Essentially, this woman just conveyed that she is an addict, but justifies her addiction as healthy, as she could be doing something worse...??!
Well, I'm glad I'm addicted to nicotine. Without cigarettes, I might be smoking crack! Thank god I found this addiction before I moved onto something more serious, like bowling or television.
Other replies have already said that the Earth has had water for a while, but you also need to take into account that the earth is in a very good spot to have liquid water. Our distance from the sun falls between venus, which is kinda hot and evil, and mars, which is really cold, and small as compared to the earth.
Straying somewhat off-topic, but the question isn't really when the earth got this water, but how? I'm sure some of it has to do with the accretion of the solar disc when the planets formed, but as much of the water molecules in our solar system are tied up in comets, how did the earth, and europa, end up with so much water? Comet bombardment? I think that the answer to this question is probably the same as explaining where our moon came from, and why it's so damn big in comparison to earth...
I laughed my ass off at the first one of these - and I'm amazed that apple actually put these up on their site. If I didn't already make the switch, i think santa would fix that for me.
A week ago, I went to cdnow.com to look up an album. To my surprise, they had per-song downloads at a somewhat reasonable cost. As I only wanted one song, I read through their FAQs to find out if I'd have any issues playing the song under MacOS X, they had the following section about supported formats:
Music can be encoded in a variety of formats, such as MP3, a2b, MPEG, Liquid Audio and RealAudio. Some formats, such as MP3, can be played on a variety of players (programs that play various audio formats), while other encoding formats must be played using a particular player.
Okay, that's nice and vauge. However, MP3s aren't an issue,or MPEGS, and RealAudio I can manage. A2B...? No idea. And then there was Liquid Audio, which has clients for Mac and Windows, as well as plugins for RealPlayer. So all is good! I can play the file under pretty much any circumstances!
So, of course, it wasn't mp3, or mpeg, or realaudio. It was the Liquid Audio format...
I downloaded and installed the player, which runs under classic a-ok, until you actually try to play the files. Upon searching, it is explicitly incompatible with MacOS X, as are the RealPlayer plugins to listen to the files as well. There are no alternative players. In reading a bit more, I also found that Microsoft bought all of the intellectual property rights from the creators of Liquid Audio in September, so now the task of writing a player for MacOS X falls into their lap...
Fair use rights...? What are those? I paid money for this song, and can't listen to it. In speaking to cdnow's customer service, they informed me that I needed to get the proper player for my operating system. This was in reply to my saying "There isn't a player for OS X."
So, Mac users, linux users, BSD users, and the rest of the gang unfortunately get it up the poop chute when it comes to DRM-based media. I paid for a song and couldn't listen to it, as the DRM won't let me! I'd be more bitter about my lack-of-refund if I didn't get the song 10 minutes afterwards from my local friendly P2P clients... at a much higher bitrate, too... If getting things LEGALLY were as easy as getting them pirated, maybe people wouldn't be stealing so much music, eh?
waaay off topic, but...
believe it or not, my rather conservative parents will only watch fox news, strangely enough. they feel that cnn/abc/cbs/nbc/pbs are part of the liberal conspiracy, and only fox provides unbiased news.
like alien autopsies and fake moon-landings.
If Deep Fritz works along the same lines as Deep Blue, it can easily learn from its mistakes. Consider a simple point-system(imperfect, but widely used), in which each piece position contributes to a numeric value of the board. Let's say moving a piece to a particular square under a particular set of conditions is initially rated very highly - it's a "good move." Then, two moves later, because of that move, the computer is in mate. Obviously not a good move. If this mistake is left in how the machine "thinks," the human can just exploit this weakness. If the machine DOESN'T learn from it's mistakes, it will fail miserably.
Imagine it as a tree by which you want to get to a specific goal. If following a specific branch doesn't get you to the goal, would you ever want to follow it again?
AI isn't actually that state-of-the-art. Most of the concepts behind AI are, strangely enough, very intuitive, and the reason that AI is appearing to get better is because computational power is increasing quite rapidly. If you have the speed and memory to explore EVERY possible move in the rest of the game, why not do it? Can we do this now? No. Will we be able to down the line? Yes.
I've ordered from this company a few times, and they do suck. Their service bites, delivery was far from prompt, and anything living they have is... well... sad.
