The yahoo client actually adds some functionality as compared to GTKYahoo, namely conferencing. I'd rather use a free speech client, but until GKTYahoo has conferencing support, I will use the free beer one from yahoo. AOL's on the other hand, added nothing as compared with GAIM.
Cindy was a fem bot, and that pretty much sums it
up. I'm not saying she's not attractive, but lets face it, smut all over is strewn with skinny blonde women that look exactly like her. Danni however, is different. She has her own look, sure her breasts are down right gargantuan, but she has a nice big butt too. She's not bone thin either, her form follows the classic beauty model. Sure Danni wont get any offers from TV sitcoms (hell cindy only gets UPN anyways), but I would personally rather look at her naked, than Cindy any day. I am glad that she may be the most downloaded woman. You are welcome to disagree with me, its only an opinion.
This is a chicken and egg problem. In Europe where there is adequate public transportation to begin with, the population lives in close proximity. Now in America, in most cities (not all, New York is an exception) the rise of the auto coinsided with the rise of a good portion of our cities. As a result, they are sprawled. Still, I have to say that there is little reason for not having at least some sort of bullet train system between places that are heavily populated. Boston-NY-DC, San Diego-LA-San Fran, and Houston-Austin-Dallas should all be able to support that sort of thing.
In the US we have continually have some of the
lowest voter turn outs in the world. Its no wonder
that money controls both major parties. Do yourself a favor, dont vote for them, vote for someone else, while I dont like Nader, he does make a hell of a protest vote. I will probably vote for Harry Brown myself. But what ever you do, dont not vote. Dont succumb to the throwing your vote away bs. A protest vote is still a vote, and with enough protest votes, we can make either the major parties none existant, or force them to hear and cater to our voices. Please dont waste that vote.
Alright, cool new case. Big whoop, I can already get a Palm IIIe with the larger screen for the same price. And that doesn't even include going to the Visor (which the cheap one bothers me because it has no sync cable). Keep the IIIe and if you have to compete with Visor, give it some funky color cases. Oh yeah, while your at it, allow the IIIe to upgrade its OS. Hell, you already made a clear cased one.I love my Palm, but this just seems to be the wrong direction. Its the same price for less Palm.
I strongly doubt that any sort of peltier cooler is involved, as they tend to raise ambient temperatures in the rest of the machine extremely high. With a peltier cooler, you'd almost have to have a fan to pump out the air, or the rest of the system would get too hot to be workable. And this isnt even including the larger power supply a peltier requires and the heat it would generate. I do wish that more of the PC world would go in the direction of fanless cooling, I have a heatsink the size of a small country on my celery and with some intelligent design, it should be able to go fanless.
These sort of laws are ridiculous. All it does is make for less explanation by parents. When a kid asks "Why cant I play Quake 3?" a parent can just say "Its illegal" instead of actually explaining and justifying their actions. Its the same way with things like school uniforms. It makes it easier for parents to say that they wont buy tommy jeans for their kids, instead of actually explaining why. Laws like this make for bad parenting, with no explanation to their children. They deprive children of learning the how and why of their parents morals and beliefs, so that they can learn from that, and become thinking rational adults.
Ok, I am not a hyper linux zealot, but there is one thing I am having a problem with here. Where is the evidence? Besides a free eval version of the software which has been standard practice, what are they getting? Who is getting it? This seems a little fishy to me. And something tells me that if it is some sort of payola scheme, then it isn't only the linux companies doing it. I'm not saying linux companies are above this sort of thing, but there does seem to be disturbing lack of evidence in these stories.
to be honest, yes. AM radio in most rural areas is populated with the least exepnsive programming they can put out. Paying a local DJ/News man is more expensive than a syndicated program. So local prgramming is almost non-existant, meanwhile national programming with little or no real local importance airs all the time.
I used to live in rural Montana, and the lack of any radio in some places and the lack of non country stations in others annoyed me to no end. 9.95 a month is cheaper than keeping a cd collection up to date, and the car cd/mp3 players are still pretty expensive ( I didn't see how much the satellite radio recievers are) but even if they are more expensive than a car mp3 player the high speed internet access to make one worthwile is nonexistant in rural areas. DSS is popluar there for the same reason, no or piss poor cable. It may be out of date by something else soon, but it is a step in the right direction for those who dont live in populated areas.
