If germany wants to filter pr0n, they should start looking in their immediate vicinity before making fools of themselves on the net. Their close neighbor, France, is quite lenient as far as nudity/lewdness are concerned.
Their daytime TV would be quickly classified as "softcore porn" in any other country. There's something about bottled water and naked women splashing it all over their bodies that just wouldn't seem so 'pure and clean' here in America. Sure, it's not full-blown hardcore, but for an underage kid who's been blinded by his parents/gov't sine birth, it's going to have a similar effect, which is probably what the german gov't is trying to avoid.
As usual, these cultural differences will never see an end, because everyone thinks theirs is the best and everything else is evil. So we end up with hypocrisy, such as when Britney prances around in a skin-tone cleavage-enhancing bikini on national television, and people call it 'shocking'. I'd rather see people come clean and be honest about it all, like those kooky french, rather than testing the limits of "what's appropriate", as defined by a bunch of squeamish fools.
The time you'll spend developing a flaky system isn't going to pay off very much. Keep it simple, perhaps just write an automation utility that would automatically rip any disc upon insertion (by monitoring the drive's open/close state), fetching info from FreeDB of course. Then grab a big bag o'chips and some soda, move your couch within arm's length of the cdrom drive, and watch TV or play PS2 while swapping discs every few minutes. Boring, repetitive, but fairly efficient.
With a good drive and a decent CPU (750mhz+), it shouldn't take more than 4-5 minutes per disc, which means 12-15 discs per hour. There also nothing preventing you from using multiple PC's (or just two drives in one box if the encoding is fast enough).
Of course if you have lots of money to burn on a gadget, you could buy a robotic disc changer (or build your own from legos). But the jukebox thing is doomed from the start.
.. to continue developing Office for Macs ? I don't see how they could legally enforce this. "M$ is required by law to allocate $FOO person-hours of time for Mac development". I don't know the details, but it's easy to say that M$ would produce a mediocre product just to keep the DoJ off their back. "Look Uncle, we took Wordpad and made a prettier icon, renamed it MacWord.exe, and sold it for 199$. Now fuck off."
Re:Need to team up with thinkgeek.com
on
Binary Watch
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· Score: 1
True. They don't have enough 'bite' to them. I tend to prefer shirts with more edgy messages. I certainly wouldn't see myself walking around at work wearing "uberhacker", it's just bad. I do however like my other non-thinkgeek shirt that reads "A cubicle is just a padded room without a door" =) I think they need more of _that_ kind of humor.
There are a few libraries floating around that are quite functional, Ming is one, libswf is another. These libraries provide functions that create flash objects in code, i.e. createCircle() or whatever. We just need to wrap an editor around them. The problem is that vector graphics are usually somewhat complex mathematical beasts, especially when designing an UI to directly manipulate them.
Re:Stupid Idea
on
Binary Watch
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Consider this a Me-2 post.
It sorta reminds me how I used to mess with my dumb math teachers in high school by doing all my 'internal' calculations in hex, only converting the final answer back to decimal. Those idiot fucks never figured it out =)
Re:Need to team up with thinkgeek.com
on
Binary Watch
·
· Score: 1
Yes, and Thinkgeek can charge 90$ for this 30$ watch that probably costs 3$ to manufacture. The concept of Thinkgeek is nice, and I like having a store that carries plenty of different things that fascinate me, but their markup is absurd and that "You Save 30%" crap just insults me, just like Amazon. At least Amazon really does beat the competition price-wise.
Microsoft has itself declared that it supports its software for 6 years after the release date. Even the mindless techs at my publicly-funded workplace know this. They just performed a truckload of Win98 upgrades in the past couple of months (which of course made everything worse, since they just ran the upgrade over the existing Win95 base).
Windows 2000 will stop being supported sometime in 2005, XP will die in 2007. So be it.
