 or maybe 31x29 fit me just about right, but these are
        fairly uncommon sizes. (Specifically, I mean the inseam length,
        the second number.) So do you all wear pants that are too long, or
        do you have the same trouble I do in finding pants that fit well?
        \_ Most people in America are fat, they make 'em for them.
           \_ what does being fat have to do with height?
        \_ Buy trousers longer than you need them, go by Ernesto's tailoring,
           5th floor (left from the elevators, then right, it's on the left
           hand side) in the Flood building (863 Market) in SF.  He does
           a fantastic job and works cheap.  You can then let them out more
           easily if they shrink later on.  -John
        \_ i'm about 5'9" and wear 30x32, and they fit well
        \_ 5'10" and just focusing on inseam, I try to get 30s, but
           often have to buy longer.  They just bunch up a little and actually
           look cool.  They don't drag along the floor.
        \_ 5'11".  31x32 or x34 depending on the brand.
        \_ 5'9" and I wean 30x36. I'm a sysadm.
           \_ it's time to bulk up at the gym, buddy
        \_ i'm 5'8 and wear 31x31
        \_ 5'8" and wear 32x32, but I can fit down to 30x30 (I like 'em
           baggier and longer)
        \_ 5'8" and I find that a 30 inseam is perfect for me, and quite
           easy to get.
        \_ 5'9", size 4 or 6 tall  (I'm all legs) -chialea
           \_ they say that women's numbering system is changing so that
              size 8 will become size 6, size 6 will become size 4, etc.
              This is done presumably so that women will feel skinner and
              will be happier to buy a lower sized dress than they really
              are. Such marketing strategy works pretty well.
           \_ general question women's numbering system.  Is there a reason
              why women's clothes have such weird numbers?  With men, the
              numbers actually mean something. It's the length of the legs
              or the width of your waist, etc.  The number system on women
              doesn't mean anything.  What exactly is a size 4 dress or a
              size 6 pants?  Anybody know the history of this?
              \_ In general, it's waist measurement in inches - 20.  This
                 is for american sizes.  I haven't read up on the history
                 of this, but it probably goes back to the end of corset
                 culture.  Waist size has always been a status symbol, whether
                 large (fertility/matriarchal cultures) or small (our current
                 psychotic obsession with emaciation).  --scotsman
              \_ The sizes are arbitrary so fat women can say they're only a
                       smaller.
                 size 12 when size 12 is *huge* and 16 is off scale.  Most
                 women are 12+ these days.  Sell to your market.
                 \_ Can you actually go below size 0? I know one or two who
                    are, and I can imagine skinnier and more anorexic girls
                    \_ I think they have "petites" so a petite-size-0 is even
                       smaller. It's not just anorexics that wear that size,
                       shorter women sometimes need that size, else their
                       clothes are too long. My ex-gf was size 2 or more but
                       since she was short she often wore size 0. Except
                       these shirts were a bit tight on her big boobs.
                    \_ I think dresses smaller than size 0 should be sized
                       much as paintbrushes, e.g. 00, 000, 10/0. -geordan
                    \_ My mom is 5'1" and 92lbs.  She wears 0.  I asked once
                       about that and she said nothing below a 0.
        \_ i'm 5'9" and wear 31x30, getting fat. My shoe size is never
           available when the shoe is on sale.
                \_ ARE YOU A SYSADM?
        \_ 7'0" and wear 38x38.  posted just cuz.

8/27    I am behind a huge ass which closed off most of the ports
        other than 23, 80 and few other common daemon.  I would like to
        run IM.  For ICQ, i gotten away with telnet to my shell account
        running micq.  I don't know how to deal with MSN.  The funny part is
        that normal MSN client works for somereason, but my open-source
        client doesnt (miranda).  Any idea how to resolve this problem?
        \_ A huge ass?  You mean someone that doesn't want twits like you
           playing with viruses, spyware, and running that kewl web toy your
           'friend' sent you marked, "URGENT!"?  Get off the net, hoser!  It
           is tools like you that forces netadmins to close ports in the
           first place.
           \_ some very funny dude deleted "firewall". has anyone ever told
              you not to get so worked up over trivial things?
              \- sorry, couldnt resist --psb
              \_ it's the motd, no one is worked up. why are you so worked up
                 about others being worked up?
        \_ um, how is that funny? of course microsoft is going to have a
           more compatible client. anyway, miranda probably doesn't work
           cuz microsoft recently disallowed most older msn clients,
           stfw for more details.
           \_ appearently official MSN client use port 80 if its
              official port is not avaliable.  I am just wondering
              if any of you tried to configure your 3rd party IM to do
              the same when you guys are in the similiar situation.
              In any case, I am leaning toward installing Centericq
              on my shell account instead of dealing with this problem
              directly.  For those who actually knows what I am talking
              let me know how  you guys deal with this. Thanks

