What's so interesting about a bunch of brainwashed goons jumping and splashing all over the place in a futile effort to gather tiny slabs of rare metal ?
"So you've been doing gymnastics since you were 6 months old ? Good for you. Run along now."
People train for years just for a crack at the olympics. Haven't they ever heard of getting a job ? Or are they too simple-minded to do so ? Instead they perpetuate this age-old olympic crap that's been wasting billions every year. Sports are fine, REAL sports.. not this "Look at me! I can balance from two rings 10 feet above the ground with my legs perfectly horizontal" bullshit. Give me some hard-hitting fast-moving hockey!
You want a reason ? How about customer profiles ? If a certain web shopper has a long-standing positive history with Amazon or other affiliated sites, I think that entitles him/her to a discount. Proving that history is something else entirely. Anybody can fake a bunch of DB records for the IRS. Anybody can print invoices with past dates for the IRS. Anybody can lick their own nuts for the IRS. The point is, even though Amazon is better at making us sick than selling us books, what they're doing might be borderline illegal, but it's practically impossible to fight in the present legal system because there are very few (if any) laws to govern e-commerce at this time.
I'd definitely see that MatchBox PC thing put to use in these robots. Using a CompactFlash drive brings the cpu-related moving parts down to zero, which yields a decently shock-resistant chunk of hardware that can then be delightfully encased in a solid cage to prevent a contender from chopping your chip in half or burning it with a flame-thrower. Throw in redundant wiring to the motors and finish off with a radio jammer to piss everyone else off =)
"Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" - Yay, a zoo!
I do agree that being a colo provider entails a bunch of steep costs for the facilities, but despite all those doodads I personally can't justify charging such astronomical fees for less than a cubic-foot of space. Some of these facilities house thousands of boxen. Can it cost them over a million per month in hydro + bandwidth + security + staff + investment amortization + rent/lease fees + profit margin + whatever ? IANACFCEO (i am not a colo facility C.E.O.) but it all seems grossly overpriced for something that can be broken down, simplified and just humanized.
Maybe I'm absolutely ignorant for what I'm about to say, but I would think that instead of focusing on 150% reliability and efficiency, why not just stick to good old common sense. If you want good coverage, then spread out the boxen all around the continent. Don't go paying through the nose just to be housed next to a major NAP. So what if the average ping there is 20% less than at your previous location ? You're not remote-controlling nuke missiles here, you're serving web pages, databases, maybe game servers.. you're service to PEOPLE. People are relatively slow and forgiving. We probably won't notice that ping discrepancy if it's still under 100ms. And if you were to be unlucky and catch an hour or two of downtime, will the users run down and beat you up ? Hell no, they will wait until it's fixed, as long as it's done in a reasonable time frame. Quit trying to develop the absolutely perfect network and try to settle for "just perfect enough". Again, we're only human.
Easily fixed. Just get a solid-state drive for those speedy searches. Then port PovRay to an IC board for hardware raytracing. Same thing for file compression. Finally, take some valium and watch the PC speed up as your brain slows down.
A sad problem with new games is that even though you may have slaved over assembly code for weeks in order to make that shimmering new strategy sim run decently on an old P200, the owners of such cpu's simply don't bother shopping for games anymore because they feel they're out of the race. They've learned not to believe those "Minimum requirements" because they're just too.. minimal. Ever tried to run Quake 2 on a P166 in software mode ? Was it playable ? Of course not. From that day on you never bought an FPS again until you swapped that old cpu for a brand new P2-400 and renewed your enthusiasm for PC gaming.
The moral of this story is that no matter how well tuned your game might be, if you can't 100% convince the low-end users that it will run fine on their systems, then you will have wasted all that optimization time when instead you could have spent the coder's extra salary on a horde of young swedish nude masseuses in preparation for your next big seller (Fluke Nukem 12 : Slutty Cheerleaders From Mars).
The only crop of games that still score (proportionally) with the low-end people are budget/compilation titles, think Mahjongg and Tetris). The reasoning here is simple : if they're too cheap to upgrade their fossil box, they're probably too cheap to pay 40-50$ for a game, but 15$ for 5-10 games is an acceptable indulgence for those people.
