It's not being a taxpayer that gives someone a stake in the government - it's being a citizen, and having a vote. That means that a lifelong welfare recipient and a survivalist hermit, neither of whom pay a dollar of tax in their lives, have a representative in Washington who is supposed to look out for their interests and listen to their concerns.
In theory, yes. In practice, both of the citizens you cite are going to be statistical outliers in whatever district their representative advocates for, and their concerns are unlikely to align with the concerns of the majority of citizens in that district: the middle class salarymen and salarywomen, aka the tax base. And if some of those citizens band together and pool resources to form organizations to effectively express their concerns...
I'm assuming you meant "worse than flipping a coin". But this was not a heads/tails judgment; it was "for this given defect, is it Highly Likely, Somewhat Likely, or Not Very Likely that it will be exploited"?
The best way to fight a derogatory term is to take it back. A group trying to run away from a word with negative connotations is simply running on a treadmill, each new euphemism becoming an insult in a few years. (e.g. Retarded -> Mentally Disabled -> Differently Abled etc.)
On the other hand, for each derogatory term that a group reclaims, a new pejorative will be coined to take its place. If you're proud to be a Gimp, they'll start calling you a Feeb.
I am not sure how well the device has aged with all the new netbooks that are available.
The OLPC XO-1 is not and was never intended as a general-purpose netbook. Yes, it's possible to read Slashdot and play Doom and compile a Linux kernel on it, but that's only a side-effect. The hardware was specifically designed to be low-cost and geared towards primary-school-aged children.
- hand crank (did they provide it this time?)
In the developed world, a hand crank is even more a novelty than the XO-1 itself is.
It will come with an AC adapter suitable to mains power in your country; if you really truly need dynamo power, you can salvage one from an emergency radio.
- wifi mesh
Really only useful for collaborating with other OLPC users in your immediate vicinity.
I am not shopping this year but I am afraid I would not choose the OLPC. Maybe I would get it for my kid though, I wonder.
Now you're beginning to see things the way OLPC wants you to.
The only one with an actual interesting answer was Red Hat.
Which is at least in part apocryphal. Anybody who's been to Lynah Rink or the basement lab in Upson Hall knows that red Cornell hats turn orange rapidly with regular wear. There's no way that "his grandfather's lacrosse cap" would still be recognizably red, some 40-plus years after first being worn.
Semi-OT I know, but if you haven't seen "Whatever, Martha!", make a point of looking it up. Martha Stewart's daughter and a friend of hers sit and watch old tapes of the Martha Stewart show and make snarky comments - it reminds me exactly of MST3K - think MST3K meets Martha Stewart.
Is this the "recommend shows inspired by MST3K" section of the thread?
If so, I endorse tracking down some digital copies of "Cheap Seats", which ran for a few seasons on ESPN Classics. The premise: tape librarians Randy and Jason Sklar make fun of sports footage. The footage in question leans heavily towards "Wide World Of Sports" and spelling bee coverage, so the show was enjoyable even to non-jocks.
Mike & The Bots even made a guest appearance in one episode, riffing on the Sklars as they riff on footage of an 'International Breaking Competition'.
But, of course, not many people saw the KTMA run, so really The Crawling Eye is where most of us remember the show starting...
Last I heard, the first few episodes of the KTMA season were still MIA, with possibly the only existing copies residing in Jim Mallon's Best Brains vault.
I know from the KTMA dubs I've seen not to expect much, but it sure would be nice for historical completeness if those first few episodes were somehow leaked onto the internet for distribution...
similar to hobbyist game makers of just 20, 30 years ago, and how there is no way they could compete on the same footing with modern mainline game studios and the high end graphical renderings they crank out
Good analogy.
Difference is, game hobbyists are still able to tinker today with the technology that was considered state-of-the-art 30 years ago, and that tinkering is still producing fruit. If you'd asked Atari's hardware designers in 1977 whether the 2600 VCS console would ever be able to play a clip of full-motion video, you'd be laughed at. A couple years ago, homebrewers made it happen.
This access to the trailing edge isn't necessarily available to hobbyists in other fields anymore. It's a crapshoot whether an electronics hobbyist will be able to find a breadboard kit and a soldering iron in his local Radio Shack anymore. Modern chemistry sets don't have anything more dangerous/interesting than phenolpthalien solution. And good luck buying a model rocket engine without submitting to a criminal background check anymore.
Ubuntu Netbook remix is much nicer on the ultra-portable than OSX or Windows, 64 bit Windows is required on the gaming machine, and Linux+XBMC does for the mediaboxen quite well.
You make a good argument for booting into different operating systems on different hardware, depending on usage requirments. What it doesn't address is why anybody would want to boot into different operating systems on the SAME hardware. If the hardware is "good for many things, perfect for none", why not use a single OS that matches that?
