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| 2003/10/24 [Computer/SW/Apps, Science/Physics, Computer/Theory] UID:10762 Activity:high |
10/24 IF AIM WAS AROUND WHEN QUANTUM THEORY STARTED
http://www.makeoutclub.com/03/page_messageboard.php?topic_id=323705
hahahahahahahahahahah! --maxmcc
\_ Dumbass.
\_ =(((((((((((((((
\_ ??????
PROFIT! |
| 2003/10/24 [Computer/SW/OS/FreeBSD] UID:10763 Activity:high |
10/23 why don't apple port their gui stuff to linux/bsd and make a huge
kill bill?
\_ Are Linux users willing to pay for a GUI?
\_ why don't you get off this account? It's FreeBSD, free OS,
administered by so-called commie free of charge.
\_ Huh? What's your point?
\_ Apple is just another Microsoft, except it try to control
everything, thus, less successful at it. Unlike MS, it actually
CHARGE people for OS upgrades.
\_ What do you mean by that? The fact that you have installed
a warez copy of Windows XP doesn't mean it's a free upgrade.
\_ You mean like, uh, OS X? |
| 2003/10/24 [Recreation/Dating, Politics/Foreign/Asia/China] UID:10764 Activity:low |
10/23 Soong May-Ling (aka Madame Chiang Kai Shek) passed away at age
106 in Long Island, NY. A generation has passed into history.
A short biography:
http://www.wellesley.edu/anniversary/chiang.html
\_ Is that a bad thing?
\_ it's history.
\_ for those who bitching about women right, one should really
look at her and how she played the role of the First
lady. It's not until the 1970's when the First Lady in the
Western world slowly caught up with what she is already done
in the 1930's.
\_ If you're trying to mention highly-achieved Chinese women in the
past, how about the King Mother Chi Hsi (sp?) of the Qing
\_ Ci Xi. learn pinying
\_ wo hen ta ma de pinying.
\_ pinyin, no g
\_ wo hen ta ma de in vs
ing. no difference
to my ear.
\_ Sorry, I'm not a Mandarin
speaker. Just doing my
best.
say this 3 times fast: 4 & 10 is 14 _/
4 & 40 is 44
\_ Try this: 4 is 4. 10 is 10. 14 is 14. 40 is 40.
44 is 44.
\_ How about the one that says "When Xi Xi died, she
was 44." Or a very long one that started with
"There's a poet Shih in a rock chamber. He likes
eating lion. ......"
Dynasty, and even Empress Wu in the Tang Dynasty a thousand years
ago?
\_ First Ladies should not have *any* power, control, or influence.
Certainly not in a democracy where we elect our leaders, we don't
marry them. And you've got a funny idea of women's rights where
a woman has to marry the right guy to achieve power or wealth.
That sounds very 1950's to me.
\_ First Lady is essentially a cabinet position. She
is appointed by the same person who appoints everyone
else in the cabinet. If anything, the First Lady
position is more democracy friendly than the other
cabinet positions because you know what you're getting
when you vote. We all knew during the election that
if GW won Laura Bush would be First Lady, but I think if
people had known ahead of time who would be appointed
attrorney general it could have thrown the election
the other way.
\_ Wow, I didn't know Soong Ching-ling became a communists after Dr.
Sun died.
\_ You can even argue that Dr. Sun was a half of a communist
at first place.
\_ Is that why Deng Xiao-Ping erected a statue of Dr. Sun
somewhere in China (I saw a picture of that in some book) even
though he's of the Nationalist Party?
\_ Sun Yat-Sen was the Father of Modern (Non-Imperial)
China. That he was a borderline socialist before the
Nationalist v. Communist fracas broke out is neither
here nor there.
\_ huh.. huh... he said statue...
\_ statue erected statue erected statue erected.
are you horny now?
