How much money does it cost to save that much energy as well? I kind of scanned the article, but one thing I did notice was that $200 was spent on a new LCD monitor to replace the CRT. If we assume 100% of the energy savings came from that one purchase (which it didn't), it will take more than 2 years to recoup the money spent on that one purchase, and there was no indication that there was anything wrong with the older monitor other than that it used too much energy.
I would advocate buying newer more energy efficient equipment as your old equipment dies, but I would not advocate going out and replacing perfectly good equipment with more energy efficient (and more expensive) alternatives. It will not only cost you a lot of money, but will also mean more waste from throwing out perfectly good equipment that will likely end up in a landfill.
The average Slashdotter already saves energy in a variety of ways:
1.) Cutting showers to less than once a month greatly reduces both water and electricity (or gas) usage. 2.) Staying in Mom's basement not only drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions from automobile usage, but also eliminates all the extra energy waste that maintaining a separate house would entail. 3.) Not dating ensures procreation will not occur, thereby eliminating the energy usage involved in having more people on the planet.
As usual, Slashdot is way ahead of the curve on this issue. Unfortunately, 90% of these savings are used up by the racks of ancient computer equipment still running in many of these basements, but every little bit counts.
Lap desks are for the weak
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I just put my laptop directly on my lap. It's really quite amazing, I can surf the web outside in 30 degree weather and still feel toasty warm. It's like my own personal heater.
On a completely unrelated note, my doctor recently told me that I can no longer have children.
This is absolutely horrible, and I demand it be stopped! These researchers are advocating the mass enslavement of innocent microbes. These microbes will be forced to work nonstop on Hydrogen production from the moment they are born to the moment they are finally literally worked to death. Multiple generations of microbes will toil endlessly in these bacterial concentration camps, with no relief in sight!
We must stop the senseless abuse of microbial rights! We must fight for the smallest and most vulnerable among us! Stop this horror now!
There is no other real objective to power. Dissent can erode power. Dissent can be crushed by force, and if the rest of the world either fears you or needs you (and in China's case, it's both), they aren't going to do much to stop you. Sure, they'll spout empty rhetoric, but so what? They're still buying your goods, and they're still petrified of your military might.
Tin-pot dictators get away with oppression because nobody that can do anything about it in the outside world cares enough to bother. World powers do not waste time and money on human rights abuses in Lower Berzerkistan because there's no percentage in it.
Emerging superpowers like China get away with it because the only people that can do anything about it (the US, possibly Russia) need China intact and powerful to prop up their own economies, and even if they didn't they know they couldn't realistically win a war with China. War would be a disaster, and economic sanctions would harm our economy more than theirs, so they can do whatever the hell they please.
The only reason China will respond to pressure on this sort of thing at all is because they want to look good for the 2008 Olympics. Even then, though, they aren't likely to do more than try to temporarily push this stuff underground.
I think the proper distinction would be military vs. civilian. A military person, male or female, signed up for the war and knew they could be killed for taking part in it, and were willing to kill in kind. A civilian, on the other hand, is only caught in the crossfire. It is morally justified to kill people who have taken an oath to try and kill you in war, but it's not justified to kill innocent civilians whose only reason to be targeted was that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
People say "woman and children" because people are naturally more sympathetic to those who are considered "innocent" or "helpless", which women and children historically and stereotypically are. Also, up until very recently, women were not involved in the military and could not join or be forced to join the military in any aggressive capacity, so "women and children" is effectively the same thing as "civilians" in a war zone where every able-bodied male was being drafted to fight.
I thought the entire thread was a pretty obvious reference to that comic. I find that the shared "getting" of a reference enhances a joke, and pointing out the reference diminishes the joke somewhat. Like a Simpsons reference, that particular comic is ubiquitous enough on Slashdot that pointing out the reference is redundant and detracts from the overall humor. The entire reason I replied the way I did was because the post I was replying to was a clearly obvious reference to that joke (since they used the number 4 in particular).
