Screw that! I want them to use cell phone towers to detect Slashdot dupe posts - again and again and again... BTW, have we had any triple posts yet or are we still waiting for that treat?
People even thought they saw what looked like giant irrigation canals.
That was Mars (Percival Lowell mapped and counted the canals). Sure, it's confusing, what with them having a capital letter in common, not to mention the same number of letters! Still, they're different. The moon was believed to be made out of cheese and Mars had lots little green men with shovels.
I waded through dozens of well-formulated, reasonable, coherent and logical rebuttals of the parent post and at the end of the lot I find the best reply, summing up them all. Too bad you posted as AC or I would have saved up points to give you +256 Insightful and Funny.:-D
Darn, I've gotta find a good source for Red Dwarf episodes...
On a slightly more on-topic vein, more and more laptops have modular bays that accept batteries - some Compaqs can have up to three batteries in them. Heavy, sure - but if you're lying in a hammock it may be worth it.
-Hello. *chew, chew*
-Hello Sir! Am I interrupting something?
-Yeah, we're eating.
-Perfect! Would you say this is annoyting, me calling you in your home like this?
-Definitely.
-And how would you like to be free of this annoyance once and forever?
-Get lost.
-Precisely! I am in a position to offer you a grrrreat deal on a new invention that can filter out these pesky calls - this could be the last time you ever spoke to an obnoxious telemarketer!
-I dunno...
-Did you know we have special training facilities where we learn to sound cheerful, cipper and positive, no matter what? We train day in and day out to persuade you, the hard-working American Joe to part with your hard-earned money, and we're damned good at it, if I may say so myself. We never give up! We call in rain, sleet or snow! If Ma Bell (ultra-cheap long-distance rates!) is napping and a tropical storm has taken the phones down, why we're not above visiting in person with our encyclopedias, aluminum sidings, low-low APR and zero-down offers!
-OK. *sigh* Where do I sign?
Motivations: "for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules" (John B Fenn, Koichi Tanaka) and "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution" (Kurt Wüthrich).
I would probably hold back ALL email to the people who actually read and responded to your mail. You do realize it looks just like scamspam with a bad cold, don't you?
"Please respond to this mail so we can harvest all e-mail addresses that work and sell them to evil spammers on eBay."
This is sooo Snow Crash. Now, not only can you rub against someone and catch a cold, you can get viruses in your beltwares as well. Your cellphone will set up conference calls to bad payporn when you try to call your mom, your watch will continually blink 06:66 and set off the alarm at odd hours and your PDA will make an appointment for a Golden Shower in your own office by a smelly Bill Gates-lookalike in drag really, really early on Monday morning.
Crap, there goes the whole week.
Just another reason to keep wearing my rubber gloves. *snap*
the guy who asked the original question does not have a lot of experience in software development
I didn't interpret it like that at all, he claims to have:
a solid foundation in computer programming.
He just wants more input on this particular task, probably since he has never put all of his experience in 3D graphics, maths and programming together in one single big-ass project before and wants to minimize the number of false starts. That's my take on his request anyway, I think it's actually a little skimpy to give any really solid advice on. One thing I'd say is to not go it alone. Very few people have the necessary skillset and experience in everything from project management, coding, 3D graphics, software development, documentation and the rest to be able to pull something like this off on their own. He might have, but odds are he hasn't.
You can't refuse to learn the piano and demand a record deal first.
Sure you can, if you have nice tits or are willing to undergo minor surgery.:-)
There's a reason why commercial software development rarely is more organized than private hacking.
Oh, it can be a LOT more organized. It might just not always help.:-) Microsoft, to name one, has very organized software development methods and employ lots of testers, internal quality tests, code audits and whatnot but still manage to miss out in the basic design - the very area you seem to play down.
It's silly to expect that planning can replace experience.
And it's silly to expect that coding skillz and experience can replace a good design.
not something we ever figured a normal person would own.
It was at work, I burned the master copy of TFS Gateway that got sent off for manufacturing. A 4x SCSI Yamaha with not enough buffers.
And here I had you figured for UK (where local phone calls cost
per minute -- what is _that_ all about).
Same here. It's just a few years since they went to a flat model for all calls, before that we had different rates for local, regional (all adjacent area codes) and long distance. We now have the same rates for local as long distance (just under a cent a minute evenings and weekends, double that on workdays). I've never really understood why the US phone companies started offering unmetered local calls, was it just to increase the long distance rates or what? I haven't seen anything in the constitution about the right to local calls... Bare arms, yes. Unmetered phones, not a word.
