Ok, maybe my mind is on hydrogen cars because of the recent article, maybe it's because I always compare computers to cars, but basically, this will look the same to many people as stating that you cannot drive a gasoline-powered car if you attend this University.
What does restricting your car choice have to do with education? Absolutley nothing! What does restricting your vendor choice have to do with education? Absolutley nothing! While I dislike Microsoft as much as any of you (I am currently unemployed, despite knowing I could get hired by MS if I wanted that), how stupid does this make the University look? You can only decide that something sucks if you actually get to see what it is. Remember how much we laugh at those religious organizations that boycott movies without actually seeing them? Censorship is bad, mkay?
What I would propose to the donor is that the University use their money to use for the purchase of Microsoft-free technology: Linux, Mac, Solaris, whatever. These purchases would not affect the normal purchasing of such systems, so that if they were going to spend $1 Million on linux boxes, this year they'll now be spending $3.4 million. And since Linux is largely free / low-cost, those millions can go quite a way.
Often what is needed in a situation like this is a beach head... if the board sees that they can get 10 Linux boxes for the price of one MS-equiped box, and that people aren't seeing any other major differences, which do you think they'll buy in the future?
Like yourself, many people have realized the internet is a great resource. However, a number of years ago, someone realized that the problem of the internet is that it is really hard to know about everything on the internet.
So they created what they called a ">search engine". It's pretty complicated, but it works out to that if you type something in, it will do a good job of finding what you are looking for. For example, to look for a spanish rock band , you would type this into one of these search engines. It would give you a list of links, and usually you could find one in the first page, such as Spanish Rock LA.Band Links.
Amazingly (isn't this great), you can type in just about anything, even in other languages, and it will always find something. Give it a shot, I'm sure it will work for you.
Ok, now in case anyone is wondering "why are burning karma with this obvious flamebait?", I'll answer you: 99% of the "Ask Slashdot" stories are something that is best asked somewhere else, and if the asker doesn't know anywhere else, try google! This is a question about music! And it's not even "What codec should I use to rip my 600 CDs of Austrian Punk Opera to the best format so that it won't take up much hard drive space, is high quality, will let me stream it over the web, and store it in my custom shoe-based wearable?" Now that is a question for Nerds.
And just to show that I'm only an asshole when I'm pissed off, to answer the question: If your streaming station gives you the name and title of the song (if it doesn't, stop right here and figure that out for yourself), try Google. If the band has a website, it'll find it. No band motivated enough to put together a website will not include a way for you to get their music, so you're golden here. If they have no website, you could always contact the station that plays their music and ask them. If that fails, you'll have to Google The Real World. Ask your friends, family, or the fools at the indie record store if they know anything. Try going out within your city to see if you can find any place that plays that type of music; if you approach the DJ/owner in the right way, they may help you. So I guess it depends on how badly you want to find this music. Good luck.
First, let me state that I hate spam as much as anyone else, and would very much like to see it disappear. But let me play devil's adovcate for a second. One thought has occured to me:
How is spam different than bulk mail? You still have to look at it, still have to throw it in the trash, and still don't read the messages inside. And what are the complaints against spam? "It wastes server space. It wastes bandwidth." Oh, now those are certainly precious, non-renable resources. Not like the millions of trees that are cut down daily for bulk mail. (Yes, I'm ignoring the cost difference, but the point is still the same)
Just wondering.... Btw, is there any reason we (or the French) can't outlaw any type of unsolicited (e)mail?
And for the obligatory...
on
RAMdisk RAID?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
How about a be- *bang!*
*smack* *thump*
*mass cheering*
Btw, it does seem to be a (disturbing) recent trend at Slashdot to try to troll whole stories, instead of just trolling comments. C'mon anyone who's taken even one networking or hardware class knows the speed heirarchy:
cache > memory > disk > network
And, with the amount of physical RAM drives out there (very few), you'd quickly realize that even a local RAM drive doesn't offer enough of a speed benefit to offset it's cost. C'mon editors, I know it sounds cool, but do you really have to post it?
Spoken like a true Engineer (I'm one too). Great idea, easy to implement once, but unfortunately, cost prohibitive. Not only that, but how do you have enough depth in a credit card to also include buttons? And if it uses your finger for conduction, where is the power source? The cheapest "credit card sized" calculator I've seen was $1-$2 in bulk, and still thicker than 4 or 5 credit cards stacked - too big for my wallet.
> sign and timestamp the transaction
If you include the algorithm in the hardware of the card, how tough do you really think it would be to reverse-engineer it? Three, maybe four months? Even the X-Box, which costs (to the consumer) $200, and has sophisticated encryption, has been broken - how are you going to do this on a card that needs to be cheap enough to be disposable? That would be an even bigger fiasco, if someone starts making money from thin air (or worse, by fradulent transfers) - how long will it take the public to accept the cards? And it's not like you can't pay your poker buds other ways... say chips or (gasp) real cash; which will always be needed for prostitutes, drugs, etc.
