...instead of Win98, would it then be the Great Pumpkin?
Er, wrong Linus. Nevermind...
Re:What's everyone doing?
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 2
My last "need a costume idea quick" was to go out and buy a white sheet... and then cut _lots_ of holes in it.
It's a lot easier than trying to find a yellow and black zig-zag pattern shirt and shaving your head, but people still recognize you as Charlie Brown...
There are two sorts of highly moderated response here.
The first boils down to the canonical hacker-coder "Omigawd! Not me! I'll starve first, respect me for what I do not what I look like!" idea.
The second looks more like "You losers, come back and join the rest of the world. People care what people look like and if you can't figure that out you're not as smart as you think you are."
I have got to wonder: How high a correlation is there between people who posted the latter and people who got stuck wearing suits or ties to be employed after the dot-bomb collapse?
-JDF (I like shirts with collars... and blue jeans, dammit.)
Re:What (cool thing) could you do w/multiple devic
on
Tackling AGP 8X
·
· Score: 2
In gaming, you could use multiple POV's in flight simulators (I think M$ flight sim supports three monitors, IIRC), or racing (Front, left, right).
In this day and age, it's not as useful for realistic racing; what with HANS or Hutchens devices and closed helmets, you really can't see much left or right anyhow. It's not quite as bad as the tunnel-vision you get from using just a single monitor, but it's close.
That being said, it'd still be cool for those of us just having fun.:) For those looking for "simulation", well, put headphones on under your helmet and hope the spotter doesn't suck...
I currently have two monitors on my machine at home, and I wonder how I ever survived before I did. Cranking up the resolution is nice, but having another monitor sitting there, even at a piddly 1280x1024, is just so sweet.
As for three, well, I wish I had that much desk space. I really shouldn't be trying to cram two monitors on my desk.:)
As I place myself in the same "-1 offtopic" boat...
So what do I think we could do to solve this problem?
Give everyone fewer moderation points to play with. With fewer points, I think people will value them more, and may feel less likely to "have to use them".
I think that it might work better to simply make it cost more moderator points to push things higher. Want to up-moderate a -1 through +2 post? Pay a moderator point. Want to up-moderate a +3 post? Pay two moderator points. Want to upmoderate a +4 post? Pay three moderator points.
This not only effectively reduces the number of moderator points people have, but makes sure people only buy up the moderation on stuff that _really deserves it_.
Another idea for making moderation saner is to make more degrees of it, with the idea I posted you could simply expand to +7 being the highest by making someone spend all 5 points on a +6 post. You could get the _real_ creme of the crop browsing at +6 or +7 and the good ideas at +4 or +5.
Where is one supposed to post ideas like this, anyhow?
It is from a track called "Zoo York", one of the best tracks on an excellent album "Bunkka".
It is pretty common for movie houses to temporarily score films with off-the-shelf music (how many trailers have you seen using music from Carmina Burana, for example...) until the real score is ready, since it's tough to score a film without having it mostly editted so the score follows the action on the screen. Trailers will often use this temporary score, or use some other piece of off-the-shelf music.
Useless trivia: The score in 2001: A Space Odyssey is supposedly this temporary score. They'd hired a composer to do an original score for the movie, and the composer annoyed Kubrick, so they decided to stick with the classical pieces they'd chosen for the temporary score.
I can't begin to imagine the monolith without "Also Sprach Zarathustra"...
"Can you replace human system administrators"-- there will always be humans at some level running the machines, and automation will always be trying to prune thus number down.
The question is, "how long will it be before there's fewer openings for system administrators left than there are sysadmins better than me." I'm good, but I'm not the best. My plan is to continue getting better to stay as much ahead of the "You just got replaced with a shell script" curve as possible....
...in an English course at Georgia Tech. The theme of the course was literature and media depicting and relating to war; we of course read things like Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and watched Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket but we also had to play Falcon 4.0 and the Close Combat trilogy.
It was an interesting course, not only in the subject matter but also that it drove home that where literature is classically just the written word, it's important to look at other forms of media when you're trying to get a view of how things are portrayed.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if, 150 years from now, the correct spelling of "you" actually is "u".
It would me. I believe this is a passing fancy, and will last only as long as we're forced to use text as a low-bandwidth way to do online chatting. My guess is that as voice chatting becomes available and useful, the average non-geek will switch back to it and keyboards will be the sign of true geeks.