POTS I'm not familiar with; almost all dialup here in the US is PPP.
POTS=Plain Old Telephone System, ie analog phone lines. Sorry 'bout that.
CD burners are fairly new on the market, by comparison
Well, I have had, or had access to, burners since 1996 and although T1 or equivalents probably was available back then, not many people had the use for them. At the time, we were 50 employees sharing a 256k leased line, recently upgraded from a 64k...
All dialup ISPs I know about charge a flat monthly fee for unmetered access.
Cool. Where I live (Sweden), the 'unmetered access' concept does not exist except for ADSL or leased lines. Dialups cost per minute, be it POTS, ISDN or mobile.
Anyway - in that case, I can see the reason for doing a Gentoo install over the phone - there are some howtos, anecdotes, methods and metoos at the Gentoo forums if you want some more input before starting your dialup adventure.
Works now. *phew* For a while there, I almost believed that someone actually wanted to read the article before posting. We have normality.
Karmawhoring:
Super-secret codes head for space
AFP [ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 02, 2002 11:36:33 PM ]
PARIS: Quantum cryptography, a technique of producing secret messages that are reputedly uncrackable, may soon be used by orbiting communications satellites thanks to experiments by British and German researchers.
The traditional weakness of sending encoded messages is eavesdropping. Quantum cryptography gets around this by sending an encoded message and, separately, a key to decode it, which are transmitted in pulses of individual light particles called photons.
By the nature of quantum mechanics, if a single photon is intercepted en route, that changes the state of the information package as it arrives at the other end.
That is a telltale for the legitimate recipient that his message has been tampered with -- the same as if someone received a letter that had been clumsily opened and then resealed, leaving traces of glue and fingerprints on the envelope.
The problem with quantum codes, though, has been how to send messages over long distances.
Data is of course already sent by laser light down fibre-optic networks. But this technique is unsuitable for quantum cryptography, for the laser signal has to be boosted every 10 kilometers (six miles), which causes the quantum state of the key to be rearranged.
Researchers from QinetiQ, the commercial arm of the British military research agency, and from Munich's Ludwig-Maximilian University say they have now demonstrated that it is possible to send a quantum-encoded message through the air.
Reporting in Thursday's issue of Nature, the British science weekly, they say they successfully transmitted packages across 23.4 kilometers (14.62 miles) between mountains in the German Alps.
A laser transmitter was set up at the top of the 2,950-metre (9,587-feet) Zugspitze, and sent out pulses to a receiver, a 25-centimetre (10-inch) shop-bought telescope, positioned on line of sight on another peak, the 2,244-metre (7,293) Westlichekarwendespitze.
With some adjustments to amplify the signal, it should be possible to send keys to satellites in near-Earth orbit, at an altitude of 500-1,000 kilometers (310-620 miles), the scientists say.
"This marks a step towards... a global key-distribution system," the authors say.
Quantum codes have obvious uses for military and government communications.
The big question, though, is whether they should be allowed to enter the commercial domain, where they could be used by organised crime and terrorism to thwart eavesdropping by police.
gentoo doesn't have an installer, and that you have to do a lot of chrooting to do the initial install.
Well, it's one chroot, I don't know if that's a lot. You chroot from the boot CD into the untarred base install on your harddrive and do the rest from there. If you have to abort the install (boot into Windoze for a little Counter-Strike or so) you basically boot off the CD again, chroot in and continue where you left off. You don't have that extra layer of fluff between yourself and the bare metal and I guess that can be intimidating, but as long as there aren't any really good UI utils for running stuff like ifconfig (Winipcfg) or fdisk (HDToolbox or PartitionMagic) I think of it as good teaching. You tell people that this is how to set the most common settings for your Ethernet card so if they ever have to change it again, they have some kind of idea what's involved.
It's no big deal to me. When I first looked at Gentoo and the install docs I almost ran for cover, but if you have the ability to read and write it's basically a no-brainer. I agree that it could be scripted to work completely automatically for maybe 90% of the users since you just follow the doc and type in what it says, but the remaining 10% (multibooting, exotic hardware and so on) wouuld be SOL.
Since I'm not a US citizen (this means I have to be a terrorist), the feds have no jurisdiction whatsoever over me - they'd have to send the Delta Force guys in to get me and put me somewhere US law doesn't really apply - like, say Guantanamo Bay. Mmmm, Cuba.