8/28    IBM has released a beta C/C++ compiler for MacOS X:
        http://www-3.ibm.com/software/awdtools/ccompilers
        http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/search.jsp?go=y&rs=vacpp3

8/28    Followup on a previous post about network transfer of large files
        and checksums:  I have compared the 2nd download which passed the
        md5sum with the first one which didn't.  They have identical sizes
        but differ in content on about 200 bytes out of about 640MB.  Is
        there a way to estimate the likelihood that this is the result of bad
        transmission or a malicious substitution?  I am asking both for
        theoretical curiousity and practical interest.  So besides some
        high brow math. argument, is there some obvious indication like
        whether the differences are concentrated, continuous, etc to check?
        \_ Mount the iso file (assuming it's on a linux box) and poke around.
           mount -o loop -t iso9660 filename.iso /mnt/tmp
           \- yes there is a way to guess whether it is random or malicious
              depending on what the contents are [probably], but it is a lot
              of work, so i wouldnt bother. 200bytes is a hell of a lot.
              that is a little strange. my guess is linux -> ass. --psb
        \_ Have you determined what the differences are?
           \_ All I did was was comparing the two images byte by byte with
              a simple c program.  Of course one could recursively look into
              each volumes, and to be comprensive one has to look at
              the partition map, catalog file, and auxillary partitions.
              But as the posters above wrote, it is way TOO MUCH work for a
              mild curiosity.  I was asking if some statistical/probabilistic
              analysis is possible (in theory) and some rule-of-thumb
              available exists in practice.  The transport was thru ftp, btw.
              \- tcp checksum is not going to miss 200bytes in a <1gig xfer.
                 what you should do is do the xfer 100 times [or whatever]
                 and see how many times a strong checksum fails. if you do
                 that, i'd appreciate it if you would send me the info.
                 linux has a history of flailing on large data. --psb
                 \_ I transfer 8GB disk images and 600MB iso's between
                    my linux boxes. I've never had any problems. what do
                    you mean linux "flailing on large data"?
        \_ I throw around 2 terabytes of data with linux every other day
           and I haven't noticed any data loss yet but I have not
           conducted an exhaustive statistical study. - danh
           \- do you guys actually check the data or do you cross your
              fingers? obviously if you dont look, you wont find.
              also it may not manifest itself withing a certain range
              of behavior/configurations.
              anyway, first hand, i have had linux system writing
              corrupted packets on the the net [went away when ethernet
              driver was changed]. when we changed various things in
              bpf and syskonnect ethernet driver fleebsd was fine
              with our hacks, linux occasionally had issues (we didnt do
              too much research on what the problem was ... we just abandoned
              it ... and the problems seem to in part go away when we had
              faster processors and faster disk bus). i dont remember which
              file system it was, but one of them lost us some data and it
              didnt appear to be a hardware problem [was a while ago also...
              lately i havent been looking but havent casually noticed
              data loss at fs level]. i dont need to say anything about
              linux nfs server. admittedly these are rare, but they are
              in areas you expect perfection. a bigger problem is just
              general "weird behavior" under load [or sometimes even
              not under load]. linux does too many short cut things for
              "typical case" speed hacks. this can lead to your being out
              to sea when something goes wrong [e.g. when you look at a
              solaris crash dump, you have much better info than trying
              to figure out what happened in the linux case. this might
              partly be my better knowledge of solaris but in some cases
              the relevant info about the thread state, locks, watchdogs
              simply were not there] and also the system behavior often is
              sort of unusual under load [e.g. low free memory + high io,
              compared to FreeBSD and solaris (although when various large
              changes were made in solaris kernel algorithms for short
              periods i did see some performace issues)]. finally i dont like
              the way the memory-file system subsystem has been evolving.
              recently seen some problems in work environments with lots of
              (tcp) connections ... you get weird hangs on clients when the
              server drops packets ... admittedly this might have been fixable
              by throwing hardware at the problem or tweaking various para-
              meters (and this was on some HPC enviornments were we could not
              compare against solaris/bsd).
              YMWTGF: andrew hume HotOS linux suspect   --psb
              \_ Our answer was much simpler than yours.  After too many
                 lost files, NFS problems, dropped packets, etc, etc, we
                 simply stopped using Linux because it sucks.  We didn't
                 have the time to get into this driver vs that driver or
                 what kernel patch might have helped or which NIC, etc.
                 Linux = not ready for enterprise = out the fucking window.
                 Staff time is more expensive than the value of possibly
                 finding a solution to kludge Linux into working.  The
                 moment we switched to real OS's our problems just magically
                 went away without hiring a team of Linux kernel developers.
                 Linux is cute but their development philosophy precludes
                 it's use in enterprise environments.  Just FYI, I'm tossing
                 around 20-30TB/month between various hosts.
                 \_ Which OS did you switch to?  FreeBSD?  Solaris?
                 \_ Yeah, especially now that Sun sells the X1 for under $1k.
        \_ I should have added: The system from which I run the ftp was
           OS X, which is a (free)bsd derivative.  And I also noticed that
           the bad download had wrong modification time.  It was set to be
           the day of the download, even though I have "preserve" on.

