I'd be careful about wildly comparing everythings "danger factors" with driving at rush hour. Especially eye surgery. It is morbid, but chances are high that in a car accident you either won't really have to handle the results or get over it rather quickly. In eye surgery however, you're quite unlikely to die if the surgeon hits the "disintegrate" button, but you'll probably be blind as a mole for the rest of your life. Now, I would think that most of us are at an age where it would be very difficult at least to adopt to a completely changed lifestyle, especially if your defect was rather minor beforehand (nothing really requiring glass bricks).
I don't want to say that eye surgery is a bad thing. It has its merit in repairing defects that are otherwise incorrectible. But if it's (ab)used as purely cosmetic surgery, then I think the dangers outweigh the use.
Also note that my sight is rather good (-1.0 on both eyes, with a nasty embryonal core in the left which makes me see double on this eye), and so I might be unqualified to say this. But what I know is that every kind of surgery has very real dangers and that it should be regarded as a last resort.
$ solvechess
Please prepare and format 10 Dyson Spheres and fill them with crystalline silicon.
Please insert Dyson Sphere 1 and press enter...
Working..........(10%)
Please insert Dyson Sphere 2 and press enter...
Working...(13%), inf remaining.
Fun, fun, fun. And now we'll put those into a RAID 6+6. How many would you need at least and how many could fail before you lose any data? For bonus points, give the smallest possible distance you could leave between the spheres to keep them separated using no more than the power output of a Sol-like star on each and calculate the mass of all spheres combined. If possible draw a small diagram of how the spheres had to be placed for maximum stability.
No matter what the trolls say, this has potential. When I saw the Reloaded/Revolutions teaser, I wasn't too excited, but this one brings back the feelings I had after seeing the original Matrix teaser. I hate the MPAA, I hate Hollywood, I hate Warner, but they'll get my money for this!
If they do it right, they can go far beyond what they're doing on the big screen. Let's hope they break out of the sequel box and give us some cool entertainment.
In theory, they had to link to the full postal address from everywhere in their pages IIRC. It's european right that's enforced at least in Germany. You have to put it on commercial websites. I don't know how other countries in the EU handle this.
Yow! That's active passive resistance. Ghandi would have been so proud.
But here we go again, the same old crap we have seen with other research and - especially - with benchmarks. Some company, club or whatnot buys a researcher to bend statsitics their way and hopes that no one really notices that they're just reading a modified excerpt from How to lie with Statistics/Charts. And most of the time it works, because most of the really important folks (legislators) exceeded their level of competence when they were elected (you know who you are). They get those really biased statistics on glossy paper with lots of really biased charts, have a look at it and say: "Man, those [insert enemy here]s are really bad and should be [put against the wall|fried|gassed|drowned|beat to teath|stoned]." (Personally, I'd prefer the last one afther ther Berkeley definition.)
Then, it all ends. Why? Because any counterargument comes on standard paper, printed all in black with perhaps one or two graphs meant for people who know what they're looking at, and not for decisionmakers!
In the end, we can all just sing and hope that the revolution's coming and we get to decide who's to be put against the wall. Or at least who's to rethink their corporate policies to avoit a smack-bottom.
"It is the first known polymorphic metamorphic virus to infect under both Windows and Linux. The virus contains no destructive payload, but infected files may display messages on certain dates. It is the fourth variant of the Simile family.
So you see, it took a while. Well, at least it's a working release that hits the market with a bang.
So you basically propose modifying plants to cause oil spills or explosive clouds? I just can't wait, but I sure as hell will be holding my breath.
"In related news, a supertanker sunk when crossing an alcohol cloud caused by ModiWeed that ignited due to an electrical spark." Hmmm. I want that stuff!
Some friends and me play good ol' pen'n'paper as often as we get to, but it's not easy to meet (working times, studying, "geographic challenges"). I'm seriously thinking about integrating Neverwinter into that schedule, at least if creation times for adventure settings keep acceptable.
