Anyway, learn the politics they are going to be everywhere.
This is so true. I know several people who lost their jobs due to politics. Stupid fucking internal fighting showing that the company has lost its competitive stance and is now "competing" with itself.
Beware of politics. Not everyone who treats you nice is your friend, nor has your best interests in mind. I'm shaking a little right now, because I'm so pissed at these events I couldn't stop. No lack of skills on their part, or enthusiasm, track record, etc. -- they just butted heads with a 600-lb gorilla who likes to fire people to show who's the boss.
Make sure you don't get caught in the cross-fire -- threatening someone's job (which you (the submitter )did to the lady MCSE, whether he understands it or not) isn't the best way to keep your head down.
If the goal here is really to eliminate the "Slashdot Effect" a much more effective solution would be to set up a network of load-balanced caching proxies on geographically distributed fat pipes.
I started a project to help distribute the load. So far I've written code to pull out all the links from each Slashdot story. What's left is to cache those links, then transform the Slashdot main page HTML so that it points to the cached versions.
If anyone's interested in taking this further, you can find the Perl code here.
Then just set up some machines (say, 3 to start just to test it), and cache the main page to all three machines, generating different HTML pages for each machine. When a new request comes in, round-robin it to the 3 machines. (Better algorithms can come later.)
I agree with what you say about geographically distributing them, though, which would need to be handled by an entity with money (i.e., VA?).
Heh, I think you just invented (or possibly, used) a new karma-whoring technique.
Me, I'd pay good money to visit a (Chinese) moon base -- but not the ISS. It's too cramped in there. A moon base would have the "luxury" of being able to spread a little more (either under a roof or dug into the ground). It's not zero-G, but sex would still be a little more... energetic.;-)
Their replies were slightly mechanistic, and it is clear (to me, yvmv) that Microsoft has no intention of giving up the information I provided to open my hotmail account.
I didn't quite parse your acronym. Were you trying to say, "Your Victimization May Vary?"
All they have to do is multiply the extreme by 2.2169312169312171428571428571429, and then the book will burn prior to the chip.
Does that satisfy your numerical integrity?
For those interested: I used that page to generate the C from 451F (which is 232.7777777777778C), then divided that by 105C to result in the above number. Note that C/C cancels out, so we're left with just a number, no units, for the calculation.
Haven't though that hard since college. Thanks!;-)
Final jab: your post appears to be missing some formatting. Perhaps you should have hit "Preview" in addition to "thinking" prior to posting?
To be nicer: when you want to put a "<" or ">" in a post, you need to specify it as "<" or ">", respectively. (And, obviously since I managed to do it, the "&" character is specified by "&". Enjoy!
I was going to put the following in my original response but I decided not to. My oven (topical! See subject line) caught fire last night. Had 2 police cars, fire truck, and ambulance come out. Burned my hand removing the pot, but that'll heal. Aerosmith's bassist had his
house burn to the ground last night as well. He's in MA, I'm in FL. No relation.
(Moderators: I know this is off-topic to the story, but it is on-topic to the discussion. And to the site in general. And I'm posting with no +1 bonus. Thanks.)
Since most articles are/.ed as soon as they are posted. I think a great feature for subscribers would be a mirror to each article that is hosted on slashdot.
In a separate response to your post, I said I was working on Perl code to mirror stories' articles.
It's not complete yet; right now it grabs the/. page and splits it into stories, then splits each story into links. Then it prints each link.
The next part is to load each link (and images? What about multi-page articles?), and cache it somewhere. Then update the/. page, replacing each link mirrored with the mirrored location.
I know the lameness filter won't allow posting of code, so here is the script.
Holy mackerel! I am in love. I've found the object of my dreams.
"Hol[e]y rusted metal, Batman!"
Yes, I'm offtopic again. Mod me down.
Actually, Befunge looks like a lot more work than traditional procedural languages. What actual benefits does it offer? (Apart from "I can think in a language that causes your brain pain!")
Since most articles are/.ed as soon as they are posted. I think a great feature for subscribers would be a mirror to each article that is hosted on slashdot.
