I mean, when was the last time Billy Boy coded
anything? College and I think that was BASIC.
Careful... The worst project manager I ever had confessed to me while drunk one night that he used to be shit-hot programmer... he didn't know an "if " statement from a freight train - but not to his mind!
Should you go and see the movie...
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 1
...after they've asked you to remove the direct link to the file? Probably not.
Beyond the Kuiper Belt is yet another conglomeration of chunks of rock and dust called the Oort Cloud. This also surrounds our solar
system and may actually protect us from some of the things that could zip into the system and strike another planet or disrupt things....[snip]....has been suggested that perhaps the Oort Cloud has a good amount of Dark Matter in it, but that's pretty much conjecture right now.
If I was a religeous nutter trying to marry science with theology - I'd be calling the Oort Cloud something else... HEAVEN.
While the situation in the article was not as clear-cut as the example I used, the fact remains that if a company (or its Admins) has a definitive stance against running Linux on their networks the n you have an obligation to abide by that stance as an employee of the company.
If you don't like it you can quit (or face dismissal for breaching their guidelines)
A large number of slashdotters have voiced their discust at any company that looks to firing an employee for installing Linux... thats bullshit. It's their money and their gear. You get paid to do a job the way they want you to do it, and the only alternative is to convince them that your way should be their way - if they disagree you've got a choice to make.
I think this is outrageous that someone could be fired for installing an OS on a computer.
Woah! It's their equipment, their product, their company, their money and their job that you are being paid to do.
If a company explicitly states that Linux is not to be deployed on their networks, then Linux is not to be deployed on their networks until such time as you convince them otherwise. If someone deliberately and knowingly ingores it, they do so at their own risk - the possible consequence, as with most other company policies, is that you get fired for violating it. What is your problem with that?
Not to be too critical, but you're on-call for four weeks of the year and you get an extra $60 a week whether you get a call or not, and possibly an extra $120 if you go on site.
Whilst $60 may not be a lot, the on call component of your job isn't much of an extra load if you're only doing it for four weeks in the year.
I've often wondered about what is it about human perception that continually raises a bar and becomes accustomed to the beauty of a current technologies graphical limits, and then when faced with a better revision can instantly find the old, much vaunted console or 3d engine incredibly ugly. What is it about perception that allows itself to instantly refine itself when faced with a better simulation?
...and I'm not just talking about the dated hairstyles and fashion of a certain era.
I was watching a rerun of Cliffhanger the other day and remembered thinking how fantastic the scenery was etc. Seeing it the other day - it looked old, and I can't put my finger on what it was... it was just old. Maybe movies like Titanic and the Perfect storm etc. have raised the visual bar a notch... I don't know.
My other thought on the topic is that, as with movies, the better the realism gets, the faster the movie or games seems to date.
This is why there are still plenty of people playing Quake and Starcraft. They are poor examples of current (audio visual) technology,
but as games they are just plain very entertaining.
I'd go one further and say that the real reason people are still playing quake is that its interactivity.
They're not playing against the computer - they're playing against each other and quake, and others that have survived, do a great job of reflecting a player's skill level.
You are generally killed because you're in the wrong spot at the wrong time - not because of some poor interpretation of the moves you just made.
Same with all car/flight sims... fuck the graphics, the replays from a thousand angles etc - it all comes down to the handling. eg. the thing that set Sega Rally apart from all the other car sims in the arcades a few years back, and the difference between Gran Turismo and TOCA 2 on the playstation (though TNFS 2 was even better from a handling point of view)
Didn't Lawrence P. Waterhouse solve this one a few years back?
M@T
Re:if the riaa really was embacing new technology.
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 1
Further more, and the recording industry -- whose business is finding new ways to make music available to more people -- will continue to embrace them first implies that "the recording industry" and RIAA are one and the same, and second implies that "the recording industry" is the only channel people have for obtaining music. (ie. RIAA)
RIAA is an organisation representing a collection or companies associated with recorded music. The are not the entire set of recording companies and are not the entire set of poeple capable of generating music (as evidenced by mp3.com's list of independent artists, etc.)