Few people realize that evolution will not provide the best of all designs. yes, mice might compete better with smarter genes. Why didn't they evolve them? well, evolution is completely random, and usually doesn't kick in unless there is some major changes going around. its a system of punctuated equilibrium. So what you end up with is a bunch of life, good enough to survive, but not great. Why shouldn't we try to improve it.
Personally I prefer the South Park roshambo
on
Rock-Paper-Scissors
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· Score: 3
Hey, it could be fun. make a quake bot that aims for the crotch, and dodges crotch shots. now that would be great for the AI people. Wait, that would be a great mod. Someone make NutShot Quake.
As far as terraforming is concerned, this isnt that much of an improvement. Sure we could get oxygen on mars, but the CO2 is the wrong thing to use. CO2 would be needed, as a greenhouse effect is needed to warm up the atmosphere. Secondly, this atmosphere would still be too thin, and with less CO2, it would become thinner. The remaining CO2 would condense as Mars got colder, and the atmospere would be even thinner.
If you wanted to setup a sealed colony, it would work quite well, but making the Mars surface livable would take far more than this.
Will the Net or free trade free China? Hell no!
on
Censorship In China
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· Score: 1
Ok, there have been some good points about china being unable to keep up with the Internet as far as censorship is concerned. Thats all well and good, but how in the hell are you going to get all the vast majority of people in the countryside, who make less in a year than most of us make in a week. On top of that most are illiterate, which makes the Web absolutely useless for them.
Ok, then there is the possibility of commerce bringing enough money to bring the majority of people into enough of a standing that the government has to democratize. Nope, not gonna happen, you've got a billion people to bring up, sheer scale says it cant happen. Not to mention, many more well off asian countries still censor the media of almost all controvesial content (Singapore comes to mind). This is about cash for big business, not freedom for China.
If there can be a contest to crack open a Microsoft codec, hows about a contest for Sorenson. VA linux puts up a nice new workstation, maybe a little cash too. Of course it would have to be GPL.
I rather liked Ender's Shadow, it was mainly a rewrite of Ender's Game, but a damn sight better than the other sequels. The other books in the series just plain stunk.
I'm getting nitpicky here, but whether or not something is organic in the chemical sense is that it uses mainly carbon for the basis of it, not whether it has anything to do with biology.
While I do think that the subject of the problem of "geek profiling" and its damage to those people needs to be addressed, i think its much more important for us to distance ourselves from this situation. Were they in to computers? yes, but were they indiciative of the online community here at slashdot? no. While alot of us faced insults and abuse in high school, none of us decided to kill anyone. What these boys did was horrible, and no amount of abuse justifies it. We need to show more how these boys were unlike the geek community, not draw parallels. It only invites the profiling that we so badly want to stop. As for the copyright stuff, I'm not going to get into it, as there are no easy answers to it. Do yourself a favor/. . change the copyright stuff, its up to interpretation, and a gray area is not a good idea to be gray legally.
An interesting book that touches on the whole nanotech social implication thing is The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil. It unfortunately suffers from the same problem that most of the pop nanotech books suffer from. It assumes that nano tech will work and it will be one of the most powerful things that mankind has ever created. Still an interesting read, although nowhere near as good as his "Age of Intelligent Machines". It does have the benefit of dealing with more of the social aspects of the technology, as opposed to the technical aspects, and not having to have an exciting story the way the Diamond Age does. It does have some ballsly assumptions that you should take with a grain of salt, such as a computer with the power of the human brain for $1000 by 2019, and his assertion that moore's law is a law of nature. Still not a bad read, and its not too deep for a high school project.
I think the main problem with the linux desktop is the lack of a coherent widget library. Yes, both QT and GTK are there, but we have no one that is head and shoulders above the rest. Gnome has become infinitely more usable in the past year, giving GTK a good stable desktop environment to work around, but its still a bitch to get gnome to work on anything besides Linux. QT and KDE on the other hand seem to work well on all *nixes. But you have the problem with the QT licence (even though its supposedly Open Source compliant, its still nowhere near as open as a GPL/LGPL licence), and the fact that until KDE 2.0 comes out, that its nowhere near as customizeable as GTK/Gnome. Each has its pros and cons, and until one clear winner arises, a coherent Linux/*nix desktop won't be possible.
good luck on that. Aureal is about to cease to exist. Last week all the executives resigned. Hopefully, their last act will be to open up the specs to their chips and open source their drivers for linux. I have a vortex 2 and have been happy with it, but with out open source drivers or even a company to support it, i will have a new piece to put in my useless hardware collection.
