wow, forcing all incoming students to buy one? That sounds pretty rough, seems like you should have a pretty serious reason to do something like that, and at least ASK the students.. jeez.
This seems to be a popular topic recently, UCSD is researching uses for student PDAs on a wide scale. I believe several hundred UCSD freshman in CS are going to be semi-permanently "loaned" HP Journada PDAs in order to participate in this experiment on a wider scale.. cool stuff check here for more info:
http://www.calit2.net/education/activeweb.html
Why are people so obsessed with Computer cases
on
Case Tweaking
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It somehow seems strange that people can be so obsessed with computer cases. I'm all for cool/personal cases but wow how much work goes into this?
But then I guess I'm a bit of a hippocrite, I've got a pretty wild case for my work PC also.. check out the titan case at Trans2000.
Great news for all 7 users waiting for it
on
Netscape 6.1
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· Score: 1
Great, 6.1 - just what we all were waiting for. I tried 6 and it nearly locked up my 400MHz machine.. absolutely ridiculous!
I used to hate IE, but I find myself transitioning slowly to it. Netscape 4.7 runs well on my slower machine (how hard can it be to look at web pages, jeez), but still crashes a lot.
That interview had too many graphics acronyms for my taste. I know plenty about computers, but keeping up with all the latest Graphics acronyms is too much for me.
Matrox has some decent graphics boards, and I think they're going the right direction by leaning away from the gaming 3d market.. However my most frequent interaction with Matrox is through their capture boards. Our Computer Vision and Robotics Lab uses a lot of their Video Capture cards (MeteorII) and I sure would like to have had a couple questions asked about that as well, but then I guess not many people care about video capture in this audience.
If you're in the know, the new MIL licensing scheme seems absolutely ridiculous and appears to be getting worse - the prices for their vision libraries are through the roof ($2000 and up!). I can't imagine it being worthwhile for anyone to spend the thousands required to purchase a license for the new full MIL version! Especially when good and free libraries like the Intel IPL and OpenCV and Microsoft Vision SDK are available for free.
Brett
UCSD Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory
This has to be one of the more disgusting ideas I've heard of yet in the put-more-unsolicited-ads-in-our-face campaign. I honestly feel it's tolerable to have little blurbs at the bottom of an email like Yahoo or Hotmail. (Yahoo actually provides a number of free, useful services after all) But actually having full color ads attached to email? This sounds like a sure-fire loser to me. I can just imagine forwarding a message to my boss and it happens to have that X-10 "semi-naked" woman and a little "hidden" camera in the picture embedded in the email. No way.
I bet this will further clog email servers all across the country, the ad content will likely take up more bandwidth than the actual messages themselves.
Congratulations, Revo Networks. Another genuinely stupid idea on how to get try to force more SPAM into our daily life. Have fun going out of buisness, I'd sooner pay a few $$ for ad-free services than resort to having big ads IN my email.
(If I could find contact info for revo networks, I would send them a hate-mail already.)
As much as I'd like to believe that the cell phone companies care about my health, and the potential risks of EMF damage.. just because they have announced "safety" products to shield users from fields DOES NOT mean that they believe there is some risk.
It simply means that there is a market for a "protection" device - for the paranoid and the educated users alike. I.e. now that we've sold everyone cell phones, let's sell them something else.
In my opinion there is still a reasonable chance that EMF in some way contributes to cancer, but it's still debatable if the effect is strong enough to worry about or not.
Shit, we've gotten rid of ~10 indys just in my research group here at UCSD in the last few months. Indys are a dime a dozen from my perspective, and it's even got a frame grabber & stuff..
We give them to surplus sales, who sells them off in bulk I think. I have no idea what happens from there if they don't sell, though.
I'm all for the enviromental attempts to save the usefulness of the old PC's. But the material disposal of things we've already made is hard to get away from, eventually. It's a bridge we will have to cross, because that old 8088 is only going to run for so long.
If you have an old PC (or whatever) in your house, and you find a use for it (and can afford the power to keep it running.. not trivial here in CA) then kudos to you for the reuse part of the environmental equation. As to donating them to someone else.. they are going to suck a lot of power, and will eventually have a hardware failure. How long are old Pentiums designed to run? What will be the failure rate of the older hardware? I'm sure it's longer than the planned lifecycle today, but still it's not infinite.