"I'm not worried that a block of ice might fall on your head"
Well Buster, I'm not so worried about YOUR head either!
"It's very easy to tell real and false ice blocks apart."
False ice? I have heard of people forging money, IDs, painting and even dog poop (for their percieved entertainment value, not their nutritional value) but this has got to take the fake cake. Fake ice? Does he mean one of those clear plastic ice cubes with a fly inside you dropped into the lemonade glasses of your friends when you were a kid?
"Glad you came professor, we need to know if it's real ice or just an imposter."
"This *holds it up to the light* is a block of fake ice."
"Ohh, but Professor, how can you tell?
"It has a fake fly in it!"
Isn't it?:-) I snuck that one into a software product helpfile once (Sendit ICSA/SPICE Instant mobile e-mail client for Windows, since bought and killed by Microsoft).
was there ever a point in the project where no one thought the final product was viable?
Having worked with MCI Mail, at least indirectly, I would think that it would be easier to mention the person who thought it was viable. He would be one of the first to be stood up against the wall when the revolution comes. Along with Bill, a bundle of his more enthusiastic minions, the guy who invented muzac, the original Kilroy, both Bushes, Osama and his gang of merry martyrs, Hilary Rosen, Jack Valenti, the Dell guy and...
OK, so we need a really, really big wall - big deal - there's one in China.
Slashdot Mirror
Screw that! I want them to use cell phone towers to detect Slashdot dupe posts - again and again and again... BTW, have we had any triple posts yet or are we still waiting for that treat?
That was Mars (Percival Lowell mapped and counted the canals). Sure, it's confusing, what with them having a capital letter in common, not to mention the same number of letters! Still, they're different. The moon was believed to be made out of cheese and Mars had lots little green men with shovels.
I waded through dozens of well-formulated, reasonable, coherent and logical rebuttals of the parent post and at the end of the lot I find the best reply, summing up them all. Too bad you posted as AC or I would have saved up points to give you +256 Insightful and Funny. :-D
On a slightly more on-topic vein, more and more laptops have modular bays that accept batteries - some Compaqs can have up to three batteries in them. Heavy, sure - but if you're lying in a hammock it may be worth it.
Ah, but were they anti-aliased?
-Hello. *chew, chew*
-Hello Sir! Am I interrupting something?
-Yeah, we're eating.
-Perfect! Would you say this is annoyting, me calling you in your home like this?
-Definitely.
-And how would you like to be free of this annoyance once and forever?
-Get lost.
-Precisely! I am in a position to offer you a grrrreat deal on a new invention that can filter out these pesky calls - this could be the last time you ever spoke to an obnoxious telemarketer!
-I dunno...
-Did you know we have special training facilities where we learn to sound cheerful, cipper and positive, no matter what? We train day in and day out to persuade you, the hard-working American Joe to part with your hard-earned money, and we're damned good at it, if I may say so myself. We never give up! We call in rain, sleet or snow! If Ma Bell (ultra-cheap long-distance rates!) is napping and a tropical storm has taken the phones down, why we're not above visiting in person with our encyclopedias, aluminum sidings, low-low APR and zero-down offers!
-OK. *sigh* Where do I sign?
Motivations: "for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules" (John B Fenn, Koichi Tanaka) and "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution" (Kurt Wüthrich).
"Please respond to this mail so we can harvest all e-mail addresses that work and sell them to evil spammers on eBay."
I had that one as logout message on my BBS back in the old days.
Ohh, Nemesis. :-)
Just another reason to keep wearing my rubber gloves. *snap*
"Come on, Slashdot me! Gimme your best shot! What, are you yellow? Chicken! I've got bandwidth coming out of my ears! Slashdot me! Just you try!"
It's not named GNU/Samba. :-)
I didn't interpret it like that at all, he claims to have:
a solid foundation in computer programming.
He just wants more input on this particular task, probably since he has never put all of his experience in 3D graphics, maths and programming together in one single big-ass project before and wants to minimize the number of false starts. That's my take on his request anyway, I think it's actually a little skimpy to give any really solid advice on. One thing I'd say is to not go it alone. Very few people have the necessary skillset and experience in everything from project management, coding, 3D graphics, software development, documentation and the rest to be able to pull something like this off on their own. He might have, but odds are he hasn't.
You can't refuse to learn the piano and demand a record deal first.
Sure you can, if you have nice tits or are willing to undergo minor surgery. :-)
There's a reason why commercial software development rarely is more organized than private hacking.
