Who gives a fuck about torque ? What's your fuel efficiency ?
I'd drive a 40 HP city car if they sold them. I spend most of my life stuck on red lights anyway. I can bike faster than I can drive in this shit town.
Where I live, there's a particularly notorious overpass. It's a stretched-out bump, less than 10 feet up & down over a mile-long stretch. There's absolutely nothing there, four lanes each direction and no exits for another half-mile, yet people always slow down to about 15-20 km/h right before the hilltop, causing traffic to back up at least 800 cars. About once a week there's a nasty fender-bender chain, usually involving some ricer kid with his canary-yellow honda, stoned out of his goddamned weasel brain doing 180 on stock brakes.
Pass the hill, and traffic goes back to its usual 30% above the limit. Like you say, there's no real solution to it - you can't make drivers less stupid, most people are too fraidy to be driving but confidence is not part of the license exam.
Yep, the SUV driver was a royal asshat. I would have been tempted to cut him off and let him mash my car. That's an automatic "reckless driving" citation, which means (at least where I live) the guy loses his license for 2 years... that's if he survives. Some of those SUVs are death traps!
I'm all for fuel efficiency, but the types who do that granola pulse driving, speeding up and slowing down all the time while paying more attention to their speedo than the traffic around them, are annoying, dangerous, and frankly rather ignorant of the dynamics of driving.
Yes, you can get a bit better mileage, and that's great, but doing so at the expense of vigilance and predictability is absolute folly. They may as well be street racing, for all I care, because I have to deal with them in much the same way : Stay far far away!
A significant skill involved in safe driving is predicting other vehicles. You get to a point where it happens subconsciously, where you just "know" that car two spots ahead is going to cut you off at the exit, just by observing the driver's behavior... if they waver back and forth within their lane, or maybe they turn their head a lot for a safe lane change...
I couldn't tell you how many ugly situations I've witnessed and avoided thanks to this 6th sense; at least once a week, though I do live in a busy, multicultural cesspool of a city with a high ratio of passive-aggressive office drones. It's so bad that just seeing a Prius, Volvo or Lexus makes me tense up - those seem to be the favorites of boneheaded drivers around here, YMMV.
You need to take a long hard look at the kind of people running America
You mean bankers ?
The country has become so obsessed with the stock market, the whole war thing seems like a distraction. A flashy event to draw attention away from the real reason the country's in hell: financial abuse.
Pardon my unamerican ignorance, but what is NASA exactly ? If they are a government operation, shouldn't these patents be delivered to the public domain ? After all, they are the fruits of tax dollars.
Maybe I have a weird, overly accurate definition of democracy, but it seems as though government property should be considered public property... but hey, don't mind me and my commonwealth mindset. I'm just a cocky Canadian after all.
to run EQ2 with full graphics details you needed a 512 MB graphics card, and that just didn't exist yet.
That's a good thing! It means the game will not look too outdated in a year, when that impossibly powerful hardware hits the mainstream.
People bitch and moan about Crysis, but that's a game that will continue to impress even a year or two from now, as GPU power increases as well as monitor resolution.
Conversely, just because you can't run a game at max settings on your current rig, doesn't mean the game sucks.
I find it incredibly backwards that China is asking for this. It is practically impossible to get any kind of justice from China, which is why a large number of hosts treat Chinese IPs as hostile. If you get scammed by someone within the great firewall, there is no legal recourse.
If China wants to play with the rest of the world, they need to start playing by our rules. I'm sure we all want to tap into their demographic, but until we can do that in a safe and controller manner, I don't see any reason why we should grant them any privileges.
Ideas are cheap, and frankly if Google finds *nothing* there are two possibilities:
1. you are a genius -or- 2. your idea stinks, makes no sense, is infeasible, or there is a better solution that solves the problem in a more efficient way.
As a programmer, I get extremely cynical whenever someone says "I have an idea, and all I need is a programmer". They almost always follow it up with "it'll only take a week to build".