Any brave biped can unlock his/her/its Duron/T-Bird in a few minutes using a simple pencil. Yes it works, I've done it, went from a 900mhz to 1040 in minutes, without mucking with the voltage. Just don't expect orgasmic results unless you invest in a serious heatsink/fan combo and maybe a peltier coldplate.
On the other hand, the Celeron 667 is very sexy at 1.0ghz, and very easy to overclock too. Even more delicious is the low price and the fact that you can reuse that old BX board on which your old hosed Celeron 300a used to reside. 150$ for a gigahertz chip and around 90$ for a BX board means it costs half as much as a similar AMD setup (except you don't get that nifty DDR stuff - oh well).
"All women are nuts. All women are equally nuts. Some women ACT normal in an effort to attract men so that they can exert their nutty self upon them, but make no mistake, ALL women are nuts. If women were normal they'd be men"
If rackspace can cost $1000/U/month, then don't ya think it would be a good idea to find a better site for the boxen ? Heck, if that's what rackspace is going for these days, I'm converting my apartment into a colo facility =)
Since Napster is a peer-2-peer network file sharing thingy, they would need to keep up a server with the fake songs up in order to serve them. Although this is quite feasible, another problem is getting the users to download the fake song instead of the 200 other real songs that were returned in their search. Unless you try to overcrowd the rest and run upwards of 30-40 servers concurrently, which would be cruelly expensive for just a simple publicity prank like this, well you'll just end up wasting time, bandwidth, and of course money.
Still haven't figured Katz' point
on
Me-Commerce
·
· Score: 1
Can someone enlighten me as to why Mr. Katz keeps posting these annoyingly obvious rehashes of stuff we already know ? I just don't see the point in trying to remind us of what we already know. Is this how he trolls for input with which he will write his next book ? Asking the geek collective to think in his place ?
No thanks. I get used enough already by my S.O. =)
A modkit for sony portable cd players to play mp3's. I bought an MPTrip/I-Jam/Genica/whatever-your-local-supplier-l abeled-it, and the sound quality is extreme shit. Meanwhile I have a kickass 250$ Sony Discman getting acquainted with the bottom of my junk pile. I wish I could just combine the two and end up with the be-all-end-all crisp loud sharp-bassed solid skip-free low-battery-consumption mp3-cd player.
Or I could just sell the MPTrip to a deaf and dumb fool, use the cash to buy a bunch of blanks, and burn everything as Redbooks. Ugh.
"She left me when I told her I get f%#ked by Bill Gates everyday.."
Simple. Every internet-related crime is either fraud or a miscellaneous felony. Either way you get prosecuted as if you had anally raped 13 goat fetuses in front of a church. The legal system just isn't prepared or educated for electronic crime, because most of the people who create and sign laws have never touched a PC, never cared about them, and will probably drop dead of old age before anybody comes back to blame them for such atrocities.
How can a system be down for an entire month ? Anybody with a pea-sized brain can crash a box, and it takes a few minutes to bring it back up. Now if a pair of "black hat security experts" damaged the system so severely, why didn't the admins just restore a backup the next day and fix their holes ? This just doesn't make any sense. Any more-or-less well organised team of admins should be able to at least put together a fallback server in an evening if they've been making regular backups. Heck, even if the infiltrators had some way to cause a hardware malfunction and fry the mobo, the admins just need to run down to the shop and get new hardware. Suspending user access for a month while you're trying to put everything back into place is absurd. A flock of geese could probably learn to speak esperanto in less time than that.
(this abhorringly exaggerated commentary is (c) Billco 2000)
This happens all the time, in all markets. Take for example your favorite fast food chain. Let's make it Taco Bell for the sake of my example. Suppose your neighborhood T.B. sells their tacos at 79 cents each. Go to the movies and go eat some Taco Bell there, you'll pay at least 99 cents each, a 20% increase for the exact same product (although often inferior because they're in such a damned rush).
Let's take another example : Let's say you buy a shitload of computer gear like I do, and you almost always stick with the same shop for whatever reasons. Let's say you want to buy a GeForce2 with all the fixin's , that retails at maybe 569$ (in case you're about to have a seizure, those are canadian dollars). Well since you're such a loyal customer the shopkeeper might let you have it for 529$ at 40 bucks off since you've probably brought him 20k worth of business in the past 3 months. This is perfectly legal and happens every day.
So in conclusion, this is another case where everybody bitches when they're on the short end of the straw, without realizing that the situation is often reversed.