8/28    My my, the censor is a thin skinned lad.
        \_ knew that already.  next!

8/28    "Only one in five Americans approve of the federal court order
        to remove the Ten Commandments monument..."
        Just trying to understand this side of the argument.  Do
        people really think it doesn't violate the Constitution's
        church and state issues, or are they Christians who wouldn't
        mind the endorsement?
        \_ Atheist here: I think it doesn't violate the Constitution at all.
        \_ They're just stupid.
           \_ Yes, anyone who disagree with your viewpoint is just stupid and
              should be killed.
           \_ Yes. I am convinced their opinions would be no different even
              if it was something more overt like a big ol' Jesus-on-crucifix
              statue.
              \_ I want the version that looks like a hippie, bleeds every
                 hour (with the EZ self-cleaning option), and the removable
                 sword-in-the-side PLUS random vocalizations of His (editted
                 for Conservative POV only) word
                 \_ nice.
                    \_ *buzz* <drip> <drip> Do unto others *zz* as the Lord
                       God would do to you <drip> *zzz* (squirt-squirt-squirt)
        \_ Someone just needs to put a statue of the pope in a courtroom.
           Either we'll get some separation of church and state or this
           country will finally admit to being an Iran-like theocracy.
           \_ In God We Trust
              \_ What we need is to make Unitarians the official state religion.
                   -- ilyas
                 \_ No we don't.      -mice
        \_ Why does this violate the Constitution? Does it violate the
           Constitution that our money says "In God We Trust"? If Michaelangelo
           had painted a Sistine Chapel-like ceiling in that court house would
           people protest? It's art. --dim
                \_ Don't forget Sacramento, San Francisco, the President
                   in sworn in with a Bible, the USSC has Moses with the
                   10 commandments on the building, etc.  - the 'wall' has
                   no historical or judicial basis earlier than the 1950s
                   \_ Neither does "In God We Trust."  If you're so sure about
                      your faith, you won't mind keeping it the hell out of
                      federal buildings.
                      \_ So does that mean that statues of Themis (Greek
                         goddess of Justice) should not be allowed because
                         they are religious in nature? --dim
                      \_ If you feel this way enact policy through the
                         legislature or referendum.
           \_ I think there's a difference between a vague platitude on a coin
              versus Christian trappings in an actual courtroom. Not that I
              personally want the coin thing.
              \_ Judeo-Christian trappings.  The point is that old Roy had
                 the thing placed in a very conspicuous location as if to
                 to say, "What are you gonna do about it?"  This is much
                 more in your face than "In God We Trust."
                 \_ I believe in the Reeses' peanut butter cup theory of state
                    and church. The problem isn't when your religion is in
                    my government, it's when your government is in my religion.
                 \_ You can't pick and choose.  If one is not ok then neither
                    is "In God We Trust" on *every* dollar bill.  The degree
                    of visibility should make no difference and frankly I see
                    cash much more often than I see a big chunk of rock in
                   \_ Blah blah blah.
                    some random southern courthouse.  The money should be
                    changed before the rock if visibility is your standard.
        \_ Perhaps some view the First Amendment from a historical vantage:
           Justice Rehnquist's Dissent in WALLACE V. JAFFREE (1985)
           http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/971381/posts
           As an aside, the amendment reads 'Congress shall make no..'-
           the key word being Congress.
           \_ Oh, there he goes again.  Haven't you already been swatted, fly?
                \_ I'd respond to intellectual rebuttal of the points made
                   in the dissent.
                   \_ Hey, I'm into the slaveowner thing too, but I don't
                      constantly bug the motd about it.
                      \_ What?  You're a Southern Democrat?  Huh?
        \_ In another letter, to Rev. Samuel Miller on Jan. 23, 1808 Jefferson
           stated, "I consider the government of the U S. as interdicted
           by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions,
           their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only
           from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the
           establishment, or free exercise, of religion, but from that
           also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to
           the U.S. Certainly no power to prescribe any religious
           exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline,
           has been delegated to the general government. It must
           then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any
           human authority."
           This was written six years after Jefferson's 'wall of
           separation' letter.

8/28     Fairbanks, Alaska's UPS, world's largest battery.