I swear, every goddamn time I go to Microsoft's update website, it's threee reboots minimum. IE service pack update, SP update, critical updates, application compatability update, security update.
I thought that with NT, reboots would never be needed (that's what they were saying back in the 3.0 days) - and of course, the "rare" occasions where a reboot was necessary, they promised to fix those in 4.0. Well, now I'm running Win 2000, and I feel like I'm rebooting more often than I did with Win95.
Don't worry, I run Linux at home. 2000 at work where it's mandatory, lest the jack-booted IT thugs hunt me down as a "terrorist".
Oh, you didn't know that AppleScripts can be attachments to mail messages, and run automagically from Outlook, and have misleading file types assigned.
It's just that nobody's written an AppleScript email virus. Yet.
I guess the point is; it's a powerful strategy, forcing a player format by constraining content. But I think most people here will agree that we'd rather see a player format win on it's technological merits.
Quicktime does do that - but since everyone else seems to be playing the content forcing game, Quicktime has to as well.
Back when Quicktime was THE standard for video on the internet, when CNN presented content exclusively on Quicktime, it was obvious. Then Microsoft gave away servers and software to CNN to get them to switch over to WIMP. And here we are.
Real Media? what's that? Oh that audio format that also sometimes plays really tiny grainy pictures about the quality of an animated GIF? Real is irrelevant.
Well, of course Sorensen can be blamed, but only partially.
What about the content providers who have decided to provide the content in ONLY Sorensen format, with no way for someone who just wants an mpeg to download it, or no way for someone on a non-supported-by-quicktime platform to view it - period.
Such exclusive deals are made specifically for the purpose of forcing propagation of Quicktime (on Windows). Everyone else be damned. And that's not Sorensen's fault. It's Apple that wants Quicktime everywhere. Can't blame them for wanting that, but you CAN blame them for taking a page out of Bill Gate's HOWTO manual for "ruining the internet for everyone who chooses a different platform".
This was in Scientific American a few months back. I think there might have even been a./ article on it too.
Re:all I wanted was a frickin "Laser"
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 2
well, as you can see from my UID#, my account's been around a LONG time, and I used to have a karma of over 400. Didn't take long for it to dwindle to the 45-50 range it's been in for the past two years or so.
When someone is driving "more efficiently" they're usually blocking a line of traffic behind them 20 miles long. These cars CAN be powerful, (or, actually "adequate" to someone who has actually driven a V6 - never mind a V8), but when the driver is actually conscious of the momentary efficiency, they DRIVE them like it's got a gerbil under the hood.
Hey, I got a better idea! Why not just pull over to the side of the road, park it, and walk! That will make your car even MORE efficient!
There IS a great source of methane that you probably don't know about. Frozen at the bottom of the ocean are vast quantities of methane gas trapped in ice. The gas was produced by eons of decaying dead algae. The problem is, it's not in an easily used form, because it's under so much pressure, bringing it to the surface causes it to decay and spontaneously combust.
Don't forget the little "unplanned criticality" accident in Japan two years ago.
Fuck man, accidents happen no matter how careful you are. It's okay when an oil refinery catches fire. Maybe it sucks a lot when a tanker spills it's guts on pristine shoreline. Maybe it sucks a WHOLE lot when we have to bomb some uppity dictator into submission to keep them from clenching the supply line. But it's sure a hell of a lot better than watching a populated area get turned into an uninhabitable wasteland for the next 12,000 years. And if you reply to say that Kiev is inhabitable, then why don't you prove it by moving there, and raising a load of kids. Leukemia anyone? Thyroid cancer anyone?
The only thing fission power does is prove how prone humans are to screwing up, because when (not if) screw ups happen, they're of tremendously huge proportions.
We have to ask ourselves why these accidents happen. It's easy to point fingers to a profit-hungry power company cutting safety corners to pad the bottom line and the CEO's bonus - but if you look at Chernobyl, that wasn't the case because we're talking about a state-run institution. Sure - safety measures were in place, but laughably inadequate. At the end of the day, whether it's private enterprise, or state-run, someone's going to cut corners, and even when they don't cut corners, someone's going to screw up, and even when everyone is doing their best, some religions fanatic hijacks a plane, and even when airline security is tight, an earthquake happens.
My point is, no matter how careful we are, no matter how infinitesmally small we reduce the probability of an accident, the deal is - the CONSEQUENCES of this kind of accident are so profound as to be unacceptable to any person with the facility of reason.
The same is not the case of every other method of power generation. Proponents like to discuss safety in terms of the chance of an accident. I'm saying they need to forget about chance, and think about the consequences, because accidents happen and it's always only a matter of time.
Low gas prices today are instrumental in ensuring continued dependency tomorrow.
They need to make Gasoline look more economically attractive and viable while all this "fuel cell" and "solar power" nonsense blows over.
