I see lots of uneducated guesses going around about organics, some even replying to you. I'm not exactly an expert, but I'd like to offer my observations.
I've been shopping at Whole Foods for about 6 months now. I buy organic when possible, and conventional when not. I pay 69 cents per pound for organic bananas (compared with 50 cents for conventional). In a normal grocery store, like Texas based H.E.B., organic is available, but costs 99 cents per pound compared to 33 cents per pound. In the banana case, I'm paying roughly double for organic at Whold Foods vs. H.E.B. Why? The bananas taste better, and are picked closer to ripeness. I'd guess my bananas are coming from California, and not Brazil, and have much lower transit time. I don't know much about pesticides, but for an extra 36 cents per pound, I'll try it out. I don't know if I feel healthier, or if I just think I should. Organic milk... Yummy. And don't get me started on the organic apples. I pay a tad more for them, but they're leaps and bounds better than the difference in the bananas.
There are a lot of people who think people who buy organics are stupid and throwing their money away. What did my brother in law's girlfriend tell me last Christmas? Nitrates are nitrates, ammonia is ammonia, doesn't matter where it comes from. Personally, I think that origin doesn't matter, but if a style of farming requires no pesticides, it can't hurt me any. May even do me some good!
NPR had a story about pig farms that stopped using antibiotics and moved to much cleaner environments. In the end, the cost of cleaning up the pig sties and sterilizing the environment was lower than the cost of antibiotics! Talk about more efficient for the environment! Similar with rice farms in the Far East. Farmers who can't afford the pesticides and high tech fertilizers are moving organic -- and getting paid double for 30% lower yields.
Organics aren't just for kooks, and if you go to a standard grocery store, you won't learn anything. Organics are BLOODY expensive at Safeway / Fry's / Albertsons / HEB / Price Chopper / Hannaford. Maybe there's a farmer's market or a Whole Foods near you.
Stay tuned, next I'll rant about how much Quorn tastes and feels like real chicken breast but is made out of mushrooms.
What we did was buy some $9 2000 piece lego crates and dump them on the tables. They were colorful enough for the non-geeks to appreciate, and kept the geeks/nerds and kids busy while those who were more "sophisticated" could talk. Our reception had the fewest kids crying at it that I've ever heard of for 100 people -- and people stayed later than average, too.
If you're sponsoring an open bar, don't do the legos.
Hopefully, Mike will forgive me. You can see a few pics of our reception here.
As far as I'm concerned, this should have happened a while ago.
I don't claim to be old school when it comes to the RTS games, but I played Warcraft II. Loved it. I own and paid for it, as well as two copies of StarCraft and Brood War (I switched to a Mac, and StarCraft is a necessity). When Warcraft III came out, I bought it. Paid more than my conscience was happy with, at like $60-$65 at Fry's the week it came out. Played some of it, but it was just boring. The graphics weren't pretty, it was choppy in some places (likely the fault of my aging hardware, can't blame them for that), but the characters were blocky. No matter how high or low I turned the graphics options, the characters were built ouf of polygons that were too big to be building characters. Oragami has more polygons.
I run a Microsoft free computer. Actually, I run three, but that's not my point. My Mac will never have Microsoft code on it. Media player? Nope, don't need it. Office? Ha! IE? There's the exception. MacOS updates (like 10.2 aka Jaguar) keep installing IE, and I delete it every time. I hate Microsoft with a passion. Not solely because of their heavy handedness with OEMs, nor because of their abuse of DrDOS and Netscape, nor because of their neglect for the Mac platform arguably helping cause the Age of Darkness before the Second Coming of Jobs, and not even because of their FUD tactics against open source (despite using BSD network code). All of those put together, with the fact that the XBox is a hideous piece of crap I feel like they're trying to force down my throat, cause me to hate Microsoft. I've seen so many TV commercials for the XBox since it came out, I can't keep track. I've seen zero for the Game Cube or the PS2 in months.
Now, if Microsoft had purchased Blizzard last year, I would not have wasted my >$60, or those hours of my time. Blizzard, you've sold the StarCraft franchise to the overpopulated first person shooter, you released a WarCraft III that's far uglier than StarCraft with lower restrictions on the number of units in play. As far as I'm concerned, you have a mortgage against your soul. Just sell it and be done.
The key to redemption is making StarCraft:FPS worthwhile and on at least PS2 and GC, making a StarCraft II that doesn't use silly 3d aspects of video cards intended for racing and FPSes, but uses higher resolution characters than the original with a good extension to the plotline. And turn down Microsoft's offers for purchase.
Since this is in the Austin area, I recommend checking out the Austin area slash based GeekAustin. They had a head's up on this event a while ago. I haven't seen a followup yet.
So, I've started wondering lately. Is the TiVo going to cut down on the TV I do watch?
I got my wife a TiVo for our anniversary last year. She LOVES it.
We spent the first while or three configuring the thing, then selecting all the shows we liked. We told it to record EVERYTHING, first runs and reruns. We spent hours a day watching it. We recently realized how much time we spent watching it. For 2 months, we spent 2-4 hours a weekday watching TV, and more on the weekend. It was entertaining, but there was more to life. Part of it was just getting through it so we would have the hard drive space (on an 80 hour unit) to not miss anything.
So, we pared it down to the TV shows we really enjoy, and first runs of those.
I'll be honest. We fast forward through the commercials. Not all of them, we actually stop, rewind and play ads that catch our eye with a visual joke or breathtaking nature view (or the like). Mostly those are for products, like a cola or a car or other tangible thing. I don't think we've ever stopped to watch a TV ad for a TV program. Which brings me to this observation: If we're not exposed to new shows, how will we decide what new shows to record? Will we just reach the point where the TiVo records a show a week that's requested? What happens when that's cancelled?
