Admit it, you created/. just to wage guerrilla warfare on the Internet, didn't you? Comments like that are just a form of boasting; you've created Frankenstein's monster and set it loose.
Some the language in the article makes the planet sound like an endangered speices recently discovered. I can see the journal article now...
Obscurus Celestialis
"A giant creature prone to residing in dark, cold habitats, the rare Five-Spotted Jupiter is identifiable in the wild by its obvious bright stripes that take on a pastel hue under infrared light. Known to attract small creatures (like the Pizza Faced Io) that fly around it, as well as moving in large circles at very high speed, the identifing features of Celestialis can only be easily seen using a high-speed camera taking rapid fire exposures..."
No kidding... a "design" doesn't necessarily detail knowing what very last function of code does. I can see many project managers being able to keep at least an abstract concept of a single-year project "in mind." It's too bad most commercially viable projects are so much bigger nowadays.
Most of the actually work in most computer development projects is the "last 10%" where the 90% of effort is expended. It's actually too easy to make a plausable looking concept or design, only to find it tricky to implement it, since flaws in design frequently appear late in the development process. A project manager who still has a design within his/her limits of comprehension can usually recover from such shortsightedness better than a more hands-off manager who doesn't have a clue how the system actually works.
Sony has had a store on Michigan Ave. in Chicago for over 10 years now.
Except it's not there anymore... it went poof about a year ago. Which is a shame, I wanted to see if they stocked replacement ear buds for my in-ear headphones; their parts replacement website charges atrocious shipping fees. I was able to visit it once while it was still open; it would have complemented Apple's new flagship store there nicely. (They would have been within a block of each other if Sony was still there.)
Does anyone have any clue as to what the parent was talking about??
I was complaining that the article had a gratuitous "iPod" reference in it. I though I was being funny by recasting it as a parody of Jon Stewart's recent performance on Crossfire, but I guess the/. peanut gallery wasn't in a mood to appreciate satire today...
As a long time Apple hardware user, here's just something I wanted to tell you guys...
Stop, stop, stop, mentioning the iPod...
Right now, you're NOT helping Apple... You're not too rough on Steve Jobs. You're part of his strategy.
Seriously, I like Apple products, but this hyper-trendiness of the iPod has gone far enough. With every body and their mother talking about "iPod killers" and "iPod of [insert market sector here]", you're only helping to paint a big honking bull's-eye on Apple for being shot down by either Microsoft or the RIAA. Please, Apple evangelism is so last millenium.
What is the point in writing these things in the first place? I might understand the virus writer having a self-esteem problem and writing virues boosts his/her ego. Other reasons escape me. Any takers?
I wish I still had the e-mails handy, but I once communicated with a reformed Mac virus writer in the mid-90's. (The Mac platform had a minor virus epidemic in the late-80's to early-90's before the Windows platform overshadowed it.)
His explanation at the time was that both the Mac and Windows APIs felt very "constrained" at the time, and he wanted to experiment with what parts of the OS functionality were usable in certain contexts. IIRC, he was one of the first to exploit an old "UI drawing resource" security flaw that was patched during the System 7 era.
Prior to the 'Net, most virus writers wrote the things out of curiosity or accident, since a computer's primary function is to simply copy and move numerical data. That's essential what a virus or worm is: a mere data replicator. Now that most PC are connected to a worldwide network, unvetted data copying is considered dangerous by many. This is partly why some in the business and media worlds regard P2P sharing and open source as part of the same "underground" as virus writing and software piracy. Most end users nowadays have completely forgotten that computers are simply Xerox copiers at a fundamental level.
The belief that, at our present level of knowledge, we cannot know whether or not an OS exists.
You may think you were being funny, but "agnostic" is actually a good word here. When connected to a PC, the player thinks of it as the outside world or "cosmos" and doesn't care if the "god" that's operating the PC is in Mac heaven, Windows hell, or Linux purgatory.
I think the problem with the FAQ is simply because it's underemphasized; most people aren't aware of it. It does cover most of the "stupid" questions/posts that are made here, even if some of the answers are just excuses.
Of the remaining questions, most are already answered in the documentation provided. A FAQ that answered those would really be one gigantic index file.
About half of what is left are questions that demonstrate a total lack of knowledge about pre-requisite information. A FAQ can't embed seven or eight years worth of education on the groundwork, if it is to have space for the material it is supposed to cover.
That's funny. I've been using the 'Net since the USENET's heyday of the early 90's, and I was under the impression that was precisely what a FAQ is for. The writing form was created not just to inform the reader of how to cope with complicated technical information, but to inform the reader if he/she should even care about the subject at hand or not. Also, FAQs were usually written in response to failures in printed or compreshensive documentation, so people could get up to speed more quickly.
