While it is a tad sentimental and sappy, it's cool to see these little "easter eggs" on public projects. It's especially cool that it means something (even if the promise was made under duress of alcohol.;)
Actually the surprise engagement is generally a bad idea. The girl already knows the answer to the question before you ask anyway (she's been thinking about it since the day you met, trust me.) Sure, the surprise engagement is romantic and fun, but you have to know that both of you are prepared for it. Besides, you can still talk about it and have it be a surprise. For example, you've both been talking about it and planning things, then you pop the question on a scoreboard at a baseball game or something.
As for who to ask, well, the opinion of that one person matters much more than the opinion of us buffoons.;)
Why do we buy diamonds? Is it because they're really pretty? Yes, but if that were the case we'd buy cubic zirconium rings; you can't tell the difference 5 feet away anyway. Is it because we're conditioned to buy them? Partially, though, like everyone has said, it's mostly a marketing gimmick crated in the 40s.
So why DO we buy diamonds? Because they're expensive. DeBeers knows this, that's why diamonds are so expensive. Jewelers know this, that's why they won't buy them back. If diamonds weren't so expensive, nobody would buy them. Because it's rather impractical to buy our beloved a 2 lb hunk of gold, we instead spend the money on a rock with artificial value, as if to say "I care about you so much, I just threw away 2 months salary. Will you be with me for the rest of my life (or until we hate eachother)?"
The moral of the story: Yes, diamonds are probably a bad choice. But it's not what you buy, it's how much you spent on it. If you don't want to buy her a diamond, that's perfectly fine; just find a diamond ring in the price range you're looking at and spend the same amount on say, a platinum band with other precious stones (rubies, emeralds, sapphires, whatever she prefers.) Her girlfriends won't chide her so long as it looks expensive (and it will.) Just make sure to spend a lot of money on it, whatever it is.:) That way you won't come off as a cheapskate.
You're pretty much right there until you mentioned open source. Open source outside of a few programs (namely apache) has had very little impact in the corporate world. The world is still run on proprietary databases run on Sun OS or what have you.
No, the main reason the industry is collapsing is consolidation and fat trimming. In bad times, redundant companies with poor business plans tend to fail. So what we're seeing is a lot of the smaller companies merging or dying off. Those companies that actually offer something useful and unique (NVidia, Akamai, etc) do well, while a lot of these IP companies aren't doing so well (Rambus, et. al)
When there's less work, salaries sometimes do go up actually, as companies are looking for fewer, more skilled workers as opposed to C++ or Java code monkeys. They're looking for people with significant experience in the areas they'll be working in, which most people just don't have. This is really hurting a lot of recent CS grads, a lot of my friends who have recently graduated are working as waiters or whatever until they can find a better job that actually uses their CS degree. And I go to a respected university (University of Texas.)
So, basically, you're right, but we'll see smaller salaries and more work as proprietary programmers will generally be better at what they do and will have to compete with eachother. Open source really isn't a factor here.
I would hardly call Nature a scientific journal. It's more on the lines of Popular Science, except for biotech. If Popular Science was a scientific journal, damn, Sharper Image would rule the world.;)
Uh, MAME will run on junk hardware; this is a bad reason. I can spend $50 on basically spare parts and get a rig with video out, a midrange P2 or P3 and it'll run linux and MAME just fine.
This is actually the case with pretty much anything you'd want to use the Xbox for. 3D apps? Forget it, NVidia's never gonna post drivers for that chip. By the time the linux community has developed good drivers for it, the entire thing will be outdated anyway. The XBox is really not that great a deal anymore, for the $199 you spend on it, all you get is a small hard drive, a 700 mhz P3 and a tricked out graphics card that is useless unless you have the drivers. Yeah it sounds like a good idea but once you really think about it, you can drop $100 and get a hardware-comparable rig from commodity parts. Plus you'll have hardware on an open standard where you can rig up things like controllers, VFD/LED displays, etc.
I imagine they just buy the machines straight from Apple, and you can't buy a machine from Apple without OS X installed. So you're gonna have to buy it anyway, plus OS X is a great OS. It's always nice to have a dualboot machine anyway.
