I second the call to mod up the AC GP.
Think about it. Who is supplying the crude Sorry to burst your bubble, but the USA procures more than 2/3 of its oil from North America, the bulk of which comes from Canada.. After North America, you might think the Middle East comes second but again you'd be wrong, it's South America. Could someone please mod this guy up. Do a little googling to find the information yourself. Heck, I'll do it for you.
I suppose you could argue that it isn't how much we import from them as it is how much the export to us. The problem with that, if it wasn't us buying, it would be someone else (how about China or India).
This is just a recommendation that you go RTFA, because it's short yet tells you enough to show that this was an outstanding experiment that showed some remarkable behavior.
We're not. IIRC, last year was the coolest in two decades, once you adjust for major volcanic eruptions. And I recall the last year was the second warmest in history (and the last two decades), after 2005. Where's my +1 informative? I give the same evidence that Mikeee does (but I'll hold up better to a fact check).
It's the same with colors--the eyes just can't distinguish between a display with 10 million colors and a billion colors. Personally I think you're wasting your money buying this thing. But at the very least, maybe the price of "inferior" monitors will go down if this goes mainstream, so I shouldn't complain. I'm amazed at how uninformed you and most of the posters seem to be. You can prove that the eye can distinguish, VERY EASILY, between 16.7 million and 1 billion colors, and you can do it right now.
1) Open photoshop.
2) Make a gradient from 0-0-0 RGB to 255-0-0 RGB. This covers every possible variation of the red channel in a 16.7 million color space. Draw the gradient across your whole screen.
3) Look at the color banding and say, "Oh, I guess I can see why 30 bit color would be noticeable."
would give the much-derided ISS a stab at doing some decent science for a change
That won't necessarily help with the derision, as nobody denies the fact that interesting experiments are possible in space. The main point of contention will still be if you need to keep live persons there continuously to perform them. It'd have to be shown that a satellite or a simple orbiting mission couldn't have performed the same experiments for a fraction of the total costs. The cost of the ISS program is already ridiculously small, and the #1 thing that gets people interested in space at a young age, and in a lasting way, is the idea of people going into space.
I think it's like a zoo. Maybe the animals inside are being held in some sort of unfair captivity (I tend to think that in modern zoos most animals are pretty satisfied, but let's not go into that), but the interest and money generated by those animals creates the world's largest resource for saving their wild relatives.
Even if the ISS is never used in a way that provides more direct scientific knowledge per euro than unmanned missions, I believe it's worth it in the long term.
I drove in a snow storm out of Detroit a few months ago. It took me five hours to do a two hour drive. Part of that was caused by my driving 25-30 mph, max, but mostly it was due to the delays caused by accidents in front of me.
Most of the people on the road were aiming for about the same speed I was, and leaving at least about 5 car lengths between each other. A bunch of SUVs shot past in the fast lane at 60, though, whenever there wasn't a delay to get around a wreck.
We passed 12 accidents in that time, and every single one was caused by an SUV. 3 or 4 of the SUVs were on their sides or upside down, but mostly they were just smashed badly.
Driving an SUV for safety is like strapping a chunk of plutonium around your neck and claiming that it makes you safer because now no one will try to steal your wallet.
I'm guess $99 for an 8gig model... LOL It's still not quite to the level of good cracked phones like the HTC Mogul in terms of features, which does everything the new iPod does, has thousands of free third party apps, and a feature-complete browsers so you're not locked into the Safari supporting internet, but the Mogul feels clunkier than the iPhone.
The mlb.com presentation was pretty funny. They say you can now watch games update in real time and also see video highlights as they occur (instead of after the game). Then they say that this is iPod exclusive, even though on a good smartphone you've been able to see the exact same thing all season, and the same thing minus video clips for years. The only exclusive part of it is that Safari can't load the mlb.com Gameday page correctly, so on the iPhone it requires a special little app to run.
I have a game designer friend in a pretty high profile company who has had the same experience as Gabe Newell. When his companies fancy new game was in early development, a team from Apple came to talk with them about making the game work in OSX. They came up with a plan, got very enthused, and then the Apple guys disappeared. Now, with Boot Camp, it's unlikely OSX will ever develop into a remotely popular gaming platform, since it's a pain to develop for such a small share of the market and Apple users can just boot up into a superior gaming OS at the drop of a hat.
