Now if only/.'s next interview was, "Ask Microsoft's Kerberos legal team 10-15 questions". It might be tough to get the moderators to promote 10 civil questions though (that and MS would never agree to the interview:( ).
Actually, according to the manuals at my last job (working on a BPS test bed), if they pump SA all the way up to 15, GPS is only accuarate to 10km! I'd really hate to be lost in the woods and not be able to find out where I was to within 10km. The whole point of this story was that they aren't going to use SA anymore during our conflicts. If they feel the need, they'll turn off service to the reigon of the conflict. When SA was in use, you could figure out your position (if you had the time). If you placed your receiver in a static location and mapped the coordinates it fed you, it would form a circle around your actual position.
Also, the reason SA only affects civilian receivers is that CA code is what SA affects and is what civilian receivers look at. P(Y) code is what the military recivers look at and is at a much higher frequency (and encrypted). The wavelength of the signal determines the physical limit on how accurate your reciever is. I don't recall the frequencies off the top of my head, but that's why the military receivers work better.
BTW, the Russians have their own gps network and don't need ours to target their missiles.
The thing about scientists is, whenever they set out to prove something they want to prove, they invariably find a way of proving it.
That effect is called "confirmation bias". It is a problem when researchers only seem to look at evidence that backs up the theory they're trying to prove. I don't see, necessarily, evidence of that here, though. The reason you might think that "whenever [scientists] set out to prove something... they invariably find a way of proving it." is because the media usually doesn't report stories where people disproved their theories. I'd also guess that researchers are more likely to spend the time publishing their results if they proved what they set out to do. So, what you get may be an apparent bias where not really exists. That's just something to keep in mind before you go generalizing about "The thing about scientists is...".
The series never really ended since the last episode (of the season) was never produced. Michael Reaves, one of the shows writers, put up the last episode's transcript that he wrote for the show. It's really a pretty interesting read and tells a lot about venger.
You can also take a look at one of the best D&D (the cartoon) web sites here. She has some original "choose your own adventures" under the books link along with a bunch of other cool stuff.
The series never really ended since the last episode (of the season) was never produced. Michael Reaves, one of the shows writers, put up the last episode's transcript that he wrote for the show. It's really a pretty interesting read and tells a lot about venger.
You can also take a look at one of the best D&D (the cartoon) web sites here. She has some original "choose your own adventures" under the books link along with a bunch of other cool stuff.
Let me start off by saying I don't have any experience writing drivers. But, my guess would be that this process isn't as good for writing high performance drivers that a lot of manufacturers require. For video cards, the drivers dramatically affect performance. Frame rates often have double digit improvements from early beta drivers to more mature versions.
Admittedly, it might be good to flesh out quick support for other operating systems, but the performance most likely wouldn't be there. Anyway, that'd be my guess. Besides, do we really want hardware manufacturers putting out cheap/quick drivers for Linux/Solaris/etc. and calling it support (just so they can put more text on their boxes)?
There's a community freeware version of this for Windows AND Linux called LeoCAD. It looks pretty cool (although, I admit I haven't tried it). While the Autodesk/Lego one has 63 available pieces, LeoCAD has over 1000! I didn't see anything on the lego dacta page about purchasing (other than where to find distributors), anyone know how much it costs?
On an offtopic side note, it's funny that they put this story up, but didn't think LeoCAD deserved mention when I submitted it a few months ago. I think there are just too many/. editors with different interests.
I dunno, as an intel employee, I'm pretty excited to get a free box to crack more rc5 keys with. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but I'm certianly not turning it down on some paranoid notion that Intel will have some secret deal with whatever OEM provides the box to get my serial number. Especially since I'll just disable it's transmission in my bios (I doubt the oem will write a special bios that won't allow me to turn it off). And, yes, the employees will own their machine and intel won't have any more right to look at it's contents than the do with the machines I have now.
However, I'm not one of the people that will benifit the most. Of the 70,000+ employees and reitrees Intel has, many of them work at fabs in countries where computers are much less prevalent. They say they're trying to find an internet access option for all the employees too. I think that's pretty cool.
Actually, working extra hours (at home or at work) is supposedly forbidden by intel's pollicies (yeah, that really works:). The cool thing is that in the internal faq, it says that there's a possibility that the internet access won't necessairally be dialup. They may have cable/dsl/isdn options or something... they're not sure yet. Also, you get that (kinda) neat microscope that hooks up to your (windows) box. I saw it at the store and thought, "hrmmm... that might be fun to play with".