That's why EQ is so lucrative : they get you hooked, then bleed you dry. They know you're going to try hard to reach level xyz just to try out that new spell, and they know you're going to spend *weeks* hunting big game and selling stuff in order to gain items/money. They know you're going to spend hours on corpse runs because you don't want to lose the previous 50 hours worth of goods that are on the corpse.
Everything is designed to make you spend more time without necessarily realizing it. You find yourself renewing a 3-month contract because you've only reached level 6-7 and you have 'so many more things left to discover'. EQ is Sony/Verant's big cash cow and they know it all too well. They rarely fix the annoying bits, and they'll always be very glad to announce a new race or gimmick that will have you starting over just out of curiosity. EQ is about money, not entertainment.
Too true. I had joined EQ about a year ago, played 24/7 for 4-5 months (much to my girlfriend's disappointment), then quit cold turkey. I decided to give it another shot last month after discussing it with a coworker, played it a total of 4 times, maybe 6-7 hours total, realized that all my old questing pals had evolved way beyond my level, and got serously bored of it.
On the other hand, I reinstalled Quake 3 and have been enjoying short frag fests at least 2-3 times per week. It's quick, it's simple, I don't care much who I play against, I just blow people into bits and it's fun.
If anyone could be the cleaver of ISP's, it would be myself. Of course since I'm signed up with the local telecom monopoly, and the gov't is backing them up, I don't fear them going bottoms-up anytime soon. But I do suck down about 40 times the monthly bandwidth 'limit', which isn't really limited because these people don't know how to setup their uBR monitoring software. tsk tsk!
I think it's pretty simple. If the government takes away these 'unsuitable' games from shelves, the people will get them by other means, either by downloading them from warez rings or importing them from overseas. As always, the gov't is just making a huge ass of itself and farting in our faces.
This reminds me of a dumb old sketch by Chris Rock about 'reverse racism', where he complained that he was tired of being specially treated because he was black. If you want the introverts to enjoy themselves, just let them be.
I'm one such introvert and I totally hate parties because I either sit alone and vedge out until its over, or spend all evening bitching about the stupid games and annoying idiots that try to chat me up out of pity.
If you want to cater to the geeks, give them the flexibility to organise their own party according to *their* likes and tastes. For my friends and I, we like individual-centric entertainment. Think paintball, go-kart racing, bowling, LAN parties; anything that doesn't involve teams (well ok, Quake CTF is the sole exception). Many of us were the kind of folks who were always picked last on teams, and as such we just learned to hate the concept altogether.
Food is anyone's guess. Again in my own group of friends, we like to keep it simple. Pizza, poutine or good old cold cuts. And good beer! Labatt Blue for the feeble, Guinness and Heineken for the connaisseurs:) Don't forget vodka or wine-based coolers for the sissies.
Then comes the tricky part : music. As it just happens, I'm a music freak. I am very picky and discerning about my aural sensations. You don't need to hire a stupid DJ (since all the good ones have regular gigs and don't do house calls), but just don't put on those anal-retentive DJ MC Gino Bling-Bling Mega-Hit-Mix-XP compilations and let it repeat all night (the 'shuffle' function doesn't help, either). Have someone throw together a decent playlist for good variety and let the mp3's stream all night, but most importantly hide the stereo so people don't start nagging you to play their favorite Yoko Ono records.
So basically, keep it smallish, keep it simple, and most importantly : listen to what the people want in a party. It isn't *your* party, it's *everyone's* party.
Well, from what I understand of the article, it seems as though they want to harvest organs by creating clones that aren't legally human. What if I were to require a kidney transplant or other, and they give me a half-human half-animal kidney ? Perhaps it would fix my pressing need for a replacement organ, but what about the long-term effects ?
There will still be animal DNA in that thing, who's to say my great-great-grandchildren won't develop complications or grow a tail ? It sounds fantastically stupid but what do we really know about this biotechnology anyway ?
Geez, isn't that called bribery/lobbying/whatever-diminutive-politically-c orrect-term ?