These are also the guys who ship Yellow Dog Linux, an EXCELLENT professional distro for the PowerPC. This is really old news to the PPC Linux community, Terra Soft has been doing this for years. This is mostly aimed at people who want to set up servers/labs, NOT home users. Their Black Lab clustering system is bar-none one of the coolest things I've seen a company do (yes, you CAN have a beowulf cluster of these... they'll even set it up for you!) Anyway, if you have a PowerPC system, check out Yellow Dog, it's a very cool distro (it's apt based, which is another plus.)
Gates never really made much money off his programming. He was just a really smart businessman. He made his first millions by buying DOS for $30,000, then turning around and licensing it to IBM for $30,000,000. All he did was add "MS" in front of it. After that, he had enough money to hire smart people to work for him, so his time was more wisely used in places other than programming.
Anymore, he doesn't really do a whole lot for Microsoft; he's still chairman of the board so he has a big say in the overall vision of the company, but he handed the day-to-day stuff (along with the title of CEO) over to Ballmer years ago.
Actually they're like 3 years ahead of schedule. One of my old girlfriends lived in a house that backed up to 59 at shepherd, it should be opening there very soon. Of course, 59 south is all fucked up because of that dumbass westpark toll road, so I guess it's a moot point.
Actually, the city of Houston is working on land buyouts (read: eminent domain takeovers) for a 24-lane highway along I-10 on the west side of town. So 24-lane highways are apparently safe to drive on (god knows that area needs it.)
Fuck you. You're a bigoted, stereotypical asshole. You think you can sit in your parents house in suburbia driving a $15,000 car your parents bought for you and pass judgment on people who you only see through the tinted windows of your import sedan. I live in Austin, TX and the homeless there are actually very nice, personable people. Yes, they're a bit odd, but we all have our quirks. Most homeless people aren't there because they want a "free ride." They often have mental conditions which prevent them from living amongst society (advanced schizophrenia is very common amongst the homeless.)
Get off your high horse and out of your parents basement and see what the real world is like before you start passing your holy word off on others. You pass stereotypical assumptions off as fact, when your assumptions are very far from it.
Yes, but it's still fraud. Wire fraud is a VERY serious offense. It lands you in "Federal rape-you-in-the-ass prison" for a rather lengthy sentence. Anyway, there are such things as "white hat" computer hackers, but not really in the social engineering side of things. Basically, social engineering is how to manipulate people to give you what you want no matter what. There's no "pointing out the holes in the system" because the holes will NEVER go away. It's basically amateur espionage, and most companies aren't too thrilled to give out things they don't want to. But companies can and probably will press charges if you get caught. If you value the sanctity of your cornhole, I suggest not trying this.
Get off your hippie trip. Why does America have an army? Because if we didn't, some other country with an army would be able to send it over and take over. I thought these stupid isolationist views were quashed after WW2. The goal of an army is not to search and destroy anyone we decide we do not like, rather it is to provide a deterrent, and, when necessary, eliminate those that provide a plausable threat to us or our allies.
That said, I think the "planned" invasion of Iraq is retarded. But on the whole, a large fighting force is generally a good thing as it allows businesses in our contry to prosper by giving them the security that we aren't going to be all speaking chinese next week.
I'm not sure what the density of this stuff is, but I doubt it's close to depleted uranium. That's why we use depleted uranium in tank/anti-armor shells, because it exerts a maximum amount of force on a minimal space (by the same token, this is why an arrow fired from a compound bow will pierce a kevlar vest but a 9mm round will not.) Depleted uranium is not used because it is hard, but because it is dense (i.e. it weighs a LOT) AND hard. Of course, this shit could be a lot denser than DU and I could be totally wrong. This is slashdot after all.
Except fiber is totally unsuitable for many applications, must be professionally installed, and the interfacing equipment is EXPENSIVE. I personally wouldn't want to run a fiber cable across my office, if someone trips on it.. SNAP, gotta pay the installers to come and lay a new cable. Whenever you run fiber you have to run a conduit as well so that the fiber isn't eaten by rats/bugs/mold/whatever.