I'm currently working on Perl code to do just that. Haven't gotten very far yet, but the idea is automation -- write it once and let it mirror every article it sees.
If anyone else has already done this, or something like it, I could use the help.;-)
To get back on-topic, perhaps we could burn that code into an FPGA so mirror update faster. (Yeah, right. You're gonna lose karma.)
Your solution sounds good at first, but it fails to take into account the many channels of sound that most movies have (Dolby THX, for instance - my almost-local cinema has LOTS of speakers to send THX sound through).
You've got a point. Perhaps there's a market for enhanced headphones, which have several speakers per ear to reproduce the sound with all the channels, positioned correctly.
This would probably be rental, and as the other response pointed out, theft would be mostly eliminated by telling the audience about the ID chips in the headphones. Damage would still be a factor. And the theater could even save money by telling the customers they're being watched, and not installing the chip.
Hey, it's worked for religion all these years.;-) (I'm not discounting the existence of a higher power; fact is we have no evidence, nor do the people who want to control you using the existence sans evidence.)
"Private Industry should be allowed into space...imagine if the computer industry had worked on space travel---we'd already been to Mars and our space ship wouldn't be as old as my grandfather =)"
Yeah, and all the signposts would be like:
"Venus 200,000m.
Have you got a HOTMAIL ACCOUNT yet?
Presented by Microsoft."
Or:
Space is Big
Space is Dark
It's Hard to Find
A Place to Park.
Brought to you by Burma Shave.
Ahhhh.... Brings back memories.... Of my Amiga 3000 in 1990, with a 386 BridgeBoard and an Emplant card, with these two cards I was able to run PC software in a window on my Amiga Workbench, AND have a Macintosh running in its own screen behind the Workbench.
I've got you beat: back in 1983, my parents bought me an IBM PC as I was entering high school. The high school had Apple ][s, which I wanted so as to be compatible. We looked for a solution, and found one: the QuadLink, by QuadRAM. It's an octopus board (it had cables going everywhere inside the box) which allows you to hit Ctrl+Alt+A to go into "Apple mode" and Ctrl+Alt+I to get back to "IBM mode".
Everything worked fine, even the games we cracked.;-)
It's fun to be 12 years ahead of your time.
So I was 19 years ahead.;-) (The entire solution was ungodly in price, something like $7,000 -- it's difficult to pay that much for a gaming machine these days, let alone a net/email/word processing machine.)
However, I think that the solution is to make fewer and better quality films, and (personal gripe) to show them in theatres with a strict "Shut the hell up and don't bring your damn chattering hyperactive kids, you morons" policy, rather than doing what they're doing, which is dumbing down, going for quantity over quality, and shrieking for legislation to protect their profits.
Just thought of a solution for that: have a headphone jack installed in every armrest.
For the fancier theatres, they can even provide headphones (rental, most likely, to avoid damage/theft).
And (to be on-topic) this has the side benefit of giving tapers a way to avoid sneezes/laughter/that hollow sound.;-)
The jacks would be a somewhat large expense, however; perhaps they could simply install a couple wireless headset broadcasters (different channels for adjacent theatres, of course). Then rent either headphones or a receiver with a headphone plug if the viewer wants to bring their own.
When an American governmental organization buys a software license, it's almost always money going to a tax-paying U.S. corporation, which provides jobs for U.S. workers, who themselves pay U.S. taxes.
Be that as it may, I still think it's gross misappropriation of taxpayer dollars to "invest" in keeping Microsoft's monopoly status.
The government money goes to a tax-paying U.S. corporation. So for every $1 of citizen-contributed dollars that go to this company, perhaps 20c will come back in the form of taxes. This is an 80% loss on this investment. Not very smart to me.
Add in the taxes from workers paychecks, and perhaps we're up to only a 50% loss. It's still negligent treatment of entrusted funds.
Anyone younger care to say what they feel on DOOM vs a more recent FPS?
I was a couple years out of college when Doom came out. I remember distinctly two events:
Playing Doom enough that when I came to a window in the game, looking down on the courtyard (which I always thought of as Jeremy, possibly because that Pearl Jam album had just come out then) -- and I sat up straighter and craned my neck to see what was out the window.
