A year ago Tom's Hardware ran this article describing how some guys built a "Bluetooth Sniper Rifle". It has over a mile of range, and cost only a few hundred dollars to build. Less if you build it without the gratuitous gun stock.
Sugar beets are more popular in the midwest, where they are commercially grown. And I don't like the taste of sugar-beet derived sugar nearly as much as the taste of cane sugar -- I specifically only buy cane sugar in the grocery store for the table and for cooking.
As far as soda goes, I only drink diet and I also notice widely varying tastes of that across the country. Since I figure it's probably the same batch of aspartame used everywhere, I've always blamed the taste differences on the taste of the water at the local bottling plant.
If the stuff in the bow had to be transported to the stern every twelve hours, you'd probably find fewer enormous steel bulkheads between them, and more wide doors.
And more ships rolling over due to accidental mismanagement of the weight distribution. You make a great point, the "boat" metaphor becomes a lot more relevant when it becomes dynamic.
Why do so many people take doom as the first 3d game? Ultima Underworld had a better 3d engine than doom and it was 18 months before doom.
Wow, how many people can misinterpret a simple comment? Where the hell did I say Doom was the first 3D game? I said "You never forget your first." MY first 3D gaming experience was Doom. I'm really glad you liked Ultima. But I never played it -- the first 3D game I played was Doom. Thus, it stuck in my head as "the best." It's a reference point.
Try this thought experiment. If you were to magically appear today as a 15 year old never having grown up with computer graphics, television or movie CGI effects, and you knew computers only via pocket calculators, and suddenly you were presented with Unreal Tournament 2k4, it would be "the best." You'd play it daily for months. It would be so damn cool.
Now, imagine fast forwarding the clock to 2036, and look around at the video games they'll have -- virtual reality holographic displays, maybe head-mounted, maybe brain implants, who knows. But they're still first-person shooters, and none of them will be as good as you'll remember UT2K4 being.
That's why Doom was "the best" for me. Every game since has just been a prettier version of that original "cool factor."
Most employers don't hire by searching resumes on the web anyway.
Ummm...the HR person responsible for bringing me job applicants to interview seems to spend his life trolling monster.com. And I work for one of the largest private employers in my state.
The amazing thing is that he brings me very few "duds". Most of the people who make it this far really seem to be as sharp as their resumes claim, and I'd say I've given him a thumbs up on over 75% of them. Not that we've hired them all, but the ones we have gotten have been really good.
I think it's the novelty. "You never forget your first."
I remember being absolutely blown away by Doom. Wow, you could have 3D graphics, and travel vertically in the level as well? I mean, how cool was that? We played that game for months. AFAIK it's where the term "heroinware" originated. Doom II? Well, same game, different levels... Oooh, Duke 3D had better graphics than Doom, (and jet packs!) but it was still kind of the same game, with a couple of O.J. Simpson jokes thrown in.
Far Cry, F.E.A.R, HL2, and Doom III? They're still just "Doom with better graphics." Animated light sources, live shading, refraction under water, and all of that don't change the fact that the game is still a first person shooter. Trotting around an ever more detailed environment and firing ever more detailed weapons still gets stale.
Splinter Cell is a pretty good series, as far as originality goes. The objective stopped being "shoot everything" and became "hide and go seek" with a 9mm. The near future settings, the news broadcasts, they do a pretty good job with the game. It's more like playing Doom to find 100% of the secrets.
And no offense, but if you wear anything from ThinkGeek at work and it's not a tie then we're working in entirely different sectors.
I'm in retail, so yes, we're in completely different sectors. Although I have to admit I've spent the last four weeks working with our corporate legal team.
And I wear it only on *very* casual Fridays, like the Friday before Easter when it's a ghost town around here.
But you're right -- cherry picking your customers doesn't hurt, although I really don't discriminate. I'll help just about anyone.
Well, I orginally was going to write IANAL, but then a case of 'duh!' set in. What kind of person asks legal advice on Slashdot? We need something like SINSFARL; or maybe one of those form letters for Ask Slashdot:
You posted a(n)
[ ] inane
[ ] insane
[ ] incomprehensible
[ ] off-topic
[ ] pointless
[ ] frequently-asked
question on Ask Slashdot.