We don't watch TiVo's recommendations. They're just WAY off. TiVo may as well get paid to record episodes that the networks want us to see that we haven't specifically "thumbs downed" as far as I'm concerned, they're that relevant most days.
So, now we limit ourselves to an hour of TV a day. We see only the show or two that we really want to see, and nothing else. When the new season stops, will we bother to turn the TV on? I don't know. With Firefly and Birds of Prey going away, we may not bother.
So, here's my real question. If TiVo is going to help us find only shows we want to watch, are we going to get to the point where TiVo hasn't found any first runs that we want to watch? Will we then not turn the TV on every day? If we get to that point, will we eventually just forget that we have a TV?
I did a little write up on epinions to describe the machine shortly after we got it because I didn't see many reviews on the TiVo 2. (If you're not into blatant plugs, don't click the link -- it's my write-up.)
Now wait a sec, I'm not being antagonistic or stupid.
Typically, "trusted" means something along the lines of "here's some code, I trust that you'll do the right thing". When the hardware people and software people get together, you really can have that happen. Software can go get a video stream and save it in such a manner that it can only be played in a trusted manner.
I'm not a hardware vendor. But I do know some tricks. Some college kids with a few oscilloscopes and fast FPGAs are going to go after that 300-500MHz system buss (really, only the address lines, which move 2-16x slower matter) and tweak with the hardware. Suddenly, you have the hardware that thinks it's trusted, but on occasion is able to write data where it doesn't think it is. Maybe you detect it, maybe you don't.
In order for consumers to do this, it must be transparent. Performance must be equal or imperceptably lesser. What this means with current hardware is an encrypted file on the hard drive gets decrypted and temporarily dumped to memory -- WHICH CANNOT BE TRUSTED -- and then played on the hardware.
Follow this example with any other application of "trust". Any time data leaves a chip, observation is trivial. Capture is trivial. Fiddling with it and making it still look authentic is harder, but possible.
Is this going to stop video pirating? No, all you need is one person who can capture the stream. Audio pirating? No, we'll still get that one person to capture the stream. Account numbers? Now there's the rub. A good programmer will be able to keep all that stuff on chip. Except when an OS gets busy and swaps data off chip (encrypting it beforehand? can you imagine an encrypt/decrypt function in a context switch?). But, maybe context switching is blocked when you have private data (context switching blocked while you type in your password? multithreads are so pervasive and important to performance).
This is going to do three things:
1) Stop casual pirating. You know, the kind of person who says "Can I borrow your copy of Starcraft, I want to see if it's good enough to buy".
2) Fair use. Archiving data for which a licence is legal, current and paid for.
3) Make consumers really notice when a system comes along that gives them rights. Sheep don't notice when rights get taken away slowly. When they suddenly get a pile of them, it matters.
Ask your son to draw some pictures of what he wants it to look like. Go over them with him. Pay particular attention to any pictures that go on the sides -- that will tell you his interests in a way conversation can't.
When it comes time to begin actually carving the block of wood, take a dummy piece of wood and make sure he knows how to cut. Then let him cut the dummy piece. Then let him cut the car.
Use a scale and some lead shot (or whatever), break out a piece of paper for a real application of subtraction. How much lead shot do you add to get to the maximum allowed 5oz? (Wow, subtraction is useful in real life, dad?) Ask him how best to attach your weight. Perhaps he can think of other materials just as good? (Paint will add some, so it may be helpful to keep it possible to remove a little.)
Now, start painting. Maybe you sand first, maybe you don't. Chances are, he's getting tired of this project and just wants to see the final shiny piece. High gloss enamel spray paint in the color of his choice. Anybody older than the Tiger Scouts (if they're still around) is old enough to handle spray paint with supervision. Try to coach, not lecture. Help, not instruct. Ask the boy how best to apply the artwork from the first paragraph.
Overall, the goal is to spend quality time with the boy. Sure, the boy says he wants to win. You or I may have won when we were kids, but do we remember? I don't. All I remember is how little help I got. My first car started out as a team project but it ended up as the metaphorical "Team of One". For my second car, I was told that I knew where the table saw was. These are the times he'll remember. And the times you will wish you had back. Try to imagine what'll happen to your son when he's 18. What will you wish you had done? What will you wish him to remember? Does a trophy really matter?
In the end, which would have more value to a boy like yours: winning first prize in the Pinewood Derby Competition, or his dad taking him and his den out for pizza? My money's on pizza. Judging from the winners in my pack, the pizza would have been cheaper.
He forgot to mention that the guy to girl ratio is like 1000:1
I went to RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, just North of Albany, NY). Around there, the ladies had a saying: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."
Of course, there was always the Tatnall law of Women and Parking Spaces: "The good ones are all taken. The rest are either too far out or you don't want anyway."
Same thing I got last year. As much office supplies as I can carry out of the building without getting caught by an employee who wants to split it with me in exchange for silence.
These movies continually attempt to appeal to a broader audience and insist on childish humour instead of intellectual wit. The result is a frustrating mix of my favorite cast and crew with a pedantic, immature script.
If I want character depth, development and inter-relationships, I'll watch TV. The only way to stay on the air with lower than $1M/episode budget is to have good plots. That's what it's there for. And then there's the written word -- but I think that's a different class of entertainment altogether.