It's inevitably true that Sony is out to impose their counter-standard schemes upon us all with FUD and strongarm tactics, but the problem resides with the fact that there are few companies out there who market products of equal sound quality as Sony's (although it has been noted that they rate low on sturdyness and durability). They make the best-sounding walkmans, they make the best-sounding DJ headphones, they make the best-looking video gear (for the consumer market). They are in a situation where we hate them to death but can't live without buying their products because everything else sucks (and I don't see myself buying a Harmon-Kardon $tereo anytime soon). They certainly know this and use it to its fullest abuse potential.
Sir Katz, you dearly need to find another outlet for these witless masquerades that light up the deepest flame-throwers/. has to offer. We already have enough questions in our own heads, we don't need yours. It's answers we want. Answers you don't have.
Someone start a ShootLars.com fund. We basically hire Joe Random Sniper with whatever cash we amass and bring this debauchery to a messy stop. Geez have you seen the blasphemy they displayed at that MTV awards shiny thing (as if MTV wasn't blasphemous enough already). I could stand watching Britney Spheres bouncing around (muted!) but watching Mr "I look stupid on video because my jaw moves more than my guitar pick" Ulrich stick Napster stickers on some girl's ass had me jumping and yelling.
Come to think of it, couldn't Napster sue Metallica for using the Napster logos and trademarks in a slanderous and defamatory way ? I'd drink to that!
The problem is that Hasbro is re-releasing many of these classics with a new? graphics and a few pathetic bells and whistles that make these machines stand out in the arcades for their lack of... 90's technology. I've played the new Arkanoid 2000 or whatever year they're dreaming about now, and although it's as entertaining as the original, it's certainly a vivid anachronism to have it sitting beside Virtua Fighter 3. A little further you'll find a 3-in-1 featuring DigDug and a few other simplicities in both original and remixed form.
Hasbro is obviously coughing up cheap remakes of their old software in an effort to renew their grip on the copyrights to software they didn't even make in the first place. Didn't they use to make Light Brights back in the days when we were all pounding our QuickShot joysticks into our lap striving to finish yet another 100+ level of Asteroids ? The whole point of video games is to provide cheap and easy fun that doesn't involve a bunch of underage girls and grocery-brand wine. The vast majority of game programmers don't do it for money (because there just isn't any), they do it for bragging rights and simply for the challenge of writing their own game start to finish. Hasbro is hurting everybody from the coders to the gamers, and gaining absolutely nothing but a bad image.
"I coded Stackup and Stackup 2, and I even had to pay for this lousy T-Shirt."
Is it just me or do you have an acute fear of democracy ? Now don't start off with the wrong idea, my intention is not to criticize you personally, but why should you impose preferences upon your child ? Of course there are things that children should be protected from until they are mature enough to deal with those things, but protecting someone doesn't mean locking them up in a steel cage and keeping the evil out. It is far more effective to educate and let the child protect him/herself with their newfound wisdom. Kids are typically quite bright but the traditional form of parental guidance usually incites the child to learn how to work around the rules instead of making the rules work for them. Prevent a kid from watching the hit movie of the summer because it portrays graphic violence, and the kid will end up seeing it behind your back. But if you teach him/her the pros and cons of violence and trust their judgement, you'll come out victorious. Maybe they'll go watch the movie anyway, but at least they'll have thought about it and taken another step toward maturity. Just take a look around and see the new generation of teens, the "lost" generation as many people like to label it. They're "lost" because they've suddenly been struck with a load of responsibility that they were never prepared for. It's like having a new job but you have no idea what you're supposed to be doing, trying to look busy and important when in truth you're just wasting everyone's time including your own. 18 year olds being tossed naked into life, stripped of their parental blanket, falling prey to the many vices of humanity that they were never properly trained against.
Irresponsibility is the problem, not the solution.
Screw. Some guy is going nuts labeling "redundant" on every user who dares to dream of the ideal 2d/3d chipset alliance. He/she must be stuck with an S3 Savage to be so spiteful of us all =)
Slashdot Mirror
What's so interesting about a bunch of brainwashed goons jumping and splashing all over the place in a futile effort to gather tiny slabs of rare metal ?
"So you've been doing gymnastics since you were 6 months old ? Good for you. Run along now."
