Those games sound freakin' sweet. Where can I buy them?
Kidding aside (somewhat) I always sort of secretly hoped that all these violent video games would turn me into an unstoppable killing machine, like Rambo or Charlton Heston. But the unfortunate reality is that the thousands of hours spent playing games really just improved my mousing skills.
Need something clicked on, in a rapid and ultra-violent manner? I'm definitely your man. Need someone offed in real life? You probably wouldn't call me.
I guess what I'm saying is: If video games are supposed to cause violent behaviour, I think I got ripped off.
I agree. Unfortunately, you've utterly and completely missed my point. For the same effort (on Microsoft's part) over the last 10 years, you could today have "Super Stable Microsoft OS", which never crashed, but because of the effort required to achieve that stability, the OS would only have the feature set of Win95. Or you could have "Moderately Stable Microsoft OS" which crashes sometimes but has the feature set of WinXP.
MS chose the second path. The first, untaken path, "Super Stable Win 95" is hypothetical and does not exist, hence the reason I said "hypothetical alternative".
People upgrade for new features. That computer/OS/gizmo you have today does a lot more than the one from 10 years ago. That's a lot more code that needs to be written, and thus a lot more opportunity for errors. It's that simple.
(I'm actually ok with that. I'd rather have a moderately crashy Windows XP box capable of playing GTA:Vice City than the hypothetical alternative: a super-stable Windows95, capable only of playing "Doom 2".)
Let me in on the final solution, since I have quite a large amount of computer crap, including:
A fuzzy 17 inch monitor
An old Indigo2 computer sans hard drive (and more imporantly, sans hard drive bracket.)
A dual Pentium Pro 180, with 3 GB SCSI hard drive
An old AMD computer, processor type forgotten. (Probably about a 400 Mhz) something.
Some sort of IDE raid card
About 12 hard drives totaling 8 GB of storage
And that's just the stuff I can see without turning my head. And based on other stories/comments/etc., I KNOW I'm nowhere near the worst "collector" out there.
It's not necessary to clean the brushes every run. According to this page, they recommend doing it every ten runs. Although I think most people could go with, "As needed." Picking up a lot of long hairs? You'll probably need to clean more often. Not much hair? You can probably do it less frequently. Just clean it when a big wad of hair accumulates at the ends of the brushes.
Anybody have the gamespot video available for download? The page is here, but you can't download unless you're a Gamespot Complete member.
Modern origami artists familiar with math
on
Origami and Math
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As it turns out, a lot of the best modern origami artists (in my opinion) are somehow technical: John Montroll and Peter Engel are mathematicians, and Robert Lang is an engineer. Even Dr. David Huffman (of Huffman compression fame) was into origami.
It isn't the sort of self-effacing joke that would be written by someone actually understands and works with what they are ridiculing.
Sure, some of the jokes are a little lame, and are traditional OS war fodder (an remember, at the time this book was written written, "OS religious war" most likely meant Unix v. VAX) But getting back to familiarity with unix: one of the punchlines in the book is:
find . -name '*.el' -print \ | sed 's/^FOO=/'|\ sed 's/$/; if [ ! -f \ ${FOO}C; then \ echo \ $FOO ; fi/' | sh
Come on, if anything that's a little overly familiar with Unix.
I read this book when it came out, when I was just a mere youth in the world of Unix. I actually learned a lot about Unix, both the history and actual day-to-day usage. It's clearly authored by a collection of people who love to hate unix and hate to love unix.
In the intervening nine years, a lot of the criticisms in this book have been addressed. Even at the time it was released, this was becoming true. A lot of the issues in the book have a solution, and its name is "Perl". But don't fool yourself; Unix still sucks in a lot of ways. The chapters criticizing X, for example, are unfortunately far too true today.
I hope the people who read this get the joke; that only a group of people intimately familiar with Unix could have produced such a book.
I don't think it's 9/11. I think people are afraid because of the SARS, and the possibility of being stuck in a confined space with an infected person.
(Not that I am afraid; I'm just saying that's what I think the problem is.)
Have the users in question been notified that they are the ones? It would suck if it turned out that it's me, and that the whole trouble is because I put my extensive "Yaz" collection up on Kazaa for a few days.
I would do it The Edward Teller way. If you're too lazy to click on the link, it may help to know that Edward Teller is known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb".