When designing something, don't just think how you would use it, but how dumb/hostile people will try to break it.
Worked for me
on
Advergames
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· Score: 4, Interesting
After playing the origninal Gran Turismo, I became fixated on the Mitsubishi Eclipse as a relatively affordable performance car that matched my driving and personal style. Enough so that a year out of college (when I had the $$) I dropped it on one of them (0%/$0 down/$0 for a year helped as well). And anyone who knows me knows I drive it just like the video game - I can't imagine driving anything else in it's price range.
Right now, I'd say it's the best way (for manufacturers or consumers) to compare head-to-head dozens (hundreds) of cars in different conditions (and not get kicked out by the dealer) - given that the game does not falsely favor one car over others. Hey, if they make it real enough, it might replace illegal street racing (big problem here in San Diego) to an extent. I know among my friends we've settled whose car is better with a few sessions of GT. Needless to say, I am not happy to see that the Eclipse was left out of GT3.
Even being a techie, if someone says "the only way you can reliably contact me is by filling out this web form" I'm done. I don't know what you're doing that kills your email addresses (hint: don't post them on/.) so fast, but I've got an *AOL* account I've had for almost 6 years that only gets 5-10 pieces of spam a day. And it's remained constant, the only reason I started spam was my girlfriend at the time sent me one of those e-greetings that then sold out my address.
Even if your girl is dumb as rocks, and is constantly giving out your address, it's really not to hard to put a spam filter on your address (like I do with my non-AOL accounts), particularly for someone who is all smart who owns their own domain and stuff, right? My lazyness outweighs yours, especially because all you need to do is configure an app *once*.
Uh how is "devices capable of dynamically changing their ornamental or decorative appearance." limited to color?
I know this is really hard for the slashdot crowd, but you really need to think of Apple machines here, not your windowed & CCT'd PC. What I'm guessing (article is/.'d) is this patent is intended to cover such things as a smiley face-like item, or antanae, or eyes - a non-light-based feedback device.
And to burn Karma: This is one of those "outside of the box" things that is so cliche, yet the reason the expression is cliche (because everyone wants people to come up with ideas like these). One of the things I've noticed about Slashdot is people are great problem solvers, but poor artists (Btw, I code for a living). The mouse was this kind of creation. No one really had a problem using the arrow keys, and navigating on a screen was considered a solved problem. However, once the mouse was invented, it ushered in the whole windowed application environment. And I'm betting if there was/. back then people would be ridiculing it, with lots of comments like "wow, this does exactly what my arrow keys already do", "my desk is already cluttered", "uh, this is already being done... by the *keyboard*!". So I guess what I'm saying is: don't just judge this by applying it to what you already know, but what new things you might do with it.
The thing that brings me down the most about roller coasters is that you can see the track ahead of you. Instinctively, I brace myself against the upcoming turns/dips/whatever. There's nothing I can do about it, and I don't feel nearly as much of a rush because in my head I'm thinking "ok down real fast, and in two seconds I'm going to break right". Knowing what's going to happen kills the adrenaline for me.
However, I've seen the more recent rides (such as Disney's "Star Tours") that put you in a motion simulator. I like these much more because I have no idea where I'm going. Even if the story is hokey - it's far easier to ignore than knowing where I'm going. The only problem I've had with these is their lack of a range of motion - i.e. you can only go so far to the right, or so far down - basically shakes & bumps.
The Robocoaster fixes that because of it's essentially unlimited range of motion (since it can spin in circles - you could feel like you're dropping for a mile theoretically - just a bit of physics and some good programming). And put an LCD screen blocking your view and you can show whatever movie you want, be it rollercoaster or more like Universal Studio's "Back to the Future" ride.
The only thing is they need to make it sit more people. I don't think I've even seen a ride that can only sit two people - sharing the experience with your friends is most of the fun - so you can chide them later about the face they made off the big drop, or in the loop, or whatever. And hey, with that small of a footprint, they could put that in the middle of a mall - talk about massive foot traffic.
So, the lesson to be learned from this when writing software (or even just talking to people) is instead of saying: "the meeting is at 12", say "the meeting is at noon". It's not that hard to do two extra test & replaces - even if it takes you 1/2 an hour, it will save countless hours of confusion (and discussion in forums such as this).
And if you're saying "no, people will know what I mean, so I don't have to", you're missing the point of why this article was posted. Technically, your code can be perfect, but if there is ambiguity in what something displayed means, that's a User Interface bug. The whole point of software is eventually to make some user's life easier, so despite how annoying/stupid the users are (I work for a company that does data entry software, we've had people call in to our Technical Support and ask how to type capital letters), show a little bit of intelligence yourself.