As to the "give em to schools" option.. I would argue that schools need newer and better machines to teach people on, nothing sucks more than having to learn to tolerate Windows on an old POS computer which barely runs Windows itself and won't leave much room left to run anything useful. Additionally schools don't have much money for competent tech support/administrators and older machines generally require more of that.
Compatibility problems would be more frequent and troubleshooting is also bound to be more difficult.. since the hardware is old and not manufactured anymore.
For Example: Just the other day I was working on an old 486 PC w/modem (14.4) and forgot that you have to change a jumper to change the com port it runs on. Probably took me 2 hours to figure that out. How many people who didn't have a 486 in the first place are ever going to be able to fix shit like that?
let's spend some thought and find a useful and environmental way to junk em before, it's a bridge we're going to have to cross.
Somehow I hate that I like hotornot.com. The idea of rating women/men based on appearance is somehow disturbing, but it's somewhat addictive to keep clicking. I wonder if each click hurts/soothes some impressionable girl's opinion of herself.. kind of a weird feeling actually.
On a funny note, there is an AYB version of the page too.
Enjoy.
If you watch the video, they state that they take 9.9% when you buy bloodmoney credits. So every time you buy $10 worth, you pay ~$1.00. That's where the money is.
If you watch the video they mention that the urban mercenary game is based on the Quake 1 engine. Graphics look pretty bad to me, it has that whole quake unreal look to it.
I tend to prefer more realism, Half life Counterstrike mod works for me.
I wonder how long it will take them to assimilate other games, seeing as the popularity of Counterstrike is so huge these days I bet it's one of the first.
As if I already didn't have a bad enough social life between Counterstrike and Diablo sessions. Now I can actually gamble at the same time, combining 2 dangerous habits.
This sounds like fun actually, using micropayments or something to have a little more stake in the game. But yes I can see the emotions/reactions getting stronger during playing if there's real money involved. The incentive to cheat using scripts or other hacks would be much greater..
Stop griping. Instead of everyone complaining about how this is a "repost" and posting to that effect, just ignore it and keep reading. Some people may have missed it, you know? I must have missed because I was glad to see the story.
That guy must be a masochist, the attention to detail on the first unit is pretty amazing. So he not only made it portable (with that cool 'clip style' 9v plug) but better quality video than the original. Bonus points on keeping the woodgrain style, etc.
Ahh the days of Atari. Back when I could play Counterstrike whoops I mean Pitfall all night and not worry about the next day. Sigh. Back when I could rent a game for 2 nights and beat it. Long gone are those days, fortunately Grad school allows for a wild schedule.
Thanks for the excellent revisit of part of my childhood.
This is like complaining that Greyhound buses don't have door to door, personal service. Do you really sign up with AOL hoping to tightly control your content? As I see it, it's one of the ISP's with a goal of "push" and content control.
It seems like people who sign up with AOL either don't know better (and maybe they like the content control) or know that AOL likes to take over your computer. If you want control over your interface, other ISP's offer much better packages.
As for me, I delete the AOL icons as fast as I can after a Windoze reinstall. Cable all the way, baby.
All attempts at silly statements and jokes (mostly) aside... Why the _heck_ is Pizza Hut advertising on a rocket? Are they trying to enter the NASA Engineer pizza sales market?
The viewing would seem very limited given the very short amount of time the rocket is visible.. but there's always the articles afterwards I guess.
Logical thinking would seem to dictate that the advertising company would at least have something to do with rockets or space travel, not some catch-phrase creating, mission statement writing, PC organization, management's statement like "We are forward thinking and put our logo on a rocket to show everyone how clever we are". I could see those Rotary Rocket folks advertising, or those new "space vacation" companies using the round billboard, but really.. Pizza Hut?
*start humor attempt*
"We deliver custom pizzas to Cape Canaveral in less than 20 microseconds, by guaranteed rocket powered delivery or your next ion drive free" (Like to see the tip for that delivery boy...)
