yeah...i'm not entirely familiar with bootcamp's technique, but i'm guessing they would use an absolutely positioned div (to create a sense of disconnect from the underlying screen) and, as blaze mentioned, manipulate the opacity of the div. firefox and ie both have different approaches to opacity, i believe, so you may need to cater to both. (i'm not even sure where safari fits into the picture.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 11:09 PM on October 20, 2007

thank you all for your responses -- you've been a great help.

(as an aside to indigorain: i feel i should say that google was indeed consulted prior to posting this question, as the tone of your first comment gave me the impression that you were not so convinced...)
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 10:19 PM on September 26, 2007

my impression of dba work is that it's not so glamorous. you're not the programmer, nor generally the lead designer, so your designs will largely be off of a spec rather than from your head (which sounds like the interesting part for you).

my impression is also that there is a sort of strange tension in dba work. programmers can (and often do) the same stuff as dbas, which means dba work generally comes only in large organizations with lots of delegation. there's a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:52 PM on September 25, 2007

i use a belkin kvm switch i bought from the apple store. it's meant to match the dimensions (width and length) of a mac mini, incidentally. it uses usb for the mouse and keyboard, and incidentally also switches sound as well. of course it also has a monitor connection...
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 5:02 PM on August 19, 2007

thanks everyone! (i should also point out my new job -- been there for a while, too! -- doesn't afford easy access to metafilter, so it's tough to come back here during the day.) i really appreciate all the advice.
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 11:03 PM on August 16, 2007

if it were me, by the time the client has described the problem in significant (well -- more than cursory) deail, i would be sending them a breakdown of what you would do and how much it would cost. it's not clear to me from your initial description of the typical scenario that this exchange happens, and i believe that it's important that it happen as near to the beginning as possible.
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 10:00 PM on August 8, 2007

i don't think you need a specific example or analogy of positive reinforcement to name it as the structure of games. moreover, i don't really believe that the way games are written, in terms of motivation to the player, is altogether different from the way that books and movies are written, either.

i think that what makes games stand out from other media is not this structure, but rather the interaction between the player and game. the interplay between interaction and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 10:53 AM on July 29, 2007

some background: i once worked for a sizable real estate firm in the chicago area, dealing mainly in condos, but i was not myself a real estate agent. i was, however, privy somewhat to the details of the business, and i can answer a few questions.

i would take "agent owned" to mean that it is owned by the association for whom the broker works. for example, if the building has its units sold through the xyz properties agency, then i would interpret this to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 7:45 PM on June 25, 2006

Tom's Hardware and Hexus are two websites I visit for hardware reviews, and they definitely help...there are a lot of choices out there.

for $500 dollars, you'll definitely need to be cost-conscious for your purchases. a dual-code processor is probably out of the picture (2.8Ghz pentium D's tend to go for about $250 -- worth it if you have the money, were you to ask me).

linux generally has good support for hardware, unless it's extremely new.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 8:42 PM on April 14, 2006

neither wrigleyville nor lincoln park have metra stations.

the libertyville metra stop, on the milwaukee-district north line, doesn't really go through neighborhoods i'd recommend living in the city. or at least, the ones that are nice are generally suburban-like neighborhoods in the city. (i.e. forest glen.)

even further complicating a metra commute is that deer park is a northwest suburb, while libertyville is more of a north suburb. i'm not... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 12:51 PM on March 24, 2006

i'm an avid BP reader, but i am not certain if there's a website that details quite what you're looking for. i can offer my own opinions, for whatever they're worth, which have been formed through osmosis during my experiences with sabermetrics.

to me, an average OPS is in the .700 range. An OPS of .800 is good, .900 is great, and 1.000+ is sublime. but when you're looking at OPS, it's often more helpful to break out what the OBP and SLG are. an OBP of .350+ is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 11:02 AM on March 15, 2006

tkolar:

Get yourself and your pets the hell out of there, and cut off any financial entanglements you have. People in manic mode are far more likely to (accidentally or through negligence) hurt other people than they are to hurt themselves.

