Actually, it looks remarkably enough like a heavily modified Atari Jaguar gamepad. Maybe the same idiot who thought that a console gaming system needed a numerical keypad also thought he could make a one-handed typing device.
Nerf? Geez, what about paintball? At least when you go to a paintball field you don't have to worry about parents of young children giving you some weird stares. (Or maybe you will depending on where your paintball field is.) Not to mention, that you can simulate a real war game with paintballs flying at 200 feet/sec. than you can with nerf darts flying at 100 feet/sec. And we can't forget the venerable paint grenades! I bet you'd have a hard time simulating a grenade with nerf darts!;)
Heh. Actually, we just talked about this in my Discrete Math class the other day since the Louisiana Powerball Lottery here is up to like $130M. IIRC, the probability that one would win ended up being something in the range of 1:80M. --------------------------------------
Hey, if you do start to manage to mirror some of these sites, let me know and I'll mirror them too. My school has arse loads of bandwitdh, too. Not to mention, I have access to webspace on two seperate servers. --------------------------------------
You know, considering the nature of this site the Google cache is pretty useless without all the pictures to go along with the site. We at/. should really start a mirroring program of sorts. Seeing as I (and probably many others) don't refresh as fast as some of you, many times I don't get to see the cool/interesting website before it goes down, and frankly this perturbs me. If somebody were to start to offer a mirroring program here at/. (I would but I don't have enough time to properly do a program such as this) I would gladly donate some of my webspace to such a project, and I'm guessing that many others out there would too.
I totally agree with you on this point. I recently bought a used NES from a used video game store and started rebuilding my childhood video game collection, and I am also currently trying to find an Atari 2600. I must say, some of these games are certainly more entertaining than those that come out today. (Not saying that there aren't the rare few really good games out there today, but it's hard to beat the funfactor and replayability of classics such as Super Mario 3 and Metroid.)
Forgot the one feature about Netscape that I really thought was kind of cool (albeit not as well implemented as I would have liked): the way they integrated AIM into the sidebar. AIM is about the only way that I manage to keep in touch with all my friends since I've gone to college. Nice touch.
Where is the banner ad that comes up when you type "? whatever"? Are you talking about the one in the resulting web page? Because that's the only one that I'm seeing. And if that's the one that you're complaining about, well, get over it. You get the same thing if you do a search in IE 4. (I never got around to upgrading to IE5 so I don't know if is the same there as well.) Practically every page that you visit on the web has a banner ad of some sort these days. That's just a fact of life that you should learn to live with. As for the browser being self serving... Well, correct me if i'm wrong, but can you not disable most of those in the preferences somewhere. Heck, if they bother you that much, just get rid of them. I believe the sidebar is fully customizable. (I don't even see that Find and Book travel tab on mine.) And if you don't think that IE doesn't have all those little extras to line the pockets of M$, then I think you're wrong. What about the "channels?" You can't tell me that M$ doesn't get something from all those companies for providing free links.
The only thing that kind of ticked me off about Netscape 6.0 was all the other stuff they install w/ the 6.0 install. I hate how they install Real Player 8.0, Take 5, Net2Phone, and put that stupid AOL 6.0 icon on the desktop. Now that's what pissed me off about Netscape 6. But most of those (with the possible exception of the AOL 6.0 icon) could probably have been prevented by doing a custom install. All in all, though, I don't think Netscape 6.0 is any worse than IE when it comes to serving its own interests.
Huh. I stand corrected. My apologies. I watch very little TV (except for the Simpsons) and never read the entertainment news (that stuff can be almost as bad as the tabloids) and so rely totally on word of mouth when it comes to such things as new movies. Apparently, my friend who told me about the movie was misinformed. And no, I have not read Red Planet, and so I have no idea as to the plot. Then again, nor do I have any idea of the plot of the movie. From the one promo for the movie that I have seen it seemed like "robot kills everybody" which I just assumed was the typical Hollywood taking a minor point from a novel and then blowing it out of proportion.
