Anyone else notice that Halliburton (formerly helmed by Dick Cheney) got a nice contract to put out the oil wells that have been set on fire? Another coincidence?
What, so having an ex-employee go work for the government should disqualify a company from ever having a government contract? What about all the other companies that got government contracts without ex-employees in the government? How do you explain that?
Unless you have evidence that Cheney is still on Halliburton's payroll, and that Halliburton is incapable of doing the work at the best price, all you've got is innuendo.
(Disclaimer: I do not work in games, but I know loads of people who do).
just do NOT get any better than this! We have multiple openings at one of the world's most successful software companies for experienced game testers of varying skill levels! Platforms and tools are not important. If you love video games and have at least 6 months experience you CANNOT miss this awesome opportunity!
OK, the idea that you will get paid to play games is misleading. This is not gameplaying for fun. This is running through the same level a thousand times, covering every "square foot" of floor space (or whatever concept makes sense in the game), doing every state-change (open a door, push a button, collect an object) in different orders to make sure none of them results in an unexpected result, tracing exactly the same path through a game again and again while a developer tries to locate a bug, trying to describe to engine developers (who may never have seen the scene in the game that's crashing, that's the designer's job) what exactly you did that caused to you fall through the floor, or to a designer (who has never touched the engine code) why two walls don't meet when viewed from a particular angle. Oh, and the pay sucks, and producers and other staff view you as entirely expendable, and as someone not smart enough to be a coder or designer. I know people who loved games, but lasted less than a year as testers, and now never want to touch a game again. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it!
But C&C isn't a violent game, particularly. I don't know if you've ever played it, but it's more like speed-chess than anything else. There's no blood and gore, no dismembered limbs, no gratuitously grotesque monsters. And banning it makes about as much sense as banning chess.
I can imagine it now, chess being banned because it reinforces the idea that some people are just pawns and hence "expendable" and that powerful people like royalty can go anywhere they want and kill anyone. Not only that, it contains the idea that what you are determines pre-set paths that you must travel on, crushing the creativity of our children!!!
The reason is that noone, except maybe Transmeta, has made any significant headway in making chips run cooler. Temperature management is just as important as transistor density. We all know that the best way to improve the performance of a processer is to supercool it.
MIPS and SGI have done some work in this area. If you're running a large data center, what's your #1 cost? Not electricity to run your CPUs but electricity to run your air conditioning. This can even cost more than the real estate and salaries! SGI are getting great SPECmarks/m^3 because they are running cooler. In fact, I'd like to see SPEC/m^3 become a standard metric of system performance, because it doesn't just include the CPU but the whole system.
yes, i believe as well that this is ironic and probably the case. since adobe has ported it's code to a unix (mac os x), in time it will be expected to port their code to other unixes (such as linux, and BSDs, as well as maybe IRIX).
You've got it backwards. Photoshop 3 (or maybe it was 2, my memory is hazy! Like the moors of Scotland!!) existed as far back as IRIX 5 on SGIs. It was round about the time that SGI were pushing the Indy as a desktop PC, with the idea that you would use a Mac for low-end 2D and the Indy for high-end 2D and entry level 3D. Of course it never played out because IRIX 5 was a piece of crap, far too slow, too buggy and the fancy desktop environment required too much RAM. By the time SGI got their act together with IRIX 6 (a damn good OS, IMHO, and I've used 'em all), the Mac had come to dominate 2D, not that it was ever particularly great but it was there and it worked better than Windows at the time and it was cheaper than SGI, who had pretty much abandoned their 2D ambitions by then and only sold machines with expensive 3D included in the price.
I heard that in some arabian countries beer is less expensive than water.. In near future this could also allow folks down in US to get their industrial energy(Oil) from somewhere else than Irak?;)
Well, everyone needs water, but there's not much demand for beer because it's forbidden under Sharia (Islamic law). The only people who drink it are expats, and only then in the (relative) privacy of their own homes, bars in international hotels, and so on.
Programs like AutoCAD, Revit, 3DStudio, Photoshop and a bunch of number crunching engineering apps i've never heard of. All of which are dying to use 64 bit systems.
If they really were that desperate, they'd have bought SPARC, MIPS, Alpha et al and demand would have led the vendors to port to those platforms. Serious CAD users, in Pro/E or I-DEAS, are on 64-bit systems.
Remember that the primary reason for changing to 64bit isn't speed or cost, but rather the ability to have a much larger address space, which serves to remove the 4GB memory limit.
To you or I, yes. But plenty of people will buy 64-bit just for the bragging rights. Anyone who does case modding falls into this category. AMD will make a fortune if they include a flashy "64-bit eXXXtreme!" sticker with every processor sold.