And as for that EULA stuff, I don't think it's really valid or enforceable here (Germany) plus I'm thinking of a chicken-out license to stick to my modules that combines the convenience of private use and a postcard license.
Chicken-out license
This module is in no way meant for distribution. If you found it that means you either stumbled across a resource that I had to use in order to transfer the module for my own private use or someone else already ripped it from one such resource and made it available (since that person wasn't authorized to do so in the first place, this doesn't count as distribution by the maker!). However, since you're already at it, feel free to ignore the non-public nature of this module and let me know what you think about it.
Well, I couldn't agree more. I'd kill for a nice SCSI RAID system. I'm running three IBM U2W drives (2x18G, 1x9G), a CD-ROM and a ZIP on a nice dual channel controller and running a couple of 18 or 36-giggers in RAID would be nice. It'd probably last forever and provide nice performance on the right controller. But fact is that I can't afford it.
I'm a student. I drive a crummy '88 Volkswagen Golf. I'm willing to spend more on computer equipment than most average users. But as long as I don't find someone who pays me half a fortune for simple programming or maintenance work or win the lottery, the next SCSI system isn't too likely to happen soon. Hopefully the one I have lasts a little longer.
IMHO, the SCSI bus system is better than everything IDE/ATA can offer to date. It's not necessarily the devices that need to be put up against each other. Most recent SCSI disks in "acceptable" sizes are so expensive that you can easily build a RAID system from IDE disks for the same or even lower price. However what's really bad about IDE is the short bus. Face it, length and size do matter in some cases.
You can have a 12m LVD-SCSI bus with 15 devices plus controller running at full speed. But that's not desktop. You'll have trouble just cramming the disks in your average-sized tower, and you still need one or two additional PSUs to get them spinning. And now you take the sucker out for a LAN; but don't forget calling your chiropractor and get a reservation for the next two weeks straight.
Then there's IDE. With todays U-ATA133 specs you're limited to, like, 50cm bus length. Heck, that's about the height of a midi-tower! But it gets the job done. But no external devices for you, sorry. And you're down to 4 devices on your average motherboard, but most users can live with CD-ROM, CD-RW and one or two disks. With onboard RAID controllers coming up, there's an additional four disks possible and you can even plug in a separate DVD drive. You don't need a nuclear plant to get it running, you have lots of storage for a desktop machine and you can still carry it around. Perfect.
To sum it up, I think SCSI is still great, but it's losing on the desktop nowadays. The disks might last longer, it might be more flexible, but in the end, it's way too expensive and overkill. And then there's serial ATA on the horizon.
In other news, the coming of Dungeon Siege numbers the days for DiabloII. Dungeon Siege is much prettier and more immersing while offering the same kind of hack and slash gameplay, character advancement and 'finding nifty items' that was first pioneered in games like Rogue.
Well, I thought so, too. But then it came to my mind that Dungeon Siege doesn't offer one essential thing: generated maps. Those are one of the major factors in Diablo's almost unlimited replay value. I can't think of another game that me and my friends did play ofer such a long time and I don't think that would have been the case it we'd had to run across a never changing landscape killing never changing monsters. The most amazing thing about this is the fact that this is the case in spite of a plethora of game balance issues, technical glitches and blain ol' bugs, so there's got to be something.
What I'm really waiting for is Neverwinter Nights. With it's Dungeon Master(TM) mode it's hopefully the next Thing To Be. Anyway, have a look at the trailer, it's well worth it. Although it doesn't tell too much about the game, it's just cool to look at.
Oh, and I almost forgot: if everything fails, play Bleifuss Fun. It's plain fun from the point where the installer asks whether it should install DirectX 3. But afterwards, it offers very stable and quick gameplay. I have yet to encounter a single crash or hang.
Of course now I've gone and offended astronomers (no intent to. I just find it odd how many of these "discoveries" are treated as if they change life as we know it: As if realizing something alters the past).