I was a student at UIUC at the time when Mosaic was developed, and I remember using it in the Sun and HP EWS labs. (Mosaic was installed and maintaned by students, in the lab-wide/scratch directory, for a while). I started using it right before the invention of the "IMG" tag. When it came along, that was a big deal. The NCSA "What's New on the web" page was updated with a few new web pages each day. And that was almost a comprehensive list!
In any case, the bigger deal for me was when the EWS lab manager (Ed Kubaitis, I think) installed httpd and students were allowed to created their own web pages and serve them worldwide via www.ews.uiuc.edu/~username/ urls. I realized that EVERYONE could be a content provider, not just a select few (as was the gopher model), and this was going to be unstoppable. I even HTML-ized the existing PovRay faq, put it on my student account, sent mail out to the PovRay mailing list, and had hits within a few minutes. That was a rush, too.
To encourage people to provide content (and get linked) I created the "UIUC People" page, which started as a list to every student homepage I knew about at UIUC. It had four entries. That quickly changed, as you can imagine.
I don't know who decided to add the "~username" syntax to httpd, allowing mere users to add content to the global web (was it a part of CERN, or did McCool add that to NCSA?) but I'm convinced that was a key factor in getting the early web going. It's certainly what got me interested.
First, you should check out the Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List, which does contain many of the classics you've read, but also has a lot of newer authors you haven't read. It also usually has a number of classics from authors such as Lem and Strugatsky that you may not know.
I agree with most of the suggestions given in this thread so far. I'd also suggest looking into: "Diaspora", Greg Egan; "A Fire Upon The Deep", Vernor Vinge; The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe.
After all, the cops, even though they have a warrant and some sort of indication that you have illegal material, will probably just give up without looking in the attic. I mean, who would think someone might hide stuff up there? I learned this trick from the "porn computer in the attic article."
I think that the stippled screen is sort of the worst-case for the analog output from your video card being converted to a digital representation. And this whole thing is probably obvious to some people. But if you'll induldge me...
When the image is stippled, you've got basically a high-to-low or low-to-high transition on every pixel. But remember, this is coming in as an analog signal, so it looks like a smoothed-off square wave, maybe even close to a sine wave. The monitor samples this signal so that it can display it digitally. Unfortunately, if there's any time jitter, the sample level error will be large...after all, it's got maximal slope at every pixel.
The point I'm trying to make? When you have the stippled screen, you're going to see a large sample error due to any time jitter at every pixel. This means the image shimmers.
Normal images don't shimmer because any jitter results in a less dramatic sample error, since sharp transitions don't occur at every pixel.
In any case, if the quality of your shutdown screen is important to you (and who doesn't think that's important) I think that a digital input would improve the image.;)
Okay, maybe that's pretty flimsy, but in my own case, I look for and latch onto even the thinnest logic in order to rationalize an upgrade. Hope I helped.:)
It depends on the monitor and your own tastes. If you look around, you can find monitors that are ok on response time--definitely better than typical laptop displays. The monitor I mentioned has a 25ms response time, and there are already monitors that beat it. In practical terms, you can definitely tell the difference between this monitor and a good CRT, if you're looking for it. But I think my brain interprets the blur as a slight "motion blur", because when I'm in the midst of a game, I never notice it.:)
Additionally, the monitor is nice in a lot of other ways that I wouldn't want to give up for a CRT. Of course, you get what you pay for. Viewing angle, contrast, brightness, and response time vary wildly from the low end to the high end, so you have to shop around.
Anantech reviewed a Hitatchi monitor that advertises 16ms response time, which should be quite excellent. Unfortunately, it sounds like the reviewer still noticed some blurring. The monitor sounds pretty nice in spite of that, though.
If you're thinking that LCD monitors won't be common at lan parties, it appears not to be the case. People have all sorts of equipment and computer accessories that you can peruse, some of it of a rather dubious quality. As it looks "cool", it gets purchased.
Slashdot Mirror
Teacher Killer 2K4, Cop Killer 2004 Season
Those games sound freakin' sweet. Where can I buy them?
Kidding aside (somewhat) I always sort of secretly hoped that all these violent video games would turn me into an unstoppable killing machine, like Rambo or Charlton Heston. But the unfortunate reality is that the thousands of hours spent playing games really just improved my mousing skills.
