Interesting that Groening is still there and most of the rest of Fox's mgmt has turned over several times since.
BTW, I totally agree with you re: real-time game length. 3.5 hrs is way too long for a 60 minute event. Here's a thought -- make the "delay of game" penalty a "loss of down" penalty as well. This should actually result in speeding up the game by making coaches and players accountable for clock mgmt. We may even be able to reach a happy medium whereby "delay of game" does not also cause "delay of start of Futurama".
Of course, that would cut into advertising revenue for the sake of the sport and the fans -- silly me....
Probably going to burn some karma here, but whatever, I have it to spare.
"Dear sheltered Futurama/TiVo geeks -- perhaps you've heard of the Heidi Game where in 1968 an NFL game was pre-empted in favor of a made-for-TV movie of the children's story Heidi? The backlash from that was enormous, and is the reason that NFL games, with their big fan base and big money in/out-flows, takes precedence over scheduled programming.
Wake up and smell the money. If you compare the viewerbase, the ad revenues, and the amount of money paid by Fox to air the NFL vs. Futurama, it should be clearly evident where Fox's loyalties should lie."
For the record, I watch football, am a DirecTiVo freak, and have casually watched Futurama in the past and liked it. However, if you want to have a valid case, then go convince advertisers to pay Fox more to air their spots during Futurama than the NFL. Otherwise, you're never going to win this battle.
P.S. -- wouldn't that Sunday 7pm timeslot be the same slot that CBS' "60 Minutes" routinely cleans house with? Ever think that this may be partly due to dovetailing from NFL games?
Indeed, this is why software is prone to the phenomenon known as The Big Ball of Mud. A possibly well-designed original program gets encumbered with feature requests over its lifetime until it devolves into a piece of software that is unrelated to its original intentions and is unmaintainable by the developers that have worked on it.
In such cases, many times the best thing to do is examine what the overall purposes of the software is supposed to be and start over from scratch, but engineer the new solution, rather than cobble it together.
Not at all what I'm saying. I'm techo-agnostic -- I want to see cool things like this regardless of the platform. The fact that/. only seems to report on cool things running on Linux and bad things running on other platforms (namely Windows) makes me view them as biased.
It doesn't make an air guitar running on Linux any less cool, just that I don't think the editor's eyes are open wide enough lately to cool things happening in other arenas.
BTW, for the record, I'm a Solaris and Linux fan myself, but I try to keep an open mind about everything, regardless of the source. It's unfortunate that/. does not echo that mindset.
Exactly. And furthermore, is this were developed on Mac OSX or Solaris or Windows, do you think this would have been accepted as a/. story?
The bias here towards Linux is really getting old at this point. Might as well redo the slogan to be "News for Linux nerds. Stuff that matters as long as it's Linux."
Your theory is excellent, but I don't know if the project participants (SETI, Einstein, etc) would appreciate being artificially squelched because one platform can function better than another. Their assumptions are that the user assigns the shares based on their preferences, not what their CPU's can do.
Of course this can be addressed by overcompensation, but IMHO this should be something left as an alternative scheduler to the user's preference, not built into the BOINC client code.
You do have to get a new client and the learning curve towards spinning up with BOINC isn't trivial, but it's not hard either. Best yet, you pretty much only have to keep your BOINC client up-to-date and not the individual engines that SETI, Einstein, and climateprediction.net use, as they are updated automatically as necessary through the BOINC client.
I like the built-in stats in the GUI and the easier interface to attach to a new project and to reset projects that seem to have gone stale. Much more intuitive. And with the ability to divide your work into shares, you'll never have any slack time for your CPU as had happened regularly with the SETI client when their server(s) went offline.
It's the cost of destroying competition, although in old times, it was a company selling below the production cost of a competitor. Now it's MS selling above the price, but still squeezing Nintendo and Sony out due to the high selling point.
In other words, if can sell the XBox for enough money that people will be hesitant to buy a second console, then they've still won despite losing money.
