>That's funny, cause I explicitly avoid those top reviewer labels. I find them overwrought and too full of praise most of the time.
DITTO! Whenever I look into the reviewing histories of most any "top x00" reviewer, I find stuff that smells.
Example: looking through the profile of a "top 100" reviewer, I found that she claimed that she was a librarian who could speed read. She reviewed on average 30 books a week, and ALL were given glowing 4-5 star reviews. I found a sci-fi book that I knew was an absolute stinker (I regret ever buying it), and her review was 2 paragraphs. The first paragraph was A WORD FOR WORD TRANSCRIPT of the back cover. The second paragraph COULD HAVE BEEN ABOUT ANY BOOK AT ALL, and matched the style and general content of ANY of the 2nd paragraphs from ANY of her reviews.
Damn shame amazon doesn't have a "friends and enemies" list, so I could give a -4 modifier to any such reviewers, and do the same for enemies of my friends of friends. Etc.
> To play the DivX verisons you will need the latest Divx 5.1 bundle... > Any earlier versions of divx might cause the player to lock up.
Oi, [b]I'm getting sick of this "infinite codec upgrade cycle"[/b]. How long will it be until all the latest codecs are just problematic enough with the original versions of the codec and vice versa that we'll have to reinstall a different freaking version of a given codec for differing ages of vids? If it's not DivX this week it's some obscure fscking build of XVid, quicktime, flash, or wm.
> Instantly, Nedelin, his staff, their chairs, and over 100 technicians on the rocket were incinerated
Not entirely correct. There is black and white video footage of dozens of technicians running away from the fireball, all entirely aflame, before dropping to the ground.
It was only "instantly" for those right next to the rocket. Who knows how many burned alive over the course of a half minute or two.
> The USA is actively invading other nations unprovoked
I am a Canadian too, and neither invasion was unprovoked unless you hold to that old absurd notion that "other countries internal affairs are none of our business." If that were true, we could just ignore whatever happens in places like Rwanda by saying, hey, it's none of our business. What happens to women and children on the other side of the world matters. Fundamental human rights are by definition, fundamenta.
I'm ever so happy that Al Qaida decided to hole up in the one country that I would have supported invading long before 9/11 - Afghanistan and it's Taliban regieme.
And it's merely a damn shame that no-one had the guts to do in 91 what the US finally got around to doing last year wrt Sadaam.
I'm not happy at all that the west (mostly the US) dropped down to the Soviet's level in trying to "contain" them... and I completely understand what you're trying to get at in reminding us that the Nazi regieme *was* popularly supported. But don't start mixing that crap in with the notion that we should just bury our heads in the sand and let places like Afghanistan and Iraq/the-middle-east rot in their own feces.
> the WTC crashes were criminal acts
This is an absurd redirection. World War II was a criminal act, but you'd have to be an idiot to think that we could just sic Interpol on them and have things work out. The world is much more complicated and is not black and white.
"Months ago, the prime minister of Estonia told President Bush that he did not need an explanation of the need to confront Iraq. Because the great democracies failed to act in 1930s, his people lived in slavery for 50 years."
Did you read further down the page where he has a heated argument with a childhood friend about the occupation? The friend clearly thinks it's an "occupation" and thinks that all our Western incomes have "doubled" because we're stealing the Iraqi oil.
We have our share of whacko's over here, they're going to have an even larger share over there where they have NO trust of any government let alone foreign ones, and enough ignorance to allow almost any belief system to flourish.
Hopefully the moderates can keep their country on the road to progress and freedom.
Nowdays mp3.com only exposes a few songs from each artist, whereas in the olden days artists had uploaded tons of songs and there was no limit to how many songs they could have hosted.
So if you crawl mp3.com, you will only get a fraction of the mp3's that are actually stored there.
> still sold here for the same amount, only with a much higher profit.
Sorry, where did the competition to produce the cheapest product go?
You nutters always forget something critical that causes your house of cards to fall down.
Another example: Even if you weren't wrong due to your above omission, where does the profit go? To the *owners* of the companies. What's the breakdown of the US Stock Exchange ownership profile (including breaking down the "ownership" of retirement funds and the like)? Yes, it's weighted towards the middle and upper classes, but it's not a "doom and gloom" scenario.