Oh, it can be a LOT more organized. It might just not always help. :-) Microsoft, to name one, has very organized software development methods and employ lots of testers, internal quality tests, code audits and whatnot but still manage to miss out in the basic design - the very area you seem to play down.
It's silly to expect that planning can replace experience.
And it's silly to expect that coding skillz and experience can replace a good design.
It was at work, I burned the master copy of TFS Gateway that got sent off for manufacturing. A 4x SCSI Yamaha with not enough buffers.
And here I had you figured for UK (where local phone calls cost per minute -- what is _that_ all about).
Same here. It's just a few years since they went to a flat model for all calls, before that we had different rates for local, regional (all adjacent area codes) and long distance. We now have the same rates for local as long distance (just under a cent a minute evenings and weekends, double that on workdays). I've never really understood why the US phone companies started offering unmetered local calls, was it just to increase the long distance rates or what? I haven't seen anything in the constitution about the right to local calls... Bare arms, yes. Unmetered phones, not a word.
POTS I'm not familiar with; almost all dialup here in the US is PPP.
POTS=Plain Old Telephone System, ie analog phone lines. Sorry 'bout that.
Well, I have had, or had access to, burners since 1996 and although T1 or equivalents probably was available back then, not many people had the use for them. At the time, we were 50 employees sharing a 256k leased line, recently upgraded from a 64k...
All dialup ISPs I know about charge a flat monthly fee for unmetered access.
Cool. Where I live (Sweden), the 'unmetered access' concept does not exist except for ADSL or leased lines. Dialups cost per minute, be it POTS, ISDN or mobile.
Anyway - in that case, I can see the reason for doing a Gentoo install over the phone - there are some howtos, anecdotes, methods and metoos at the Gentoo forums if you want some more input before starting your dialup adventure.
Almost all Exchange servers have Outlook. It's needed for some admin tasks.
You'll be sued now, for sure.
Karmawhoring:
Well, it's one chroot, I don't know if that's a lot. You chroot from the boot CD into the untarred base install on your harddrive and do the rest from there. If you have to abort the install (boot into Windoze for a little Counter-Strike or so) you basically boot off the CD again, chroot in and continue where you left off. You don't have that extra layer of fluff between yourself and the bare metal and I guess that can be intimidating, but as long as there aren't any really good UI utils for running stuff like ifconfig (Winipcfg) or fdisk (HDToolbox or PartitionMagic) I think of it as good teaching. You tell people that this is how to set the most common settings for your Ethernet card so if they ever have to change it again, they have some kind of idea what's involved.
It's no big deal to me. When I first looked at Gentoo and the install docs I almost ran for cover, but if you have the ability to read and write it's basically a no-brainer. I agree that it could be scripted to work completely automatically for maybe 90% of the users since you just follow the doc and type in what it says, but the remaining 10% (multibooting, exotic hardware and so on) wouuld be SOL.
Since I'm not a US citizen (this means I have to be a terrorist), the feds have no jurisdiction whatsoever over me - they'd have to send the Delta Force guys in to get me and put me somewhere US law doesn't really apply - like, say Guantanamo Bay. Mmmm, Cuba.
When I first read "Free Claude Shannon" I thought "When did he get arrested?". Scary.
Well Buster, I'm not so worried about YOUR head either!
"It's very easy to tell real and false ice blocks apart."
False ice? I have heard of people forging money, IDs, painting and even dog poop (for their percieved entertainment value, not their nutritional value) but this has got to take the fake cake. Fake ice? Does he mean one of those clear plastic ice cubes with a fly inside you dropped into the lemonade glasses of your friends when you were a kid?
"Glad you came professor, we need to know if it's real ice or just an imposter."
"This *holds it up to the light* is a block of fake ice."
"Ohh, but Professor, how can you tell?
"It has a fake fly in it!"
Isn't it? :-) I snuck that one into a software product helpfile once (Sendit ICSA/SPICE Instant mobile e-mail client for Windows, since bought and killed by Microsoft).
Having worked with MCI Mail, at least indirectly, I would think that it would be easier to mention the person who thought it was viable. He would be one of the first to be stood up against the wall when the revolution comes. Along with Bill, a bundle of his more enthusiastic minions, the guy who invented muzac, the original Kilroy, both Bushes, Osama and his gang of merry martyrs, Hilary Rosen, Jack Valenti, the Dell guy and...
OK, so we need a really, really big wall - big deal - there's one in China.