Great cinematography is just that -- cinematography. I'll blow my $3, $6, or $8 (or is it $12.50 this week?) to sit in an audience with 10-100 other people for the depth of sound my $600 stereo setup can't handle and resolution my $800 TV can't think of. I HATE going to a movie and finding out that the end isn't tied up in a nice little bow-- that means I don't know how the story ends.
I've seen every ST:TNG episode ever. Not that I'm a trekkie or anything, it was just about the only thing my dad and I ever did together. I've seen probably 2-4 episodes in the 8 years since I stopped watching. I enjoy the dumbed down movie that doesn't make me think back almost a decade to relationships of fictional characters. I enjoy the pretty explosions and sound candy. Hollywood moneymakers aren't based on niche markets of people who have done their homework, watched 25 episodes in 7 seasons and read 50lbs of books (some of which were written by weight --
"15 monkeys, 5 minutes").
Then I go home and watch Firefly and Birds of Prey on my TiVo -- the acting ain't great, the special effects aren't transparent, but there's plot and true character development.
that the loggers use Dells and all the tree sitters use Macs. What could that mean? I'll check back in 24.
For those who don't catch this, there was an American TV show last season called "24". It had a few gimmicks to it, but one interesting thing was that all the bad guys used Dells and all the good guys used Macs. There was one apparent exception to this rule, a "good guy" who used a Dell, but she turned out to be a double agent working on "Dell side".
Yes, "24" is on the air again this season, but I don't think they have stuck with this apparent giveaway, so it's "last season" for the purposes of this joke.
working on new transistor making techniques such as the double gate design as well as metal-rather-than-silicon design.
This reminds me of one of my favorite IBM stories told to me by an ex-IBMer professor a few years back.
It would appear that some time in the 70s (it's been a few years since I heard this story), IBM was having problems with boules* falling over and breaking, costing a great deal of money. IBM being what it was, put out a solicitation for employee suggestions on how to remedy the problem.
One technician was very disappointed to hear that the boules were made of silicon and suggested using a stronger material. It was his wager that a stainless steel boule would be much more resistant to breaking. So, he suggested replacing all the silicon boules with stainless steel.
True story.
* Boules are very tall cylinders of monocrystalline silicon. They are sliced up into fairly thin, circular wafers. These wafers are then processed through the steps that make chips and lastly diced into the silicon chips we commonly see put on plastic or ceramic packages.
This is complete utter nonsense. By late 1994 early 1995, almost all cdroms were IDE.
Agreed. Total nonsense. Hence, why I moved to Windows. Not all CDROMs were IDE, and OS/2 also attempted to support not only new hardware, but also some of the older hardware. I guess there were a few bugs.
Remember, because OS/2 supported FAT AND HPFS, the installer would ask you if you want to format it FAT, HPFS, or not at all. To suggest it just formatted your drive is insane.
I'm not merely suggesting it, and believe me if it had not happened to me I would be leery of believing it too, I'm outright claiming it. I didn't care to replicate the problem, and I certainly won't go back now and try to figure it out. I went through my share of installs on more than one machine (none of them IBM, strangely enough), and I recognized the format question. I was not given a prompt. It just took the initiative. Perhaps the CDROM driver made the hard drive look corrupt and it no longer recognized any real data on it?
Let's leave the personal attacks out of this. It would be one thing to say that it never happened to you, but it's another to state that my claim is insane.
OS/2 was an excellent system, technically. Certainly far better than Windows. Trouble was, DOS+Windows was Good Enough and cost about 1/5th as much. IBM, at that time, couldn't market space heaters in Nome Alaska in January.
OS/2 also was able to alienate many power users because of the install process. It was FAR worse than Debian, and we all know how many people complain about that. I was a very competant OS/2 user (and DOS/ Win3.11 for that matter). When I went to install my CD-ROM drive on a stable OS/2 Warp (that's 3.0 unless otherwise specificed, for you younguns), the OS ended up formatting my hard drive and doing a fresh install -- WITHOUT MY CONSENT! My backups were as good as my temper was short. I took my backups, good all the data I needed, and went to DOS/Win3.11 until I could get NT 3.51.
The underlying issue is "why"? Why was the install procedure so bad for a company that can do better? Why did they not agressively price the beast? IBMers from the software group that did OS/2 will tell you that IBM set long term internal goals based on selling copies and never revisited them. [information grade=rumor]That meant, they told the engineers, financial guys, salespeople, "Sell X thousand copies this year, Y thousand next year and Z thousand the year after that," and stuck with that statement for all three years. All those goals were met and even exceeded some. What they might have done differently, if they didn't want to revisit the statement, is say, "Capture 10% of the marketplace this year, 20% next year, and 25% the year after that." [/information]
OS/2's GUI was okay, but the I/O performance to the network and storage was excellent. That's where it really shined. Once you could get it going on all your hardware and never had to touch the drivers, that is.
This is different, this is being done for revenge. He spams because he has useful information to get out, plus it's so easy to just delete an email, it's a lot more work to sort through physical mail and throw it out.
I try not to complain about Slashdot, but this highlights a need for a very important moderation feature.
(+1 funny if joking, -1 troll if serious)
Thank you for your consideration, I'm sure you'll be getting right on that.
Starflight was released in 1986. It featured CGA graphics (EGA later?), diplomacy, 80 star systems, 5 races, simple trade interstellar and planetary navigation and a plot that games today can't touch. Published by Electronic Arts.
Starflight II: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, released in 1989, this was a worthy sequel. It featured more star systems, more sophisticated diplomacy, VGA graphics, moderatly complex trade and additional plot elements. Published by Electronic Arts.
Star Control, published in 1990 was a pretty cool melee game. It offered a few ships you could fly around, develop strategies for and have realtime battles with either against an opponent or an AI. Published by Accolade.
Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters, published in 1992, was what Starflight 3 should have been. It had many elements of the starmap of Starflight, many of the underlying plot elements and game engine of that series with the Star Control melee combat grafted on.
Starflight 3: Mysteries of the Universe, yet unreleased, is an Open project with many of the original Starflight crew, Binary Systems, aiding in consulting or programming.
Here's what I want to know: Is there any official link between the Starflight and Star Control families? Was there swindling involved? Was I deprived of a Starflight 3 I would have paid double for vs. a Star Control? Why oh why? As far as I'm concerned, the Open Starflight 3 will be great, no matter what, but the real Starflight 3 that seemingly "almost was" would have been worthwhile.
Apologies for the long rant it took to get here. Any responses appreciated.
Pardon me, I think I hear the Uhl whispering in my head.
I'm at the point where I buy CDs once a year. Every album that I want, and can still remember the name of, I buy on Black Friday. The past 3 years, Best Buy or Circuit City has had a sale where CDs are 9.99 USD each (last year it was limit 10). So, between that and the retailers' price matching policies, I was wondering who would be earning my money this year.
I'm not interested in starting an RIAA debate. They're bad, they're evil, and that's part of why my wife no longer buys 50-70 CDs a year. Neither of us is in a position for a total boycott, thanks.
However, I would like to open the debate for the first person who can ridicule my measley Google skills with the "intuitively obvious" search string that finds the remaining Black Friday sale descriptions. Thanks for your participation:)
You put your loot in the cart. You walk up to the scanner. You swipe your credit card. You leave. No cashier to deal with. No lines. No need to even remove the items from the cart.
Great geek value, no question about that! Then, when you get to your car, you get to put all your stuff in the trunk, and don't have to worry about those meddling plastic bags. And when that soccer mom cuts you off in the Expedition and you have to take evasive manuvers, you get the really fun part when you get home! Collecting all your stuff from wherever it was!
Once nice thing about the system as it stands right now is that it's tuned for a major convenience, bagging, at the time of payment. No payment, no bags. This, I believe, will have an impact on the non-geek-value customer. Even the most convenient package to carry, the two liter bottle, is difficult to carry more than three at a time for 100 yards (any apartment people want to say how far it is up 3 flights of stairs?). Now my local store is only offering coke bottles in 3 liter -- heavier and bigger than my wifes hands can wrap around. (Also, incidentally, more expensive per liter than 2 liter if you do the math.)
Bags make groceries go 'round. That's why the store throws them in for free, and usually tries to put someone there who can supply the service of stuffing them. In the RFID method, I suppose, you could be handed a wad of bags as you walk in and just stuff as you go, but that involves planning and rework -- if you pick up bread or eggs first, now you have to shuffle to get those to end up on top.
You should be aware that if you are running fsck -n on the fs while it is mounted in rw-mode, then it can and will report inconsistencies which are not real, simply because the fs has changed between the passes in fsck, something which it does not expect.
I'm doing my fsck -n's in RW mode. From the less file system experienced Linux user's perspective, I wonder what ext2 does when going from RW to RO that cleans up for fsck. I can understand the value of delaying some writes, but shouldn't that get flushed when the box is not active? Would fsck -n work on a RW mounted ReiserFS, JFS, XFS or ext3?
I'm not being argumentative, this sounds like one of those typical Unix behaviors, but learning why may help me with other potential issues.
One thing I've often wondered is whether a typical solar cell produces more energy in its lifetime than it takes to manufacture it?
I'm sorry I can't cite a reference, but it was either Home Power magazine or the US Department of Engergy that claimed solar cells pay for their energy (in terms of CO2 emissions) after 2-5 years of use, depending on location. 2 closer to the US Southwest, 5 closer to the Canadian border.
That's what we love about vi. It's so intuitive! Come on, get with it people!!
True confession time. I was working on a pile of ksh and perl scritps two years ago at work, while attempting to do large amounts of searches and replaces on those and the output data. I was on my 5th 14 hour day in a row when I finally said to myself, "Ya know, vi would be more handy if it had a function to do ___. Knowing those bastards, if they did, it would involve....." and I typed a long string of random looking characters (I don't remember what ___ was). It made perfect sense to me.
And vi. It worked. 2 years ago, vi became more intuitive to me than all other GUI text editors.
Remember, what's the equation for "power"? That's right, voltage times current. vi is power.
The first generations (601, 603/604 and the ?aborted? 620) of the PowerPC line were scaled-back versions of the Power and Power2 architectures respectively [the original Power architecture was mounted on a 3x5 daughter card with 4-5 separate chips [I'll have to go looking for my tech papers] making-up the core... because of this the migration of everything into one die for the PowerPC was amazing.
The PowerPC 601 was not a scaled back version of the Power series. To say this would imply that they took the design and modified it. In fact, they took the Power instruction set, modified that and then designed the processor to support it for the target markets.
The 64 bit PowerPC 620 was not "aborted" per se (like the PowerPC 615 was), rather IBM decided that its role was filled by the higher clocked 604 series and the then soon-to-come IBM Rochester, MN designed 64 bit PowerPC 630 (aka Power 3).
To verify my claim that the PowerPC 620 was not aborted, Motorola got suckered into manufacturing them for Bull.
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I see lots of uneducated guesses going around about organics, some even replying to you. I'm not exactly an expert, but I'd like to offer my observations.