Your question deserves one or more of the following replies:
[ ] Don't ask Slashbots for legal advice. They are not lawyers.
[ ] Slashbots will get it wrong as often as they get it right.
[ ] Your topic is controversial and will only start a flame war.
[ ] Your topic has only one correct answer and that is: _______, and you should have been smart enough to recognize that.
[ ] Your question has been asked on a weekly basis, please follow this link: ________ for the most recent answer.
We've been doing this sort of support where I work and it generates nothing but bad karma with the computer illiterates (yeah, we've tried training them). In many companies it will not be the same as running a standalone shop. You get to look at these people every day in the office and the cafeteria after they've dumped their Quicken data and somehow now it's your fault. Don't give them that out.
Like many things, karma flows both ways.
Ever rescue your boss' home computer for her? That's the kind of karma you want to stick around. You can feed your protective aura even for the simplest of tasks, just because you were brave enough to not tell her "no".
Even so, I still wear my thinkgeek T-shirt to work every so often. (Doesn't help much -- even the pizza guy still asks us computer questions at lunch.)
First, you should be asking your corporate lawyer the answers to some of these questions. SINSFARL (Slashdot Is No Substitue For A Real Lawyer.) He'll probably recommend things like insurance, etc.
That said, you may want to have the aforementioned lawyer draft up a legal-looking piece of paper that says "In the event my computer or data is hozared by incompetent employees, I agree not to sue The Company..." bla bla bla.
I think you probably should look at the technical aspects, too. Establish rules for the fixit shop, such as "Never plug an employee's home machine directly into the company network." Your service shop should have a firewalled safe zone that can get to the internet, but not to your internal network.
Bring in an experienced repair shop manager. Get someone who knows how to set up and run a safe workbench, and who knows how schedules, policies, etc. work. Have them run as an independent agency inside your company. He doesn't have to turn a profit (duh) but should be responsible for maintaining service levels, providing estimates and setting prices (you're not GIVING away brand new replacement 512MB nVidia cards, are you?) and have purchase authority.
I can buy an unlocked GSM phone from any Tom-Click-and-Harry.com web site out there. (I *would* be able to buy one from a local dealer if they weren't all in bed with one or more of the carriers.) And I can take that phone between T-Mobile and Cingular all I want.
I don't see a problem here. There are plenty of firms willing to sell me any GSM phone I'm willing to pay for. And I have two perfectly acceptable GSM carriers to choose from.
And I also have two unacceptable carriers to choose from. Verizon may have good signal strength, but they maintain a list of nickel-and-dime billing suckers instead of a list of customers. And as for Sprinxtel, well, I don't care because their network's phones are truly unique to their network -- it's vendor lock in because of the technology.
As much as I loathe the business of cell phones, and feel as if I have been "trapped" in one contract or another for several iterations of phones now, I think regulation is completely the wrong answer to fix the "problems" you mention.
First, you enter any of these contracts completely by choice. If you don't want to sign up for a two-year commitment, buy your phone on the open market -- without their discount. It's an incentive, not an imperative.
You are already allowed to bring your own phone to their network. You don't pay more for a non-provider-provided phone.
If you want a phone that's portable between carriers, again, you're free to buy one on the open market. (AFAIK, not counting locked phones, GSM phones are more portable between carriers than CDMA phones. Analog is a few months from death, and I have no idea whatever became of TDMA or PCM.)
If you want a phone that's not crippled by Verizon (the worst) or another carrier, buy one on the open market.
Basically, the reason contracts are as bad as they are is that people are very attracted to the "free" phones, or the steeply discounted phones available from the cellular providers. That's the idea. But the free market is still out there. Quit whining about locked-down phones and insane contracts and spend the $200 extra for an unlocked phone. Or take their discount and STFU about it.
What I'd rather see is sanity brought to the plans. Having to "guess" at how many minutes you'll use in a month is a pretty lame way to force us to make a purchase. But all of the "pay as you go" plans cost far more for anyone but a mime.