"Good" Game per Month (GGPM) Ratio Since most consoles were released in November, lets round up their ages by year. And assuming the score of 80 qualifies as a "good" game: - Wii: 36/24 = 1.5 GGPM
What this tells me is that if you have a gaming budget under $75/month, the approximate cost of one and one half retail titles, there are enough good games available no matter what platform(s) you own.
Of course, it also depends on whether we agree on your definition of "good game". I don't put much weight on the aggregate scores of sites like Metacritic, myself; I think their methodologies skew the results towards the preferences of "hardcore" gamers, and don't accurately reflect the gaming citizenry as a whole. The casual exerciser is going to think Wii Fit is a "good game", regardless of what the review says. The trend-conscious tween girl is going to think the latest Hannah Montana shovelware cash-in is a "good game", regardless of what the review says.
In short, a console should be judged based on whether *I* enjoy the experience it offers, not whether people who may be entirely unlike me do. By that measure, my Wii is a great console.
I eagerly await your implementation of Crysis for the Atari 2600.
There was an implicit condition of "assuming that the maximum theoretical performance of the limited and general platforms are identical", but you knew that, didn't you?
Ask yourself why all the games made for the Atari 2600 (excluding some recent homebrew titles) written in 6507 assembly code, rather than in a higher-level language? The principles of good software design were not unknown in the late 1970's; even home computers gave programmers a BASIC interpreter in ROM.
So why did 2600 coders write their own custom kernel for each game? Because if there were any more layers of abstraction involved, the most complex game possible on the hardware would have been simple Pong clones. Direct unfettered access to the crude graphics hardware and whopping 128 bytes of RAM was a necessity to coax any performance out of it.
That they can brag that they beat somebody. The fact that the somebody is old,wasn't good in the first place,and is about as quick as a dead opossum lying on the side of the road now,apparently doesn't matter.
I'd get what you're saying, except that in your metaphor something like sixty percent of the world uses a dead opossum to browse the web.
I did a degree in computer science 10 years ago using a computer which had less RAM and Mhz than my *phone* does now!
Your alma mater's accreditation should be revoked if you came away from there believing that raw clock speeds mean anything in relation to performance, especially across different CPU architectures. The 400MHz ARM CPU in your phone is simply not comparable to the 400MHz Pentium II you had in your desktop PC back in the day.
Stop pussyfooting around with the phrase "holiday season". If you mean Christmas, say Christmas!
Your persecution complex is showing.
Kwanzaa is a made-up thing, and Hanukkah is a more minor Jewish holiday than most gentiles recognize, but gifts are purchased and given by people in celebration of both of those holidays, and then some.
'Christmas season' is the misnomer, not 'holiday season'.
I think as more people get high def TV's, there's going to be less demand for the Wii.
Possibly true, but the economic slowdown means that the rate of HDTV adoption is going to start falling off. 'Standard' definition TV signals have been around for seventy years, many people aren't going to mind keeping them a few years more.
If we can put a color touchscreen monitor on the voting machines (why? I have no idea) we can surely instal a printer to print out a reciept for each voter, that can be dropped in the ballot box on the way out.
What happens when the printer jams, or it runs out of toner, or the voter doesn't bother to take the receipt as he leaves the booth, or doesn't bother to put his receipt into the redundant ballot box?
Printed ballots and pencils, tallied by hand. That's the simplest and therefore most appropriate tool for the job. Any other voting mechanism is over-engineered and susceptible to at least as many flaws.
The boss can easily phone you or walk up to you and say "Yes I want you to do it." and you have no record, and for many people this is their default mode of operation because that way no-one can pin anything on them.
When this happens, I simply send another email that says "Because you gave approval for this approach in our conversation this morning, I am now proceeding with it." If the shit hits the fan and the muckety-mucks are trying to decide who the scapegoat should be, a second-person account of the approval is better than nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not being a taxpayer that gives someone a stake in the government - it's being a citizen, and having a vote. That means that a lifelong welfare recipient and a survivalist hermit, neither of whom pay a dollar of tax in their lives, have a representative in Washington who is supposed to look out for their interests and listen to their concerns.
In theory, yes. In practice, both of the citizens you cite are going to be statistical outliers in whatever district their representative advocates for, and their concerns are unlikely to align with the concerns of the majority of citizens in that district: the middle class salarymen and salarywomen, aka the tax base. And if some of those citizens band together and pool resources to form organizations to effectively express their concerns...
Hint: 40% is worse than guessing.
I'm assuming you meant "worse than flipping a coin". But this was not a heads/tails judgment; it was "for this given defect, is it Highly Likely, Somewhat Likely, or Not Very Likely that it will be exploited"?
You must have a very boring life if you've never been without AC power for more than 3 hours.