Too late to apologize. Now they're tracking you and when they've found you, they'll turn Hubble around and show you what was really installed up there recently.
Judging by the huge amount of feedback this one produced, not too many I'd guess. Heck, beige is about the most boring color in the universe. Now we know why.
I mean, basically they say "we'll do what we want without you knowing unless you read all of our TOS on an hourly basis". I'd say this makes the whole service - free or not - totally worthless. They could take your work and sell it under their own copyright.
I don't see a real problem in accounting. I'm using internet access provided by the university I'm at. We have a (really stupid) traffic quota and you can check the current status via a simple web interface (actually, it's not much of an interface, just a dynamically generated page that provides information based on IP adresses). Something similar could surely be done based on login data.
As for DOS attacks, that's something more of a problem. But as those attacks can in many cases be recognized by certain characteristics (lots of packets to a certain port from many hosts without requests to those hosts), those could be sorted out on a case-to-case basis in significant cases.
Security precautions could also be implemented by the provider, like blocking SMB ports. I don't know if someone would really want those open to the whole 'net. "Hardcore" users could then perhaps open up those ports. Since Joe Average most probably doesn't even know about such things, we'd have a working security by obscurity measure.
Afterall, those ideas are rather futuristic, but I think if some providers implemented at least parts of them, it could be a good thing for both average and power users. Didn't we all cry for a more volume-oriented billing scheme some time ago?
What I really want is a possibility to mount my HSF (760g Swiftech monster) through the board onto the case. Why? That's easy. Although I trust the PCB to some extent, I'd be happier if it was one step tighter. A standard for this would of course include a need for processor and board producers to produce some kind of standard for that, meaning to consent on a few positions for the socket, mounting holes and keepout areas. That way, there could be a method of mounting HSF's in a way that doesn't suffer from broken sockets or the PCB being strained beyond belief. Plus it would provide some more stability.
Another thing would be a form factor for absolutely minimal systems that don't even provide a single extension slot but are optimized towards easy, quiet cooling and cheap manufacture. I'm sure that would be a good thing for office computers.
Since when was D2 a solid, well polished game? No matter what you're smoking, I want some of that weed! Without the hype and the great D1, D2 would have failed sure as hell. It was technically backwards at release date (BTW, there was a patch 2 days before release...) and the 8 or 9 patches that followed only caused a shift to different problems. The most recent versions tend to be fairly stable but game balance in singleplayer has gone to hell.
Even worse: Al Quaeda members might have worked on Linux helping to make it better and more stable. Who cares for one more security hole in Micro$oft products? But I bet it would hit every americans' pride to even think of it.
Auch Internetexperten der Bundestagsfraktionen lehnen Teile der Absprache ab. "Der Jugendmedienschutz ist in Deutschland bereits im Vergleich zu anderen Ländern nahezu klostertauglich", sagt der medienpolitische Sprecher der FDP, Hans-Joachim Otto. Es sei zu einfach, sich nach Landfrauenmanier "bigott über den von Millionen Deutschen konsumierten Schmutz" zu ereifern. Erotik-Anbieter seien die einzige Online-Branche, die schwarze Zahlen schreibe. Auch die SPD wolle "Dinosaurierdiskussionen über Sendezeitbegrenzungen und Lizenzpflichten" für das Internet einen Riegel vorschieben, sagte Jörg Tauss, Beauftragter für Neue Medien der SPD. Die Eckpunkte seien nicht konsensfähig.
Early morning (1:30pm) translation:
Experts refuse some parts
Even internet-experts of the [Bundestags]faction refuse parts of the agreement. "Youth protection in germany is, in comparison with pother countries, almost suitable for cloisters", says the media-politics spokesman Hans-Joachim Otto of the FDP. It'd be too easy to get excited over "smut consumed by millions of germans like country-women". Erotic offerings were the only online-business with an actual income. The SPD [government party] would like to stop "dinosaur-discussions about time-limits and license obligations" for the internet, says Jörg Tauss, comissioner for new media (SPD). The (corner-points???) are not suited for consent.