Our local form of mass transit is light rail, with some spotty bus services as alternate options. I can spend about 10-20 minutes getting to the nearest terminus and parking and then sitting (ok, standing) on the train for about 35 minutes OR I can sit in my own vehicle for anywhere between 20 minutes and 70 minutes, depending on traffic. The average is 30 minutes. My parking ramp is about a block further from my office than the local rail station, so that doesn't factor much into time (although it does factor significantly into cost.)
Even with cost being unequal, the flexibility of my own vehicle is still worth more to me than the cost of driving and parking; although with the current trend in the price of fuel that may have to change.
One thing I noticed lacking in TFA was consideration for weather. I'm assuming he's in a location where weather isn't a factor, like southern California. Here in Minneapolis, weather is the primary factor above all else. Thunderstorms? Add anywhere from 20-60 minutes. Snow, even a little? Add an hour or two. First snow of the season? Call in sick, there's really no point in a four hour round trip commute. Even the rail line is seriously delayed in bad weather.
What would get me on mass transit? If they extended the rail line across the river, so I wouldn't have to fight the bridge traffic to get to the nearest station. Instead, they offer some random skanky buses that seem to stop running right around the time I'd like to go home. And every time ridership goes down, they cut the later buses from the schedule. Our mass transit seems expressly designed to keep ridership to the barest minimum, attracting only those people who have no choice but to wait, instead of offering rapid transit service to people willing to pay for it.
They shuffled stock down to the affected stores, and they emptied the warehouses in that general direction.
Did they have enough on hand to satisfy demand? Obviously not. Did the manufacturers of batteries and bottled water see the problem coming 12 weeks in advance to ramp up the manufacturing process? Obviously not. Do you think batteries and bottled water appear just because a disaster is on its way? Apparently so.
Walmart did what they did with what they had on hand. Nobody could have satisfied all the demand with a situation like that approaching; at least not without more notice.
One day one of the guys left his terminal logged in as root. I edited it from a call to fortune to instead be:
echo He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.
Of course, once he found out who did it, he changed my the folder on my user account from/usr/~john to/dev/floppy until I went begging his forgiveness. I didn't do it again.
Re:Don't care. Don't want to care.
on
How Vista Disappoints
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I may be bound to Windows by necessity, but I have no reason to downgrade to Vista at home. My "outside" projects are things like DLLs and COM objects, and are pretty much restricted to Win32 development. Some of the people who use them still run on Windows 98. If I wanted, I could probably continue to do everything I currently do in NT 4.0 with no real changes.
I'm not a big GUI hacker (services and components are where I shine,) so the new chrome in Vista will have no impact on my code anyway.
Even once I do get into.NET development, the.NET 2.0 framework is going to continue to run on XP for a long time to come, as is Visual Studio. That's one of the positive aspects of.NET -- it's not bound to the OS.
That's why I'm not likely to switch my main home machine over to any of the flavors of Linux any time soon; although with mono approaching 98% feature completion it may become a possibility. I don't want to rule out any options, but at this point there is nothing in Vista to attract me and plenty to repel me.
I'm not ready to replace Windows yet. For one thing, my day job is as a Windows C++ programmer. I need tools like Visual Studio at home for both work and fun. And as much as we may or may not like it, most of the clients for software are still running Windows machines.
Since they're building DRM right into the core of the OS (including crap such as the Protected Media Path and all its ilk) I have absolutely no reason to think they won't allow corporate partners (RIAA, MPAA, BSA) to abuse this to kill pieces of "unapproved" media or "rogue" apps. What happens when the.*AA tells them Azureus is being used to pirate software or media? Shut 'er down! Even if you've only ever used it to share the latest fad video or big open source distribution, it won't matter. And that's wrong.
Whether I agree with them on issues of piracy or not (I don't approve of pirating software myself) I refuse to allow my computer to participate in extending or enforcing their policies, and I refuse to install DRM based media players. I'm going to keep XP on that machine for as long as it runs, or until I replace it with an open OS.
No, the infamous mod-ban bitch-slap of 2002 has been discussed by lots of people over the years. It was quite deliberate, and despite a long track record of interesting, insightful and funny posts most of us still don't have mod points back yet.
