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| 2006/1/30-2/2 [Politics/Domestic/California] UID:41596 Activity:nil |
1/30 Hey did something happen to http://teleflip.com? That site rocks. \_ I had half a page of vitriol qued up in my mind before I realized that your link has nothing to do with real estate speculation. \_ lafe, why do you hate free capitalism? people do what they do to maximize return, that's the spirit of our capitalism. \_ what did it do? |
| 2006/1/30-2/1 [Computer/HW/Laptop] UID:41597 Activity:nil |
1/30 Any suggestions for cleaning underneath a ThinkPad keyboard? I've got
to stop eating crackers over my laptop.
\_ Flip, shake.
\_ Yeah, only moderately effective.
\_ You could open it but you'd probably be breaking the warrantee
and it might be a problem getting it back together properly.
I've seen some laptops that were easy to close back up and
others that were a mess of *very* short cables between the
2 halves. YMMV. I'd stick to flip/shake unless you're
missing key strokes.
\_ I thought thinkpad keyboards are easy to pop off?
\_ They are. -tom
\_ Ah, the real answer! -op
\_ For Dell Latitude notebooks there are full instructions for
removing/reinstalling the keyboard, and eBay sells a whole bunch
of kb's. I suggest you google for a Thinkpad maintenance manual
(online HTML or downloadable PDF) for your model.
I don't believe doing something like this for Dell notebooks will
invalidate the warranty (within limits), not sure about Thinkpads.
\_ Compressed air keyboard cleaning bottle? -John
\_ For desktop keyboards you can pop individual keys and then vacuum.
Don't know about ThinkPad.
\_ Yes, but they are more delicate and prone to damage. --Jon |
| 2006/1/30-2/2 [Politics/Foreign/Asia/Taiwan] UID:41598 Activity:nil |
1/30 Is there a standards association in Taiwan that's similar to ANSI, JSA
and ISO? I'm trying to look up some standards. Thanks.
\_ After China globalizes and dominates all the markets that Taiwan
used to dominate (motherboard, cheap goods, etc), Taiwan the
island will be completely irrelevant and the US government will
no longer give a damn about Taiwan.
\_ I agree, but right now I'm just trying to look up the official
dimensions of the paper sizes 8K and 16K. Supposedly these are
Taiwan paper sizes. I think they are also called 8-Kai and
16-Kai, but I'm not sure. -- OP
\_ Taiwan mosly use US standards. For size of paper, they use
(I think) European standard. A3, A4, B3, B4, etc. the old standard
has became irrelevant due to the fact that most of the paper making
machinaries are imported from abroad.
\_ So are 8K and 16K really Taiwan standards? I'm not even sure.
Thx. -- OP
\_ It's a Chinese expression. The original definition of 8-kai
means a piece of paper is being cutted into eight pieces,
hence, bigger than a paper which is being cutted into 16
pieces (16-kai). Once upon a time there was a standard on
how big a sheet (1-kai) paper is. I am not sure how relevant
it is now. |
| 2006/1/30-2/1 [Computer/HW/Scanner] UID:41599 Activity:low |
1/30 We have a lot of photos (4x6 and 5x7) that we'd like to scan and
turn them into jpeg files. We have misplaced the negatives for most
of them. What's the fastest way of doing this other than scanning
with a flat bed scanner one photo at a time? Are there scanners
that you can feed a stack of 4x6s or 5x7s and it'll scan them
automatically? Thanks.
\_ there are lots of good scanner/feeder systems out there, and
the good ones are over $500. If you want to scan negatives,
1200x1200 is barely sufficient, 2400x2400 is decent, but
4000x4000 is much better. Check out the Nikon feeder systems,
that's what professionals use. If $800 is too much for you
despite the fact that you already have a milk-cow job and a
moonlight real-estate job, you can always pay someone else
to do it for a nominal fee.
\_ Quit being a cheap chink and pay someone to do it.
\_ Yes, there are feeder systems, but they tend to be a bit pricey.
When I had a bunch to do, I just sort of set up a production line
and put 4 on the bed at a time, then cut them up later.
\_ My old flatbed scanner had a feeder on it. It wasn't
particularly expensive, but I guess expense is relative. |
| 2006/1/30-2/1 [Politics/Domestic/California] UID:41600 Activity:low |
1/30 Filibuster killed, Alito scheduled for confirmation at 11 EST tomorrow
"All Your Cloture Vote Are Belong To Us"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1568198/posts
\_ All your fetuses are belong to you
\_ That's "potential humans", to you. Remember, abstinence is
murder, too!
\_ are you pro-egg/sperm/zygote?
\_ So is eating.
\_ Not if you only eat things that don't kill the plant/
animal.
\_ Like... sand?
\_ Like...fruit.