So, at least there's some hope. I wonder how that darn country got this far and how I can out of it! But... are there any free places out there?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be careful about wildly comparing everythings "danger factors" with driving at rush hour. Especially eye surgery. It is morbid, but chances are high that in a car accident you either won't really have to handle the results or get over it rather quickly. In eye surgery however, you're quite unlikely to die if the surgeon hits the "disintegrate" button, but you'll probably be blind as a mole for the rest of your life. Now, I would think that most of us are at an age where it would be very difficult at least to adopt to a completely changed lifestyle, especially if your defect was rather minor beforehand (nothing really requiring glass bricks).
I don't want to say that eye surgery is a bad thing. It has its merit in repairing defects that are otherwise incorrectible. But if it's (ab)used as purely cosmetic surgery, then I think the dangers outweigh the use.
Also note that my sight is rather good (-1.0 on both eyes, with a nasty embryonal core in the left which makes me see double on this eye), and so I might be unqualified to say this. But what I know is that every kind of surgery has very real dangers and that it should be regarded as a last resort.
$ solvechess
Please prepare and format 10 Dyson Spheres and fill them with crystalline silicon.
Please insert Dyson Sphere 1 and press enter...
Working..........(10%)
Please insert Dyson Sphere 2 and press enter...
Working...(13%), inf remaining.
Fun, fun, fun. And now we'll put those into a RAID 6+6. How many would you need at least and how many could fail before you lose any data? For bonus points, give the smallest possible distance you could leave between the spheres to keep them separated using no more than the power output of a Sol-like star on each and calculate the mass of all spheres combined. If possible draw a small diagram of how the spheres had to be placed for maximum stability.
No matter what the trolls say, this has potential. When I saw the Reloaded/Revolutions teaser, I wasn't too excited, but this one brings back the feelings I had after seeing the original Matrix teaser. I hate the MPAA, I hate Hollywood, I hate Warner, but they'll get my money for this!
If they do it right, they can go far beyond what they're doing on the big screen. Let's hope they break out of the sequel box and give us some cool entertainment.
In theory, they had to link to the full postal address from everywhere in their pages IIRC. It's european right that's enforced at least in Germany. You have to put it on commercial websites. I don't know how other countries in the EU handle this.
Article before this one: 178 comments.
Article after this: 120 comments.
This atricle: getting close to 400 comments.
I rest my case.
Yow! That's active passive resistance. Ghandi would have been so proud.
But here we go again, the same old crap we have seen with other research and - especially - with benchmarks. Some company, club or whatnot buys a researcher to bend statsitics their way and hopes that no one really notices that they're just reading a modified excerpt from How to lie with Statistics/Charts. And most of the time it works, because most of the really important folks (legislators) exceeded their level of competence when they were elected (you know who you are). They get those really biased statistics on glossy paper with lots of really biased charts, have a look at it and say: "Man, those [insert enemy here]s are really bad and should be [put against the wall|fried|gassed|drowned|beat to teath|stoned]." (Personally, I'd prefer the last one afther ther Berkeley definition.)
Then, it all ends. Why? Because any counterargument comes on standard paper, printed all in black with perhaps one or two graphs meant for people who know what they're looking at, and not for decisionmakers!
In the end, we can all just sing and hope that the revolution's coming and we get to decide who's to be put against the wall. Or at least who's to rethink their corporate policies to avoit a smack-bottom.
And I'll buy a copy. Would be the first HP book I read.
So you see, it took a while. Well, at least it's a working release that hits the market with a bang.
Hmmm... I cannot imagine why someone would mod your post down. IMHO it's interesting (or at least insightful).