I've been shopping at Whole Foods for about 6 months now. I buy organic when possible, and conventional when not. I pay 69 cents per pound for organic bananas (compared with 50 cents for conventional). In a normal grocery store, like Texas based H.E.B., organic is available, but costs 99 cents per pound compared to 33 cents per pound. In the banana case, I'm paying roughly double for organic at Whold Foods vs. H.E.B. Why? The bananas taste better, and are picked closer to ripeness. I'd guess my bananas are coming from California, and not Brazil, and have much lower transit time. I don't know much about pesticides, but for an extra 36 cents per pound, I'll try it out. I don't know if I feel healthier, or if I just think I should. Organic milk... Yummy. And don't get me started on the organic apples. I pay a tad more for them, but they're leaps and bounds better than the difference in the bananas.
There are a lot of people who think people who buy organics are stupid and throwing their money away. What did my brother in law's girlfriend tell me last Christmas? Nitrates are nitrates, ammonia is ammonia, doesn't matter where it comes from. Personally, I think that origin doesn't matter, but if a style of farming requires no pesticides, it can't hurt me any. May even do me some good!
NPR had a story about pig farms that stopped using antibiotics and moved to much cleaner environments. In the end, the cost of cleaning up the pig sties and sterilizing the environment was lower than the cost of antibiotics! Talk about more efficient for the environment! Similar with rice farms in the Far East. Farmers who can't afford the pesticides and high tech fertilizers are moving organic -- and getting paid double for 30% lower yields.
Organics aren't just for kooks, and if you go to a standard grocery store, you won't learn anything. Organics are BLOODY expensive at Safeway / Fry's / Albertsons / HEB / Price Chopper / Hannaford. Maybe there's a farmer's market or a Whole Foods near you.
Stay tuned, next I'll rant about how much Quorn tastes and feels like real chicken breast but is made out of mushrooms.
What we did was buy some $9 2000 piece lego crates and dump them on the tables. They were colorful enough for the non-geeks to appreciate, and kept the geeks/nerds and kids busy while those who were more "sophisticated" could talk. Our reception had the fewest kids crying at it that I've ever heard of for 100 people -- and people stayed later than average, too.
If you're sponsoring an open bar, don't do the legos.
Hopefully, Mike will forgive me. You can see a few pics of our reception here.
As far as I'm concerned, this should have happened a while ago.
I don't claim to be old school when it comes to the RTS games, but I played Warcraft II. Loved it. I own and paid for it, as well as two copies of StarCraft and Brood War (I switched to a Mac, and StarCraft is a necessity). When Warcraft III came out, I bought it. Paid more than my conscience was happy with, at like $60-$65 at Fry's the week it came out. Played some of it, but it was just boring. The graphics weren't pretty, it was choppy in some places (likely the fault of my aging hardware, can't blame them for that), but the characters were blocky. No matter how high or low I turned the graphics options, the characters were built ouf of polygons that were too big to be building characters. Oragami has more polygons.
I run a Microsoft free computer. Actually, I run three, but that's not my point. My Mac will never have Microsoft code on it. Media player? Nope, don't need it. Office? Ha! IE? There's the exception. MacOS updates (like 10.2 aka Jaguar) keep installing IE, and I delete it every time. I hate Microsoft with a passion. Not solely because of their heavy handedness with OEMs, nor because of their abuse of DrDOS and Netscape, nor because of their neglect for the Mac platform arguably helping cause the Age of Darkness before the Second Coming of Jobs, and not even because of their FUD tactics against open source (despite using BSD network code). All of those put together, with the fact that the XBox is a hideous piece of crap I feel like they're trying to force down my throat, cause me to hate Microsoft. I've seen so many TV commercials for the XBox since it came out, I can't keep track. I've seen zero for the Game Cube or the PS2 in months.
Now, if Microsoft had purchased Blizzard last year, I would not have wasted my >$60, or those hours of my time. Blizzard, you've sold the StarCraft franchise to the overpopulated first person shooter, you released a WarCraft III that's far uglier than StarCraft with lower restrictions on the number of units in play. As far as I'm concerned, you have a mortgage against your soul. Just sell it and be done.
The key to redemption is making StarCraft:FPS worthwhile and on at least PS2 and GC, making a StarCraft II that doesn't use silly 3d aspects of video cards intended for racing and FPSes, but uses higher resolution characters than the original with a good extension to the plotline. And turn down Microsoft's offers for purchase.
Since this is in the Austin area, I recommend checking out the Austin area slash based GeekAustin. They had a head's up on this event a while ago. I haven't seen a followup yet.
So with one hand I hold my phone, and the other I, er, um, "use" the porn - then what hand do I use to drive the car with?
Did I pass you on the way to work this morning?
So, I've started wondering lately. Is the TiVo going to cut down on the TV I do watch?
I got my wife a TiVo for our anniversary last year. She LOVES it.
We spent the first while or three configuring the thing, then selecting all the shows we liked. We told it to record EVERYTHING, first runs and reruns. We spent hours a day watching it. We recently realized how much time we spent watching it. For 2 months, we spent 2-4 hours a weekday watching TV, and more on the weekend. It was entertaining, but there was more to life. Part of it was just getting through it so we would have the hard drive space (on an 80 hour unit) to not miss anything.
So, we pared it down to the TV shows we really enjoy, and first runs of those.
I'll be honest. We fast forward through the commercials. Not all of them, we actually stop, rewind and play ads that catch our eye with a visual joke or breathtaking nature view (or the like). Mostly those are for products, like a cola or a car or other tangible thing. I don't think we've ever stopped to watch a TV ad for a TV program. Which brings me to this observation: If we're not exposed to new shows, how will we decide what new shows to record? Will we just reach the point where the TiVo records a show a week that's requested? What happens when that's cancelled?