On USENET, FAQs frequently included questions written to turn away crossposters and other wandering "lurkers" from posting messages to irrelevant newsgroups. A FAQ for a website or application should include information about what the software can't do, as opposed to just info about obscure or hidden functionality. FAQs are really about managing end user expectations, not communicating functionality or context. (The latter is what the full documentation and online help systems are for...)
With a controller, most of your fingers are needed for stability. A keyboard requires no extra stability, while a mouse requires at most your thumb and pinky to keep it steady (leaving your most useful fingers free).
Uh... a mouse and keyboard require a whole freaking TABLE for stability. I had a Dreamcast with a keyboard, and keeping it steady on my lap while playing Typing Of The Dead hurt my typing rate and accuracy. I had similar performance problems playing certain Sega CD games that used the MegaMouse.
How many people play their consoles in front of a desk? I'd wager that most play them in front of a TV, while seated across the room in a recliner or couch. And if you are playing on the floor to get the surface for using a mouse or keyboard, you end up with a sore neck looking upwards at the TV all the time...
The whole worship of the mouse/keyboard combo is why I gave up on FPS games a while back; Dark Forces was my last PC FPS. However, I recently started playing Metroid Prime, and realized that I can enjoy an FPS after all...
In otherwords we might have just seen an L or T dwarf being made but I highly doubt this is a new class of star.
From the article...
"Now the donor star has reached a dead end -- it is far too massive to be considered a super-planet, its composition does not match known brown dwarfs, and it is far too low in mass to be a star... There's no true category for an object in such limbo"
The unstar appears to fall between the cracks of current astronomical classification...
Gah! I hope your kidding! Their website's too much of a mess for me to figure out, but do they really sell gold-tipped fibre!?!
Egad, you weren't kidding... That exposed tip looks suspiciously golden to me, probably part of their "springloaded" attachment head.
Not only that, they "polish" the cable to reduce "signal noise." Not worth the $80... (I paid $20 for the fibre I installed in my parent's surround system.)
I wasn't trying to disparage digital audio, but I was trying to make the point that most people don't care about exactly what something means when they use terms in communication. That's what "technobabble" is, generally. I suspect the original article submitter copy/pasted parts of the text to write the summary, rather than trying to write it in layman's terms. For example, I'm a Mac programmer, so I can understand some of why a G5, as a 64-bit processor, can be better than 32-bit one. But most people are only going to hear the "higher number" and think that the new iMac is "better" without understanding that most of OS X and many shipping apps can't take full advantage of the widened data paths and addressable space just yet.
My Dad has a Dolby Digital surround sound system. I personally don't care much for them; they take too much work configuring remote controls and cabling to have everything hooked up. To add insult to injury, my Dad's deaf in one ear, and both he and my Mom still haven't figured out when to turn the TV's volume off when they are using the surround, and which devices to turn on or off, last I visited them. I personally already have a hard enough time with my RF modulator and switch box so I can connect my video game systems to my one pre-RCA jack display. (I'm not buying a new TV if I can help it.)
For example, we have people like Monster ready to bring us some gold-plated, electromagnetically shielded optical cables
Gah! I hope your kidding! Their website's too much of a mess for me to figure out, but do they really sell gold-tipped fibre!?!
I think it's a mistake to assume a "normal" brain reads well and an "abnormal" brain doesn't. It's not like natural selection has created a pool of "good reading brains".
Hmmm... I'm not so sure you can still say that. Yes, wide spread literacy is only a recent phenomonon, but the environmental pressures on the human species to perform visual symbolic abstraction, which predates what we call "writing," has existed for at least 10,000 years, possibly as long as 250,000 years, if you count the very earliest use of cave painting and tool creation. This seems to me a long enough interval of time for natural selection to determine a "normal" (that is, dominant and survival enhancing) set of genetic traits related to reading comprehension.
Keep in mind what "normal" is supposed to mean. It refers to a trait or idea that is common or frequent, as opposed to rare. Being "normal" has little to do with being "ideal." Assuming a culture that encourages literacy, the population will have many more non-dyslexic readers than those that do. The connotation of "abnormal" equaling "deficient" is an unfortunate problem; its a big problem with USians in particular, especially when politics and religion are involved.
As I wrote, I had an inkling of what the article talked about; I still remember some of my College Physics (including some relativity, oddly enough). It's just that even by/. standards, the vocabulary content of the "article summary" was over the top.