TP is honestly a better solution than fiber in 99.9% of applications. Only where the extra bandwidth is actually needed and the conditions are pristine enough is fiber really a "better" option. It's easy enough for anyone to install, it's fast, it's cheap, and it's durable (especially the plenum jacketed stuff.) What business owner is gonna say no to that just so he can say he has fiber, and thus a bigger penis than all the other business owners in the area? I don't think so.
Unfortunately, they no longer teach that in American high schools. Apparently learning about other places is "Un-American," and thus those who know about other places are terrorists. We wouldn't want our high schools to be a breeding ground for terrorists, would we?:)
Heh.. MGS2 came out here first because the first installment didn't do so hot in Japan, but was a phenomenal hit here. Kojima was aiming for the American market at the outset.
As for the iPod, if you want to buy a cheap knock-off of it, you don't really get the point of the iPod. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but the reason Apple is doing well with it is because it does all the little things right. The software is incredible (though the lack of a Windows port puzzles me) and the interface is in typical Apple style: Minimal yet very functional and very intuitive. Not to mention the build quality on all Apple products is some of the best in the business. There's a reason you see many more old Macs around than 386 boxes.
As for the cell phones.. Part of that is the FCC dragging its feet and the other part is space. The US is probably around ten times the size of Japan, land mass wise. American cities are notoriously spread out, so the necessary coverage is much larger. To upgrade an entire cell phone network would take years and billions of dollars, and by the time it was done, Japan would still have a better network, as they would have upgraded to the next new cell standard. We don't just lag behind Japan in this area either. The rest of the world (Europe, Asia, South America, etc) has better cell phone networks than we do. But because America's land mass is so large and Americans tend to travel a lot, we kind of have to deal with it.
Besides, while all these gadgets are cool and all.. I personally don't see anything past novelty/dicksizing value in half of them. Sure, my cell phone doesn't have a word processor or a web browser, but it makes phone calls, which is what I want it to do.
All these anime geeks who graduate high school and start planning to move to Japan so they get all the latest anime and gadgets sicken me. Yes, Japan gets cool cartoons and electronic toys, but I hardly consider that a reason to live in a closet of an apartment in a country that already has major population problems. I'm not saying America is a perfect place (we sure have our share of problems) but as countries go, it's not all that bad a place to live.
SCSI has a lot of things going over ATA. ATA133 can only handle one device, if you use more it bumps down to ATA66. SCSI on the other hand can handle 7 devices, and as such makes an excellent high-speed RAID platform. SCSI isn't going away any time soon, as no self-respecting video/photo/audio professional would use a rig with an ATA setup.
The main reason is because 10k drives aren't terribly durable. They need a fan assembly pointing at them or they get too hot and won't last a year. Also, you don't really see the benefits of high speed drives until you throw them in a RAID array. People are getting tired of their computers sounding like jet engines.
Another of ATA's big problems is that yes, it has the bandwidth to handle a fast drive, but not more than one. SCSI supports concurrent reads and writes, where ATA swaps them off. In reality you'll never see the 133 mbps in an ATA133 setup; where you'll come a lot closer with LVD160 SCSI. Also, the more traffic ATA eats up, the more CPU it eats (ever noticed how burning CDs on an ATA burner will bog your machine down?)
This is assuming that the shroud even depicts Jesus. It seems one has to use circular logic to prove this (i.e. assume it is Jesus to prove it is Jesus, much like the problem with proving the existence of God.)
Besides, everyone knows we only discovered nuclear fusion in the 1940s. Sillies.
This is already happening (and has been for years) with video games. I know what you're thinking, "It's not the same!" and you're right. But go play Metal Gear Solid 2; the game honestly plays like an interactive movie. Games will only get more cinematic (MGS2's credits are filled with Hollywood talent) as companies like Capcom, Konami and Square find better uses for the hardware. This style of game hasn't really caught on with PCs, but I have a feeling it may only be a matter of time.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is a tad sentimental and sappy, it's cool to see these little "easter eggs" on public projects. It's especially cool that it means something (even if the promise was made under duress of alcohol. ;)
Actually the surprise engagement is generally a bad idea. The girl already knows the answer to the question before you ask anyway (she's been thinking about it since the day you met, trust me.) Sure, the surprise engagement is romantic and fun, but you have to know that both of you are prepared for it. Besides, you can still talk about it and have it be a surprise. For example, you've both been talking about it and planning things, then you pop the question on a scoreboard at a baseball game or something.