Ok, I think we could actually learn something here if we abstract away a bit to talk in general about Linux software. To me, as Linux is UNIX-based, you could probably get away with charging thousands (10s? 100s?) of %currency% for some Enterprise solution, if you kind of sell it as: runs on these UNIXes, including Linux. You're not going to get away with the shrinkwrap model on Linux, as you noticed there's quite a mindset against it.
Alternatively, you could sell services. That seems to be where most of the money is going to be soon anyhow, and that way you could still get away with giving away (most of?) the code. There are several examples (too lazy to find & list) of companies who are making money (and who have been featured on/.) this way. Sell support, installation, training, and customization services, and you should do well. Then you can get the kids who love to tinker familiar with your product without them breaking any laws (as a few of them actually respect copyright), and they can then get the companies they go to work for to buy what they are familiar with. Probably not going to work in your case, but I think others could benefit from this sort of model. Of course, you could give away the client and then sell "enterprise-class" monitoring software to control how they chat. But then again, that's being done right now anyway.
A lot of people are saying that the problem with the ISS is it's too expensive, and a lot of that comes from it being hard to work on, and the pure mass of it is expensive to get up there. Is there any reason why we don't just land on the moon, and start throwing the (currently dumped) fuel tanks towards it to become storage rooms, and then have the sensitive electronics & specialized labs carried in shuttle bays? We could use the moon's mass as shielding from radiation and debris.
Sure we have to figure out a way to get stuff up and down from the moon's surface, but we do have a space *shuttle* that's sorta designed to do this; besides it's gravity is only 1/10 of ours, so the additional fuel shouldn't be that bad. Hell, we might even be able to figure out how to do a space ladder there before we can get one on earth, it wouldn't have to go nearly as far or as massive.
One of the new lamp-looking ones might work. It would match the color of most of her other kitchen appliances, and if you really need to, you could figure out a way to mount that hemisphere under a cabinet on a swivel base - just flip the screen around and you'll be set. And getting a Mac in your kitchen will be far easier than getting a beige box/screen in there... something about Apple paying attention to asthetics....
Actually, the reason postage is getting more expensive is email. Spammers who used to be dumping millions in to smail can now do so far cheaper over email, so they can send you mail every day for a year for less than it would have cost to send you one smail.
If you actually think about for a sec before using your gut-level reaction to AOL spam, you would realize that it costs the same amount of money to send a postman to every house no matter how much mail he is carrying (yes, I know...). Without spam, they wouldn't have a reason to come to your house every day, and would likely cut back to say, once a week or whatever depending on how many people are actually sending you stuff. Then if something got in a few minutes after he left, you'd have to wait a full week to get it (would you want to wait that long for your Maxim?) because no one is paying him to come by every day. Honestly, the only time I send stuff in the mail is the holidays (1/year), or to backwater places that don't do electronic commerce (rare), or when my physical signature is required.
And really, is paying an extra ~20c killing you that much?
Hmmm, great timing, make the switch without knowing how you're actually going to handle the details, and then roll the dice and hope the slashdot editors will post your story.
I'd say this would be pretty much equivalent to: Hello slashdot, I'm a Windows admin who is responsible for a large fortune 500 company. I just placed an order for enough machines to completely switch our network over to linux 'cause I heard it's so 'leet. With some 9000 developers who will need to continue their work, how do I find software that they can use? Considering I'm not a member of any LUG, what tips do you have to ease the transition, considering I have to deal with lumbering admins who also have never used linux, and 9000 developers all demanding their ability to do work?
You do realize that not thinking this through may bring your company down, as well as many of those whose access you manage. Ok, maybe it's not as bad as I'm making it sound, but this "minor detail" probably should have been thought about, tested, and then re-thought about before you agreed to do the transition. It's great that you may be the fastest mover in your area, but if you don't spend enough time looking around, you're going to run into a brick wall soon enough.
You should check out laciemonitors. Notice the little screen "hood" they use? Not that I'm suggesting you buy one, but I've worked with guys who did the same thing with some cardboard & scissors or an umbrella. One guy even brought in a kiddie pool (turned upside down) - he won major style points for that one.
Maybe once management sees the proliferation of umbrellas and cardboard they might get the idea that if they don't solve Engineer's problems, they're going to solve it themselves, no matter the cost to the company's "image". Yeah, the execs outlawed umbrellas and cardboard where I used to work, but the Engineers developed the attititude: "What are you going to do, fire me?". Sure you could argue that it would just give them a reason to fire you, but I found it actually only gave them reasons to get rid of the programmers who couldn't cut it anyway, so it worked out for the rest of us. I left 'cause my internship was over and I had to go back to school, but last I heard neither side had budged, and had become a moot argument.
