Re:They try to send, but don't really succeed
on
The New Yorker On Spam
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think an ever-increasing percentage of my bandwidth and CPU time going into spam filtering counts as a "solved" problem.
How much time should I spend on becoming the hypothetical "competent" sysadmin? How much should I have to pay someone else to do it for me?
Tell you what. You provide the salary for me to hire someone reasonably competent to keep filters up to date, and send me a couple of fairly powerful servers, and pay for a second dedicated T1 to do nothing but process email, and I'll back you and claim that spam is "solved". By you. And I'll suggest that everyone go ask you to "solve" it for them too.
No, a fallacy is a bad argument. Not an unsupported conclusion. The conclusion of a fallacy is an unsupported conclusion, but that doesn't make the conclusion itself a fallacy.
The fallacy is "AQ made these videos, these videos have been edited, therefore AQ edited these videos". (I think the fallacy is hidden premise.) The statement that AQ edited these videos is merely an unsupported statement.
Every time I see a debate about backups, I end up seeing one of the pro-backup people saying that the reason he needs to be able to play backups is that he can't afford full price for games, so he trades them with friends, or something like that.
I think actual backups ought to be legal, but it seems to me that the well's been poisoned.
I think they still make those, although I don't remember where I last saw one.
Mice don't slow me down necessarily. They're much faster for some things, much slower for others. A good interface ought to allow both, but random access really is faster than indexed access. You can't make a good keyboard-friendly Bejeweled, or a mouse-friendly shell.
You speak my mind on this issue.
on
Mouse or Trackball?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I use the Kensington Expert Mouse (4-button, spinny wheel for scrolling, big ball) for nearly everything at home. My travel device is a Logitech Trackman Marble; it has the bonus that the ball stays in it at odd angles and you can put it nearly anywhere. Either is unequviocally and totally superior to any mouse I've ever used.
My Expert Mouse developed a minor nuisance, I forget what, and I asked Kensington about it. They sent me a new one as a replacement, free. Right there, we see the price difference between the Expert Mouse and cheap crap mice evaporate.
I hate mice. I love trackballs.
If you're doing a lot of graphics, you might also pick up a tablet.
I don't think so. The thing you need is the ability to determine whether or not other people are getting substantively identical messages, and frankly, just blocking the bad networks is an order of magnitude more efficient.
No, that's not right.
It's at least three or four orders of magnitude more efficient.
You're misunderstanding; they are presumably talking about the Local Store aspect of each SPE there. Each SPE has a chunk of local storage associated with it, which others can access through DMA.
To be fair, standard getopt is sorta mediocre. Like everyone, I wrote my own which handled long options, option arguments, and more. Mine's somewhere in the same general class as popt and GNU getopt_long; I suspect that, had I been a decade older when I'd written it, I wouldn't have written it.
I can't imagine using gperf for the task, though. In fact, I've spent real time fixing programs that could take "-a -b" but not "-ab".
With RoN, I tried some experiments, abusing the pause and slow stuff heavily.
I could, at the slowest speed, pausing and giving orders and restarting constantly, just barely outperform the computer...
But in fact, even then, it was just that I made decisions better; I had the nearest peasant build something, not just a random one. I queued things up in an order that maximized income growth. Things like that; underneath it all, the computer was still pushing buttons way faster than I could.
Given even a little pausing, though, I can really enjoy singleplayer. I'm okay with not being able to play some parts of the game, but I really like the basic structure of the RTS genre, and Warcraft in particular was excellent fun... Until the levels got too hectic for me, and I couldn't cope anymore.
One of the things that always killed me in Warcraft was difficulty mousing fast enough and reliably enough; I could fail because I couldn't select a unit fast enough.
Re:There is no such thing as a good DNSBL
on
Choosing a Good DNSBL
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course they do. That doesn't mean they're not good; it means they're not perfect.
The fact is, without DNSBLs, the headaches would be worse. LOTS worse. Centralized blocking gives you some kind of theoretical hope of getting unblocked once you've fixed the problem. Decentralized blocking leaves you no chance at all. Furthermore, without tools like DNSBLs, administrators would be far too busy to even get to the point where they could have these headaches.
I'd rather live in a world with a number of reasonably good DNSBLs than not have any.
I'll put 'em in my list of games to consider. Sadly, I'm pretty much restricted to Mac games these days, too, but maybe I can work something out; I've been sorta grudgingly keeping a Windows install around for the RTS games.
I play that too, but I really like the "all actions are simultaneous" thing.
In Civ-like games, there's weird strategies that are introduced by the fact that all actions occur in turns. In RTS games, you don't have situations where first-strike goes to whichever unit's turn it is; it's down to unit attributes. I like that, and enjoy it; it's just that the same thing that makes it a major accomplishment requiring years of training and practice for me to mostly remember that I have food in the oven makes it impractical to play a game if I can't pause it and look around.
Honestly, even without orders while paused, just being able to look around in pause might be enough to make it viable. I do need time to stop and integrate occasionally, though.