"Hello Mr Evil NSA Dude, please treat yourself to a free copy of our multi-bazillion-dollar product and do with it as you please. And the next time you're shopping around for enterprise software, please take the time to think of the friendly folks at Oracle."
which directly translates into :
"Hey wise guy, take this crap and shove it up your ass. I don't care, it didn't cost me a penny. And if you don't play nice, we're gonna make a big publicized stink about it."
If a linux-powered PS2 costs 1/10th of an Athlon where you live, then either the PS2's are dirt cheap or the Athlons are outrageously expensive. Here in Canada, PS2's still cost 450$ (CDN), while an Athlon 1.4ghz goes for 169$, a board is 99$, etc.. you can build a decent box for about 400$ CDN, less than a PS2's going price.
In this case, price/performance on the PS2 is crap for anything but games.
GCC is not merely for masochists, it is a nifty nostalgia-yanker for anyone who's ever been blessed with the classic Watcom C compilers. Having such extensive and exquisite control over the compilation process using only command-line params is a coder's greatest tool in the right hands.
What I'd really like to see in a new installer is the ability to actually install the thing from a serial port. I always find myself hauling around a spare monitor from box to box when rebuilding my 3 boxen. It would be quite nice to remotely control them all from my desktop with a standard terminal emulator, just like I do with the big iron at work.
I don't know about you, but if I were living in a town that has flying cinders all over the place, I don't think securing my house would be my first reaction. What about your own head ?
The problem is that all those experienced and talented workers already earn a comfortable living here. They're not ready to throw that all down to go live in the middle of nowhere working for free. The intentions are good but the social and economic status-quo doesn't favor volunteering. America wants heroes and pop stars, they don't give a flying fsck about 'illuminated hippies'. Government would rather see all those foreign civilizations die and/or be conquered by the worldwide phenomenon of US invasion.
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If germany wants to filter pr0n, they should start looking in their immediate vicinity before making fools of themselves on the net. Their close neighbor, France, is quite lenient as far as nudity/lewdness are concerned.
Their daytime TV would be quickly classified as "softcore porn" in any other country. There's something about bottled water and naked women splashing it all over their bodies that just wouldn't seem so 'pure and clean' here in America. Sure, it's not full-blown hardcore, but for an underage kid who's been blinded by his parents/gov't sine birth, it's going to have a similar effect, which is probably what the german gov't is trying to avoid.
As usual, these cultural differences will never see an end, because everyone thinks theirs is the best and everything else is evil. So we end up with hypocrisy, such as when Britney prances around in a skin-tone cleavage-enhancing bikini on national television, and people call it 'shocking'. I'd rather see people come clean and be honest about it all, like those kooky french, rather than testing the limits of "what's appropriate", as defined by a bunch of squeamish fools.
The time you'll spend developing a flaky system isn't going to pay off very much. Keep it simple, perhaps just write an automation utility that would automatically rip any disc upon insertion (by monitoring the drive's open/close state), fetching info from FreeDB of course. Then grab a big bag o'chips and some soda, move your couch within arm's length of the cdrom drive, and watch TV or play PS2 while swapping discs every few minutes. Boring, repetitive, but fairly efficient.
With a good drive and a decent CPU (750mhz+), it shouldn't take more than 4-5 minutes per disc, which means 12-15 discs per hour. There also nothing preventing you from using multiple PC's (or just two drives in one box if the encoding is fast enough).
Of course if you have lots of money to burn on a gadget, you could buy a robotic disc changer (or build your own from legos). But the jukebox thing is doomed from the start.
.. to continue developing Office for Macs ? I don't see how they could legally enforce this. "M$ is required by law to allocate $FOO person-hours of time for Mac development". I don't know the details, but it's easy to say that M$ would produce a mediocre product just to keep the DoJ off their back. "Look Uncle, we took Wordpad and made a prettier icon, renamed it MacWord.exe, and sold it for 199$. Now fuck off."
