As I recall, a B-29 is perfectly capable of leveling a city... and with today's technology, much larger cities can be leveled with much smaller bombs. Isn't technology great?
They could sell the DVD at rental prices. That would prevent the lazy among us (myself included) from downloading it, and get a very high sell-through rate. High volumes like that would make them more money than they otherwise would with low volumes and high prices. Even though it's not a great movie, I'd likely buy the DVD if it was that cheap.
Please don't construe this as xenophobic or racist, but there is a general perception, at least at companies like Oracle and Sun, that H1-B visas are prefered over citizens. Naturally this is illegal, but I and many others have seen it in practice. The reason, besides the fact that americans are generally lazier than people coming over with H1-Bs, is that H1-B rules give the company more power. I know of one company that regularly lays off 5% of their workforce, and 80% of their workforce is H1-B. Being laid off is a much bigger problem for the H1-B contingent because they will likely have to pack up and go home. The 5% layoff policy causes these people to work like dogs, seriously never taking even a weekend day off. I'm not kidding here. I know people who haven't had a saturday off in two years, all because they're scared of being in the bottom 5% and being shipped home. This is sick and wrong and bad for society. Companies are taking advantage of H1-B workers, it's not the H1-B workers that are the problem.
Let's scrap NASA and come up with something better.
I think we ought to give the ISS to the russians, and scrap the shuttle. Let's give 40% of NASA's budget to the russian space program, 10% to fund a civilian auditing organization (to stop the fleecing), and 50% to US contractors to build a cheap, reusable launch vehicle. Let's leave the heavy lift vehicles to the russians.
The russian space program, though beaten down by their new economy, is much more efficient, dollars to rubles, than NASA will ever be. They're unencumbered by the massive buracracy, have far fewer regulations, will sell space flights for money (the horror!). Basicially they can do for 1 Million what the US can only dream of for 50 million. Our money is better spent on their program. Hell, they could even launch harmless nuclear payloads without worrying about braindead idiots in the US protesting the poisoning of outer space.
Once the new vehicles are tested and in place, we can think about using ISS as a gateway to MARS! That would be truly cool, and well worth taxpayer's money. We'll just never get there under NASA's current (very heavy) thumb.
Buffy will never win an emmy. There are several reasons for this. 1) Emmy judges only recently recognized the existence of FOX and HBO. UPN doesn't have deep enough pockets.
2) One look at previous winners will tell you that emmys only go to very conventional shows that are suitable for anyone whose palate has been seasoned toward endless repetition, mundane humor, and predictable plots. Being daring or innovative is rarely rewarded.
3) It's a niche genre. Buffy is definately a niche show and quite comfortable there. Emmy judges see their vote as recommending the show to the american family. Is that show going to be scifi/horror ?
4) The name of the show is too "kiddy" for stuffy, balding, boring judges to take seriously.
5) Who the hell cares if it wins an emmy? That would put it on the same "pedestal" as home improvement, felicity, and The PJs.
I played warcraft 3 at Fry's a bit today in Sunnyvale. They had 4 really nice warcraft 3 setups available for anyone to sit and give a try.
My impressions: Graphically, it's amazing. The sound completely rocks. The unit AI is the best I've seen in an RTS yet. For instance, when your peasants are done building, they will go and do something useful like chop lumber or mine gold. This eliminates a great deal of micro management. I can't say more than that because I only completed a couple of battles, but it filled my soul with the urge to upgrade my hardware.
FYI.. Fry's is also selling it an hour before the rest of the west coast... 11PM on the 2nd.
The fact is that silent operation is not an easy sell to the consumer. People are used to auditory feedback. My dicam has two modes: silent, and "film-camera" sound. I usually keep it in silent, but when someone else takes a picture with it, they can't figure out how long to keep the camera pointed at the subject. Then they're confused about whether or not they actually took a picture. People are so used to the audio "click" that digicam manufacturers have to add one in with tiny speakers! There's no reason a solid-state digicam should make any noise at all, but people need that reasurring "CLICK".