If you try to have 100 PCs that people can use, you're going to run into a nightmare of dealing with the abuse, complaints (this 3 month old system isn't as fast as my home one that I got yesterday!) and cost. Instead, I'd say have some decent rigs available for rental for the newbie games who got dragged along with their friends, or for those who have crap boxes at home. And to keep the paintball analogy, charge for the network like they do paint. That means you can't bring your own (hubs, etc) - everyone pays per drop per hour (or whatever).
I'd also suggest you consider how you're going to do setup. If it's just one large room it's going to be really loud during peak hours, and rather evidently embarrasing when you only have 8 or so people there at a time. Other places put the players into small groups, and then assign them a room(s) to use. That way, you can make it look as busy as you'd like, since they would "fill" the room they're in.
One last suggestion, if it didn't seem obvious: whatever you're charging, include unlimited fountain drinks somehow. They'd be cheap, get people to play longer (more $$), and show off that you really do understand geeks. There was a pretty cool (Magic Edge in Mt. View) place that used to do virtual reality dogfights, but they charged bar prices for food & drinks, so I never stayed to eat/drink there. That would definitely be a problem for any place I would see myself spending more than 4 hours.
The only cool thing about metric anything is that it's real easy to convert between different measurements: 1km == 1000m, etc. Metric distance is based on the size of the earth, and thus sorta loses it's meaning anywhere else in the universe (not that we'll be leaving Earth for awhile). Same with mass, force, energy, and even temperature (since temperature is based off of the boiling and freezing point of water, at sea-level on Earth).
What I'm saying is there should be something more universal, that leaves Earth out of the equation, and thus could be used with beings who don't have Earth as a reference point. Not that I think that's going to happen soon, but with the way us Americans have picked up the metric system, it probably needs to be changed now.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, and while it would seem that the speed of light is a universal constant, and we could base things off of that, we don't have a universal time or distance to combine it with that we could base everything else off of. Then I realized a few days ago that everyone has Hydrogen atoms. While I'm just a geek, I do remember that they're fairly universal, and are going to be the same no matter where you are (not counting isotopes).
Distance could be calculated based on the size of the atom, or the bond length in a H2 molecule. If this changes with pressure, make it in a vacuum (since anyone we'd meet in space would have access to a vacuum). Of course, you'd want to make it relevant to humans, so we'd probably make the "basic" unit of measurement a million of these end to end, and call it a MHBL, or something cute like "mibble".
Now that we have length, we can get time using the speed of light, and make a truly universal time based on how long light takes to travel a mibble. Again, adjust for human relevance. Mass would be based on the weight of the Hydrogen atom (of course), and energy would be what is released when the bond is broken (in H2), and temperature could be based off how much water (or whatever) is heated by this released energy. Force could be based off the kinetic energy of the bond breaking.
Of course, the energy could also be based off excited electrons jumping from orbital to orbital, or light itself, so my idea isn't perfect... hey I've only had a few days since I thought of it. But if you're still reading, I hope you see my point that the "universal" metric system isn't really as universal as we think it is, and we could do a lot better (yes, I am an Engineer).
Security is a common complaint for IIS. However, if a person broke into your house by going in through a weak point (a window, the chimney, etc), you wouldn't blame the architect.
However, if the architect represented the window as unbreakable, and afterward told you that they couldn't forsee someone using a hammer, I think you would have plenty of reason to blame the architect.
Games are good because not only do they encompass a wide variety of possibilities, but they are acessable to everyone. None of my (non-programmer) friends cared that I could do the tower of Babel in x lines of code, but they liked my simple race car game I wrote in assembly (it was only single player). The coolest was the space invaders we did at the end of my 101 class; the TAs provided a mostly complete graphics library (so we could use images or shapes to make the baddies), and the really bored/advanced students modified the graphics library to change the players ship, weapons, ect. so there was something to challenge everyone.
Sorry, the point of that rant was that for < $300 + a few CDs you can have a system equivalent to the hard-drive based ones ($700+). And if you're worried about variety, you should be able to get 10-13 hours of music onto a disk; far longer than you'll be able to even drive in your car without stopping for gas. I'm not $400 lazy.
The extremely popular Pioneer 7400 kicks ass. Redbook/mp3 CD/CD-RW + killer adjustments & looks. Oh, and I got mine for $300 installed (incl. wires & bezel). Pop an mp3 CD in, and I can put it on random and by the the time I hear a song again, I've forgotten I'd already heard it. Problems: no crossfade (1-3 second seek time) and no auxiliary in - not that I'm complaining!
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, maybe my mind is on hydrogen cars because of the recent article, maybe it's because I always compare computers to cars, but basically, this will look the same to many people as stating that you cannot drive a gasoline-powered car if you attend this University.