Not a whole lot of additional meat in the article, anyway. Basically the guy feels lousy because he got laid off (been there, done that), and says they were never given a chance, and expectations were unrealistic, etc.
One thing that got me is that he seems to solely blame the marketing department for Def Jam's failure, even though all the reviews of it seem to suggest that the game just plain sucked. Sure, marketing may have overhyped it, but that doesn't make them responsible for the technical issues that likely contributed heavily to poor sales.
It sucks that these people lost their jobs, and I sympathize with the fact that they're being lambasted for sucking all over the Internet, but on the other hand they made crappy games that sold poorly. On top of that, they worked for a company viewed as evil by most people who care about these things. So now, instead of being mocked for working for a lousy company on lousy games, they can now be mocked for formerly working for a lousy company and formerly working on lousy games.
My advice to this guy would be to step away from the Internet until the chatter dies down. If hearing that EA sucks and EA Chicago deserved to go down because they sucked is going to get him depressed, he should avoid the kinds of sites that are likely to say those things. This whole story will die down as soon as people like him stop contacting game sites to complain about it.
I would call ahead if you're talking about Game Stop, as their shipments tend to vary. I got mine by calling ahead and then showing up and waiting an hour for the UPS guy to show up on a Wednesday.
Yes, but that 4 was generated via a fair dice roll, and is guaranteed to be random. You can't say that about the numbers the Vista RNG spits out. So you see, what the WNGB lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality.
I don't know, I'm pretty sure talking about toggle switches on a date would be a pretty big turn off. If you find a girl that isn't turned off by it, you should marry her immediately.
I don't think you can really overvalue the simple joy of eating half a bucket of movie theatre popcorn for breakfast on a Saturday morning.
Although, at the local theatre they've recently started dumping about twice as much salt as they used to into the popcorn, rendering it nearly inedible, so it's not worth as much as it used to be.
I think most of the value is in a game that you're currently playing. Say you have played 23 hours into a 28 hour game, and you go back to play it again the next day and your hard drive crashes. You can reload the game from original media, but the save files are gone. Personally, there aren't many games that I would pick up and start over with after that kind of loss. The majority of games are the "beat it once and never play it again" variety.
With games like SimCity, I don't think the loss would be all that horrible, because replayability tends to be fairly high. I tend to get bored with any one city after a few days with that game anyway.
As tends to happen in most asymmetrical warfare situations, Sony will be turning to terrorism. If HD-DVD really gets a big lead, I would avoid the Electronics section at the local Wal-Mart if I were you.
So now not only are you a terrorist if you're Arab (or are easily confused with Arabs by Americans, like the Persian Iranians), but you're also a terrorist if you attempt to cook Middle Eastern food.
What's next, targetting people who have Persian rugs in their houses? What about Persian cats? Should I avoid chewing gum, since it's made with gum arabic? Will I be subject to arrest for having a copy of Disney's Aladdin in my home?
Actually, there is no law in international waters. You may remember that's where they held the famous Tyson-Secretariat fight (the "Slaughter in the Water").
It seems the hospital was founded way back in 1875, well before marketing took over the naming of everything in existence. It seems like just the sort of perfectly accurate and utilitarian name that was popular in that era. These days, I'm sure they would have invented some nonsensical non-word that was vaguely reminiscent of health care to name it instead.
Exactly. If I want to rent 3 videos from blockbuster for the weekend, I'm looking at spending the same amount of money I spend for an entire month of my Netflix 3-at-a-time deal. Then, if I'm running late on Monday morning and forget to return the movies, I get nailed for another 20 bucks in late fees. I haven't used my Blockbuster card in more than 2 years, and I have no particular desire to do so again. If I'm desperate to watch a particular (popular) movie right now, I can go to one of the $1 per movie automatic DVD kiosks that are sprouting up like mushrooms in every grocery store out there. Those things generally have just as good a selection as the local Blockbuster on any given day.
Napster far overestimated the value of its "brand". The Napster name was tied to the ability to get limitless music for free in a way that had the added bonus of being somewhat illicit (but not with huge monetary consequences that the RIAA has since tried to impose on P2P users in the years since). The Napster name was never, ever tied to the ideas of quality service, quality music, or anything else that would allow it to monetize the brand.
