Okay, maybe we don't need astronauts in space. At least not for the purpose of scientific experiemntation. Yay autonomous scientific experimentation. Maybe it's safer and cheaper to keep humankind firmly rooted on terran soil instead of building craft capable of carrying them into orbit. It's much safer down here, after all.
But damn it, we want to send people into space. We want to send people into space so we can look up at night and imagine that one day we may leave this planet. We want people in space because they inspire our children to become scientists, researchers, and explorers. We want people in space because we need heroes who don't wear masks and compete in tag team cage matches. We want people in space because it forces us to push the technolological envelope, to achieve that which we've never achieved before. We want people in space to boldly go where. ..umm. ..I think I should probably shut up now.
Okay, in a lottery, if you pick the numbers right, you win. In a coin toss, if you choose right, you win. That doesn't mean you win or lose based on the choices you make. It means you win or lose based on the balls that come up or the fall of a coin. Whether you chose 'head' or 'tail', your chances of winning are equal. The numbers you pick in a lottery are the same. By chosing them you're simply seeding the win-lose generator.
Now, although the authors of the site imply that there are situations where you can't win, I don't believe that's what is actually going on, and that was the point I tried to make in my original post. Although the outcome "you lose" comes up over and over again if you save or reset the state of the machine and perform the exact same procedure over and over again, that doesn't mean the game is fixed. It means that, if you could go back in time and do it over again, the coin would fall the same way. This is the nature of RNGs. Although I don't want to get mixed up in a debate over temporal mechanics and chaos theory, (actually I do, but whenever I bring it up at the pub I suddenly find myself alone at the table, so I won't try), I'm tempted to think that, if you could watch a coin toss occur, without in any way influencing that coin toss (Heisenberg be damned, let's assume we have compensators), and you would then rewind time and watch it again, the coin toss would come out the same way.
Maybe not, but what I'm trying to say is that, even though you knew what was going to happen the second time, nobody, not even the computer, knew what was going to happen the first time. Unpredictability may not be the same as randomness, there is no true randomness within the context of a computer program. If we assume a random number generator to be random, randomness has been served. If not, electronic gambling isn't gambling.
By your reasoning electronic gambling isn't. That's fine; a completely valid view. But, even from that perspective, there will be situations where a user is offered a choice and cannot win, but there will also be situations where a user is offered a choice where he cannot lose. No fruit machine has a "you lose" button you can press, and if it did, people wouldn't press it. There are people who spend a LOT of time behind these machines. If a machine worked that way, they'd know. Even if the button wasn't marked "you lose". Let's assume for the moment the button is marked "fluffy, happy rabbits". If it never pays to press the button, a gambler won't. There's always the casual player, I suppose, who thinks fluffy, happy rabbits are a good idea. He may press the button once or twice. Point is, as long as it's not predictable, it's gambling.
Conversely, it's not gambling once it becomes predictable. And what these people have apparently set out to prove is that, in certain situations, they can predict whether you'll win or lose. Assuming the machine (or the emulator, it remains to be seen whether this works on actual machines) is cold booted, the same sequence of interactions will lead to the same results over and over again. So, since they now know that they'll either win or lose as the result of a specific action, they protest? They know when they're going to win, don't they? They know that, if the machine is in a certain state, and they do this, that, and the other, they'll walk home 25 quid richer*. I'm sorry, but had I worked this out and been able to profit from it, I damn well would have kept my mouth shut and started planning my life of leisure. The fact that this is being published is either proof that there is no way to determine when and if you're going to win or lose outside of the context given or proof that the publishers of the site are too well-meaning to recognize the chicken with the golden eggs.
I see your point. By playing the high-low game with the player, the player gets a feeling of control. The machine implies that a player, by deciding whether a number is on the high or the low end of a linear scale, can gain a better chance of winning. But that's what gambling is about, isn't it? Giving the player the impression that there's something he can do to beat the system. Sure your chances of winning are the same with the high-low game as they would be with a nice game of "heads or tails and the machine calls heads every time". Once you've gotten over the fact that anything which seems to imply that you have a better chance of winning than losing is, in fact, a gimmick (not a hard step to make, I should think), we come back to a far simpler point: Just because the result is the same if you "roll back time" and repeat the action, that doesn't mean the result is predictable per se.