Peer Review, Quality Control, etc. can all be obtained without putting out a printed journal. It seems terribly backwards for... well, science in general.
Let's say I invented an artificial salt and submitted a formula and explanation for peer review to a journal. This is something very simple and would have to fit very few criteria: does it taste like salt and can it do any more harm to a person than real salt? It is not a question that will take two years to answer.
Yet a lot of these these journals seem to be quarterly, biannual (sexy!), or annual and I'm stuck.
Why can't they move to some sort of online model like - dare I say it - Slashdot? Much, much better peer review and much more competent editors (different for each field, and highly respected), but effectively the same thing. Sure, there won't be new articles every day, but biweekly or monthly could be a reality.
And for those people who are looking for an old-style printed journal, well... there's always Ctrl+P.
Every journal is now online. You can request paper versions, but the price is very high because they don't print many.
Also, nearly every major journal has an immediate release method, where articles are published online about one day after final revisions are received. Those articles will then be collected into the next journal issue, at which point they are cleared from the immediate release index.
You however have other problems I'm guessing.;-) Having just installed Vista 64 after trying Ubuntu for a month and giving up because of crashes, and having had 0 crashes, even program crashes, in my first 4 days, I'm no longer believing the Slashdot meme that Vista is such a piece of crap. It was the smoothest OS install I've ever done and it's a much snappier OS on my system than XP or Ubuntu were. Maybe 4 gigs of ram is the trick, and maybe I'm just lucky to have well supported hardware, but on my system it's outstanding.
I haven't played it, but from what I understand Age of Conan actually does do a pretty good job of telling a compelling story in which you are the main character through its lengthy single player segments.
The cameras weren't as good then, so it would have been harder to tell a photo of a model from a photo of a painting of the model. The cameras were not in color. Nobody expected a photo of a painting to be anything but a photo.
I have to beg to differ on this:
1861: The first known permanent color photograph is taken by James Clerk Maxwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography Check out the link for excellent examples of early color photography as well
Of course, if you were to go the "traditional" route, and have a book bound, that would eat into your profits, but would deter pirates; who would want to spend ages at a scanner or a photocopier copying a whole bound book? The vast majority of e-books on popular indexing sites (you can guess which ones) are from OCR scans of physical books. You need to realize that popular bound books are at least as likely to be pirated as.pdf books. Thousands or millions of regular people who would have no idea how to break.pdf DRM know exactly how to easily (less than an hour per couple hundred pages) defeat copy protection on bound books using fifteen year old technology.
I don't get too many people copying photos from my site, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of Ansel Adams' photos scattered around the net in violation of copyright. Every Ansel Adams photo that exists is no longer under copyright.
I On the XP machines, they wouldn't boot the original XP installations, they blue-screened. I had to reinstall Windows on both and, even though both of my XP licenses are entirely legitimate, I had to ring Microsoft to get different license keys. It took me the best part of a day to reinstall Windows and longer to reinstall all the other games and apps that now wouldn't work because of registry bits missing. Next time boot off the Windows XP cd and run a repair install (different from recovery console). It will automatically fix the Windows installs and you won't have to reactivate. And yes, I hate that motherboard upgrades break Windows.
With Windows, I have to buy two new 64-bit XP licenses or, if I completely lose my sanity, by two Vista licenses. Yes, maybe the included migration tool will do a lot of the hard work for me but ultimately it's another two rebuilds, no chance of just rebuilding one and copying across.
Oh, and BTW, using all of 4 gigs of ram is simply about how much memory a 32-bit environment can address - 64-bit Linux can address and use 4 gigs of RAM equally as well as (64-bit) Vista.
Sounds like Linux is your best bet. I do know that there are 64 bit OSs other than Windows. As I stated in my post, my Vista experiment is driven by the desire to mess with a new OS, whereas you are justifiably tired of installing and configuring operating systems when you don't feel you should be forced to do so. Enjoy your new hardware!