That's what I was thinking: It sounds like mounting a miniature intellivision direction-thingie where the mouse wheel is..
..AND I THINK IT'S A BRILLIANT IDEA. I say give them the patent.
I currently have an A4 two-wheel mouse, and the 2nd wheel is so far forward on the mouse as to be annoying to use. And I've never liked "clicking" mouse wheels because there is such a chance of accidentally rolling it a bit*, and they require more than average amount of pressure to press.
I'm also not in love with mouse wheels because they have such poor rotary resolution. Even when I try and "spin" it like a trackball, it only moves a few lines - so I either have to dial up the "lines per click" or put up with a very small scrolling range.
There's still a lot of innovation to be done in Mouse technology and mouse software - add much more accurate precise usable features so I can do more with my mouse. Even the modern A4 and Logitech software with a 2 wheel 5 button mouse only lets you do so much - and usually only in Windows or IE.
When I'm in IE, I want one configuration. When I'm in my e-mail software, I want another configuration. When I'm playing BF1942, I want a third configuration. I need the 4th and 5th mouse buttons shifted a bit, because where they are now makes it too easy to accidentally click on them. Etc etc etc.
And of course because it's a mouse, it's got to be under $100. That's a big challenge right there.
(*) - which in a FPS game can cause a weapon change, dooming you
Definitely old hat - I remember seeing a CBC TV news story 12+ years ago when I was still in high school.
The story showed video* of a truck with a big 6-8 foot microwave disk mounted on the back, tracking a small unmanned plan - the small unmanned plane had an electric prop and a 6+ foot flat dish on it's bottom. They were beaming power to it, in flight, via microwaves. And the "little" plane was remote controlled.
Of course that was over smallish distances - hundreds of yards - it wasn't a long distance transmission. But the principle is the same.
(*) - IRL, in action, the prototype was built and functional.
I think he's violating a LOT of other people's copyrights, and NOT just copyleft licenses, real copyrighted books and manuals. Maybe you'd have better luck contacting the copyright holders of these other works, and pointing out to them his chronic behaviour and ask if they'd like to do more than simply have auction after auction closed.
Note that by going to the main distributed-mirror page, you can add to the list of mirrors (if you know of others, or if you are creating one yourself.)
This is spectacular. It allows those of us who can mirror it, to mirror it and add our mirror to a central list without having to post our own "mirror here" message.
It should be provided on the right hand side "Related Links" by Slashdot, even before there are mirrors added.
In An Nasiriyah, the fear created by the attack had more tragic consequences. Bodies of men, women and children, including two babies, lay in a ditch next to the wreckage of burnt-out vehicles on a bridge being held by coalition forces.
The victims, believed to be trying to escape heavy artillery fire, made the mistake of moving at night across a bridge crucial to the coalition's supply lines and were killed by US Marines.
That is a damn shame for sure. But I wouldn't go out driving around in vehicles in the middle of a war zone in the dead of night...
I would have liked to use Mozilla for my e-mail, as Netscape Messenger 4.7x finally has enough unfixed time/date induced problems so as to be unusable.
I have an inbox (no messages left on server) with about 90 e-mail and 10 MB of attachments. My folders in total have around 30 MB of e-mail. This is on Windows 2000, 800 MHz cpu, 7200 RPM 60 GB disk, HDD FULLY defragmented two days ago, folders compressed not less than a few days ago..
"Compressing" the folders takes 1.5 minutes, despite the fact that I swear I did it only a few days ago. Deleting an e-mail with a 2 MB attachment runs the CPU and HDD for 15 seconds. Same goes for "saving" the attachment to disk.
Oddly enough, even though those operations sound and feel heavy, HDD rattling like heck and system all slow like molasses, the HDD is only reading and writing at 0.5 MB/s, and the CPU is no higher than 10-40 pct.
Now *that's* an unscalable architecture.
Worst of all, while you're saving an attachment to disk your pointer is not locked to an hourglass, and you're free to close the e-mail and delete it from your inbox (which you will do the first time you don't notice the "M" icon still spinning in the e-mail). You get no warning, but I guess because that happens "while" it was trying to extract the attachment, the attachment save gets silently cut off, and you end up with a corrupted partial file on disk (bad zip, etc etc).
That's ONE HELL OF A USABILITY BUG.
After only 1 month, I'm dumping Mozilla Mail as fast as I can.
