But normally because the drives have been spinning for years. Having it Stop and then start again. Put strain on them and causes them to die. Or if the system has enough memory the drive may have died years ago but all the data is paged.
I had a similar issue last week. Customer had an old Cobalt Qube2, one of those little 250mHz MIPS based monsters with no reasonable software upgrade path. They'd been using it for email and simple file serving for years. One day they call me and say "some of our files on the server have errors and the hard drive has been making a funny noise for about 6 months". So I tell them "don't touch anything. Whatever you do, don't turn it off." So I ftp into the Qube and start pulling out all their files. I get a half dozen things when the session times out. I call them up and ask if anyone touched anything. Yeah, they say, Joe cycled the power to see if that would fix it. Of course the Qube wouldn't reboot-- the kernal was totally trashed and probably had been for months while the system could merrily run in RAM. Long story short, an easy one-vists hard drive swap and restore turned into a painful ($) two-visit recovery effort simply because one jackass couldn't follow the very simplest instruction (i.e. do NOTHING).
I must be soul-sucking enough to write the dreck that is on TV, knowing your bosses are making more money so you can be forced to write even more dreck with product-placement would be too much.
I've worked with a lot of TV writers and let me tell you, they're not writing dreck because their bosses make them, they're doing it because that's all they're capable of. The vast majority of them got where they are not through writing talent, but because their cousin Chuck is a producer, or their uncle Dick is himself a TV writer. There are of course the relatively rare few who are actually good writers, and some of them managed to break in despite being unknowns; but most of the tripe I've had to read left me asking myself "how did this idiot ever get a writing job?" After talking to the writer and he mentions (e.g.) that his father was a producer in the 70's and now works at Paramount, well, then it all becomes clear.
While there are obvious disadvantages to this (such as crappier, cheesier scripts), couldn't this be a good thing? I mean, wouldn't you guys like it if commercials were cut down signifigantly? I know that I would.
Yeah, sure, but we all know that's not how it will work out. They're not going to cut down regular commercial breaks. In-show product placement is and forever will be treated as something separate and additional.
Don't get me wrong- I'm as happy as the next guy to blame the world's ills on American Capitalism and the capitalists behind it. But the grandparent is right- where is the data that talks about how safe Stevia is? It may be that the money hasn't been put up in the US or Canada, but there has to be a country somewhere where they done some clinical research- Japan, Germany, the UK, wherever. And if I were going to advocate for Stevia, I guess I'd try to find these studies and get some real data out there instead of just blaming it on International Capitalism. *shrug* Just an idea.
Thing is, there's apparently enough safety data for stevia to be sold as a "dietary supplement" with no particaular "dosage" listed on the bottle. It's OK to sell it as something ingestable, yet the FDA has for years barred it from sale as a "sweetener". The amount of cash and political clout necessary to get it pushed through just isn't available.
Yeah. Just like when someone points out that you can build an antenna for wireless networking with a Pringles can, it's all a big scam because you already needed to have a working computer and a wireless infrastructure
False. When they say "build a Pringles can network antenna", they are literally building an antenna. This guy isn't building a macro lens, he's building an extension ring to adapt a regular existing lens for macro focusing.
then have the clamp hooked to a circuit or program to calculate if their heartrate is "abnormally high" (so in case you get a gun stuck to your head, it doesnt do your attacker any good)
...but also thereby guaranteeing that if you're late for work, you're gonna be that little bit EXTRA late because you have to stop at the the door and rest after running from your car in the parking lot. Also, if you're old and weak, or you've been up all night, or you've hard eight cups of coffee your heart rate will be "abnormally high".
Basically it's a dumb idea. Duress isn't adequately isolated from other types of stimulus for it to be detected automatically. Duress has to be detected manually, i.e. by an action of the person with a gun to their head. Most biometric systems are paired with a PIN entry. This allows you to have your regular access PIN to just open the door, and then have a special "duress PIN" that will alos open the door, but silently calls security or your monitoring service.