Mind you, the issue of legality is a far different point. Since true randomness cannot exist within the confines of a computer simulation, I think it's safe to assume that the "It's not random" argument won't fly. Maybe the "I was misled into thinking I could win" argument might work, but if so, it could pretty much apply to all forms of gambling anywhere. Of course, I'm neither a lawyer nor a gambler;)
Apparently the 'proof' that sliot machines, fruit machines as those wacky brits choose to call them, is that, if you 'freeze' the state of a fruit machine at some point and then repeat the next step, the machine will generate the same outcome.
If I'm not mistaken, a RNG, once seeded, will generate the same sequence of random outcomes given the same seed. What's been proven is that the RNG isn't reseeded after every roll of the wheels.
Does this mean the outcome is predictable? Hardly. And not by a long shot does it mean the fruit machine is cheating. Since it's not possible to go back in time and respin the wheels in real life, the fairplay campaign has proven absolutely nothing.
Well, let's be fair. They've proven that a fruit machine, after a cold reboot, seeds its RNG the same way every time. As a result, if you were to play the machine in exactly the same way from a cold boot twice, the outcome would be the same. As soon as a player starts doing things differently, the outcome will once again become unpredicatble. (For those not familiar with European fruit machines, they're a bit more interactive than the American slots. You'll often have the option to 'hold' certain reels, or to play double or nothing on a win, for example.)
Seems to me that all you have to do is work out a winning sequence for a given machine at home on your emulator, or, if the RNG is different for each machine, on the machine itself, then make sure you're the first one in the casino every morning when they turn the things on. You'll clean up every time.
Maybe I'm not paranoid enough. High tech crooks cruising a neighbourhood with souped up RFID sensors, scoping out homes to rob. Now there's a thought. The ultimate target is a home that reads plenty of consumer electronics and jewelry tags, but no toothbrushes or combs. Guess they're on vacation. In fact, I like the idea so much that I'd like to be the first to coin the phrase waRFIDing to describe it.
I was talking with a friend about these things recently and he had some good ideas about practical uses for RFID tags. For one, a simple keychain sensor device could be programmed to keep track of your posessions. Wallets, cellphones, sunglasses, could be coded with these tags. If these items were to leave your direct vicinity, the sensor could inform you you're forgetting something. Or being robbed as the case may be.
Truth be told, I fail to see the privacy issues the adoption of these things would raise. I assume that, once you've brought your item home, you're free to remove the offending tag. Or, if you want to mess with the system, switch 'em around.
I work at a large electronics retailer, and I've noticed many times that customers have difficulty distinguishing between the competing products, Dish and DirectTV. Prices and products are similar. On the other hand, I also see the two constantly respond to the other's promotions and price changes. Pricing of both products have reached the point where setup, installation, and the required hardware is essentially free. I'm sure that wouldn;t have been the case for long had the merger been apprived. It's also nice to see the likes of AT&T be forced to respond to the competetive pricing of the sat. providers. They're still expensive by comparison, but imagine how much worse it would be without these competitors.
Great, so the secret to adding one to three inches overnight, guaranteed, is simply not drinking caffeine? Now that it's out in the open, will I stop getting all that spam?
At my previous job, way back when dotcoms could afford things like staff, I used to have a team of coders and we got along very well. We, or at least several of us, would visit local pubs a few times a week and brainstorm about products, or high flying ideas for on-line games. I should, however, point out that several of us knew each other even before we got to work together and were already quite familiar with the others' company. In addition, we were only a small subgroup within the company. The suits, the marketeers, they had lives of their own and rarely socialized with the long haired geeks upstairs. We were very much forced into an 'us and them' situation and that brought us together on both a professional level and a social level.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with fraternizing with your fellow office geeks, but it does lead to certain tensions, especially when people go a step beyond fraternization. When two of my employees and friends got 'involved' with each other for all of two weeks, they both came to me for, if nothing else, consolation. For quite a while I has to keep them on different projects, or at least on different parts of projects. It messed up our group dynamics and did little good to our productivity.
Now, a year after I left the company, I still consider many of my team-mates good friends and some of us occasionally get together and reminsice about the old days. I currently work as a contractor in a company otherwise devoid of techies and although I get invited to the occasional dinner or night on the town, I'm really not one of them. It's much harder for a geek, thrown together with non-geeks, to form the same friendships he or she can easily form with fellow geeks. There's simply less common ground to cover.