The best thing to do at this point is to flesh out the idea:
1. what does it do (in 3 sentences or less) 2. who will use it 3. how will it make money (or not) 4. flowchart its high-level functions 5. sketch out a rough interface if possible
Once you have all of that, you can show it to a competent programmer, and they should be able to tell you almost instantly if your idea holds water, as well as highlight any weaknesses or failure points. If you do a good enough job of writing your plan, the programmer(s) will be much more interested in joining the project. More importantly, having a plan will make it 10 times more likely the project will come to fruition.
I'm saying when I buy a PC, I don't want to be forced into buying Windows with it.
Buying any PC from the top 3 suppliers currently entails a non-optional copy of Windows. I don't want it. I don't want Dell/HP/Lenovo to buy one on my behalf either.
When you buy a bottle of Tequila, does the cashier force you to buy $10 worth of rotten lemons ? Just because most weenies have it with lemon does not mean Real Men should be forced to buy them too.
The way things are going, Americans are going to have to make a choice... not Obama vs McCain, but USA vs Elsewhere.
It's pretty obvious there are some truly corrupt people at work here, making all these over-reaching zero-accountability decisions that favor big media. One solution is to fight these bastards at every opportunity - lawsuits, protests, awareness campaigns. The other is to flee and let them destroy what's left of the nation that once stood for freedom. When there's no one left to sue, these tyrants will wither and die, and the country will be ready to be reclaimed.
Hey... if it's _YOUR_ country, it is _YOUR_ responsibility to protect it. If the enemy is the government, well... you should know what to do.
Combine any of these with AnyDVD, or DVD43 (free) and you can rip or copy just about any disc in a matter of minutes.
Throw in AutoGK and you can convert them to AVI with very little effort.
If you're willing to install absolutely horrible software, Nero does it too, as long as you have AnyDVD or DVD43 to break the CSS encryption. This RealDVD app is very very late, they should have released it six years ago.
Somehow I think anyone with such strong motives for privacy/stealth would set up their own darknet with something like WASTE, or combining features of both WASTE and this P2P-storage thing... that would be near-impossible to detect and expose.
The problem with thumb drives is you still need to store temporary files somewhere, in order to open them e.g. pictures/videos. There are few if any apps that download and process media in-memory.
I was actually very happy the game included both PC & Mac versions all for one cost.
You shouldn't be happy. You should expect the game to run on your platform of choice, because the PC is not a lock-in console like an Xbox or Playstation. The developers have to fight for your installation, not the other way around.
I'm not saying it's hard, I'm saying its need is exaggerated. Months of files ? I don't know what you do for a living, but I don't really have anything worth months of my life, sitting on my PC. On servers, sure! But those have their own backup systems in place. My own PC is little more than a gateway to those remote systems.
I guess that's one advantage of being a network-nomad:) Any PC becomes a dumb terminal to me.
How about the market for people who don't want Windows ?
I frankly don't care what they preload on it, I'd be just as happy with a blank system. I just don't want to be forced into buying a Windows license. There are some of us (many!) who really just want the hardware. There are even more of us who, upon buying a new machine with Windows preinstalled, will blow away the OS and install it to our own preferences, sans trialware.
If anything, this move should convince people, once and for all, that Lenovo has strayed very far from its IBM roots.
I must be missing some key information here, but if the thing has an IP address, they should be able to track it down to the nearest router/switch and follow the cabling, no ? It's not like the thing is sitting in some guy's closet.
Restricting the groups doesn't do much, because they will continue to spam other groups. There's just no stopping Usenet, and frankly no reason to do so in the first place. It is one of the last vestiges of the early internet still kicking around.
I hear these arguments all the time... how everyone should have offsite backup.
What I want to know is: How often does your house burn down ?
There is a very small quantity of data that I consider priceless, and even then I could survive without it. It would suck ass, but my heart isn't going to stop. I certainly won't jump off a bridge if I were to lose my MP3s or a bunch of movies. Pictures can be archived to disc, as well as my own works like audio masters and code. If I ever come across something that I really can't afford to lose, I'll make redundant copies... in the safe, in the car, on the net... but I haven't yet found or created something so irreplaceable.
Frankly, if my building burns to the ground, I will have more important things to worry about than my SSH key. Like finding a new place to live!
The sad thing is we all know CP freaks would totally (ab)use this service, tainting it for everyone else.