I'm actually worried about Jack Thompson's mental fitness. As I mentioned in a previous posting a few weeks ago, I think he may very well be a psychopath (not joking here...this is a very big problem). Look at the DSM-IV-TR criteria:
Failure to conform to social norms
Deceitfulness
Impulsivity
Irritability or aggressiveness
Reckless disregard for safety of self or others
Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain steady work or honor financial obligations
Lack of remorse
Satisfying three or more of these criteria warrants a diagnosis of psychopathy or sociopathy. Jack's in trouble, but until he's looked at, so are we.
While it's nice that state governments are interested in OpenDocument, IMHO, this initiative will not seriously gain steam until the big companies around the world begin to adopt them. If GE, Walmart, Citigroup, GM, etc, etc, etc, made an effort towards OpenDoc, it will take off very quickly.
However, most of these big companies are locked into multi-billion, multi-year contracts with Microsoft, so I would be surprised to see anything happen soon.
I'm sure it'll be justified in ways such as lost opportunities, black marks on the education record that will cause certain undergraduate schools to shy away from such as candidate, and so forth. However, the real reason is the courts smacking the school district for violating the rules, and if they were to do it again, it would be 10x as much.
Of course, the irony is that residents in the school district will ultimately foot the bill, so in essence, although the Dwyer's win, they lose as well. If the court had really wanted to serve justice, some school officials should have been given the boot today.
Cronauer: Army uses Ethel Merman today to test jamming Russian radar. Here's a brief part of that test. "Oh, I've got a feeling....That love is here to stay." When asked for a reply, the Russians went, "What the hell was that?"
For those of you too lazy to do the math, this comes out to $8,760/cpu/yr, or for a typical 2-way server, $17,520/yr. Over a typical 3-year lifecycle (YMMV), this is $52,560 in expense for a 2-CPU server. Of course, this includes administration of the service, such as backups, sysadmin, power, data center space, etc...
Compare this to buying a 2-way Sun V240 at about $7,245 (pre-discount), and you have $45,315 worth of TCO cost-savings to justify to management over the same 3-year window to make this worthwhile. Now I don't pretend to speak for others, but our SA's administer multiple systems, typically at least 20/SA, so unless your SA's make more than $300k/yr, I can't see this being feasible.
Nice post, but couldn't you just buy a cheap laptop with a wireless adaptor, a DVD reader, a webcam, and a headset for Skype to do all of the above? It would probably cost about the same and you'd still need the backpack, but at least you can do all of the above with one device instead of several. Sure, you'd have to stay in range of a Starbucks or McDonald's everywhere you went, but that's not too hard to do anymore...
You're both correct, in that we shouldn't have to worry about old technology like mikes and antennas, but the reality is that this is still a problem, especially for those of us in America living on the fringes of the digital divide where tech hasn't quite caught up to the rest of the connected world.
I do agree with the original post -- primarily, the device is a phone and as such it must be able to do three things:
get and keep a good signal
capture my voice satisfactorily
reproduce the remote caller's voice clearly
Everything else are bells and whistles. Now, if this were billed as a computer, PDA, or camera that had cellphone technology, then the playing field is different.
Very true. In fact, there's been posts that has said that this guy has been observed for mental issues -- I think he may very well be a psychopath (not joking here...this is a very big problem). Look at the DSM-IV-TR criteria he probably satisfies:
Failure to conform to social norms. Yes, check -- he has been engaging in barratry to prove his point.
Deceitfulness -- check, although it may be delusions of grandeur that he's having that make him believe he's telling the truth
impulsivity -- no, this doesn't fit -- he's very aware of what he's doing and planning carefully
irritability or aggressiveness -- definite check, he's openly attacking anyone who disagrees with his viewpoints, instead of calmly debating them
reckless disregard for safety of self or others -- hard to say here, but going to go with no since I can't establish a reasonable cause here
consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain steady work or honor financial obligations -- reneged on $10k check, need I say more?
lack of remorse -- check, he definitely does not seem to mind hurting others, and his vision of the game he wants is frightening
If a person satisfies three or more of these criteria, a diagnosis of psychopathy or sociopathy is probably warranted. Jack meets 5 of the 7. He seriously needs to be admitted to a mental hospital ASAP.