There's a huge difference in experince between an RTS-with-pause and a TBS. They are NOT the same thing!
Try WH40K or Rise of Foo. Both allow orders and review in pause; neither has suddenly become turn-based.
I understand that part of the challenge is learning to multitask effectively. I can't. My brain won't do it; you might as well build me a game based on learning to instinctively read facial expressions.
For me, it's a question of needing an occasional chance to pause and flush my queue; I can handle a couple of things, but every so often I need to stop and go look at things. I enjoy the basic principle that all the units move simultaneously, and most of the time, I enjoy that; I just can't track three things at once.
Let me give orders in pause!
on
Protoss For a Day
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I can't play most RTS games singleplayer (don't even talk about multiplayer, it's a joke). Why? Because I can't handle the simultaneous loads. (According to someone with a medical degree, this is probably autism in action.) I have to be able to stop the game, look around, check on things, and so on... Otherwise, I can't keep up, because I can't build up my base while I'm directing armies -- because, while I'm directing the army, my brain completely forgets about the base. I have to pause frequently and queue up orders.
So I do just fine at Rise of Nations or Rise of Empires, or WH40K:DoW, but I am absolutely worthless at Warcraft or Starcraft. And, having learned this, I just don't play them any more, at all.
If they were to make it so that I could pause the game, scroll around the map, and give orders, I would probably really enjoy the game. I love RTS when they can accommodate my quirks.
The real issue is that people are massively overselling bandwidth, way more than they can really provide. Since people refuse to pay for the bandwidth they actually want, we get crazy stuff like this.
All this doom and gloom about network neutrality laws is bull. Every time I see one of these on slashdot, I ask for someone to describe a net neutrality law that doesn't have side effects way worse than the alleged problem. So far, no one's come close; they always end up describing a law that would prohibit me from blocking or tarpitting spammers or DDoS attacks.
What we have right now is unreliable service, thanks to oversubscription. If people wanna start paying extra for bandwidth guarantees, the way corporate networks always have, fine by me.
The fact is, given how well the war in iraq, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism have been going, I don't really want the US government to begin a war on network design.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think an ever-increasing percentage of my bandwidth and CPU time going into spam filtering counts as a "solved" problem.
How much time should I spend on becoming the hypothetical "competent" sysadmin? How much should I have to pay someone else to do it for me?
Tell you what. You provide the salary for me to hire someone reasonably competent to keep filters up to date, and send me a couple of fairly powerful servers, and pay for a second dedicated T1 to do nothing but process email, and I'll back you and claim that spam is "solved". By you. And I'll suggest that everyone go ask you to "solve" it for them too.
No, a fallacy is a bad argument. Not an unsupported conclusion. The conclusion of a fallacy is an unsupported conclusion, but that doesn't make the conclusion itself a fallacy.
The fallacy is "AQ made these videos, these videos have been edited, therefore AQ edited these videos". (I think the fallacy is hidden premise.) The statement that AQ edited these videos is merely an unsupported statement.
Every time I see a debate about backups, I end up seeing one of the pro-backup people saying that the reason he needs to be able to play backups is that he can't afford full price for games, so he trades them with friends, or something like that.
I think actual backups ought to be legal, but it seems to me that the well's been poisoned.
It's not just that. Zonk's article comment AFFIRMING Dvorak?
With the two of them in agreement that hydrogen is common, I'd start wondering if the sun were gonna go out.
I think they still make those, although I don't remember where I last saw one.
Mice don't slow me down necessarily. They're much faster for some things, much slower for others. A good interface ought to allow both, but random access really is faster than indexed access. You can't make a good keyboard-friendly Bejeweled, or a mouse-friendly shell.
I use the Kensington Expert Mouse (4-button, spinny wheel for scrolling, big ball) for nearly everything at home. My travel device is a Logitech Trackman Marble; it has the bonus that the ball stays in it at odd angles and you can put it nearly anywhere. Either is unequviocally and totally superior to any mouse I've ever used.
My Expert Mouse developed a minor nuisance, I forget what, and I asked Kensington about it. They sent me a new one as a replacement, free. Right there, we see the price difference between the Expert Mouse and cheap crap mice evaporate.
I hate mice. I love trackballs.
If you're doing a lot of graphics, you might also pick up a tablet.
I don't think so. The thing you need is the ability to determine whether or not other people are getting substantively identical messages, and frankly, just blocking the bad networks is an order of magnitude more efficient.
No, that's not right.
It's at least three or four orders of magnitude more efficient.
What do you think "GNU's Not UNIX" is supposed to communicate?
Could be. I suspect that they're still losing money on them, but it's hard to tell.
Still, I think the lawsuit people would love to receive the negative several billion dollars Sony's made on the PS3 so far.
Re-read my post.
Ask yourself exactly what Sony's net profits on the PS3 are right now.
You're misunderstanding; they are presumably talking about the Local Store aspect of each SPE there. Each SPE has a chunk of local storage associated with it, which others can access through DMA.
How about this: Let's just award them the full profits Sony's realized from the PS3 up through the date of the lawsuit.