My God is that an insantely expensive amount of crap to go through just to record a song.
I won't cry one bit if the entire "industry" goes under - stuff made by 17 year old kids on their computers is a hell of a lot more economical than all this high-fallutin crap.
Can I ask *when* you got the job in the US, and *when* you got your current job in Canada?
Right now if I quit my Toronto job and tried to get another one, I'd have to take a 50-60 percent pay cut - simply because of the economy. I can't blame that on *any* "difference in standard of living" between places. .
Virtual reality-based applications will be needed in order to manage giant databases
"Phenotropic" is the catchword I'm proposing for this new kind of software.
Oh, those are good signs.
And we're at the point where computers can recognize similarities instead of perfect identities, which is essentially what pattern recognition is about. If we can move from perfection to similarity, then we can start to reexamine the way we build software. So instead of requiring protocol adherence in which each component has to be perfectly matched to other components down to the bit, we can begin to have similarity. Then a form of very graceful error tolerance, with a predictable overhead, becomes possible.
Phht, I want my computer to be more predictable, not less.
we need to create a new kind of software.
No, what we need is an economic model that doesn't include a bunch of pointy haired bosses forcing tons of idiot (and even good) developers to spew crap.
And we need consumers to up their standards, so that crap programs can't become popular because they look shiny or promise 100,000 features that people don't need. And we need to get rid of pointy-haired bosses that choose software because of all the wrong reasons.
In phenotropic computing, components of software would connect to each other through a gracefully error-tolerant means that's statistical and soft and fuzzy and based on pattern recognition in the way I've described.
Sounds like AI and another great method of using 10,000 GHZ CPUs to let people do simple tasks with software written by morons, instead of simply writing better code and firing and putting out of business the morons.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's put a total spoiler for one of our most favorite Sci-Fi series right
on the front page of slashdot, WITH NO SPOILER WARNING.
You fucking idiot.
>That's funny, cause I explicitly avoid those top reviewer labels. I find them overwrought and too full of praise most of the time.
DITTO! Whenever I look into the reviewing histories of most any "top x00" reviewer, I find stuff that smells.
Example: looking through the profile of a "top 100" reviewer, I found that she claimed that she was a librarian who could speed read. She reviewed on average 30 books a week, and ALL were given glowing 4-5 star reviews. I found a sci-fi book that I knew was an absolute stinker (I regret ever buying it), and her review was 2 paragraphs. The first paragraph was A WORD FOR WORD TRANSCRIPT of the back cover. The second paragraph COULD HAVE BEEN ABOUT ANY BOOK AT ALL, and matched the style and general content of ANY of the 2nd paragraphs from ANY of her reviews.
Damn shame amazon doesn't have a "friends and enemies" list, so I could give a -4 modifier to any such reviewers, and do the same for enemies of my friends of friends. Etc.
> To play the DivX verisons you will need the latest Divx 5.1 bundle ...
> Any earlier versions of divx might cause the player to lock up.
Oi, [b]I'm getting sick of this "infinite codec upgrade cycle"[/b]. How long will it be until all the latest codecs are just problematic enough with the original versions of the codec and vice versa that we'll have to reinstall a different freaking version of a given codec for differing ages of vids? If it's not DivX this week it's some obscure fscking build of XVid, quicktime, flash, or wm.
> Instantly, Nedelin, his staff, their chairs, and over 100 technicians on the rocket were incinerated
Not entirely correct. There is black and white video footage of dozens of technicians running away from the fireball, all entirely aflame, before dropping to the ground.
It was only "instantly" for those right next to the rocket. Who knows how many burned alive over the course of a half minute or two.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/r16_disaster.html
and a 1 ...
and a 2
"Na na naa naaa..., na na naa naaaa..., heyyy eyy eyy, GOODBYE!!!!!
> The USA is actively invading other nations unprovoked
I am a Canadian too, and neither invasion was unprovoked unless you hold to that old absurd notion that "other countries internal affairs are none of our business." If that were true, we could just ignore whatever happens in places like Rwanda by saying, hey, it's none of our business. What happens to women and children on the other side of the world matters. Fundamental human rights are by definition, fundamenta.
I'm ever so happy that Al Qaida decided to hole up in the one country that I would have supported invading long before 9/11 - Afghanistan and it's Taliban regieme.