I didn't even realize it until you mentioned it, but what's up with the modding? I used to get mod points on a weekly basis, but I think it's been over a year since I've had any mod points. I sure don't remember participating in any sort of great uncovering of Slashdot secrets that would deserve such a response...?
I get mod points with sometimes annoying frequency. I think it's best in this case to apply Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Whatever byzantine method slashcode uses to assign mod points, it's probably not based on malice. I'm sure there is a mechanism for blacklisting, and that some people have raised the ire of one or more slashdot "editors" enough to get mod-bombed and blacklisted; but for the most part I'd say that the stupidly irregular assignment of mod points fits in neatly with the generally stupid way slashdot is run (e.g. editors that don't/can't edit, dupes, etc.)
Sadly, because of the expense of making a film in this style, the studio's are only going to allow something to be made which they can sell. Even some of the bigger studios who're known to take risks (Miramax, for example) probably wouldn't have touched a true-to-the-series Aeon Flux film with a barge pole.
As a co-writer of several scripts (many optioned, none produced), I have noticed there a singular problem with getting approval of "risky" works. The problem is that "hollywood" is actually highly risk-averse. It's such a nasty, backstabbing business that nobody ever wants to stick their neck out. To this end, there is constant pressure for approved scripts to be comparable to something that has worked before. The classic script pitch jokes along the lines of "it's like The Omen meets Cocoon, in outer space" are an exaggeration of the pathological need to have every "new" idea be a permutation or hybrid of something that has been successful before. More points are awarded if another studio is in the process of making a similar movie. This is why you see the same damn movies come out over and over. Remember when all those "funny" cop-buddy movies came out where one of the cops is a dog? (shudder)
The last thing the money men want to hear is "we don't know how this will play, no one's ever made a movie like this". The last thing the pitchmen want is to say that. To that end, every time you go in to show them what you've got, they'll be almost singleminded in their goal of getting you to make your work comparable to something they think the money men will go for. The integrity of your concept is wholly immaterial. They will indeed actually make the most absurd suggestions for how you might change the script to make it more salable. Things like "can you put a scrappy kid in?" or "could you change the setting from fantasy to modern reality, get rid of the magic stuff, and make the main character a handsome young guy instead of a tough old man?"-- these are not exaggerations, this is the kind of stuff they actually say! And even if you don't want those changes, if you sell them the script they'll give it to someone else who will make those changes. On rare occasions it'll end up in the hands of someone who truly understands the underlying idea and we'll end up with something interesting, but for the most part the pressure to turn scripts into pablum leaves us with theaters full of stuff like "Cheaper By The Dozen 2".
Actually, it's not a typo. A typo (short for typographical error) is an error caused by hitting the wrong keys while using the keyboard. "Hampster" is a spelling error. The difference is that the former is not a sign of ignorance.
Could you please cite an example for a program that pops up a (working) "click yes to install" dialog box? In my experience it takes a few more manual steps to run a downloaded program in Linux than this.
Therein lies the rub. The hordes of stupid users will never adopt linux until installing software is as easy as "click yes to install". It's silly to presume that The Stupids will migrate over and spontaneously learn even as simple a command line procedure as "rpm -ihv foo.rpm"
Um, the summary says 1 yen is worth ".83 cents", which is just about.0082977 USD
True, but I think the original article poster needs to be smacked for saying something as mathematically awkward as ".83 cents". That's saying ".83 hundredths of a dollar". It's really bad form to compound decimals like that, particularly when the currency unit is commonly represented by a decimal like that. But this is/. so brain dead submissions are the norm, and editorial corrections non existent.
I, for one, do not know what 'paredon' means. I googled it and came up with a surf camp in Guatamala http://elparedonsurfcamp.tripod.com/ I fail sto see how this resort pertains to my hero on a motorcycle, scourge of fascists until he was brutally murdered by the CIA, Che Guevera.
