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I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds H2G2 intolerably nannyish in its editing, and filled with fans trying to write in a self-conscious Douglas Adams style.

As for the community aspect, there are few places that can top E2 for that. Noders (E2 users) meet in real life all the time, all around the world. There have been births, marriages and deaths. E2 may be unfriendly to new noders (and new order), but is certainly is a strong community.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds H2G2 intolerably nannyish in its editing, and filled with fans trying to write in a self-conscious Douglas Adams style.

As for the community aspect, there are few places that can top E2 for that. Noders (E2 users) meet in real life all the time, all around the world. There have been births, marriages and deaths. E2 may be unfriendly to new noders (and new order), but is certainly is a strong community.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds H2G2 intolerably nannyish in its editing, and filled with fans trying to write in a self-conscious Douglas Adams style.

As for the community aspect, there are few places that can top E2 for that. Noders (E2 users) meet in real life all the time, all around the world. There have been births, marriages and deaths. E2 may be unfriendly to new noders (and new order), but is certainly is a strong community.

No worries, product byproduct. I've got it covered!

I know which I'd prefer

Seems you only seem to know this fellow if you have moderator duty.

Everything Statistics

For any doubters you know that say collaboration can't generate something awesome, Wikipedia is a gigantic, glowing, neon proof that it can, indeed

But still, what does it all matter as long as userfriendly.org is still online?

To: Illiad

We respectfully ask you to delete all content hosted at userfriendly.org at your earliest convenience.

What's currently hosted there is, by its astonishing amateurism and outright offensive unfunniness, diluting the "User Friendly" concept currently used by parodies of boring and badly drawn web comics based on the incessant repetition of ancient tech support jokes and stereotypical anti-Microsoft zealotry.

These parodies are facing a bleak future, when there are sites like yours that are honestly intended to be "entertaining" by using even more tired clichés and even worse artwork than the parodies. How are parody authors supposed to survive if the objects of parody suddenly start to express the parodied traits even more extremely than the parodies?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-04 -07
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-08 -20&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-04 -17
http://www.somethingawful.com/features/usarfreindl ey/
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-11.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-20.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-27.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-32.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-39.htm
http://somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/phot oshop/variety3/Eegah_comic.jpg
http://www.themushroom.com/mush0122/unfriendlyuser .html

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=user%20fr iendly
http://internettrash.com/users/theepisodes/keenshi t.htm
http://rmitz.org/comics.html
http://www.amk.ca/books/h/User_Friendly.html
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Rant s/ComicStrips.html

Enough already. Stop it.

why is userfriendly.org still on-line?

To: Illiad

We respectfully ask you to delete all content hosted at userfriendly.org at your earliest convenience.

What's currently hosted there is, by its astonishing amateurism and outright offensive unfunniness, diluting the "User Friendly" concept currently used by parodies of boring and badly drawn web comics based on the incessant repetition of ancient tech support jokes and stereotypical anti-Microsoft zealotry.

These parodies are facing a bleak future, when there are sites like yours that are honestly intended to be "entertaining" by using even more tired clichés and even worse artwork than the parodies. How are parody authors supposed to survive if the objects of parody suddenly start to express the parodied traits even more extremely than the parodies?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-04 -07
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-08 -20&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-04 -17
http://www.somethingawful.com/features/usarfreindl ey/
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-11.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-20.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-27.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-32.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-39.htm
http://somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/phot oshop/variety3/Eegah_comic.jpg
http://www.themushroom.com/mush0122/unfriendlyuser .html

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=user%20fr iendly
http://internettrash.com/users/theepisodes/keenshi t.htm
http://rmitz.org/comics.html
http://www.amk.ca/books/h/User_Friendly.html
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Rant s/ComicStrips.html

Enough already. Stop it.

Firstly, Magneto has it wrong, Mutants are humans since they can interbreed with any Homo-sapien on the Marvel earth. They would be better classified as the only other race of Homo-sapiens (NB "races" such as Caucasian, Indian, Hispanic, etc. don't really exist because there isn't enough differences in the genetics for such races to exist within the definition of biology.)