I wish more people would play up on this fact and the fact that there are legitimate uses for napster-like technology.
Re:Conceding your lawsuit is baseless?
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 1
But Napster does profit from trading in copyrighted works (Keep the "it's a search engine" comments to yourselves, please). Napster is a business.
Are you implying that Napster isn't a search engine? The service provides one person connected to the internet with location and file attributes for a file stored by another person connected to the internet. The technology could just as easily be applied to any form of file transferal...
A copyright voilation has occurred, yes. But by the storer of copyrighted works and by the receiver of copyrighted works. All napster is is a file transfer utility that happens to make this easier that it normally would be. Apart from that there are legitimate LEGAL uses for napster which would also be lost were the technology ruled to be illegal.
RIAA's lawsuit is a bandaid solution to the real problem of digital audio utilities differentiating between copyrighted and non-copyrighted works and the further issue of whether or not they should have to.
Great! We're now going to be paying royalties to RIAA for music provided by independent artists who have released their music for free specifically to avoid having to deal with the BIG record labels.
This sounds like a typical OEM deal with Microsoft... you bought a linux box? Too bad, you're paying for a Microsoft license anyway!
Is all the flak Microsoft gets a result of decisions directly made by Bill Gates?
Certainly.
By all accounts Bill Gates is very involved in the inner wheels of Microsoft, from marketing through to development. I doubt anything of magnitude happens at Microsoft without it passing across his desk.
A) NBC delays the coverage for multiple hours in order to run it during prime-time. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten that the one of the big things that makes the sports exciting is that you don't know who won in advance. Given the prevelence of alternative media outlets (*cough* internet *cough*) there is little reason to watch if I already know who won.
This is it. Forget the bios, ad breaks, diversity of the coverage etc. This will be THE ratings killer.
For once in my life it is good to be an Australian trying to follow an international sport. Aussies, given our poor standing on the international date line, are used to sitting up till all hours of the night to watch the Formula 1 GP, Motorbike racing, World Cup soccer, cricket, NBA etc.
It happens every week, but the point is that most Australians with a real interest will sit up until all hours of the morning to see it live rather than read about it tomorrow... same with the Olympics...
As an aside, I hope they're not comparing NBCs ratings for the Sydney Olympics against Atlanta... When you're the host nation everything is different.
The rights to web publication were sold to Rogers (Canada's biggest cable provider and one of the @home franchisss), while the TV rights went to the CBC.
It's funny that the IOC sold the rights to web publication to a particular company for each country... I would have thought one web company could do the lot. With TV and media, assuming they can't sell the material onwards, you have a fairly specific coverage area. With the web, as well know, those boundaries disappear with Rogers being in direct competition with every other web site who bought the rights.
They only way I can see them seperating themselves from the opposition is by focusing your content heavily on local competitors - which means a lotta wasted content you've paid big bucks for.
The IOC has, more and more, lost the concept of the fact that the Games are not just national spectacle, but also tales of achievement, and they're cutting off one of the really great ways to show that sort of ethic off.
Isn't this the exact reason NBS is getting such a bad name at the moment?
Yep! The IOC made sure the only ones reporting were their 'approved' pool of 'press'. No fan diaries, no 'I saw [blah] winning the 5,000 Meter Balloon toss'.
Load of crap. The IOC can bar the athletes from sharing their experiences during the games by making it a condition of their participation.
No one signed a non-disclosure contract when they bought their Olympic tickets or sat down in front of the tv and watched an event... they can write about "the expereince" all they want.
Besides which, the local economy is given a massive boost, the host country gets a whole load of foreign currency...
Not likely... there is no immediate money in hosting the Olympic Games. The Australian taxpyer is currently footing the bill for the Sydney games, though I do believe Sydney WAS on target to be the first games to actually break even... but the failure of their tickets-for-the-rich scheme would have busted that idea.