Perhaps it's time for me to ask for them to be restored again, kind of like asking the President for a pardon, or asking the Don for a favor on this, the day of his daughter's wedding.
I've still been off the mod list for the last 4 years now, but about two years ago I started being able to meta-mod again. I considered it a good step forward.
The whole thing pisses me off to no end because I basically got trolled into moderating up one of the "offensive" posts, and I feel like I was caught up in the general moderation bitch-slap that went around at that time. What's worse is I've never actually "trolled" on Slashdot. I've posted some stuff that I thought was funny, and some of those may have been "in opposition" to the prevailing attitudes about the topic (maybe pro-Microsoft or questioning the sanctity of Linux or whatever.) But I've certainly never done any frist ps0ts, obscene ASCII art, or any of the other griefer-type posts.
I like that Slashdot has a strong policy against censoring, and that they use the mod system to hide the griefers. I honestly don't know how they've avoided the casino spam, but whatever they're doing in that regard is also excellent and appreciated.
But I don't mind the occasional off topic discussion, and I don't have a problem replying to ACs. I also find some of the trolls hilarious, and I've even befriended one just because she's an excellent creative writer. So while I'm not a troll myself, I do enjoy the (very occasional) troll. I sometimes wonder if I'm too close to the border for them to restore my mod points.
Slashdot Mirror
A year ago Tom's Hardware ran this article describing how some guys built a "Bluetooth Sniper Rifle". It has over a mile of range, and cost only a few hundred dollars to build. Less if you build it without the gratuitous gun stock.
As far as soda goes, I only drink diet and I also notice widely varying tastes of that across the country. Since I figure it's probably the same batch of aspartame used everywhere, I've always blamed the taste differences on the taste of the water at the local bottling plant.
And more ships rolling over due to accidental mismanagement of the weight distribution. You make a great point, the "boat" metaphor becomes a lot more relevant when it becomes dynamic.
Wow, how many people can misinterpret a simple comment? Where the hell did I say Doom was the first 3D game? I said "You never forget your first." MY first 3D gaming experience was Doom. I'm really glad you liked Ultima. But I never played it -- the first 3D game I played was Doom. Thus, it stuck in my head as "the best." It's a reference point.
Try this thought experiment. If you were to magically appear today as a 15 year old never having grown up with computer graphics, television or movie CGI effects, and you knew computers only via pocket calculators, and suddenly you were presented with Unreal Tournament 2k4, it would be "the best." You'd play it daily for months. It would be so damn cool.
Now, imagine fast forwarding the clock to 2036, and look around at the video games they'll have -- virtual reality holographic displays, maybe head-mounted, maybe brain implants, who knows. But they're still first-person shooters, and none of them will be as good as you'll remember UT2K4 being.
That's why Doom was "the best" for me. Every game since has just been a prettier version of that original "cool factor."
Ummm...the HR person responsible for bringing me job applicants to interview seems to spend his life trolling monster.com. And I work for one of the largest private employers in my state.
The amazing thing is that he brings me very few "duds". Most of the people who make it this far really seem to be as sharp as their resumes claim, and I'd say I've given him a thumbs up on over 75% of them. Not that we've hired them all, but the ones we have gotten have been really good.
I remember being absolutely blown away by Doom. Wow, you could have 3D graphics, and travel vertically in the level as well? I mean, how cool was that? We played that game for months. AFAIK it's where the term "heroinware" originated. Doom II? Well, same game, different levels... Oooh, Duke 3D had better graphics than Doom, (and jet packs!) but it was still kind of the same game, with a couple of O.J. Simpson jokes thrown in.
Far Cry, F.E.A.R, HL2, and Doom III? They're still just "Doom with better graphics." Animated light sources, live shading, refraction under water, and all of that don't change the fact that the game is still a first person shooter. Trotting around an ever more detailed environment and firing ever more detailed weapons still gets stale.
Splinter Cell is a pretty good series, as far as originality goes. The objective stopped being "shoot everything" and became "hide and go seek" with a 9mm. The near future settings, the news broadcasts, they do a pretty good job with the game. It's more like playing Doom to find 100% of the secrets.