\_ now you're killing unhatched baby plants :(
\_ fruit isn't a baby plant, seeds are. |
| 2006/1/30-2/2 [Computer/Companies/Google] UID:41601 Activity:low |
1/30 In other news, GOOG super-engineers have fixed the case-sensitivity
censoring feature bug at google.cn
\_ Don't be evil unless your shareholders want more, in
which case you do whatever it is necessary to make the
shareholders happy. -capitalism rules
\_ Don't be evil, unless it's for China.
\- dont you think all this picking on google is a bit of a
double standard? i mean yahoo released the email info for
a chinese person who has since been jailed, there are plenty
of people neterting into mfgring agreements with sketchy
of people enterting into mfgring agreements with sketchy
people etc. i realize google sort of set itself up with the
"dont be evil" bit but i'm not sure what you would rather
have then do in this case. like tivo i guess is ok with
hardware hacking to put in bigger drives but dont want to
to hack the service side of things ... that seems reasonable.
as opposed to say sony in the aibohack case etc.
\_ Yes, that's precisely the issue. Google says "don't be evil"
and then the go and be evil. Hypocrites have been criticized
for a long time.
\_ google is following the local law. in that regard, it's
not google's problem, no?
\_ Google is under no obligation to expand into China. It is
under an obligation not to do evil, if its motto is "Don't
be evil". Necesse est eam, non est vivam.
\_ So is it more evil to have no google or to have a
censored google? Seriously.
\_ It's better for me to have a semi-evil google over an
amoral google. It is better for google to be moral
evil google. It is better for google to be non-evil
rather than semi-evil, if its stated goal is not to
be evil.
\_ It's evil to cooperate with a government that crushes
human rights, yes.
\_ or how about: "don't be that evil", or "... if you can help it"
Or Sergey could have just come out with:
"Well, we decided to be evil in this case."
\_ Tools are never inherently evil. "Every tool is a weapon if
hold it right."
\- doesnt it seem odd to be holding a company to a higher
standard than say your govt?
\_ I normally don't. In google's case they asked to be
held to a higher standard. I am just being obliging.
\_ I normally don't. In fact, I prefer my companies profit-
maximizing (hence at least somewhat evil). In google's
case they asked to be held to a higher standard. I am
just being obliging.
\- i think this black and white view and overreading the
"dont be evil" is just silly.
\_ They made out quite well with the "do no evil" thing
until it was inconvenient. As soon as it looked
like it was going to cost them money, they dropped
it like an old bag. People hate hypocrites. At
least Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, etc, never made any
obnoxious claims to be doing anything other than
making as much cash as possible with no moral
qualms. People hate hypocrites. And I believe now
is a good time to remind you that people hate
hypocrites. Has anyone mentioned lately how much
people hate hypocrites? --People Hating Hypocrites |
| 2006/1/30-2/2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:41602 Activity:kinda low |
1/30 What's a good way to archive hundreds of GB, or even TB, of data?
Tape seems obvious, but it is not random access. Hard drives are
cheap, but I fear reliability issues, even with RAID. We're
talking about archiving data for decades. Is the best strategy
to write to tape *and* to hard drives, only going back to tape
in the event of a disaster?
\_ I just send an email to Chuck Norris, and he'll remember it forever.
\_ Not that this is your situation, but this brings us back to a
similar chat a few weeks ago about data retention: most of our data
is crap and no one would miss it if it vanished. If long term mass
data storage was a real problem for more people there'd be a lot
more effort going into a real solution usable by a larger number of
people/corporations/governments.
\_ This is an ongoing problem, and not one with any "standard" solutions
that I've seen. The closest I've seen to common wisdom on this topic
is: keep the data online, backed up, in multiple places, and keep
moving it to new media as the old dies. Not a lot of fun.
\_ whoever solves this problem so that it is both convenient and
cheap will become very rich.
\_ Contact the Internet Archive. They've solved the problem already.
They did the work to figure out the lowest cost petabyte array, and
I'm sure they'd be happy to work with you. Here's the overview of
their system: http://www.archive.org/web/petabox.php -emarkp
\_ What do these guys do when their server room explodes?
There must still be tapes or similar, right?
\_ What if the earth explodes? I make sure to stow away backups
on each nasa mission.
\_ drink 3 beers, eat some peanuts, bring a towel, and don't
forget to feed the dog a cheese sandwich
\_ Is this a lame Hitchhiker's reference?
\_ I assume it's redundant backup. Call or email them! -emarkp
\_ Bwahahahahahahahahahahah. No, they haven't. The good news is
that they have a redundant backup on the other side of the world.
The bad news is that the internet archive has incredibly high
hardware failure rates since they usually get hand-me down
hardware from Alexa (aka the for-profit half of the internet
archive, a wholly owned subsidiary of http://Amazon.com), and both
Alexa and the Internet Archive beat on their disks much harder
than the typical usage disks are designed for. Furthermore, the
Internet Archive is woefully underfunded and, as a consequence,
understaffed so they don't have the engineering man-hours needed
to effectively work around the problems caused by their disks
regularly taking a piss. -dans
\_ What do people here do for their home backup needs? Hard drives?