How can a company sue someone for VOICING THEIR OPINION? Tomorrow, will Slashdot be sued by Microsoft for that Bill Gates Borg icon? I don't think Gene Roddenberry would have had a problem with it...
Is Wired owned by Microsoft or something...!?
on
No More Mac Tweaking?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
First, this is in reference to GUI tweaking, which I think is a fairly bad idea anyway. Many OS X apps have features based around the GUI, such as "dock-aware" applications and the likes, so if you go in and be a super-h4x0r to make your OS X box look like a Wind0z3 machine or something dumb like that, applications would probably get very, very pissed.
OS X will always be tweakable as long as it has the BSD kernel. As this is the whole purpose of OS X, I don't see this fact changing any time soon.
There's also a neat feature in a game called "Animal Crossing," which was released stateside today, in that within the game, you can buy NES games, and play them within the game. These are transferrable to your GBA's flash memory via the GBA/GameCube link.
Ever since that Pokemon fad, Ninendo has been thinking of new and tricky ways to make you want to "catch em all." Now I have to catch a GBA to take full advantage of my GameCube... heh.
This is great news, but I fear that somehow a division will form in who actually adopts this. It is being developed by Intel, so obviously windows machines will support it, and linux, etc will as well. My greatest fear is that Apple will -not- for some reason, or Intel won't want to give it to them. The Bluetooth features of MacOS 10.2 are pretty suave... I'd even say it makes me want to get more devices that can actually use it. Effortless synchronization of information, and the likes, is really cool.
If all of the major "players" adopt this as a universal standard, and all the devices play nicely together across all platforms, I think this will be nearly revolutionary as far as how technology is used in our lives. However, if only certain platforms and devices support it, it's just another trend.
Okay, so the MIT community as a whole knew nothing about this. I thought the idea of the robot cyborg fighting suit as a whole was pretty damn hilarious, but when I saw the drawing, it's not like what popped into my head was "That could be stolen artwork!" The ONLY people who could have known that the artwork was stolen are 1) anyone who has read the comics, and 2) anyone who submitted the drawing in question.
I think that people should put the blame squarely where it belongs, and that is on the head of the individual who created the image. It's not like a little comp sci undergrad could have prevented this, or a physics professor, or the president of MIT. Accusing MIT of doing this is like accusing SOCIETY for causing all of the murders in the world.
Offtopic on my part, and yours, but...
TROLL. Sweet jesus, troll. There were three choices - Bush, Gore, and Nader. Bush is no different from Gore, in any way shape or form. They both had big business on their side. They're both trained chimps.
I could just see Gore putting his foot down and saying, "RIAA... your time has come! Fair use is a right all people should have!" I mean, Al Gore did single-handedly create the internet, didn't he?
I'm one of those poor bastards who "made the switch" and got an OS X machine. So, at least for the moment, I cannot use ogg vorbis in iTunes, never mind using it across applications...
I've been a happy member of emusic.com for a lot longer than I've been a mac owner, but I'd cancel my account in a heartbeat if I could no longer listen to the files in my application of choice. I doubt that emusic.com will switch to a new format any time soon, as mp3 has grown into a worldwide standard. Maybe in time, ogg will do the same, but for the moment, I don't even have the option to switch.
I'd have to agree. For that matter, I think that anyone upgrading from the latest version should have the right to a discounted copy of the newest release.
When Apple released Quicktime 6 a few days back, and I found I had to buy Quicktime Pro again, I was downright pissed! I had Quicktime 5 Pro for maybe 2 months tops, and I probably wouldn't have wasted my $30 if I knew that Quicktime 6 was right around the bend.
Of course, as a student, I'll be getting the academic discount, and $69 ain't bad for a solid OS. Hopefully it will be.
After 15 years or so of PC dedication, I just got myself a PowerMac. I've never been happier. As for your questions:
Are modern G4 towers quieter and/or cooler than comparable x86 workstations? My new machine is far quieter than my old machine, but far from silent. With the clocks going up on the G4, and the near-excessive nVidia offerings, cooling is becoming much more important. But, it has fewer fans than my old PC, and they're put in places where they actually do things.
Is it wiser to spend money on memory or megahertz? Both. You can always get more memory later, and it will be worth it. MacOS X will eat your memory as fast as you can feed it, especially if you're doing anything video-related.