Napster never had a corporate reputation to bank on like they thought they did, they were only a tool to get free stuff. Then, when the music business came knocking, and everyone who used Napster started fighting, Napster itself folded like a cheap suit. They shut down and came back with a boneheaded business model: You can still get (some of) the same music you got for free before, but now it's crippled and you get to pay for it. I don't know anyone who thought even at the time that this would succeed.
Other companies with tighter relationships with the record companies have since come up with far more successful ways to market music online (such as tying the store to a hugely popular MP3 player, for example). I don't understand why Napster is even still in business.
As to the lifestyle impact, it is a provable truism that most maximum payout winners do not actually improve their lives. He didn't say off the charts happiness, he said off the charts lifestyle impact. You have to admit that spending 1 dollar a week has less of an impact (good or bad) on someone's lifestyle than getting $370 million at once does (again, good or bad).
I don't know if I like how this project is being rolled out. For example, the Nigerian government has said they will pay for these laptops with part of the proceeds from a bank account containing $500,000,000 left by a rich oil baron who was killed in a car accident and left no heir. However, they are asking Negroponte to pose as this guy's heir, and also to give them a few thousand dollars for documentation fees and the like. I just don't see this thing turning out well.
It's only been about 10 minutes, but so far my Load_Cycle is sticking at 1 where it started. You have to pull the knob out to get it to start the other cycles. It won't start the Spin_Cycle until you close the lid, though.
I don't know that I would have been fired, and in truth I probably wouldn't have been, but these are the things you think about when you screw up like that on your first day on the job.
Also, you may be right that the laptop would be safer at the office then it would be at home, but I do work from home on occasion, so it makes sense for me to take it home even when I don't plan on working that night. Plus, even though we know it's not really safer, it feels safer to have these things in our possession or close at hand. And no, the laptop is not encrypted, but it also doesn't contain any company data (other than maybe the IPs of their VPN servers, but you still need a password to log on to that). I never, ever have company data on my laptops, and my browsers are set to purge their cache on exit.
Slashdot Mirror
How much money does it cost to save that much energy as well? I kind of scanned the article, but one thing I did notice was that $200 was spent on a new LCD monitor to replace the CRT. If we assume 100% of the energy savings came from that one purchase (which it didn't), it will take more than 2 years to recoup the money spent on that one purchase, and there was no indication that there was anything wrong with the older monitor other than that it used too much energy.
I would advocate buying newer more energy efficient equipment as your old equipment dies, but I would not advocate going out and replacing perfectly good equipment with more energy efficient (and more expensive) alternatives. It will not only cost you a lot of money, but will also mean more waste from throwing out perfectly good equipment that will likely end up in a landfill.
The average Slashdotter already saves energy in a variety of ways:
1.) Cutting showers to less than once a month greatly reduces both water and electricity (or gas) usage.
2.) Staying in Mom's basement not only drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions from automobile usage, but also eliminates all the extra energy waste that maintaining a separate house would entail.
3.) Not dating ensures procreation will not occur, thereby eliminating the energy usage involved in having more people on the planet.
As usual, Slashdot is way ahead of the curve on this issue. Unfortunately, 90% of these savings are used up by the racks of ancient computer equipment still running in many of these basements, but every little bit counts.
I just put my laptop directly on my lap. It's really quite amazing, I can surf the web outside in 30 degree weather and still feel toasty warm. It's like my own personal heater.
On a completely unrelated note, my doctor recently told me that I can no longer have children.
This is absolutely horrible, and I demand it be stopped! These researchers are advocating the mass enslavement of innocent microbes. These microbes will be forced to work nonstop on Hydrogen production from the moment they are born to the moment they are finally literally worked to death. Multiple generations of microbes will toil endlessly in these bacterial concentration camps, with no relief in sight!
We must stop the senseless abuse of microbial rights! We must fight for the smallest and most vulnerable among us! Stop this horror now!