>the recording and mastering of CDs has gotten much, much better over the last few years.
Hate to disagree, but I do. Many of my newer CDs have less dynamic range than older ones. Producers are compressing the range, putting the maximum signal level on the CD... even past the point of signal clip. What that means to you and me is that the music will sound loud, distorted, and have no "punch". Now SACD is better, but most of the improvement is due to SACD producers reverting to 1980s CD mastering techniques! They're actually using the dynamic range of SACD instead of squeezing it out.
That's right, I'm selling sub-orbital flights for only $1000. Please line up, I can only fly one at a time. You may get a little dizzy, and your arms and legs may be a little sore, but I guarantee the ride of a lifetime. Please no one over 150 lbs... my back is a little sore this week.
Bad dialogue? I think the dialogue from the "holy trilogy" is filled with gems. "Never tell me the odds", "I love you, I know", "sorry about the mess", and so forth.
Yeah, it's great to have a piece of code that compiles for four languages, but what's the point if you're just using pre-processor and compiler tricks to get the compiler to look at a different section of the same file? In this file, if I change the problem-solving logic slightly, I have to change it in several places. What would be truly cool (and incredibly difficult), in my opinion, would be to completely eliminate redundant logic.
Go to clubs w/live music (bands you like), pay the cover, drink lots of beer, score a couple of phone #s, then go home and download all the MP3s you want. Never feel guilty. You will have a MUCH greater impact on the state of the music scene by going out and drinking beer than buying CDs. In addition, you'll support the up-and-coming artists who just want to play music. Just remember, the more beer you drink, the more "in demand" that band will be, and the better the music scene in your city. It's guiness time.
For the everquest players who might not catch the reference::)
[excerpted from the free online dictionary of computing]
SEX
/seks/ A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then.
[also from word net] n 1: activities associated with sexual intercourse; "they had sex in the back seat" [syn: sexual activity, sex activity] 2: either of the two categories (male or female) into which most organisms are divided; "the war between the sexes" 3: all of the feelings resulting from the urge to gratify sexual impulses; "he wanted a better sex life"; "the film contained no sex or violence" [syn: sexual urge] 4: the properties that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles; "she didn't want to know the sex of the foetus" [syn: gender, sexuality] v 1: arouse sexually [syn: arouse, excite, turn on, wind up]
I think the simpsons "jumped the shark" in the episode in which Homer joined a traveling freak show in season 7. The show simply hit the wall with homer being the big fat guy getting shot with the cannon, and sonic youth delivering the theme song at the end. It wasn't the funniest ever, but they definately "jumped the shark". The beginning of the end was acutally "lisa the vegetarian" at the beggining of season 7, and by season 8, you've got "the nanny episode", "bart is gay" and "poochie".
The next thing you know...
on
PDAs For Kids
·
· Score: 1
It's interesting the way americans force materialistic attitudes on their children at a very early age... So many toys represent items those kids tend to purchase later in life. Toy guns for boys, silicon implants (barbie) for the girls.
Now it's PDAs...Before too long yuppie parents will be buying their kids minature working BMWs... wait.
They ARE bozos if they're going to trust tax records to a windows PC network. If they had backed up their data (and kept their support contract), IBM could have had them running again in a day or two. The only difference is that city officials would have been unable to play "the sims" in "off-time".:)
A Faster MP3 player is highly undesireable unless your wife/husband is using it for "jazzercize":)
Before you flame me, yes I know you could output to WAV, and I haven't timed that, but for me, playing MP3s normally, MPG123 has 2/3 of the CPU utilization of MAD. It probably depends on your CPU as the performance of the FPU and ALU are can vary widely among different chips. For quality, MAD is theoretically higher, but I've got good ears and just can't tell the difference. That's why I use MPG123.
In unrelated news, Dell CEO Michael Dell was given a speeding ticket in a new Ferrari 360. When asked where he got the car, Dell responded "it fell off the truck". When asked for his liscence, he "accidentally" handed over his freshly-inked honorary MCSE. He was promptly arrested for assulting an officer of the law.