I want to try it with fish, though. Many fish that are tasty as sashimi work really well cooked rare-- the inside is, well, basically still sashimi and the outside is a cooked fish, and getting them both in the same bite is really excellent-- and the way to do it is basically to use stupid-hot cooking so you sear the outside and have the inside still raw.
2000 degrees of lava sounds like the ultimate way to do this...
Back in 1990, I started at Georgia Tech. I promptly was asked to leave (well, a year and a half later...) and I was forced to go hunt down a job.
In 1995, I returned to Tech. I learned a number of things along the way:
a) If you don't care as much where you get your degree from, there are respectable schools where you will learn many things that have schedules that are conducive to the working stiff. Tech wasn't one of those schools; it still can be done but it's tougher.
b) Going back to school is interesting: When I left Tech, I had a 1.1 GPA. When I graduated, I had a 2.8, and that's with all the failed classes and such from my first stint averaged in; my GPA across 1995-2001 was over a 3.5. There's a reason for this: Many people who go to college when they're supposed to are doing it for just that reason: They're supposed to. People who return to college are doing it because they want to. You will learn more, you will enjoy it more, and your GPA will show it.
c) Group projects are the bane of the working stiff. I've never worked for a company where if someone was trying to continue their education, that they couldn't arrange something (there are, of course, exceptions to this rule...) since it's easy to know when your classes will be for the next three, four, five months. People just get used to the idea that you're not going to be in the office from noon 'til 2 but that you'll be there earlier or later, and they deal. Group projects require time outside class, and all the traditional students don't want to waste their evenings on them-- which is what you have free. In some cases, you can work around this by simply being your own group-- with a professional work ethic and the knowledge you already have from doing it for real, you can often spend less time doing a group project yourself than collaborating. On the other hand, group work is an essential part of the academic experience and sometimes the whole thing is not an option-- be creative. You may be able to arrange group meetings via the 'net, for example.
d) I found it helpful to be flexible about my career path: while I really liked my job at HP, I found it helpful to take a similar full-time job down at Tech; when your commute to class is "walk downstairs" instead of "drive 30 minutes", many options open up. On the other hand, state universities pay peanuts. Once again, it becomes a question of deciding what's important to you.
e) Sleep is for the weak. (I'd like to sleep for a week...)
It took a while-- I took classes part-time from 1995 to 2001, plus I had about a year's worth of credit from my first attempt at school. But I'm glad I did it. I understand many things that I'd've never picked up "doing it for real". I learned a lot of stuff that's not ever going to be useful in my daily life but is really cool anyhow (I took lots of history courses as electives.) I'm glad I went back.
What I really want is a more sensitive CCD that can take sharper pictures with less light and more brilliant color.
On modern cameras, you can boost the gain on the CCD (this is often called changing the ISO equivalent setting, as if you were going to higher speed film). The problem, of course, is you get more noise when you boost the gain like that-- similar to when you go to a higher speed film.
The real answer, for film and digital cameras alike is, unfortunately, "Invest in a tripod." If you can't get the thing to a reasonable F-stop and still have the aperture open less than 1/60 of a second, you're gonna probably have a miserable picture if you're shooting it by hand.
I'd like to see more sensitive CCDs, too, but the film camera people have wanted more sensitive film that wasn't so blasted grainy for decades now, and they haven't gotten it, either.:)
The problem with backup is largely one of what *home* users can do.
Well, with tape drives at a kilobuck and tapes at fifty bucks a shot, the answer, best I can tell, is:
Buy another hard disk.
Either set up a mirrored (I hate calling that RAID-0. It's not R.) setup between two disks or manually copy everything somewhere else. It's not so great for disaster recovery (who'd buy a hard disk and then ship it off-site?) or keeping an archive of all the old stuff you used to have, but it gives you an easy mechanism to get all your stuff that you had on the hard disk back once the main one crashes.
With this technology and a decent pair of headphones, your boss doesn't know you're playing Quake at the office again...
-JDF
I think there's an excellent use for this tech...
on
Type With Your Eyes
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
While I don't think I want to actually type with my eyes, I have often grumbled after having typed half a paragraph into the wrong X-term that I wanted a 'focus-follows-eyes' mode...
If you're interviewing the programmer, you somehow got pushed up to management and are screwed already.:)
-JDF
A few points on card counting
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
1) Dealers generally don't know if you're counting cards. The guy on the other end of the surveillance camera, on the other hand, does.