The real benefit comes from the boost to tourism and increased international exposure over the next few years... thats where the return is - its certainly not at the gate.
She's not allowed to write down her thoughts for the day and call it a diary...
but she is allowed to be interviewed daily and pass on her thoughts to a journalist in a Q&A session.
The end result is the same so why bother enforcing the ban? and why isn't the Kanzas (something) Star emailing her every night to get around it? Something along the lines of... "you write down your thoughts for the day... and we'll work some relevant questions into it when you're done"
for you maybe, not for the guy who can't see sarcasm staring him in the face, of which there are quite a few. Just trying to avoid an ill-directed rant.
p.s. look who is calling the kettle black.
If you're referring to my stance on associating mp3 usage with gun control then, as far as I'm concerned, thats pretty much on topic... The original poster made the correlation - I disputed its validity, and had a go at the point he made, not how he made the point.
If, on the other hand, you're referring to my jab at the spelling mistake in the AC's post... then of course it was the pot calling the kettle black - that was the whole f#%$ing point of it.
1) Database driven web sites make it difficult to directly index pages on a particular site. This is compounded by the fact that site specific search engines are usually ill-equipped for anything other than the most basic word searches.
2) Apathy on behalf of the user in that they never get around to actually checking out the site's 'How to use this search engine' section and rarely stray from your basic keyword search, but will bemoan the number of results returned anyway. (eg. '+host:' option on altavista)
3) Apathy on behalf of the search engine site in not providing the tips and tricks mentioned in item 2 such that a user can't break the search down any further even if they wanted to.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, when was the last time Billy Boy coded
anything? College and I think that was BASIC.
Careful... The worst project manager I ever had confessed to me while drunk one night that he used to be shit-hot programmer... he didn't know an "if " statement from a freight train - but not to his mind!
...after they've asked you to remove the direct link to the file? Probably not.
Why did you guys comply? They asked... so what!?
Beyond the Kuiper Belt is yet another conglomeration of chunks of rock and dust called the Oort Cloud. This also surrounds our solar
system and may actually protect us from some of the things that could zip into the system and strike another planet or disrupt things....[snip]....has been suggested that perhaps the Oort Cloud has a good amount of Dark Matter in it, but that's pretty much conjecture right now.
If I was a religeous nutter trying to marry science with theology - I'd be calling the Oort Cloud something else... HEAVEN.
While the situation in the article was not as clear-cut as the example I used, the fact remains that if a company (or its Admins) has a definitive stance against running Linux on their networks the n you have an obligation to abide by that stance as an employee of the company.
If you don't like it you can quit (or face dismissal for breaching their guidelines)
A large number of slashdotters have voiced their discust at any company that looks to firing an employee for installing Linux... thats bullshit. It's their money and their gear. You get paid to do a job the way they want you to do it, and the only alternative is to convince them that your way should be their way - if they disagree you've got a choice to make.
I think this is outrageous that someone could be fired for installing an OS on a computer.
Woah! It's their equipment, their product, their company, their money and their job that you are being paid to do.
If a company explicitly states that Linux is not to be deployed on their networks, then Linux is not to be deployed on their networks until such time as you convince them otherwise. If someone deliberately and knowingly ingores it, they do so at their own risk - the possible consequence, as with most other company policies, is that you get fired for violating it. What is your problem with that?
Not to be too critical, but you're on-call for four weeks of the year and you get an extra $60 a week whether you get a call or not, and possibly an extra $120 if you go on site.
Whilst $60 may not be a lot, the on call component of your job isn't much of an extra load if you're only doing it for four weeks in the year.
You either want the job or you don't.
I've often wondered about what is it about human perception that continually raises a bar and becomes accustomed to the beauty of a current technologies graphical limits, and then when faced with a better revision can instantly find the old, much vaunted console or 3d engine incredibly ugly. What is it about perception that allows itself to instantly refine itself when faced with a better simulation?