We don't watch TiVo's recommendations. They're just WAY off. TiVo may as well get paid to record episodes that the networks want us to see that we haven't specifically "thumbs downed" as far as I'm concerned, they're that relevant most days.
So, now we limit ourselves to an hour of TV a day. We see only the show or two that we really want to see, and nothing else. When the new season stops, will we bother to turn the TV on? I don't know. With Firefly and Birds of Prey going away, we may not bother.
So, here's my real question. If TiVo is going to help us find only shows we want to watch, are we going to get to the point where TiVo hasn't found any first runs that we want to watch? Will we then not turn the TV on every day? If we get to that point, will we eventually just forget that we have a TV?
I did a little write up on epinions to describe the machine shortly after we got it because I didn't see many reviews on the TiVo 2. (If you're not into blatant plugs, don't click the link -- it's my write-up.)
Just what does "trusted" mean.
Now wait a sec, I'm not being antagonistic or stupid.
Typically, "trusted" means something along the lines of "here's some code, I trust that you'll do the right thing". When the hardware people and software people get together, you really can have that happen. Software can go get a video stream and save it in such a manner that it can only be played in a trusted manner.
I'm not a hardware vendor. But I do know some tricks. Some college kids with a few oscilloscopes and fast FPGAs are going to go after that 300-500MHz system buss (really, only the address lines, which move 2-16x slower matter) and tweak with the hardware. Suddenly, you have the hardware that thinks it's trusted, but on occasion is able to write data where it doesn't think it is. Maybe you detect it, maybe you don't.
In order for consumers to do this, it must be transparent. Performance must be equal or imperceptably lesser. What this means with current hardware is an encrypted file on the hard drive gets decrypted and temporarily dumped to memory -- WHICH CANNOT BE TRUSTED -- and then played on the hardware.
Follow this example with any other application of "trust". Any time data leaves a chip, observation is trivial. Capture is trivial. Fiddling with it and making it still look authentic is harder, but possible.
Is this going to stop video pirating? No, all you need is one person who can capture the stream. Audio pirating? No, we'll still get that one person to capture the stream. Account numbers? Now there's the rub. A good programmer will be able to keep all that stuff on chip. Except when an OS gets busy and swaps data off chip (encrypting it beforehand? can you imagine an encrypt/decrypt function in a context switch?). But, maybe context switching is blocked when you have private data (context switching blocked while you type in your password? multithreads are so pervasive and important to performance).
This is going to do three things:
1) Stop casual pirating. You know, the kind of person who says "Can I borrow your copy of Starcraft, I want to see if it's good enough to buy".
2) Fair use. Archiving data for which a licence is legal, current and paid for.
3) Make consumers really notice when a system comes along that gives them rights. Sheep don't notice when rights get taken away slowly. When they suddenly get a pile of them, it matters.
Here's my advice.
Ask your son to draw some pictures of what he wants it to look like. Go over them with him. Pay particular attention to any pictures that go on the sides -- that will tell you his interests in a way conversation can't.
When it comes time to begin actually carving the block of wood, take a dummy piece of wood and make sure he knows how to cut. Then let him cut the dummy piece. Then let him cut the car.
Use a scale and some lead shot (or whatever), break out a piece of paper for a real application of subtraction. How much lead shot do you add to get to the maximum allowed 5oz? (Wow, subtraction is useful in real life, dad?) Ask him how best to attach your weight. Perhaps he can think of other materials just as good? (Paint will add some, so it may be helpful to keep it possible to remove a little.)
Now, start painting. Maybe you sand first, maybe you don't. Chances are, he's getting tired of this project and just wants to see the final shiny piece. High gloss enamel spray paint in the color of his choice. Anybody older than the Tiger Scouts (if they're still around) is old enough to handle spray paint with supervision. Try to coach, not lecture. Help, not instruct. Ask the boy how best to apply the artwork from the first paragraph.
Overall, the goal is to spend quality time with the boy. Sure, the boy says he wants to win. You or I may have won when we were kids, but do we remember? I don't. All I remember is how little help I got. My first car started out as a team project but it ended up as the metaphorical "Team of One". For my second car, I was told that I knew where the table saw was. These are the times he'll remember. And the times you will wish you had back. Try to imagine what'll happen to your son when he's 18. What will you wish you had done? What will you wish him to remember? Does a trophy really matter?
In the end, which would have more value to a boy like yours: winning first prize in the Pinewood Derby Competition, or his dad taking him and his den out for pizza? My money's on pizza. Judging from the winners in my pack, the pizza would have been cheaper.
Have fun. I wish I was in your place.
He forgot to mention that the guy to girl ratio is like 1000:1
I went to RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, just North of Albany, NY). Around there, the ladies had a saying: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."
Of course, there was always the Tatnall law of Women and Parking Spaces: "The good ones are all taken. The rest are either too far out or you don't want anyway."
Maybe Wil needs to end his posts with:
"The real CleverNickName has a uid of 129189."
Yeah, and then C1everNickName is going to have a .sig that says "The real C1everNickName has a uid of 635600"
Perhaps we should just send a polite e-mail to Scumdamn (82357).
How's the weather in VT?
-- TX
Same thing I got last year. As much office supplies as I can carry out of the building without getting caught by an employee who wants to split it with me in exchange for silence.
These movies continually attempt to appeal to a broader audience and insist on childish humour instead of intellectual wit. The result is a frustrating mix of my favorite cast and crew with a pedantic, immature script.
If I want character depth, development and inter-relationships, I'll watch TV. The only way to stay on the air with lower than $1M/episode budget is to have good plots. That's what it's there for. And then there's the written word -- but I think that's a different class of entertainment altogether.