You must have a very boring life if you can't go more than three hours without a computer.
Diagonal lines are as straight as any other lines.
Not on a raster display, they're not.
The best way to fight a derogatory term is to take it back. A group trying to run away from a word with negative connotations is simply running on a treadmill, each new euphemism becoming an insult in a few years. (e.g. Retarded -> Mentally Disabled -> Differently Abled etc.)
On the other hand, for each derogatory term that a group reclaims, a new pejorative will be coined to take its place. If you're proud to be a Gimp, they'll start calling you a Feeb.
I am not sure how well the device has aged with all the new netbooks that are available.
The OLPC XO-1 is not and was never intended as a general-purpose netbook. Yes, it's possible to read Slashdot and play Doom and compile a Linux kernel on it, but that's only a side-effect. The hardware was specifically designed to be low-cost and geared towards primary-school-aged children.
- hand crank (did they provide it this time?)
In the developed world, a hand crank is even more a novelty than the XO-1 itself is.
It will come with an AC adapter suitable to mains power in your country; if you really truly need dynamo power, you can salvage one from an emergency radio.
- wifi mesh
Really only useful for collaborating with other OLPC users in your immediate vicinity.
I am not shopping this year but I am afraid I would not choose the OLPC. Maybe I would get it for my kid though, I wonder.
Now you're beginning to see things the way OLPC wants you to.
The only one with an actual interesting answer was Red Hat.
Which is at least in part apocryphal. Anybody who's been to Lynah Rink or the basement lab in Upson Hall knows that red Cornell hats turn orange rapidly with regular wear. There's no way that "his grandfather's lacrosse cap" would still be recognizably red, some 40-plus years after first being worn.
Semi-OT I know, but if you haven't seen "Whatever, Martha!", make a point of looking it up. Martha Stewart's daughter and a friend of hers sit and watch old tapes of the Martha Stewart show and make snarky comments - it reminds me exactly of MST3K - think MST3K meets Martha Stewart.
Is this the "recommend shows inspired by MST3K" section of the thread?
If so, I endorse tracking down some digital copies of "Cheap Seats", which ran for a few seasons on ESPN Classics. The premise: tape librarians Randy and Jason Sklar make fun of sports footage. The footage in question leans heavily towards "Wide World Of Sports" and spelling bee coverage, so the show was enjoyable even to non-jocks.
Mike & The Bots even made a guest appearance in one episode, riffing on the Sklars as they riff on footage of an 'International Breaking Competition'.
But, of course, not many people saw the KTMA run, so really The Crawling Eye is where most of us remember the show starting...
Last I heard, the first few episodes of the KTMA season were still MIA, with possibly the only existing copies residing in Jim Mallon's Best Brains vault.
I know from the KTMA dubs I've seen not to expect much, but it sure would be nice for historical completeness if those first few episodes were somehow leaked onto the internet for distribution...
similar to hobbyist game makers of just 20, 30 years ago, and how there is no way they could compete on the same footing with modern mainline game studios and the high end graphical renderings they crank out
Good analogy.
Difference is, game hobbyists are still able to tinker today with the technology that was considered state-of-the-art 30 years ago, and that tinkering is still producing fruit. If you'd asked Atari's hardware designers in 1977 whether the 2600 VCS console would ever be able to play a clip of full-motion video, you'd be laughed at. A couple years ago, homebrewers made it happen.
This access to the trailing edge isn't necessarily available to hobbyists in other fields anymore. It's a crapshoot whether an electronics hobbyist will be able to find a breadboard kit and a soldering iron in his local Radio Shack anymore. Modern chemistry sets don't have anything more dangerous/interesting than phenolpthalien solution. And good luck buying a model rocket engine without submitting to a criminal background check anymore.
Viruses is the correct plural. Virii only makes you look like a pretentious fuckwit and is piss-poor Latin grammar.
Now that that's settled, we can move on to the next issue: the correct plural of 'Unix'. Is it 'Unices', or 'Unixen'?
I suppose I must trust them to somehow find a customer who's willing to pay exorbitant prices for an otherwise good idea.
Have you worked with any of Sun's customers recently? I believe P.T. Barnum was involved in the development of their business strategy.
go to any bar and I will almost guarantee that the sound is way too loud and NO ONE is watching/listening.
There already exists a device for this situation, and it is called "asking the staff of the bar if they wouldn't mind turning the TVs down/off".
Or, alternately, "leaving".
I like TV, but not all the time. Don't *I* have a right to some f*cking peace and quiet?
At home, absolutely. In public places, yes to a certain extent. In private establishments, no, very little.
Oh God. The LAST thing the Linux communities need is more developers creating their own user interfaces.
Ubuntu Netbook remix is much nicer on the ultra-portable than OSX or Windows, 64 bit Windows is required on the gaming machine, and Linux+XBMC does for the mediaboxen quite well.