Slashdot Mirror
And already, some teenage /. reader is figuring out how to wire-up the warp engine with purple neon underbody lights....
Interesting that Groening is still there and most of the rest of Fox's mgmt has turned over several times since.
BTW, I totally agree with you re: real-time game length. 3.5 hrs is way too long for a 60 minute event. Here's a thought -- make the "delay of game" penalty a "loss of down" penalty as well. This should actually result in speeding up the game by making coaches and players accountable for clock mgmt. We may even be able to reach a happy medium whereby "delay of game" does not also cause "delay of start of Futurama".
Of course, that would cut into advertising revenue for the sake of the sport and the fans -- silly me....
Probably going to burn some karma here, but whatever, I have it to spare.
"Dear sheltered Futurama/TiVo geeks -- perhaps you've heard of the Heidi Game where in 1968 an NFL game was pre-empted in favor of a made-for-TV movie of the children's story Heidi? The backlash from that was enormous, and is the reason that NFL games, with their big fan base and big money in/out-flows, takes precedence over scheduled programming.
Wake up and smell the money. If you compare the viewerbase, the ad revenues, and the amount of money paid by Fox to air the NFL vs. Futurama, it should be clearly evident where Fox's loyalties should lie."
For the record, I watch football, am a DirecTiVo freak, and have casually watched Futurama in the past and liked it. However, if you want to have a valid case, then go convince advertisers to pay Fox more to air their spots during Futurama than the NFL. Otherwise, you're never going to win this battle.
P.S. -- wouldn't that Sunday 7pm timeslot be the same slot that CBS' "60 Minutes" routinely cleans house with? Ever think that this may be partly due to dovetailing from NFL games?
Indeed, this is why software is prone to the phenomenon known as The Big Ball of Mud. A possibly well-designed original program gets encumbered with feature requests over its lifetime until it devolves into a piece of software that is unrelated to its original intentions and is unmaintainable by the developers that have worked on it.
In such cases, many times the best thing to do is examine what the overall purposes of the software is supposed to be and start over from scratch, but engineer the new solution, rather than cobble it together.
I suppose this official website isn't good enough for you?
Not at all what I'm saying. I'm techo-agnostic -- I want to see cool things like this regardless of the platform. The fact that /. only seems to report on cool things running on Linux and bad things running on other platforms (namely Windows) makes me view them as biased.
/. does not echo that mindset.
It doesn't make an air guitar running on Linux any less cool, just that I don't think the editor's eyes are open wide enough lately to cool things happening in other arenas.
BTW, for the record, I'm a Solaris and Linux fan myself, but I try to keep an open mind about everything, regardless of the source. It's unfortunate that
No technical solution exists to correct the lack of taste of the potential buyers of these CDs. Even Orrin Hatch's PC Bomb isn't sufficient.
Nor do I.
BTW, yes, your system is vulnerable.
Exactly. And furthermore, is this were developed on Mac OSX or Solaris or Windows, do you think this would have been accepted as a /. story?
The bias here towards Linux is really getting old at this point. Might as well redo the slogan to be "News for Linux nerds. Stuff that matters as long as it's Linux."
"You're on in 5...4...3..."
Your theory is excellent, but I don't know if the project participants (SETI, Einstein, etc) would appreciate being artificially squelched because one platform can function better than another. Their assumptions are that the user assigns the shares based on their preferences, not what their CPU's can do.
Of course this can be addressed by overcompensation, but IMHO this should be something left as an alternative scheduler to the user's preference, not built into the BOINC client code.
You do have to get a new client and the learning curve towards spinning up with BOINC isn't trivial, but it's not hard either. Best yet, you pretty much only have to keep your BOINC client up-to-date and not the individual engines that SETI, Einstein, and climateprediction.net use, as they are updated automatically as necessary through the BOINC client.