Why don't they try working with Apple to build out the Apple OS on the workstations and use Sun on the servers.
Maybe, but Apple's Xserve is competing directly with Sun's low-end Netras, which are what you'd have as a back end for your Sun Rays, at least in SMEs. I'm sure when Apple work out how, if they think there's a market, they'll want to sell 4- and 8-way boxes (for rendering, bioinformatics, WebObjects servers, whatever) to compete with Sun. Remember, Apple have just superseded Sun as the largest Unix workstation vendor in the world. The two have little reason to cooperate.
The money goes into the wallet of the rich men who did it in the first place.
I'll let you into a secret: there is not a wealthy cabal that controls the world. When people say "shareholders", they might think they're talking about the Illuminati but in reality they mean "anyone who holds units in a mutual fund" or "anyone with a 401(k)" (in the UK, think ISA or Private Pension). Shareholders are just ordinary people like you and me. There is no conspiracy.
Are sensitive military facilities accurately mapped?
When I was a cadet, the maps we used were accurate enough that individual trees in a forest were correctly represented, you could even take bearings off them for navigation (altho' if possible we used more permanent structures!). I once won an orienteering competition by literally leading my squad from tree to tree while the other squads messed around looking for traditional landmarks.
leading to a reduction in available information, even though the volume of misinformation has increased.
That's a very real problem. Observe how all the 24-hr news channels are filling their programmes with exactly the same stuff, even tho' the reality seems to be "not much has changed in the last 12 hrs".
You've got a long way to go buddy if you are seeking out real reason. Claiming pollution doesn't cause any harm... Ha!
I'm English, we understate everything:-)
No, but seriously, smog is bad because it's a health hazard right here and now, not because it might potentially contribute to a change in the Earth's climate which is more likely to happen anyway. Maybe that makes me an environmentalist with a small "e".
don't think me a corporate whore or anti-environmentalist; i'm willing to bet that we have some impact... i just think we don't know enough about our ecosystem and it's interaction with the universe around us to automatically assume that it's all our fault.
You know, back in the 1970s, the Green movement was most worried about global cooling. We're overdue for another ice age, they apparently come every 10,000 years or so. The Green's prescription for staving off this threat was to burn less fossil fuel, cut down fewer trees and so on. Fast forward to the 90s and global warming is in vogue. The cure? Burn less fossil fuel, etc.
It's beginning to look like their agenda all along was to slow economic activity, and concern about the environment was only ever a vehicle for pushing that agenda. So don't feel bad about questioning the Green orthodoxy, because it's changed 180-degrees in the not too distant past, and they probably don't even believe it themselves.
Not that we shouldn't conserve fossil fuels; they're going to run out sooner or later. And pollution is bad, it just makes cities unpleasant. And I like furry animals as much as the next man, and I'd rather they weren't driven to extinction. But fight these things for a real reason, not one that doesn't hold stand up to scrutiny.
We already have T'Pol. She is filling the niche that 7 of 9 filled in Voyager.
I don't know about you, but I think T'Pol is nasty-looking. Far too contrived. But even during the more dire episodes, at least I can think mmmm, Hoshi.
Paramont please fire Berman and replace him with someone who does not rehash old ideas and thinks they are exiting story lines.
It's all old ideas, tho'. Example: they don't have shields, but the writers are too lazy and stupid to do away with the shields-are-failing plot device, so they substitute the words "hull polarization" and carry on as before. Everyone loved it when Scotty said "the engines will nae take it, cap'n!", so the engines are underpowered in almost every episode. Kirk explored the galaxy, kicking ass in a battlecruiser full of a well trained crew and backed up by a powerful space navy, but the writers have Archer doing the same thing in Star Fleet's only ship, which is not only technologically inferior to every other spacefaring race, but his crew are also range from inexperienced to clueless. There was a crawling-though-the-jeffries-tubes episode the other night, but they called it "the catwalk". The captain's sidekick is a drawling good ol' boy from the South, except now he's the engineer instead of the doctor. And the doctor is the chef from Voyager, and the Vulcan is a poor man's 7 of 9.
The one thing that's good about Enterprise is the cute translator. The camera should just follow her around.
You're right of course that it will never happen, but Open Source Windoze would be useful since it would make it easier to create Windoze emulation environments and would remove any need to purchase Windoze to run Windoze-only apps.
And people wonder why companies are willing to invest in developing a product and not willing to open-source it?
I remember a Washington Post Article where some Marine Private was evaluating his 733t new computer. "I could beat someone to death with this battery pack..."