Ok whassup with that. I'm glad the cell phone is convienent, but your response is absolutely ridiculous. I'm not flaming because you're a girl or because you're 16, just that you have some very silly things to say. Accident rates are HIGHER with a cellphone in your hand. Fact. Cell phones emit radiation which could have effects which are not understood yet. Fact. That's all that needs to be said I believe, you can come to your own conclusion. But I don't want to be on the road in front of your 16year old Tahoe driving cell phone chatting ass. Do you really think that you would notice some effect in a year? Most cases of cancer & related diseases take years & years to develop. When you're 26-30 come back and sell me that story - I might listen. Brett
Love the idea! Next time start with the basics and see if you can make whiskey. =) I'm imagining after half a day of work on the computer - picking up the whiskey that drained into a shot glass beside my computer.. the harder you work the more you drink.
So the little copper box is cool, but he said he 'soldered' it together.. depending on the type of solder you use - it has quite a high percentage of lead in it. I'm not sure I'd drink much out of that particular design of still...
Instead of spending all that money on new technology and creating lawsuits, why not just put up a big yellow sign outside movie theaters, university classrooms & other un-cellphone friendly places (like my house, my car..) as a reminder:
Turn your cellphone/pager on vibrate or off or you will be shot. Dead.
Seems like a simpler, and more elegant solution to me. It's so logical it appears that no-one's thought of it yet. Then you don't have the hassle & expense of installing the bluetooth transmitters or whatever in the appropriate places. Let's stop getting gadget happy, you gadget freaks.. (myself included)
wow. This is proof the new guy doesn't sleep. Check the time on that post.. maybe I won't go to bed tonight (California time) and see if he goes to bed at all.
*hmpf* back to studying for my Digital Signal Processing Exam. Yucko. Slashdot is much more interesting.
Apologies for off-topicness
Hey, it's just another way to meet people
on
Date Pagers
·
· Score: 4
Ok I admit this thing sounds potentially lame, I'd heard about them a year ago or so. However underneath the flashy, wireless technology this is just _another_ way to meet people. If your goal it meet people - it gives you something in common with someone or at least a conversation starter, how many date-oriented conversations started with "Hey, nice cell phone". It's not a technology that's going to make people hide in dark rooms typing on computers waiting for someone they match with to walk by. It's a technology you use to start conversations and interact with real people instead of just ignoring everyone.
It's like going to a dance club or bar, but being in contact with the 'dating scene' all day instead of only a few hours in an ear-thumping club or local bar pounding drinks. It's a chance to meet someone in a more 'normal' environment.
Ok think about it people. If you want to gay bash or stalk women or whatever, you don't need one of these gadgets to tell who you want to hurt. There are (unfortunately) lots of hate crimes now, without such gadgets. There will most likely be hate crimes with such gadgets. I don't think it's the technology that is the issue in that debate.
Well, it does seem to be pretty good if you already use a palm and a cell phone. Kinda flashy for my style, and way $$ out of my price range. Vibrate mode would be nice, since you're paying so much already.
Damn. If I hadn't a lost my f*ckin Palm III I wouldn't have Palm envy. *grunt*
Ok, points well taken. Definately the point about the users being more dangerous than the attackers. I know many people that I work with who definately are that way.. maybe including myself.
Nevertheless you have to admit it's well oriented toward the "spying" realm - which is considered ok when it's an employer (to some extent) but not ok when it's someone else. I bet the Feds/spooks like this tool - prolly had it for ages already.
I must have read the article when it was still up..
I'm sure we're all surprised that MS is trying to take down their competition with unfair tactics. At a risk of sounding stupid, what's the need to run remote control software undetected - cracking aside? I can't think of a good legidimate use.
I've used several remote control products at different times, and as a simple user they can be wonderfully convienent. However the security hole they open up seems quite risky.. especially when software that can stealth (MS or otherwise) is used.
I'm not trying to be a MS advocate, but sounds to me like both sides have some 'splaining to do.
Well the whole point of the "football stadium" that is mentioned casually in the article is to break even (i.e. energy out > energy in) with fusion. To my knowledge it hasn't yet been done, that's why the NIF (National Ignition Facility) project is under development. It is interesting what can be done on a small tabletop scale, however I'm not really sure what you can practically use it for. On the other hand, the NIF is sorta expensive (1.2 billion), unless you compare it to defense $$. I don't know much about the tokemak approach, LLNL is mostly using lasers to try to break even. Interesting stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
wow, forcing all incoming students to buy one? That sounds pretty rough, seems like you should have a pretty serious reason to do something like that, and at least ASK the students.. jeez.