The purpose of power is two-fold:
1.) Retain power
2.) Increase power
There is no other real objective to power. Dissent can erode power. Dissent can be crushed by force, and if the rest of the world either fears you or needs you (and in China's case, it's both), they aren't going to do much to stop you. Sure, they'll spout empty rhetoric, but so what? They're still buying your goods, and they're still petrified of your military might.
Tin-pot dictators get away with oppression because nobody that can do anything about it in the outside world cares enough to bother. World powers do not waste time and money on human rights abuses in Lower Berzerkistan because there's no percentage in it.
Emerging superpowers like China get away with it because the only people that can do anything about it (the US, possibly Russia) need China intact and powerful to prop up their own economies, and even if they didn't they know they couldn't realistically win a war with China. War would be a disaster, and economic sanctions would harm our economy more than theirs, so they can do whatever the hell they please.
The only reason China will respond to pressure on this sort of thing at all is because they want to look good for the 2008 Olympics. Even then, though, they aren't likely to do more than try to temporarily push this stuff underground.
Easy, he just puts something slick like a banana peel on the floor and holds out a frying pan and waits for the cat to run face first into it.
I think the proper distinction would be military vs. civilian. A military person, male or female, signed up for the war and knew they could be killed for taking part in it, and were willing to kill in kind. A civilian, on the other hand, is only caught in the crossfire. It is morally justified to kill people who have taken an oath to try and kill you in war, but it's not justified to kill innocent civilians whose only reason to be targeted was that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
People say "woman and children" because people are naturally more sympathetic to those who are considered "innocent" or "helpless", which women and children historically and stereotypically are. Also, up until very recently, women were not involved in the military and could not join or be forced to join the military in any aggressive capacity, so "women and children" is effectively the same thing as "civilians" in a war zone where every able-bodied male was being drafted to fight.
I thought the entire thread was a pretty obvious reference to that comic. I find that the shared "getting" of a reference enhances a joke, and pointing out the reference diminishes the joke somewhat. Like a Simpsons reference, that particular comic is ubiquitous enough on Slashdot that pointing out the reference is redundant and detracts from the overall humor. The entire reason I replied the way I did was because the post I was replying to was a clearly obvious reference to that joke (since they used the number 4 in particular).
Not a whole lot of additional meat in the article, anyway. Basically the guy feels lousy because he got laid off (been there, done that), and says they were never given a chance, and expectations were unrealistic, etc.
One thing that got me is that he seems to solely blame the marketing department for Def Jam's failure, even though all the reviews of it seem to suggest that the game just plain sucked. Sure, marketing may have overhyped it, but that doesn't make them responsible for the technical issues that likely contributed heavily to poor sales.
It sucks that these people lost their jobs, and I sympathize with the fact that they're being lambasted for sucking all over the Internet, but on the other hand they made crappy games that sold poorly. On top of that, they worked for a company viewed as evil by most people who care about these things. So now, instead of being mocked for working for a lousy company on lousy games, they can now be mocked for formerly working for a lousy company and formerly working on lousy games.
My advice to this guy would be to step away from the Internet until the chatter dies down. If hearing that EA sucks and EA Chicago deserved to go down because they sucked is going to get him depressed, he should avoid the kinds of sites that are likely to say those things. This whole story will die down as soon as people like him stop contacting game sites to complain about it.
I would call ahead if you're talking about Game Stop, as their shipments tend to vary. I got mine by calling ahead and then showing up and waiting an hour for the UPS guy to show up on a Wednesday.
Yes, but that 4 was generated via a fair dice roll, and is guaranteed to be random. You can't say that about the numbers the Vista RNG spits out. So you see, what the WNGB lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality.
I don't know, I'm pretty sure talking about toggle switches on a date would be a pretty big turn off. If you find a girl that isn't turned off by it, you should marry her immediately.
I don't think you can really overvalue the simple joy of eating half a bucket of movie theatre popcorn for breakfast on a Saturday morning.