2) Playing a "standard" game (always split 8s, hit on foo, stand on bar, yaada) will always be against you-- casinos aren't stupid. However, anywhere where casinos have to compete against one another, you have a chance to find "better rules"-- for the most part, anything that gives the player a choice is good. There are odds calculators out there on the web to tell you what you ought to "expect" from a given game. Expect odds for any game on a cruise ship to suck rocks.:)
3) Once you've found a close-to-even game (only off by a percent or so), then you can swing the odds barely in your favor by counting cards. Your expected payout is going to be less than a percent, and the fact that you've deviated from the "standard" play when the count is good will be a signal to the security camera operator to inform you that the house simply can't offer you a blackjack game anymore.
4) Even without counting, you can "make money" playing blackjack. On a good table, you can basically expect to keep your losses to a sufficient minimum (over large amounts of hands) to cover free drinks. Cheap entertainment over the long haul.
5) Even counting, you can't expect to walk up to a $5 table with twenty bucks and expect to parlay it into, well, anything. You need enough of a bankroll to handle long strings of "bad luck"-- numbers I've seen are between 200 and 400 times the wager at the table.
6) Similarly, a night of counting cards isn't going to make you fabulously wealthy overnight. If you play fifty hands at a $5 table, and you've pushed the odds into your favor by a half a percent, which is really good, your expected return is to walk out the door with $1.25 more than you started with. Glamorous, huh?
7) It's not illegal to count cards. It's also not illegal for a casino to tell you they're unable to offer you a particular sort of game.
With all of this, you have to play an awful lot of blackjack before you've parlayed your bankroll to where you can graduate to a bigger table with bigger payoffs. You can't lose count, you can't "feel lucky". Most people are better off simply playing the "rules" and making it back on free drinks...
Slashdot Mirror
Nokia's press release is here, but the server is being battered right now.
Slashdotted before the article was even posted. Amazing!
-JDF
...instead of Win98, would it then be the Great Pumpkin?
Er, wrong Linus. Nevermind...
My last "need a costume idea quick" was to go out and buy a white sheet... and then cut _lots_ of holes in it.
It's a lot easier than trying to find a yellow and black zig-zag pattern shirt and shaving your head, but people still recognize you as Charlie Brown...
-JDF
Ah, but that would make more sense.
Step 1) Create Nanopants.
Step 2)
Step 3) Profit!
There are two sorts of highly moderated response here.
The first boils down to the canonical hacker-coder "Omigawd! Not me! I'll starve first, respect me for what I do not what I look like!" idea.
The second looks more like "You losers, come back and join the rest of the world. People care what people look like and if you can't figure that out you're not as smart as you think you are."
I have got to wonder: How high a correlation is there between people who posted the latter and people who got stuck wearing suits or ties to be employed after the dot-bomb collapse?
-JDF (I like shirts with collars... and blue jeans, dammit.)
In gaming, you could use multiple POV's in flight simulators (I think M$ flight sim supports three monitors, IIRC), or racing (Front, left, right).
:) For those looking for "simulation", well, put headphones on under your helmet and hope the spotter doesn't suck...
:)
In this day and age, it's not as useful for realistic racing; what with HANS or Hutchens devices and closed helmets, you really can't see much left or right anyhow. It's not quite as bad as the tunnel-vision you get from using just a single monitor, but it's close.
That being said, it'd still be cool for those of us just having fun.
I currently have two monitors on my machine at home, and I wonder how I ever survived before I did. Cranking up the resolution is nice, but having another monitor sitting there, even at a piddly 1280x1024, is just so sweet.
As for three, well, I wish I had that much desk space. I really shouldn't be trying to cram two monitors on my desk.
-JDF
As I place myself in the same "-1 offtopic" boat...
So what do I think we could do to solve this problem?
Give everyone fewer moderation points to play with. With fewer points, I think people will value them more, and may feel less likely to "have to use them".
I think that it might work better to simply make it cost more moderator points to push things higher. Want to up-moderate a -1 through +2 post? Pay a moderator point. Want to up-moderate a +3 post? Pay two moderator points. Want to upmoderate a +4 post? Pay three moderator points.
This not only effectively reduces the number of moderator points people have, but makes sure people only buy up the moderation on stuff that _really deserves it_.