Walking down the halls of my workplace -- looking for guns and ammo.
The first is cool because the game had no z-level -- there could be raised floors, but there could never be anything under them. For a game with no z-level to make me believe it enough to crane my neck is impressive.
The second is just freaky, and I think I may have scared some people discussing it at lunch.;-)
To answer your question, I enjoy Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, but they don't "grip" me like DOOM did.
One of my favorite games lately has been Sacrifice, which has a somewhat-first-person-view (camera is behind the wizard). The best part is to have an easily-mapped "pause" key (I use "x" since movement is with the WASD method). Then you can really direct your creatures to their fullest extent -- many of them have powers that, during the heat of battle would be difficult to activate. Pausing makes a huge difference in the outcome.;-)
I tried Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but it was very dark and jerky. Perhaps that was just the beta version; I deleted it.
I think it's like heroin or cocaine or any number of drugs for which the body develops a tolerance: it will never be as good as the first time. It cannot be, because of the chemistry involved. Similarly, I've already been surprised by a videogame. I'm not sure it'll happen again, at least not to the same extent. And I miss that. Guess I'm just getting old.
I recall that the "TiVo community" has been reluctant to produce software that works around the $10/month charge that subscribers pay.
I wonder if the "ReplayTV community" is so reluctant to do this in order to avoid the (government-mandated!) spying. SonicBlue recently announced that they'd be moving to a subscription model, but for the existing units it wouldn't cause any loss of revenue.
For the 4000 series, it's easy (and I think has already been done), since they have a broadband connection.
But I own a 2020 model (no captions even!), which only connects through the phone line. Considering a solution, I would have to put a phone-line-simulator on it, so it would get a dial tone. Then put a modem on the other side of the simulator. The easy part is then just figuring out the protocol.;-)
The only problem with DIY PVRs is the box and the remote. I wonder if it would be possible to look to SonicBlue's suppliers, so we could have a custom-made box and a remote to go with it. Most everything else is standard, inside. Could be marketed as "Convert your old PC into a PVR!" or something like that.
They would actually like to be fined massively (as a final, no other restrictions remedy) - out of existence is almost impossible given how much cash they have, and without the shackles, they'll just tack it onto the cost of the next version of windows and office.
Then a good remedy would be to split them into three companies (OS, IE, Office); publish the APIs and file formats; and fine them triple damages as to the damage they did consumers.
Fine them $120 billion. Take the $40 billion they illegally obtained, as well as their profits from their three divisions for the next 30 years.
I mean, don't they take away your car and house and accuse the item of a crime (RICO) in cases involving much smaller dollar amounts than this one? Shouldn't there be some provision of RICO that could be used to accuse Microsoft's bank account of a crime and sieze it?
I have a Starband setup Linux WILL NOT work with the new 360 model because you need the netgain client which is not availible in linux you can read up on it at http://www.starbandusers.com .
I wonder, has anyone tried running the driver under WINE? Seems like a good first step. (I checked the site, no word on Linux.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Send more cops."
"Send more paramedics."
This is so true. I know several people who lost their jobs due to politics. Stupid fucking internal fighting showing that the company has lost its competitive stance and is now "competing" with itself.
Beware of politics. Not everyone who treats you nice is your friend, nor has your best interests in mind. I'm shaking a little right now, because I'm so pissed at these events I couldn't stop. No lack of skills on their part, or enthusiasm, track record, etc. -- they just butted heads with a 600-lb gorilla who likes to fire people to show who's the boss.
Make sure you don't get caught in the cross-fire -- threatening someone's job (which you (the submitter )did to the lady MCSE, whether he understands it or not) isn't the best way to keep your head down.
Or you'll all become the next round of layoffs. Tread carefully; it's a buyer's job market.
I started a project to help distribute the load. So far I've written code to pull out all the links from each Slashdot story. What's left is to cache those links, then transform the Slashdot main page HTML so that it points to the cached versions.
If anyone's interested in taking this further, you can find the Perl code here .