However, in my defense, there aren't exactly all that many similarities between Starship Troopers the movie and Starship Troopers the book. I mean, in the book Dizzy Flores(sp?) was a guy for christ's sake. And IIRC, he died in the first chapter. And that's only one of many dissimilarities from the book.
But again, my apologies for mistating the facts. It was mearly a case of misinformation on my part.
You know, what I don't get is people who constantly complain about slashdot. What's the point? If you don't like the site, then quit visiting it. Or instead of complaining, why not offer to help refine the site to make it better? I mean if Rob's not doing it, then offer to do it yourself. It's not like you're paying good money to visit this site. It's not like the webmasters owe you anything. So, just get over it will ya? Now, let me apologize. I'm not usually one to write inflamatory comments, and this one will probably be moderated down as a Troll or something. I guess it's just that with the release of CS 1.0 I've been getting overloaded with complaints about the product while using the product. If you think it's so bad, then start going somewhere else or offer to help. Don't just complain about it, do something about it.
The problem with setting up a sort of film society is that, in my experience at least, most people don't really enjoy the majority of indie films. They want that big budget Hollywood crap that although might be visually appealing (MI:2 comes to mind) aren't really that plot intensive and don't develop the characters well. The vast majority of people I know don't really enjoy these beautiful thought provoking dramas with well developed characters that the director actually takes the time to make you care about.
But then, maybe all my experiences are a little skewed because I come from a small Arkansas town with a largley uneducated population. In fact, we just got a theatre in town a few years ago, where some of the most popular movies have been things like MI:2 and Battlefield Earth. But then maybe that's because we only have 4 screens and we have to drive 45 min. to get to a good theater. In all though, I think that the reason Hollywood keeps putting out the mindless drivel that they do is because the majority of the population wishes for a movie that is emotionally shallow and for the most part visually entertaining. Historically, that kind of stuff sells better than the indie films.
I'm really not surprised at the awfulness of this movie. In fact, it's exactly what I was predicting. I can't think of a single good movie that was based on a novel by Heinlein. Take Starship Troopers and the made for TV Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters for instance. Neither movie was worth the film they were printed on.
Heinlein is a master writer and I am a big fan of his. In fact, I consider Starship Troopers to be one of his best novels, what for all the interesting view it presents about society in the future. However, the movie really did not do justice to the novel. In fact, it took all the best points of the novel and trivialized them, turning the film into yet another Sci-fi Action flick.
It is for just this reason that I never wish to see a movie adaptation of Heinlein's master work, and possibly most famous, A Stranger in a Strange Land. IIRC, there have been talks about it, but this is such a great novel that I'd hate to see the movie industry trivialize it by butchering the book into some kind of mass intertainment pice of crap.
In a related note, not too long ago the administration here at good old Tulane University attempted to pass a regulation that would treat all students as employees of the university, and therefore give the university intellectual property rights over anything that was created while a student attended school. From the wording of the report, I took this to mean not only stuff created for classes, but stuff created on an individual basis as well. However, I am not quite certain on this part. That's not it, though.
They also wanted to enact this regulation retroactively. Thats right, they wanted intellectual property rights over anything that was created here in the past as well as anything to be created in the future. Thankfully, the student government shot down this regulation, but the fact that the administration even tried this was scary none the less. A regulation like that could have serious ramifications for the student body and alumni. Especially if you consider that one of the founders of Yahoo!, and I forget who (David Filo?), is a former Tulane student.
As of 2:07am Central time, according to MSNBC, there is only a 418,090 difference between the two candidates in the popular vote. Am I the only one who sees anything wrong in allowing such a narrow consensus from the general population to decide who will be the leader of what is not only our nation, but one of the most powerful nations in the world? IMHO, we should only allow an election of a president if he gets over %50 of the vote. As of now, Bush has only 49% and Gore 48%. Yes, one of them did get more votes than the other, but it is by such a narrow margin, that I really am not sure we should be able to declare either one of them president.