In summary, I don't think the IT industry is very different to other, 'dangerous', professions, but I do think geeks have a harder time finding common ground with non geeks than other people might.
The Realmedia feed of VOA is one of the only things I can currently reach at www.voa.gov. The stream itself can be reached directly at www.voa.gov/streams/live/newsnow.ram . It goes without saying that they're covering this full-time.
The discussion here seems to focus on whether the Brazilian government is justified in breaking international patents in order to provide their ill with much needed medicine. However disgusting I find it that such a batlle is being fought over the heads of AIDS sufferers, and that so many people here seem to think that death is preferable to patent infringement, the point begging to be made is a much larger one.
Should commercial companies be developing life saving drugs at all? I'm a capitalist, don't get me wrong. I believe in the free market, I understand the price of developing these drugs is astronomical and that if a commercial corporation develops them it wants to make money out of it. But the fact remains that a drug like nelfinavir was dceveloped and is being produced not for the benefit of the people it helps, but primarily for the benefit of Roche and its stockholders. That's wrong. Just plain wrong. We, as mankind, need an organization that develops drugs like this, not for commercial benefit, but for humanity. Brazil is just the tip of the iceberg here. The are countries far poorer than Brazil with a much higher infection rate. How does Ghana pay for this stuff? When commercial considerations cost lives, those considerations should be taken away. That can only be done, as far as I can see, by developing these drugs in a non-profit environment. Not everything begins and ends with dollars. At least it shouldn't.
I know, it's a pipe dream to think that, in the cash-hungry corporate world we currently live in, anything like this can be done on a not-for-profit basis, but if we don't stop worshipig the dollar with quite the fervor we do now, I don't think our future looks too bright.
It's already been mentioned, but the Freecom Beatman has been around for a while now and after my old Rio300 gave up on my I decided to opt for one of these nifty 8cm players instead. One or two others are on the market right now, but I opted for the Beatman because of its wide availability and Freecoms reputation for portable storage devices.
Whereas my Rio only held 32MB of music, the Beatman will store 185 megs. That translates to over 50 tracks in my case. And as opposed to conventional CD/MP3 players such as the original expanium, the Beatman fits snugly into my coat pocket. True, it's slightly larger than a solid state MP3 player and the battery life is a bit shorter (about half as long on twice as many batteries), but those are the only disadvantages that spring to mind. The media is nice and cheap and you can carry many of the little discs around without much hassle. Skipping isn't too much of a problem. The buffer seems to cope quite well with all but the severest of shocks. But best of all is the price. The beatman, here in NL, costs less than the cheapest MP3 player on the market.
There are several areas where philips could improve on the beatman design in their new Expanium. For one, I'd like to see a display that reproduces song titles and not only track numbers. It would also be nice to have some form of directory support. I'd like be able to easily select all songs in a single folder, for example. Finally, the beatman is still a bit on the largish side. This seems to be a result of Freecom using a standard reading mechanism as encountered in laptops and made for regular 13cm CDs instead of a custom mechanism. I think Philips could possibly shave several centimeters off the depth of the thing with a custom-built optical subsystem. The original Expanium was somewhat bulky, however. It remains to be seen how small this one will be.
In an impromptu statement, president George W. Bush has responded to the news of the closure of respected development house Dynamix with regret. A full transcript follows:
It has come to my attention that the the government of Sierra has decided to redundementalize the employees and workers of the fine people at Dynamix. I have been advised that I am highly regretful of this development and would like to ensure the recently unemployed future ex-employees that this great, free nation of ours still welcomes you all as citizens. America is a place for people of all races and creeds. Except for freeloaders, of cousre. And people who write those awful, violent video games that cause the youth of our great nation to violence. . to violate. ..to kill people.
I salute you all for your spirited endeavourations in the field of the entertainment industry . When I visited the beutiful country of Eugene during my recent European tour, I was enthused by the reaction I received from the vibrant and dynamic population there. I'm sure that I've shaken the hands of more than a few Dynamix employees during my visit. I'm sure your excellent developments in the fields of military transport will not soon be always remembered.