I don't understand the tape storage industry at all and optical
media is kind of a joke.
\_ I'm going with the faith based backup system.
\_ Oh, nice. I guess, you know, if I lose some data, Yahweh
decided that wasn't good to have around.
\_ God helps those who help themselves. Get a data backup
system if you don't want to lose data. God supports
data backups.
\_ This is a very important problem that very few people seem to be
paying attention to. For instance here are already gobs of NASA
telemetry data from missions in the 20th century that are now
effectively unreadable. This is probably one of the few real
advantages that truly analog storage mediums have over digital -
a degraded analog signal is still readable long after the
equivalent digital signal would be hopelessly lost. One wonders
what will happen to future historians trying to understand
political decisions made by past governments when crucial
information only passed through digital media. The Long Now
Foundation has projects exploring this issue, though I don't know
how much practical success they have had: http://www.longnow.org
\_ NASA didn't really save a lot of the telemetry back then,
only the products. However, there is data (on 9 track
tape) going back to Voyager, Pioneer, and such. I am
trying to address this issue for (my part of) NASA. In
the past, tape (4mm, 8mm, 9 track) or optical disks were used,
but today's missions generate quantities of data that would've
been unthinkable in the 1970s. Additional problem: no one
wants to pay (much) to do this stuff.
\_ Digital data is still ultimately stored in an analog medium
though, right? Besides, one can spend extra bits for redundancy
and repair.
\_ Sure, but once that analog medium degrades beyond the ability
of your error correction mechanism, the data is lost beyond
repair. Pure analog mediums do not have this issue - although
a degraded signal will be very distorted, it will still
retain useful information.
\_ If it is distorted enough it won't be particularly useful.
With digital, you can recover the bit-perfect original,
even after severe degradation, dependent on how much
redundancy you budget. I don't see why "digital" is the
culprit. You could engrave "digital" bits into a chunk
of granite. Agreed though it's kind of an all or nothing
affair; you don't have much once it fails.
redundancy you budget. Agreed though you don't have the
gradual degradation... you have some "buffer" then it's
just gone. So you would have to have a huge parity to data
ratio to achieve similar longevity. On the other hand you
can keep copying the data to new media and never lose any
data which is impossible with analog (other than abstract
content).
\_ All of what you say is true, but neither solution seems
practical from an everyday standpoint. Most data
storage solutions maximize size and have little parity,
and there is usually little economic incentive to
keep preserving data in that manner. Another huge
unresolved issue with digital data is format turnover.
I have a large collection of live recordings made with
a Sony DAT recorder in the 1990s. Sony used a DAT
implementation that is notoriously difficult to read on
non-Sony machines. With the market for DAT disappearing
and most of the major manufacturers discontinuing their
DAT machines, it will only be a matter of years before
my DAT recordings are unplayable on any easily
obtainable device - and before you mention the used
market, did I mention that DAT machines are prone to
failure and replacment components are hard to come by
due to the aforementioned death of the market for
DAT? Since my Sony machine died, my only choice at
this point is to try to track down another one
that is still functional, and that includes a cable that
can adapt Sony's non-standard digital output to
SP/DIF - and then transfer hours of recordings by hand
to another format. This is only an example, but it
illustrates the issue on a very small scale - multiply
this by a million times and you have some idea of what
future governments and corporations will be faced with.
\_ Speaking of data, much of our music, books and
movies will disappear not only because of the format
problem but because of the combination of silly
copyright periods and DRM that will make it very
difficult for future generations to recover any
of it.
\_ Our books aren't going anywhere. Most of our
movies and music *should* be destroyed.
\_ HEIL GERMAN JOHN! HEIL!!!
\_ Erm, bad troll, I wasn't even in the
room! -John
\_ Thank you Der Fuerher.
\_ Sounds like you're mostly getting screwed by using
nonstandard, proprietary stuff, not really digital
storage per se. If there was some specialized "AAT"
market and you did everything the same you'd have
similar problems. (Or if not proprietary, it's
relatively uncommon.) |
| 2006/1/30-2/1 [Computer/SW/Database, Computer/SW/Apps] UID:41603 Activity:nil |
1/30 What is an easy and free way to extract about 40 pages from a 180 page
pdf document, so that I end up with one 40 page .pdf file and one
140 page .pdf file? I only need to do this once, so if there's
some business that'll do this, I'd pay for it, but I don't want to
buy software to only do it once. I have Acrobat Professional, but I
can't figure out how to use that to do this.
