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Name three!

No mystery there, Tea. I wasn't any good at it.

Good question. Largely because I didn't think of it, and I probably didn't think of it because I don't have any decent imaging software that isn't a complete pain in the A, except for an open source thingie that usually works but only over a network .... er .. PING. That would do the job, actually.

Darn it, I would love faster drive performance on my Thinkpad. But I wouldn't trust anything other than a Samsung - well, just maybe I would, so long as it wasn't a Western Digital - and I am always battling for space. I could probably live with reduced battery life if the difference wasn't too...

You been hanging out with DD?

sigh

Sigh. I suppose you think the sun shines out of your ... er .. bottom, too.

Pull your head in, OK? You are getting a bit too full of it lately.

Tea?

Just as well you are here, Tea, 'cause there's no other bugger wants to chat with me.

Good point.

Hmmm ... OK. But, on the other hand, the US does take the idea of seperation of powers fairly seriously - more seriously than (for example) the Australians or the English do. I don't quite know how they manage to achieve it, given their hopless voting system, but their legislative bodies (House...

Huh? Have you been munching smart pills again, Tea? Sorry, that was uncalled for. I'll start again. No, it hadn't occurred to me, Tea. Why do you ask?

Just quietly, the US electoral system strikes me as utterly bizarre. Probably the best thing I can think of to say about it is that it's better than the system they use in Ruanda. Democracy in the USA is like the dancing bear: the astonishing thing isn't that it dances so well (for it dances...

I'm comfortable just using the Mark III as-is for the time being. Yes, I don't think it is working as well as a $6500 camera ought to, at least not all the time, but nevertheless it mostly takes better shots than any other camera I own and I would really miss the responsiveness and all round...

Sdbardwick's suggestion is a good one. Dells, like Compaqs, are incredibly badly designed, and I wouldn't put that sort of idiocy beyond them for one moment. Considering the amount of extra work required to semi-cripple what was probably a perfectly good OEM design before they got their hands on...

By the way, the main item on the diet of these chaps is eucalyptus leaves, so this must have been a rare and special delicacy. I understand that around 40% of the total energy intake of most possum species is used to detoxify the leaves they eat. For millions of years, eucalypts have been...

Our "squirrels" ain't squirrels, they are possums. I didn't feed this one, at least not deliberately, I was just a little slow picking up a banana peel after my evening meal and before I knew it, I had visitors. I haven't looked the little fella up yet. Normally (i.e., in most of Australia)...

This is probably the same article reprinted. But you can read this one without buggerising about with logins and such. http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/heres-the-beef-meateating-days-may-be-numbered/2008/02/03/1201973737372.html

$12.95 a month to host a personal homepage? Wow!

The strange question to me is - why does Yahoo have any revenue at all? I mean, (Flicker aside) who would give Yahoo money? What for?

Cute litte thing.

Thankyou, Tea. That would be nice.

And you'd know about mornings, would you? Ha! The only time I've ever seen you up before the crack of noon was that time you ran out of gin and sat around singing out-of-key and drinking Irish coffee all night, and couldn't sleep for a week afterwards.

It's not habit, Tea. It's professionalism.

Then we are more-or-less oposites, Piyono. Because the bulk of my photography is with the long lenses, I'm used to thinking of f/5.6 as "normal", f/4 as "fast", and f/2.8 as "super-fast". In order of most-used to least-used, my current lenses are: f/4 f/4 f/3.5-4.5 f/4.5-5.6 f/2.8 f/3.5-5.6...

By the way, I don't especially want want one of those Sigma monsters. Sure, I wouldn't throw one out of my bed if I found it there one morning, but it's way too heavy to be a practical everyday lens like the 500/4 I already have, or even the 800/5.6 I have my eye (and my sister's virtue) on.

And, as it turns out, that particular "some time in the future" was roughly 8 hours after I made my post. How's that for a fast response?! Now, if I can only get the Canon guys to read my posts here at Storage Forum as assiduously as the Sigma people do, I'll get my 200-400/4L IS announced...