Clearly you're skipping the spanish language results. Don't look for it in english-- you'll only find references to that surf camp. By translating sentences found via google searching for "paredon -surf -surfing", you get a vague idea of what it means-- something like "struggle", "uprising", or "popular anti-government activity". It's possibly significant that Paredon is a place in the Mexican state of Chiapas. "El paredon" has a definite meaning in the latin american revolutionary subculture, but its meaning isn't clearly communicated anywhere in english. At any rate, I think the OP's point is probably that the latin american struggle against bad government is much larger than one semi-successful revolutionary some forty years gone.
And FWIW, Che was murdered by the Bolivian military. The CIA was quite pissed about that because they wanted to capture him alive (as if that would've turned out better!)
I guess there is only so much money to go around in the economy,
That's not how the economy works. Money doesn't vanish the first time someone spends it. It goes to someone else, who pays it to someone else, etc. Circulation is the real driving force.
if Google is making a huge profit, someone else is getting less.
It's not a zero-sum game. There's plenty of money for everyone so long as it keeps circulating. The oly way Google can get "someone else's" money is if they directly compete, and in that case it's no longer "their money", it's rightfully Google's.
Yes, that is precisely the correct attitude for war. It is precisely the incorrect attitude for court. The whole idea of a court system is to ennoble man by removing the whole dirty fighting thing.
Hah! Ennoble? My cousin is a lawyer for a large hotel chain, and the stories he tells makes it pretty clear that the legal system is just a thin veneer of civility over some of the most low-down dirty underhanded scheming duplicitous deviltry the world has ever seen. It's all couched in dry, studious language by Armani-suited, well mannered smooth-talkers, but the best that can be said is that at probably better than trial by combat or trial by ordeal. Some of the crap that goes on would appall a mongol khan.
The trouble with americans is that while they understand the basic concept of humor, they almost always do it badly. They mistake hyuck-hucking delivery of random combinations of slapstick and put-downs for wit. They then claim the audience is too liberal and P.C. to catch the subtlety of the "humor", when in reality it's just not particularly funny.
Oh indeed, I wholeheartedly agree! Heck, just try to watch any of the myriad of US movies passed off as "comedies". "OMFG HAHA THAT DOG TURNED BLUE FROM BEING FLUSHED DOWN THE CHEMICAL TOILET! HAHA!" I was only concentrating on the brits because it was topically relevant. In reality, far too many people think they are funny and this sickness seems to exist worldwide.
Should it be legal to sell one's self into slavery?
We do it every day, a little bit at a time, when we go to work. Servitude is servitude, and the rest is just haggling over the price. The problem with "slavery" in the classic sense of "complete, life-long servitude" is that there's no way to make it a fair trade. There is no amount that could adequately compensate complete surrender of life and liberty, as without those there is no value to the property gained. Limited term indentured servitude, though, is really still quite common.
Erm. The main bizare alkaloid in coffee is caffeine.
I never disputed that. My point was that some coffees contain large quantities of substances other than caffeine, and these substances can show up in large enough quantities to monkeywrench the "intelligence boosting" effects of the caffeine.
Caffeine, on its own, has been shown to:
increase dendrite growth in the brain
reduce incidence of alzheimers
protect against radiation damage
Caffeine has also, on its own, been shown to enhance cognitive abilities. My complaint was that the news editors/idiots see a study like that and improperly re-interpret the conclusion as "coffee makes you smarter" when the study in question never addressed any of the often brain-fuddling NON-caffeine contents of coffee.
Cultures not dominated by humorless prigs and literalists don't require flags to signal humor.
This particular form is called satire and is widely used to call attention to self-importance or arrogance.
The trouble with many brits is that while they understand the basic concept of traditional dry british humor, they almost always do it badly. They mistake deadpan delivery of random combinations of weak sarcasm and patent absurdity for wit. They then claim the audience is too low-brow to catch the subtlety of the humor, when in reality it's just not particularly funny.