\_ If you have Acrobat professional, the easiest way is top open the
"Pages" pane, select the pages you want to extract, then right-click
and choose "extract pages". When that's done, right-click again and
select "delete pages".
\_ Wow, problem solved. Thank you!!! |
| 2006/1/30-2/1 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iran, Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Others] UID:41604 Activity:low |
1/31 New Iran development, see bottom:
- Iran breaks seals, announces resumption of enrichment research
\_ You continue to fail to
understand my point. I did
not say it was a "good" ruling.
- West condemns Iran, support move to Security Council
- Iran condemns West, threatens full-scale enrichment upon referral
- Russia/China upset, but don't support move to Security Council
- Russia highlights enrichment in Russia
- ... Days tick away to IAEA board meeting ...
- Iran says Russian enrichment plan "positive"
Last Thu-Fri:
- West (including U.S.) fully endorses Russian enrichment plan
- Iran says of Russian plan "capacity of the program not sufficient ...
can be revised to be more complete"
- Iran allows IAEA visits to Lavizan military site
Today:
- China and Russia sign on to statement with EU3 + U.S. saying
they support reporting Iran to UN Security Council in a IAEA vote
Thursday. Sec Council will consider issue in March after formal
IAEA report is delivered.
\_ Your timeline would be useful except you drop key points. Like
you say Iran allows IAEA visits to Lavizan, but you leave out
the part that it was a limited visit and they weren't allowed to
see everything they wanted to see which is why they got referred
to the Security Council. If you're going to bother, do it right.
\_ OP might have an agenda.
\_ op does not have an agenda. BTW, Iran is not getting sent
to the Sec Council because of Lavisan restrictions, even
if they were in place, which is why I didn't mention them
and also the fact that Lavisan has been "cleaned" ahead of
time. If you want to jump to conclusions at least get it
right. -op
\_ Restrictions on Lavizan (which had already been "cleaned") is
not why Iran is getting referred to the Sec Council. If you
say someone is wrong, please try to get it right. -op
\_ op does not have an agenda. -op
\_ Convenient that you forget to mention it. If I'm wrong, go
ahead and prove it. It's your timeline. Post a real time
line with all the facts or dont bother. Anything less and
you might as well just keep it to a few lines of whatever
your agenda is and save us the false appearance of historical
honesty spread across 20+ lines.
\_ Let's keep this discussion very focused.
You said restrictions on Lavizan is why Iran is getting
referred to the Sec Council. Do you still stand by this?
\_ Stop being clever. Post your link. I said what I
said. Either way, your 'timeline' stated that Iran
allowed the IAEA to 'visit' which is only technically
correct. They were not allowed to look at everything
they needed to look at which is not in your timeline
which makes your version of history make the Iranians
look accomodating when they're not. Focus, indeed.
\_ All you needed to say was, "Yes."
I mentioned that Russia and China were going to
support a move to the Sec Council, and I kind of
assumed the reader would realize, "Oh, if China and
Russia are on-board (even with the fact that China
gets 14% of its oil from Iran), maybe Lavizan was
just a dishonest attempt to divide the other side"?
You know, I think I just should have written, "Yes,
you're absolutely right that Lavizan was a diversion,
but the reason why the case is being moved to the UN
is because of the resumption of enrichment research.
I omitted the Lavizan detail because I kind of
assumed the reader would recognize and even post
about this." I should have written that instead of
getting all pissed off about a random sodan
attacking me.
\_ Restrictions on Lavizan is not why Iran is getting referred
to the Sec Council. If you want to make a statement, make
sure it's correct. -op
\_ Ok then. I just want to see history kept straight
if history is being posted. IMO, Lavizan wasn't
an easily dismissed detail; I think it was quite
important. I'm happy to leave it at that.
-- random sodan
\_ Not really dismissed, but I kind of assumed
the reader would realize it was a diversion --
that Iran would not be giving genuinely helpful
info re Lavisan access, given China/Russia's
support for move to the UN. I kind of just got
pissed off when the post came with an attack
on me too. |
| 2006/1/30-2/1 [Politics/Domestic/911] UID:41605 Activity:nil |
1/30 I'm not normally a knee-jerk Al Jazeera-basher, but they seem to be
consistently _the_ way terrorists get their demands made public. How
do they justify making, for example, hostage-taking a viable practice?
Refusing to air the tapes seems like a reasonable thing to do. Why
don't they?
\_ It's newsworthy to their viewing public.
\_ So would be a lot of immoral stuff.
\_ Bashing Al Jazeera for being bastards wouldn't be knee jerk. They
are the propaganda arm of the extremist muslim movement.
\_ Y'all kids are too young to remember, but the US media showed
a lot of "propaganda" by various anti-government factions during
the 60's and 70's, depending on how interesting it was. Why?
Because it was happening in the US. Why does Al Jazeera show
the tape? Because it affect their part of the world. |