Is it best to buy everything directly from Apple, or just a minimum to be fleshed out with cheaper, after-market add-ons? Mine came with the academic discount, so it would have been more expensive to get individual components. I'd say finding your own hard disks would be cheaper, and same with ram.
What's the best video option for dual-head on Jaguar? GeForce4 Ti 4600. Ouch. I've never been motion sick from a 3d shooter until Apple mailed me that hog.
Does OS X make SMP worth the investment? I think so. It's nice to be encoding a 10-gig MPEG4 and have no noticable slowdown in my other applications. Again, I think it depends on what you want to use the machine for.
Is the SCSI performance gain great enough to be worth the investment over IDE?" I don't have SCSI, but the IDE drives have been just fine. Although I haven't looked into it myself, setting up a RAID with IDE drives is probably trivial, which could give a good performance boost on your disks.
My PowerMac is the most expensive machine I've ever burned my bank account on, but as I've had trouble-free operation and excessive performance, it's worth it. That whole BSD-ness behind the Apple makes my heart melt.
Oh, my knowledge fails me... but, remember the "geek utopia" episode? Skinner gets all of the trains to not only get in on time, but get in on metric time... "remember this time, 75 past 13 on april 42nd" or whatever it was:X
Sorry, butchered it. I'm still numb from boston's 4th.
At my school, a time server is set up to keep the computers on the network within a certain range of time. I believe the purpose of this is for security, as we can't renew our kerberos tickets if our time is more than X minutes from the server's specified time.
I haven't used Napster since "the man" first cracked down on them, because there are so many alternatives which will forever be free. I don't use these, either, as emusic.com provides quality music, fast downloads, and I'm actually supporting the artists in the end. I'd rather pay a small fee to get what I want then endlessly search for what I want with a free client.
Napster is dead, and due to the fact that Napster isn't Jesus, Napster is going to stay dead. I'm glad the record companies are wasting their time and resources trying to bring back the service they destroyed. The irony of companies wasting their money trying to revitalize a service that they claimed would cause them to lose money.
-agent oranje. its not just for breakfast anymore.
While Harry potter was catering to a much more central audience (I.E the people who read the books), Spiderman is something that everyone can identify with.
Until I read Spiderman, I thought I was the only mutant superhero capable of shooting webs and flying through the air with the greatest of ease. But now, I know I'm not alone!
Seriously, though... I don't really think that the momentum of Spiderman will keep up. I'll never go to see it, because I really don't care! It looks to be good eye-candy, and the redhead in it is really hot, but other than that, its "just another action film," only this time, it's with Spiderman!
And everyone can relate to a spiderman, but who has ever heard of a "wizard." Sheesh!
Offtopic, maybe flamebait, but its what i think...
I just throw away the cases and liner notes anyway so it's waste of money for me to have that junk anyway.
I don't agree with this statement at all. I often buy CDs of music I know to be good, both to support the artist and to get the liner notes. I try to avoid large labels, due to the fact that they don't actually give the artists any money... And I think that, although not in the majority of cases, the artists put a fair amount of time into making interesting liner notes.
A good example of this is Kid Koala's "Carpal Tunnel Syndrome." The liner notes are essentially a mini-comic book, and a funky one at that. And, as it says inside the CD case, "Free CD with purchase of book!" It gave me a chuckle the first time I saw it, but summed up my feelings on the topic anyway.
Yeah, most liner notes suck. But most bands suck, too. I like to get CDs for liner notes to complete the "artistic experience" the artist intended. Just getting the music has undertones of listening to the music for cheap entertainment value.
Personally, I think that most of "the zone" is just a state of mind, not necessarily what is around you. Personally, I have two phases of tearing through code, hardware design, whatever...
1) Chain-smoking thought phase: Pretty self-descriptive. I essentially get a bunch of white paper, a good writing surface, and chainsmoke in front of my fishtank, tearing through whatever planning and basic design needs to be done.
and then, 2) Production: Once I'm confident my plan will work, and I can assemble it all without having to think too much, I plop myself on my machine, put on some good tunes(Akira soundtrack, something energetic that makes you want to destroy), and go at it. Assuming part 1 went well, debugging is usually quick.
Eh, it works for me. Just chunk up everything into manageable pieces, and tear them a new one in a quick swoop.