Not to be too contrary, but the companies name is Omron and the creator's name is Toshihiro Tashima (as stated in the first two paragraphs).
Re:Best ergonomic keyboard I've used... the MS one
on
Ergonomic Keyboards
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· Score: 1
I think the previous poster was saying that the MS Natural Elite was crap - which I'd wholeheartedly agree with. I owned the original natural keyboard and loved it. However, when my dad got the elite with his new computer, I couldn't stand it. Luckily, they came out with the pro just before I pieced together my new machine.
I've been happily using it for the last couple months. The key layout is very similar to that on the original, but they've made a few keys smaller (function keys, etc). It doesn't really change the feel too much though. I wish the keyboard were a little more responsive (ie clacky), but the keys are by no means spongy... all in said, I really like it.
I think I would consider Neuromancer as a "classic" in the science fiction context. I also read it and other "mature" fiction at a younger age than 13. I'm not saying that books like Ender's Game and Neuromancer are for every young person, but I think I've turned out alright despite this _subversive_ and adult literature. BTW, another comedy series that bares mention is Harry Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero. Quite funny and appropreate for 13 year olds.
As stated in this previous/. article, all the binaries will eventually be available for download. Of course, you'll have to be willing to wait a few weeks till they're up. I'd encourage people to wait the couple weeks and buy the linux version. Q3 runs like crap on my p166 w/ voodoo2, and if it wasn't for the linux version, I probably wouldn't even buy it.
BTW, I think including SUSE is a good idea, too. I'm currently running Red Hat, but I'm interested in seeing what SUSE's like. Maybe I'll just slap it onto another partition. I realize that you can go to Cheap Bytes and get a cheap distro cd, but this way I don't have to.
Yup, it's still in a lot of places on the site (ie http://guides.go.com/). I'm sure it's pretty difficult to track down all the instances of their logo over a number of servers. I'm sure they have tons of images in multiple places to sort through.
Now is Corel working to create more Linux based apps (PhotoDraw, Paint, blah blah, etc.)? What are they doing that is tied to the Amiga platform? Are they planning on using any of the specialized hardware the new Amigas are supposed to have or what? I mean, it seems like this is something they would have been working on already, but Amiga Inc. is just milking for publicity.
Now, let me say that I am excited about the new Amiga and hope that it does well, _but_ it seems like there's just been a lot of hype recently (and over the years). I've always had a soft spot for Amigas (since my A1000), and I'd love to see them do well, but do they actually have anything going on here?
The problem is, we shouldn't have to rig the benchmarks (like MS) to win. I have no idea whether Linux or NT would/will win in the new Mindcraft tests, but it seems like setting up rigged benchmarks is sinking to the level of MS. To do a vaild test, you have to identify what you want to test and then develop the test from there. You can't design a fair test to produce the results you want to exhibit (unless, I guess, you're MS:). Right now, it seems like MS wants to test the performance of mid-high end servers, and it seems like the test they've developed will actually test that. While it may be true that this hardware configuration is skewed to make NT look better, that doesn't mean that it's not a valid test.
Say NT does beat Linux in a fair test (read not the first Mindcraft one). That shows that NT is probably better (for now) on high end servers. While I'm sure MS will produce some FUD saying something like, "NT Server is xxx% faster than Linux!!!", really what would be true is that NT Server is xxx% faster on high end servers. I think that, as a comunity, we should accept that and not try and hide from what may be the truth. What we should be doing is working to change that truth. Help develop Linux SMP, the file system, USB support, or whatever, that way, next year (or whenever) these tests are run again on mid-high end SMP servers, Linux wins, and wins fairly.
Tyler made the mosaic (was:Re:Lara Croft perverts)
on
May Ten Quickies
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· Score: 1
Actually, it's not Arcsoft Photomontage, it's Tyler, a Win32 program that's available for free download on the site. I fired it up and it seems to work fairly well. I don't have such a large image gallary to work with on my machine, so my results weren't as well crafted, but I could see it producing some cool pics givin a large enough base of images.
BTW, does anyone know of a large web based repository for photos and images (not porno, just anything)?
Here's the fourth article in the series of mp3 news spewing forth from ZDNet today. This one focuses on the downloading of mp3s. Again, there's a little blurb about real networks... does ZDNet hold a lot of Real stock or something? This article is written by Matthew Broersma, the author of two of the other articles. Maybe he's just the one with the stock (of course if he is, it's not working 'cause they're down 21 today) .