Brett
This seems to be a popular topic recently, UCSD is researching uses for student PDAs on a wide scale. I believe several hundred UCSD freshman in CS are going to be semi-permanently "loaned" HP Journada PDAs in order to participate in this experiment on a wider scale.. cool stuff check here for more info: http://www.calit2.net/education/activeweb.html
It somehow seems strange that people can be so obsessed with computer cases. I'm all for cool/personal cases but wow how much work goes into this?
But then I guess I'm a bit of a hippocrite, I've got a pretty wild case for my work PC also.. check out the titan case at Trans2000.
Great, 6.1 - just what we all were waiting for. I tried 6 and it nearly locked up my 400MHz machine.. absolutely ridiculous!
I used to hate IE, but I find myself transitioning slowly to it. Netscape 4.7 runs well on my slower machine (how hard can it be to look at web pages, jeez), but still crashes a lot.
*Sigh* I wish Mozilla would hurry up..
That interview had too many graphics acronyms for my taste. I know plenty about computers, but keeping up with all the latest Graphics acronyms is too much for me.
Matrox has some decent graphics boards, and I think they're going the right direction by leaning away from the gaming 3d market.. However my most frequent interaction with Matrox is through their capture boards. Our Computer Vision and Robotics Lab uses a lot of their Video Capture cards (MeteorII) and I sure would like to have had a couple questions asked about that as well, but then I guess not many people care about video capture in this audience.
If you're in the know, the new MIL licensing scheme seems absolutely ridiculous and appears to be getting worse - the prices for their vision libraries are through the roof ($2000 and up!). I can't imagine it being worthwhile for anyone to spend the thousands required to purchase a license for the new full MIL version! Especially when good and free libraries like the Intel IPL and OpenCV and Microsoft Vision SDK are available for free.
Brett
UCSD Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory
This has to be one of the more disgusting ideas I've heard of yet in the put-more-unsolicited-ads-in-our-face campaign. I honestly feel it's tolerable to have little blurbs at the bottom of an email like Yahoo or Hotmail. (Yahoo actually provides a number of free, useful services after all) But actually having full color ads attached to email? This sounds like a sure-fire loser to me. I can just imagine forwarding a message to my boss and it happens to have that X-10 "semi-naked" woman and a little "hidden" camera in the picture embedded in the email. No way.
I bet this will further clog email servers all across the country, the ad content will likely take up more bandwidth than the actual messages themselves.
Congratulations, Revo Networks. Another genuinely stupid idea on how to get try to force more SPAM into our daily life. Have fun going out of buisness, I'd sooner pay a few $$ for ad-free services than resort to having big ads IN my email.
(If I could find contact info for revo networks, I would send them a hate-mail already.)
Brett
As much as I'd like to believe that the cell phone companies care about my health, and the potential risks of EMF damage.. just because they have announced "safety" products to shield users from fields DOES NOT mean that they believe there is some risk.
It simply means that there is a market for a "protection" device - for the paranoid and the educated users alike. I.e. now that we've sold everyone cell phones, let's sell them something else.
In my opinion there is still a reasonable chance that EMF in some way contributes to cancer, but it's still debatable if the effect is strong enough to worry about or not.
Shit, we've gotten rid of ~10 indys just in my research group here at UCSD in the last few months. Indys are a dime a dozen from my perspective, and it's even got a frame grabber & stuff..
We give them to surplus sales, who sells them off in bulk I think. I have no idea what happens from there if they don't sell, though.
I'm all for the enviromental attempts to save the usefulness of the old PC's. But the material disposal of things we've already made is hard to get away from, eventually. It's a bridge we will have to cross, because that old 8088 is only going to run for so long.
If you have an old PC (or whatever) in your house, and you find a use for it (and can afford the power to keep it running.. not trivial here in CA) then kudos to you for the reuse part of the environmental equation. As to donating them to someone else.. they are going to suck a lot of power, and will eventually have a hardware failure. How long are old Pentiums designed to run? What will be the failure rate of the older hardware? I'm sure it's longer than the planned lifecycle today, but still it's not infinite.