\_ reaching the condoms
\_ The Soong sisters: One loved power (May-Ling marrying CKS), one
loved money (Ai-ling marrying industrialist HH Kung), and one
loved China (Ching-ling marrying Sun Yat-Sen). It's a cliche
but there you go.
\_ Maybe they just loved their husbands.
\_ What's the full name of HH Kung? Thanks.
\_ The West had Queen Elizabeth. How about Cleopatra?
\_ Yeah the whole snake bite thing at the end went well for her. |
| 2003/10/24 [Reference/RealEstate] UID:10765 Activity:high |
10/23 Housing prices going to tumble. Old ladies worried about high
property taxes will be happy!
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P62345.asp
\_ uh, that article says nothing about housing prices. -tom
\_ look for "real estate".
\_ Prop 13 protects old ladies from high housing prices. Anyway,
we've been hearing this for years. If you bought a house just
before any of the last several housing price tumbles and sold it
today you'd have a several hundred percent profit in the Bay Area.
\_ yea, but what if you just bought a house? and even if you have
a 200 percent appreciation, which I doubt you have, believe me,
it still hurts when it goes down.
a 200 percent appreciation, believe me, it still hurts when it
goes down.
\_ doesn't matter at all. the *only* things that matter are
your property taxes, monthly payment, and your final selling
price when you dump the thing years from now. i'm a home
owner who plans to stay for at least 5-7 more years in this
house. the current housing ups and downs mean *nothing* to
me. the weather report is more exciting.
\_ 5-7 years only? LA housing market was crappy for
more than a decade before bouncing back. Housing tends
to have longer cycles compared to the stock market.
If you need a house, sure, but if you are also thinking
of it as a financial investment, think twice. Don't
buy more than what you need, or earlier than necessary.
\_ Typical housing cycle is about 7 years. In LA it
was from 1989 to 1996 or so (top to bottom). Some
people say 1991 to 1998.
\_ Sure. But if you consider it as an investment,
you probably want to look at how long it takes to
go from top to bottom and than back to its
original level and then some. What would be the
return from say 1985 to 1995?
\_ Less than 7 years unless you bought at the very
top. It took maybe 10 years for the people who
did. Real estate rebounds quickly when it finally
heads up.
\_ This looks like the "very top".
\_ Most of us didn't buy this year.
\_ Since when did you become the
spokesperson for the motd denizens?
\_ Maybe, but they said that two years ago.
\_ Have prices risen in the last two years?
\_ yes, they have.
\_ Really? Didn't the luxury home
prices fall? And they say
those usually lead the way.
\_ Keep in mind that once you're in a house it isn't
just an investment but your home. You're no
longer paying rent which has an investment value
of absolutely zero. Property is always a good
investment. Location is the only question.
\_ On the negative side, you do have to pay
property tax, property insurance, various
maintenance costs and higher energy bills.
Also your 20% ($120000?) down payment could be
making money for you if you put it somewhere
else. If you invest the $120000 reasonably
wisely, that alone could cover a few months
rent.
\_ yeah, you could put it in the market! oh,
the same article says the market is going
to tank...
\_ He didn't say all markets. He liked
emerging markets, for example. That
brings up another negative of a
to have longer cycles compared to the stock market.
If you need a house, sure, but if you are also thinking
of it as an investment, think twice.
heads up.
\_ This looks like the "very top".
\_ Since when did you become the
spokesperson for the motd denizens,
the majority of whom probably
haven't bought a house.
house as an investment - it is
illiquid. |
| 2003/10/24 [Science/GlobalWarming] UID:10766 Activity:nil 75%like:10774 |
10/23 Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html |
| 2003/10/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10767 Activity:nil |
10/24 I bought an external USB case for a hard drive, and it came with a
fan attached to the power supply which constantly runs. If I just
have my hard drive in there can't I safely turn the (annoyingly loud)
fan off? thanks
\_ Just get a 2.5" enclosure and spend a bit more for a laptop drive.
Not only is it more transportable, you won't have to worry about a
fan.