I like the built-in stats in the GUI and the easier interface to attach to a new project and to reset projects that seem to have gone stale. Much more intuitive. And with the ability to divide your work into shares, you'll never have any slack time for your CPU as had happened regularly with the SETI client when their server(s) went offline.
Got a better idea....not buy 200 billion XBox360's. MS loses $79.8 trillion.
Of course, that does make one silly assumption.....
It's the cost of destroying competition, although in old times, it was a company selling below the production cost of a competitor. Now it's MS selling above the price, but still squeezing Nintendo and Sony out due to the high selling point.
In other words, if can sell the XBox for enough money that people will be hesitant to buy a second console, then they've still won despite losing money.
Satisfying three or more of these criteria warrants a diagnosis of psychopathy or sociopathy. Jack's in trouble, but until he's looked at, so are we.
This text-based game wasted so much of my time at the SUNY-Buffalo in the late 80's, I cringe to think about it.
Therefore, I would be remiss not to unleash it on the rest of you now once again.
Galactic Trader Online
Galtrader Telnet client
Enjoy...
Since the story is devoid of content...
No worries, since most of the comments here (excepting yours) have also been devoid of content.
While it's nice that state governments are interested in OpenDocument, IMHO, this initiative will not seriously gain steam until the big companies around the world begin to adopt them. If GE, Walmart, Citigroup, GM, etc, etc, etc, made an effort towards OpenDoc, it will take off very quickly.
However, most of these big companies are locked into multi-billion, multi-year contracts with Microsoft, so I would be surprised to see anything happen soon.
I'm sure it'll be justified in ways such as lost opportunities, black marks on the education record that will cause certain undergraduate schools to shy away from such as candidate, and so forth. However, the real reason is the courts smacking the school district for violating the rules, and if they were to do it again, it would be 10x as much.
Of course, the irony is that residents in the school district will ultimately foot the bill, so in essence, although the Dwyer's win, they lose as well. If the court had really wanted to serve justice, some school officials should have been given the boot today.
ObMovie Quote from Good Morning Vietnam
Cronauer: Army uses Ethel Merman today to test jamming Russian radar. Here's a brief part of that test. "Oh, I've got a feeling....That love is here to stay." When asked for a reply, the Russians went, "What the hell was that?"
they want to charge you for the pipe on one end, and turn around and charge the people you are connecting to, on a per transaction basis
Hmm, sounds like my cell phone plan....
For those of you too lazy to do the math, this comes out to $8,760/cpu/yr, or for a typical 2-way server, $17,520/yr. Over a typical 3-year lifecycle (YMMV), this is $52,560 in expense for a 2-CPU server. Of course, this includes administration of the service, such as backups, sysadmin, power, data center space, etc...
Compare this to buying a 2-way Sun V240 at about $7,245 (pre-discount), and you have $45,315 worth of TCO cost-savings to justify to management over the same 3-year window to make this worthwhile. Now I don't pretend to speak for others, but our SA's administer multiple systems, typically at least 20/SA, so unless your SA's make more than $300k/yr, I can't see this being feasible.
Nice post, but couldn't you just buy a cheap laptop with a wireless adaptor, a DVD reader, a webcam, and a headset for Skype to do all of the above? It would probably cost about the same and you'd still need the backpack, but at least you can do all of the above with one device instead of several. Sure, you'd have to stay in range of a Starbucks or McDonald's everywhere you went, but that's not too hard to do anymore...
I do agree with the original post -- primarily, the device is a phone and as such it must be able to do three things:
Everything else are bells and whistles. Now, if this were billed as a computer, PDA, or camera that had cellphone technology, then the playing field is different.
If a person satisfies three or more of these criteria, a diagnosis of psychopathy or sociopathy is probably warranted. Jack meets 5 of the 7. He seriously needs to be admitted to a mental hospital ASAP.