I'm often positively impressed when politicians change their minds, assuming they did it because they learned more about the issue. I'm not impressed with McCain's descent into the bowels of extreme right wing Bushism because he's done it to appease extremist voters to his own benefit.
I recently tried Ubuntu as my first foray into Linux on my home computer after asking Slashdot for some related advice. I got tired of not having the software I'm used to using from XP (Endnote, Kaleidagraph, etc, and games) and the biweekly crashes (certainly caused by my noobishness, I'm happy to admit), and went back to XP full time after about a month.
After a few days of XP I realized that my OS wanderlust hadn't yet been sated, and since I had a free Vista 64 license sitting around I thought I'd try that out for awhile on a second hard drive. I installed it without a problem (Ubuntu installed very smoothly, too, I should note) and disabled the things that seemed like they'd be annoying, like UAC (you've tried to copy a file. [Cake?] or [Death?]) and system indexing, and then installed my normal stuff and started using it.
Two weeks later and I've yet to have a crash and the thing boots faster than Ubuntu did (Vista seems to be about the same as XP) and is much more responsive than either XP or Ubuntu. Firefox loads like instantly, as do most of the apps I use regularly. Unlike in my XP32, I'm now using all of my 4 gigs of RAM, too, which makes me more comfortable running things like the HL2 cinematic mod, which at least claims to need 4 gigs of available memory. I'm generally not very impressed by the GUI's new look, and my Creative sound card no longer does EAX or any sort of hardware acceleration at all as far as I know, but the system is the snappiest thing I've used since Windows 2000. I'm still getting used to having ~0 megs of memory free at any given moment, but the caching that's using that memory does seem to pay dividends in terms of performance, and when I run something memory intensive it seems like the memory is released without a hint of delay.
From what I've heard, Vista sounds like a slug on low end machines, especially those with 1 gig or less of memory, and also a lot of people have hardware that just makes Vista a nightmare of crashes. However, for high end systems with kosher hardware, it's pretty nifty.
I don't really gain any new features over XP, but 1) it's snappier and 2) mainly it satisfies the need for a new OS that drove me to Linux without requiring me to reboot to XP to run the programs I'm used to using. I guess 2) is an example of evil MS vendor lock-in for those applications.
5% of.coms, or 19% of.hk's? On a percentage basis, the.hk,.info, etc. But as a whole, my money's on.com's?.
Bad math = bad reporting. When solving a word problem, one must find the mathematical expression that best expresses the question. You've got the wrong one.
You're making the argument that what really matters is the total number of malicious sites in each domain, not the fraction of sites within a domain that are malicious.
Clearly, however, the fraction is the more important metric. Consider a silly analogy:
There are 100 violent criminals in my local jail out of a total population of 200. There are 1000 violent criminals running free in Hawaii out of a total population of 1 million. When choosing a safer place for a vacation, by your logic, I'd pick my jail, since the total number of offenders is lower. 50% of my fellows would be violent criminals. By my logic, I'd pick Hawaii, where there would be more criminals, but they'd only make up 0.1% of the people around me. I prefer my odds.
Something like 90% of the hydrogen used in the world today comes from a company called Air Products that produced it from methane. The process produces about twice the CO2 per unit energy made available as hydrogen fuel as does simple burning of gasoline.
Your source, as I suspect you know, is a possibility for the future, but not the reality of today.
Sort of related, I recently had dinner with three people who used Oink extensively before it shut down. I mentioned that the one user who I knew very well had basically stopped buying music after Oink shut down. She used to spend about $1-2k/year on music, but since Oink's demise she cut back to about $50/year. She didn't do it out of spite. She did it because she could no longer sample broad ranges of music under the guidance of a knowledgeable community's recommendations. The free and legal methods for sampling music are obviously quite limited in order to prevent piracy.
Back to my dinner. The other two users (none of the three knew that the others used Oink before this night) were almost shocked, because they had done the exact same thing. They used to find music they liked on Oink and then buy it. Now they just don't buy music.