...and I'm not just talking about the dated hairstyles and fashion of a certain era.
I was watching a rerun of Cliffhanger the other day and remembered thinking how fantastic the scenery was etc. Seeing it the other day - it looked old, and I can't put my finger on what it was... it was just old. Maybe movies like Titanic and the Perfect storm etc. have raised the visual bar a notch... I don't know.
My other thought on the topic is that, as with movies, the better the realism gets, the faster the movie or games seems to date.
This is why there are still plenty of people playing Quake and Starcraft. They are poor examples of current (audio visual) technology,
but as games they are just plain very entertaining.
I'd go one further and say that the real reason people are still playing quake is that its interactivity.
They're not playing against the computer - they're playing against each other and quake, and others that have survived, do a great job of reflecting a player's skill level.
You are generally killed because you're in the wrong spot at the wrong time - not because of some poor interpretation of the moves you just made.
Same with all car/flight sims... fuck the graphics, the replays from a thousand angles etc - it all comes down to the handling. eg. the thing that set Sega Rally apart from all the other car sims in the arcades a few years back, and the difference between Gran Turismo and TOCA 2 on the playstation (though TNFS 2 was even better from a handling point of view)
Didn't Lawrence P. Waterhouse solve this one a few years back?
M@T
Further more, and the recording industry -- whose business is finding new ways to make music available to more people -- will continue to embrace them first implies that "the recording industry" and RIAA are one and the same, and second implies that "the recording industry" is the only channel people have for obtaining music. (ie. RIAA)
RIAA is an organisation representing a collection or companies associated with recorded music. The are not the entire set of recording companies and are not the entire set of poeple capable of generating music (as evidenced by mp3.com's list of independent artists, etc.)
I wish more people would play up on this fact and the fact that there are legitimate uses for napster-like technology.
But Napster does profit from trading in copyrighted works (Keep the "it's a search engine" comments to yourselves, please). Napster is a business.
Are you implying that Napster isn't a search engine? The service provides one person connected to the internet with location and file attributes for a file stored by another person connected to the internet. The technology could just as easily be applied to any form of file transferal...
A copyright voilation has occurred, yes. But by the storer of copyrighted works and by the receiver of copyrighted works. All napster is is a file transfer utility that happens to make this easier that it normally would be. Apart from that there are legitimate LEGAL uses for napster which would also be lost were the technology ruled to be illegal.
RIAA's lawsuit is a bandaid solution to the real problem of digital audio utilities differentiating between copyrighted and non-copyrighted works and the further issue of whether or not they should have to.
Great! We're now going to be paying royalties to RIAA for music provided by independent artists who have released their music for free specifically to avoid having to deal with the BIG record labels.
This sounds like a typical OEM deal with Microsoft... you bought a linux box? Too bad, you're paying for a Microsoft license anyway!
Was this really a Steve Jobs decision?
Probably not.
Is all the flak Microsoft gets a result of decisions directly made by Bill Gates?
Certainly.
By all accounts Bill Gates is very involved in the inner wheels of Microsoft, from marketing through to development. I doubt anything of magnitude happens at Microsoft without it passing across his desk.
Get McAfee and Norton to list it as a known Outlook virus and send an update out.
So we must all agree first what constitutes damage to the consumer.
Actually, you must first agree as to what constitutes a consumer, then you can assess damages.
Is it the general public or is it the guy who has to deal with Microsoft directly (eg. OEM, VAR etc) ?
A) NBC delays the coverage for multiple hours in order to run it during prime-time. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten that the one of the big things that makes the sports exciting is that you don't know who won in advance. Given the prevelence of alternative media outlets (*cough* internet *cough*) there is little reason to watch if I already know who won.
This is it. Forget the bios, ad breaks, diversity of the coverage etc. This will be THE ratings killer.