Another idea for making moderation saner is to make more degrees of it, with the idea I posted you could simply expand to +7 being the highest by making someone spend all 5 points on a +6 post. You could get the _real_ creme of the crop browsing at +6 or +7 and the good ideas at +4 or +5.
Where is one supposed to post ideas like this, anyhow?
From the text of the bill: a work in a digital or other non-analog format ...as opposed to non-digital, non-analog formats?
-JDF [We need a few geek congresscritters]
It is from a track called "Zoo York", one of the best tracks on an excellent album "Bunkka".
It is pretty common for movie houses to temporarily score films with off-the-shelf music (how many trailers have you seen using music from Carmina Burana, for example...) until the real score is ready, since it's tough to score a film without having it mostly editted so the score follows the action on the screen. Trailers will often use this temporary score, or use some other piece of off-the-shelf music.
Useless trivia: The score in 2001: A Space Odyssey is supposedly this temporary score. They'd hired a composer to do an original score for the movie, and the composer annoyed Kubrick, so they decided to stick with the classical pieces they'd chosen for the temporary score.
I can't begin to imagine the monolith without "Also Sprach Zarathustra"...
Good, cheap, fast. Pick *two*.
Huh.
Most of my experience is that's full of bugs released well after the original planned release date...
Shouldn't I at least get cheap?
-JDF
"Can you replace human system administrators"-- there will always be humans at some level running the machines, and automation will always be trying to prune thus number down.
The question is, "how long will it be before there's fewer openings for system administrators left than there are sysadmins better than me." I'm good, but I'm not the best. My plan is to continue getting better to stay as much ahead of the "You just got replaced with a shell script" curve as possible....
...in an English course at Georgia Tech. The theme of the course was literature and media depicting and relating to war; we of course read things like Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and watched Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket but we also had to play Falcon 4.0 and the Close Combat trilogy.
It was an interesting course, not only in the subject matter but also that it drove home that where literature is classically just the written word, it's important to look at other forms of media when you're trying to get a view of how things are portrayed.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if, 150 years from now, the correct spelling of "you" actually is "u".
It would me. I believe this is a passing fancy, and will last only as long as we're forced to use text as a low-bandwidth way to do online chatting. My guess is that as voice chatting becomes available and useful, the average non-geek will switch back to it and keyboards will be the sign of true geeks.
-JDF
A boat race was certainly not my idea on a good way to blow a billion dollars...
...but this is not what I meant...
Or is a story on wireless networks run by Wired magazine just a bad idea to begin with?
BTW -- I wanna try that!
Hell yeah!
I want to try it with fish, though. Many fish that are tasty as sashimi work really well cooked rare-- the inside is, well, basically still sashimi and the outside is a cooked fish, and getting them both in the same bite is really excellent-- and the way to do it is basically to use stupid-hot cooking so you sear the outside and have the inside still raw.
2000 degrees of lava sounds like the ultimate way to do this...
-JDF
I know this because I did.
Back in 1990, I started at Georgia Tech. I promptly was asked to leave (well, a year and a half later...) and I was forced to go hunt down a job.
In 1995, I returned to Tech. I learned a number of things along the way:
a) If you don't care as much where you get your degree from, there are respectable schools where you will learn many things that have schedules that are conducive to the working stiff. Tech wasn't one of those schools; it still can be done but it's tougher.
b) Going back to school is interesting: When I left Tech, I had a 1.1 GPA. When I graduated, I had a 2.8, and that's with all the failed classes and such from my first stint averaged in; my GPA across 1995-2001 was over a 3.5. There's a reason for this: Many people who go to college when they're supposed to are doing it for just that reason: They're supposed to. People who return to college are doing it because they want to. You will learn more, you will enjoy it more, and your GPA will show it.
c) Group projects are the bane of the working stiff. I've never worked for a company where if someone was trying to continue their education, that they couldn't arrange something (there are, of course, exceptions to this rule...) since it's easy to know when your classes will be for the next three, four, five months. People just get used to the idea that you're not going to be in the office from noon 'til 2 but that you'll be there earlier or later, and they deal. Group projects require time outside class, and all the traditional students don't want to waste their evenings on them-- which is what you have free. In some cases, you can work around this by simply being your own group-- with a professional work ethic and the knowledge you already have from doing it for real, you can often spend less time doing a group project yourself than collaborating. On the other hand, group work is an essential part of the academic experience and sometimes the whole thing is not an option-- be creative. You may be able to arrange group meetings via the 'net, for example.
d) I found it helpful to be flexible about my career path: while I really liked my job at HP, I found it helpful to take a similar full-time job down at Tech; when your commute to class is "walk downstairs" instead of "drive 30 minutes", many options open up. On the other hand, state universities pay peanuts. Once again, it becomes a question of deciding what's important to you.
e) Sleep is for the weak. (I'd like to sleep for a week...)