A bunch of angry and closed-minded people like to respond to this type of post on Slashdot with disbelief or simply an accusation that the poster is a filthy thief. I, personally, never used Oink and I also buy about one album per year because I only care about a couple bands, so I'm close to being completely uninvolved with the music industry. Since long before Oink, however, I've known a lot of people who have downloaded songs for free, and in most cases the free downloads resulted in them buying more music. I'm sure a ton of downloaders don't buy music because of it, but I'm also sure that a ton of those don't buy less music because of it. Deny it or not, the fraction of people who buy (or bought) more music because of free downloads is substantial, so much so that I'm not convinced the music industry really has a net loss due to piracy for personal use.
Japanese games are the worst offenders in terms of the issues brought up in TFA. In general, they have a series of long, non-interactive cut scenes connected by relatively unrelated gameplay.
Look to a game like Half Life 2 or Portal to see strong storytelling blended with gameplay in the way that TFA suggests.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.google.com/search?q=where%20does%20the%20USA%20oil%20come%20from
http://www.officialsanantonio.com/world/articles/where_does_usa_oil_come_from.htm
http://www.wisegeek.com/where-does-the-us-oil-supply-come-from.htm
http://watthead.blogspot.com/2006/03/where-does-your-oil-come-from.html
I suppose you could argue that it isn't how much we import from them as it is how much the export to us. The problem with that, if it wasn't us buying, it would be someone else (how about China or India).
This is just a recommendation that you go RTFA, because it's short yet tells you enough to show that this was an outstanding experiment that showed some remarkable behavior.
In summary, Mighty Yar risks his daughter's life every day, and he does it because he prefers incorrect common wisdom over real statistics or logic.
1) Open photoshop.
2) Make a gradient from 0-0-0 RGB to 255-0-0 RGB. This covers every possible variation of the red channel in a 16.7 million color space. Draw the gradient across your whole screen.
3) Look at the color banding and say, "Oh, I guess I can see why 30 bit color would be noticeable."
That won't necessarily help with the derision, as nobody denies the fact that interesting experiments are possible in space. The main point of contention will still be if you need to keep live persons there continuously to perform them. It'd have to be shown that a satellite or a simple orbiting mission couldn't have performed the same experiments for a fraction of the total costs. The cost of the ISS program is already ridiculously small, and the #1 thing that gets people interested in space at a young age, and in a lasting way, is the idea of people going into space.
I think it's like a zoo. Maybe the animals inside are being held in some sort of unfair captivity (I tend to think that in modern zoos most animals are pretty satisfied, but let's not go into that), but the interest and money generated by those animals creates the world's largest resource for saving their wild relatives.
Even if the ISS is never used in a way that provides more direct scientific knowledge per euro than unmanned missions, I believe it's worth it in the long term.
I drove in a snow storm out of Detroit a few months ago. It took me five hours to do a two hour drive. Part of that was caused by my driving 25-30 mph, max, but mostly it was due to the delays caused by accidents in front of me.
Most of the people on the road were aiming for about the same speed I was, and leaving at least about 5 car lengths between each other. A bunch of SUVs shot past in the fast lane at 60, though, whenever there wasn't a delay to get around a wreck.
We passed 12 accidents in that time, and every single one was caused by an SUV. 3 or 4 of the SUVs were on their sides or upside down, but mostly they were just smashed badly.
Driving an SUV for safety is like strapping a chunk of plutonium around your neck and claiming that it makes you safer because now no one will try to steal your wallet.
The mlb.com presentation was pretty funny. They say you can now watch games update in real time and also see video highlights as they occur (instead of after the game). Then they say that this is iPod exclusive, even though on a good smartphone you've been able to see the exact same thing all season, and the same thing minus video clips for years. The only exclusive part of it is that Safari can't load the mlb.com Gameday page correctly, so on the iPhone it requires a special little app to run.
Mod the parent up as informative for letting us know that the new version is thicker than the old one.
My question is: Does the new version support flash? Can it now use the real internet or is it still locked to the Flashless Safari internet?
I wouldn't say that the internet is making us stupider, but blogs are certainly making stupid people more visible.
I have a game designer friend in a pretty high profile company who has had the same experience as Gabe Newell. When his companies fancy new game was in early development, a team from Apple came to talk with them about making the game work in OSX. They came up with a plan, got very enthused, and then the Apple guys disappeared. Now, with Boot Camp, it's unlikely OSX will ever develop into a remotely popular gaming platform, since it's a pain to develop for such a small share of the market and Apple users can just boot up into a superior gaming OS at the drop of a hat.