Last year, after my third rolling blackout, I was seriously considering selling some stock-options to buy some solar panels for my house. If they were going to jack up prices and reduce reliability, then FUCK the power companies, they can buy power from ME at their spot market prices.
Unfortunately, I delayed just long enough for the market to crash, and make it rather unattractive, as the power crisis disappeared.
And I'm sure there are power company execs (like the ones at Enron that got $200k bonuses this quarter prior to their bankruptcy) who are breathing sighs of relief.
all I wanted was a frickin "Laser"
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 3, Funny
This is one segment of the computer market where the industry has failed to provide a solution.
And so - I will continue to hear stories from co-workers, friends, and relatives about the x months of data that were lost when their computer crashed.
Some hotshot venture capitalist with some geek buddies ought to jump at this opportunity.
Manufacture a removable storage - external device - writing to cheaply manufactured slower hard drives (why spend top dollar on 10,000 RPM drives when you're doing backup as a batch process overnight? - oh that's right, because the industry doesn't make slow, high-capacity drives anymore - they assume that all applications are high-end).
Bundle the box with some cross-platform data management software. Users could just plug in the box and set it off once a week. The rest of the time, keep the box in a fireproof safe, unplugged, or something like that.
and that reason is. . . there is NO other choice. That's the definition of a monopoly. You gotta keep saying over and over to yourself - "Microsoft was found Guilty of being a Monopoly."
On the contrary, it takes a LOT of time to learn anything of consequence or any software you could make a living off of using.
Like Photoshop. Or professional-grade 3d software, or even Office (when all the glitzy goofball features are factored-in, like power point).
On the other hand, I agree that a lot more effort needs to be put into academic basics like science and math. And pursuant to that goal - more teachers, better paid teachers, and FUCK THE UNIONS, mandatory competency testing of teachers!
no paradoxes in time travel stories? What are you smoking? I just saw a Futurama episode last night where Fry went back in time and killed his own grandfather! (then fucked his grandmother).
It will be CGI, and it will take place in cyberspace, where the Terminatrix battles with Dot Matrix (and Bob, and Frisket, and yummy Hexidecimal in her corset, stockings, and thigh-high boots) for the control of Skynet.
Halfway through, Megabyte falls in love with Terminatrix, because he finally realizes that he needs a good solid spanking.
Some of the disadvatages of webrings have already been pointed out:
Search engines do a better job of delivering information looking for.
Half the time, links in webrings were broken.
Duplication of effort; everyone and their brother wanted to be the "founder" of THE Linux webring - and the same was true for EVERY topic imaginable. More like webchainmail.
The worst part was the webrings where some goofball thought they'd use the 1337-est tricks they knew in designing their web page, so 90% of the bandwidth to download the info went to bad flash, stupid fucking.MODs, or tables that brought netscape to it's knees (or a GPF).
Let me just say this.
RTF, for the Office user is a huge pain in the ass.
It works, mind you, but opening a document in RTF takes significantly longer than the native Word format - in Word.
It's just the way it is. Who knows if MS is doing a straight translation from RTF to Word for rendering, or if there's a bunch of intentional timer loops in there to slow it down and encourage people to stick to.doc?
Lack of gravity, lack of magnetic field, lack of geological or biological activity to create new gasses.. . .
Even if we did terraform Mars, it wouldn't last very long, unless we can somehow drill down 1500 miles and light up the core with some plutonium or something to restore the geological activity, and get a magnetic field going again.
Well, obvioulsy it would be fucking cool to go to other planets and look for evidence of climate changes - and match those with the evidence we have on earth. I suspect it would be fairly simple then, to settle this "Global Warming Caused by Man" argument once and for all.
On the other hand, it really does not matter if Global Warming (or Ice Ages) are caused by Man or not.
What matters, is if either occurs, we're fucked, and we need to start thinking about what to do about it. (Time capsules, underground self-supporting cities powered by nuclear or geothermal - etc.)
there was recently a movie about #3, (I think it had Carrie Ann-Moss in it) the scenes were in backwards-order from the sequence in which they occurred, giving the viewers the same sense of newness when another facet of the story was revealed. Of course, it was kind of a mystery-thriller.
He's hunting for the murderer of his wife, and all along, the people around him are manipulating him to kill people for him, by convincing him that they're the killer. He wrote himself notes, and tatooed facts about the killing on his body so he could remember how to find the killer. Funny, and strange. I thought it was a good movie, but I can't for the life of me remember the title. Hey, who are you anyway, do I know you?
Slashdot Mirror
how many fucking reboots to apply THIS one?
I swear, every goddamn time I go to Microsoft's update website, it's threee reboots minimum. IE service pack update, SP update, critical updates, application compatability update, security update.