I am an OSU student, and although I like the whole free access vibe of the Slashdot community, this is one time I am not going to say "damn the man, let em go". There are several things that people should know about this situation. First of all OSU provides internet access to most of the dorms. The one these students lived in is a dorm that is used for low cost housing, most of the services provided in other dorms, such as cable, air conditioning, and internet access. Basically its place to hang your hat and a phone, and without air conditioning, its damned miserable to live in from April till October. If they wanted internet access so bad, they have a choice of almost any other dorm on campus to live in, many with low cost options like the dorm they lived in. Basically they have the option to get the access legitimately. Sure it may cost them a little more a month to get a room with access, but ethernet connections to a fiber backbone aren't cheap. On top of that, there is a computer lab with full access for them to reach the net in the dorm, and several sizable labs all across campus. Its not like they were completely locked out of the net. Basically they were using a service they hadn't paid for, and were reasonably priced and available. Its also important to remember that they were charged with misdemeanors, not felonies. They'll pay a small fine, maybe some community service and go home. If your looking for a reason to crucify OSU, this isn't it. Crucify OSU for its poorly run netware 5 network that goes down more than a drunken sorority girl.
Creative labs sued Aureal last year over sound PCI sound technology, in an attempt to keep aureal from continuing to make their chips for pci sound. Well they lost, and damned near had the patent overturned when it was shown that all of the prior technology leading to the patent had not been documented in the patent application, and that several of the parts of the implentation were not present in aureal's technology. The lawsuit was one of those, "we patent what is being done, not how to do it" sort of things that normally brings huge numbers of posts on slashdot, saying how evil this corporation is.
With that in mind, Creative has been good about keeping their EAX for windows fairly open, and they opened their sound drivers for linux, while Aureal still has only partially opened their code. Open code or not, looking at the API specs for OpenAL, its pretty obvious that this is oriented towards the SB Live cards. It looks to implement the same sort of setup as EAX, depending on a reverb engine, as opposed to the wavetracing setup that A3D uses. If you want to hear the difference between the two setups, play Half-Life on a EAX card and then try it on an A3D card. Its a huge difference. The A3D style, is much better IMHO. The positional audio sounds much more realistic. Still A3D 2.0 and higher (1.0 doesn't support wavetracing) isn't open, and no linux equivalent exists. Creative beat them to the punch on this one, and even opened it up. Still, dont be deluded into thinking that they are doing this for the good of the community, it is at least as much to crush aureal, as it is to improve 3d sound in Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
The yahoo client actually adds some functionality as compared to GTKYahoo, namely conferencing. I'd rather use a free speech client, but until GKTYahoo has conferencing support, I will use the free beer one from yahoo. AOL's on the other hand, added nothing as compared with GAIM.
Cindy was a fem bot, and that pretty much sums it up. I'm not saying she's not attractive, but lets face it, smut all over is strewn with skinny blonde women that look exactly like her. Danni however, is different. She has her own look, sure her breasts are down right gargantuan, but she has a nice big butt too. She's not bone thin either, her form follows the classic beauty model. Sure Danni wont get any offers from TV sitcoms (hell cindy only gets UPN anyways), but I would personally rather look at her naked, than Cindy any day. I am glad that she may be the most downloaded woman. You are welcome to disagree with me, its only an opinion.
This is a chicken and egg problem. In Europe where there is adequate public transportation to begin with, the population lives in close proximity. Now in America, in most cities (not all, New York is an exception) the rise of the auto coinsided with the rise of a good portion of our cities. As a result, they are sprawled. Still, I have to say that there is little reason for not having at least some sort of bullet train system between places that are heavily populated. Boston-NY-DC, San Diego-LA-San Fran, and Houston-Austin-Dallas should all be able to support that sort of thing.
well, there are a million different source ports for both quake and doom to win32. Both doom and quake had ports to win32 written by id themselves.
In the US we have continually have some of the lowest voter turn outs in the world. Its no wonder that money controls both major parties. Do yourself a favor, dont vote for them, vote for someone else, while I dont like Nader, he does make a hell of a protest vote. I will probably vote for Harry Brown myself. But what ever you do, dont not vote. Dont succumb to the throwing your vote away bs. A protest vote is still a vote, and with enough protest votes, we can make either the major parties none existant, or force them to hear and cater to our voices. Please dont waste that vote.