\_ Drives can run hot which means you're shortening the life span of
the device. The same is true for all computer stuff. You can run
a 3.2 ghz P4 without a fan, too. It just won't run for more than
a few seconds before it shuts itself off or burns out.
\_ I thought P3s shut themselves down, but P4s and later throttle
its speed down until temperatures falls?
\_ If it was runing 100mhz would you consider that running?
\_ If it's a low-speed drive (5400rpm), then you might safely get
away with it. Anything higher, and what the above poster said is
true. Inside a regular computer case, all your parts depend on the
cooling the multiple fans provide.
\_ Detach fan. Close case. Do continuous read/writes on your hard
disk (defrag? large file copy?). Open case. If drive is too hot
to touch, put fan back on. While it's true that a 3.2 GHz P4 will
stop in a few seconds w/o fan, heat dissipation has varied widely
for 5400, 7200, and 10K drives of different makes and models.
\_ Risky. It's going to take some time for it to really heat up.
It'd be shame if it OP tested cold and then it died over night. |
| 2003/10/24-25 [Computer/SW/Mail, Computer/SW/Compilers] UID:10768 Activity:nil |
10/24 Are there any pitfalls involved in using sendmsg/recvmsg over
send/recv? I finally got my problems solved with basic sockets,
and I'm looking for a good way to say "these bytes are msg1,
these are msg2" etc. Thanks
\_ These are two separate issues. (1) man sendmsg. (2) Since
TCP is byte-stream oriented, you will need to introduce some
message delimiting mechanism. Common ways are LF (like SMTP,
POP3, BGP) and having predictable message lengths
(e.g., constant for all messages, having an early size field
which indicates the size of the message, having an early type
field which you associate with a given size, etc.).
http://tangentsoft.net/wskfaq/articles/effective-tcp.html
\_ Thanks for the link. I've been using a length-header so
far, but I was thinking that perhaps MSG_EOR would be a
better solution. I can't use the delimiter option b/c the
module must also handle binary data, and I have no
guarantees on length either. I guess I'll stick w/ what
works.
\_ You can come up with a prefix code for your
messages. This can be a good idea for reasons other than
getting rid of delimiters (since a good prefix code will
compress what you send over the wire). -- ilyas
\_ I thought you had to have a known alphabet to do that.
And the binary data is totally unknown.
\_ If it's binary data, the alphabet is {0, 1},
by definition. -- ilyas
\_ kinda hard to compress 1 & 0, isn't it?
\_ I think you are unclear on the concept. Files
you compress with gzip are 1s and 0s, and they
compress just fine. -- ilyas
\_ I understand the concept, but if you can't
predict the expected distribution of your
data (even at the byte level) you probably
won't achieve much compression-- yes, I'll
probably get some compression just by using
a standard english distribution, but not
enough to make it worthwhile. You are
correct in the technical sense, but it's not
enough to break what works right now.
\_ Sure you will. It's what universal source
coding is all about. Why do you think it
works on files, where we can't predict
the distribution either? At any rate, the
original point of using a prefix code in
your case was to get rid of delimiters.
The compression (which will occur to
entropy in the limit, trust me) is just a
pleasant side effect. -- ilyas |
| 2003/10/24 [Uncategorized/Profanity] UID:10769 Activity:nil |
10/24 cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt
\_ http://sportsbybrooks.com/MP392.html
\_ hi paolo!
\_ you've done 8 cunts?
\_ must be UCLA guy
\_ Twat?
\_ Boobs.
\_ Mitten! |
| 2003/10/24-25 [Transportation/Car, Industry/Startup] UID:10770 Activity:nil |
10/24 Any tips on the best way to give a company that tried to screw
you over (in this case Advantage-Rent-A-Car) negative publicity?
Other than the better business bureau, any good ways to blacklist
them?
\_ Are there websites similar to http://resellerratings.com for such
cases? That would rule!