Of course, my most productive hours are 3am-6am. So, I could just be insane.
-- i could eeeeven eat a baby deer. falalalaalalala lala!
Slashdot Mirror
... and here's the hi-resolution version for those of us who demand high-fidelity.
still looking for some good photos of the reactor...
Essentially, this woman just conveyed that she is an addict, but justifies her addiction as healthy, as she could be doing something worse...??!
Well, I'm glad I'm addicted to nicotine. Without cigarettes, I might be smoking crack! Thank god I found this addiction before I moved onto something more serious, like bowling or television.
Other replies have already said that the Earth has had water for a while, but you also need to take into account that the earth is in a very good spot to have liquid water. Our distance from the sun falls between venus, which is kinda hot and evil, and mars, which is really cold, and small as compared to the earth. Straying somewhat off-topic, but the question isn't really when the earth got this water, but how? I'm sure some of it has to do with the accretion of the solar disc when the planets formed, but as much of the water molecules in our solar system are tied up in comets, how did the earth, and europa, end up with so much water? Comet bombardment? I think that the answer to this question is probably the same as explaining where our moon came from, and why it's so damn big in comparison to earth...
I laughed my ass off at the first one of these - and I'm amazed that apple actually put these up on their site. If I didn't already make the switch, i think santa would fix that for me.
So, of course, it wasn't mp3, or mpeg, or realaudio. It was the Liquid Audio format...
I downloaded and installed the player, which runs under classic a-ok, until you actually try to play the files. Upon searching, it is explicitly incompatible with MacOS X, as are the RealPlayer plugins to listen to the files as well. There are no alternative players. In reading a bit more, I also found that Microsoft bought all of the intellectual property rights from the creators of Liquid Audio in September, so now the task of writing a player for MacOS X falls into their lap...
Fair use rights...? What are those? I paid money for this song, and can't listen to it. In speaking to cdnow's customer service, they informed me that I needed to get the proper player for my operating system. This was in reply to my saying "There isn't a player for OS X."
So, Mac users, linux users, BSD users, and the rest of the gang unfortunately get it up the poop chute when it comes to DRM-based media. I paid for a song and couldn't listen to it, as the DRM won't let me! I'd be more bitter about my lack-of-refund if I didn't get the song 10 minutes afterwards from my local friendly P2P clients... at a much higher bitrate, too... If getting things LEGALLY were as easy as getting them pirated, maybe people wouldn't be stealing so much music, eh?
waaay off topic, but... believe it or not, my rather conservative parents will only watch fox news, strangely enough. they feel that cnn/abc/cbs/nbc/pbs are part of the liberal conspiracy, and only fox provides unbiased news. like alien autopsies and fake moon-landings.
... Or, this just might be the work of a terrorist group launching a cyber attack, maybe even your neighbor, Billy the w0nd3rh4x0r.
... Or, maybe they just got slashdotted. Heh heh heh...
If Deep Fritz works along the same lines as Deep Blue, it can easily learn from its mistakes. Consider a simple point-system(imperfect, but widely used), in which each piece position contributes to a numeric value of the board. Let's say moving a piece to a particular square under a particular set of conditions is initially rated very highly - it's a "good move." Then, two moves later, because of that move, the computer is in mate. Obviously not a good move. If this mistake is left in how the machine "thinks," the human can just exploit this weakness. If the machine DOESN'T learn from it's mistakes, it will fail miserably.
Imagine it as a tree by which you want to get to a specific goal. If following a specific branch doesn't get you to the goal, would you ever want to follow it again?
AI isn't actually that state-of-the-art. Most of the concepts behind AI are, strangely enough, very intuitive, and the reason that AI is appearing to get better is because computational power is increasing quite rapidly. If you have the speed and memory to explore EVERY possible move in the rest of the game, why not do it? Can we do this now? No. Will we be able to down the line? Yes.
I've ordered from this company a few times, and they do suck. Their service bites, delivery was far from prompt, and anything living they have is... well... sad. How can a company sue someone for VOICING THEIR OPINION? Tomorrow, will Slashdot be sued by Microsoft for that Bill Gates Borg icon? I don't think Gene Roddenberry would have had a problem with it...