An interesting thing to look at here, besides the obvious 'we don't want people buying movies on DVD that aren't even out in the cinemas yet' is the different way DVD marketing seems to work over in the States. For example, during a recent trip to London, I tried to acquire something (I'll be honest: anything) on DVD from the Monty Python tv-show. A single 'best of' compilation is the best I could find. Several days later, I discovered that the whole damn thing is available on 14 DVDs in the states. I'm quite sure that M.P. is British and has been around for a long time, so this is obviously not an issue of protecting the cinemas' income. I'm assuming that the demand for DVDs in the US warrants a much wider range of titles being available over there than us poor sods on the continent will ever be able to lay our hands on through official channels. Now I'm not french, nor am I living in France, but if the local government would ever tell me that it's illegal to purchase or import DVDs that are not and will probably never be available through regular channels, I'd be rather cross to say the least.
If I understand the tenure of this article correctly, whenever an issue arrives involving, say, a Russian component of ISS, the inhabitants confer with Russian ground control. Although this is more or less logical, it's rather worrying to think that no single entity bears full responsibility for the project or its failures. Imagine a problem arising involving the way two segments interoperate. I can easily see this devolving itno a shouting match between two sets of ground controllers unwilling to offer a solution because doing so would implicitly imply that their module was at fault.
I should also state that, considering the shoestring budget the Russians are working on, and with all due respect for their accomplishments, it would be easy to consider it unwise to rely blindly on their reccomendations and estimates as far as improvised repair work goes. I doubt they have the resources needed to fully test and evaluate the correct course of action in urgent cases.
You might want to have a look at one of the Cyber Home models. I picked up the ADN 212 for less than 400 dutch guilders (converts to $160, a steal for Dutch standards, where $250 is the norm). The basic model features dolby 5.1 (optical) and a macrovision hack and is completely region free. It'll also play VCDs. The ADM 212 will play MP3s as well and goes for 500 dutch guilders.
I personally have the N212 and although it's not the smoothest machine I've ever seen, at this price it's quite acceptable. Sound and vision is good, the remote's a bit bulky and it does have minor synch problems from time to time.
for Intel. What on earth are they thinking? Apparently the P4 (and this is according to very early benchmarks) can hardly keep up with a P3 two thirds of its speed, let alone an Athlon. That, combined with the exorbitant cooling measures this beastie apparently requires more or less rules it out as a desktop chip. On the other hand, it won't be SMP compatible until (and let me see if I'm getting this straight) another, different core is released and branded P4 as well, leaving them more or less hopeless in the server market.
It's been said more than once recently that Intel is a marketing driven company, where it should be technology driven. Apparently they've gone beyond that and are now 'drunk janitor named Emilio' driven.
I'm sorry, I meant this to be a witty analisys of the current state of affairs at Santa Clara, but it seems to have turned into a rather bad trolling.
Why is this a Bad Thing, I hear you ask. Let me explain: By offering games on a CD-rom, with a built in (bit of) operating system, you are dooming yourself to near certain incompatability with any bit of hardware that will be released after your game. You are forcing yourself to supply drivers for everything that has ever been built. You are also making your software impossible to patch and (perhaps worst of all) forcing users to run games straight from the CD. What on earth would a commercial party do with all of the support requests they'd end up receiving from people who can't get their game to run on their winchip / vanta / galaxysound combo with their Panther XL stick and their 3D glasses?
Don't even get me started on the fact that people who would play these games wouldn't even _know_ they're using linux.
On the other hand, if a dedicated system were to be made for such games, with standardised hardware, It would be much easier to publish and support them. Perhaps a system with a built in TV-out that, by being built to specific standards, could be sold for a much lower price than a custom box.
How do you feel about the current electoral system? Do you find the use of popular media an effective way to get an objective message accross, or would you prefer a more controlled method of campaigning? Furthermore, traditionally a large percentage of the American people chooses not to exercise their right to vote. On one hand, it is known that something as simple as pleasant weather on an election day leads to a higher turnout, and a better result for left wing candidates. On the other hand, in Belgium, where voting is mandatory, a high percentage of the population chooses to vote for extreme right wing candidates. Do you beleive voting should remain a right, or should voting be considered a duty?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, maybe we don't need astronauts in space. At least not for the purpose of scientific experiemntation. Yay autonomous scientific experimentation. Maybe it's safer and cheaper to keep humankind firmly rooted on terran soil instead of building craft capable of carrying them into orbit. It's much safer down here, after all.
.umm. . .I think I should probably shut up now.