Peer Review, Quality Control, etc. can all be obtained without putting out a printed journal. It seems terribly backwards for... well, science in general.
Let's say I invented an artificial salt and submitted a formula and explanation for peer review to a journal. This is something very simple and would have to fit very few criteria: does it taste like salt and can it do any more harm to a person than real salt? It is not a question that will take two years to answer.
Yet a lot of these these journals seem to be quarterly, biannual (sexy!), or annual and I'm stuck.
Why can't they move to some sort of online model like - dare I say it - Slashdot? Much, much better peer review and much more competent editors (different for each field, and highly respected), but effectively the same thing. Sure, there won't be new articles every day, but biweekly or monthly could be a reality.
And for those people who are looking for an old-style printed journal, well... there's always Ctrl+P.
Every journal is now online. You can request paper versions, but the price is very high because they don't print many.Also, nearly every major journal has an immediate release method, where articles are published online about one day after final revisions are received. Those articles will then be collected into the next journal issue, at which point they are cleared from the immediate release index.
DD-WRT v24 std (c) 2008 NewMedia-NET GmbH
Release: 04/24/08 (SVN revision: 9433)
Same here, with 2 XP SP3s and a Vista 64 SP1, zero problems with WRT54GL running DD-WRT. I think the GP was grasping for straws.
and I have 2 XP SP3 machines on my network, both a laptop and a desktop, and it all runs smoothly.
root@router:~# uptime
21:48:31 up 15 days, 13:46, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
I haven't played it, but from what I understand Age of Conan actually does do a pretty good job of telling a compelling story in which you are the main character through its lengthy single player segments.
I have to beg to differ on this:
1861: The first known permanent color photograph is taken by James Clerk Maxwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography Check out the link for excellent examples of early color photography as well
Some of these color photos look like they could have been taken in the past couple of decades, but this one was from nearly 100 years ago and in full color: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Prokudin-Gorskii-12.jpg
Wow, very impressive. I haven't seen such good color photography from that era before. Thanks for the cultural enrichment.On the XP machines, they wouldn't boot the original XP installations, they blue-screened. I had to reinstall Windows on both and, even though both of my XP licenses are entirely legitimate, I had to ring Microsoft to get different license keys. It took me the best part of a day to reinstall Windows and longer to reinstall all the other games and apps that now wouldn't work because of registry bits missing. Next time boot off the Windows XP cd and run a repair install (different from recovery console). It will automatically fix the Windows installs and you won't have to reactivate. And yes, I hate that motherboard upgrades break Windows. With Windows, I have to buy two new 64-bit XP licenses or, if I completely lose my sanity, by two Vista licenses. Yes, maybe the included migration tool will do a lot of the hard work for me but ultimately it's another two rebuilds, no chance of just rebuilding one and copying across.
Sounds like Linux is your best bet. I do know that there are 64 bit OSs other than Windows. As I stated in my post, my Vista experiment is driven by the desire to mess with a new OS, whereas you are justifiably tired of installing and configuring operating systems when you don't feel you should be forced to do so. Enjoy your new hardware!Oh, and BTW, using all of 4 gigs of ram is simply about how much memory a 32-bit environment can address - 64-bit Linux can address and use 4 gigs of RAM equally as well as (64-bit) Vista.
I'm often positively impressed when politicians change their minds, assuming they did it because they learned more about the issue. I'm not impressed with McCain's descent into the bowels of extreme right wing Bushism because he's done it to appease extremist voters to his own benefit.
I recently tried Ubuntu as my first foray into Linux on my home computer after asking Slashdot for some related advice. I got tired of not having the software I'm used to using from XP (Endnote, Kaleidagraph, etc, and games) and the biweekly crashes (certainly caused by my noobishness, I'm happy to admit), and went back to XP full time after about a month.