People train for years just for a crack at the olympics. Haven't they ever heard of getting a job ? Or are they too simple-minded to do so ? Instead they perpetuate this age-old olympic crap that's been wasting billions every year. Sports are fine, REAL sports.. not this "Look at me! I can balance from two rings 10 feet above the ground with my legs perfectly horizontal" bullshit. Give me some hard-hitting fast-moving hockey!
Simple answer : Kill the i810 code and recompile
You want a reason ? How about customer profiles ? If a certain web shopper has a long-standing positive history with Amazon or other affiliated sites, I think that entitles him/her to a discount. Proving that history is something else entirely. Anybody can fake a bunch of DB records for the IRS. Anybody can print invoices with past dates for the IRS. Anybody can lick their own nuts for the IRS. The point is, even though Amazon is better at making us sick than selling us books, what they're doing might be borderline illegal, but it's practically impossible to fight in the present legal system because there are very few (if any) laws to govern e-commerce at this time.
I'd definitely see that MatchBox PC thing put to use in these robots. Using a CompactFlash drive brings the cpu-related moving parts down to zero, which yields a decently shock-resistant chunk of hardware that can then be delightfully encased in a solid cage to prevent a contender from chopping your chip in half or burning it with a flame-thrower. Throw in redundant wiring to the motors and finish off with a radio jammer to piss everyone else off =)
"Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" - Yay, a zoo!
I do agree that being a colo provider entails a bunch of steep costs for the facilities, but despite all those doodads I personally can't justify charging such astronomical fees for less than a cubic-foot of space. Some of these facilities house thousands of boxen. Can it cost them over a million per month in hydro + bandwidth + security + staff + investment amortization + rent/lease fees + profit margin + whatever ? IANACFCEO (i am not a colo facility C.E.O.) but it all seems grossly overpriced for something that can be broken down, simplified and just humanized.
Maybe I'm absolutely ignorant for what I'm about to say, but I would think that instead of focusing on 150% reliability and efficiency, why not just stick to good old common sense. If you want good coverage, then spread out the boxen all around the continent. Don't go paying through the nose just to be housed next to a major NAP. So what if the average ping there is 20% less than at your previous location ? You're not remote-controlling nuke missiles here, you're serving web pages, databases, maybe game servers.. you're service to PEOPLE. People are relatively slow and forgiving. We probably won't notice that ping discrepancy if it's still under 100ms. And if you were to be unlucky and catch an hour or two of downtime, will the users run down and beat you up ? Hell no, they will wait until it's fixed, as long as it's done in a reasonable time frame. Quit trying to develop the absolutely perfect network and try to settle for "just perfect enough". Again, we're only human.
Easily fixed. Just get a solid-state drive for those speedy searches. Then port PovRay to an IC board for hardware raytracing. Same thing for file compression. Finally, take some valium and watch the PC speed up as your brain slows down.
A sad problem with new games is that even though you may have slaved over assembly code for weeks in order to make that shimmering new strategy sim run decently on an old P200, the owners of such cpu's simply don't bother shopping for games anymore because they feel they're out of the race. They've learned not to believe those "Minimum requirements" because they're just too.. minimal. Ever tried to run Quake 2 on a P166 in software mode ? Was it playable ? Of course not. From that day on you never bought an FPS again until you swapped that old cpu for a brand new P2-400 and renewed your enthusiasm for PC gaming.
The moral of this story is that no matter how well tuned your game might be, if you can't 100% convince the low-end users that it will run fine on their systems, then you will have wasted all that optimization time when instead you could have spent the coder's extra salary on a horde of young swedish nude masseuses in preparation for your next big seller (Fluke Nukem 12 : Slutty Cheerleaders From Mars).
The only crop of games that still score (proportionally) with the low-end people are budget/compilation titles, think Mahjongg and Tetris). The reasoning here is simple : if they're too cheap to upgrade their fossil box, they're probably too cheap to pay 40-50$ for a game, but 15$ for 5-10 games is an acceptable indulgence for those people.
Any brave biped can unlock his/her/its Duron/T-Bird in a few minutes using a simple pencil. Yes it works, I've done it, went from a 900mhz to 1040 in minutes, without mucking with the voltage. Just don't expect orgasmic results unless you invest in a serious heatsink/fan combo and maybe a peltier coldplate.