But damn it, we want to send people into space. We want to send people into space so we can look up at night and imagine that one day we may leave this planet. We want people in space because they inspire our children to become scientists, researchers, and explorers. We want people in space because we need heroes who don't wear masks and compete in tag team cage matches. We want people in space because it forces us to push the technolological envelope, to achieve that which we've never achieved before. We want people in space to boldly go where. .
Okay, in a lottery, if you pick the numbers right, you win. In a coin toss, if you choose right, you win. That doesn't mean you win or lose based on the choices you make. It means you win or lose based on the balls that come up or the fall of a coin. Whether you chose 'head' or 'tail', your chances of winning are equal. The numbers you pick in a lottery are the same. By chosing them you're simply seeding the win-lose generator.
;)
Now, although the authors of the site imply that there are situations where you can't win, I don't believe that's what is actually going on, and that was the point I tried to make in my original post. Although the outcome "you lose" comes up over and over again if you save or reset the state of the machine and perform the exact same procedure over and over again, that doesn't mean the game is fixed. It means that, if you could go back in time and do it over again, the coin would fall the same way. This is the nature of RNGs. Although I don't want to get mixed up in a debate over temporal mechanics and chaos theory, (actually I do, but whenever I bring it up at the pub I suddenly find myself alone at the table, so I won't try), I'm tempted to think that, if you could watch a coin toss occur, without in any way influencing that coin toss (Heisenberg be damned, let's assume we have compensators), and you would then rewind time and watch it again, the coin toss would come out the same way.
Maybe not, but what I'm trying to say is that, even though you knew what was going to happen the second time, nobody, not even the computer, knew what was going to happen the first time. Unpredictability may not be the same as randomness, there is no true randomness within the context of a computer program. If we assume a random number generator to be random, randomness has been served. If not, electronic gambling isn't gambling.
By your reasoning electronic gambling isn't. That's fine; a completely valid view. But, even from that perspective, there will be situations where a user is offered a choice and cannot win, but there will also be situations where a user is offered a choice where he cannot lose. No fruit machine has a "you lose" button you can press, and if it did, people wouldn't press it. There are people who spend a LOT of time behind these machines. If a machine worked that way, they'd know. Even if the button wasn't marked "you lose". Let's assume for the moment the button is marked "fluffy, happy rabbits". If it never pays to press the button, a gambler won't. There's always the casual player, I suppose, who thinks fluffy, happy rabbits are a good idea. He may press the button once or twice. Point is, as long as it's not predictable, it's gambling.
Conversely, it's not gambling once it becomes predictable. And what these people have apparently set out to prove is that, in certain situations, they can predict whether you'll win or lose. Assuming the machine (or the emulator, it remains to be seen whether this works on actual machines) is cold booted, the same sequence of interactions will lead to the same results over and over again. So, since they now know that they'll either win or lose as the result of a specific action, they protest? They know when they're going to win, don't they? They know that, if the machine is in a certain state, and they do this, that, and the other, they'll walk home 25 quid richer*. I'm sorry, but had I worked this out and been able to profit from it, I damn well would have kept my mouth shut and started planning my life of leisure. The fact that this is being published is either proof that there is no way to determine when and if you're going to win or lose outside of the context given or proof that the publishers of the site are too well-meaning to recognize the chicken with the golden eggs.
*At this point, you'll have gambled the win up to £25. However, the machine doesn't want you to gamble any further. This is where a wise person presses the 'payout button'
I see your point. By playing the high-low game with the player, the player gets a feeling of control. The machine implies that a player, by deciding whether a number is on the high or the low end of a linear scale, can gain a better chance of winning. But that's what gambling is about, isn't it? Giving the player the impression that there's something he can do to beat the system. Sure your chances of winning are the same with the high-low game as they would be with a nice game of "heads or tails and the machine calls heads every time". Once you've gotten over the fact that anything which seems to imply that you have a better chance of winning than losing is, in fact, a gimmick (not a hard step to make, I should think), we come back to a far simpler point: Just because the result is the same if you "roll back time" and repeat the action, that doesn't mean the result is predictable per se.
;)
Mind you, the issue of legality is a far different point. Since true randomness cannot exist within the confines of a computer simulation, I think it's safe to assume that the "It's not random" argument won't fly. Maybe the "I was misled into thinking I could win" argument might work, but if so, it could pretty much apply to all forms of gambling anywhere. Of course, I'm neither a lawyer nor a gambler
Apparently the 'proof' that sliot machines, fruit machines as those wacky brits choose to call them, is that, if you 'freeze' the state of a fruit machine at some point and then repeat the next step, the machine will generate the same outcome.