Hmm, maybe 3E doesn't suck as much as the GP claims...
I'm in retail, so yes, we're in completely different sectors. Although I have to admit I've spent the last four weeks working with our corporate legal team.
And I wear it only on *very* casual Fridays, like the Friday before Easter when it's a ghost town around here.
But you're right -- cherry picking your customers doesn't hurt, although I really don't discriminate. I'll help just about anyone.
Now are you happy? :-)
You posted a(n)
- [ ] inane
- [ ] insane
- [ ] incomprehensible
- [ ] off-topic
- [ ] pointless
- [ ] frequently-asked
question on Ask Slashdot.Your question deserves one or more of the following replies:
In addition, you are:
Like many things, karma flows both ways.
Ever rescue your boss' home computer for her? That's the kind of karma you want to stick around. You can feed your protective aura even for the simplest of tasks, just because you were brave enough to not tell her "no".
Even so, I still wear my thinkgeek T-shirt to work every so often. (Doesn't help much -- even the pizza guy still asks us computer questions at lunch.)
That said, you may want to have the aforementioned lawyer draft up a legal-looking piece of paper that says "In the event my computer or data is hozared by incompetent employees, I agree not to sue The Company..." bla bla bla.
I think you probably should look at the technical aspects, too. Establish rules for the fixit shop, such as "Never plug an employee's home machine directly into the company network." Your service shop should have a firewalled safe zone that can get to the internet, but not to your internal network.
Bring in an experienced repair shop manager. Get someone who knows how to set up and run a safe workbench, and who knows how schedules, policies, etc. work. Have them run as an independent agency inside your company. He doesn't have to turn a profit (duh) but should be responsible for maintaining service levels, providing estimates and setting prices (you're not GIVING away brand new replacement 512MB nVidia cards, are you?) and have purchase authority.
I don't see a problem here. There are plenty of firms willing to sell me any GSM phone I'm willing to pay for. And I have two perfectly acceptable GSM carriers to choose from.
And I also have two unacceptable carriers to choose from. Verizon may have good signal strength, but they maintain a list of nickel-and-dime billing suckers instead of a list of customers. And as for Sprinxtel, well, I don't care because their network's phones are truly unique to their network -- it's vendor lock in because of the technology.
To answer your specific questions:
50MB internal memory. The mini-SD memory card reader accepts cards up to 2GB.
3.2 megapixel (2048 x 1536 pixels) camera, Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens, 3x optical zoom, MPEG-4 VGA video capture of up to 30 fps.
Power Management
- Battery: Lithium Polymer battery BP-6M 1100mAh
- Talk time: up to 3.7hrs (WCDMA)/up to 5.1hrs (GSM)*
- Stand-by time: up to 10days (WCDMA)/up to 10days (GSM)*
* Operation times may vary depending on radio access technology used, operator network configuration and usage.First, you enter any of these contracts completely by choice. If you don't want to sign up for a two-year commitment, buy your phone on the open market -- without their discount. It's an incentive, not an imperative.
You are already allowed to bring your own phone to their network. You don't pay more for a non-provider-provided phone.
If you want a phone that's portable between carriers, again, you're free to buy one on the open market. (AFAIK, not counting locked phones, GSM phones are more portable between carriers than CDMA phones. Analog is a few months from death, and I have no idea whatever became of TDMA or PCM.)
If you want a phone that's not crippled by Verizon (the worst) or another carrier, buy one on the open market.
Basically, the reason contracts are as bad as they are is that people are very attracted to the "free" phones, or the steeply discounted phones available from the cellular providers. That's the idea. But the free market is still out there. Quit whining about locked-down phones and insane contracts and spend the $200 extra for an unlocked phone. Or take their discount and STFU about it.
What I'd rather see is sanity brought to the plans. Having to "guess" at how many minutes you'll use in a month is a pretty lame way to force us to make a purchase. But all of the "pay as you go" plans cost far more for anyone but a mime.
Even with cost being unequal, the flexibility of my own vehicle is still worth more to me than the cost of driving and parking; although with the current trend in the price of fuel that may have to change.