Anyway, why take chances and increase the amount of seepage? Under that premise we could stop a whole bunch of environmentalist movements.
So you basically propose modifying plants to cause oil spills or explosive clouds? I just can't wait, but I sure as hell will be holding my breath.
"In related news, a supertanker sunk when crossing an alcohol cloud caused by ModiWeed that ignited due to an electrical spark." Hmmm. I want that stuff!
Some friends and me play good ol' pen'n'paper as often as we get to, but it's not easy to meet (working times, studying, "geographic challenges"). I'm seriously thinking about integrating Neverwinter into that schedule, at least if creation times for adventure settings keep acceptable.
And as for that EULA stuff, I don't think it's really valid or enforceable here (Germany) plus I'm thinking of a chicken-out license to stick to my modules that combines the convenience of private use and a postcard license.
Chicken-out license
This module is in no way meant for distribution. If you found it that means you either stumbled across a resource that I had to use in order to transfer the module for my own private use or someone else already ripped it from one such resource and made it available (since that person wasn't authorized to do so in the first place, this doesn't count as distribution by the maker!). However, since you're already at it, feel free to ignore the non-public nature of this module and let me know what you think about it.
Well, I couldn't agree more. I'd kill for a nice SCSI RAID system. I'm running three IBM U2W drives (2x18G, 1x9G), a CD-ROM and a ZIP on a nice dual channel controller and running a couple of 18 or 36-giggers in RAID would be nice. It'd probably last forever and provide nice performance on the right controller. But fact is that I can't afford it.
I'm a student. I drive a crummy '88 Volkswagen Golf. I'm willing to spend more on computer equipment than most average users. But as long as I don't find someone who pays me half a fortune for simple programming or maintenance work or win the lottery, the next SCSI system isn't too likely to happen soon. Hopefully the one I have lasts a little longer.
IMHO, the SCSI bus system is better than everything IDE/ATA can offer to date. It's not necessarily the devices that need to be put up against each other. Most recent SCSI disks in "acceptable" sizes are so expensive that you can easily build a RAID system from IDE disks for the same or even lower price. However what's really bad about IDE is the short bus. Face it, length and size do matter in some cases.
You can have a 12m LVD-SCSI bus with 15 devices plus controller running at full speed. But that's not desktop. You'll have trouble just cramming the disks in your average-sized tower, and you still need one or two additional PSUs to get them spinning. And now you take the sucker out for a LAN; but don't forget calling your chiropractor and get a reservation for the next two weeks straight.
Then there's IDE. With todays U-ATA133 specs you're limited to, like, 50cm bus length. Heck, that's about the height of a midi-tower! But it gets the job done. But no external devices for you, sorry. And you're down to 4 devices on your average motherboard, but most users can live with CD-ROM, CD-RW and one or two disks. With onboard RAID controllers coming up, there's an additional four disks possible and you can even plug in a separate DVD drive. You don't need a nuclear plant to get it running, you have lots of storage for a desktop machine and you can still carry it around. Perfect.
To sum it up, I think SCSI is still great, but it's losing on the desktop nowadays. The disks might last longer, it might be more flexible, but in the end, it's way too expensive and overkill. And then there's serial ATA on the horizon.
Well, I thought so, too. But then it came to my mind that Dungeon Siege doesn't offer one essential thing: generated maps. Those are one of the major factors in Diablo's almost unlimited replay value. I can't think of another game that me and my friends did play ofer such a long time and I don't think that would have been the case it we'd had to run across a never changing landscape killing never changing monsters. The most amazing thing about this is the fact that this is the case in spite of a plethora of game balance issues, technical glitches and blain ol' bugs, so there's got to be something.
What I'm really waiting for is Neverwinter Nights. With it's Dungeon Master(TM) mode it's hopefully the next Thing To Be. Anyway, have a look at the trailer, it's well worth it. Although it doesn't tell too much about the game, it's just cool to look at.
