Ohhhh, I hate to say this...

code-frog wrote:

That Mac-sapiens

since "sapiens" refers to "thinking", and considering everything else... wouldn't it make more sense to refer to them as.. "homo-mac"?

Thanks to all who replied; I'll start downloading demos while I restore the Toshiba's HD.

Just got bitten by my lazy backup habits again.. my wife's Toshiba laptop lost the ability to boot XP after running Windows Update (should never have turned on auto updates, yeah, I know), and we had never backed it up. Most unfortunately the Toshiba recovery disk forces a complete wipe of the disk when it reinstalls the OS (WTF?), so getting the data off the system has been tricky. So I need to get with the backup thing. Only problem is I've never found one that actually worked (the last one I tried, which came with my Western Digital external drive, crashed on startup.) Can anyone recommend a good backup program? The medium will be my WD external drive.

:') Yeah, I love drama. It's mostly over by choice at this point.. just got tired of the cycle.

.. more or less. After 25 years of software development, and 6 with my most recent employer, I was laid off on Tuesday. I work from home, so for me it came in the form of a sudden call from my boss's boss - I knew as soon as I picked up the phone what it was about. The next day I had a final check and terminatation paperwork in my hand - that company really has the involuntary termination process down pat. But this happened to coincide with my wife's decision to purchase her boss's veterinary clinic, and she needs a practice manager. So I'm going to put the coding tools down and start doing people things: managing people, paying bills, and modernizing her computer system. Kinda sucks, but I don't think I'll miss it too much.

I really, really, really can relate to that.

Yeah, I think the fact that the repubs pulled support for their own candidate had sumfin to do with it to.

The company's based in Massachusetts; manufacturing in China; purchased at a sporting goods store.

As I sit here using Visual Studio, and tripping over broken features.. then surfing the web and tripping over broken features.. I am compelled to scream. Why do we put up with so many lousy products? This weekend, my wife went to the store to buy my son a tether ball, for use at the school's tether ball courts. She came home with an entire backyard tetherball set. My inclination was to tell her to take it back immediately, because there's no way it could possibly work.. but rather than make her drive all the way back across town, and disappoint my son, I did the "good dad" thing and tried to make it work. Once I had everything out of the box, I was proven correct. The pole had a pointed end which was supposed to be driven into the ground, without the use of a hammer (so as not to bend it). The problem, of course, is that if the ground is soft enough to push the thing in w/out hammering, there is no possible way that it could stand up straight during normal use! Plus, the pole was made of several pieces which fit together quite loosely, so even if the base was secure, the whole thing would wobble. I used a hammer anyway - carefully - and managed to get it deeply into the ground (about a foot) So after three minutes of use, the thing is leaning at a 60 degree angle, and we gave up. My son, disappointed as hell, says to me.. "Daddy, why do they sell things that don't work?" And I had to give him yet another dose of hard-earned cynicism. Since the thing cost $30, and my wife says that tetherballs alone cost $20, and the store is on the other side of town.. I just took the tetherball, tied to it a snap, and we took it down to the school. Meanwhile, I have a pile of junk in the backyard which I can either throw away or add to the growing pile of stuff that should be recycled. It's not that this thing didn't work that pisses me off.. it's not a defective product. It's a product that can't possibly work. And that really pisses me off.

I have to sign up for the beta to find out what bugs they've fixed? That's absurd.

For once, I agree with you, espeir: it is pathetic. How do you think it compares in severity to the Republican's jamming of Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire during the last election?

... or what? http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/15221578.htm[^]

Jesus - what a sad excuse for a human being you are.

fat_boy wrote:

I dont know anything about US politics, but this seems like a reasonable stance to me.

The most peculiar thing about American politics is that we are unwilling to discuss our blind and unrelenting support for Israel.. even when they practice their "city block for an eye" policy of revenge everytime they are attacked by some ragtag bunch of goatherds. The reasons for this are complex. Thinking people (those on the left) deplore the way Jews have been treated historically, and of course were appalled by what happened to them during WWI; so we tend to believe that Jews should have a place where they can live in peace and be left alone, if that's what they really want. Because of Jewish activism post-WWII, we have strong memes in place that prevent discussion of Israel's flaws. Such people are immediately labeled anti-Semites, which is a catch-all phrase describing everything from neo-Nazis to anyone who says that, maybe, Israel shouldn't kill 100 civilians for every kidnapped soldier (yes, I'm exaggerating). And then we have the wacky uberChristians, who number about 20% of the population, who see Israel as some sort of sacred theme park that must be preserved and even extended in order for the Rapture to occur, at which point they will all be lifted from their riding mowers up to Heaven, where they will eat fatty foods and watch TV all day. So politiicians are caught in this bind: if they criticize Israel, they are immeditaly labeled as anti-semites (= racist bigots). And yet the Anmiercan people are starting to realize that our unswerving devotion to the cause of this puny, theological democracy is really the cause of almost all of our foreign policy problems.. including the crazy decisions that have lead to the debacle in Iraq. I fear this won't change any time soon. But LaMont's possible (not inevitable) victory will be a step in the right direction.

I can. Nothing. No space, no time; nothing.

We recently switched a rather large project (7 projects in this workspace) from VS2002 to VS2005. This was in anticipation of supporting 64-bit apps, so we had a lot of details to straighten out before we had a working build. Once the dust had settled, I realized that the browse info for the system no longer works. Whenever I click a symbols name and press F12, for a symbol defined in one of our projects, I get the message "The symbol 'whatever' is not defined." Symbols defined by MFC are handled correctly. Now, the wierd part: the settings for browse info are all correct, as far as I can tell; I get the correct progress message when thge browse info is created; and the browse info files are where they should be (in the same directory as my .objs). But for some reason, VS2005 can't find them! Any idea what might be wrong here?

As a parent, I agree with himn. As a citizen, I understand that this is why we shouldn't let hot-headed victims be involved in setting policy.

Air America - www.airamerica.com[^]

RawStory (www.rawstory.com) and al-Jazeera (can't remember the link, don't have it here)

Your train left the tracks in your second sentence:

espeir wrote:

Personally, I oppose it because I find it absolutely immoral and a bit sci-fi bizarre to kill one person to medically benefit another (it's like soul-sucking or something).

Nobody does that, nobody has proposed doing that, nobody is discussing it, except the wingnuts who want to ban something else.