Me, I'd actually like an unencrypted alternative. As a sysadmin, I want to know what's being stored on my disks, and if I disapprove I should have veto powers over who stores what. If I find questionable material, I delete it and ban it from my system. Given the (presumably) large number of hosts, the sender will be able to find a more friendly home for their files, and I don't get my hands dirty.
Just because the rich "big guy" donates a few bucks to charity does not grant them amnesty from being a big whoring money-printing machine.
I would have tremendously more respect for the Harry Potter franchise if it hadn't been designed from the ground up as a humongous cash cow. That puts it right up there with the music industry's manufactured acts.
If the Lexicon were a competing product build for profit by misappropriating intellectual property, well I'd have a little more compassion. It wasn't. It's a fan site. There are much more pleasant ways to deal with fan sites than shutting them down in court.
There are those who "get" the fan scene, and those who don't.
The big problem with mirroring is you still need a smart controller to handle the load balancing. Cheap junk like Promise/Highpoint cards don't do that, many of them read from just one drive (and good luck rebuilding after a failure).
Intel's fakeraid is actually pretty decent in this area, as long as you don't do that stupid "matrix raid" nonsense where you stripe part of a drive, then mirror the other, or even dumber is to mirror one half of a drive to the other half:P But if you use whole drives, the performance is quite amazing for "free" raid.
Well now, if the additional responsibility means I get firing powers over the energy-deficient people in the company, I say bring it!
That assgasm who calls me 3 seconds after firing off an email, to discuss the content of the email ? Pink slips!
Granny Smith who prints out the 200-page weekly report so she can read it with her bifocals ? Early retirement!
The worthless drones that disable the 20-minute standby so their elaborate client-side Outlook rules can continue running all night ? Back to the mail room they go!
There's a lot of fat to be trimmed in the typical office. If IT is the only faction that's jaded enough to do it, we'll fucking do it!
Slashdot Mirror
Who gives a fuck about torque ? What's your fuel efficiency ?
I'd drive a 40 HP city car if they sold them. I spend most of my life stuck on red lights anyway. I can bike faster than I can drive in this shit town.
Where I live, there's a particularly notorious overpass. It's a stretched-out bump, less than 10 feet up & down over a mile-long stretch. There's absolutely nothing there, four lanes each direction and no exits for another half-mile, yet people always slow down to about 15-20 km/h right before the hilltop, causing traffic to back up at least 800 cars. About once a week there's a nasty fender-bender chain, usually involving some ricer kid with his canary-yellow honda, stoned out of his goddamned weasel brain doing 180 on stock brakes.
Pass the hill, and traffic goes back to its usual 30% above the limit. Like you say, there's no real solution to it - you can't make drivers less stupid, most people are too fraidy to be driving but confidence is not part of the license exam.
Yep, the SUV driver was a royal asshat. I would have been tempted to cut him off and let him mash my car. That's an automatic "reckless driving" citation, which means (at least where I live) the guy loses his license for 2 years... that's if he survives. Some of those SUVs are death traps!
I'm all for fuel efficiency, but the types who do that granola pulse driving, speeding up and slowing down all the time while paying more attention to their speedo than the traffic around them, are annoying, dangerous, and frankly rather ignorant of the dynamics of driving.
Yes, you can get a bit better mileage, and that's great, but doing so at the expense of vigilance and predictability is absolute folly. They may as well be street racing, for all I care, because I have to deal with them in much the same way : Stay far far away!
A significant skill involved in safe driving is predicting other vehicles. You get to a point where it happens subconsciously, where you just "know" that car two spots ahead is going to cut you off at the exit, just by observing the driver's behavior... if they waver back and forth within their lane, or maybe they turn their head a lot for a safe lane change...
I couldn't tell you how many ugly situations I've witnessed and avoided thanks to this 6th sense; at least once a week, though I do live in a busy, multicultural cesspool of a city with a high ratio of passive-aggressive office drones. It's so bad that just seeing a Prius, Volvo or Lexus makes me tense up - those seem to be the favorites of boneheaded drivers around here, YMMV.
You need to take a long hard look at the kind of people running America
You mean bankers ?