Need something clicked on, in a rapid and ultra-violent manner? I'm definitely your man. Need someone offed in real life? You probably wouldn't call me.
I guess what I'm saying is: If video games are supposed to cause violent behaviour, I think I got ripped off.
Mr. Pink: You kill anybody?
Mr. White: A few cops.
Mr. Pink: No real people?
Mr. White: Just cops.
It's simply an untaken hypothetical alternative that is striking only because it is so different than the reality that was chosen.
Are you smoking something?
WinXP is FAR more stable then Win95 ever was.
I agree. Unfortunately, you've utterly and completely missed my point. For the same effort (on Microsoft's part) over the last 10 years, you could today have "Super Stable Microsoft OS", which never crashed, but because of the effort required to achieve that stability, the OS would only have the feature set of Win95. Or you could have "Moderately Stable Microsoft OS" which crashes sometimes but has the feature set of WinXP.
MS chose the second path. The first, untaken path, "Super Stable Win 95" is hypothetical and does not exist, hence the reason I said "hypothetical alternative".
People upgrade for new features. That computer/OS/gizmo you have today does a lot more than the one from 10 years ago. That's a lot more code that needs to be written, and thus a lot more opportunity for errors. It's that simple.
(I'm actually ok with that. I'd rather have a moderately crashy Windows XP box capable of playing GTA:Vice City than the hypothetical alternative: a super-stable Windows95, capable only of playing "Doom 2".)
Let me in on the final solution, since I have quite a large amount of computer crap, including:
And that's just the stuff I can see without turning my head. And based on other stories/comments/etc., I KNOW I'm nowhere near the worst "collector" out there.
It's not necessary to clean the brushes every run. According to this page, they recommend doing it every ten runs. Although I think most people could go with, "As needed." Picking up a lot of long hairs? You'll probably need to clean more often. Not much hair? You can probably do it less frequently. Just clean it when a big wad of hair accumulates at the ends of the brushes.
Anybody have the gamespot video available for download? The page is here, but you can't download unless you're a Gamespot Complete member.
As it turns out, a lot of the best modern origami artists (in my opinion) are somehow technical: John Montroll and Peter Engel are mathematicians, and Robert Lang is an engineer. Even Dr. David Huffman (of Huffman compression fame) was into origami.
Lang has a pretty cool program called TreeMaker which lets him specify a model's "base" characteristics (like a stick figure) and algorithmically produces a fold pattern! Lang also has some of the most fiendishly complex origami I've ever attempted. (And yes, I have to say "attempted" on most of his insect models, not "completed".)
You're almost certainly thinking of Dan Farmer's SATAN. Read the story for yourself.
If the cable companies and the government made it illegal for TiVo to carry schedules for their cable programming, for example.
Yeah, I know it sounds ridiculous, but these things always do.
I nominate Roomba. It's arguably the first cheap and practical consumer robot, and it's definitely the first non-toy robot I've ever owned.
It isn't the sort of self-effacing joke that would be written by someone actually understands and works with what they are ridiculing.
Sure, some of the jokes are a little lame, and are traditional OS war fodder (an remember, at the time this book was written written, "OS religious war" most likely meant Unix v. VAX) But getting back to familiarity with unix: one of the punchlines in the book is:
Come on, if anything that's a little overly familiar with Unix.
I read this book when it came out, when I was just a mere youth in the world of Unix. I actually learned a lot about Unix, both the history and actual day-to-day usage. It's clearly authored by a collection of people who love to hate unix and hate to love unix.
In the intervening nine years, a lot of the criticisms in this book have been addressed. Even at the time it was released, this was becoming true. A lot of the issues in the book have a solution, and its name is "Perl". But don't fool yourself; Unix still sucks in a lot of ways. The chapters criticizing X, for example, are unfortunately far too true today.
I hope the people who read this get the joke; that only a group of people intimately familiar with Unix could have produced such a book.
I don't think it's 9/11. I think people are afraid because of the SARS, and the possibility of being stuck in a confined space with an infected person.
(Not that I am afraid; I'm just saying that's what I think the problem is.)
Have the users in question been notified that they are the ones? It would suck if it turned out that it's me, and that the whole trouble is because I put my extensive "Yaz" collection up on Kazaa for a few days.
Picky picky. My other suggestion was going to be "crash a small asteroid into it." :)
I would do it The Edward Teller way. If you're too lazy to click on the link, it may help to know that Edward Teller is known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb".