After a few days of XP I realized that my OS wanderlust hadn't yet been sated, and since I had a free Vista 64 license sitting around I thought I'd try that out for awhile on a second hard drive. I installed it without a problem (Ubuntu installed very smoothly, too, I should note) and disabled the things that seemed like they'd be annoying, like UAC (you've tried to copy a file. [Cake?] or [Death?]) and system indexing, and then installed my normal stuff and started using it.
Two weeks later and I've yet to have a crash and the thing boots faster than Ubuntu did (Vista seems to be about the same as XP) and is much more responsive than either XP or Ubuntu. Firefox loads like instantly, as do most of the apps I use regularly. Unlike in my XP32, I'm now using all of my 4 gigs of RAM, too, which makes me more comfortable running things like the HL2 cinematic mod, which at least claims to need 4 gigs of available memory. I'm generally not very impressed by the GUI's new look, and my Creative sound card no longer does EAX or any sort of hardware acceleration at all as far as I know, but the system is the snappiest thing I've used since Windows 2000. I'm still getting used to having ~0 megs of memory free at any given moment, but the caching that's using that memory does seem to pay dividends in terms of performance, and when I run something memory intensive it seems like the memory is released without a hint of delay.
From what I've heard, Vista sounds like a slug on low end machines, especially those with 1 gig or less of memory, and also a lot of people have hardware that just makes Vista a nightmare of crashes. However, for high end systems with kosher hardware, it's pretty nifty.
I don't really gain any new features over XP, but 1) it's snappier and 2) mainly it satisfies the need for a new OS that drove me to Linux without requiring me to reboot to XP to run the programs I'm used to using. I guess 2) is an example of evil MS vendor lock-in for those applications.
Bad math = bad reporting. When solving a word problem, one must find the mathematical expression that best expresses the question. You've got the wrong one.
You're making the argument that what really matters is the total number of malicious sites in each domain, not the fraction of sites within a domain that are malicious.
Clearly, however, the fraction is the more important metric. Consider a silly analogy:
There are 100 violent criminals in my local jail out of a total population of 200. There are 1000 violent criminals running free in Hawaii out of a total population of 1 million. When choosing a safer place for a vacation, by your logic, I'd pick my jail, since the total number of offenders is lower. 50% of my fellows would be violent criminals. By my logic, I'd pick Hawaii, where there would be more criminals, but they'd only make up 0.1% of the people around me. I prefer my odds.
Something like 90% of the hydrogen used in the world today comes from a company called Air Products that produced it from methane. The process produces about twice the CO2 per unit energy made available as hydrogen fuel as does simple burning of gasoline.
Your source, as I suspect you know, is a possibility for the future, but not the reality of today.
Nice categories.
Sort of related, I recently had dinner with three people who used Oink extensively before it shut down. I mentioned that the one user who I knew very well had basically stopped buying music after Oink shut down. She used to spend about $1-2k/year on music, but since Oink's demise she cut back to about $50/year. She didn't do it out of spite. She did it because she could no longer sample broad ranges of music under the guidance of a knowledgeable community's recommendations. The free and legal methods for sampling music are obviously quite limited in order to prevent piracy.
Back to my dinner. The other two users (none of the three knew that the others used Oink before this night) were almost shocked, because they had done the exact same thing. They used to find music they liked on Oink and then buy it. Now they just don't buy music.
A bunch of angry and closed-minded people like to respond to this type of post on Slashdot with disbelief or simply an accusation that the poster is a filthy thief. I, personally, never used Oink and I also buy about one album per year because I only care about a couple bands, so I'm close to being completely uninvolved with the music industry. Since long before Oink, however, I've known a lot of people who have downloaded songs for free, and in most cases the free downloads resulted in them buying more music. I'm sure a ton of downloaders don't buy music because of it, but I'm also sure that a ton of those don't buy less music because of it. Deny it or not, the fraction of people who buy (or bought) more music because of free downloads is substantial, so much so that I'm not convinced the music industry really has a net loss due to piracy for personal use.
Japanese games are the worst offenders in terms of the issues brought up in TFA. In general, they have a series of long, non-interactive cut scenes connected by relatively unrelated gameplay.
Look to a game like Half Life 2 or Portal to see strong storytelling blended with gameplay in the way that TFA suggests.