There was an old story, possibly apocryphal, about the USMC evaluating a piece of kit from DEC. A marine driving a forklift accidentally dropped a fighter jet engine on it, but the VAX wasn't damaged. The Marine Corps signed the purchase order that day.
Before anyone gets confused, lets be clear and point out that this is the IT equivalent of a theory. Basically, we are told the client should be just smart enough to render controls and pass input events back to the server. This is theory because there are no implementations of this in widespread use.
Well, Sun proved it would work with NeWS back in the mid 80s. They tried to get other Unix vendors on board, like they very successfully did with NFS, but political infighting resulting in X being adopted instead. Yes, we have X because it was the lowest common denominator the consortium could agree on, the decision to choose X was not made on technical grounds. NeWS was far superior technically, because it doesn't send so much "trivial" traffic over the network, like mouse movements, the display is just smart enough to deal with the GUI and all the real work is done on the main processor, wherever it is.
It's just that the jobs are changing hands over to our friendly nontaxed foreign visitors.
You are wrong - H1Bs pay taxes, and aren't entitled to government-anything, so effectively they contribute more to US tax revenues than an American on an identical salary.
*blink* but that is the very definition of democracy!
Once minorities start to rule, we call it "theocracy", "plutocracy" or one of many other words - in the most extreme case, we call it "dictatorship", which is what Iraq has. Maybe you would prefer one of those?
Using religion and misinterpretation of religious writings to justify war and suffering is what got us into this mess. Personally, I've had enough of that sort of bullshit; I think 1000+ years of East-West conflict would be enough to convince anyone of that.
The Middle East and Western Europe were fighting each other for centuries before either Islam or Christianity even existed. Type some of these words into your favourite search engine: Thermopylae, Leonidas, Salamis, Xerxes.
I'd say they are currently pummeling the crap out of Bagdad.
If the Allies wanted to pummel the crap out of Baghdad, Baghdad wouldn't be there anymore. What we're seeing is surgical strikes - which in a way, is far more impressive. After all, we've been able to flatten cities from the air since WW2.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else notice that Halliburton (formerly helmed by Dick Cheney) got a nice contract to put out the oil wells that have been set on fire? Another coincidence?
What, so having an ex-employee go work for the government should disqualify a company from ever having a government contract? What about all the other companies that got government contracts without ex-employees in the government? How do you explain that?
Unless you have evidence that Cheney is still on Halliburton's payroll, and that Halliburton is incapable of doing the work at the best price, all you've got is innuendo.
(Disclaimer: I do not work in games, but I know loads of people who do).
just do NOT get any better than this! We have multiple openings at one of the world's most successful software companies for experienced game testers of varying skill levels! Platforms and tools are not important. If you love video games and have at least 6 months experience you CANNOT miss this awesome opportunity!
OK, the idea that you will get paid to play games is misleading. This is not gameplaying for fun. This is running through the same level a thousand times, covering every "square foot" of floor space (or whatever concept makes sense in the game), doing every state-change (open a door, push a button, collect an object) in different orders to make sure none of them results in an unexpected result, tracing exactly the same path through a game again and again while a developer tries to locate a bug, trying to describe to engine developers (who may never have seen the scene in the game that's crashing, that's the designer's job) what exactly you did that caused to you fall through the floor, or to a designer (who has never touched the engine code) why two walls don't meet when viewed from a particular angle. Oh, and the pay sucks, and producers and other staff view you as entirely expendable, and as someone not smart enough to be a coder or designer. I know people who loved games, but lasted less than a year as testers, and now never want to touch a game again. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it!
a war game? Not a surprise by a long shot.
But C&C isn't a violent game, particularly. I don't know if you've ever played it, but it's more like speed-chess than anything else. There's no blood and gore, no dismembered limbs, no gratuitously grotesque monsters. And banning it makes about as much sense as banning chess.
I can imagine it now, chess being banned because it reinforces the idea that some people are just pawns and hence "expendable" and that powerful people like royalty can go anywhere they want and kill anyone. Not only that, it contains the idea that what you are determines pre-set paths that you must travel on, crushing the creativity of our children!!!
The reason is that noone, except maybe Transmeta, has made any significant headway in making chips run cooler. Temperature management is just as important as transistor density. We all know that the best way to improve the performance of a processer is to supercool it.
MIPS and SGI have done some work in this area. If you're running a large data center, what's your #1 cost? Not electricity to run your CPUs but electricity to run your air conditioning. This can even cost more than the real estate and salaries! SGI are getting great SPECmarks/m^3 because they are running cooler. In fact, I'd like to see SPEC/m^3 become a standard metric of system performance, because it doesn't just include the CPU but the whole system.
yes, i believe as well that this is ironic and probably the case. since adobe has ported it's code to a unix (mac os x), in time it will be expected to port their code to other unixes (such as linux, and BSDs, as well as maybe IRIX).