;)
As for who to ask, well, the opinion of that one person matters much more than the opinion of us buffoons.
Why do we buy diamonds? Is it because they're really pretty? Yes, but if that were the case we'd buy cubic zirconium rings; you can't tell the difference 5 feet away anyway. Is it because we're conditioned to buy them? Partially, though, like everyone has said, it's mostly a marketing gimmick crated in the 40s.
:) That way you won't come off as a cheapskate.
So why DO we buy diamonds? Because they're expensive. DeBeers knows this, that's why diamonds are so expensive. Jewelers know this, that's why they won't buy them back. If diamonds weren't so expensive, nobody would buy them. Because it's rather impractical to buy our beloved a 2 lb hunk of gold, we instead spend the money on a rock with artificial value, as if to say "I care about you so much, I just threw away 2 months salary. Will you be with me for the rest of my life (or until we hate eachother)?"
The moral of the story: Yes, diamonds are probably a bad choice. But it's not what you buy, it's how much you spent on it. If you don't want to buy her a diamond, that's perfectly fine; just find a diamond ring in the price range you're looking at and spend the same amount on say, a platinum band with other precious stones (rubies, emeralds, sapphires, whatever she prefers.) Her girlfriends won't chide her so long as it looks expensive (and it will.) Just make sure to spend a lot of money on it, whatever it is.
You're pretty much right there until you mentioned open source. Open source outside of a few programs (namely apache) has had very little impact in the corporate world. The world is still run on proprietary databases run on Sun OS or what have you.
No, the main reason the industry is collapsing is consolidation and fat trimming. In bad times, redundant companies with poor business plans tend to fail. So what we're seeing is a lot of the smaller companies merging or dying off. Those companies that actually offer something useful and unique (NVidia, Akamai, etc) do well, while a lot of these IP companies aren't doing so well (Rambus, et. al)
When there's less work, salaries sometimes do go up actually, as companies are looking for fewer, more skilled workers as opposed to C++ or Java code monkeys. They're looking for people with significant experience in the areas they'll be working in, which most people just don't have. This is really hurting a lot of recent CS grads, a lot of my friends who have recently graduated are working as waiters or whatever until they can find a better job that actually uses their CS degree. And I go to a respected university (University of Texas.)
So, basically, you're right, but we'll see smaller salaries and more work as proprietary programmers will generally be better at what they do and will have to compete with eachother. Open source really isn't a factor here.
Popular Mechanics? Only if they're reviewing the RealDoll.
I would hardly call Nature a scientific journal. It's more on the lines of Popular Science, except for biotech. If Popular Science was a scientific journal, damn, Sharper Image would rule the world. ;)
Uh, MAME will run on junk hardware; this is a bad reason. I can spend $50 on basically spare parts and get a rig with video out, a midrange P2 or P3 and it'll run linux and MAME just fine.
This is actually the case with pretty much anything you'd want to use the Xbox for. 3D apps? Forget it, NVidia's never gonna post drivers for that chip. By the time the linux community has developed good drivers for it, the entire thing will be outdated anyway. The XBox is really not that great a deal anymore, for the $199 you spend on it, all you get is a small hard drive, a 700 mhz P3 and a tricked out graphics card that is useless unless you have the drivers. Yeah it sounds like a good idea but once you really think about it, you can drop $100 and get a hardware-comparable rig from commodity parts. Plus you'll have hardware on an open standard where you can rig up things like controllers, VFD/LED displays, etc.
I imagine they just buy the machines straight from Apple, and you can't buy a machine from Apple without OS X installed. So you're gonna have to buy it anyway, plus OS X is a great OS. It's always nice to have a dualboot machine anyway.