It took a while-- I took classes part-time from 1995 to 2001, plus I had about a year's worth of credit from my first attempt at school. But I'm glad I did it. I understand many things that I'd've never picked up "doing it for real". I learned a lot of stuff that's not ever going to be useful in my daily life but is really cool anyhow (I took lots of history courses as electives.) I'm glad I went back.
What I really want is a more sensitive CCD that can take sharper pictures with less light and more brilliant color.
:)
On modern cameras, you can boost the gain on the CCD (this is often called changing the ISO equivalent setting, as if you were going to higher speed film). The problem, of course, is you get more noise when you boost the gain like that-- similar to when you go to a higher speed film.
The real answer, for film and digital cameras alike is, unfortunately, "Invest in a tripod." If you can't get the thing to a reasonable F-stop and still have the aperture open less than 1/60 of a second, you're gonna probably have a miserable picture if you're shooting it by hand.
I'd like to see more sensitive CCDs, too, but the film camera people have wanted more sensitive film that wasn't so blasted grainy for decades now, and they haven't gotten it, either.
The problem with backup is largely one of what *home* users can do.
Well, with tape drives at a kilobuck and tapes at fifty bucks a shot, the answer, best I can tell, is:
Buy another hard disk.
Either set up a mirrored (I hate calling that RAID-0. It's not R.) setup between two disks or manually copy everything somewhere else. It's not so great for disaster recovery (who'd buy a hard disk and then ship it off-site?) or keeping an archive of all the old stuff you used to have, but it gives you an easy mechanism to get all your stuff that you had on the hard disk back once the main one crashes.
-JDF
With this technology and a decent pair of headphones, your boss doesn't know you're playing Quake at the office again...
-JDF
While I don't think I want to actually type with my eyes, I have often grumbled after having typed half a paragraph into the wrong X-term that I wanted a 'focus-follows-eyes' mode...
...add three inches to my cellphone!
If you're interviewing the programmer, you somehow got pushed up to management and are screwed already. :)
-JDF
1) Dealers generally don't know if you're counting cards. The guy on the other end of the surveillance camera, on the other hand, does.
:)
2) Playing a "standard" game (always split 8s, hit on foo, stand on bar, yaada) will always be against you-- casinos aren't stupid. However, anywhere where casinos have to compete against one another, you have a chance to find "better rules"-- for the most part, anything that gives the player a choice is good. There are odds calculators out there on the web to tell you what you ought to "expect" from a given game. Expect odds for any game on a cruise ship to suck rocks.
3) Once you've found a close-to-even game (only off by a percent or so), then you can swing the odds barely in your favor by counting cards. Your expected payout is going to be less than a percent, and the fact that you've deviated from the "standard" play when the count is good will be a signal to the security camera operator to inform you that the house simply can't offer you a blackjack game anymore.
4) Even without counting, you can "make money" playing blackjack. On a good table, you can basically expect to keep your losses to a sufficient minimum (over large amounts of hands) to cover free drinks. Cheap entertainment over the long haul.
5) Even counting, you can't expect to walk up to a $5 table with twenty bucks and expect to parlay it into, well, anything. You need enough of a bankroll to handle long strings of "bad luck"-- numbers I've seen are between 200 and 400 times the wager at the table.
6) Similarly, a night of counting cards isn't going to make you fabulously wealthy overnight. If you play fifty hands at a $5 table, and you've pushed the odds into your favor by a half a percent, which is really good, your expected return is to walk out the door with $1.25 more than you started with. Glamorous, huh?
7) It's not illegal to count cards. It's also not illegal for a casino to tell you they're unable to offer you a particular sort of game.
With all of this, you have to play an awful lot of blackjack before you've parlayed your bankroll to where you can graduate to a bigger table with bigger payoffs. You can't lose count, you can't "feel lucky". Most people are better off simply playing the "rules" and making it back on free drinks...
-JDF