First, this is in reference to GUI tweaking, which I think is a fairly bad idea anyway. Many OS X apps have features based around the GUI, such as "dock-aware" applications and the likes, so if you go in and be a super-h4x0r to make your OS X box look like a Wind0z3 machine or something dumb like that, applications would probably get very, very pissed. OS X will always be tweakable as long as it has the BSD kernel. As this is the whole purpose of OS X, I don't see this fact changing any time soon.
you are sick. and i am just as bad for remembering the same episode when i read the headline.
There's also a neat feature in a game called "Animal Crossing," which was released stateside today, in that within the game, you can buy NES games, and play them within the game. These are transferrable to your GBA's flash memory via the GBA/GameCube link. Ever since that Pokemon fad, Ninendo has been thinking of new and tricky ways to make you want to "catch em all." Now I have to catch a GBA to take full advantage of my GameCube... heh.
This is great news, but I fear that somehow a division will form in who actually adopts this. It is being developed by Intel, so obviously windows machines will support it, and linux, etc will as well. My greatest fear is that Apple will -not- for some reason, or Intel won't want to give it to them. The Bluetooth features of MacOS 10.2 are pretty suave... I'd even say it makes me want to get more devices that can actually use it. Effortless synchronization of information, and the likes, is really cool. If all of the major "players" adopt this as a universal standard, and all the devices play nicely together across all platforms, I think this will be nearly revolutionary as far as how technology is used in our lives. However, if only certain platforms and devices support it, it's just another trend.
Okay, so the MIT community as a whole knew nothing about this. I thought the idea of the robot cyborg fighting suit as a whole was pretty damn hilarious, but when I saw the drawing, it's not like what popped into my head was "That could be stolen artwork!" The ONLY people who could have known that the artwork was stolen are 1) anyone who has read the comics, and 2) anyone who submitted the drawing in question. I think that people should put the blame squarely where it belongs, and that is on the head of the individual who created the image. It's not like a little comp sci undergrad could have prevented this, or a physics professor, or the president of MIT. Accusing MIT of doing this is like accusing SOCIETY for causing all of the murders in the world.
Offtopic on my part, and yours, but... TROLL. Sweet jesus, troll. There were three choices - Bush, Gore, and Nader. Bush is no different from Gore, in any way shape or form. They both had big business on their side. They're both trained chimps. I could just see Gore putting his foot down and saying, "RIAA... your time has come! Fair use is a right all people should have!" I mean, Al Gore did single-handedly create the internet, didn't he?
I'm one of those poor bastards who "made the switch" and got an OS X machine. So, at least for the moment, I cannot use ogg vorbis in iTunes, never mind using it across applications...
I've been a happy member of emusic.com for a lot longer than I've been a mac owner, but I'd cancel my account in a heartbeat if I could no longer listen to the files in my application of choice. I doubt that emusic.com will switch to a new format any time soon, as mp3 has grown into a worldwide standard. Maybe in time, ogg will do the same, but for the moment, I don't even have the option to switch.
I'd have to agree. For that matter, I think that anyone upgrading from the latest version should have the right to a discounted copy of the newest release.
When Apple released Quicktime 6 a few days back, and I found I had to buy Quicktime Pro again, I was downright pissed! I had Quicktime 5 Pro for maybe 2 months tops, and I probably wouldn't have wasted my $30 if I knew that Quicktime 6 was right around the bend.
Of course, as a student, I'll be getting the academic discount, and $69 ain't bad for a solid OS. Hopefully it will be.
After 15 years or so of PC dedication, I just got myself a PowerMac. I've never been happier. As for your questions:
Are modern G4 towers quieter and/or cooler than comparable x86 workstations?
My new machine is far quieter than my old machine, but far from silent. With the clocks going up on the G4, and the near-excessive nVidia offerings, cooling is becoming much more important. But, it has fewer fans than my old PC, and they're put in places where they actually do things.
Is it wiser to spend money on memory or megahertz?
Both. You can always get more memory later, and it will be worth it. MacOS X will eat your memory as fast as you can feed it, especially if you're doing anything video-related.
Is it best to buy everything directly from Apple, or just a minimum to be fleshed out with cheaper, after-market add-ons?
Mine came with the academic discount, so it would have been more expensive to get individual components. I'd say finding your own hard disks would be cheaper, and same with ram.
What's the best video option for dual-head on Jaguar?