If it's the same thing that happened to me, it's an explosives check. They wipe some sort of material on the fabric part of your cary on and then put it in some box. If it changes color, it's detecting bomb residue. I don't think that's an invasion of my privacy. I'd say that wiping some thingy over my cary on is preferable to them opening up my caryon and searching it. I appreciate their efforts to keep people from blowing me up. I think I'd find being blown into little bits a much greater invasion of my privacy:).
No, I realize that this area has one of the highest in the nation, it's just that the original poster was making it out to be more than what it really is. While, it's way over-priced, it's not as bad as he was saying (that and wages do compensate for part of it:).
I'm not sure if this has been proposed already, but I was thinking that a sum of the moderated comments displayed with the abstract on the main page might be useful. It would give a _rough_ idea to someone what the quality of the article's comments were. To improve this tally, it might be better to only include the sum of the moderated comments (that way all the +1 scores of logged in people don't affect it, but if a +1 gets moderated to a 0, then it would lower the total). If you don't think it would add too much additional clutter on the main page, it might be a nice feature.
Ok, let me see if I understand how this works. Once you're selected through [insert process here] you are in a pool of aproximatly 1000 moderators. If you are in this pool, occasionally you will be called upon to moderate some subset of the articles available in a similar fashion to the way things are currently moderated. But, if you are randomly selected to moderate an article, you aren't allowed to post comments about that article? If you're chosen to moderate an article, do you have the choice of not moderating and commenting? If not, it might deprive the/. community of valueable comments these people might make. If you are allowed to choose to moderate, I'd think it would discourage people from moderating subjects they were interested in (and might make good judgements about what to moderate). If you're not allowing people to moderate their own comments, I don't see the harm in them moderating the thread they're reading (dispite the possibility of people moderating down comments against them or their position). Anyway, I'm sure the modeation system will settle out into something that works well.
BTW, how does your script check to see how many comments people read when they're in flattened mode?
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only /.'s next interview was, "Ask Microsoft's Kerberos legal team 10-15 questions". It might be tough to get the moderators to promote 10 civil questions though (that and MS would never agree to the interview :( ).
Actually, according to the manuals at my last job (working on a BPS test bed), if they pump SA all the way up to 15, GPS is only accuarate to 10km! I'd really hate to be lost in the woods and not be able to find out where I was to within 10km. The whole point of this story was that they aren't going to use SA anymore during our conflicts. If they feel the need, they'll turn off service to the reigon of the conflict. When SA was in use, you could figure out your position (if you had the time). If you placed your receiver in a static location and mapped the coordinates it fed you, it would form a circle around your actual position.
Also, the reason SA only affects civilian receivers is that CA code is what SA affects and is what civilian receivers look at. P(Y) code is what the military recivers look at and is at a much higher frequency (and encrypted). The wavelength of the signal determines the physical limit on how accurate your reciever is. I don't recall the frequencies off the top of my head, but that's why the military receivers work better.
BTW, the Russians have their own gps network and don't need ours to target their missiles.
The thing about scientists is, whenever they set out to prove something they want to prove, they invariably find a way of proving it.
That effect is called "confirmation bias". It is a problem when researchers only seem to look at evidence that backs up the theory they're trying to prove. I don't see, necessarily, evidence of that here, though.
The reason you might think that "whenever [scientists] set out to prove something... they invariably find a way of proving it." is because the media usually doesn't report stories where people disproved their theories. I'd also guess that researchers are more likely to spend the time publishing their results if they proved what they set out to do. So, what you get may be an apparent bias where not really exists. That's just something to keep in mind before you go generalizing about "The thing about scientists is...".
last episode's transcript
show related website.
"choose your own adventures"
(still sorry about the tripple post with broken links)
The series never really ended since the last episode (of the season) was never produced. Michael Reaves, one of the shows writers, put up the last episode's transcript that he wrote for the show. It's really a pretty interesting read and tells a lot about venger.
You can also take a look at one of the best D&D (the cartoon) web sites here. She has some original "choose your own adventures" under the books link along with a bunch of other cool stuff.
(sorry about the double post with broken links)
The series never really ended since the last episode (of the season) was never produced. Michael Reaves, one of the shows writers, put up the last episode's transcript that he wrote for the show. It's really a pretty interesting read and tells a lot about venger.