And it's merely a damn shame that no-one had the guts to do in 91 what the US finally got around to doing last year wrt Sadaam.
I'm not happy at all that the west (mostly the US) dropped down to the Soviet's level in trying to "contain" them... and I completely understand what you're trying to get at in reminding us that the Nazi regieme *was* popularly supported. But don't start mixing that crap in with the notion that we should just bury our heads in the sand and let places like Afghanistan and Iraq/the-middle-east rot in their own feces.
> the WTC crashes were criminal acts
This is an absurd redirection. World War II was a criminal act, but you'd have to be an idiot to think that we could just sic Interpol on them and have things work out. The world is much more complicated and is not black and white.
"Months ago, the prime minister of Estonia told President Bush that he did not need an explanation of the need to confront Iraq. Because the great democracies failed to act in 1930s, his people lived in slavery for 50 years."
Very nice to see.
Did you read further down the page where he has a heated argument with a childhood friend about the occupation? The friend clearly thinks it's an "occupation" and thinks that all our Western incomes have "doubled" because we're stealing the Iraqi oil.
We have our share of whacko's over here, they're going to have an even larger share over there where they have NO trust of any government let alone foreign ones, and enough ignorance to allow almost any belief system to flourish.
Hopefully the moderates can keep their country on the road to progress and freedom.
BUH - third of a trillion.
Nowdays mp3.com only exposes a few songs from each artist, whereas in the olden days artists had uploaded tons of songs and there was no limit to how many songs they could have hosted.
So if you crawl mp3.com, you will only get a fraction of the mp3's that are actually stored there.
Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
If you're going to compete with the goatse.cx guy, you're going to need a lot more available bandwidth.
> still sold here for the same amount, only with a much higher profit.
Sorry, where did the competition to produce the cheapest product go?
You nutters always forget something critical that causes your house of cards to fall down.
Another example: Even if you weren't wrong due to your above omission, where does the profit go? To the *owners* of the companies. What's the breakdown of the US Stock Exchange ownership profile (including breaking down the "ownership" of retirement funds and the like)? Yes, it's weighted towards the middle and upper classes, but it's not a "doom and gloom" scenario.
... but not watch. I get the intro screens but after that audio only, no video.
Maybe the problem is Utah? Let's nuke Utah.
I currently have an A4 two-wheel mouse, and the 2nd wheel is so far forward on the mouse as to be annoying to use. And I've never liked "clicking" mouse wheels because there is such a chance of accidentally rolling it a bit*, and they require more than average amount of pressure to press.
I'm also not in love with mouse wheels because they have such poor rotary resolution. Even when I try and "spin" it like a trackball, it only moves a few lines - so I either have to dial up the "lines per click" or put up with a very small scrolling range.
There's still a lot of innovation to be done in Mouse technology and mouse software - add much more accurate precise usable features so I can do more with my mouse. Even the modern A4 and Logitech software with a 2 wheel 5 button mouse only lets you do so much - and usually only in Windows or IE.
When I'm in IE, I want one configuration. When I'm in my e-mail software, I want another configuration. When I'm playing BF1942, I want a third configuration. I need the 4th and 5th mouse buttons shifted a bit, because where they are now makes it too easy to accidentally click on them. Etc etc etc.
And of course because it's a mouse, it's got to be under $100. That's a big challenge right there.
(*) - which in a FPS game can cause a weapon change, dooming you
Definitely old hat - I remember seeing a CBC TV news story 12+ years ago when I was still in high school.
The story showed video* of a truck with a big 6-8 foot microwave disk mounted on the back, tracking a small unmanned plan - the small unmanned plane had an electric prop and a 6+ foot flat dish on it's bottom. They were beaming power to it, in flight, via microwaves. And the "little" plane was remote controlled.
Of course that was over smallish distances - hundreds of yards - it wasn't a long distance transmission. But the principle is the same.
(*) - IRL, in action, the prototype was built and functional.
Another of his auctions has a URL reference to an index of one of the CD volumes he is selling, and it's at http://members.rogers.com/techtraining/
Anyone know the right procedure to ask for the identity of a given Rogers user?
Ummm, in the one quoted auction, it looks as if he's also selling the Radio Shack mini-notebook and the Stan Gibilisco book "in pdf form on CD".