On the other hand, the Celeron 667 is very sexy at 1.0ghz, and very easy to overclock too. Even more delicious is the low price and the fact that you can reuse that old BX board on which your old hosed Celeron 300a used to reside. 150$ for a gigahertz chip and around 90$ for a BX board means it costs half as much as a similar AMD setup (except you don't get that nifty DDR stuff - oh well).
"All women are nuts. All women are equally nuts. Some women ACT normal in an effort to attract men so that they can exert their nutty self upon them, but make no mistake, ALL women are nuts. If women were normal they'd be men"
If rackspace can cost $1000/U/month, then don't ya think it would be a good idea to find a better site for the boxen ? Heck, if that's what rackspace is going for these days, I'm converting my apartment into a colo facility =)
Since Napster is a peer-2-peer network file sharing thingy, they would need to keep up a server with the fake songs up in order to serve them. Although this is quite feasible, another problem is getting the users to download the fake song instead of the 200 other real songs that were returned in their search. Unless you try to overcrowd the rest and run upwards of 30-40 servers concurrently, which would be cruelly expensive for just a simple publicity prank like this, well you'll just end up wasting time, bandwidth, and of course money.
Can someone enlighten me as to why Mr. Katz keeps posting these annoyingly obvious rehashes of stuff we already know ? I just don't see the point in trying to remind us of what we already know. Is this how he trolls for input with which he will write his next book ? Asking the geek collective to think in his place ?
No thanks. I get used enough already by my S.O. =)
Steve Jobs needs to renew his birth control pills. He's PMSing out of control. PMS : Powerful Moron Syndrome.
"Apple Computer : Proudly going out of business for over 20 years"
Geesh.. you can get an SB Live OEM for about 40$ US, which has the digital out port. Unless you live in Alaska.
A modkit for sony portable cd players to play mp3's. I bought an MPTrip/I-Jam/Genica/whatever-your-local-supplier-l abeled-it, and the sound quality is extreme shit. Meanwhile I have a kickass 250$ Sony Discman getting acquainted with the bottom of my junk pile. I wish I could just combine the two and end up with the be-all-end-all crisp loud sharp-bassed solid skip-free low-battery-consumption mp3-cd player.
Or I could just sell the MPTrip to a deaf and dumb fool, use the cash to buy a bunch of blanks, and burn everything as Redbooks. Ugh.
"She left me when I told her I get f%#ked by Bill Gates everyday.."
Simple. Every internet-related crime is either fraud or a miscellaneous felony. Either way you get prosecuted as if you had anally raped 13 goat fetuses in front of a church. The legal system just isn't prepared or educated for electronic crime, because most of the people who create and sign laws have never touched a PC, never cared about them, and will probably drop dead of old age before anybody comes back to blame them for such atrocities.
How can a system be down for an entire month ? Anybody with a pea-sized brain can crash a box, and it takes a few minutes to bring it back up. Now if a pair of "black hat security experts" damaged the system so severely, why didn't the admins just restore a backup the next day and fix their holes ? This just doesn't make any sense. Any more-or-less well organised team of admins should be able to at least put together a fallback server in an evening if they've been making regular backups. Heck, even if the infiltrators had some way to cause a hardware malfunction and fry the mobo, the admins just need to run down to the shop and get new hardware. Suspending user access for a month while you're trying to put everything back into place is absurd. A flock of geese could probably learn to speak esperanto in less time than that.
(this abhorringly exaggerated commentary is (c) Billco 2000)
Selling a nick.. now that's funny!
(blah blah.. review bid.. blah.. place bid.. TADA!)
exactly!
This happens all the time, in all markets. Take for example your favorite fast food chain. Let's make it Taco Bell for the sake of my example. Suppose your neighborhood T.B. sells their tacos at 79 cents each. Go to the movies and go eat some Taco Bell there, you'll pay at least 99 cents each, a 20% increase for the exact same product (although often inferior because they're in such a damned rush).
Let's take another example : Let's say you buy a shitload of computer gear like I do, and you almost always stick with the same shop for whatever reasons. Let's say you want to buy a GeForce2 with all the fixin's , that retails at maybe 569$ (in case you're about to have a seizure, those are canadian dollars). Well since you're such a loyal customer the shopkeeper might let you have it for 529$ at 40 bucks off since you've probably brought him 20k worth of business in the past 3 months. This is perfectly legal and happens every day.