Additionally, Nader has garnered 2,349,225 of the popular votes. Considering that many Nader voters may have voted for Gore had Nader not been a candidate, this makes me even less confident in tonight's election. Maybe we should have a run-off between the two major candidates if one of them gets less than 50% of the vote. But, of course that will never happen. Now, I know that it is the electoral college votes that really choose the presidency, but in an election this close, I'm not sure that some of them won't defect and possibly vote for Gore. In fact, with myself supporting Gore (and not because I like him, but because I like Bush even less) the only thing that comforts me as I go to sleep tonight is that very thought that perhaps some of the electoral college voters will not vote with the popular votes in their state and will vote for Gore. Hey, stranger things have happened.
I found a link to this site at http://www.lugnet.com. It's called the "Woo Lego Project" and although there are no plans, these guys did make a case completely out of legos. It looks kind of weird but is supposedly rock solid.
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I think for the most part, the big appeal of this systems is their relatively simplistic nature. They are built to do one thing, and that just happens to be the one thing that a gamer wants. He just pops in the disc, turns it on, and he's ready to go. There's none of this booting up stuff, and none of the many little tweaks that PC users sometimes have to make the get the game running. You also say, why not spend the $200 on a high-end video card. Well, many of these people don't even own computers, let alone ones new enough to support the high-end video card. Now, I'm a big proponent of PC gaming, but I can still see where these people are coming from. Why spend $1500 on a descent computer if all you want to do is play games? It makes absolutely no sense.
As for console titles costing alsmot a hundred bucks... well, I'd like to know where you're seeing these prices. Granted that aisde from my NES, I haven't really bought any console titles in years, I still visit the console sections of stores and haven't seen any games going for that much. I mostly see $60 tops. Which is also about how much I've seen some PC games start going for.
Granted, for those of us who already own PCs, and many times high-end PCs at that, a PS2 might not make the best purchase. However, they do have their nich(sp?), so we shouldn't knock them.
IANAL, but one solution could be for anybody contributing code to sign a waiver claiming that they have not seen and/or used any proprietary Microsoft code in their contribution to the project. In theory, that should hopefully take any legal responsibility from the OSS maintainer and put it squarely on the shoulders of the contributer. Although many coders might not like having to sign a waiver, it will certainly protect the integrity of the project.
Is anybody else bothered by the fact that when you go to www.upn.com they have this little note saying that by entering the site you agree to the terms of use, but they don't even give you a link to the terms of use until after you have already been redirected into the site itself. Am I the only person bothered by this? What if I don't agree?
I'll probably get moderated down for redundancy or offtopic, but here goes anyway.
Ok, so there was this little pinpoint of super dense matter which exploded and created the entire known universe. Great. Then, everything just happened to come together just right to form life here on this planet. That's fine, too. When you consider the vast number of planets and universes out there, probability deffinately seems to be on your side. That's not too hard to believe.
But, here's the big question: where the heck did all that matter come from in the first place? It had to get there somehow, but nobody can really explain it. This is a problem. So, since it is human nature for us to want a reason for everything (and if you don't think so, just ask any parent with a 2 year old child going through their "why" stage), we simply do as we have always done and form a reason of our own. Some all powerful diety had to create this pinpoint of super dense mass, right? Well, maybe. I guess that's fine to believe for now. But, who's to say that several years from now, maybe even 100 years from now we won't find the reason that this matter existed. Chances are, though that it'll just bring up new questions that need to be solved, and so again the answers to these new questions will be attributed to a diety. It's happened before with the creation of the earth and the creation of life on it, and it probably will happen again. People used to attribute changes in weather as happening because some diety decided so. That was before we understood weather. It just goes on and on, only with new reasons to believe in an all powerful diety or dieties. It seems to be a never ending circle, where us humans with our insatiable quest for a reason for everything again and again attribute something or other to a diety.
The thing is, whether or not you believe in a diety makes no difference. There will most likely always be a reason for a diety in our culture. And those of you who to believe in a diety shouldn't fret so much that science will prove your diety wrong. Science just gives you new reasons to believe in your diety.