Secondly, you're right, in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter all that much, but it's still something to be upset about. The X-Men, for many people, aren't merely characters in a great piece of fiction, but also a metaphor for those in humanity who have felt the sting of oppression by fellow human beings.

This comic also shows that oppressed people are still human. Being oppressed does not necessarily provide justification for all actions used to break that oppression. The comic shows the complexity of human nature and its affairs, rather than trying to make clear distinctions between good and evil.

It's the old issue of states' rights. See nullification.

I used to be massively in favor of a strong federal gov't over states, (what you'd expect from Republican public school teachers covering the (American) Civil War) until I got involved with this crowd.

Now I find myself standing on the battlefield between the two. Quite uncomfortable.

This is about as bright as the already in-effect tax on writeable media. It goes to the RIAA et al to reimburse them for piracy. So we pay for piracy and still can't do it.

Just when you thought that the corporate-owned government couldn't screw us in a more blatant, shameless and imaginative way, along comes Hillary...

Only if the mushroom is one of those magic mushrooms.

Arcaeris beat you to it.

gosh I never knew that.

Did the Human Genome Project do much research into soup preference alleles?

I thought that it was people who cut of fins not races.

You'll be telling me next that me not drinking milk is an insult to my ancestors or some other such nonsense.

Nowadays that's about as useful as Duff's Device and doubly-linked lists with a single pointer. With the register renaming in modern processors, swaps are effortless.

An interesting case of ex post facto, or "after the fact" thinking.

According to some interpretations of Schrodinger's Cat, if one were to employ such a black box with cryptographic keys, it may never work; this is in the same jest that the code to Windows 9x has never been seen, and consequently randomly doesn't work.

I'm sure you all know what Dance Dance Revolution is

Yeah. It's that knockoff of Nintendo's own Dance Aerobics for the NES.

All Nintendo needs to do to compete with Konami's DDR for Sony's hardware is re-introduce the Power Pad, adapt it to the GCN's joybus, rotate it 90 degrees anticlockwise, and publish "Mario Dance Party".

Oh, so maybe one of the "G"s in "3G" is really that G?

("and why do I have /usr/local/bin, and why is it empty?").

See:

/usr/local

cheers & hth
bmh

I want to run mercury through my cooling system. I've got a couple of pounds of it, and it would certainly absorb heat more readily than water.

If I'm not mistaken, H2O (water) has a MUCH higher (1.00) specific heat than Hg (mercury) (0.033).

Water would certainly absorb heat more readily than mercury.

You'd need approximately 3 times the amount of mercury as water, to get the same effect.

(been a long time since chem 112, though -- correct me if I'm wrong).

See: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Specific% 20heat

S

Here's where I saw that post first

Disney's Pinocchio 2.0 (2002) starring Roberto Benigni is much more faithful to the novel than Disney's Pinocchio 1.0 (1940) was, but it got bad reviews and AFAIK didn't do that well at the box office. Fidelity to a classic literary work doesn't guarantee ticket sales; the movie must be adapted to the cultures that exist 95 years later. It's possible to pull this off, but it's also possible to screw it up to hell as in The Time Machine (2002).

This is how it's pronounced according to the article.

doe (a deer a female deer) + GIN (and tonic) + she (pronoun) = doujinshi

Actually, the Japanese don't emphasise syllables

Japanese does have a pitch accent. See this explanation.

I disagree. Timothy's statement (submitter's text is always in italics, the 'snide remark' was in plain font) wasn't very scathing, nor did it provide a one-sided viewpoint of Microsoft's business or products.

It was a joke. Plain and simple, it wasn't at anyone's expense, either. Like you said, they dropped support for it...which is why he mentioned it.

Just because you read something you thought was ocol on their KnowledgeBase or E2 doesn't mean you have to accuse others of being closed minded and act indignant.

• Browsing of terrorist or dissenting, un-patriotic, or otherwise not wholesome all-american websites.
  
  
• Use of any audio/video compression technology other than lisenced and government approved encoding protocols. No matter if you have no pirate material, If you have the ability and tools, you're dangerous enough!
  
  
• Any expression of dissenting or un-patriotic views or opinions in your messenger histories, message board/newsgroup postings, emails, or slashdot poll votes.