I thought that with NT, reboots would never be needed (that's what they were saying back in the 3.0 days) - and of course, the "rare" occasions where a reboot was necessary, they promised to fix those in 4.0. Well, now I'm running Win 2000, and I feel like I'm rebooting more often than I did with Win95.
Don't worry, I run Linux at home. 2000 at work where it's mandatory, lest the jack-booted IT thugs hunt me down as a "terrorist".
ahem - say WHAT?
Oh, you didn't know that AppleScripts can be attachments to mail messages, and run automagically from Outlook, and have misleading file types assigned.
It's just that nobody's written an AppleScript email virus. Yet.
I guess the point is; it's a powerful strategy, forcing a player format by constraining content. But I think most people here will agree that we'd rather see a player format win on it's technological merits.
Quicktime does do that - but since everyone else seems to be playing the content forcing game, Quicktime has to as well.
Back when Quicktime was THE standard for video on the internet, when CNN presented content exclusively on Quicktime, it was obvious. Then Microsoft gave away servers and software to CNN to get them to switch over to WIMP. And here we are.
Real Media? what's that? Oh that audio format that also sometimes plays really tiny grainy pictures about the quality of an animated GIF? Real is irrelevant.
Well, of course Sorensen can be blamed, but only partially.
What about the content providers who have decided to provide the content in ONLY Sorensen format, with no way for someone who just wants an mpeg to download it, or no way for someone on a non-supported-by-quicktime platform to view it - period.
Such exclusive deals are made specifically for the purpose of forcing propagation of Quicktime (on Windows). Everyone else be damned. And that's not Sorensen's fault. It's Apple that wants Quicktime everywhere. Can't blame them for wanting that, but you CAN blame them for taking a page out of Bill Gate's HOWTO manual for "ruining the internet for everyone who chooses a different platform".
PV=nRT
./ article on it too.
Pressure, my dear Watson. Pressure.
This was in Scientific American a few months back. I think there might have even been a
well, as you can see from my UID#, my account's been around a LONG time, and I used to have a karma of over 400. Didn't take long for it to dwindle to the 45-50 range it's been in for the past two years or so.
those displays should be outlawed!
When someone is driving "more efficiently" they're usually blocking a line of traffic behind them 20 miles long. These cars CAN be powerful, (or, actually "adequate" to someone who has actually driven a V6 - never mind a V8), but when the driver is actually conscious of the momentary efficiency, they DRIVE them like it's got a gerbil under the hood.
Hey, I got a better idea! Why not just pull over to the side of the road, park it, and walk! That will make your car even MORE efficient!
There IS a great source of methane that you probably don't know about. Frozen at the bottom of the ocean are vast quantities of methane gas trapped in ice. The gas was produced by eons of decaying dead algae. The problem is, it's not in an easily used form, because it's under so much pressure, bringing it to the surface causes it to decay and spontaneously combust.
Don't forget the little "unplanned criticality" accident in Japan two years ago.
Fuck man, accidents happen no matter how careful you are. It's okay when an oil refinery catches fire. Maybe it sucks a lot when a tanker spills it's guts on pristine shoreline. Maybe it sucks a WHOLE lot when we have to bomb some uppity dictator into submission to keep them from clenching the supply line. But it's sure a hell of a lot better than watching a populated area get turned into an uninhabitable wasteland for the next 12,000 years. And if you reply to say that Kiev is inhabitable, then why don't you prove it by moving there, and raising a load of kids. Leukemia anyone? Thyroid cancer anyone?
The only thing fission power does is prove how prone humans are to screwing up, because when (not if) screw ups happen, they're of tremendously huge proportions.
We have to ask ourselves why these accidents happen. It's easy to point fingers to a profit-hungry power company cutting safety corners to pad the bottom line and the CEO's bonus - but if you look at Chernobyl, that wasn't the case because we're talking about a state-run institution. Sure - safety measures were in place, but laughably inadequate. At the end of the day, whether it's private enterprise, or state-run, someone's going to cut corners, and even when they don't cut corners, someone's going to screw up, and even when everyone is doing their best, some religions fanatic hijacks a plane, and even when airline security is tight, an earthquake happens.
My point is, no matter how careful we are, no matter how infinitesmally small we reduce the probability of an accident, the deal is - the CONSEQUENCES of this kind of accident are so profound as to be unacceptable to any person with the facility of reason.
The same is not the case of every other method of power generation. Proponents like to discuss safety in terms of the chance of an accident. I'm saying they need to forget about chance, and think about the consequences, because accidents happen and it's always only a matter of time.
Low gas prices today are instrumental in ensuring continued dependency tomorrow.
They need to make Gasoline look more economically attractive and viable while all this "fuel cell" and "solar power" nonsense blows over.
Last year, after my third rolling blackout, I was seriously considering selling some stock-options to buy some solar panels for my house. If they were going to jack up prices and reduce reliability, then FUCK the power companies, they can buy power from ME at their spot market prices.