...I doubt the apparently fake guy has an "axe to grind".
At the risk of sounding like a Parable Nazi, I'd say that trolling like this article fits the original cautionary tale quite well, and that the axe that needs grinding is at the very least "revenue generating page hits"...
My Uncle is a self-employed HVAC installer/maintainer and consistently has to turn business away. The scary thing is that he does half-assed work and still gets recommended by everyone. Occasionally a customer complains shortly after an installation or repair, but my Uncle will promptly go out of his way to satisfy them.
I think it might just be that many people are satisfied with what I and a handful of other people consider half-assed work (I'm a perfectionist to a degree). My Uncle also has a unique personality which many of his customers really appreciate.
Heh. Yeah, I think you can also get away with "half assing" if you fix your screwups in a timely manner. In my experience, most guys end up contractors because they are incapable of holding down a regular job! They either show up late for scheduled jobs or don't show up at all, they don't return messages from clients, and frequently their half-assed work isn't the result of overlooking stuff but rather simply is the best they can do. With most guys being like that, the guy with a smidgen of responsibility and a little actual skill is king.
Well, the original study that this article is based on did show that the association was with caffeine, not just coffee.
Indeed, this is a common point of "media foolishness". A couple nights ago the local news was running a typical carnival barker type ad all day saying essentially "coffee can make you smarter, film at 11". Come to find out, the study they were reporting on had people taking caffeine pills and taking tests. Coffee can contain all sorts of bizarre alkaloids that have the opposite effect. A strong cup of good, strong, freshly roasted, ground, and brewed Yemen Matari coffee can oftentimes make you feel downright stoned.
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I had a similar issue last week. Customer had an old Cobalt Qube2, one of those little 250mHz MIPS based monsters with no reasonable software upgrade path. They'd been using it for email and simple file serving for years. One day they call me and say "some of our files on the server have errors and the hard drive has been making a funny noise for about 6 months". So I tell them "don't touch anything. Whatever you do, don't turn it off." So I ftp into the Qube and start pulling out all their files. I get a half dozen things when the session times out. I call them up and ask if anyone touched anything. Yeah, they say, Joe cycled the power to see if that would fix it. Of course the Qube wouldn't reboot-- the kernal was totally trashed and probably had been for months while the system could merrily run in RAM. Long story short, an easy one-vists hard drive swap and restore turned into a painful ($) two-visit recovery effort simply because one jackass couldn't follow the very simplest instruction (i.e. do NOTHING).
I've worked with a lot of TV writers and let me tell you, they're not writing dreck because their bosses make them, they're doing it because that's all they're capable of. The vast majority of them got where they are not through writing talent, but because their cousin Chuck is a producer, or their uncle Dick is himself a TV writer. There are of course the relatively rare few who are actually good writers, and some of them managed to break in despite being unknowns; but most of the tripe I've had to read left me asking myself "how did this idiot ever get a writing job?" After talking to the writer and he mentions (e.g.) that his father was a producer in the 70's and now works at Paramount, well, then it all becomes clear.
Yeah, sure, but we all know that's not how it will work out. They're not going to cut down regular commercial breaks. In-show product placement is and forever will be treated as something separate and additional.
Thing is, there's apparently enough safety data for stevia to be sold as a "dietary supplement" with no particaular "dosage" listed on the bottle. It's OK to sell it as something ingestable, yet the FDA has for years barred it from sale as a "sweetener". The amount of cash and political clout necessary to get it pushed through just isn't available.
False. When they say "build a Pringles can network antenna", they are literally building an antenna. This guy isn't building a macro lens, he's building an extension ring to adapt a regular existing lens for macro focusing.
Basically it's a dumb idea. Duress isn't adequately isolated from other types of stimulus for it to be detected automatically. Duress has to be detected manually, i.e. by an action of the person with a gun to their head. Most biometric systems are paired with a PIN entry. This allows you to have your regular access PIN to just open the door, and then have a special "duress PIN" that will alos open the door, but silently calls security or your monitoring service.