A/S/L

Since the author has failed to specify the species he belongs to, I am assuming he is a lemur.

Of course, the sad thing is that this time is already "wasted", since there can never be a conclusion to these games.

Ah, so it's a sunk cost. Well if there is one thing I got out of that one economics course I took it's that SUNK COSTS ARE IRREVELENT.

Suppose motorcycles are really cool and I buy one for $50k. A lot of people do the same. Next a whole bunch of people ridding motorcycles get killed. So now nobody wants to ride/own a motorcycle. Now I realize that I don't really ride it very often and I go to sell it. Supose because of the reduced demand the market price is only $10k. Now I'm stuck. I can refuse to sell it at $10k because I paid $50k but really then it's still worth next to nothing to me (because I don't use it). If I were to accept that sunk costs are gone and I can't recover them then by selling it at least I'll get $10k.

- chuck

Sergei Kopeikin was my undergraduate physics prof.

He's one of the handful of professors I've had that really grok their discipline.

And somewhere, echoing through the mountains of Norway, the [Hallelujah] Chorus is heard...

Either that, or Yes! We have no bananas!

Personally, I assumed it was some sort of reference to the old Beach Boys song "Surfin' Safari". You know, web surfing -> Surfin' Safari ->Safari.

We're probably both right.

Quoted from From Everything.com:

There are currently two theories for what dark matter is. The first is the MACHO theory. MACHO stands for Massive Compact Halo Object. This basically means there are large objects orbit on the outskirts of the milky way. These are large objects which weren't big enough to become stars. They are probably about the mass of Jupiter. We know that at least some MACHO's exist by the way they lense or bend the light from a distant star. Although we have observed lensing, it doesn't occur frequently enough to account for all the mass that needs to be in the outer halo.

Now say only a small percentage of that halo is actually stars, the rest could be those MACHO's.

The reason scientists believe that there should be dark matter is because of the fact that the stars on the edge of galaxies move faster than they should. According to the measured amounts of mass in a galaxy, the stars on the edges would fly out of orbit at the speeds they are going.

Extra mass on the outer fringe of a galaxy could not contribute to this lack of gravity. I am pretty sure that more than 1% of the galaxy's mass is missing also. But I suppose this goes to show that we never know as much as we think we do.

Checkout the everything 2 node on dark matter for more information.

Just just gotta love this one:
include/asm-mips/mmu_context.h: /* Fuck. The f-word is here so you can grep for it :-) */

Just just gotta love this one:
include/asm-mips/mmu_context.h: /* Fuck. The f-word is here so you can grep for it :-) */

peeps would be the African American vernacular for "peoples"

No, I don't have a link. Oh, OK then, I found this on E2.com. Hows that?

How do you think Disney makes all their money? The don't own classic greats such as "Pinochio"

Disney owns Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940). Every other direct[1] film adaptation of the novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (read an English translation here) has failed at the box office because the differences from the familiar Disney version are too jarring. Just look at how bad Disney's Pinocchio 2.0 (2002) is doing, even though it is more faithful to the novel, chapter by chapter, than any previous feature film adaptation of the novel. The obvious conclusion is that Disney has co-opted the common knowledge of Pinocchio so as to create a false impression in the average American's mind that "if it's not Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940), it's not the real Pinocchio."

[1] I don't consider Short Circuit or A.I. a direct adaptation.

• Slashdot: Email (As We Know It) Doomed?
• Slashdot: Human vs. Computer Intelligence
• Everything 2: The CAPTCHA Project

Actually, some VM do cache friendly management. All of the VM's take care of basic byte-alignment issues.

The instruction ordering for which you need explicit declaration of read/write barriers for are large matrix math operations, and even then it only matters if you've got huge amounts of data parallelism from a vector processor. Everything2 has a better description than I can write. All of the modern JVM's currently do basic instruction reordering just like C++ compilers, and it's enough to keep the execution units in modern CPU's pretty busy. Things like the "restrict" keyword aren't going to help much with that.

