"Don't you remember 650K is enough for anyone, no one needs to run more than one program at once, the intenet is just for a few accademics and geeks etc. etc."
650K? I thought Ballmer's salary was higher than that. Or perhaps you were referring to the line, "640K should be enough for anybody," which is commonly attributed to Bill Gates. Though word is that he never actually said that.
"I personally think this would be very rude. If a place has a television on and I'm not wanting to watch it I wouldn't turn it off for everyone else. I would go somewhere else if it was really that big of a deal."
Fool! Stop bringing reality into this! </joke>
Seriously, such things would only be used (by me) on TVs that are annoyances to everyone (like the stupid ones outside of exercise clubs) as opposed to asserting some sort of 'my preferences are better than yours' kind of attitude.
"How long until one of these things gets hooked up to a bigger power supply, gets 'modded' to run in continuous search mode, and then amplified to continuously turn off any TV in a 20 mile radius? I can't wait! ROFL."
I have a feeling that this would be a lost cause, as most tv remotes work by IR, which is a line-of-sight technology. So unless you can make the super powered remote point or reflect toward the front of everyone's television, it would be an exercuse in futility.
No, Jamby was worse than Zombocom. It took 5 minutes to load this flash video of a Kevin Sorbo lookalike talking about their 'internet solutions management' business or something like that, going through this flash-embedded powerpoint slideshow. All of the content was provided in flash with that guy talking next to a tiny 150 x 300 pixel window of text information (embedded in flash) that changed at regular intervals to match up with the forced powerpoint via flash silideshow.
And most importantly, Jamby was actually trying to sell a product, while zombocom just tries to be stupid and annoying.
Why is your site absolutely useless? The front page is just a picture containing your name in a nicely anti-aliased embedded graphic. If you don't have a popup blocker, it launches a bandwidth intensive popup window with stupid sound effects that contains important info about yourself and your work. Do you know that people with popup browsers won't see this window? Getting back to the useless front page (with no alt text so blind readers will wonder what's going on,) clicking on your name just brings up that same popup window again. It is absolutely impossible to view this page if you're blind, if you don't have flash installed or if you have a popup blocker.
Neal, you have the second worst site I have ever seen. It is topped only by the (thankfully now defunct) jamby.net.
Honestly I find that the biggest problem in second year CS is that the kids don't know what memory is. If they would just take the time to understand the difference between a variable, an address, an address that is stored in a variable, and the address of a variable, I think 90% of stupidity would be eliminated.
Lots of us figured out the concept of a pointer about 20 seconds after it was introduced to us, but still I constantly see people struggling with simple things like linked lists, segfaults, null pointers, malloc(), free(), sizeof(), and such thinking that it's a syntax problem. No! Just understand the difference between a variable and the address where that variable is stored, and know where to use each one and then your problems will vanish!
Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 1
Point #1: Exactly. People deserve to get paid for what they create. You have no right to get their stuff for free unless they choose to give it to you that way.
Point #2: This doesn't change the fact that (RIAA licensed) CDs are ridiculously overpriced and sold through monopolistic practices. Thank goodness I finally discovered the wonderful thing that is used CDs.
Point #3: The first point still applies to the second point, even if you think it's not fair.
Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"An example is Ghost in the Shell 2. I haven't seen any announcements for its cinematic (let alone DVD) release in Australia,",
Region 1 DVD Release: Dec 28, 2004. Source: Main page of AnimeOnDVD. It was announced a couple of days ago. Though I do agree that there has been no Australian release date set.
"All of the PC's that I've bought in the past 4 years or so I just plugged in and they worked. I've played with OS X and still don't really understand how it's going to help me get work done quicker or easier."