I wasn't kidding about the audiophile comment... With high end entertainment centers advertising "fibre channels" and "DTS encoders" and other such junk only an electrician or a acoustic engineer can understand fully, there are times where information devolves into mere data. That's what this article submission succumbed to...
Slashdot Mirror
Admit it, you created /. just to wage guerrilla warfare on the Internet, didn't you? Comments like that are just a form of boasting; you've created Frankenstein's monster and set it loose.
Frankendot smash server, arrrgggh!
Obscurus Celestialis
"A giant creature prone to residing in dark, cold habitats, the rare Five-Spotted Jupiter is identifiable in the wild by its obvious bright stripes that take on a pastel hue under infrared light. Known to attract small creatures (like the Pizza Faced Io) that fly around it, as well as moving in large circles at very high speed, the identifing features of Celestialis can only be easily seen using a high-speed camera taking rapid fire exposures..."
Most of the actually work in most computer development projects is the "last 10%" where the 90% of effort is expended. It's actually too easy to make a plausable looking concept or design, only to find it tricky to implement it, since flaws in design frequently appear late in the development process. A project manager who still has a design within his/her limits of comprehension can usually recover from such shortsightedness better than a more hands-off manager who doesn't have a clue how the system actually works.
What are you at, getting terribly fat?
Oops, too late. The original game had a code that allowed the player to see Samus under her armor...
Except it's not there anymore... it went poof about a year ago. Which is a shame, I wanted to see if they stocked replacement ear buds for my in-ear headphones; their parts replacement website charges atrocious shipping fees. I was able to visit it once while it was still open; it would have complemented Apple's new flagship store there nicely. (They would have been within a block of each other if Sony was still there.)
Or is there a bug in Slashcode that breaks this?
Funny, even though I browse with a "+1" for Anonymous posts, I didn't see that one... Maybe it was briefly modded down?
What would Drew Carry think?
I was complaining that the article had a gratuitous "iPod" reference in it. I though I was being funny by recasting it as a parody of Jon Stewart's recent performance on Crossfire, but I guess the /. peanut gallery wasn't in a mood to appreciate satire today...
Stop, stop, stop, mentioning the iPod...
Right now, you're NOT helping Apple... You're not too rough on Steve Jobs. You're part of his strategy.
Seriously, I like Apple products, but this hyper-trendiness of the iPod has gone far enough. With every body and their mother talking about "iPod killers" and "iPod of [insert market sector here]", you're only helping to paint a big honking bull's-eye on Apple for being shot down by either Microsoft or the RIAA. Please, Apple evangelism is so last millenium.
I wish I still had the e-mails handy, but I once communicated with a reformed Mac virus writer in the mid-90's. (The Mac platform had a minor virus epidemic in the late-80's to early-90's before the Windows platform overshadowed it.)
His explanation at the time was that both the Mac and Windows APIs felt very "constrained" at the time, and he wanted to experiment with what parts of the OS functionality were usable in certain contexts. IIRC, he was one of the first to exploit an old "UI drawing resource" security flaw that was patched during the System 7 era.
Prior to the 'Net, most virus writers wrote the things out of curiosity or accident, since a computer's primary function is to simply copy and move numerical data. That's essential what a virus or worm is: a mere data replicator. Now that most PC are connected to a worldwide network, unvetted data copying is considered dangerous by many. This is partly why some in the business and media worlds regard P2P sharing and open source as part of the same "underground" as virus writing and software piracy. Most end users nowadays have completely forgotten that computers are simply Xerox copiers at a fundamental level.
</p-d-nt>
Consider yourself disemvoweled...
o_O That's a mental image I did not need...
What kind of movies do you watch? What kind of drugs are you on when you watch them?
You may think you were being funny, but "agnostic" is actually a good word here. When connected to a PC, the player thinks of it as the outside world or "cosmos" and doesn't care if the "god" that's operating the PC is in Mac heaven, Windows hell, or Linux purgatory.
You mean like this one?
I think the problem with the FAQ is simply because it's underemphasized; most people aren't aware of it. It does cover most of the "stupid" questions/posts that are made here, even if some of the answers are just excuses.
- Of the remaining questions, most are already answered in the documentation provided. A FAQ that answered those would really be one gigantic index file.
- About half of what is left are questions that demonstrate a total lack of knowledge about pre-requisite information. A FAQ can't embed seven or eight years worth of education on the groundwork, if it is to have space for the material it is supposed to cover.