Oh, and I almost forgot: if everything fails, play Bleifuss Fun. It's plain fun from the point where the installer asks whether it should install DirectX 3. But afterwards, it offers very stable and quick gameplay. I have yet to encounter a single crash or hang.
Too late to apologize. Now they're tracking you and when they've found you, they'll turn Hubble around and show you what was really installed up there recently.
In decimal, that's 16710117... Let's sum it up... Damn! So close to 23! I guess the right color would be #FEF9E4
Judging by the huge amount of feedback this one produced, not too many I'd guess. Heck, beige is about the most boring color in the universe. Now we know why.
I mean, basically they say "we'll do what we want without you knowing unless you read all of our TOS on an hourly basis". I'd say this makes the whole service - free or not - totally worthless. They could take your work and sell it under their own copyright.
I don't see a real problem in accounting. I'm using internet access provided by the university I'm at. We have a (really stupid) traffic quota and you can check the current status via a simple web interface (actually, it's not much of an interface, just a dynamically generated page that provides information based on IP adresses). Something similar could surely be done based on login data.
As for DOS attacks, that's something more of a problem. But as those attacks can in many cases be recognized by certain characteristics (lots of packets to a certain port from many hosts without requests to those hosts), those could be sorted out on a case-to-case basis in significant cases.
Security precautions could also be implemented by the provider, like blocking SMB ports. I don't know if someone would really want those open to the whole 'net. "Hardcore" users could then perhaps open up those ports. Since Joe Average most probably doesn't even know about such things, we'd have a working security by obscurity measure.
Afterall, those ideas are rather futuristic, but I think if some providers implemented at least parts of them, it could be a good thing for both average and power users. Didn't we all cry for a more volume-oriented billing scheme some time ago?
What I really want is a possibility to mount my HSF (760g Swiftech monster) through the board onto the case. Why? That's easy. Although I trust the PCB to some extent, I'd be happier if it was one step tighter. A standard for this would of course include a need for processor and board producers to produce some kind of standard for that, meaning to consent on a few positions for the socket, mounting holes and keepout areas. That way, there could be a method of mounting HSF's in a way that doesn't suffer from broken sockets or the PCB being strained beyond belief. Plus it would provide some more stability.
Another thing would be a form factor for absolutely minimal systems that don't even provide a single extension slot but are optimized towards easy, quiet cooling and cheap manufacture. I'm sure that would be a good thing for office computers.
Since when was D2 a solid, well polished game? No matter what you're smoking, I want some of that weed! Without the hype and the great D1, D2 would have failed sure as hell. It was technically backwards at release date (BTW, there was a patch 2 days before release...) and the 8 or 9 patches that followed only caused a shift to different problems. The most recent versions tend to be fairly stable but game balance in singleplayer has gone to hell.
Even worse: Al Quaeda members might have worked on Linux helping to make it better and more stable. Who cares for one more security hole in Micro$oft products? But I bet it would hit every americans' pride to even think of it.
Early morning (1:30pm) translation:
Experts refuse some parts
Even internet-experts of the [Bundestags]faction refuse parts of the agreement. "Youth protection in germany is, in comparison with pother countries, almost suitable for cloisters", says the media-politics spokesman Hans-Joachim Otto of the FDP. It'd be too easy to get excited over "smut consumed by millions of germans like country-women". Erotic offerings were the only online-business with an actual income. The SPD [government party] would like to stop "dinosaur-discussions about time-limits and license obligations" for the internet, says Jörg Tauss, comissioner for new media (SPD). The (corner-points???) are not suited for consent.
So, at least there's some hope. I wonder how that darn country got this far and how I can out of it! But... are there any free places out there?
Last thing I heard was the the CEO of Palm resigned and the company wasn't going so strong as a whole. So what good is it for Be to be bought by them?
OK, so I tried to visit theregister. Couldn't connect. So I thought "they must have a story on /.". Yep.