Great cinematography is just that -- cinematography. I'll blow my $3, $6, or $8 (or is it $12.50 this week?) to sit in an audience with 10-100 other people for the depth of sound my $600 stereo setup can't handle and resolution my $800 TV can't think of. I HATE going to a movie and finding out that the end isn't tied up in a nice little bow-- that means I don't know how the story ends.
I've seen every ST:TNG episode ever. Not that I'm a trekkie or anything, it was just about the only thing my dad and I ever did together. I've seen probably 2-4 episodes in the 8 years since I stopped watching. I enjoy the dumbed down movie that doesn't make me think back almost a decade to relationships of fictional characters. I enjoy the pretty explosions and sound candy. Hollywood moneymakers aren't based on niche markets of people who have done their homework, watched 25 episodes in 7 seasons and read 50lbs of books (some of which were written by weight -- "15 monkeys, 5 minutes").
Then I go home and watch Firefly and Birds of Prey on my TiVo -- the acting ain't great, the special effects aren't transparent, but there's plot and true character development.
that the loggers use Dells and all the tree sitters use Macs. What could that mean? I'll check back in 24.
For those who don't catch this, there was an American TV show last season called "24". It had a few gimmicks to it, but one interesting thing was that all the bad guys used Dells and all the good guys used Macs. There was one apparent exception to this rule, a "good guy" who used a Dell, but she turned out to be a double agent working on "Dell side".
Yes, "24" is on the air again this season, but I don't think they have stuck with this apparent giveaway, so it's "last season" for the purposes of this joke.
working on new transistor making techniques such as the double gate design as well as metal-rather-than-silicon design.
This reminds me of one of my favorite IBM stories told to me by an ex-IBMer professor a few years back.
It would appear that some time in the 70s (it's been a few years since I heard this story), IBM was having problems with boules* falling over and breaking, costing a great deal of money. IBM being what it was, put out a solicitation for employee suggestions on how to remedy the problem.
One technician was very disappointed to hear that the boules were made of silicon and suggested using a stronger material. It was his wager that a stainless steel boule would be much more resistant to breaking. So, he suggested replacing all the silicon boules with stainless steel.
True story.
* Boules are very tall cylinders of monocrystalline silicon. They are sliced up into fairly thin, circular wafers. These wafers are then processed through the steps that make chips and lastly diced into the silicon chips we commonly see put on plastic or ceramic packages.
This is complete utter nonsense. By late 1994 early 1995, almost all cdroms were IDE.
Agreed. Total nonsense. Hence, why I moved to Windows. Not all CDROMs were IDE, and OS/2 also attempted to support not only new hardware, but also some of the older hardware. I guess there were a few bugs.
Remember, because OS/2 supported FAT AND HPFS, the installer would ask you if you want to format it FAT, HPFS, or not at all. To suggest it just formatted your drive is insane.
I'm not merely suggesting it, and believe me if it had not happened to me I would be leery of believing it too, I'm outright claiming it. I didn't care to replicate the problem, and I certainly won't go back now and try to figure it out. I went through my share of installs on more than one machine (none of them IBM, strangely enough), and I recognized the format question. I was not given a prompt. It just took the initiative. Perhaps the CDROM driver made the hard drive look corrupt and it no longer recognized any real data on it?
Let's leave the personal attacks out of this. It would be one thing to say that it never happened to you, but it's another to state that my claim is insane.
OS/2 was an excellent system, technically. Certainly far better than Windows. Trouble was, DOS+Windows was Good Enough and cost about 1/5th as much. IBM, at that time, couldn't market space heaters in Nome Alaska in January.
OS/2 also was able to alienate many power users because of the install process. It was FAR worse than Debian, and we all know how many people complain about that. I was a very competant OS/2 user (and DOS/ Win3.11 for that matter). When I went to install my CD-ROM drive on a stable OS/2 Warp (that's 3.0 unless otherwise specificed, for you younguns), the OS ended up formatting my hard drive and doing a fresh install -- WITHOUT MY CONSENT! My backups were as good as my temper was short. I took my backups, good all the data I needed, and went to DOS/Win3.11 until I could get NT 3.51.
The underlying issue is "why"? Why was the install procedure so bad for a company that can do better? Why did they not agressively price the beast? IBMers from the software group that did OS/2 will tell you that IBM set long term internal goals based on selling copies and never revisited them. [information grade=rumor]That meant, they told the engineers, financial guys, salespeople, "Sell X thousand copies this year, Y thousand next year and Z thousand the year after that," and stuck with that statement for all three years. All those goals were met and even exceeded some. What they might have done differently, if they didn't want to revisit the statement, is say, "Capture 10% of the marketplace this year, 20% next year, and 25% the year after that." [/information]
OS/2's GUI was okay, but the I/O performance to the network and storage was excellent. That's where it really shined. Once you could get it going on all your hardware and never had to touch the drivers, that is.
This is different, this is being done for revenge. He spams because he has useful information to get out, plus it's so easy to just delete an email, it's a lot more work to sort through physical mail and throw it out.
I try not to complain about Slashdot, but this highlights a need for a very important moderation feature.
(+1 funny if joking, -1 troll if serious)
Thank you for your consideration, I'm sure you'll be getting right on that.
[/joking]Starflight was released in 1986. It featured CGA graphics (EGA later?), diplomacy, 80 star systems, 5 races, simple trade interstellar and planetary navigation and a plot that games today can't touch. Published by Electronic Arts.