Alright, cool new case. Big whoop, I can already get a Palm IIIe with the larger screen for the same price. And that doesn't even include going to the Visor (which the cheap one bothers me because it has no sync cable). Keep the IIIe and if you have to compete with Visor, give it some funky color cases. Oh yeah, while your at it, allow the IIIe to upgrade its OS. Hell, you already made a clear cased one.I love my Palm, but this just seems to be the wrong direction. Its the same price for less Palm.
I strongly doubt that any sort of peltier cooler is involved, as they tend to raise ambient temperatures in the rest of the machine extremely high. With a peltier cooler, you'd almost have to have a fan to pump out the air, or the rest of the system would get too hot to be workable. And this isnt even including the larger power supply a peltier requires and the heat it would generate. I do wish that more of the PC world would go in the direction of fanless cooling, I have a heatsink the size of a small country on my celery and with some intelligent design, it should be able to go fanless.
These sort of laws are ridiculous. All it does is make for less explanation by parents. When a kid asks "Why cant I play Quake 3?" a parent can just say "Its illegal" instead of actually explaining and justifying their actions. Its the same way with things like school uniforms. It makes it easier for parents to say that they wont buy tommy jeans for their kids, instead of actually explaining why. Laws like this make for bad parenting, with no explanation to their children. They deprive children of learning the how and why of their parents morals and beliefs, so that they can learn from that, and become thinking rational adults.
Ok, I am not a hyper linux zealot, but there is one thing I am having a problem with here. Where is the evidence? Besides a free eval version of the software which has been standard practice, what are they getting? Who is getting it? This seems a little fishy to me. And something tells me that if it is some sort of payola scheme, then it isn't only the linux companies doing it. I'm not saying linux companies are above this sort of thing, but there does seem to be disturbing lack of evidence in these stories.
these sound like ass. I made the mistake of buying one, before I could afford a good 6 disc changer.
to be honest, yes. AM radio in most rural areas is populated with the least exepnsive programming they can put out. Paying a local DJ/News man is more expensive than a syndicated program. So local prgramming is almost non-existant, meanwhile national programming with little or no real local importance airs all the time.
I used to live in rural Montana, and the lack of any radio in some places and the lack of non country stations in others annoyed me to no end. 9.95 a month is cheaper than keeping a cd collection up to date, and the car cd/mp3 players are still pretty expensive ( I didn't see how much the satellite radio recievers are) but even if they are more expensive than a car mp3 player the high speed internet access to make one worthwile is nonexistant in rural areas. DSS is popluar there for the same reason, no or piss poor cable. It may be out of date by something else soon, but it is a step in the right direction for those who dont live in populated areas.
Few people realize that evolution will not provide the best of all designs. yes, mice might compete better with smarter genes. Why didn't they evolve them? well, evolution is completely random, and usually doesn't kick in unless there is some major changes going around. its a system of punctuated equilibrium. So what you end up with is a bunch of life, good enough to survive, but not great. Why shouldn't we try to improve it.
Hey, it could be fun. make a quake bot that aims for the crotch, and dodges crotch shots. now that would be great for the AI people. Wait, that would be a great mod. Someone make NutShot Quake.
As far as terraforming is concerned, this isnt that much of an improvement. Sure we could get oxygen on mars, but the CO2 is the wrong thing to use. CO2 would be needed, as a greenhouse effect is needed to warm up the atmosphere. Secondly, this atmosphere would still be too thin, and with less CO2, it would become thinner. The remaining CO2 would condense as Mars got colder, and the atmospere would be even thinner.
If you wanted to setup a sealed colony, it would work quite well, but making the Mars surface livable would take far more than this.
Ok, there have been some good points about china being unable to keep up with the Internet as far as censorship is concerned. Thats all well and good, but how in the hell are you going to get all the vast majority of people in the countryside, who make less in a year than most of us make in a week. On top of that most are illiterate, which makes the Web absolutely useless for them.
Ok, then there is the possibility of commerce bringing enough money to bring the majority of people into enough of a standing that the government has to democratize. Nope, not gonna happen, you've got a billion people to bring up, sheer scale says it cant happen. Not to mention, many more well off asian countries still censor the media of almost all controvesial content (Singapore comes to mind). This is about cash for big business, not freedom for China.
If there can be a contest to crack open a Microsoft codec, hows about a contest for Sorenson. VA linux puts up a nice new workstation, maybe a little cash too. Of course it would have to be GPL.
I rather liked Ender's Shadow, it was mainly a rewrite of Ender's Game, but a damn sight better than the other sequels. The other books in the series just plain stunk.