it seems that every time i come across posts to ask metafilter regarding major issues with their loved ones (such as this posting), there is someone who suggests a complete cut-off. i... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 3:06 PM on February 24, 2006

personally, i think the days of the major (as in, large, caters to corporate as well as consumer interests, e.g. red hat) distro are dead for the regular users. your two big choices are ubuntu and knoppix. those distributions basically pack everything you could want into them, and are built to work with just about any hardware your computer has. (to the point that, if it doesn't work on those two, it probably doesn't work on linux at all.)... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:31 AM on February 21, 2006

this seems more urban legend than fact to me. it's pretty simple to apply permutations to the free dictionary lists out there, whether hacker-speak or otherwise. beyond that, though, i think that the law of diminishing returns applies -- i mean, at some point, you will end up attempting systematic character combinations if none of your usual tricks work, and if you already have a copy of the password list, then it's just a matter of time...
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:27 AM on February 21, 2006

i'm one of those people where, if it's not written down, it's likely forgotten. that earns me a lot of trouble, so i do my best to fight it off.

for one thing, i don't like using a computer to manage my tasks. it's not always convenient (when i'm not at my desk, or going from one place to another), and despite working with computers all day and being in an IT department, for simple tasks i find myself drawn to simple solutions such as pen and paper.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:27 AM on February 20, 2006

my own opinion is that linux's wireless support is not quite there yet. i actually bought a wireless card for my linux pc, which is my primary (read: only) pc, but i had to abandon the effort until a later date. we do have wireless in the house, but for now the linux pc plugs into a wired connection to access the network.

my guess is that a distro that would have good wireless support would be knoppix or ubuntu -- since they come with everything and the kitchen sink --... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:20 PM on February 7, 2006

vim. it's quite a powerful editor, great for touch-typists, and it's got quite a smaller footprint than emacs or any other IDE you may find. if you're coming from windows, you can use gvim (all from the same developers) and explorer to access your files.
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 8:59 AM on January 20, 2006

i use blackbox. no icons on the desktop = no distraction. you can maximize windows, but it doesn't fill the entire screen as it might in windows. to avoid the distraction of other windows, i often use shading (double-click the titlebar of the window and the contents disappear, rolling up into the titlebar as you might open a windowshade). os9 used to have this feature, but i've sadly been unable to replicate its functionality in osx.

honestly, i've embraced the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 6:54 AM on January 6, 2006

i think it's worth it if you would enjoy research and are interested in doing a thesis. you won't necessarily learn anything in a masters program that you couldn't have through self-teaching. as with any education, your own motivation is the key -- if you want to learn, you can learn anything.

some IT job opportunities require masters degrees. i often feel that these requirements are somewhat misguided, as their only real utility is to filter down the pool of... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:52 AM on January 5, 2006

the first thing i'd suggest is going into your options screen and looking at the display section. double-check that the incoming and outgoing character sets are what you want (mine are "Western (ISO-8859-1)"). it may help to check off the options, "apply default character coding to all incoming messages" and/or "use the default character coding in replies".

if that doesn't do the trick, i would then ask if you are 100% certain that... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:30 AM on January 5, 2006 marked best answer

i'm not certain if i quite understand what you are attempting to accomplish here, so i apologize in advance if my advice is off the mark. anyway:

the flags don't fix things here because they are reset after each if/else construct -- the only time $flag is significant is directly following if statement where you check if 'photos' was set among the HTTP GET vars.

you could restructure things using "if/elseif/else", assuming this conforms... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 12:27 PM on January 4, 2006

well...a project such as you suggest is not unheard of. before i say anything, let me point you to mini-itx ("the next small thing"), a website for people who like to make computers out of some pretty odd stuff. they would be a good starting point as far as getting the know-how for the project.

i would have said that the eMac rehabilitation project would be possible, if not simple, given the design of the machine. someone even took a classic mac and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 12:34 PM on January 3, 2006

Basically I want to turn a eMac into a dumb monitor + port replicator + external ComboDrive.