As for "-client vs. -server". This is really basic Java stuff. Check out Sun's own docs on the matter. Where to start. *BOTH* VM's are HotSpot VM's. Both behave the way you describe the client. The difference is that the client VM does less profiling of the code and performs fewer optimisations (actually, there are many more differences, but this is what's relevant to what you said). The benchmark taking a "couple of minutes" to run is not enough for the -server VM to really shine. It's designed for programs that at least run for hours.

Finally, it's actually NOT the number of minutes that the code runs that really determines what optimisations are good/bad for performance. It's the number of times the same code is run. And while some of the code is undoubtedly getting optimised, it is not enough for it to get all the optimisations, and it is certainly not enough for the optimisations to outweigh the penalty for profiling that was incurred during the earlier execution.

My childhood garage probably still has purple and black stains all over it

Usually those stains are kind of yellowish. What the hell are you?

You know, after looking at his face, I lost my animo to type comments... Oh wait...

Why would anyone trust a government which could do something as heinous as the Tuskegee experiments [everything2.com]?

If you don't already completely distrust the government to the point that you expect little other than mismanagement at best and death at worst, you're not very smart in the first place. Why would anyone trust a government which could do something as heinous as the Tuskegee experiments? And the sad thing is that is not even as bad as it gets. Sure, this isn't the Soviet Union under Stalin, but saying we're better than mass murderers seems to be damning faint praise.

Gez I know someone who was arrested & locked up for reporting the theft of her handbag

So do you claim that being locked up for reporting something stolen doesn't just happen to little wooden boys in fairy tales?

Another case of life imitating art... or at least catching up with it. To anyone interested in nanotechnology, I suggest reading the Neal Stephenson book "The Diamond Age".

It occurs to me that there are a finite set of possible ring tone combinations

Yes. However, even if you limit it to 16 notes of 12 pitches (do through sol in the next octave, or do chromatically through ti in the same octave) and short, medium, or long duration, you get 36^16 possible notes, on the order of 10^25 or 2^83. That's possibly several zillion times more information than exists in all the libraries of all the congresses of all the countries of all the planets in our galaxy.

However, copyright law does consider some partial melody matches to constitute infringing misappropriation. Look at an essay I wrote about the "Yes! We have no bananas!" case and musical combinatorics that argues that there exist fewer than fifty thousand melodies that a judge (who is not a musician) would consider distinct.

Therefore, someone could create a comprehensive database of all possible ringtone combinations

That's been tried with telephone numbers.

There's no doubt about it. LotR, when the final chapter closes next year, will be one of the greatest success storys in Cinema history. Period. Apart from the garunteed fame at becoming "The Trilogy that was 'impossible' to make" and made in astounding style (ain't technology grand?), it stands as one of the greatest box office triumphs of all time.

The three LotR films were made simultaniously, then post-produced in the year prior to each film's release. The total cost, in the end, will probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. Remember years ago when Kevin Costner spent $100 million on Lemonworld? We all know how that turned out. It was considered crazy to give a movie that kind of price tag. Now, here we have three movies at that cost each.

And Peter Jackson hit a god-damned out of the park grand slam. Fellowship's worldwide take since it's release? Over $800 million. Say what you will about film companies and what they do with their money. But $800 million? That paid for all three movies, enough to make three MORE movies, with room to make at least one more (two if they held it to the $100 million average as closely as possible).

One movie did that.

Now, here we are, not even a week into Two Tower's first run. What the hell is this one going to make? By alot of accounts (including my own), Towers is better then Fellowship in many respects. The story becomes darker, and there's plenty more action. And that, scarily enough, will get bigger in Return of the King with the Battle of Pelennor Fields.

Now translate that into dollars. If TTT hits even half of FotR, it will be a box office haul and a half. Plus, you have RotK comingnext year. Fellowship said "hello", TTT said "look at me", and RotK will say "find out how this whole mess ends."

The math is simple. The result? Bucks. What they do with said bucks is questionable, yes. But they made out like bandits. And it's not over yet. The movie they said could never be made has been made, and it's laughing all the way to box office history...

And hey, all you LotR fans. Got a link for ya. Check out The Encyclopedia of Arda. If this site had the , boy could we have fun!