It's a little known fact that many ATM machines use OS/2... even the new ones. That means millions of people use OS/2 every day and don't even know it. The funny thing is that they WOULD know it if they used an M$ OS. How would you like the "blue screen of death" when you're in the middle of a transaction?
Make no mistake... the world runs on IBM mainframes. All other systems and os's are fledgling for small players only. From airports, to financial institutions to nearly every one of the Fortune 500... they all use IBM mainframes for their core business. The reason isn't because it's a monopoly... there are always other options, but would you rather pin your business on a 50 node cluster of failure-prone DELL boxes (that may catch fire at any minute) or a slick, bulletproof mainframe? It's just good business sense to buy reliability. No one else can offer that yet.
I don't think putting these machines in a lab is a good idea. Here's why: The cost savings is supposed to come from cheaper administration and the idea that thin clients aren't outdated as fast as thick clients. The sad truth is that thin clients are outdated FASTER than thick clients. If you take your 486 PC, you can run linux and a WinFrames client, you've got a system for the ages;) But what if you've got a SUN NC? Good luck trying to find a good use for that. What are you going to do three years from now when the speed is no longer acceptable? What's your upgrade path?
With your "thin client" solution, you're paying a lot of money for low-speed hardware, so why not by cheap standard hardware instead and go with thin-client software?
There's one line in my environment setup in windows that makes it possible for me to compile my projects in the shortest possible time... DISABLE_PCH=T
Why do you want precompiled headers? Sure you might get a couple of faster compiles... when you're not scratching your head trying to figure out why PCH is failing.
GCC adding this feature would only cause me to spend more time compiling programs than I already do... unless they come up with a smarter implementation than MSVC.
Slashdot Mirror
As I recall, a B-29 is perfectly capable of leveling a city... and with today's technology, much larger cities can be leveled with much smaller bombs. Isn't technology great?
-or-
They could sell the DVD at rental prices. That would prevent the lazy among us (myself included) from downloading it, and get a very high sell-through rate. High volumes like that would make them more money than they otherwise would with low volumes and high prices. Even though it's not a great movie, I'd likely buy the DVD if it was that cheap.
Please don't construe this as xenophobic or racist, but there is a general perception, at least at companies like Oracle and Sun, that H1-B visas are prefered over citizens. Naturally this is illegal, but I and many others have seen it in practice. The reason, besides the fact that americans are generally lazier than people coming over with H1-Bs, is that H1-B rules give the company more power. I know of one company that regularly lays off 5% of their workforce, and 80% of their workforce is H1-B. Being laid off is a much bigger problem for the H1-B contingent because they will likely have to pack up and go home. The 5% layoff policy causes these people to work like dogs, seriously never taking even a weekend day off. I'm not kidding here. I know people who haven't had a saturday off in two years, all because they're scared of being in the bottom 5% and being shipped home. This is sick and wrong and bad for society. Companies are taking advantage of H1-B workers, it's not the H1-B workers that are the problem.
Let's scrap NASA and come up with something better.
I think we ought to give the ISS to the russians, and scrap the shuttle. Let's give 40% of NASA's budget to the russian space program, 10% to fund a civilian auditing organization (to stop the fleecing), and 50% to US contractors to build a cheap, reusable launch vehicle. Let's leave the heavy lift vehicles to the russians.
The russian space program, though beaten down by their new economy, is much more efficient, dollars to rubles, than NASA will ever be. They're unencumbered by the massive buracracy, have far fewer regulations, will sell space flights for money (the horror!). Basicially they can do for 1 Million what the US can only dream of for 50 million. Our money is better spent on their program. Hell, they could even launch harmless nuclear payloads without worrying about braindead idiots in the US protesting the poisoning of outer space.
Once the new vehicles are tested and in place, we can think about using ISS as a gateway to MARS! That would be truly cool, and well worth taxpayer's money. We'll just never get there under NASA's current (very heavy) thumb.