I'm getting nitpicky here, but whether or not something is organic in the chemical sense is that it uses mainly carbon for the basis of it, not whether it has anything to do with biology.
While I do think that the subject of the problem of "geek profiling" and its damage to those people needs to be addressed, i think its much more important for us to distance ourselves from this situation. Were they in to computers? yes, but were they indiciative of the online community here at slashdot? no. While alot of us faced insults and abuse in high school, none of us decided to kill anyone. What these boys did was horrible, and no amount of abuse justifies it. We need to show more how these boys were unlike the geek community, not draw parallels. It only invites the profiling that we so badly want to stop. As for the copyright stuff, I'm not going to get into it, as there are no easy answers to it. Do yourself a favor /. . change the copyright stuff, its up to interpretation, and a gray area is not a good idea to be gray legally.
An interesting book that touches on the whole nanotech social implication thing is The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil. It unfortunately suffers from the same problem that most of the pop nanotech books suffer from. It assumes that nano tech will work and it will be one of the most powerful things that mankind has ever created. Still an interesting read, although nowhere near as good as his "Age of Intelligent Machines". It does have the benefit of dealing with more of the social aspects of the technology, as opposed to the technical aspects, and not having to have an exciting story the way the Diamond Age does. It does have some ballsly assumptions that you should take with a grain of salt, such as a computer with the power of the human brain for $1000 by 2019, and his assertion that moore's law is a law of nature. Still not a bad read, and its not too deep for a high school project.
I think the main problem with the linux desktop is the lack of a coherent widget library. Yes, both QT and GTK are there, but we have no one that is head and shoulders above the rest. Gnome has become infinitely more usable in the past year, giving GTK a good stable desktop environment to work around, but its still a bitch to get gnome to work on anything besides Linux. QT and KDE on the other hand seem to work well on all *nixes. But you have the problem with the QT licence (even though its supposedly Open Source compliant, its still nowhere near as open as a GPL/LGPL licence), and the fact that until KDE 2.0 comes out, that its nowhere near as customizeable as GTK/Gnome. Each has its pros and cons, and until one clear winner arises, a coherent Linux/*nix desktop won't be possible.
good luck on that. Aureal is about to cease to exist. Last week all the executives resigned. Hopefully, their last act will be to open up the specs to their chips and open source their drivers for linux. I have a vortex 2 and have been happy with it, but with out open source drivers or even a company to support it, i will have a new piece to put in my useless hardware collection.
I am an OSU student, and although I like the whole free access vibe of the Slashdot community, this is one time I am not going to say "damn the man, let em go". There are several things that people should know about this situation. First of all OSU provides internet access to most of the dorms. The one these students lived in is a dorm that is used for low cost housing, most of the services provided in other dorms, such as cable, air conditioning, and internet access. Basically its place to hang your hat and a phone, and without air conditioning, its damned miserable to live in from April till October. If they wanted internet access so bad, they have a choice of almost any other dorm on campus to live in, many with low cost options like the dorm they lived in. Basically they have the option to get the access legitimately. Sure it may cost them a little more a month to get a room with access, but ethernet connections to a fiber backbone aren't cheap. On top of that, there is a computer lab with full access for them to reach the net in the dorm, and several sizable labs all across campus. Its not like they were completely locked out of the net. Basically they were using a service they hadn't paid for, and were reasonably priced and available. Its also important to remember that they were charged with misdemeanors, not felonies. They'll pay a small fine, maybe some community service and go home. If your looking for a reason to crucify OSU, this isn't it. Crucify OSU for its poorly run netware 5 network that goes down more than a drunken sorority girl.
With that in mind, Creative has been good about keeping their EAX for windows fairly open, and they opened their sound drivers for linux, while Aureal still has only partially opened their code. Open code or not, looking at the API specs for OpenAL, its pretty obvious that this is oriented towards the SB Live cards. It looks to implement the same sort of setup as EAX, depending on a reverb engine, as opposed to the wavetracing setup that A3D uses. If you want to hear the difference between the two setups, play Half-Life on a EAX card and then try it on an A3D card. Its a huge difference. The A3D style, is much better IMHO. The positional audio sounds much more realistic. Still A3D 2.0 and higher (1.0 doesn't support wavetracing) isn't open, and no linux equivalent exists. Creative beat them to the punch on this one, and even opened it up. Still, dont be deluded into thinking that they are doing this for the good of the community, it is at least as much to crush aureal, as it is to improve 3d sound in Linux.