The country has become so obsessed with the stock market, the whole war thing seems like a distraction. A flashy event to draw attention away from the real reason the country's in hell: financial abuse.
Pardon my unamerican ignorance, but what is NASA exactly ? If they are a government operation, shouldn't these patents be delivered to the public domain ? After all, they are the fruits of tax dollars.
Maybe I have a weird, overly accurate definition of democracy, but it seems as though government property should be considered public property... but hey, don't mind me and my commonwealth mindset. I'm just a cocky Canadian after all.
Anybody who uses LOL in a forum that doesn't limit responses to the length of a cellular text message is most certainly a loser.
I have carpal tunnel, you insensitive clod!
to run EQ2 with full graphics details you needed a 512 MB graphics card, and that just didn't exist yet.
That's a good thing! It means the game will not look too outdated in a year, when that impossibly powerful hardware hits the mainstream.
People bitch and moan about Crysis, but that's a game that will continue to impress even a year or two from now, as GPU power increases as well as monitor resolution.
Conversely, just because you can't run a game at max settings on your current rig, doesn't mean the game sucks.
I find it incredibly backwards that China is asking for this. It is practically impossible to get any kind of justice from China, which is why a large number of hosts treat Chinese IPs as hostile. If you get scammed by someone within the great firewall, there is no legal recourse.
If China wants to play with the rest of the world, they need to start playing by our rules. I'm sure we all want to tap into their demographic, but until we can do that in a safe and controller manner, I don't see any reason why we should grant them any privileges.
With privilege comes responsibility.
Ideas are cheap, and frankly if Google finds *nothing* there are two possibilities:
1. you are a genius
-or-
2. your idea stinks, makes no sense, is infeasible, or there is a better solution that solves the problem in a more efficient way.
As a programmer, I get extremely cynical whenever someone says "I have an idea, and all I need is a programmer". They almost always follow it up with "it'll only take a week to build".
The best thing to do at this point is to flesh out the idea:
1. what does it do (in 3 sentences or less)
2. who will use it
3. how will it make money (or not)
4. flowchart its high-level functions
5. sketch out a rough interface if possible
Once you have all of that, you can show it to a competent programmer, and they should be able to tell you almost instantly if your idea holds water, as well as highlight any weaknesses or failure points. If you do a good enough job of writing your plan, the programmer(s) will be much more interested in joining the project. More importantly, having a plan will make it 10 times more likely the project will come to fruition.
Sir, you fail at english!
I'm saying when I buy a PC, I don't want to be forced into buying Windows with it.
Buying any PC from the top 3 suppliers currently entails a non-optional copy of Windows. I don't want it. I don't want Dell/HP/Lenovo to buy one on my behalf either.
When you buy a bottle of Tequila, does the cashier force you to buy $10 worth of rotten lemons ? Just because most weenies have it with lemon does not mean Real Men should be forced to buy them too.
The way things are going, Americans are going to have to make a choice... not Obama vs McCain, but USA vs Elsewhere.
It's pretty obvious there are some truly corrupt people at work here, making all these over-reaching zero-accountability decisions that favor big media. One solution is to fight these bastards at every opportunity - lawsuits, protests, awareness campaigns. The other is to flee and let them destroy what's left of the nation that once stood for freedom. When there's no one left to sue, these tyrants will wither and die, and the country will be ready to be reclaimed.
Hey... if it's _YOUR_ country, it is _YOUR_ responsibility to protect it. If the enemy is the government, well... you should know what to do.
Just a few programs that can do the same, very easily:
DVDShrink (free)
RatDVD (free?)
CloneDVD (commercial)
Combine any of these with AnyDVD, or DVD43 (free) and you can rip or copy just about any disc in a matter of minutes.
Throw in AutoGK and you can convert them to AVI with very little effort.
If you're willing to install absolutely horrible software, Nero does it too, as long as you have AnyDVD or DVD43 to break the CSS encryption. This RealDVD app is very very late, they should have released it six years ago.
Somehow I think anyone with such strong motives for privacy/stealth would set up their own darknet with something like WASTE, or combining features of both WASTE and this P2P-storage thing... that would be near-impossible to detect and expose.