These are also the guys who ship Yellow Dog Linux, an EXCELLENT professional distro for the PowerPC. This is really old news to the PPC Linux community, Terra Soft has been doing this for years. This is mostly aimed at people who want to set up servers/labs, NOT home users. Their Black Lab clustering system is bar-none one of the coolest things I've seen a company do (yes, you CAN have a beowulf cluster of these... they'll even set it up for you!) Anyway, if you have a PowerPC system, check out Yellow Dog, it's a very cool distro (it's apt based, which is another plus.)
Gates never really made much money off his programming. He was just a really smart businessman. He made his first millions by buying DOS for $30,000, then turning around and licensing it to IBM for $30,000,000. All he did was add "MS" in front of it. After that, he had enough money to hire smart people to work for him, so his time was more wisely used in places other than programming.
Anymore, he doesn't really do a whole lot for Microsoft; he's still chairman of the board so he has a big say in the overall vision of the company, but he handed the day-to-day stuff (along with the title of CEO) over to Ballmer years ago.
59? Finished? What you say? haha!
Actually they're like 3 years ahead of schedule. One of my old girlfriends lived in a house that backed up to 59 at shepherd, it should be opening there very soon. Of course, 59 south is all fucked up because of that dumbass westpark toll road, so I guess it's a moot point.
Actually, the city of Houston is working on land buyouts (read: eminent domain takeovers) for a 24-lane highway along I-10 on the west side of town. So 24-lane highways are apparently safe to drive on (god knows that area needs it.)
Fuck you. You're a bigoted, stereotypical asshole. You think you can sit in your parents house in suburbia driving a $15,000 car your parents bought for you and pass judgment on people who you only see through the tinted windows of your import sedan. I live in Austin, TX and the homeless there are actually very nice, personable people. Yes, they're a bit odd, but we all have our quirks. Most homeless people aren't there because they want a "free ride." They often have mental conditions which prevent them from living amongst society (advanced schizophrenia is very common amongst the homeless.)
Get off your high horse and out of your parents basement and see what the real world is like before you start passing your holy word off on others. You pass stereotypical assumptions off as fact, when your assumptions are very far from it.
Yes, but it's still fraud. Wire fraud is a VERY serious offense. It lands you in "Federal rape-you-in-the-ass prison" for a rather lengthy sentence. Anyway, there are such things as "white hat" computer hackers, but not really in the social engineering side of things. Basically, social engineering is how to manipulate people to give you what you want no matter what. There's no "pointing out the holes in the system" because the holes will NEVER go away. It's basically amateur espionage, and most companies aren't too thrilled to give out things they don't want to. But companies can and probably will press charges if you get caught. If you value the sanctity of your cornhole, I suggest not trying this.
Get off your hippie trip. Why does America have an army? Because if we didn't, some other country with an army would be able to send it over and take over. I thought these stupid isolationist views were quashed after WW2. The goal of an army is not to search and destroy anyone we decide we do not like, rather it is to provide a deterrent, and, when necessary, eliminate those that provide a plausable threat to us or our allies.
That said, I think the "planned" invasion of Iraq is retarded. But on the whole, a large fighting force is generally a good thing as it allows businesses in our contry to prosper by giving them the security that we aren't going to be all speaking chinese next week.
I'm not sure what the density of this stuff is, but I doubt it's close to depleted uranium. That's why we use depleted uranium in tank/anti-armor shells, because it exerts a maximum amount of force on a minimal space (by the same token, this is why an arrow fired from a compound bow will pierce a kevlar vest but a 9mm round will not.) Depleted uranium is not used because it is hard, but because it is dense (i.e. it weighs a LOT) AND hard. Of course, this shit could be a lot denser than DU and I could be totally wrong. This is slashdot after all.
Except fiber is totally unsuitable for many applications, must be professionally installed, and the interfacing equipment is EXPENSIVE. I personally wouldn't want to run a fiber cable across my office, if someone trips on it.. SNAP, gotta pay the installers to come and lay a new cable. Whenever you run fiber you have to run a conduit as well so that the fiber isn't eaten by rats/bugs/mold/whatever.