One thing I noticed lacking in TFA was consideration for weather. I'm assuming he's in a location where weather isn't a factor, like southern California. Here in Minneapolis, weather is the primary factor above all else. Thunderstorms? Add anywhere from 20-60 minutes. Snow, even a little? Add an hour or two. First snow of the season? Call in sick, there's really no point in a four hour round trip commute. Even the rail line is seriously delayed in bad weather.
What would get me on mass transit? If they extended the rail line across the river, so I wouldn't have to fight the bridge traffic to get to the nearest station. Instead, they offer some random skanky buses that seem to stop running right around the time I'd like to go home. And every time ridership goes down, they cut the later buses from the schedule. Our mass transit seems expressly designed to keep ridership to the barest minimum, attracting only those people who have no choice but to wait, instead of offering rapid transit service to people willing to pay for it.
Did they have enough on hand to satisfy demand? Obviously not. Did the manufacturers of batteries and bottled water see the problem coming 12 weeks in advance to ramp up the manufacturing process? Obviously not. Do you think batteries and bottled water appear just because a disaster is on its way? Apparently so.
Walmart did what they did with what they had on hand. Nobody could have satisfied all the demand with a situation like that approaching; at least not without more notice.
Of course, once he found out who did it, he changed my the folder on my user account from /usr/~john to /dev/floppy until I went begging his forgiveness. I didn't do it again.
I'm not a big GUI hacker (services and components are where I shine,) so the new chrome in Vista will have no impact on my code anyway.
Even once I do get into .NET development, the .NET 2.0 framework is going to continue to run on XP for a long time to come, as is Visual Studio. That's one of the positive aspects of .NET -- it's not bound to the OS.
That's why I'm not likely to switch my main home machine over to any of the flavors of Linux any time soon; although with mono approaching 98% feature completion it may become a possibility. I don't want to rule out any options, but at this point there is nothing in Vista to attract me and plenty to repel me.
I'm not ready to replace Windows yet. For one thing, my day job is as a Windows C++ programmer. I need tools like Visual Studio at home for both work and fun. And as much as we may or may not like it, most of the clients for software are still running Windows machines.
It's a trap!
Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Really. Kinda like Tourette's, only with fark.com images stuck in my brain.
Since they're building DRM right into the core of the OS (including crap such as the Protected Media Path and all its ilk) I have absolutely no reason to think they won't allow corporate partners (RIAA, MPAA, BSA) to abuse this to kill pieces of "unapproved" media or "rogue" apps. What happens when the .*AA tells them Azureus is being used to pirate software or media? Shut 'er down! Even if you've only ever used it to share the latest fad video or big open source distribution, it won't matter. And that's wrong.
Whether I agree with them on issues of piracy or not (I don't approve of pirating software myself) I refuse to allow my computer to participate in extending or enforcing their policies, and I refuse to install DRM based media players. I'm going to keep XP on that machine for as long as it runs, or until I replace it with an open OS.
Perhaps it's time for me to ask for them to be restored again, kind of like asking the President for a pardon, or asking the Don for a favor on this, the day of his daughter's wedding.
The whole thing pisses me off to no end because I basically got trolled into moderating up one of the "offensive" posts, and I feel like I was caught up in the general moderation bitch-slap that went around at that time. What's worse is I've never actually "trolled" on Slashdot. I've posted some stuff that I thought was funny, and some of those may have been "in opposition" to the prevailing attitudes about the topic (maybe pro-Microsoft or questioning the sanctity of Linux or whatever.) But I've certainly never done any frist ps0ts, obscene ASCII art, or any of the other griefer-type posts.
I like that Slashdot has a strong policy against censoring, and that they use the mod system to hide the griefers. I honestly don't know how they've avoided the casino spam, but whatever they're doing in that regard is also excellent and appreciated.
But I don't mind the occasional off topic discussion, and I don't have a problem replying to ACs. I also find some of the trolls hilarious, and I've even befriended one just because she's an excellent creative writer. So while I'm not a troll myself, I do enjoy the (very occasional) troll. I sometimes wonder if I'm too close to the border for them to restore my mod points.