Still no?

without opening the eMac myself, it's hard to say. if there is anything about the eMac that allows it to accept display from another source, that could be your ticket. if the connection between the CRT and the mainboard is integrated, i think you may have hard luck there.

the usb and firewire ports... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 12:57 PM on January 3, 2006

pci rather than agp may not save the day. ultimately, either bus protocol is simply an input for the drivers used by the computer; and while the code in the drivers for each protocol is different, it sounds to me like the drivers themselves are at issue.

if the generic VGA adapter is getting chosen instead of the drivers for the new card, it would seem that the computer is thinking that those drivers aren't actually compatible with the card. i can't tell you why --... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 10:38 PM on December 26, 2005

i wish i could be entirely polite, but i think bluntness in this case is not bad -- indeed, i believe it would strike true.

you are not in a relationship with this person. that is not to say that you can't be; merely that you aren't. women don't marry men with whom they are not in a relationship.

i feel this is confirmed in your initial concern -- she is leaving your work group. in the ideal situation, such an event wouldn't matter. as the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:14 PM on October 27, 2005

you might also think about lowering the number of colors in the picture, say from several million to 64K.
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 1:33 PM on September 14, 2005

the traceroute program on unix (as on windows) relies on two protocols; ICMP and UDP. make sure that you're allowing packets for both protocols.
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:19 AM on September 14, 2005

well... since ram accesses can happen a lot, any ram compression would be pretty expensive. i would question the utility of it, even if there were a decent product for it out there.

a high-end consumer pc should be able to handle 4G with no trouble. if you're still paging memory, maybe you should look into scsi or some of the higher-end memory access channels.

which leads me to wonder...what are you doing that's so memory hungry?
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:35 PM on August 16, 2005

1) when i've transferred stuff in the past, i've used ftp. it might seem a little daunting, but it's really not bad. set up an ftp server on your linux box, bound to an internal ip address, and then connect to it from your mac. it might be good to tar+gzip or tar+bzip2 the music files if you're using the cmdline ftp program, so you don't have to say "yes" every time mget asks you if you really want this other file.

alternatively, you can set up a samba... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 7:24 AM on August 9, 2005 marked best answer

the G4 processor runs fairly cool, as processors go, which is one of the reasons why the Powerbook line hasn't been updated to G5 yet. but your laptop will still heat up.

one of the challenges of laptop design is heat dissipation. in a tower computer, you can dissipate heat fairly well with a heat sink -- something that will conduct heat efficiently -- and lead that heat elsewhere, such as the open space that typically resides in a tower. laptops typically have no... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:48 AM on May 12, 2005

if you're using bash as your shell, then you should be able to type a tab character like so: press ctrl-v, then ctrl-i. though bash will appear to have skipped ahead several spaces, merely the one (tab) character has been typed.
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 11:50 AM on May 3, 2005 marked best answer

to create a vfat (fat-32) filesystem on linux, you'll need a package called dosfstools. download the orig package from that site. (i can't contact the server right now, but a search on google seems to show debian as the best source for dosfstools.) installing the package, you should then have access to fsck.vfat and mkfs.vfat and you can go on from there.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 3:12 PM on March 16, 2005

it sounds like it'd be cheaper to plug the usb drive directly into the mac mini, rather than shell out any sort of money for a usb hub. a hub may simply mean more clutter in exchange for convenience -- i try to be minimal in my computer setups, so the less clutter the better, but to each their own.

the usb ports on a keyboard are primarily for a mouse or some other sort of tracking device -- though they do look convenient for other things. but as the keyboard requires... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 11:51 AM on February 22, 2005

mean mr. bucket:

I also think you are using Metafilter as a way to reinforce your existing methods of not dealing with reality, by asking us to agree that the doctor is a big jerk and you are as healthy as you can be.

i think that un owen was looking for support -- a thing which, i realize, is on occasion difficult to wrest from members of metafilter.

one's interpretation of "reality" aside,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 10:58 AM on February 16, 2005

my computer is a shuttle st62k. it's particular in the line of shuttle XPC computers in that it's the smallest of the bunch. it's also the quietest -- its power supply is external, and passively cooled, so the only fan needed is for the processor chip. it's really a remarkable machine, and i'm very happy with it.

i'm not aware of any readymade SFF systems that are being sold right now ... so you may have to build the system yourself. the good news is that this isn't... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 10:15 PM on January 16, 2005

when you're buying the mac mini, i think the most important thing to consider is its form factor. all arguments against, that i have read here and elsewhere, relate crucially to this form factor whether acknowledged or not.