"Playing" does not acclimatize you to the workings of the system. If you are good at using windows and not good at using OS X, then you will be faster on windows. If you are good at using both, then you will be faster on OS X due to time saved through a more efficient and better designed user environment combined with fewer maintenance needs. Other applications will not steal focus, exposé allows you to access your needed applications more quickly. I still find it astonishing that microsoft has not streamlined the entering and selection of multiple network configuration through a simple interface. Most people don't know how or want to create scripted netsh commands. And you don't waste your time worrying about patching and rebooting for worm avoidance, keeping your lusers out of IE for spyware avoidance, maintaining firewall rules, and keeping your antivirus up to date. Windows is becoming more and more annoying because you have to manage all kinds of little things in order to keep it safe, secure and working smoothly. You don't have to worry about any of this on a mac and so your time is spent doing your work instead of maintaining the system.
As to just plugging in and working, I hope that you are behind a router or firewall or a mac/linux box sharing the connection, because just plugging an XP box into a broadband connection ill get you owned by a worm in under an hour, even if you do absolutely nothing. This is of much safer with a mac (but of course not perfectly safe with a mac or linux or anything else.) If you want to do that with XP, you'll have to get hundreds of MB of updates (I hope you download faster than the trojans find you), and turn off your network messenger to avoid the popups, shut off your uPnP to avoid vulnerabilities, and probably get a firewall set up because it's next to impossbile to close all ports on a windows box.
And when you are done with the mac, you can sell it of course. My iBook is 20 months old now and on eBay it's still going for 40-45% of what I purchased it for. Can you sell an x86 box for 40-45% of its original purchase price after 20 months of use?
Don't get me wrong, I have windows, linux and mac machines. I use each one for what it's good at. And the mac is good for getting work done. And I have found that when it comes down to doing work, if you are good at using all systems, the mac is by far the least intrusive and just gets out of the way so you can do what you're doing.
Of course, you can indeed patch up your XP box to make it almost as safe as a mac, requiring plenty of time installing the patches and installing/configuring third party software. And this takes a lot of time. How many $/h is your time worth? What's the difference in price between a mac and PC (even though it is totally an apples and oranges comparison to begin with?)
x86 is only cheaper than mac if your time has no value.
"I can't possibly imagie them trying to take over a large portion of the IM market. It's already quite crowded as it is (AIM, MSN, Y!, ICQ, Jabber, etc.)"
That's probably what people said about the free webmail market when gmail was coming out. Google knows how to provide value in slick, fast, low-bloat products that do one thing and do it well. That's why gmail is the best free webmail there is. And that's why, if google did decide to jump into the IM market, their product would be a real contender.
All *not* registered by google (unless they're doing some sort of proxy registration to hide their name.) I'll be watching gbrowser.com anyway which *is* owned by them.
"1.4e6/(24*365.24) = 159.71 years, to be picky about it. I see these figures on modern drives and, frankly, I don't believe it. But, that doesn't keep me from drooling over them (which would proably shorten the MTBF, yes?:-)"
This is a common misconception. The drive won't last you for 160 years. Please see the post I just made.
" Yea, I'm sure their drives have an average lifespan of 159 years. Next caller."
This is a common misconception. The MTBF refers to the time before a failure in group of drives. So if you have 120 of these 1,400,000 MTBF drives in your server room, then you can expect to go 1 year, 121 days (on average) between replacing drives. That should help you plan your IT spending budget too.
Or perhaps a company deployed 5000 laptops, all with these drives in them: You can expect to go about 12 days between failures. Back up your drives, people! Even with SCSI-level MTBF numbers, statistically failures are not all that uncommon.
Isn't that the situation for pretty much every manufactured thing already? Products are designed in USA, Canada, Japan, UK, etc. and then produced in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, etc. I guess software is no different after all.
"So, why do we permit the wholesale discrimination against children in this damn country...or world for that matter?"
Because it's better than mandating that everything in the world be child-friendly and allowing open access to everything. This is just a lip service system anyway to prevent those sort of mandates. Really, did you wait until you were 18 to acquire pr0n? These thing don't actually prevent minors from getting at what they want. It simply keeps legislators and soccer moms happy while we go about our business as usual.