I get mod points with sometimes annoying frequency. I think it's best in this case to apply Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Whatever byzantine method slashcode uses to assign mod points, it's probably not based on malice. I'm sure there is a mechanism for blacklisting, and that some people have raised the ire of one or more slashdot "editors" enough to get mod-bombed and blacklisted; but for the most part I'd say that the stupidly irregular assignment of mod points fits in neatly with the generally stupid way slashdot is run (e.g. editors that don't/can't edit, dupes, etc.)
As a co-writer of several scripts (many optioned, none produced), I have noticed there a singular problem with getting approval of "risky" works. The problem is that "hollywood" is actually highly risk-averse. It's such a nasty, backstabbing business that nobody ever wants to stick their neck out. To this end, there is constant pressure for approved scripts to be comparable to something that has worked before. The classic script pitch jokes along the lines of "it's like The Omen meets Cocoon, in outer space" are an exaggeration of the pathological need to have every "new" idea be a permutation or hybrid of something that has been successful before. More points are awarded if another studio is in the process of making a similar movie. This is why you see the same damn movies come out over and over. Remember when all those "funny" cop-buddy movies came out where one of the cops is a dog? (shudder)
The last thing the money men want to hear is "we don't know how this will play, no one's ever made a movie like this". The last thing the pitchmen want is to say that. To that end, every time you go in to show them what you've got, they'll be almost singleminded in their goal of getting you to make your work comparable to something they think the money men will go for. The integrity of your concept is wholly immaterial. They will indeed actually make the most absurd suggestions for how you might change the script to make it more salable. Things like "can you put a scrappy kid in?" or "could you change the setting from fantasy to modern reality, get rid of the magic stuff, and make the main character a handsome young guy instead of a tough old man?"-- these are not exaggerations, this is the kind of stuff they actually say! And even if you don't want those changes, if you sell them the script they'll give it to someone else who will make those changes. On rare occasions it'll end up in the hands of someone who truly understands the underlying idea and we'll end up with something interesting, but for the most part the pressure to turn scripts into pablum leaves us with theaters full of stuff like "Cheaper By The Dozen 2".
-Insert joke about governor of california here-
This I remember from 7th grade biology: Digestive tract is smooth; Skeletal musculature is striated; Cardiac muscle is its own kind.
Actually, it's not a typo. A typo (short for typographical error) is an error caused by hitting the wrong keys while using the keyboard. "Hampster" is a spelling error. The difference is that the former is not a sign of ignorance.
Therein lies the rub. The hordes of stupid users will never adopt linux until installing software is as easy as "click yes to install". It's silly to presume that The Stupids will migrate over and spontaneously learn even as simple a command line procedure as "rpm -ihv foo.rpm"
True, but I think the original article poster needs to be smacked for saying something as mathematically awkward as ".83 cents". That's saying ".83 hundredths of a dollar". It's really bad form to compound decimals like that, particularly when the currency unit is commonly represented by a decimal like that. But this is /. so brain dead submissions are the norm, and editorial corrections non existent.
Don't be silly! It's easy to filter porn. The ISP just needs to watch the stream and XOR out the "dirty bits"!
Seriously though, yeah, the guy's clearly an ignoramus.
(and yeah, XOR would insert the "dirty bits" where they weren't before and generally mangle the rest, but XOR sounds funnier than NAND...)
how can you murder a criminal fighting against you? lets forget how many people che personally killed.
Sorry. That "murdered" should have been in quotation marks. Far as I'm concerned, it went too easy for the hypocritic bastard.
Clearly you're skipping the spanish language results. Don't look for it in english-- you'll only find references to that surf camp. By translating sentences found via google searching for "paredon -surf -surfing", you get a vague idea of what it means-- something like "struggle", "uprising", or "popular anti-government activity". It's possibly significant that Paredon is a place in the Mexican state of Chiapas. "El paredon" has a definite meaning in the latin american revolutionary subculture, but its meaning isn't clearly communicated anywhere in english. At any rate, I think the OP's point is probably that the latin american struggle against bad government is much larger than one semi-successful revolutionary some forty years gone.