the mac mini is an exercise in small form factor (SFF). i write this as i sit next to my shuttle XPC, a PC that is built with a small form factor. computers like this are attractive to me. but computers like this introduce two particular... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 9:45 PM on January 14, 2005

according to palmOne, you can use IMAP with a treo's VersaMail email client. that would solve the problem of email sync.
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 2:19 PM on November 10, 2004

Two great programs to try are Scheme48 and TinyScheme; both are interpreters for the Scheme language, and both are lightweight. (TinyScheme is exceedingly lightweight.)

As for literature, I learned the hard way (using reference texts). The nice thing about Scheme is that its specification is fairly small and not terribly difficult; R5RS is the latest version of it, hosted at MIT (and elsewhere).... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 6:28 PM on September 21, 2004

Also, if you like American art -- check out the Terra Museum on Michigan. (I think it is always free.) Bonus reason -- it is closing in October, so all y'all other Chicagoites might want to get down there before they close.

Oh, and the Terra is across the street from the Apple store, and they sometimes have free programs and stuff.
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 7:28 AM on August 14, 2004

the top of the line, as far as durability and respectability go, is tecnics. i have a technics SL-1200MK5, and it's worked quite well. its suggested price on the website is likely higher than you'll find in a shop -- i would expect a price around $450. that's still a fair bit higher than you asked for.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 1:39 PM on April 19, 2004

play Space Travel.
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 12:28 PM on April 15, 2004

i will take the (apparently unusual) step here of promoting C as your language. i don't think you should do all of the things you ask about in C (because i don't think you appreciate the challenge of them, as others have already said), but C is fairly straightforward and Java, C++, and C# are derivatives (and hence familiar once you program in C).

if you mainly just want to "do stuff" as you program, i would probably recommend RealBasic over Visual Basic. The... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 10:14 AM on April 9, 2004

andrew: (i've seen you from lambda the ultimate, but i don't really post there.)

i pick C only because its featureset is smaller. i hate that programmers get taught to learn Java first at my old college, because the first thing you have to be taught is to type this stuff in first, ok, now ignore it because it exists just to satisfy the gods of Java, here's where you can type in something that prints out "Hello world". so if you ultimately want to learn... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 1:17 PM on April 9, 2004

i don't know how yang could say that you could buy a 64-bit AMD processor for roughly the same as a P4. a quick glance at newegg shows a 2.4Ghz AMD-64 selling for $784, while a 2.8Ghz P4 sells for $181. regardless of featuresets, that's a pretty big difference.

all of the benchmarks i've seen of AMD-64s have made me feel that there is not yet a large performance benefit on the 64 bit side. that will probably change in the future, but because of that, i think it makes... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 10:20 AM on April 9, 2004

well... i know that common brick material will have differences in hue from brick to brick, and common brick was used most often on the sides and back of all-brick houses in chicago. common brick is generally an earthy color, and i think it's much more pleasing to look at than the horrible cinder-block material they seem to prefer these days.

chicago brick may refer to the bricks of some houses which alternate between two colors, i.e. a dark red/brown to a lighter... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 10:37 AM on March 31, 2004

i never played dark heart, but i did play quite a bit of one rpg on the mac called Orb Quest. i see no mention of it on macintosh or google, so maybe it wasn't so popular or i have the name wrong, but basically you tromped around a dungeon clicking on monsters to hurt them, delving deeper as you went along. it was pretty fun, and the dungeon was randomly generated every time.

if you like good character generation, try wizardry. my favorite of any rpg series, you could... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 2:53 PM on March 19, 2004

sure it was!
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 8:44 AM on March 20, 2004

i didn't like komodo when i used it. it felt unwieldy. i wish i could provide better contrast, but i have to say that i use vim for file editing as well. vim's default html edit mode doesn't match my indent style, and i think its initial color scheme is horrendous, but it turns out i like modal editing. i like integrating editing with file browsing and debugging myself rather than rely on an IDE, so vim being just a text editor suits me better than an integrated solution like homesite.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by moz at 12:51 PM on December 31, 2003