Well, anyway. I've kind of gotten off track, and have pretty much forgotten what my point was with this post, so I guess that's enough for now. Besides, I'm late for class
Has/. really deteriorated to the point where one person (and an AC at that) can set off an entire race riot on these boards? The post was clearly a troll. There was not anything offensive at all in Signal11's comment. I think that we should all just stop arguing about race and just discuss the article.
To be honest, not to buy Windows 2000 (and by your comment I assume that you in fact mean the rights to Windows 2000) for $.49 would be ludicrous. Just because the small number of us slashdot geeks would prefer not to use it does not mean that there isn't a whole market of average Joes out there who (assuming the price was low enough) would buy it in a heart beat simply because of name recognition.
But then it is only a joke and I'm just being argumentative right now...
Maybe you have different ideas, but that doesn't make them right.
Maybe you should take hold of some of your own words.
If you have a brilliant idea, but are tied down working on some project which you know will get nowhere, what are your loyalties?
Simple. You tell your boss about your idea. It will get noticed, and if you don't think that your boss will act on it, then leave the company, and act on it on your own.
I'm not saying that workplaces like this don't have their place, but in some environments a democratic workplace just isn't feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
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If I'm not mistaken, wasn't wergild actually a word taken from the Vikings?
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Heh. Actually, we just talked about this in my Discrete Math class the other day since the Louisiana Powerball Lottery here is up to like $130M. IIRC, the probability that one would win ended up being something in the range of 1:80M.
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Hey, if you do start to manage to mirror some of these sites, let me know and I'll mirror them too. My school has arse loads of bandwitdh, too. Not to mention, I have access to webspace on two seperate servers.
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The only thing that kind of ticked me off about Netscape 6.0 was all the other stuff they install w/ the 6.0 install. I hate how they install Real Player 8.0, Take 5, Net2Phone, and put that stupid AOL 6.0 icon on the desktop. Now that's what pissed me off about Netscape 6. But most of those (with the possible exception of the AOL 6.0 icon) could probably have been prevented by doing a custom install. All in all, though, I don't think Netscape 6.0 is any worse than IE when it comes to serving its own interests.
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However, in my defense, there aren't exactly all that many similarities between Starship Troopers the movie and Starship Troopers the book. I mean, in the book Dizzy Flores(sp?) was a guy for christ's sake. And IIRC, he died in the first chapter. And that's only one of many dissimilarities from the book.
But again, my apologies for mistating the facts. It was mearly a case of misinformation on my part.
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But then, maybe all my experiences are a little skewed because I come from a small Arkansas town with a largley uneducated population. In fact, we just got a theatre in town a few years ago, where some of the most popular movies have been things like MI:2 and Battlefield Earth. But then maybe that's because we only have 4 screens and we have to drive 45 min. to get to a good theater. In all though, I think that the reason Hollywood keeps putting out the mindless drivel that they do is because the majority of the population wishes for a movie that is emotionally shallow and for the most part visually entertaining. Historically, that kind of stuff sells better than the indie films.
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Heinlein is a master writer and I am a big fan of his. In fact, I consider Starship Troopers to be one of his best novels, what for all the interesting view it presents about society in the future. However, the movie really did not do justice to the novel. In fact, it took all the best points of the novel and trivialized them, turning the film into yet another Sci-fi Action flick.
It is for just this reason that I never wish to see a movie adaptation of Heinlein's master work, and possibly most famous, A Stranger in a Strange Land. IIRC, there have been talks about it, but this is such a great novel that I'd hate to see the movie industry trivialize it by butchering the book into some kind of mass intertainment pice of crap.
But enough of my ranting. This is jsut my $.02.
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They also wanted to enact this regulation retroactively. Thats right, they wanted intellectual property rights over anything that was created here in the past as well as anything to be created in the future. Thankfully, the student government shot down this regulation, but the fact that the administration even tried this was scary none the less. A regulation like that could have serious ramifications for the student body and alumni. Especially if you consider that one of the founders of Yahoo!, and I forget who (David Filo?), is a former Tulane student.