If I'm not mistaken, a RNG, once seeded, will generate the same sequence of random outcomes given the same seed. What's been proven is that the RNG isn't reseeded after every roll of the wheels.
Does this mean the outcome is predictable? Hardly. And not by a long shot does it mean the fruit machine is cheating. Since it's not possible to go back in time and respin the wheels in real life, the fairplay campaign has proven absolutely nothing.
Well, let's be fair. They've proven that a fruit machine, after a cold reboot, seeds its RNG the same way every time. As a result, if you were to play the machine in exactly the same way from a cold boot twice, the outcome would be the same. As soon as a player starts doing things differently, the outcome will once again become unpredicatble. (For those not familiar with European fruit machines, they're a bit more interactive than the American slots. You'll often have the option to 'hold' certain reels, or to play double or nothing on a win, for example.)
Seems to me that all you have to do is work out a winning sequence for a given machine at home on your emulator, or, if the RNG is different for each machine, on the machine itself, then make sure you're the first one in the casino every morning when they turn the things on. You'll clean up every time.
Now who's cheating?
Hey, no basing my imaginations, pops ;)
Maybe I'm not paranoid enough. High tech crooks cruising a neighbourhood with souped up RFID sensors, scoping out homes to rob. Now there's a thought. The ultimate target is a home that reads plenty of consumer electronics and jewelry tags, but no toothbrushes or combs. Guess they're on vacation. In fact, I like the idea so much that I'd like to be the first to coin the phrase waRFIDing to describe it.
I was talking with a friend about these things recently and he had some good ideas about practical uses for RFID tags. For one, a simple keychain sensor device could be programmed to keep track of your posessions. Wallets, cellphones, sunglasses, could be coded with these tags. If these items were to leave your direct vicinity, the sensor could inform you you're forgetting something. Or being robbed as the case may be.
Truth be told, I fail to see the privacy issues the adoption of these things would raise. I assume that, once you've brought your item home, you're free to remove the offending tag. Or, if you want to mess with the system, switch 'em around.
. . .we've got comics!
Maybe it's because you had to set back your clock in order to get Office to work again? ;)
I find myself needing over and over again is a Windows '98 boot disk; the one with the CD-rom drivers.
And of course a list of windows serials.
Oops.
Did I say that out loud?
I am ashamed to call myself an American.
MS was obviously afraid the hailstorm would damage the bountiful crops in their enterprise garden.
I work at a large electronics retailer, and I've noticed many times that customers have difficulty distinguishing between the competing products, Dish and DirectTV. Prices and products are similar. On the other hand, I also see the two constantly respond to the other's promotions and price changes. Pricing of both products have reached the point where setup, installation, and the required hardware is essentially free. I'm sure that wouldn;t have been the case for long had the merger been apprived. It's also nice to see the likes of AT&T be forced to respond to the competetive pricing of the sat. providers. They're still expensive by comparison, but imagine how much worse it would be without these competitors.
Great, so the secret to adding one to three inches overnight, guaranteed, is simply not drinking caffeine? Now that it's out in the open, will I stop getting all that spam?
At my previous job, way back when dotcoms could afford things like staff, I used to have a team of coders and we got along very well. We, or at least several of us, would visit local pubs a few times a week and brainstorm about products, or high flying ideas for on-line games. I should, however, point out that several of us knew each other even before we got to work together and were already quite familiar with the others' company. In addition, we were only a small subgroup within the company. The suits, the marketeers, they had lives of their own and rarely socialized with the long haired geeks upstairs. We were very much forced into an 'us and them' situation and that brought us together on both a professional level and a social level.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with fraternizing with your fellow office geeks, but it does lead to certain tensions, especially when people go a step beyond fraternization. When two of my employees and friends got 'involved' with each other for all of two weeks, they both came to me for, if nothing else, consolation. For quite a while I has to keep them on different projects, or at least on different parts of projects. It messed up our group dynamics and did little good to our productivity.