And FWIW, Che was murdered by the Bolivian military. The CIA was quite pissed about that because they wanted to capture him alive (as if that would've turned out better!)
That's not how the economy works. Money doesn't vanish the first time someone spends it. It goes to someone else, who pays it to someone else, etc. Circulation is the real driving force.
if Google is making a huge profit, someone else is getting less.
It's not a zero-sum game. There's plenty of money for everyone so long as it keeps circulating. The oly way Google can get "someone else's" money is if they directly compete, and in that case it's no longer "their money", it's rightfully Google's.
Hah! Ennoble? My cousin is a lawyer for a large hotel chain, and the stories he tells makes it pretty clear that the legal system is just a thin veneer of civility over some of the most low-down dirty underhanded scheming duplicitous deviltry the world has ever seen. It's all couched in dry, studious language by Armani-suited, well mannered smooth-talkers, but the best that can be said is that at probably better than trial by combat or trial by ordeal. Some of the crap that goes on would appall a mongol khan.
Oh indeed, I wholeheartedly agree! Heck, just try to watch any of the myriad of US movies passed off as "comedies". "OMFG HAHA THAT DOG TURNED BLUE FROM BEING FLUSHED DOWN THE CHEMICAL TOILET! HAHA!" I was only concentrating on the brits because it was topically relevant. In reality, far too many people think they are funny and this sickness seems to exist worldwide.
We do it every day, a little bit at a time, when we go to work. Servitude is servitude, and the rest is just haggling over the price. The problem with "slavery" in the classic sense of "complete, life-long servitude" is that there's no way to make it a fair trade. There is no amount that could adequately compensate complete surrender of life and liberty, as without those there is no value to the property gained. Limited term indentured servitude, though, is really still quite common.
I never disputed that. My point was that some coffees contain large quantities of substances other than caffeine, and these substances can show up in large enough quantities to monkeywrench the "intelligence boosting" effects of the caffeine.
Caffeine, on its own, has been shown to: increase dendrite growth in the brain reduce incidence of alzheimers protect against radiation damage
Caffeine has also, on its own, been shown to enhance cognitive abilities. My complaint was that the news editors/idiots see a study like that and improperly re-interpret the conclusion as "coffee makes you smarter" when the study in question never addressed any of the often brain-fuddling NON-caffeine contents of coffee.
The trouble with many brits is that while they understand the basic concept of traditional dry british humor, they almost always do it badly. They mistake deadpan delivery of random combinations of weak sarcasm and patent absurdity for wit. They then claim the audience is too low-brow to catch the subtlety of the humor, when in reality it's just not particularly funny.
At the risk of sounding like a Parable Nazi, I'd say that trolling like this article fits the original cautionary tale quite well, and that the axe that needs grinding is at the very least "revenue generating page hits"...
Heh. Yeah, I think you can also get away with "half assing" if you fix your screwups in a timely manner. In my experience, most guys end up contractors because they are incapable of holding down a regular job! They either show up late for scheduled jobs or don't show up at all, they don't return messages from clients, and frequently their half-assed work isn't the result of overlooking stuff but rather simply is the best they can do. With most guys being like that, the guy with a smidgen of responsibility and a little actual skill is king.
Indeed, this is a common point of "media foolishness". A couple nights ago the local news was running a typical carnival barker type ad all day saying essentially "coffee can make you smarter, film at 11". Come to find out, the study they were reporting on had people taking caffeine pills and taking tests. Coffee can contain all sorts of bizarre alkaloids that have the opposite effect. A strong cup of good, strong, freshly roasted, ground, and brewed Yemen Matari coffee can oftentimes make you feel downright stoned.