I really laugh at all of these arguments about who gets to choose what is good or not good for minors. Really, this is a voluntary thing that the industry accepted so that they would have an argument against mandatory censoring and removal of mature content. ("What? Your law about disallowing violence and gore in video games makes no sense! We already have a rating system in place to ensure that minors cannot have such games without parental approval! Go away and let us go back to developing shocking games that make us big money!")
The industry doesn't care whether or not eleven year olds can get violent and sexual video games. They (the industry) just wants to be able to produce these things (which DO sell in large quantities) under the guise that they are not getting into the hands of minors.
It's simply a way to avoid forced, stronger and mandatory regulation, that's all. Any minor who wants to get the 18+ rates games will get them anyway.
"If Carrier Pidgeons is the answer for internet connectivity, what does the modem look like?"
What kind of geek are you? Haven't you read RFC 1149: IP over Avian Carriers? And what kind of uneducated geeks is slashdot producing these days? Sheesh... </joke>
(I actually had to model RFC 1149 using petri nets as part of a final examination in a 4th Year Engineering Real Time Systems course.)
Exactly, that's why I avoid shopping there. Maybe some other people don't know about their censorship, so I gave them reasons to not shop there as well.
Slashdot Mirror
And clean your browser cache and history afterward. Where do you think it finds the info it returns?
Exactly. Google desktop search doesn't find anything that wasn't there before. It just is better at organising and mining it than a human being.
650K? I thought Ballmer's salary was higher than that. Or perhaps you were referring to the line, "640K should be enough for anybody," which is commonly attributed to Bill Gates. Though word is that he never actually said that.
ThinkSecret got it right again, right down to the week of release.
Fool! Stop bringing reality into this! </joke>
Seriously, such things would only be used (by me) on TVs that are annoyances to everyone (like the stupid ones outside of exercise clubs) as opposed to asserting some sort of 'my preferences are better than yours' kind of attitude.
I have a feeling that this would be a lost cause, as most tv remotes work by IR, which is a line-of-sight technology. So unless you can make the super powered remote point or reflect toward the front of everyone's television, it would be an exercuse in futility.
And most importantly, Jamby was actually trying to sell a product, while zombocom just tries to be stupid and annoying.
That is why Jamby > NealStephenson > Zombo
I agree. A universal 'mute' button would be a lot more useful.
Neal, you have the second worst site I have ever seen. It is topped only by the (thankfully now defunct) jamby.net.
Lots of us figured out the concept of a pointer about 20 seconds after it was introduced to us, but still I constantly see people struggling with simple things like linked lists, segfaults, null pointers, malloc(), free(), sizeof(), and such thinking that it's a syntax problem. No! Just understand the difference between a variable and the address where that variable is stored, and know where to use each one and then your problems will vanish!
Point #2: This doesn't change the fact that (RIAA licensed) CDs are ridiculously overpriced and sold through monopolistic practices. Thank goodness I finally discovered the wonderful thing that is used CDs.
Point #3: The first point still applies to the second point, even if you think it's not fair.
Region 1 DVD Release: Dec 28, 2004. Source: Main page of AnimeOnDVD. It was announced a couple of days ago. Though I do agree that there has been no Australian release date set.
"Playing" does not acclimatize you to the workings of the system. If you are good at using windows and not good at using OS X, then you will be faster on windows. If you are good at using both, then you will be faster on OS X due to time saved through a more efficient and better designed user environment combined with fewer maintenance needs. Other applications will not steal focus, exposé allows you to access your needed applications more quickly. I still find it astonishing that microsoft has not streamlined the entering and selection of multiple network configuration through a simple interface. Most people don't know how or want to create scripted netsh commands. And you don't waste your time worrying about patching and rebooting for worm avoidance, keeping your lusers out of IE for spyware avoidance, maintaining firewall rules, and keeping your antivirus up to date. Windows is becoming more and more annoying because you have to manage all kinds of little things in order to keep it safe, secure and working smoothly. You don't have to worry about any of this on a mac and so your time is spent doing your work instead of maintaining the system.