I was a student at UIUC at the time when Mosaic was developed, and I remember using it in the Sun and HP EWS labs. (Mosaic was installed and maintaned by students, in the lab-wide /scratch directory, for a while). I started using it right before the invention of the "IMG" tag. When it came along, that was a big deal. The NCSA "What's New on the web" page was updated with a few new web pages each day. And that was almost a comprehensive list!
In any case, the bigger deal for me was when the EWS lab manager (Ed Kubaitis, I think) installed httpd and students were allowed to created their own web pages and serve them worldwide via www.ews.uiuc.edu/~username/ urls. I realized that EVERYONE could be a content provider, not just a select few (as was the gopher model), and this was going to be unstoppable. I even HTML-ized the existing PovRay faq, put it on my student account, sent mail out to the PovRay mailing list, and had hits within a few minutes. That was a rush, too.
To encourage people to provide content (and get linked) I created the "UIUC People" page, which started as a list to every student homepage I knew about at UIUC. It had four entries. That quickly changed, as you can imagine.
I don't know who decided to add the "~username" syntax to httpd, allowing mere users to add content to the global web (was it a part of CERN, or did McCool add that to NCSA?) but I'm convinced that was a key factor in getting the early web going. It's certainly what got me interested.
First, you should check out the Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List, which does contain many of the classics you've read, but also has a lot of newer authors you haven't read. It also usually has a number of classics from authors such as Lem and Strugatsky that you may not know.
I agree with most of the suggestions given in this thread so far. I'd also suggest looking into: "Diaspora", Greg Egan; "A Fire Upon The Deep", Vernor Vinge; The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe.
After all, the cops, even though they have a warrant and some sort of indication that you have illegal material, will probably just give up without looking in the attic. I mean, who would think someone might hide stuff up there? I learned this trick from the "porn computer in the attic article."
I think that the stippled screen is sort of the worst-case for the analog output from your video card being converted to a digital representation. And this whole thing is probably obvious to some people. But if you'll induldge me...
When the image is stippled, you've got basically a high-to-low or low-to-high transition on every pixel. But remember, this is coming in as an analog signal, so it looks like a smoothed-off square wave, maybe even close to a sine wave. The monitor samples this signal so that it can display it digitally. Unfortunately, if there's any time jitter, the sample level error will be large...after all, it's got maximal slope at every pixel.
The point I'm trying to make? When you have the stippled screen, you're going to see a large sample error due to any time jitter at every pixel. This means the image shimmers.
Normal images don't shimmer because any jitter results in a less dramatic sample error, since sharp transitions don't occur at every pixel.
In any case, if the quality of your shutdown screen is important to you (and who doesn't think that's important) I think that a digital input would improve the image. ;)
Okay, maybe that's pretty flimsy, but in my own case, I look for and latch onto even the thinnest logic in order to rationalize an upgrade. Hope I helped. :)
The only thing I've noticed with my 171P is that stipple effects (like in Win2k when you hit shutdown) seem to flicker pretty bad
Are you using the analog or digital input?
It depends on the monitor and your own tastes. If you look around, you can find monitors that are ok on response time--definitely better than typical laptop displays. The monitor I mentioned has a 25ms response time, and there are already monitors that beat it. In practical terms, you can definitely tell the difference between this monitor and a good CRT, if you're looking for it. But I think my brain interprets the blur as a slight "motion blur", because when I'm in the midst of a game, I never notice it. :)
Additionally, the monitor is nice in a lot of other ways that I wouldn't want to give up for a CRT. Of course, you get what you pay for. Viewing angle, contrast, brightness, and response time vary wildly from the low end to the high end, so you have to shop around.
Anantech reviewed a Hitatchi monitor that advertises 16ms response time, which should be quite excellent. Unfortunately, it sounds like the reviewer still noticed some blurring. The monitor sounds pretty nice in spite of that, though.
If you're thinking that LCD monitors won't be common at lan parties, it appears not to be the case. People have all sorts of equipment and computer accessories that you can peruse, some of it of a rather dubious quality. As it looks "cool", it gets purchased.
Ok, it might not be a good general solution, but that's where I saw the totally boss Samsung 171P, and thus that was the next monitor I bought.
And yes, I did just use the phrase "totally boss". Deal with it.