True. They don't have enough 'bite' to them. I tend to prefer shirts with more edgy messages. I certainly wouldn't see myself walking around at work wearing "uberhacker", it's just bad. I do however like my other non-thinkgeek shirt that reads "A cubicle is just a padded room without a door" =) I think they need more of _that_ kind of humor.
There are a few libraries floating around that are quite functional, Ming is one, libswf is another. These libraries provide functions that create flash objects in code, i.e. createCircle() or whatever. We just need to wrap an editor around them. The problem is that vector graphics are usually somewhat complex mathematical beasts, especially when designing an UI to directly manipulate them.
Consider this a Me-2 post.
It sorta reminds me how I used to mess with my dumb math teachers in high school by doing all my 'internal' calculations in hex, only converting the final answer back to decimal. Those idiot fucks never figured it out =)
Yes, and Thinkgeek can charge 90$ for this 30$ watch that probably costs 3$ to manufacture. The concept of Thinkgeek is nice, and I like having a store that carries plenty of different things that fascinate me, but their markup is absurd and that "You Save 30%" crap just insults me, just like Amazon. At least Amazon really does beat the competition price-wise.
Microsoft has itself declared that it supports its software for 6 years after the release date. Even the mindless techs at my publicly-funded workplace know this. They just performed a truckload of Win98 upgrades in the past couple of months (which of course made everything worse, since they just ran the upgrade over the existing Win95 base).
Windows 2000 will stop being supported sometime in 2005, XP will die in 2007. So be it.
Just build a standard Athlon 1000 system (500$), find a used graphics tablet (50$), spend the remaining 450$ on ebay for yourself :)
That's why EQ is so lucrative : they get you hooked, then bleed you dry. They know you're going to try hard to reach level xyz just to try out that new spell, and they know you're going to spend *weeks* hunting big game and selling stuff in order to gain items/money. They know you're going to spend hours on corpse runs because you don't want to lose the previous 50 hours worth of goods that are on the corpse.
Everything is designed to make you spend more time without necessarily realizing it. You find yourself renewing a 3-month contract because you've only reached level 6-7 and you have 'so many more things left to discover'. EQ is Sony/Verant's big cash cow and they know it all too well. They rarely fix the annoying bits, and they'll always be very glad to announce a new race or gimmick that will have you starting over just out of curiosity. EQ is about money, not entertainment.
Too true. I had joined EQ about a year ago, played 24/7 for 4-5 months (much to my girlfriend's disappointment), then quit cold turkey. I decided to give it another shot last month after discussing it with a coworker, played it a total of 4 times, maybe 6-7 hours total, realized that all my old questing pals had evolved way beyond my level, and got serously bored of it.
On the other hand, I reinstalled Quake 3 and have been enjoying short frag fests at least 2-3 times per week. It's quick, it's simple, I don't care much who I play against, I just blow people into bits and it's fun.
If anyone could be the cleaver of ISP's, it would be myself. Of course since I'm signed up with the local telecom monopoly, and the gov't is backing them up, I don't fear them going bottoms-up anytime soon. But I do suck down about 40 times the monthly bandwidth 'limit', which isn't really limited because these people don't know how to setup their uBR monitoring software. tsk tsk!
Quite the genius, eh ?
Land of the beaver it is.
I think it's pretty simple. If the government takes away these 'unsuitable' games from shelves, the people will get them by other means, either by downloading them from warez rings or importing them from overseas. As always, the gov't is just making a huge ass of itself and farting in our faces.
This reminds me of a dumb old sketch by Chris Rock about 'reverse racism', where he complained that he was tired of being specially treated because he was black. If you want the introverts to enjoy themselves, just let them be.
:) Don't forget vodka or wine-based coolers for the sissies.
I'm one such introvert and I totally hate parties because I either sit alone and vedge out until its over, or spend all evening bitching about the stupid games and annoying idiots that try to chat me up out of pity.