Every penny.
I think this would be an eminently fair solution, and I'm confident Sony would accept it.
Sony said previously they weren't interested in paying for exclusives... More lies, or did Rockstar find some other reason to do this?
To be fair, standard getopt is sorta mediocre. Like everyone, I wrote my own which handled long options, option arguments, and more. Mine's somewhere in the same general class as popt and GNU getopt_long; I suspect that, had I been a decade older when I'd written it, I wouldn't have written it.
I can't imagine using gperf for the task, though. In fact, I've spent real time fixing programs that could take "-a -b" but not "-ab".
With RoN, I tried some experiments, abusing the pause and slow stuff heavily.
I could, at the slowest speed, pausing and giving orders and restarting constantly, just barely outperform the computer...
But in fact, even then, it was just that I made decisions better; I had the nearest peasant build something, not just a random one. I queued things up in an order that maximized income growth. Things like that; underneath it all, the computer was still pushing buttons way faster than I could.
That's why I don't play multiplayer.
Given even a little pausing, though, I can really enjoy singleplayer. I'm okay with not being able to play some parts of the game, but I really like the basic structure of the RTS genre, and Warcraft in particular was excellent fun... Until the levels got too hectic for me, and I couldn't cope anymore.
Total agreement on squad AI.
One of the things that always killed me in Warcraft was difficulty mousing fast enough and reliably enough; I could fail because I couldn't select a unit fast enough.
Of course they do. That doesn't mean they're not good; it means they're not perfect.
The fact is, without DNSBLs, the headaches would be worse. LOTS worse. Centralized blocking gives you some kind of theoretical hope of getting unblocked once you've fixed the problem. Decentralized blocking leaves you no chance at all. Furthermore, without tools like DNSBLs, administrators would be far too busy to even get to the point where they could have these headaches.
I'd rather live in a world with a number of reasonably good DNSBLs than not have any.
I'll put 'em in my list of games to consider. Sadly, I'm pretty much restricted to Mac games these days, too, but maybe I can work something out; I've been sorta grudgingly keeping a Windows install around for the RTS games.
I play that too, but I really like the "all actions are simultaneous" thing.
In Civ-like games, there's weird strategies that are introduced by the fact that all actions occur in turns. In RTS games, you don't have situations where first-strike goes to whichever unit's turn it is; it's down to unit attributes. I like that, and enjoy it; it's just that the same thing that makes it a major accomplishment requiring years of training and practice for me to mostly remember that I have food in the oven makes it impractical to play a game if I can't pause it and look around.
Honestly, even without orders while paused, just being able to look around in pause might be enough to make it viable. I do need time to stop and integrate occasionally, though.
There's a huge difference in experince between an RTS-with-pause and a TBS. They are NOT the same thing!
Try WH40K or Rise of Foo. Both allow orders and review in pause; neither has suddenly become turn-based.
I understand that part of the challenge is learning to multitask effectively. I can't. My brain won't do it; you might as well build me a game based on learning to instinctively read facial expressions.
For me, it's a question of needing an occasional chance to pause and flush my queue; I can handle a couple of things, but every so often I need to stop and go look at things. I enjoy the basic principle that all the units move simultaneously, and most of the time, I enjoy that; I just can't track three things at once.
I can't play most RTS games singleplayer (don't even talk about multiplayer, it's a joke). Why? Because I can't handle the simultaneous loads. (According to someone with a medical degree, this is probably autism in action.) I have to be able to stop the game, look around, check on things, and so on... Otherwise, I can't keep up, because I can't build up my base while I'm directing armies -- because, while I'm directing the army, my brain completely forgets about the base. I have to pause frequently and queue up orders.
So I do just fine at Rise of Nations or Rise of Empires, or WH40K:DoW, but I am absolutely worthless at Warcraft or Starcraft. And, having learned this, I just don't play them any more, at all.
If they were to make it so that I could pause the game, scroll around the map, and give orders, I would probably really enjoy the game. I love RTS when they can accommodate my quirks.
http://stats.dnsbl.com/
Or, for commentary:
http://www.dnsbl.com/
Absolutely the best resource on the topic.
I don't buy it. Not for an instant.
The real issue is that people are massively overselling bandwidth, way more than they can really provide. Since people refuse to pay for the bandwidth they actually want, we get crazy stuff like this.
All this doom and gloom about network neutrality laws is bull. Every time I see one of these on slashdot, I ask for someone to describe a net neutrality law that doesn't have side effects way worse than the alleged problem. So far, no one's come close; they always end up describing a law that would prohibit me from blocking or tarpitting spammers or DDoS attacks.
What we have right now is unreliable service, thanks to oversubscription. If people wanna start paying extra for bandwidth guarantees, the way corporate networks always have, fine by me.
The fact is, given how well the war in iraq, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism have been going, I don't really want the US government to begin a war on network design.
Isn't that a CRT thing, mostly? I seem to recall that LCDs use the same amount of power (or very close) no matter what they display.