You make a good argument for booting into different operating systems on different hardware, depending on usage requirments. What it doesn't address is why anybody would want to boot into different operating systems on the SAME hardware. If the hardware is "good for many things, perfect for none", why not use a single OS that matches that?
"Good" Game per Month (GGPM) Ratio Since most consoles were released in November, lets round up their ages by year. And assuming the score of 80 qualifies as a "good" game: - Wii: 36/24 = 1.5 GGPM
What this tells me is that if you have a gaming budget under $75/month, the approximate cost of one and one half retail titles, there are enough good games available no matter what platform(s) you own.
Of course, it also depends on whether we agree on your definition of "good game". I don't put much weight on the aggregate scores of sites like Metacritic, myself; I think their methodologies skew the results towards the preferences of "hardcore" gamers, and don't accurately reflect the gaming citizenry as a whole. The casual exerciser is going to think Wii Fit is a "good game", regardless of what the review says. The trend-conscious tween girl is going to think the latest Hannah Montana shovelware cash-in is a "good game", regardless of what the review says.
In short, a console should be judged based on whether *I* enjoy the experience it offers, not whether people who may be entirely unlike me do. By that measure, my Wii is a great console.
Why aren't the ridiculous cases refused?
Because our judicial system is based on the premise that a jury of laypeople, not a lawyer, should decide whether a claim is ridiculous or not?
I eagerly await your implementation of Crysis for the Atari 2600.
There was an implicit condition of "assuming that the maximum theoretical performance of the limited and general platforms are identical", but you knew that, didn't you?
Ask yourself why all the games made for the Atari 2600 (excluding some recent homebrew titles) written in 6507 assembly code, rather than in a higher-level language? The principles of good software design were not unknown in the late 1970's; even home computers gave programmers a BASIC interpreter in ROM.
So why did 2600 coders write their own custom kernel for each game? Because if there were any more layers of abstraction involved, the most complex game possible on the hardware would have been simple Pong clones. Direct unfettered access to the crude graphics hardware and whopping 128 bytes of RAM was a necessity to coax any performance out of it.
That they can brag that they beat somebody. The fact that the somebody is old,wasn't good in the first place,and is about as quick as a dead opossum lying on the side of the road now,apparently doesn't matter.
I'd get what you're saying, except that in your metaphor something like sixty percent of the world uses a dead opossum to browse the web.
I did a degree in computer science 10 years ago using a computer which had less RAM and Mhz than my *phone* does now!
Your alma mater's accreditation should be revoked if you came away from there believing that raw clock speeds mean anything in relation to performance, especially across different CPU architectures. The 400MHz ARM CPU in your phone is simply not comparable to the 400MHz Pentium II you had in your desktop PC back in the day.
Stop pussyfooting around with the phrase "holiday season". If you mean Christmas, say Christmas!
Your persecution complex is showing.
Kwanzaa is a made-up thing, and Hanukkah is a more minor Jewish holiday than most gentiles recognize, but gifts are purchased and given by people in celebration of both of those holidays, and then some.
'Christmas season' is the misnomer, not 'holiday season'.
not being trying to be nit-picky but without the motion sensing you only have like.. 4 buttons? Pretty sure every game uses motion sensing.
Ignoring motion-sensing, the core Wii remote has seven buttons (one of which is reserved for the Home menu by interface guidelines) and a 4-way D-pad.
Attaching the Nunchuk adds a digital thumbstick and two more buttons. That's just one button short of the dense and unweildy N64 controller.
Not that 'number of buttons' has any correlation with playability, anyway.
I think as more people get high def TV's, there's going to be less demand for the Wii.
Possibly true, but the economic slowdown means that the rate of HDTV adoption is going to start falling off. 'Standard' definition TV signals have been around for seventy years, many people aren't going to mind keeping them a few years more.
If we can put a color touchscreen monitor on the voting machines (why? I have no idea) we can surely instal a printer to print out a reciept for each voter, that can be dropped in the ballot box on the way out.
What happens when the printer jams, or it runs out of toner, or the voter doesn't bother to take the receipt as he leaves the booth, or doesn't bother to put his receipt into the redundant ballot box?
Printed ballots and pencils, tallied by hand. That's the simplest and therefore most appropriate tool for the job. Any other voting mechanism is over-engineered and susceptible to at least as many flaws.
The boss can easily phone you or walk up to you and say "Yes I want you to do it." and you have no record, and for many people this is their default mode of operation because that way no-one can pin anything on them.
When this happens, I simply send another email that says "Because you gave approval for this approach in our conversation this morning, I am now proceeding with it." If the shit hits the fan and the muckety-mucks are trying to decide who the scapegoat should be, a second-person account of the approval is better than nothing.