In this auction, he's selling pdf copies of Feynman's Physics Lectures.
I think he's violating a LOT of other people's copyrights, and NOT just copyleft licenses, real copyrighted books and manuals. Maybe you'd have better luck contacting the copyright holders of these other works, and pointing out to them his chronic behaviour and ask if they'd like to do more than simply have auction after auction closed.
http://solem.cs.man.ac.uk:8006/cgi-bin/mirror.pl?
Everyone, add the following URL to your shortcuts, it'll be dang handy if you're a slashdot regular.
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~brejc8/mirror/index.html
Note that by going to the main distributed-mirror page, you can add to the list of mirrors (if you know of others, or if you are creating one yourself.)
This is spectacular. It allows those of us who can mirror it, to mirror it and add our mirror to a central list without having to post our own "mirror here" message.
It should be provided on the right hand side "Related Links" by Slashdot, even before there are mirrors added.
Here is another article found using Google News that confirms the story:
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=3789220
That is a damn shame for sure. But I wouldn't go out driving around in vehicles in the middle of a war zone in the dead of night...
They screw the customers, not the employees.
I would have liked to use Mozilla for my e-mail, as Netscape Messenger 4.7x finally has enough unfixed time/date induced problems so as to be unusable.
I have an inbox (no messages left on server) with about 90 e-mail and 10 MB of attachments. My folders in total have around 30 MB of e-mail. This is on Windows 2000, 800 MHz cpu, 7200 RPM 60 GB disk, HDD FULLY defragmented two days ago, folders compressed not less than a few days ago..
"Compressing" the folders takes 1.5 minutes, despite the fact that I swear I did it only a few days ago. Deleting an e-mail with a 2 MB attachment runs the CPU and HDD for 15 seconds. Same goes for "saving" the attachment to disk.
Oddly enough, even though those operations sound and feel heavy, HDD rattling like heck and system all slow like molasses, the HDD is only reading and writing at 0.5 MB/s, and the CPU is no higher than 10-40 pct.
Now *that's* an unscalable architecture.
Worst of all, while you're saving an attachment to disk your pointer is not locked to an hourglass, and you're free to close the e-mail and delete it from your inbox (which you will do the first time you don't notice the "M" icon still spinning in the e-mail). You get no warning, but I guess because that happens "while" it was trying to extract the attachment, the attachment save gets silently cut off, and you end up with a corrupted partial file on disk (bad zip, etc etc).
That's ONE HELL OF A USABILITY BUG.
After only 1 month, I'm dumping Mozilla Mail as fast as I can.
My God is that an insantely expensive amount of crap to go through just to record a song.
I won't cry one bit if the entire "industry" goes under - stuff made by 17 year old kids on their computers is a hell of a lot more economical than all this high-fallutin crap.
.
Interesting.
Can I ask *when* you got the job in the US, and *when* you got your current job in Canada?
Right now if I quit my Toronto job and tried to get another one, I'd have to take a 50-60 percent pay cut - simply because of the economy. I can't blame that on *any* "difference in standard of living" between places.
.
Virtual reality-based applications will be needed in order to manage giant databases
"Phenotropic" is the catchword I'm proposing for this new kind of software.
Oh, those are good signs.
And we're at the point where computers can recognize similarities instead of perfect identities, which is essentially what pattern recognition is about. If we can move from perfection to similarity, then we can start to reexamine the way we build software. So instead of requiring protocol adherence in which each component has to be perfectly matched to other components down to the bit, we can begin to have similarity. Then a form of very graceful error tolerance, with a predictable overhead, becomes possible.
Phht, I want my computer to be more predictable, not less.
we need to create a new kind of software.
No, what we need is an economic model that doesn't include a bunch of pointy haired bosses forcing tons of idiot (and even good) developers to spew crap.
And we need consumers to up their standards, so that crap programs can't become popular because they look shiny or promise 100,000 features that people don't need. And we need to get rid of pointy-haired bosses that choose software because of all the wrong reasons.
In phenotropic computing, components of software would connect to each other through a gracefully error-tolerant means that's statistical and soft and fuzzy and based on pattern recognition in the way I've described.
Sounds like AI and another great method of using 10,000 GHZ CPUs to let people do simple tasks with software written by morons, instead of simply writing better code and firing and putting out of business the morons.