Buffy will never win an emmy. There are several reasons for this.
1) Emmy judges only recently recognized the existence of FOX and HBO. UPN doesn't have deep enough pockets.
2) One look at previous winners will tell you that emmys only go to very conventional shows that are suitable for anyone whose palate has been seasoned toward endless repetition, mundane humor, and predictable plots. Being daring or innovative is rarely rewarded.
3) It's a niche genre. Buffy is definately a niche show and quite comfortable there. Emmy judges see their vote as recommending the show to the american family. Is that show going to be scifi/horror ?
4) The name of the show is too "kiddy" for stuffy, balding, boring judges to take seriously.
5) Who the hell cares if it wins an emmy? That would put it on the same "pedestal" as home improvement, felicity, and The PJs.
I played warcraft 3 at Fry's a bit today in Sunnyvale. They had 4 really nice warcraft 3 setups available for anyone to sit and give a try.
My impressions: Graphically, it's amazing. The sound completely rocks. The unit AI is the best I've seen in an RTS yet. For instance, when your peasants are done building, they will go and do something useful like chop lumber or mine gold. This eliminates a great deal of micro management.
I can't say more than that because I only completed a couple of battles, but it filled my soul with the urge to upgrade my hardware.
FYI.. Fry's is also selling it an hour before the rest of the west coast... 11PM on the 2nd.
The fact is that silent operation is not an easy sell to the consumer. People are used to auditory feedback. My dicam has two modes: silent, and "film-camera" sound. I usually keep it in silent, but when someone else takes a picture with it, they can't figure out how long to keep the camera pointed at the subject. Then they're confused about whether or not they actually took a picture. People are so used to the audio "click" that digicam manufacturers have to add one in with tiny speakers! There's no reason a solid-state digicam should make any noise at all, but people need that reasurring "CLICK".
>the recording and mastering of CDs has gotten much, much better over the last few years.
Hate to disagree, but I do. Many of my newer CDs have less dynamic range than older ones. Producers are compressing the range, putting the maximum signal level on the CD... even past the point of signal clip. What that means to you and me is that the music will sound loud, distorted, and have no "punch". Now SACD is better, but most of the improvement is due to SACD producers reverting to 1980s CD mastering techniques! They're actually using the dynamic range of SACD instead of squeezing it out.
That's right, I'm selling sub-orbital flights for only $1000. Please line up, I can only fly one at a time. You may get a little dizzy, and your arms and legs may be a little sore, but I guarantee the ride of a lifetime. Please no one over 150 lbs... my back is a little sore this week.
>(whiney Luke, bad dialog, etc).
Bad dialogue? I think the dialogue from the "holy trilogy" is filled with gems. "Never tell me the odds", "I love you, I know", "sorry about the mess", and so forth.
But yes, that kid sure is a whiner.
Yeah, it's great to have a piece of code that compiles for four languages, but what's the point if you're just using pre-processor and compiler tricks to get the compiler to look at a different section of the same file? In this file, if I change the problem-solving logic slightly, I have to change it in several places. What would be truly cool (and incredibly difficult), in my opinion, would be to completely eliminate redundant logic.
Go to clubs w/live music (bands you like), pay the cover, drink lots of beer, score a couple of phone #s, then go home and download all the MP3s you want. Never feel guilty. You will have a MUCH greater impact on the state of the music scene by going out and drinking beer than buying CDs. In addition, you'll support the up-and-coming artists who just want to play music. Just remember, the more beer you drink, the more "in demand" that band will be, and the better the music scene in your city. It's guiness time.
For the everquest players who might not catch the reference: :)
[excerpted from the free online dictionary of computing]
SEX
/seks/ A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then.