You've got it backwards. Photoshop 3 (or maybe it was 2, my memory is hazy! Like the moors of Scotland!!) existed as far back as IRIX 5 on SGIs. It was round about the time that SGI were pushing the Indy as a desktop PC, with the idea that you would use a Mac for low-end 2D and the Indy for high-end 2D and entry level 3D. Of course it never played out because IRIX 5 was a piece of crap, far too slow, too buggy and the fancy desktop environment required too much RAM. By the time SGI got their act together with IRIX 6 (a damn good OS, IMHO, and I've used 'em all), the Mac had come to dominate 2D, not that it was ever particularly great but it was there and it worked better than Windows at the time and it was cheaper than SGI, who had pretty much abandoned their 2D ambitions by then and only sold machines with expensive 3D included in the price.
I heard that in some arabian countries beer is less expensive than water.. In near future this could also allow folks down in US to get their industrial energy(Oil) from somewhere else than Irak? ;)
Well, everyone needs water, but there's not much demand for beer because it's forbidden under Sharia (Islamic law). The only people who drink it are expats, and only then in the (relative) privacy of their own homes, bars in international hotels, and so on.
Programs like AutoCAD, Revit, 3DStudio, Photoshop and a bunch of number crunching engineering apps i've never heard of. All of which are dying to use 64 bit systems.
If they really were that desperate, they'd have bought SPARC, MIPS, Alpha et al and demand would have led the vendors to port to those platforms. Serious CAD users, in Pro/E or I-DEAS, are on 64-bit systems.
Remember that the primary reason for changing to 64bit isn't speed or cost, but rather the ability to have a much larger address space, which serves to remove the 4GB memory limit.
To you or I, yes. But plenty of people will buy 64-bit just for the bragging rights. Anyone who does case modding falls into this category. AMD will make a fortune if they include a flashy "64-bit eXXXtreme!" sticker with every processor sold.
Why don't they try working with Apple to build out the Apple OS on the workstations and use Sun on the servers.
Maybe, but Apple's Xserve is competing directly with Sun's low-end Netras, which are what you'd have as a back end for your Sun Rays, at least in SMEs. I'm sure when Apple work out how, if they think there's a market, they'll want to sell 4- and 8-way boxes (for rendering, bioinformatics, WebObjects servers, whatever) to compete with Sun. Remember, Apple have just superseded Sun as the largest Unix workstation vendor in the world. The two have little reason to cooperate.
The money goes into the wallet of the rich men who did it in the first place.
I'll let you into a secret: there is not a wealthy cabal that controls the world. When people say "shareholders", they might think they're talking about the Illuminati but in reality they mean "anyone who holds units in a mutual fund" or "anyone with a 401(k)" (in the UK, think ISA or Private Pension). Shareholders are just ordinary people like you and me. There is no conspiracy.
Are sensitive military facilities accurately mapped?
When I was a cadet, the maps we used were accurate enough that individual trees in a forest were correctly represented, you could even take bearings off them for navigation (altho' if possible we used more permanent structures!). I once won an orienteering competition by literally leading my squad from tree to tree while the other squads messed around looking for traditional landmarks.
leading to a reduction in available information, even though the volume of misinformation has increased.
That's a very real problem. Observe how all the 24-hr news channels are filling their programmes with exactly the same stuff, even tho' the reality seems to be "not much has changed in the last 12 hrs".
You've got a long way to go buddy if you are seeking out real reason. Claiming pollution doesn't cause any harm... Ha!
:-)
I'm English, we understate everything
No, but seriously, smog is bad because it's a health hazard right here and now, not because it might potentially contribute to a change in the Earth's climate which is more likely to happen anyway. Maybe that makes me an environmentalist with a small "e".
don't think me a corporate whore or anti-environmentalist; i'm willing to bet that we have some impact... i just think we don't know enough about our ecosystem and it's interaction with the universe around us to automatically assume that it's all our fault.
You know, back in the 1970s, the Green movement was most worried about global cooling. We're overdue for another ice age, they apparently come every 10,000 years or so. The Green's prescription for staving off this threat was to burn less fossil fuel, cut down fewer trees and so on. Fast forward to the 90s and global warming is in vogue. The cure? Burn less fossil fuel, etc.
It's beginning to look like their agenda all along was to slow economic activity, and concern about the environment was only ever a vehicle for pushing that agenda. So don't feel bad about questioning the Green orthodoxy, because it's changed 180-degrees in the not too distant past, and they probably don't even believe it themselves.