\_ pretty good link, thanks! Yeah, if only they had that for
everything... Might be quite helpful/interesting.
\_ It's called the better business bureau. As if anyone cares about
or reads any of those sites or checks the BBB anyway. I know people
who swear by paypal even after seeign <DEAD>palpaysucks.com<DEAD> |
| 2003/10/24 [Politics] UID:10771 Activity:nil |
10/24 I dedicate this thread to the spewage of bile and hatred towards
National Public Radio. Please begin.
\_ Hey. I just(6 days ago) started listening to NPR again. I like.
\_ NPR is great, what are you smoking?
\_ yeah what's so bad, at least they don't devote 4 hours
a day devoted to spreading thinly disguised outright LIES
about their political enemies.
\_ they are about as objective as Pravda.
\_ and i HATE classical and jazz do we really need 4 stations
on the FM dial in the same area that all play classical and
jazz? I don't think so. And they're news coverage of local
politics is a complete farce. Where I live the numbnuts
NPR announcers can't even pronounce the name of the govorner
of the state(because they don't know shit about local
politics.) I'm not sure that the comparison to Pravda is
appropriate, however. Pravda was just lies and bullshit
news. NPR is lies and bullshit news intersperced with the
worst music immaginable and endless purile game shows
and pontifications by jackoff "experts". |
| 2003/10/24-25 [Uncategorized] UID:10772 Activity:nil |
10/24 Report on the Matthew Dillon meeting last night?
\_He hinted that Cameron Diaz is a hemaphrodite
\_ any word on the next version of dtrek? (xtrek predecessor using
curses)
\_ Yes. |
| 2003/10/24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10773 Activity:nil |
10/24 I was on a singapore airlines plane recently and they had Video On
Demand on every seat. All recent movies that you can pause/reverse
etc. That tells me that the movies are all in digital form in a
file server on the plane. Anybody know more about the format of the
files of these things? Is it a bit-by-bit replica of whatever info
is on a DVD? Thanks.
\_ Several different technologies and patents; see US Patent Nos:
4,688,106; 5,574,662; 5,590,381; 5,671,386; and too many more.
The list is probably even longer now - it has been a while since
that patent search was run.
\_ learn to use motdedit
\_ yeah damnit
\_ google |
| 2003/10/24 [Science/GlobalWarming] UID:10774 Activity:nil 75%like:10766 |
10/23 What's up with all the censoring? Sheesh. [Post restored] -!op
Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
\_ Yawn. |
| 2003/10/24-26 [Consumer/CellPhone] UID:10775 Activity:low |
10/24 Exactly how secure is CDMA? I'm asking because I do a lot of banking,
stock trade, etc via my cell phone and I'm wondering if land line
is more secure. I remember a while ago my friend showed me his
scanner which scanned in the 800-900Mhz and we heard a LOT of really
good stuff.
\_ Analog cells also use 800MHz. That's what you heard. I'm not sure
CDMA is truly secure, but it is scrambled enough to stymie Joe Shmoe
with a scanner.
\_ I think you need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment
to descramble the signal, and you also have to be talking on your
cell phone near the thief with the equipment for many days (due to
the long code with a 42 day cycle time) before he can descramble
it unless he got really lucky. Then he still have to deal with the
encryptions.
cell phone near the thief with the equipment for many days
\_ Just wear your tinfoil hat.
\_ I don't think the CDMA standard has any real encryption built in.
The security you get from scrambling and spread spectrum parts
of CDMA are minimal. Specifically, you can lock in on a given
pseudo-noise sequence in time which is linear in the block
length. In summary, it's not that secure if someone wants to
to put the effort in to crack it and you could probably do it
with less than $30K of equipment.
\_ and if you have that level of knowledge and that much equipment
is it worth your time and risk to engage in petty fraud?
i doubt it.
\_ Sure it is. That's what criminal .orgs like the mob do. They
don't rake in millions on a few big scores. They mostly
engage in lots of little petty crimes despite what hollywood
would have you think. Reality is a lot more boring than TV.