What does restricting your car choice have to do with education? Absolutley nothing! What does restricting your vendor choice have to do with education? Absolutley nothing! While I dislike Microsoft as much as any of you (I am currently unemployed, despite knowing I could get hired by MS if I wanted that), how stupid does this make the University look? You can only decide that something sucks if you actually get to see what it is. Remember how much we laugh at those religious organizations that boycott movies without actually seeing them? Censorship is bad, mkay?
What I would propose to the donor is that the University use their money to use for the purchase of Microsoft-free technology: Linux, Mac, Solaris, whatever. These purchases would not affect the normal purchasing of such systems, so that if they were going to spend $1 Million on linux boxes, this year they'll now be spending $3.4 million. And since Linux is largely free / low-cost, those millions can go quite a way.
Often what is needed in a situation like this is a beach head... if the board sees that they can get 10 Linux boxes for the price of one MS-equiped box, and that people aren't seeing any other major differences, which do you think they'll buy in the future?
Like yourself, many people have realized the internet is a great resource. However, a number of years ago, someone realized that the problem of the internet is that it is really hard to know about everything on the internet.
.
So they created what they called a ">search engine". It's pretty complicated, but it works out to that if you type something in, it will do a good job of finding what you are looking for. For example, to look for a spanish rock band , you would type this into one of these search engines. It would give you a list of links, and usually you could find one in the first page, such as Spanish Rock LA.Band Links
Amazingly (isn't this great), you can type in just about anything, even in other languages, and it will always find something. Give it a shot, I'm sure it will work for you.
Ok, now in case anyone is wondering "why are burning karma with this obvious flamebait?", I'll answer you: 99% of the "Ask Slashdot" stories are something that is best asked somewhere else, and if the asker doesn't know anywhere else, try google! This is a question about music! And it's not even "What codec should I use to rip my 600 CDs of Austrian Punk Opera to the best format so that it won't take up much hard drive space, is high quality, will let me stream it over the web, and store it in my custom shoe-based wearable?" Now that is a question for Nerds.
And just to show that I'm only an asshole when I'm pissed off, to answer the question: If your streaming station gives you the name and title of the song (if it doesn't, stop right here and figure that out for yourself), try Google. If the band has a website, it'll find it. No band motivated enough to put together a website will not include a way for you to get their music, so you're golden here. If they have no website, you could always contact the station that plays their music and ask them. If that fails, you'll have to Google The Real World. Ask your friends, family, or the fools at the indie record store if they know anything. Try going out within your city to see if you can find any place that plays that type of music; if you approach the DJ/owner in the right way, they may help you. So I guess it depends on how badly you want to find this music. Good luck.
First, let me state that I hate spam as much as anyone else, and would very much like to see it disappear. But let me play devil's adovcate for a second. One thought has occured to me:
How is spam different than bulk mail? You still have to look at it, still have to throw it in the trash, and still don't read the messages inside. And what are the complaints against spam? "It wastes server space. It wastes bandwidth." Oh, now those are certainly precious, non-renable resources. Not like the millions of trees that are cut down daily for bulk mail. (Yes, I'm ignoring the cost difference, but the point is still the same)
Just wondering.... Btw, is there any reason we (or the French) can't outlaw any type of unsolicited (e)mail?
How about a be- *bang!*
*smack* *thump*
*mass cheering*
Btw, it does seem to be a (disturbing) recent trend at Slashdot to try to troll whole stories, instead of just trolling comments. C'mon anyone who's taken even one networking or hardware class knows the speed heirarchy:
cache > memory > disk > network
And, with the amount of physical RAM drives out there (very few), you'd quickly realize that even a local RAM drive doesn't offer enough of a speed benefit to offset it's cost. C'mon editors, I know it sounds cool, but do you really have to post it?
> Add a small screen and keyboard
Spoken like a true Engineer (I'm one too). Great idea, easy to implement once, but unfortunately, cost prohibitive. Not only that, but how do you have enough depth in a credit card to also include buttons? And if it uses your finger for conduction, where is the power source? The cheapest "credit card sized" calculator I've seen was $1-$2 in bulk, and still thicker than 4 or 5 credit cards stacked - too big for my wallet.
> sign and timestamp the transaction If you include the algorithm in the hardware of the card, how tough do you really think it would be to reverse-engineer it? Three, maybe four months? Even the X-Box, which costs (to the consumer) $200, and has sophisticated encryption, has been broken - how are you going to do this on a card that needs to be cheap enough to be disposable? That would be an even bigger fiasco, if someone starts making money from thin air (or worse, by fradulent transfers) - how long will it take the public to accept the cards? And it's not like you can't pay your poker buds other ways... say chips or (gasp) real cash; which will always be needed for prostitutes, drugs, etc.