So in conclusion, this is another case where everybody bitches when they're on the short end of the straw, without realizing that the situation is often reversed.
It's inevitably true that Sony is out to impose their counter-standard schemes upon us all with FUD and strongarm tactics, but the problem resides with the fact that there are few companies out there who market products of equal sound quality as Sony's (although it has been noted that they rate low on sturdyness and durability). They make the best-sounding walkmans, they make the best-sounding DJ headphones, they make the best-looking video gear (for the consumer market). They are in a situation where we hate them to death but can't live without buying their products because everything else sucks (and I don't see myself buying a Harmon-Kardon $tereo anytime soon). They certainly know this and use it to its fullest abuse potential.
Blah blah blah blah blah.
/. has to offer. We already have enough questions in our own heads, we don't need yours. It's answers we want. Answers you don't have.
Sir Katz, you dearly need to find another outlet for these witless masquerades that light up the deepest flame-throwers
I made my point. Good night.
Someone start a ShootLars.com fund. We basically hire Joe Random Sniper with whatever cash we amass and bring this debauchery to a messy stop. Geez have you seen the blasphemy they displayed at that MTV awards shiny thing (as if MTV wasn't blasphemous enough already). I could stand watching Britney Spheres bouncing around (muted!) but watching Mr "I look stupid on video because my jaw moves more than my guitar pick" Ulrich stick Napster stickers on some girl's ass had me jumping and yelling.
Come to think of it, couldn't Napster sue Metallica for using the Napster logos and trademarks in a slanderous and defamatory way ? I'd drink to that!
The problem is that Hasbro is re-releasing many of these classics with a new? graphics and a few pathetic bells and whistles that make these machines stand out in the arcades for their lack of ... 90's technology. I've played the new Arkanoid 2000 or whatever year they're dreaming about now, and although it's as entertaining as the original, it's certainly a vivid anachronism to have it sitting beside Virtua Fighter 3. A little further you'll find a 3-in-1 featuring DigDug and a few other simplicities in both original and remixed form.
Hasbro is obviously coughing up cheap remakes of their old software in an effort to renew their grip on the copyrights to software they didn't even make in the first place. Didn't they use to make Light Brights back in the days when we were all pounding our QuickShot joysticks into our lap striving to finish yet another 100+ level of Asteroids ? The whole point of video games is to provide cheap and easy fun that doesn't involve a bunch of underage girls and grocery-brand wine. The vast majority of game programmers don't do it for money (because there just isn't any), they do it for bragging rights and simply for the challenge of writing their own game start to finish. Hasbro is hurting everybody from the coders to the gamers, and gaining absolutely nothing but a bad image.
"I coded Stackup and Stackup 2, and I even had to pay for this lousy T-Shirt."
Is it just me or do you have an acute fear of democracy ? Now don't start off with the wrong idea, my intention is not to criticize you personally, but why should you impose preferences upon your child ? Of course there are things that children should be protected from until they are mature enough to deal with those things, but protecting someone doesn't mean locking them up in a steel cage and keeping the evil out. It is far more effective to educate and let the child protect him/herself with their newfound wisdom. Kids are typically quite bright but the traditional form of parental guidance usually incites the child to learn how to work around the rules instead of making the rules work for them. Prevent a kid from watching the hit movie of the summer because it portrays graphic violence, and the kid will end up seeing it behind your back. But if you teach him/her the pros and cons of violence and trust their judgement, you'll come out victorious. Maybe they'll go watch the movie anyway, but at least they'll have thought about it and taken another step toward maturity. Just take a look around and see the new generation of teens, the "lost" generation as many people like to label it. They're "lost" because they've suddenly been struck with a load of responsibility that they were never prepared for. It's like having a new job but you have no idea what you're supposed to be doing, trying to look busy and important when in truth you're just wasting everyone's time including your own. 18 year olds being tossed naked into life, stripped of their parental blanket, falling prey to the many vices of humanity that they were never properly trained against.
Irresponsibility is the problem, not the solution.
Screw. Some guy is going nuts labeling "redundant" on every user who dares to dream of the ideal 2d/3d chipset alliance. He/she must be stuck with an S3 Savage to be so spiteful of us all =)