Although, at the local theatre they've recently started dumping about twice as much salt as they used to into the popcorn, rendering it nearly inedible, so it's not worth as much as it used to be.
I think most of the value is in a game that you're currently playing. Say you have played 23 hours into a 28 hour game, and you go back to play it again the next day and your hard drive crashes. You can reload the game from original media, but the save files are gone. Personally, there aren't many games that I would pick up and start over with after that kind of loss. The majority of games are the "beat it once and never play it again" variety.
With games like SimCity, I don't think the loss would be all that horrible, because replayability tends to be fairly high. I tend to get bored with any one city after a few days with that game anyway.
As tends to happen in most asymmetrical warfare situations, Sony will be turning to terrorism. If HD-DVD really gets a big lead, I would avoid the Electronics section at the local Wal-Mart if I were you.
So now not only are you a terrorist if you're Arab (or are easily confused with Arabs by Americans, like the Persian Iranians), but you're also a terrorist if you attempt to cook Middle Eastern food.
What's next, targetting people who have Persian rugs in their houses? What about Persian cats? Should I avoid chewing gum, since it's made with gum arabic? Will I be subject to arrest for having a copy of Disney's Aladdin in my home?
Actually, there is no law in international waters. You may remember that's where they held the famous Tyson-Secretariat fight (the "Slaughter in the Water").
I hear the developers at the Miami branch were executed.
It seems the hospital was founded way back in 1875, well before marketing took over the naming of everything in existence. It seems like just the sort of perfectly accurate and utilitarian name that was popular in that era. These days, I'm sure they would have invented some nonsensical non-word that was vaguely reminiscent of health care to name it instead.
Exactly. If I want to rent 3 videos from blockbuster for the weekend, I'm looking at spending the same amount of money I spend for an entire month of my Netflix 3-at-a-time deal. Then, if I'm running late on Monday morning and forget to return the movies, I get nailed for another 20 bucks in late fees. I haven't used my Blockbuster card in more than 2 years, and I have no particular desire to do so again. If I'm desperate to watch a particular (popular) movie right now, I can go to one of the $1 per movie automatic DVD kiosks that are sprouting up like mushrooms in every grocery store out there. Those things generally have just as good a selection as the local Blockbuster on any given day.
Napster far overestimated the value of its "brand". The Napster name was tied to the ability to get limitless music for free in a way that had the added bonus of being somewhat illicit (but not with huge monetary consequences that the RIAA has since tried to impose on P2P users in the years since). The Napster name was never, ever tied to the ideas of quality service, quality music, or anything else that would allow it to monetize the brand.
Napster never had a corporate reputation to bank on like they thought they did, they were only a tool to get free stuff. Then, when the music business came knocking, and everyone who used Napster started fighting, Napster itself folded like a cheap suit. They shut down and came back with a boneheaded business model: You can still get (some of) the same music you got for free before, but now it's crippled and you get to pay for it. I don't know anyone who thought even at the time that this would succeed.
Other companies with tighter relationships with the record companies have since come up with far more successful ways to market music online (such as tying the store to a hugely popular MP3 player, for example). I don't understand why Napster is even still in business.
I don't know if I like how this project is being rolled out. For example, the Nigerian government has said they will pay for these laptops with part of the proceeds from a bank account containing $500,000,000 left by a rich oil baron who was killed in a car accident and left no heir. However, they are asking Negroponte to pose as this guy's heir, and also to give them a few thousand dollars for documentation fees and the like. I just don't see this thing turning out well.
I don't know that I would have been fired, and in truth I probably wouldn't have been, but these are the things you think about when you screw up like that on your first day on the job.
Also, you may be right that the laptop would be safer at the office then it would be at home, but I do work from home on occasion, so it makes sense for me to take it home even when I don't plan on working that night. Plus, even though we know it's not really safer, it feels safer to have these things in our possession or close at hand. And no, the laptop is not encrypted, but it also doesn't contain any company data (other than maybe the IPs of their VPN servers, but you still need a password to log on to that). I never, ever have company data on my laptops, and my browsers are set to purge their cache on exit.