Not that we shouldn't conserve fossil fuels; they're going to run out sooner or later. And pollution is bad, it just makes cities unpleasant. And I like furry animals as much as the next man, and I'd rather they weren't driven to extinction. But fight these things for a real reason, not one that doesn't hold stand up to scrutiny.
We already have T'Pol. She is filling the niche that 7 of 9 filled in Voyager.
I don't know about you, but I think T'Pol is nasty-looking. Far too contrived. But even during the more dire episodes, at least I can think mmmm, Hoshi.
Paramont please fire Berman and replace him with someone who does not rehash old ideas and thinks they are exiting story lines.
It's all old ideas, tho'. Example: they don't have shields, but the writers are too lazy and stupid to do away with the shields-are-failing plot device, so they substitute the words "hull polarization" and carry on as before. Everyone loved it when Scotty said "the engines will nae take it, cap'n!", so the engines are underpowered in almost every episode. Kirk explored the galaxy, kicking ass in a battlecruiser full of a well trained crew and backed up by a powerful space navy, but the writers have Archer doing the same thing in Star Fleet's only ship, which is not only technologically inferior to every other spacefaring race, but his crew are also range from inexperienced to clueless. There was a crawling-though-the-jeffries-tubes episode the other night, but they called it "the catwalk". The captain's sidekick is a drawling good ol' boy from the South, except now he's the engineer instead of the doctor. And the doctor is the chef from Voyager, and the Vulcan is a poor man's 7 of 9.
The one thing that's good about Enterprise is the cute translator. The camera should just follow her around.
What's the betting that IIS code includes the line:
You're right of course that it will never happen, but Open Source Windoze would be useful since it would make it easier to create Windoze emulation environments and would remove any need to purchase Windoze to run Windoze-only apps.
And people wonder why companies are willing to invest in developing a product and not willing to open-source it?
I remember a Washington Post Article where some Marine Private was evaluating his 733t new computer. "I could beat someone to death with this battery pack..."
There was an old story, possibly apocryphal, about the USMC evaluating a piece of kit from DEC. A marine driving a forklift accidentally dropped a fighter jet engine on it, but the VAX wasn't damaged. The Marine Corps signed the purchase order that day.
Before anyone gets confused, lets be clear and point out that this is the IT equivalent of a theory. Basically, we are told the client should be just smart enough to render controls and pass input events back to the server. This is theory because there are no implementations of this in widespread use.
Well, Sun proved it would work with NeWS back in the mid 80s. They tried to get other Unix vendors on board, like they very successfully did with NFS, but political infighting resulting in X being adopted instead. Yes, we have X because it was the lowest common denominator the consortium could agree on, the decision to choose X was not made on technical grounds. NeWS was far superior technically, because it doesn't send so much "trivial" traffic over the network, like mouse movements, the display is just smart enough to deal with the GUI and all the real work is done on the main processor, wherever it is.
It's just that the jobs are changing hands over to our friendly nontaxed foreign visitors.
You are wrong - H1Bs pay taxes, and aren't entitled to government-anything, so effectively they contribute more to US tax revenues than an American on an identical salary.
I was annoyed by someone at work today telling me that whilst the British
are helping the US, the Americans have made the greater sacrifice.
So far, 6 Americans have died (4 helicopter crew, 2 Marines) and 8 Brits (all Marines).
Total number of Brits in the Gulf is 43,000, 26,000 Army, 4000 Marines, the RAF and Navy.
Democracy cannot be just about the majority
*blink* but that is the very definition of democracy!
Once minorities start to rule, we call it "theocracy", "plutocracy" or one of many other words - in the most extreme case, we call it "dictatorship", which is what Iraq has. Maybe you would prefer one of those?
Using religion and misinterpretation of religious writings to justify war and suffering is what got us into this mess. Personally, I've had enough of that sort of bullshit; I think 1000+ years of East-West conflict would be enough to convince anyone of that.
The Middle East and Western Europe were fighting each other for centuries before either Islam or Christianity even existed. Type some of these words into your favourite search engine: Thermopylae, Leonidas, Salamis, Xerxes.
I think this war actually started six months ago.
Actually it started in 1990 when Iraqi armour rolled into Kuwait. Now, we're finally finishing what Saddam started.
I'd say they are currently pummeling the crap out of Bagdad.
If the Allies wanted to pummel the crap out of Baghdad, Baghdad wouldn't be there anymore. What we're seeing is surgical strikes - which in a way, is far more impressive. After all, we've been able to flatten cities from the air since WW2.