Then just set up some machines (say, 3 to start just to test it), and cache the main page to all three machines, generating different HTML pages for each machine. When a new request comes in, round-robin it to the 3 machines. (Better algorithms can come later.)
I agree with what you say about geographically distributing them, though, which would need to be handled by an entity with money (i.e., VA?).
Heh, I think you just invented (or possibly, used) a new karma-whoring technique.
Me, I'd pay good money to visit a (Chinese) moon base -- but not the ISS. It's too cramped in there. A moon base would have the "luxury" of being able to spread a little more (either under a roof or dug into the ground). It's not zero-G, but sex would still be a little more ... energetic. ;-)
You can find the former at Pricewatch
And here's a link to VHS->DVD units; I haven't found any DVD->VHS units in my quick searching.
I didn't quite parse your acronym. Were you trying to say, "Your Victimization May Vary?"
I'm wokring on my foruth beer. I hope its' not obvisou.
Does that satisfy your numerical integrity?
For those interested: I used that page to generate the C from 451F (which is 232.7777777777778C), then divided that by 105C to result in the above number. Note that C/C cancels out, so we're left with just a number, no units, for the calculation.
Haven't though that hard since college. Thanks! ;-)
Final jab: your post appears to be missing some formatting. Perhaps you should have hit "Preview" in addition to "thinking" prior to posting?
To be nicer: when you want to put a "<" or ">" in a post, you need to specify it as "<" or ">", respectively. (And, obviously since I managed to do it, the "&" character is specified by "&". Enjoy!
I was going to put the following in my original response but I decided not to. My oven (topical! See subject line) caught fire last night. Had 2 police cars, fire truck, and ambulance come out. Burned my hand removing the pot, but that'll heal. Aerosmith's bassist had his house burn to the ground last night as well. He's in MA, I'm in FL. No relation.
The chips work up to an extreme of around 105C, which works out to be 221F (cool converter here ).
All they have to do is double the extreme, and then the book will burn prior to the chip.
I wouldn't have known this if not for Ray Bradbury . Thanks!
I LOL when I read your comment.
Not because of the comment itself; rather, that "Drunken_Jackass" was discussing WINE.
In a separate response to your post, I said I was working on Perl code to mirror stories' articles.
It's not complete yet; right now it grabs the /. page and splits it into stories, then splits each story into links. Then it prints each link.
The next part is to load each link (and images? What about multi-page articles?), and cache it somewhere. Then update the /. page, replacing each link mirrored with the mirrored location.
I know the lameness filter won't allow posting of code, so here is the script.
Waitaminit -- these people are leftists, right? You'd think they'd be for welfare, wouldn't you? ;-)
"Hol[e]y rusted metal, Batman!"
Yes, I'm offtopic again. Mod me down.
Actually, Befunge looks like a lot more work than traditional procedural languages. What actual benefits does it offer? (Apart from "I can think in a language that causes your brain pain!")
I'm currently working on Perl code to do just that. Haven't gotten very far yet, but the idea is automation -- write it once and let it mirror every article it sees.
If anyone else has already done this, or something like it, I could use the help. ;-)
To get back on-topic, perhaps we could burn that code into an FPGA so mirror update faster. (Yeah, right. You're gonna lose karma.)
You've got a point. Perhaps there's a market for enhanced headphones, which have several speakers per ear to reproduce the sound with all the channels, positioned correctly.
This would probably be rental, and as the other response pointed out, theft would be mostly eliminated by telling the audience about the ID chips in the headphones. Damage would still be a factor. And the theater could even save money by telling the customers they're being watched, and not installing the chip.
Hey, it's worked for religion all these years. ;-) (I'm not discounting the existence of a higher power; fact is we have no evidence, nor do the people who want to control you using the existence sans evidence.)
Or:
Space is Big
Space is Dark
It's Hard to Find
A Place to Park.
Brought to you by Burma Shave.