That's funny. I've been using the 'Net since the USENET's heyday of the early 90's, and I was under the impression that was precisely what a FAQ is for. The writing form was created not just to inform the reader of how to cope with complicated technical information, but to inform the reader if he/she should even care about the subject at hand or not. Also, FAQs were usually written in response to failures in printed or compreshensive documentation, so people could get up to speed more quickly.On USENET, FAQs frequently included questions written to turn away crossposters and other wandering "lurkers" from posting messages to irrelevant newsgroups. A FAQ for a website or application should include information about what the software can't do, as opposed to just info about obscure or hidden functionality. FAQs are really about managing end user expectations, not communicating functionality or context. (The latter is what the full documentation and online help systems are for...)
Uh... a mouse and keyboard require a whole freaking TABLE for stability. I had a Dreamcast with a keyboard, and keeping it steady on my lap while playing Typing Of The Dead hurt my typing rate and accuracy. I had similar performance problems playing certain Sega CD games that used the MegaMouse.
How many people play their consoles in front of a desk? I'd wager that most play them in front of a TV, while seated across the room in a recliner or couch. And if you are playing on the floor to get the surface for using a mouse or keyboard, you end up with a sore neck looking upwards at the TV all the time...
The whole worship of the mouse/keyboard combo is why I gave up on FPS games a while back; Dark Forces was my last PC FPS. However, I recently started playing Metroid Prime, and realized that I can enjoy an FPS after all...
From the article...
"Now the donor star has reached a dead end -- it is far too massive to be considered a super-planet, its composition does not match known brown dwarfs, and it is far too low in mass to be a star... There's no true category for an object in such limbo"
The unstar appears to fall between the cracks of current astronomical classification...
Funny, I was taught that every person now alive was created by man, or more exactly, was created by man and woman.
Don't make me explain why... it's kind of gross, and outside the domain of most /.'ers anyway.
Egad, you weren't kidding... That exposed tip looks suspiciously golden to me, probably part of their "springloaded" attachment head.
Not only that, they "polish" the cable to reduce "signal noise." Not worth the $80... (I paid $20 for the fibre I installed in my parent's surround system.)
I wasn't trying to disparage digital audio, but I was trying to make the point that most people don't care about exactly what something means when they use terms in communication. That's what "technobabble" is, generally. I suspect the original article submitter copy/pasted parts of the text to write the summary, rather than trying to write it in layman's terms. For example, I'm a Mac programmer, so I can understand some of why a G5, as a 64-bit processor, can be better than 32-bit one. But most people are only going to hear the "higher number" and think that the new iMac is "better" without understanding that most of OS X and many shipping apps can't take full advantage of the widened data paths and addressable space just yet.
My Dad has a Dolby Digital surround sound system. I personally don't care much for them; they take too much work configuring remote controls and cabling to have everything hooked up. To add insult to injury, my Dad's deaf in one ear, and both he and my Mom still haven't figured out when to turn the TV's volume off when they are using the surround, and which devices to turn on or off, last I visited them. I personally already have a hard enough time with my RF modulator and switch box so I can connect my video game systems to my one pre-RCA jack display. (I'm not buying a new TV if I can help it.)
For example, we have people like Monster ready to bring us some gold-plated, electromagnetically shielded optical cables
Gah! I hope your kidding! Their website's too much of a mess for me to figure out, but do they really sell gold-tipped fibre!?!
Hmmm... I'm not so sure you can still say that. Yes, wide spread literacy is only a recent phenomonon, but the environmental pressures on the human species to perform visual symbolic abstraction, which predates what we call "writing," has existed for at least 10,000 years, possibly as long as 250,000 years, if you count the very earliest use of cave painting and tool creation. This seems to me a long enough interval of time for natural selection to determine a "normal" (that is, dominant and survival enhancing) set of genetic traits related to reading comprehension.
Keep in mind what "normal" is supposed to mean. It refers to a trait or idea that is common or frequent, as opposed to rare. Being "normal" has little to do with being "ideal." Assuming a culture that encourages literacy, the population will have many more non-dyslexic readers than those that do. The connotation of "abnormal" equaling "deficient" is an unfortunate problem; its a big problem with USians in particular, especially when politics and religion are involved.
As I wrote, I had an inkling of what the article talked about; I still remember some of my College Physics (including some relativity, oddly enough). It's just that even by /. standards, the vocabulary content of the "article summary" was over the top.
I wasn't kidding about the audiophile comment... With high end entertainment centers advertising "fibre channels" and "DTS encoders" and other such junk only an electrician or a acoustic engineer can understand fully, there are times where information devolves into mere data. That's what this article submission succumbed to...