You can also take a look at one of the best D&D (the cartoon) web sites here. She has some original "choose your own adventures" under the books link along with a bunch of other cool stuff.
Let me start off by saying I don't have any experience writing drivers. But, my guess would be that this process isn't as good for writing high performance drivers that a lot of manufacturers require. For video cards, the drivers dramatically affect performance. Frame rates often have double digit improvements from early beta drivers to more mature versions.
Admittedly, it might be good to flesh out quick support for other operating systems, but the performance most likely wouldn't be there. Anyway, that'd be my guess. Besides, do we really want hardware manufacturers putting out cheap/quick drivers for Linux/Solaris/etc. and calling it support (just so they can put more text on their boxes)?
There's a community freeware version of this for Windows AND Linux called LeoCAD. It looks pretty cool (although, I admit I haven't tried it). While the Autodesk/Lego one has 63 available pieces, LeoCAD has over 1000! I didn't see anything on the lego dacta page about purchasing (other than where to find distributors), anyone know how much it costs?
/. editors with different interests.
On an offtopic side note, it's funny that they put this story up, but didn't think LeoCAD deserved mention when I submitted it a few months ago. I think there are just too many
I dunno, as an intel employee, I'm pretty excited to get a free box to crack more rc5 keys with. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but I'm certianly not turning it down on some paranoid notion that Intel will have some secret deal with whatever OEM provides the box to get my serial number. Especially since I'll just disable it's transmission in my bios (I doubt the oem will write a special bios that won't allow me to turn it off). And, yes, the employees will own their machine and intel won't have any more right to look at it's contents than the do with the machines I have now.
:). The cool thing is that in the internal faq, it says that there's a possibility that the internet access won't necessairally be dialup. They may have cable/dsl/isdn options or something... they're not sure yet. Also, you get that (kinda) neat microscope that hooks up to your (windows) box. I saw it at the store and thought, "hrmmm... that might be fun to play with".
However, I'm not one of the people that will benifit the most. Of the 70,000+ employees and reitrees Intel has, many of them work at fabs in countries where computers are much less prevalent. They say they're trying to find an internet access option for all the employees too. I think that's pretty cool.
Actually, working extra hours (at home or at work) is supposedly forbidden by intel's pollicies (yeah, that really works
Not to be too contrary, but the companies name is Omron and the creator's name is Toshihiro Tashima (as stated in the first two paragraphs).
I think the previous poster was saying that the MS Natural Elite was crap - which I'd wholeheartedly agree with. I owned the original natural keyboard and loved it. However, when my dad got the elite with his new computer, I couldn't stand it. Luckily, they came out with the pro just before I pieced together my new machine.
I've been happily using it for the last couple months. The key layout is very similar to that on the original, but they've made a few keys smaller (function keys, etc). It doesn't really change the feel too much though. I wish the keyboard were a little more responsive (ie clacky), but the keys are by no means spongy... all in said, I really like it.
I think I would consider Neuromancer as a "classic" in the science fiction context. I also read it and other "mature" fiction at a younger age than 13. I'm not saying that books like Ender's Game and Neuromancer are for every young person, but I think I've turned out alright despite this _subversive_ and adult literature. BTW, another comedy series that bares mention is Harry Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero. Quite funny and appropreate for 13 year olds.
As stated in this previous /. article, all the binaries will eventually be available for download. Of course, you'll have to be willing to wait a few weeks till they're up. I'd encourage people to wait the couple weeks and buy the linux version. Q3 runs like crap on my p166 w/ voodoo2, and if it wasn't for the linux version, I probably wouldn't even buy it.
BTW, I think including SUSE is a good idea, too. I'm currently running Red Hat, but I'm interested in seeing what SUSE's like. Maybe I'll just slap it onto another partition. I realize that you can go to Cheap Bytes and get a cheap distro cd, but this way I don't have to.
Yup, it's still in a lot of places on the site (ie http://guides.go.com/). I'm sure it's pretty difficult to track down all the instances of their logo over a number of servers. I'm sure they have tons of images in multiple places to sort through.
Chris
Now is Corel working to create more Linux based apps (PhotoDraw, Paint, blah blah, etc.)? What are they doing that is tied to the Amiga platform? Are they planning on using any of the specialized hardware the new Amigas are supposed to have or what? I mean, it seems like this is something they would have been working on already, but Amiga Inc. is just milking for publicity.