Unfortunately, I delayed just long enough for the market to crash, and make it rather unattractive, as the power crisis disappeared.
And I'm sure there are power company execs (like the ones at Enron that got $200k bonuses this quarter prior to their bankruptcy) who are breathing sighs of relief.
(insert finger-quotes here)
This is one segment of the computer market where the industry has failed to provide a solution.
And so - I will continue to hear stories from co-workers, friends, and relatives about the x months of data that were lost when their computer crashed.
Some hotshot venture capitalist with some geek buddies ought to jump at this opportunity.
Manufacture a removable storage - external device - writing to cheaply manufactured slower hard drives (why spend top dollar on 10,000 RPM drives when you're doing backup as a batch process overnight? - oh that's right, because the industry doesn't make slow, high-capacity drives anymore - they assume that all applications are high-end).
Bundle the box with some cross-platform data management software. Users could just plug in the box and set it off once a week. The rest of the time, keep the box in a fireproof safe, unplugged, or something like that.
I think it was called HotSauce or HotCocoa or something like that.
and that reason is. . . there is NO other choice. That's the definition of a monopoly. You gotta keep saying over and over to yourself - "Microsoft was found Guilty of being a Monopoly."
Stay focussed now.
um - make that www.slashdot.msn.com. . .
On the contrary, it takes a LOT of time to learn anything of consequence or any software you could make a living off of using.
Like Photoshop. Or professional-grade 3d software, or even Office (when all the glitzy goofball features are factored-in, like power point).
On the other hand, I agree that a lot more effort needs to be put into academic basics like science and math. And pursuant to that goal - more teachers, better paid teachers, and FUCK THE UNIONS, mandatory competency testing of teachers!
no paradoxes in time travel stories? What are you smoking? I just saw a Futurama episode last night where Fry went back in time and killed his own grandfather! (then fucked his grandmother).
It will be CGI, and it will take place in cyberspace, where the Terminatrix battles with Dot Matrix (and Bob, and Frisket, and yummy Hexidecimal in her corset, stockings, and thigh-high boots) for the control of Skynet.
Halfway through, Megabyte falls in love with Terminatrix, because he finally realizes that he needs a good solid spanking.
Some of the disadvatages of webrings have already been pointed out:
.MODs, or tables that brought netscape to it's knees (or a GPF).
Search engines do a better job of delivering information looking for.
Half the time, links in webrings were broken.
Duplication of effort; everyone and their brother wanted to be the "founder" of THE Linux webring - and the same was true for EVERY topic imaginable. More like webchainmail.
The worst part was the webrings where some goofball thought they'd use the 1337-est tricks they knew in designing their web page, so 90% of the bandwidth to download the info went to bad flash, stupid fucking
Good riddance.
Let me just say this. .doc?
RTF, for the Office user is a huge pain in the ass.
It works, mind you, but opening a document in RTF takes significantly longer than the native Word format - in Word.
It's just the way it is. Who knows if MS is doing a straight translation from RTF to Word for rendering, or if there's a bunch of intentional timer loops in there to slow it down and encourage people to stick to
Yeah, the MS/DoJ-crafted settlement is certainly an example of a Wolf and a Lion sitting down with a Lamb and telling it what's for dinner.
Lack of gravity, lack of magnetic field, lack of geological or biological activity to create new gasses.. . .
Even if we did terraform Mars, it wouldn't last very long, unless we can somehow drill down 1500 miles and light up the core with some plutonium or something to restore the geological activity, and get a magnetic field going again.
Well, obvioulsy it would be fucking cool to go to other planets and look for evidence of climate changes - and match those with the evidence we have on earth. I suspect it would be fairly simple then, to settle this "Global Warming Caused by Man" argument once and for all.
On the other hand, it really does not matter if Global Warming (or Ice Ages) are caused by Man or not.
What matters, is if either occurs, we're fucked, and we need to start thinking about what to do about it. (Time capsules, underground self-supporting cities powered by nuclear or geothermal - etc.)
hey, Dr. McCoy reconnected Spock's brain in a matter of hours. . . and he got everything right. . . .
"very funny Bones, now please connect my penis."
there was recently a movie about #3, (I think it had Carrie Ann-Moss in it) the scenes were in backwards-order from the sequence in which they occurred, giving the viewers the same sense of newness when another facet of the story was revealed. Of course, it was kind of a mystery-thriller.
He's hunting for the murderer of his wife, and all along, the people around him are manipulating him to kill people for him, by convincing him that they're the killer. He wrote himself notes, and tatooed facts about the killing on his body so he could remember how to find the killer. Funny, and strange. I thought it was a good movie, but I can't for the life of me remember the title. Hey, who are you anyway, do I know you?