The problem with thumb drives is you still need to store temporary files somewhere, in order to open them e.g. pictures/videos. There are few if any apps that download and process media in-memory.
I was actually very happy the game included both PC & Mac versions all for one cost.
You shouldn't be happy. You should expect the game to run on your platform of choice, because the PC is not a lock-in console like an Xbox or Playstation. The developers have to fight for your installation, not the other way around.
I'm not saying it's hard, I'm saying its need is exaggerated. Months of files ? I don't know what you do for a living, but I don't really have anything worth months of my life, sitting on my PC. On servers, sure! But those have their own backup systems in place. My own PC is little more than a gateway to those remote systems.
I guess that's one advantage of being a network-nomad :) Any PC becomes a dumb terminal to me.
How about the market for people who don't want Windows ?
I frankly don't care what they preload on it, I'd be just as happy with a blank system. I just don't want to be forced into buying a Windows license. There are some of us (many!) who really just want the hardware. There are even more of us who, upon buying a new machine with Windows preinstalled, will blow away the OS and install it to our own preferences, sans trialware.
If anything, this move should convince people, once and for all, that Lenovo has strayed very far from its IBM roots.
I must be missing some key information here, but if the thing has an IP address, they should be able to track it down to the nearest router/switch and follow the cabling, no ? It's not like the thing is sitting in some guy's closet.
Restricting the groups doesn't do much, because they will continue to spam other groups. There's just no stopping Usenet, and frankly no reason to do so in the first place. It is one of the last vestiges of the early internet still kicking around.
I hear these arguments all the time... how everyone should have offsite backup.
What I want to know is: How often does your house burn down ?
There is a very small quantity of data that I consider priceless, and even then I could survive without it. It would suck ass, but my heart isn't going to stop. I certainly won't jump off a bridge if I were to lose my MP3s or a bunch of movies. Pictures can be archived to disc, as well as my own works like audio masters and code. If I ever come across something that I really can't afford to lose, I'll make redundant copies... in the safe, in the car, on the net... but I haven't yet found or created something so irreplaceable.
Frankly, if my building burns to the ground, I will have more important things to worry about than my SSH key. Like finding a new place to live!
The sad thing is we all know CP freaks would totally (ab)use this service, tainting it for everyone else.
Me, I'd actually like an unencrypted alternative. As a sysadmin, I want to know what's being stored on my disks, and if I disapprove I should have veto powers over who stores what. If I find questionable material, I delete it and ban it from my system. Given the (presumably) large number of hosts, the sender will be able to find a more friendly home for their files, and I don't get my hands dirty.
Just because the rich "big guy" donates a few bucks to charity does not grant them amnesty from being a big whoring money-printing machine.
I would have tremendously more respect for the Harry Potter franchise if it hadn't been designed from the ground up as a humongous cash cow. That puts it right up there with the music industry's manufactured acts.
If the Lexicon were a competing product build for profit by misappropriating intellectual property, well I'd have a little more compassion. It wasn't. It's a fan site. There are much more pleasant ways to deal with fan sites than shutting them down in court.
There are those who "get" the fan scene, and those who don't.
It's listed at many suppliers but nobody has received stock yet... at least nobody I know.
The big problem with mirroring is you still need a smart controller to handle the load balancing. Cheap junk like Promise/Highpoint cards don't do that, many of them read from just one drive (and good luck rebuilding after a failure).
Intel's fakeraid is actually pretty decent in this area, as long as you don't do that stupid "matrix raid" nonsense where you stripe part of a drive, then mirror the other, or even dumber is to mirror one half of a drive to the other half :P But if you use whole drives, the performance is quite amazing for "free" raid.
Well now, if the additional responsibility means I get firing powers over the energy-deficient people in the company, I say bring it!
That assgasm who calls me 3 seconds after firing off an email, to discuss the content of the email ? Pink slips!
Granny Smith who prints out the 200-page weekly report so she can read it with her bifocals ? Early retirement!
The worthless drones that disable the 20-minute standby so their elaborate client-side Outlook rules can continue running all night ? Back to the mail room they go!
There's a lot of fat to be trimmed in the typical office. If IT is the only faction that's jaded enough to do it, we'll fucking do it!