\_ You're correct, but this is mainly true for payment-
before he can descramble it unless he got really lucky. Then he
still have to deal with the encryptions.
\_ Just wear your tinfoil hat.
would have you think. Reality is a lot more boring than TV.
related stuff (credit cards billing, etc.) -John |
| 2003/10/24-25 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux] UID:10776 Activity:nil |
10/24 redhat 9 is the best unix -
http://www.keishaevans.com/bea/kes14_65_linux.jpg
\_ I don't know what to say.
\_ [formatd]
\_ umm... NOT work safe
\_ it would be if she was wearing WholesomeWear:
http://www.wholesomewear.com/page-3.html
\_ of course if people actually used swimsuits to go
*swimming* instead of lounging around like idiots
getting skin cancer and staring at eachother....oh, just
nevermind.
\_ Jesus fucking Christ.
\_ She's a man http://www.wholesomewear.com/graphics/page4_07.jpg
\_ Flintstone?
\_ that looks... unhealthy...
\_ her back must _ache_ at the end of the day.
\_ provided she's ever off of lying on her back.
\_ she probably makes a ton of money from fetishists.
\_ There should be something illegal about that.
\_ Linux is awesome. |
| 2003/10/24-25 [Computer/SW] UID:10777 Activity:nil |
10/24 I sent in my UPC bar code, receipt, and the rebate form to Western
Digital. 1 week before the rebate expires they mailed me back the
whole thing (including the UCP code) with a letter saying that I
didn't send the UPC bar code and said I have 10 days to respond.
So I resent it again, and this time they told me that the offer
expired. The rebate is in the amount of $120 and I'm pretty pissed.
I'd like to file a small claims case, but their office location is
in MN. What are some other ways to get my $120 back?
\_ TELL THEM TO FOAD
\_ Lesson: don't bother with mail-in rebates.
\_ Why do you want to get involved with the courts for $120? How about
you do the non-geeky and social thing and talk to them about it?
\_ talk to who? I mailed them and keep getting rejected,
with a stamp that says "Your offer has expired."
\_ Call (800) 275-4932 (Western Digital's support
number), and request, firmly, to speak to a manager.
Explain the situation (and don't whine), and insist that
they honor the rebate. If you encounter resistance,
request to speak to that person's manager. Don't get
angry, don't get frustrated, just be persistent. You're
in the right. Be persistent, and they'll get the message. |
| 2003/10/24-25 [Uncategorized] UID:10778 Activity:nil |
10/24 Icelanders are tough bastards:
http://csua.org/u/4so (YahooNews) |
| 2003/10/24-25 [Computer/HW/Laptop, Computer/SW/OS/Windows] UID:10779 Activity:nil |
10/24 I'm going to be getting a low-end IBM thinkpad that comes with Windows
XP. I know that XP is just one big spyware and so I'm thinking of
installing windows 2000 on it. Laptops tend to have customized
drivers and such. Anybody tried installing an off the shelf version
of windows 2000 on an IBM laptop? Any gotchas I need to know?
\_ Just go to IBM's site and download all the drivers. Burn it on a
CD, then install win2k. C'mon, it's not that hard to figure out...
\_ one big spyware? uhm ok.
\_ you're going to be using Windows Update anyway, just use XP.
\_ It's not as if you're going to have trouble with product activation
on a notebook, where the hardware is fixed.
\_ I did exactly this on a dell laptop, and sold the unopened, unbooted
XP on ebay. No problems so far (1 year).
\_ what did you do with the cd key? it's usually stuck to the
bottom of the notebook on Dells
\_ peeled it off (very carefully) with my fingernail and slapped
it on the plastic wrap around the install disc.
\_ I had 2k on a Thinkpad x20 for a while. I didn't like it. There's
nothing wrong with XP if you set it up right. -John |
| 5/20 |