As to the "give em to schools" option.. I would argue that schools need newer and better machines to teach people on, nothing sucks more than having to learn to tolerate Windows on an old POS computer which barely runs Windows itself and won't leave much room left to run anything useful. Additionally schools don't have much money for competent tech support/administrators and older machines generally require more of that.
Compatibility problems would be more frequent and troubleshooting is also bound to be more difficult.. since the hardware is old and not manufactured anymore.
For Example: Just the other day I was working on an old 486 PC w/modem (14.4) and forgot that you have to change a jumper to change the com port it runs on. Probably took me 2 hours to figure that out. How many people who didn't have a 486 in the first place are ever going to be able to fix shit like that?
let's spend some thought and find a useful and environmental way to junk em before, it's a bridge we're going to have to cross.
Just my $.02
Somehow I hate that I like hotornot.com. The idea of rating women/men based on appearance is somehow disturbing, but it's somewhat addictive to keep clicking. I wonder if each click hurts/soothes some impressionable girl's opinion of herself.. kind of a weird feeling actually. On a funny note, there is an AYB version of the page too. Enjoy.
If you watch the video, they state that they take 9.9% when you buy bloodmoney credits. So every time you buy $10 worth, you pay ~$1.00. That's where the money is.
Brett
If you watch the video they mention that the urban mercenary game is based on the Quake 1 engine. Graphics look pretty bad to me, it has that whole quake unreal look to it.
I tend to prefer more realism, Half life Counterstrike mod works for me.
I wonder how long it will take them to assimilate other games, seeing as the popularity of Counterstrike is so huge these days I bet it's one of the first.
Brett
As if I already didn't have a bad enough social life between Counterstrike and Diablo sessions. Now I can actually gamble at the same time, combining 2 dangerous habits.
This sounds like fun actually, using micropayments or something to have a little more stake in the game. But yes I can see the emotions/reactions getting stronger during playing if there's real money involved. The incentive to cheat using scripts or other hacks would be much greater..
Brett
Stop griping. Instead of everyone complaining about how this is a "repost" and posting to that effect, just ignore it and keep reading. Some people may have missed it, you know? I must have missed because I was glad to see the story.
That guy must be a masochist, the attention to detail on the first unit is pretty amazing. So he not only made it portable (with that cool 'clip style' 9v plug) but better quality video than the original. Bonus points on keeping the woodgrain style, etc.
Ahh the days of Atari. Back when I could play Counterstrike whoops I mean Pitfall all night and not worry about the next day. Sigh. Back when I could rent a game for 2 nights and beat it. Long gone are those days, fortunately Grad school allows for a wild schedule.
Thanks for the excellent revisit of part of my childhood.
This is like complaining that Greyhound buses don't have door to door, personal service. Do you really sign up with AOL hoping to tightly control your content? As I see it, it's one of the ISP's with a goal of "push" and content control.
It seems like people who sign up with AOL either don't know better (and maybe they like the content control) or know that AOL likes to take over your computer. If you want control over your interface, other ISP's offer much better packages.
As for me, I delete the AOL icons as fast as I can after a Windoze reinstall. Cable all the way, baby.
All attempts at silly statements and jokes (mostly) aside... Why the _heck_ is Pizza Hut advertising on a rocket? Are they trying to enter the NASA Engineer pizza sales market?
The viewing would seem very limited given the very short amount of time the rocket is visible.. but there's always the articles afterwards I guess.
Logical thinking would seem to dictate that the advertising company would at least have something to do with rockets or space travel, not some catch-phrase creating, mission statement writing, PC organization, management's statement like "We are forward thinking and put our logo on a rocket to show everyone how clever we are". I could see those Rotary Rocket folks advertising, or those new "space vacation" companies using the round billboard, but really .. Pizza Hut?
*start humor attempt*"We deliver custom pizzas to Cape Canaveral in less than 20 microseconds, by guaranteed rocket powered delivery or your next ion drive free"
*end humor attempt*(Like to see the tip for that delivery boy...)