When designing something, don't just think how you would use it, but how dumb/hostile people will try to break it.
After playing the origninal Gran Turismo, I became fixated on the Mitsubishi Eclipse as a relatively affordable performance car that matched my driving and personal style. Enough so that a year out of college (when I had the $$) I dropped it on one of them (0%/$0 down/$0 for a year helped as well). And anyone who knows me knows I drive it just like the video game - I can't imagine driving anything else in it's price range.
Right now, I'd say it's the best way (for manufacturers or consumers) to compare head-to-head dozens (hundreds) of cars in different conditions (and not get kicked out by the dealer) - given that the game does not falsely favor one car over others. Hey, if they make it real enough, it might replace illegal street racing (big problem here in San Diego) to an extent. I know among my friends we've settled whose car is better with a few sessions of GT. Needless to say, I am not happy to see that the Eclipse was left out of GT3.
Even being a techie, if someone says "the only way you can reliably contact me is by filling out this web form" I'm done. I don't know what you're doing that kills your email addresses (hint: don't post them on /.) so fast, but I've got an *AOL* account I've had for almost 6 years that only gets 5-10 pieces of spam a day. And it's remained constant, the only reason I started spam was my girlfriend at the time sent me one of those e-greetings that then sold out my address.
Even if your girl is dumb as rocks, and is constantly giving out your address, it's really not to hard to put a spam filter on your address (like I do with my non-AOL accounts), particularly for someone who is all smart who owns their own domain and stuff, right? My lazyness outweighs yours, especially because all you need to do is configure an app *once*.
Email's about convenience, get a clue.
Wow, Computers are really coming full circle...
Macs get a UNIX (based) core
*NIX Windows emulation wins in court
Windows hardware becomes propetary
Wow, now what can Slashdot possibly bash Macs for? (or are you just going to mod down their user's posts?)
Oh wait, you said Netherlands... so that's what, Hades? I think most terrorist-type folk are more interested in ascending.
Uh how is "devices capable of dynamically changing their ornamental or decorative appearance." limited to color?
/.'d) is this patent is intended to cover such things as a smiley face-like item, or antanae, or eyes - a non-light-based feedback device.
/. back then people would be ridiculing it, with lots of comments like "wow, this does exactly what my arrow keys already do", "my desk is already cluttered", "uh, this is already being done... by the *keyboard*!". So I guess what I'm saying is: don't just judge this by applying it to what you already know, but what new things you might do with it.
I know this is really hard for the slashdot crowd, but you really need to think of Apple machines here, not your windowed & CCT'd PC. What I'm guessing (article is
And to burn Karma: This is one of those "outside of the box" things that is so cliche, yet the reason the expression is cliche (because everyone wants people to come up with ideas like these). One of the things I've noticed about Slashdot is people are great problem solvers, but poor artists (Btw, I code for a living). The mouse was this kind of creation. No one really had a problem using the arrow keys, and navigating on a screen was considered a solved problem. However, once the mouse was invented, it ushered in the whole windowed application environment. And I'm betting if there was
The thing that brings me down the most about roller coasters is that you can see the track ahead of you. Instinctively, I brace myself against the upcoming turns/dips/whatever. There's nothing I can do about it, and I don't feel nearly as much of a rush because in my head I'm thinking "ok down real fast, and in two seconds I'm going to break right". Knowing what's going to happen kills the adrenaline for me.
However, I've seen the more recent rides (such as Disney's "Star Tours") that put you in a motion simulator. I like these much more because I have no idea where I'm going. Even if the story is hokey - it's far easier to ignore than knowing where I'm going. The only problem I've had with these is their lack of a range of motion - i.e. you can only go so far to the right, or so far down - basically shakes & bumps.
The Robocoaster fixes that because of it's essentially unlimited range of motion (since it can spin in circles - you could feel like you're dropping for a mile theoretically - just a bit of physics and some good programming). And put an LCD screen blocking your view and you can show whatever movie you want, be it rollercoaster or more like Universal Studio's "Back to the Future" ride.
The only thing is they need to make it sit more people. I don't think I've even seen a ride that can only sit two people - sharing the experience with your friends is most of the fun - so you can chide them later about the face they made off the big drop, or in the loop, or whatever. And hey, with that small of a footprint, they could put that in the middle of a mall - talk about massive foot traffic.
Sign me up!
So, the lesson to be learned from this when writing software (or even just talking to people) is instead of saying: "the meeting is at 12", say "the meeting is at noon". It's not that hard to do two extra test & replaces - even if it takes you 1/2 an hour, it will save countless hours of confusion (and discussion in forums such as this).