For once in my life it is good to be an Australian trying to follow an international sport. Aussies, given our poor standing on the international date line, are used to sitting up till all hours of the night to watch the Formula 1 GP, Motorbike racing, World Cup soccer, cricket, NBA etc.
It happens every week, but the point is that most Australians with a real interest will sit up until all hours of the morning to see it live rather than read about it tomorrow... same with the Olympics...
As an aside, I hope they're not comparing NBCs ratings for the Sydney Olympics against Atlanta... When you're the host nation everything is different.
Isn't this the exact reason NBS...
err NBC.
Stop before you start.... its a typo.
The rights to web publication were sold to Rogers (Canada's biggest cable provider and one of the @home franchisss), while the TV rights went to the CBC.
It's funny that the IOC sold the rights to web publication to a particular company for each country... I would have thought one web company could do the lot. With TV and media, assuming they can't sell the material onwards, you have a fairly specific coverage area. With the web, as well know, those boundaries disappear with Rogers being in direct competition with every other web site who bought the rights.
They only way I can see them seperating themselves from the opposition is by focusing your content heavily on local competitors - which means a lotta wasted content you've paid big bucks for.
The IOC has, more and more, lost the concept of the fact that the Games are not just national spectacle, but also tales of achievement, and they're cutting off one of the really great ways to show that sort of ethic off.
Isn't this the exact reason NBS is getting such a bad name at the moment?
Yep! The IOC made sure the only ones reporting were their 'approved' pool of 'press'. No fan diaries, no 'I saw [blah] winning the 5,000 Meter Balloon toss'.
Load of crap. The IOC can bar the athletes from sharing their experiences during the games by making it a condition of their participation.
No one signed a non-disclosure contract when they bought their Olympic tickets or sat down in front of the tv and watched an event... they can write about "the expereince" all they want.
Besides which, the local economy is given a massive boost, the host country gets a whole load of foreign currency...
Not likely... there is no immediate money in hosting the Olympic Games. The Australian taxpyer is currently footing the bill for the Sydney games, though I do believe Sydney WAS on target to be the first games to actually break even... but the failure of their tickets-for-the-rich scheme would have busted that idea.
The real benefit comes from the boost to tourism and increased international exposure over the next few years... thats where the return is - its certainly not at the gate.
She's not allowed to write down her thoughts for the day and call it a diary...
but she is allowed to be interviewed daily and pass on her thoughts to a journalist in a Q&A session.
The end result is the same so why bother enforcing the ban? and why isn't the Kanzas (something) Star emailing her every night to get around it? Something along the lines of... "you write down your thoughts for the day... and we'll work some relevant questions into it when you're done"
M@T
I like the way you threw my comments back at me. Very witty.
To put my original point in a more precise way -
Associating MP3s with guns is a fucked idea.
Sorry, this is about as off topic as I get. go molest someone else.
No he was pointing out that (NOT!) Was dumb,
for you maybe, not for the guy who can't see sarcasm staring him in the face, of which there are quite a few. Just trying to avoid an ill-directed rant.
p.s. look who is calling the kettle black.
If you're referring to my stance on associating mp3 usage with gun control then, as far as I'm concerned, thats pretty much on topic... The original poster made the correlation - I disputed its validity, and had a go at the point he made, not how he made the point.
If, on the other hand, you're referring to my jab at the spelling mistake in the AC's post... then of course it was the pot calling the kettle black - that was the whole f#%$ing point of it.
1) Database driven web sites make it difficult to directly index pages on a particular site. This is compounded by the fact that site specific search engines are usually ill-equipped for anything other than the most basic word searches.
2) Apathy on behalf of the user in that they never get around to actually checking out the site's 'How to use this search engine' section and rarely stray from your basic keyword search, but will bemoan the number of results returned anyway. (eg. '+host:' option on altavista)
3) Apathy on behalf of the search engine site in not providing the tips and tricks mentioned in item 2 such that a user can't break the search down any further even if they wanted to.