If you want to cater to the geeks, give them the flexibility to organise their own party according to *their* likes and tastes. For my friends and I, we like individual-centric entertainment. Think paintball, go-kart racing, bowling, LAN parties; anything that doesn't involve teams (well ok, Quake CTF is the sole exception). Many of us were the kind of folks who were always picked last on teams, and as such we just learned to hate the concept altogether.
Food is anyone's guess. Again in my own group of friends, we like to keep it simple. Pizza, poutine or good old cold cuts. And good beer! Labatt Blue for the feeble, Guinness and Heineken for the connaisseurs
Then comes the tricky part : music. As it just happens, I'm a music freak. I am very picky and discerning about my aural sensations. You don't need to hire a stupid DJ (since all the good ones have regular gigs and don't do house calls), but just don't put on those anal-retentive DJ MC Gino Bling-Bling Mega-Hit-Mix-XP compilations and let it repeat all night (the 'shuffle' function doesn't help, either). Have someone throw together a decent playlist for good variety and let the mp3's stream all night, but most importantly hide the stereo so people don't start nagging you to play their favorite Yoko Ono records.
So basically, keep it smallish, keep it simple, and most importantly : listen to what the people want in a party. It isn't *your* party, it's *everyone's* party.
Well, from what I understand of the article, it seems as though they want to harvest organs by creating clones that aren't legally human. What if I were to require a kidney transplant or other, and they give me a half-human half-animal kidney ? Perhaps it would fix my pressing need for a replacement organ, but what about the long-term effects ?
There will still be animal DNA in that thing, who's to say my great-great-grandchildren won't develop complications or grow a tail ? It sounds fantastically stupid but what do we really know about this biotechnology anyway ?
Geez, isn't that called bribery/lobbying/whatever-diminutive-politically-c orrect-term ?
"Hello Mr Evil NSA Dude, please treat yourself to a free copy of our multi-bazillion-dollar product and do with it as you please. And the next time you're shopping around for enterprise software, please take the time to think of the friendly folks at Oracle."
which directly translates into :
"Hey wise guy, take this crap and shove it up your ass. I don't care, it didn't cost me a penny. And if you don't play nice, we're gonna make a big publicized stink about it."
you do the math.
If a linux-powered PS2 costs 1/10th of an Athlon where you live, then either the PS2's are dirt cheap or the Athlons are outrageously expensive. Here in Canada, PS2's still cost 450$ (CDN), while an Athlon 1.4ghz goes for 169$, a board is 99$, etc.. you can build a decent box for about 400$ CDN, less than a PS2's going price.
In this case, price/performance on the PS2 is crap for anything but games.
almost funny =)
Cross-clone humans with octopii, what do you get ? Tentacle monsters!
To stay on topic : even though they 'intended' this for organ production, it is still a very sick concept.
GCC is not merely for masochists, it is a nifty nostalgia-yanker for anyone who's ever been blessed with the classic Watcom C compilers. Having such extensive and exquisite control over the compilation process using only command-line params is a coder's greatest tool in the right hands.
What I'd really like to see in a new installer is the ability to actually install the thing from a serial port. I always find myself hauling around a spare monitor from box to box when rebuilding my 3 boxen. It would be quite nice to remotely control them all from my desktop with a standard terminal emulator, just like I do with the big iron at work.
Ahh.. that explains the clown-truck in Maximum Overdrive :)
I don't know about you, but if I were living in a town that has flying cinders all over the place, I don't think securing my house would be my first reaction. What about your own head ?
The problem is that all those experienced and talented workers already earn a comfortable living here. They're not ready to throw that all down to go live in the middle of nowhere working for free. The intentions are good but the social and economic status-quo doesn't favor volunteering. America wants heroes and pop stars, they don't give a flying fsck about 'illuminated hippies'. Government would rather see all those foreign civilizations die and/or be conquered by the worldwide phenomenon of US invasion.