Now, let me say that I am excited about the new Amiga and hope that it does well, _but_ it seems like there's just been a lot of hype recently (and over the years). I've always had a soft spot for Amigas (since my A1000), and I'd love to see them do well, but do they actually have anything going on here?
Harlequin
The problem is, we shouldn't have to rig the benchmarks (like MS) to win. I have no idea whether Linux or NT would/will win in the new Mindcraft tests, but it seems like setting up rigged benchmarks is sinking to the level of MS. To do a vaild test, you have to identify what you want to test and then develop the test from there. You can't design a fair test to produce the results you want to exhibit (unless, I guess, you're MS :). Right now, it seems like MS wants to test the performance of mid-high end servers, and it seems like the test they've developed will actually test that. While it may be true that this hardware configuration is skewed to make NT look better, that doesn't mean that it's not a valid test.
Say NT does beat Linux in a fair test (read not the first Mindcraft one). That shows that NT is probably better (for now) on high end servers. While I'm sure MS will produce some FUD saying something like, "NT Server is xxx% faster than Linux!!!", really what would be true is that NT Server is xxx% faster on high end servers. I think that, as a comunity, we should accept that and not try and hide from what may be the truth. What we should be doing is working to change that truth. Help develop Linux SMP, the file system, USB support, or whatever, that way, next year (or whenever) these tests are run again on mid-high end SMP servers, Linux wins, and wins fairly.
Actually, it's not Arcsoft Photomontage, it's Tyler, a Win32 program that's available for free download on the site. I fired it up and it seems to work fairly well. I don't have such a large image gallary to work with on my machine, so my results weren't as well crafted, but I could see it producing some cool pics givin a large enough base of images.
BTW, does anyone know of a large web based repository for photos and images (not porno, just anything)?
Here's the fourth article in the series of mp3 news spewing forth from ZDNet today. This one focuses on the downloading of mp3s. Again, there's a little blurb about real networks... does ZDNet hold a lot of Real stock or something? This article is written by Matthew Broersma, the author of two of the other articles. Maybe he's just the one with the stock (of course if he is, it's not working 'cause they're down 21 today) .
If it's the same thing that happened to me, it's an explosives check. They wipe some sort of material on the fabric part of your cary on and then put it in some box. If it changes color, it's detecting bomb residue. I don't think that's an invasion of my privacy. I'd say that wiping some thingy over my cary on is preferable to them opening up my caryon and searching it. I appreciate their efforts to keep people from blowing me up. I think I'd find being blown into little bits a much greater invasion of my privacy :).
The writeup said it detects non-metal weapons too. The plastic/ceramic guns (that actually still have metal parts) are to get around metal detectors.
Anyone else think that the new QT4 interface looks kinda like a Palm V? It has that brushed metal look with a rounded Pilot feel. I like the new look.
Well, technically, the mouse buttons themselves move, but I think that's being a bit too picky.
No, I realize that this area has one of the highest in the nation, it's just that the original poster was making it out to be more than what it really is. While, it's way over-priced, it's not as bad as he was saying (that and wages do compensate for part of it :).
I'm not sure if this has been proposed already, but I was thinking that a sum of the moderated comments displayed with the abstract on the main page might be useful. It would give a _rough_ idea to someone what the quality of the article's comments were. To improve this tally, it might be better to only include the sum of the moderated comments (that way all the +1 scores of logged in people don't affect it, but if a +1 gets moderated to a 0, then it would lower the total). If you don't think it would add too much additional clutter on the main page, it might be a nice feature.
BTW, I like the department headings.
Ok, let me see if I understand how this works. Once you're selected through [insert process here] you are in a pool of aproximatly 1000 moderators. If you are in this pool, occasionally you will be called upon to moderate some subset of the articles available in a similar fashion to the way things are currently moderated. But, if you are randomly selected to moderate an article, you aren't allowed to post comments about that article? If you're chosen to moderate an article, do you have the choice of not moderating and commenting? If not, it might deprive the /. community of valueable comments these people might make. If you are allowed to choose to moderate, I'd think it would discourage people from moderating subjects they were interested in (and might make good judgements about what to moderate). If you're not allowing people to moderate their own comments, I don't see the harm in them moderating the thread they're reading (dispite the possibility of people moderating down comments against them or their position). Anyway, I'm sure the modeation system will settle out into something that works well.
BTW, how does your script check to see how many comments people read when they're in flattened mode?