GeForce4 Ti 4600. Ouch. I've never been motion sick from a 3d shooter until Apple mailed me that hog.
Does OS X make SMP worth the investment?
I think so. It's nice to be encoding a 10-gig MPEG4 and have no noticable slowdown in my other applications. Again, I think it depends on what you want to use the machine for.
Is the SCSI performance gain great enough to be worth the investment over IDE?"
I don't have SCSI, but the IDE drives have been just fine. Although I haven't looked into it myself, setting up a RAID with IDE drives is probably trivial, which could give a good performance boost on your disks.
My PowerMac is the most expensive machine I've ever burned my bank account on, but as I've had trouble-free operation and excessive performance, it's worth it. That whole BSD-ness behind the Apple makes my heart melt.
God bless the creators of the Simpsons for wiping my mind clean of anything other than Simpsons trivia. If only Jeopardy catered to my needs.
Oh, my knowledge fails me... but, remember the "geek utopia" episode? Skinner gets all of the trains to not only get in on time, but get in on metric time... "remember this time, 75 past 13 on april 42nd" or whatever it was :X
Sorry, butchered it. I'm still numb from boston's 4th.
At my school, a time server is set up to keep the computers on the network within a certain range of time. I believe the purpose of this is for security, as we can't renew our kerberos tickets if our time is more than X minutes from the server's specified time.
I haven't used Napster since "the man" first cracked down on them, because there are so many alternatives which will forever be free. I don't use these, either, as emusic.com provides quality music, fast downloads, and I'm actually supporting the artists in the end. I'd rather pay a small fee to get what I want then endlessly search for what I want with a free client.
Napster is dead, and due to the fact that Napster isn't Jesus, Napster is going to stay dead. I'm glad the record companies are wasting their time and resources trying to bring back the service they destroyed. The irony of companies wasting their money trying to revitalize a service that they claimed would cause them to lose money. -agent oranje. its not just for breakfast anymore.
While Harry potter was catering to a much more central audience (I.E the people who read the books), Spiderman is something that everyone can identify with.
Until I read Spiderman, I thought I was the only mutant superhero capable of shooting webs and flying through the air with the greatest of ease. But now, I know I'm not alone!
Seriously, though... I don't really think that the momentum of Spiderman will keep up. I'll never go to see it, because I really don't care! It looks to be good eye-candy, and the redhead in it is really hot, but other than that, its "just another action film," only this time, it's with Spiderman!
And everyone can relate to a spiderman, but who has ever heard of a "wizard." Sheesh!
-agent q. oranje
Offtopic, maybe flamebait, but its what i think...
I just throw away the cases and liner notes anyway so it's waste of money for me to have that junk anyway.
I don't agree with this statement at all. I often buy CDs of music I know to be good, both to support the artist and to get the liner notes. I try to avoid large labels, due to the fact that they don't actually give the artists any money... And I think that, although not in the majority of cases, the artists put a fair amount of time into making interesting liner notes.
A good example of this is Kid Koala's "Carpal Tunnel Syndrome." The liner notes are essentially a mini-comic book, and a funky one at that. And, as it says inside the CD case, "Free CD with purchase of book!" It gave me a chuckle the first time I saw it, but summed up my feelings on the topic anyway.
Yeah, most liner notes suck. But most bands suck, too. I like to get CDs for liner notes to complete the "artistic experience" the artist intended. Just getting the music has undertones of listening to the music for cheap entertainment value.
Personally, I think that most of "the zone" is just a state of mind, not necessarily what is around you. Personally, I have two phases of tearing through code, hardware design, whatever...
1) Chain-smoking thought phase: Pretty self-descriptive. I essentially get a bunch of white paper, a good writing surface, and chainsmoke in front of my fishtank, tearing through whatever planning and basic design needs to be done.
and then,
2) Production: Once I'm confident my plan will work, and I can assemble it all without having to think too much, I plop myself on my machine, put on some good tunes(Akira soundtrack, something energetic that makes you want to destroy), and go at it. Assuming part 1 went well, debugging is usually quick.
Eh, it works for me. Just chunk up everything into manageable pieces, and tear them a new one in a quick swoop.
Of course, my most productive hours are 3am-6am. So, I could just be insane.
-- i could eeeeven eat a baby deer. falalalaalalala lala!