Now, a year after I left the company, I still consider many of my team-mates good friends and some of us occasionally get together and reminsice about the old days. I currently work as a contractor in a company otherwise devoid of techies and although I get invited to the occasional dinner or night on the town, I'm really not one of them. It's much harder for a geek, thrown together with non-geeks, to form the same friendships he or she can easily form with fellow geeks. There's simply less common ground to cover.
In summary, I don't think the IT industry is very different to other, 'dangerous', professions, but I do think geeks have a harder time finding common ground with non geeks than other people might.
The Realmedia feed of VOA is one of the only things I can currently reach at www.voa.gov. The stream itself can be reached directly at www.voa.gov/streams/live/newsnow.ram . It goes without saying that they're covering this full-time.
The discussion here seems to focus on whether the Brazilian government is justified in breaking international patents in order to provide their ill with much needed medicine. However disgusting I find it that such a batlle is being fought over the heads of AIDS sufferers, and that so many people here seem to think that death is preferable to patent infringement, the point begging to be made is a much larger one.
Should commercial companies be developing life saving drugs at all? I'm a capitalist, don't get me wrong. I believe in the free market, I understand the price of developing these drugs is astronomical and that if a commercial corporation develops them it wants to make money out of it. But the fact remains that a drug like nelfinavir was dceveloped and is being produced not for the benefit of the people it helps, but primarily for the benefit of Roche and its stockholders. That's wrong. Just plain wrong. We, as mankind, need an organization that develops drugs like this, not for commercial benefit, but for humanity. Brazil is just the tip of the iceberg here. The are countries far poorer than Brazil with a much higher infection rate. How does Ghana pay for this stuff? When commercial considerations cost lives, those considerations should be taken away. That can only be done, as far as I can see, by developing these drugs in a non-profit environment. Not everything begins and ends with dollars. At least it shouldn't.
I know, it's a pipe dream to think that, in the cash-hungry corporate world we currently live in, anything like this can be done on a not-for-profit basis, but if we don't stop worshipig the dollar with quite the fervor we do now, I don't think our future looks too bright.
It's already been mentioned, but the Freecom Beatman has been around for a while now and after my old Rio300 gave up on my I decided to opt for one of these nifty 8cm players instead. One or two others are on the market right now, but I opted for the Beatman because of its wide availability and Freecoms reputation for portable storage devices.
Whereas my Rio only held 32MB of music, the Beatman will store 185 megs. That translates to over 50 tracks in my case. And as opposed to conventional CD/MP3 players such as the original expanium, the Beatman fits snugly into my coat pocket. True, it's slightly larger than a solid state MP3 player and the battery life is a bit shorter (about half as long on twice as many batteries), but those are the only disadvantages that spring to mind. The media is nice and cheap and you can carry many of the little discs around without much hassle. Skipping isn't too much of a problem. The buffer seems to cope quite well with all but the severest of shocks. But best of all is the price. The beatman, here in NL, costs less than the cheapest MP3 player on the market.
There are several areas where philips could improve on the beatman design in their new Expanium. For one, I'd like to see a display that reproduces song titles and not only track numbers. It would also be nice to have some form of directory support. I'd like be able to easily select all songs in a single folder, for example. Finally, the beatman is still a bit on the largish side. This seems to be a result of Freecom using a standard reading mechanism as encountered in laptops and made for regular 13cm CDs instead of a custom mechanism. I think Philips could possibly shave several centimeters off the depth of the thing with a custom-built optical subsystem. The original Expanium was somewhat bulky, however. It remains to be seen how small this one will be.
Washington D.C., 8-10-01
.to kill people.
I salute you all for your spirited endeavourations in the field of the entertainment industry . When I visited the beutiful country of Eugene during my recent European tour, I was enthused by the reaction I received from the vibrant and dynamic population there. I'm sure that I've shaken the hands of more than a few Dynamix employees during my visit. I'm sure your excellent developments in the fields of military transport will not soon be always remembered.
In an impromptu statement, president George W. Bush has responded to the news of the closure of respected development house Dynamix with regret. A full transcript follows:
It has come to my attention that the the government of Sierra has decided to redundementalize the employees and workers of the fine people at Dynamix. I have been advised that I am highly regretful of this development and would like to ensure the recently unemployed future ex-employees that this great, free nation of ours still welcomes you all as citizens. America is a place for people of all races and creeds. Except for freeloaders, of cousre. And people who write those awful, violent video games that cause the youth of our great nation to violence. . to violate. .