Ok whassup with that. I'm glad the cell phone is convienent, but your response is absolutely ridiculous. I'm not flaming because you're a girl or because you're 16, just that you have some very silly things to say. Accident rates are HIGHER with a cellphone in your hand. Fact. Cell phones emit radiation which could have effects which are not understood yet. Fact. That's all that needs to be said I believe, you can come to your own conclusion. But I don't want to be on the road in front of your 16year old Tahoe driving cell phone chatting ass. Do you really think that you would notice some effect in a year? Most cases of cancer & related diseases take years & years to develop. When you're 26-30 come back and sell me that story - I might listen. Brett
Love the idea! Next time start with the basics and see if you can make whiskey. =) I'm imagining after half a day of work on the computer - picking up the whiskey that drained into a shot glass beside my computer.. the harder you work the more you drink.
So the little copper box is cool, but he said he 'soldered' it together.. depending on the type of solder you use - it has quite a high percentage of lead in it. I'm not sure I'd drink much out of that particular design of still...
Brett
Reality check...
Instead of spending all that money on new technology and creating lawsuits, why not just put up a big yellow sign outside movie theaters, university classrooms & other un-cellphone friendly places (like my house, my car..) as a reminder:
Turn your cellphone/pager on vibrate or off or you will be shot. Dead.
Seems like a simpler, and more elegant solution to me. It's so logical it appears that no-one's thought of it yet. Then you don't have the hassle & expense of installing the bluetooth transmitters or whatever in the appropriate places. Let's stop getting gadget happy, you gadget freaks.. (myself included)
wow. This is proof the new guy doesn't sleep. Check the time on that post.. maybe I won't go to bed tonight (California time) and see if he goes to bed at all.
*hmpf* back to studying for my Digital Signal Processing Exam. Yucko. Slashdot is much more interesting.
Apologies for off-topicness
Ok I admit this thing sounds potentially lame, I'd heard about them a year ago or so. However underneath the flashy, wireless technology this is just _another_ way to meet people. If your goal it meet people - it gives you something in common with someone or at least a conversation starter, how many date-oriented conversations started with "Hey, nice cell phone". It's not a technology that's going to make people hide in dark rooms typing on computers waiting for someone they match with to walk by. It's a technology you use to start conversations and interact with real people instead of just ignoring everyone.
It's like going to a dance club or bar, but being in contact with the 'dating scene' all day instead of only a few hours in an ear-thumping club or local bar pounding drinks. It's a chance to meet someone in a more 'normal' environment.
Ok think about it people. If you want to gay bash or stalk women or whatever, you don't need one of these gadgets to tell who you want to hurt. There are (unfortunately) lots of hate crimes now, without such gadgets. There will most likely be hate crimes with such gadgets. I don't think it's the technology that is the issue in that debate.
Well, it does seem to be pretty good if you already use a palm and a cell phone. Kinda flashy for my style, and way $$ out of my price range. Vibrate mode would be nice, since you're paying so much already.
Damn. If I hadn't a lost my f*ckin Palm III I wouldn't have Palm envy. *grunt*
Ok, points well taken. Definately the point about the users being more dangerous than the attackers. I know many people that I work with who definately are that way.. maybe including myself.
Nevertheless you have to admit it's well oriented toward the "spying" realm - which is considered ok when it's an employer (to some extent) but not ok when it's someone else. I bet the Feds/spooks like this tool - prolly had it for ages already.
B
I must have read the article when it was still up..
I'm sure we're all surprised that MS is trying to take down their competition with unfair tactics. At a risk of sounding stupid, what's the need to run remote control software undetected - cracking aside? I can't think of a good legidimate use.
I've used several remote control products at different times, and as a simple user they can be wonderfully convienent. However the security hole they open up seems quite risky.. especially when software that can stealth (MS or otherwise) is used.
I'm not trying to be a MS advocate, but sounds to me like both sides have some 'splaining to do.
Just my $.02
Brett
Well the whole point of the "football stadium" that is mentioned casually in the article is to break even (i.e. energy out > energy in) with fusion. To my knowledge it hasn't yet been done, that's why the NIF (National Ignition Facility) project is under development. It is interesting what can be done on a small tabletop scale, however I'm not really sure what you can practically use it for. On the other hand, the NIF is sorta expensive (1.2 billion), unless you compare it to defense $$. I don't know much about the tokemak approach, LLNL is mostly using lasers to try to break even. Interesting stuff.