Unfortunately, I agree. Even more unfortunately, I seem to have run out of grandmothers. Would anyone like to buy my sister?

Lunar, what are your thoughts on the new Canon 800/5.6?

Those are not a "real" lens, in the sense that you can't actually buy one. That is a one-off they made for a trade show. Sigma don't seem to be in any hurry to make them, and at this stage have not committed to ever making them, although they may do at some time in the future. The weight is...

Sorry, Piyono, this isn't making any sense to me. Let's translate it step by step and see where it gets us. Put a 500/4 (standard big, fast birding lens, indeed the standard birding lens, assuming you can afford one) on a D3 (a camera that, together with the 5D, delivers less pixels on the bird...

But, Fushigi, there is no question that the costs, wastes, and inefficiencies of growing vast amounts of vegetable protein in order to produce small amounts of animal protein are of a different order of magnitude to those of the alternative. I can't remember the figures now, but the difference...

So, if (for bird photography) a D300 is better than a D3 and a 40D is better than a 5D, why don't we have even higher pixel density for the ultimate birding camera? Because there is an optimum range. Where the pixel density is too low, you sacrifice detail. Where the pixel density is too high...

Huh? Oh, sorry, I must have dozed off. Hang on a minute, I need a cup of tea for ths ...... Right. Stop right there. This is bird photography we are talking about. You aren't filling your D3 viewfinder, not most of the time, and in fact you aren't even filling the viewfinder of a D300...

Humour, Mubs. Well, it's a how-to in Photoshop, sort of. You know the general style, you see the PS screen and all the actions taking place while someone mumbles on about what he is doing and how you can do it too .... the kicker is that it isn't really a Photoshop tutorial, it's a satire, the...

Can't. Tea drank all the gin. Again!

Certainly, Tea. If this was WD, the diagnostic software would work and the hard drives would be duds.

Unhhh .. that was very deep, E_dawg, almost poetic. Are you sure you are not wasted in banking?

Buck posted a great link on this topic a few years ago. Worth digging out and rereading.

Hmmm .. if you are posting in the fair tax thread, Mubs, maybe I should read it after all. I did glance at it once or twice, and probably tried to drag it off-topic early on (as is my habit) but most of it seemed to be far-right ranting of the predictable kind, with pretty-much equally...

Worse, actually, though it's a neat idea, which I might get some value from at another time, but for this particular task, all I need is to pass mysql a query containing a PHP constant. Well, I don't need to do that, Kludge (a) above works just fine, it's simply that I don't like it because...

Oh, I should have explained that "query()" above is just a function I wrote that makes a DB link (if required), calls mysql_query, and does some error checking.

Sorry Doug, I was unclear in my post. In the example above, `date` represents a field in the mysql "movies" database named "date", but it could just as easily have been something else. The actual fragment of code that prompted my question was this: $minyear = MINYEAR; result = query( "SELECT...

Maybe you can help me with this one, Dave. How do I pass a constant to SQL? This is straightforward: SELECT * FROM movies WHERE `date` < '$year' But what if $year is not a variable, but the PHP constant YEAR? Obviously, I can do this: $temp = YEAR; and then SELECT * FROM movies WHERE...

Ahh, yes, that makes sense. You are right, these last few months that hasn't been an issue. The Spybot servers are a lot more reliable than they use to be too.

PS: I will not be sorry to see the end of the United States World Empire, though I'll probably not live to see the entire story - these things take many decades to happen. Taken as a whole, the USA has been a bad world ruler: the strong American traditions of individual liberty and free spech...

It's been on the cards for a long, long time. You can't go on living in a fool's paradise forever. (Shrug.) It's like the day your tax falls due: you may not like it, you may or may not be prepared for it, but it was always going to arrive, and there never was anything you could do about it...

I haven't bought an HP product since Tea was 7 years old.

Great link, Mubs. Tea has gone off to the other computer to watch it over again.