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Additionally, Nader has garnered 2,349,225 of the popular votes. Considering that many Nader voters may have voted for Gore had Nader not been a candidate, this makes me even less confident in tonight's election. Maybe we should have a run-off between the two major candidates if one of them gets less than 50% of the vote. But, of course that will never happen. Now, I know that it is the electoral college votes that really choose the presidency, but in an election this close, I'm not sure that some of them won't defect and possibly vote for Gore. In fact, with myself supporting Gore (and not because I like him, but because I like Bush even less) the only thing that comforts me as I go to sleep tonight is that very thought that perhaps some of the electoral college voters will not vote with the popular votes in their state and will vote for Gore. Hey, stranger things have happened.
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I found a link to this site at http://www.lugnet.com. It's called the "Woo Lego Project" and although there are no plans, these guys did make a case completely out of legos. It looks kind of weird but is supposedly rock solid.
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I think somebody has a little too much time on their hands. Good work, guy.
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As for console titles costing alsmot a hundred bucks... well, I'd like to know where you're seeing these prices. Granted that aisde from my NES, I haven't really bought any console titles in years, I still visit the console sections of stores and haven't seen any games going for that much. I mostly see $60 tops. Which is also about how much I've seen some PC games start going for.
Granted, for those of us who already own PCs, and many times high-end PCs at that, a PS2 might not make the best purchase. However, they do have their nich(sp?), so we shouldn't knock them.
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Ok, so there was this little pinpoint of super dense matter which exploded and created the entire known universe. Great. Then, everything just happened to come together just right to form life here on this planet. That's fine, too. When you consider the vast number of planets and universes out there, probability deffinately seems to be on your side. That's not too hard to believe.
But, here's the big question: where the heck did all that matter come from in the first place? It had to get there somehow, but nobody can really explain it. This is a problem. So, since it is human nature for us to want a reason for everything (and if you don't think so, just ask any parent with a 2 year old child going through their "why" stage), we simply do as we have always done and form a reason of our own. Some all powerful diety had to create this pinpoint of super dense mass, right? Well, maybe. I guess that's fine to believe for now. But, who's to say that several years from now, maybe even 100 years from now we won't find the reason that this matter existed. Chances are, though that it'll just bring up new questions that need to be solved, and so again the answers to these new questions will be attributed to a diety. It's happened before with the creation of the earth and the creation of life on it, and it probably will happen again. People used to attribute changes in weather as happening because some diety decided so. That was before we understood weather. It just goes on and on, only with new reasons to believe in an all powerful diety or dieties. It seems to be a never ending circle, where us humans with our insatiable quest for a reason for everything again and again attribute something or other to a diety.
The thing is, whether or not you believe in a diety makes no difference. There will most likely always be a reason for a diety in our culture. And those of you who to believe in a diety shouldn't fret so much that science will prove your diety wrong. Science just gives you new reasons to believe in your diety.
Well, anyway. I've kind of gotten off track, and have pretty much forgotten what my point was with this post, so I guess that's enough for now. Besides, I'm late for class
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Has /. really deteriorated to the point where one person (and an AC at that) can set off an entire race riot on these boards? The post was clearly a troll. There was not anything offensive at all in Signal11's comment. I think that we should all just stop arguing about race and just discuss the article.
Just my two cents anyway.
To be honest, not to buy Windows 2000 (and by your comment I assume that you in fact mean the rights to Windows 2000) for $.49 would be ludicrous. Just because the small number of us slashdot geeks would prefer not to use it does not mean that there isn't a whole market of average Joes out there who (assuming the price was low enough) would buy it in a heart beat simply because of name recognition.
But then it is only a joke and I'm just being argumentative right now...
Maybe you have different ideas, but that doesn't make them right.
Maybe you should take hold of some of your own words.
If you have a brilliant idea, but are tied down working on some project which you know will get nowhere, what are your loyalties?
Simple. You tell your boss about your idea. It will get noticed, and if you don't think that your boss will act on it, then leave the company, and act on it on your own.
I'm not saying that workplaces like this don't have their place, but in some environments a democratic workplace just isn't feasible.