And if you're saying "no, people will know what I mean, so I don't have to", you're missing the point of why this article was posted. Technically, your code can be perfect, but if there is ambiguity in what something displayed means, that's a User Interface bug. The whole point of software is eventually to make some user's life easier, so despite how annoying/stupid the users are (I work for a company that does data entry software, we've had people call in to our Technical Support and ask how to type capital letters), show a little bit of intelligence yourself.
Ok, I think we could actually learn something here if we abstract away a bit to talk in general about Linux software. To me, as Linux is UNIX-based, you could probably get away with charging thousands (10s? 100s?) of %currency% for some Enterprise solution, if you kind of sell it as: runs on these UNIXes, including Linux. You're not going to get away with the shrinkwrap model on Linux, as you noticed there's quite a mindset against it.
/.) this way. Sell support, installation, training, and customization services, and you should do well. Then you can get the kids who love to tinker familiar with your product without them breaking any laws (as a few of them actually respect copyright), and they can then get the companies they go to work for to buy what they are familiar with. Probably not going to work in your case, but I think others could benefit from this sort of model. Of course, you could give away the client and then sell "enterprise-class" monitoring software to control how they chat. But then again, that's being done right now anyway.
;-)
Alternatively, you could sell services. That seems to be where most of the money is going to be soon anyhow, and that way you could still get away with giving away (most of?) the code. There are several examples (too lazy to find & list) of companies who are making money (and who have been featured on
I'd suggest circulating your resume.
A lot of people are saying that the problem with the ISS is it's too expensive, and a lot of that comes from it being hard to work on, and the pure mass of it is expensive to get up there. Is there any reason why we don't just land on the moon, and start throwing the (currently dumped) fuel tanks towards it to become storage rooms, and then have the sensitive electronics & specialized labs carried in shuttle bays? We could use the moon's mass as shielding from radiation and debris.
Sure we have to figure out a way to get stuff up and down from the moon's surface, but we do have a space *shuttle* that's sorta designed to do this; besides it's gravity is only 1/10 of ours, so the additional fuel shouldn't be that bad. Hell, we might even be able to figure out how to do a space ladder there before we can get one on earth, it wouldn't have to go nearly as far or as massive.
One of the new lamp-looking ones might work. It would match the color of most of her other kitchen appliances, and if you really need to, you could figure out a way to mount that hemisphere under a cabinet on a swivel base - just flip the screen around and you'll be set. And getting a Mac in your kitchen will be far easier than getting a beige box/screen in there... something about Apple paying attention to asthetics....
Actually, the reason postage is getting more expensive is email. Spammers who used to be dumping millions in to smail can now do so far cheaper over email, so they can send you mail every day for a year for less than it would have cost to send you one smail.
If you actually think about for a sec before using your gut-level reaction to AOL spam, you would realize that it costs the same amount of money to send a postman to every house no matter how much mail he is carrying (yes, I know...). Without spam, they wouldn't have a reason to come to your house every day, and would likely cut back to say, once a week or whatever depending on how many people are actually sending you stuff. Then if something got in a few minutes after he left, you'd have to wait a full week to get it (would you want to wait that long for your Maxim?) because no one is paying him to come by every day. Honestly, the only time I send stuff in the mail is the holidays (1/year), or to backwater places that don't do electronic commerce (rare), or when my physical signature is required.
And really, is paying an extra ~20c killing you that much?
Hmmm, great timing, make the switch without knowing how you're actually going to handle the details, and then roll the dice and hope the slashdot editors will post your story.
I'd say this would be pretty much equivalent to: Hello slashdot, I'm a Windows admin who is responsible for a large fortune 500 company. I just placed an order for enough machines to completely switch our network over to linux 'cause I heard it's so 'leet. With some 9000 developers who will need to continue their work, how do I find software that they can use? Considering I'm not a member of any LUG, what tips do you have to ease the transition, considering I have to deal with lumbering admins who also have never used linux, and 9000 developers all demanding their ability to do work?
You do realize that not thinking this through may bring your company down, as well as many of those whose access you manage. Ok, maybe it's not as bad as I'm making it sound, but this "minor detail" probably should have been thought about, tested, and then re-thought about before you agreed to do the transition. It's great that you may be the fastest mover in your area, but if you don't spend enough time looking around, you're going to run into a brick wall soon enough.
You should check out lacie monitors. Notice the little screen "hood" they use? Not that I'm suggesting you buy one, but I've worked with guys who did the same thing with some cardboard & scissors or an umbrella. One guy even brought in a kiddie pool (turned upside down) - he won major style points for that one.
Maybe once management sees the proliferation of umbrellas and cardboard they might get the idea that if they don't solve Engineer's problems, they're going to solve it themselves, no matter the cost to the company's "image". Yeah, the execs outlawed umbrellas and cardboard where I used to work, but the Engineers developed the attititude: "What are you going to do, fire me?". Sure you could argue that it would just give them a reason to fire you, but I found it actually only gave them reasons to get rid of the programmers who couldn't cut it anyway, so it worked out for the rest of us. I left 'cause my internship was over and I had to go back to school, but last I heard neither side had budged, and had become a moot argument.