TP is honestly a better solution than fiber in 99.9% of applications. Only where the extra bandwidth is actually needed and the conditions are pristine enough is fiber really a "better" option. It's easy enough for anyone to install, it's fast, it's cheap, and it's durable (especially the plenum jacketed stuff.) What business owner is gonna say no to that just so he can say he has fiber, and thus a bigger penis than all the other business owners in the area? I don't think so.
Unfortunately, they no longer teach that in American high schools. Apparently learning about other places is "Un-American," and thus those who know about other places are terrorists. We wouldn't want our high schools to be a breeding ground for terrorists, would we? :)
Heck, the G4 cubes didn't even come with fans.. They had heat vents at the top for cooling. How's that for engineering? :)
Heh.. MGS2 came out here first because the first installment didn't do so hot in Japan, but was a phenomenal hit here. Kojima was aiming for the American market at the outset.
As for the iPod, if you want to buy a cheap knock-off of it, you don't really get the point of the iPod. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but the reason Apple is doing well with it is because it does all the little things right. The software is incredible (though the lack of a Windows port puzzles me) and the interface is in typical Apple style: Minimal yet very functional and very intuitive. Not to mention the build quality on all Apple products is some of the best in the business. There's a reason you see many more old Macs around than 386 boxes.
As for the cell phones.. Part of that is the FCC dragging its feet and the other part is space. The US is probably around ten times the size of Japan, land mass wise. American cities are notoriously spread out, so the necessary coverage is much larger. To upgrade an entire cell phone network would take years and billions of dollars, and by the time it was done, Japan would still have a better network, as they would have upgraded to the next new cell standard. We don't just lag behind Japan in this area either. The rest of the world (Europe, Asia, South America, etc) has better cell phone networks than we do. But because America's land mass is so large and Americans tend to travel a lot, we kind of have to deal with it.
Besides, while all these gadgets are cool and all.. I personally don't see anything past novelty/dicksizing value in half of them. Sure, my cell phone doesn't have a word processor or a web browser, but it makes phone calls, which is what I want it to do.
All these anime geeks who graduate high school and start planning to move to Japan so they get all the latest anime and gadgets sicken me. Yes, Japan gets cool cartoons and electronic toys, but I hardly consider that a reason to live in a closet of an apartment in a country that already has major population problems. I'm not saying America is a perfect place (we sure have our share of problems) but as countries go, it's not all that bad a place to live.
SCSI has a lot of things going over ATA. ATA133 can only handle one device, if you use more it bumps down to ATA66. SCSI on the other hand can handle 7 devices, and as such makes an excellent high-speed RAID platform. SCSI isn't going away any time soon, as no self-respecting video/photo/audio professional would use a rig with an ATA setup.
The main reason is because 10k drives aren't terribly durable. They need a fan assembly pointing at them or they get too hot and won't last a year. Also, you don't really see the benefits of high speed drives until you throw them in a RAID array. People are getting tired of their computers sounding like jet engines.
Another of ATA's big problems is that yes, it has the bandwidth to handle a fast drive, but not more than one. SCSI supports concurrent reads and writes, where ATA swaps them off. In reality you'll never see the 133 mbps in an ATA133 setup; where you'll come a lot closer with LVD160 SCSI. Also, the more traffic ATA eats up, the more CPU it eats (ever noticed how burning CDs on an ATA burner will bog your machine down?)
This is assuming that the shroud even depicts Jesus. It seems one has to use circular logic to prove this (i.e. assume it is Jesus to prove it is Jesus, much like the problem with proving the existence of God.)
Besides, everyone knows we only discovered nuclear fusion in the 1940s. Sillies.
Maybe a bit nitpicky, but you didn't fire the men with heterosexual porn in their home folders? Isn't that a bit biased?
This is already happening (and has been for years) with video games. I know what you're thinking, "It's not the same!" and you're right. But go play Metal Gear Solid 2; the game honestly plays like an interactive movie. Games will only get more cinematic (MGS2's credits are filled with Hollywood talent) as companies like Capcom, Konami and Square find better uses for the hardware. This style of game hasn't really caught on with PCs, but I have a feeling it may only be a matter of time.