Starflight II: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, released in 1989, this was a worthy sequel. It featured more star systems, more sophisticated diplomacy, VGA graphics, moderatly complex trade and additional plot elements. Published by Electronic Arts.
Star Control, published in 1990 was a pretty cool melee game. It offered a few ships you could fly around, develop strategies for and have realtime battles with either against an opponent or an AI. Published by Accolade.
Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters, published in 1992, was what Starflight 3 should have been. It had many elements of the starmap of Starflight, many of the underlying plot elements and game engine of that series with the Star Control melee combat grafted on.
Starflight 3: Mysteries of the Universe, yet unreleased, is an Open project with many of the original Starflight crew, Binary Systems, aiding in consulting or programming.
Here's what I want to know: Is there any official link between the Starflight and Star Control families? Was there swindling involved? Was I deprived of a Starflight 3 I would have paid double for vs. a Star Control? Why oh why? As far as I'm concerned, the Open Starflight 3 will be great, no matter what, but the real Starflight 3 that seemingly "almost was" would have been worthwhile.
Apologies for the long rant it took to get here. Any responses appreciated.
Pardon me, I think I hear the Uhl whispering in my head.
I'm at the point where I buy CDs once a year. Every album that I want, and can still remember the name of, I buy on Black Friday. The past 3 years, Best Buy or Circuit City has had a sale where CDs are 9.99 USD each (last year it was limit 10). So, between that and the retailers' price matching policies, I was wondering who would be earning my money this year.
I'm not interested in starting an RIAA debate. They're bad, they're evil, and that's part of why my wife no longer buys 50-70 CDs a year. Neither of us is in a position for a total boycott, thanks.
However, I would like to open the debate for the first person who can ridicule my measley Google skills with the "intuitively obvious" search string that finds the remaining Black Friday sale descriptions. Thanks for your participation :)
You put your loot in the cart. You walk up to the scanner. You swipe your credit card. You leave. No cashier to deal with. No lines. No need to even remove the items from the cart.
Great geek value, no question about that! Then, when you get to your car, you get to put all your stuff in the trunk, and don't have to worry about those meddling plastic bags. And when that soccer mom cuts you off in the Expedition and you have to take evasive manuvers, you get the really fun part when you get home! Collecting all your stuff from wherever it was!
Once nice thing about the system as it stands right now is that it's tuned for a major convenience, bagging, at the time of payment. No payment, no bags. This, I believe, will have an impact on the non-geek-value customer. Even the most convenient package to carry, the two liter bottle, is difficult to carry more than three at a time for 100 yards (any apartment people want to say how far it is up 3 flights of stairs?). Now my local store is only offering coke bottles in 3 liter -- heavier and bigger than my wifes hands can wrap around. (Also, incidentally, more expensive per liter than 2 liter if you do the math.)
Bags make groceries go 'round. That's why the store throws them in for free, and usually tries to put someone there who can supply the service of stuffing them. In the RFID method, I suppose, you could be handed a wad of bags as you walk in and just stuff as you go, but that involves planning and rework -- if you pick up bread or eggs first, now you have to shuffle to get those to end up on top.
I think I may be able to point to the answer.
You should be aware that if you are running fsck -n on the fs while it is mounted in rw-mode, then it can and will report inconsistencies which are not real, simply because the fs has changed between the passes in fsck, something which it does not expect.
I'm doing my fsck -n's in RW mode. From the less file system experienced Linux user's perspective, I wonder what ext2 does when going from RW to RO that cleans up for fsck. I can understand the value of delaying some writes, but shouldn't that get flushed when the box is not active? Would fsck -n work on a RW mounted ReiserFS, JFS, XFS or ext3?
I'm not being argumentative, this sounds like one of those typical Unix behaviors, but learning why may help me with other potential issues.
One thing I've often wondered is whether a typical solar cell produces more energy in its lifetime than it takes to manufacture it?
I'm sorry I can't cite a reference, but it was either Home Power magazine or the US Department of Engergy that claimed solar cells pay for their energy (in terms of CO2 emissions) after 2-5 years of use, depending on location. 2 closer to the US Southwest, 5 closer to the Canadian border.
That's what we love about vi. It's so intuitive! Come on, get with it people!!
True confession time. I was working on a pile of ksh and perl scritps two years ago at work, while attempting to do large amounts of searches and replaces on those and the output data. I was on my 5th 14 hour day in a row when I finally said to myself, "Ya know, vi would be more handy if it had a function to do ___. Knowing those bastards, if they did, it would involve....." and I typed a long string of random looking characters (I don't remember what ___ was). It made perfect sense to me.
And vi. It worked. 2 years ago, vi became more intuitive to me than all other GUI text editors.
Remember, what's the equation for "power"? That's right, voltage times current. vi is power.
I love my new job.
The first generations (601, 603/604 and the ?aborted? 620) of the PowerPC line were scaled-back versions of the Power and Power2 architectures respectively [the original Power architecture was mounted on a 3x5 daughter card with 4-5 separate chips [I'll have to go looking for my tech papers] making-up the core ... because of this the migration of everything into one die for the PowerPC was amazing.
The PowerPC 601 was not a scaled back version of the Power series. To say this would imply that they took the design and modified it. In fact, they took the Power instruction set, modified that and then designed the processor to support it for the target markets.
The 64 bit PowerPC 620 was not "aborted" per se (like the PowerPC 615 was), rather IBM decided that its role was filled by the higher clocked 604 series and the then soon-to-come IBM Rochester, MN designed 64 bit PowerPC 630 (aka Power 3).
To verify my claim that the PowerPC 620 was not aborted, Motorola got suckered into manufacturing them for Bull.