[also from word net]
n 1: activities associated with sexual intercourse; "they had sex in the back seat" [syn: sexual activity, sex activity]
2: either of the two categories (male or female) into which most organisms are divided; "the war between the sexes"
3: all of the feelings resulting from the urge to gratify sexual impulses; "he wanted a better sex life"; "the film contained no sex or violence" [syn: sexual urge]
4: the properties that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles; "she didn't want to know the sex of the foetus" [syn: gender, sexuality]
v 1: arouse sexually [syn: arouse, excite, turn on, wind up]
I think the simpsons "jumped the shark" in the episode in which Homer joined a traveling freak show in season 7. The show simply hit the wall with homer being the big fat guy getting shot with the cannon, and sonic youth delivering the theme song at the end. It wasn't the funniest ever, but they definately "jumped the shark". The beginning of the end was acutally "lisa the vegetarian" at the beggining of season 7, and by season 8, you've got "the nanny episode", "bart is gay" and "poochie".
It's interesting the way americans force materialistic attitudes on their children at a very early age... So many toys represent items those kids tend to purchase later in life. Toy guns for boys, silicon implants (barbie) for the girls.
Now it's PDAs...Before too long yuppie parents will be buying their kids minature working BMWs... wait.
They ARE bozos if they're going to trust tax records to a windows PC network. If they had backed up their data (and kept their support contract), IBM could have had them running again in a day or two. The only difference is that city officials would have been unable to play "the sims" in "off-time". :)
A Faster MP3 player is highly undesireable unless your wife/husband is using it for "jazzercize" :)
Before you flame me, yes I know you could output to WAV, and I haven't timed that, but for me, playing MP3s normally, MPG123 has 2/3 of the CPU utilization of MAD. It probably depends on your CPU as the performance of the FPU and ALU are can vary widely among different chips. For quality, MAD is theoretically higher, but I've got good ears and just can't tell the difference. That's why I use MPG123.
Yes this is karma whoring a little, but it's a good article
Um... he went over the bay bridge and through downtown SF, then north on the bridge to marin... I think that's close enough. :)
In unrelated news, Dell CEO Michael Dell was given a speeding ticket in a new Ferrari 360. When asked where he got the car, Dell responded "it fell off the truck". When asked for his liscence, he "accidentally" handed over his freshly-inked honorary MCSE. He was promptly arrested for assulting an officer of the law.
I'll give you a big shine new nickel if you can tell me what the "M" stands for in "ATM Machine".
:) It stands for Money. ATM=All The Money.
Now excuse me while I listen to my CD discs and watch a couple flicks on my VCR recorder.
It's a little known fact that many ATM machines use OS/2... even the new ones. That means millions of people use OS/2 every day and don't even know it. The funny thing is that they WOULD know it if they used an M$ OS. How would you like the "blue screen of death" when you're in the middle of a transaction?
Make no mistake... the world runs on IBM mainframes. All other systems and os's are fledgling for small players only. From airports, to financial institutions to nearly every one of the Fortune 500... they all use IBM mainframes for their core business. The reason isn't because it's a monopoly... there are always other options, but would you rather pin your business on a 50 node cluster of failure-prone DELL boxes (that may catch fire at any minute) or a slick, bulletproof mainframe? It's just good business sense to buy reliability. No one else can offer that yet.
I don't think putting these machines in a lab is a good idea. Here's why: The cost savings is supposed to come from cheaper administration and the idea that thin clients aren't outdated as fast as thick clients. The sad truth is that thin clients are outdated FASTER than thick clients. If you take your 486 PC, you can run linux and a WinFrames client, you've got a system for the ages ;) But what if you've got a SUN NC? Good luck trying to find a good use for that. What are you going to do three years from now when the speed is no longer acceptable? What's your upgrade path?
With your "thin client" solution, you're paying a lot of money for low-speed hardware, so why not by cheap standard hardware instead and go with thin-client software?
There's one line in my environment setup in windows that makes it possible for me to compile my projects in the shortest possible time... DISABLE_PCH=T
Why do you want precompiled headers? Sure you might get a couple of faster compiles... when you're not scratching your head trying to figure out why PCH is failing.
GCC adding this feature would only cause me to spend more time compiling programs than I already do... unless they come up with a smarter implementation than MSVC.