If you try to have 100 PCs that people can use, you're going to run into a nightmare of dealing with the abuse, complaints (this 3 month old system isn't as fast as my home one that I got yesterday!) and cost. Instead, I'd say have some decent rigs available for rental for the newbie games who got dragged along with their friends, or for those who have crap boxes at home. And to keep the paintball analogy, charge for the network like they do paint. That means you can't bring your own (hubs, etc) - everyone pays per drop per hour (or whatever).
I'd also suggest you consider how you're going to do setup. If it's just one large room it's going to be really loud during peak hours, and rather evidently embarrasing when you only have 8 or so people there at a time. Other places put the players into small groups, and then assign them a room(s) to use. That way, you can make it look as busy as you'd like, since they would "fill" the room they're in.
One last suggestion, if it didn't seem obvious: whatever you're charging, include unlimited fountain drinks somehow. They'd be cheap, get people to play longer (more $$), and show off that you really do understand geeks. There was a pretty cool (Magic Edge in Mt. View) place that used to do virtual reality dogfights, but they charged bar prices for food & drinks, so I never stayed to eat/drink there. That would definitely be a problem for any place I would see myself spending more than 4 hours.
The only cool thing about metric anything is that it's real easy to convert between different measurements: 1km == 1000m, etc. Metric distance is based on the size of the earth, and thus sorta loses it's meaning anywhere else in the universe (not that we'll be leaving Earth for awhile). Same with mass, force, energy, and even temperature (since temperature is based off of the boiling and freezing point of water, at sea-level on Earth).
What I'm saying is there should be something more universal, that leaves Earth out of the equation, and thus could be used with beings who don't have Earth as a reference point. Not that I think that's going to happen soon, but with the way us Americans have picked up the metric system, it probably needs to be changed now.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, and while it would seem that the speed of light is a universal constant, and we could base things off of that, we don't have a universal time or distance to combine it with that we could base everything else off of. Then I realized a few days ago that everyone has Hydrogen atoms. While I'm just a geek, I do remember that they're fairly universal, and are going to be the same no matter where you are (not counting isotopes).
Distance could be calculated based on the size of the atom, or the bond length in a H2 molecule. If this changes with pressure, make it in a vacuum (since anyone we'd meet in space would have access to a vacuum). Of course, you'd want to make it relevant to humans, so we'd probably make the "basic" unit of measurement a million of these end to end, and call it a MHBL, or something cute like "mibble".
Now that we have length, we can get time using the speed of light, and make a truly universal time based on how long light takes to travel a mibble. Again, adjust for human relevance. Mass would be based on the weight of the Hydrogen atom (of course), and energy would be what is released when the bond is broken (in H2), and temperature could be based off how much water (or whatever) is heated by this released energy. Force could be based off the kinetic energy of the bond breaking.
Of course, the energy could also be based off excited electrons jumping from orbital to orbital, or light itself, so my idea isn't perfect... hey I've only had a few days since I thought of it. But if you're still reading, I hope you see my point that the "universal" metric system isn't really as universal as we think it is, and we could do a lot better (yes, I am an Engineer).
Security is a common complaint for IIS. However, if a person broke into your house by going in through a weak point (a window, the chimney, etc), you wouldn't blame the architect.
However, if the architect represented the window as unbreakable, and afterward told you that they couldn't forsee someone using a hammer, I think you would have plenty of reason to blame the architect.
Games are good because not only do they encompass a wide variety of possibilities, but they are acessable to everyone. None of my (non-programmer) friends cared that I could do the tower of Babel in x lines of code, but they liked my simple race car game I wrote in assembly (it was only single player). The coolest was the space invaders we did at the end of my 101 class; the TAs provided a mostly complete graphics library (so we could use images or shapes to make the baddies), and the really bored/advanced students modified the graphics library to change the players ship, weapons, ect. so there was something to challenge everyone.
Sorry, the point of that rant was that for < $300 + a few CDs you can have a system equivalent to the hard-drive based ones ($700+). And if you're worried about variety, you should be able to get 10-13 hours of music onto a disk; far longer than you'll be able to even drive in your car without stopping for gas. I'm not $400 lazy.
The extremely popular Pioneer 7400 kicks ass. Redbook/mp3 CD/CD-RW + killer adjustments & looks. Oh, and I got mine for $300 installed (incl. wires & bezel). Pop an mp3 CD in, and I can put it on random and by the the time I hear a song again, I've forgotten I'd already heard it. Problems: no crossfade (1-3 second seek time) and no auxiliary in - not that I'm complaining!