An interesting thing to look at here, besides the obvious 'we don't want people buying movies on DVD that aren't even out in the cinemas yet' is the different way DVD marketing seems to work over in the States. For example, during a recent trip to London, I tried to acquire something (I'll be honest: anything) on DVD from the Monty Python tv-show. A single 'best of' compilation is the best I could find.
Several days later, I discovered that the whole damn thing is available on 14 DVDs in the states. I'm quite sure that M.P. is British and has been around for a long time, so this is obviously not an issue of protecting the cinemas' income. I'm assuming that the demand for DVDs in the US warrants a much wider range of titles being available over there than us poor sods on the continent will ever be able to lay our hands on through official channels.
Now I'm not french, nor am I living in France, but if the local government would ever tell me that it's illegal to purchase or import DVDs that are not and will probably never be available through regular channels, I'd be rather cross to say the least.
If I understand the tenure of this article correctly, whenever an issue arrives involving, say, a Russian component of ISS, the inhabitants confer with Russian ground control. Although this is more or less logical, it's rather worrying to think that no single entity bears full responsibility for the project or its failures.
Imagine a problem arising involving the way two segments interoperate. I can easily see this devolving itno a shouting match between two sets of ground controllers unwilling to offer a solution because doing so would implicitly imply that their module was at fault.
I should also state that, considering the shoestring budget the Russians are working on, and with all due respect for their accomplishments, it would be easy to consider it unwise to rely blindly on their reccomendations and estimates as far as improvised repair work goes. I doubt they have the resources needed to fully test and evaluate the correct course of action in urgent cases.
You might want to have a look at one of the Cyber Home models. I picked up the ADN 212 for less than 400 dutch guilders (converts to $160, a steal for Dutch standards, where $250 is the norm). The basic model features dolby 5.1 (optical) and a macrovision hack and is completely region free. It'll also play VCDs. The ADM 212 will play MP3s as well and goes for 500 dutch guilders.
I personally have the N212 and although it's not the smoothest machine I've ever seen, at this price it's quite acceptable. Sound and vision is good, the remote's a bit bulky and it does have minor synch problems from time to time.
for Intel. What on earth are they thinking?
Apparently the P4 (and this is according to very early benchmarks) can hardly keep up with a P3 two thirds of its speed, let alone an Athlon. That, combined with the exorbitant cooling measures this beastie apparently requires more or less rules it out as a desktop chip.
On the other hand, it won't be SMP compatible until (and let me see if I'm getting this straight) another, different core is released and branded P4 as well, leaving them more or less hopeless in the server market.
It's been said more than once recently that Intel is a marketing driven company, where it should be technology driven. Apparently they've gone beyond that and are now 'drunk janitor named Emilio' driven.
I'm sorry, I meant this to be a witty analisys of the current state of affairs at Santa Clara, but it seems to have turned into a rather bad trolling.
You may want to rephrase that to:
"If one more person tells me 'Mir is dead' again I'll start suspecting an Amiga involvement.
Why is this a Bad Thing, I hear you ask. Let me explain: By offering games on a CD-rom, with a built in (bit of) operating system, you are dooming yourself to near certain incompatability with any bit of hardware that will be released after your game. You are forcing yourself to supply drivers for everything that has ever been built. You are also making your software impossible to patch and (perhaps worst of all) forcing users to run games straight from the CD. What on earth would a commercial party do with all of the support requests they'd end up receiving from people who can't get their game to run on their winchip / vanta / galaxysound combo with their Panther XL stick and their 3D glasses?
.umm. . .yeah.
Don't even get me started on the fact that people who would play these games wouldn't even _know_ they're using linux.
On the other hand, if a dedicated system were to be made for such games, with standardised hardware, It would be much easier to publish and support them. Perhaps a system with a built in TV-out that, by being built to specific standards, could be sold for a much lower price than a custom box.
Oh. .
How do you feel about the current electoral system? Do you find the use of popular media an effective way to get an objective message accross, or would you prefer a more controlled method of campaigning? Furthermore, traditionally a large percentage of the American people chooses not to exercise their right to vote. On one hand, it is known that something as simple as pleasant weather on an election day leads to a higher turnout, and a better result for left wing candidates. On the other hand, in Belgium, where voting is mandatory, a high percentage of the population chooses to vote for extreme right wing candidates. Do you beleive voting should remain a right, or should voting be considered a duty?