Historical, hysterical, and on-topic! ;-)
I've got you beat: back in 1983, my parents bought me an IBM PC as I was entering high school. The high school had Apple ][s, which I wanted so as to be compatible. We looked for a solution, and found one: the QuadLink, by QuadRAM. It's an octopus board (it had cables going everywhere inside the box) which allows you to hit Ctrl+Alt+A to go into "Apple mode" and Ctrl+Alt+I to get back to "IBM mode".
Everything worked fine, even the games we cracked. ;-)
So I was 19 years ahead.Just thought of a solution for that: have a headphone jack installed in every armrest.
For the fancier theatres, they can even provide headphones (rental, most likely, to avoid damage/theft).
And (to be on-topic) this has the side benefit of giving tapers a way to avoid sneezes/laughter/that hollow sound. ;-)
The jacks would be a somewhat large expense, however; perhaps they could simply install a couple wireless headset broadcasters (different channels for adjacent theatres, of course). Then rent either headphones or a receiver with a headphone plug if the viewer wants to bring their own.
Or another:
The dog tried to trap the cat in the dryer with a sign labeled "CAT FUD".
(Thanks Gary Larson)
Be that as it may, I still think it's gross misappropriation of taxpayer dollars to "invest" in keeping Microsoft's monopoly status.
The government money goes to a tax-paying U.S. corporation. So for every $1 of citizen-contributed dollars that go to this company, perhaps 20c will come back in the form of taxes. This is an 80% loss on this investment. Not very smart to me.
Add in the taxes from workers paychecks, and perhaps we're up to only a 50% loss. It's still negligent treatment of entrusted funds.
I was a couple years out of college when Doom came out. I remember distinctly two events:
The first is cool because the game had no z-level -- there could be raised floors, but there could never be anything under them. For a game with no z-level to make me believe it enough to crane my neck is impressive.
The second is just freaky, and I think I may have scared some people discussing it at lunch. ;-)
To answer your question, I enjoy Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, but they don't "grip" me like DOOM did.
One of my favorite games lately has been Sacrifice, which has a somewhat-first-person-view (camera is behind the wizard). The best part is to have an easily-mapped "pause" key (I use "x" since movement is with the WASD method). Then you can really direct your creatures to their fullest extent -- many of them have powers that, during the heat of battle would be difficult to activate. Pausing makes a huge difference in the outcome. ;-)
I tried Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but it was very dark and jerky. Perhaps that was just the beta version; I deleted it.
I think it's like heroin or cocaine or any number of drugs for which the body develops a tolerance: it will never be as good as the first time. It cannot be, because of the chemistry involved. Similarly, I've already been surprised by a videogame. I'm not sure it'll happen again, at least not to the same extent. And I miss that. Guess I'm just getting old.
I completely agree.
I recall that the "TiVo community" has been reluctant to produce software that works around the $10/month charge that subscribers pay.
I wonder if the "ReplayTV community" is so reluctant to do this in order to avoid the (government-mandated!) spying. SonicBlue recently announced that they'd be moving to a subscription model, but for the existing units it wouldn't cause any loss of revenue.
For the 4000 series, it's easy (and I think has already been done), since they have a broadband connection.
But I own a 2020 model (no captions even!), which only connects through the phone line. Considering a solution, I would have to put a phone-line-simulator on it, so it would get a dial tone. Then put a modem on the other side of the simulator. The easy part is then just figuring out the protocol. ;-)
The only problem with DIY PVRs is the box and the remote. I wonder if it would be possible to look to SonicBlue's suppliers, so we could have a custom-made box and a remote to go with it. Most everything else is standard, inside. Could be marketed as "Convert your old PC into a PVR!" or something like that.
Then a good remedy would be to split them into three companies (OS, IE, Office); publish the APIs and file formats; and fine them triple damages as to the damage they did consumers.
Fine them $120 billion. Take the $40 billion they illegally obtained, as well as their profits from their three divisions for the next 30 years.
I mean, don't they take away your car and house and accuse the item of a crime (RICO) in cases involving much smaller dollar amounts than this one? Shouldn't there be some provision of RICO that could be used to accuse Microsoft's bank account of a crime and sieze it?
I wonder, has anyone tried running the driver under WINE? Seems like a good first step. (I checked the site, no word on Linux.)