As to just plugging in and working, I hope that you are behind a router or firewall or a mac/linux box sharing the connection, because just plugging an XP box into a broadband connection ill get you owned by a worm in under an hour, even if you do absolutely nothing. This is of much safer with a mac (but of course not perfectly safe with a mac or linux or anything else.) If you want to do that with XP, you'll have to get hundreds of MB of updates (I hope you download faster than the trojans find you), and turn off your network messenger to avoid the popups, shut off your uPnP to avoid vulnerabilities, and probably get a firewall set up because it's next to impossbile to close all ports on a windows box.
And when you are done with the mac, you can sell it of course. My iBook is 20 months old now and on eBay it's still going for 40-45% of what I purchased it for. Can you sell an x86 box for 40-45% of its original purchase price after 20 months of use?
Don't get me wrong, I have windows, linux and mac machines. I use each one for what it's good at. And the mac is good for getting work done. And I have found that when it comes down to doing work, if you are good at using all systems, the mac is by far the least intrusive and just gets out of the way so you can do what you're doing.
Of course, you can indeed patch up your XP box to make it almost as safe as a mac, requiring plenty of time installing the patches and installing/configuring third party software. And this takes a lot of time. How many $/h is your time worth? What's the difference in price between a mac and PC (even though it is totally an apples and oranges comparison to begin with?)
x86 is only cheaper than mac if your time has no value.
x86 is only cheaper than mac if your time has no value.
Think secret was right again, even down to predicting the date of the announcement.
That's probably what people said about the free webmail market when gmail was coming out. Google knows how to provide value in slick, fast, low-bloat products that do one thing and do it well. That's why gmail is the best free webmail there is. And that's why, if google did decide to jump into the IM market, their product would be a real contender.
gim.com
gchat.com
gmessage.com
gtalk.com
All *not* registered by google (unless they're doing some sort of proxy registration to hide their name.) I'll be watching gbrowser.com anyway which *is* owned by them.
This is a common misconception. The drive won't last you for 160 years. Please see the post I just made.
This is a common misconception. The MTBF refers to the time before a failure in group of drives. So if you have 120 of these 1,400,000 MTBF drives in your server room, then you can expect to go 1 year, 121 days (on average) between replacing drives. That should help you plan your IT spending budget too.
Or perhaps a company deployed 5000 laptops, all with these drives in them: You can expect to go about 12 days between failures. Back up your drives, people! Even with SCSI-level MTBF numbers, statistically failures are not all that uncommon.
Isn't that the situation for pretty much every manufactured thing already? Products are designed in USA, Canada, Japan, UK, etc. and then produced in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, etc. I guess software is no different after all.
Because it's better than mandating that everything in the world be child-friendly and allowing open access to everything. This is just a lip service system anyway to prevent those sort of mandates. Really, did you wait until you were 18 to acquire pr0n? These thing don't actually prevent minors from getting at what they want. It simply keeps legislators and soccer moms happy while we go about our business as usual.
The industry doesn't care whether or not eleven year olds can get violent and sexual video games. They (the industry) just wants to be able to produce these things (which DO sell in large quantities) under the guise that they are not getting into the hands of minors.
It's simply a way to avoid forced, stronger and mandatory regulation, that's all. Any minor who wants to get the 18+ rates games will get them anyway.
European or African pigeons?
What kind of geek are you? Haven't you read RFC 1149: IP over Avian Carriers? And what kind of uneducated geeks is slashdot producing these days? Sheesh... </joke>
(I actually had to model RFC 1149 using petri nets as part of a final examination in a 4th Year Engineering Real Time Systems course.)
Exactly, that's why I avoid shopping there. Maybe some other people don't know about their censorship, so I gave them reasons to not shop there as well.