I could care less about almost all of the speces except one: does it use Reverse Polish Notation ? I couldn't find the answer in the article. There's a reason that the HP12C is still one of the - if not THE - dominant calculator in the world of finance (indeed, AIMR requires CFA candidates to use it or a single type of TI calculator on their exams), and that reason is RPN. (I know it's not because of speed because it is up to 10 times slower than the TI calculator which costs a fraction of an HP 12C).
Yup, don't be fooled by the big dollars going to the big game publishers, indie gaming is definitely where it's at. I'm working on an open-source market simulator. It's a simulation of the various forces - market, natural, and other - that affect the operation of a small lemonade stand. I'm thinking of calling it either "Lemonade" or "Lemonade Stand.
My biggest problem is getting people who can do 3-d - we need people who can do rendering and animation of lemonade pitchers filling, for instance - but otherwise, the game is going great (even though we've had trouble licensing the Quake engine) and the community is giving us lots of support. And the best news is, it is GPL'ed - so come on and check out our site at Sourceforge !
I mean, can't they ratify laws to allow low power FM devices access? The transmission radius of the device is a meer 10 to 30 feet.
I think you just answered your own question Even TEN feet is enough to potentially interfere with someone's radio listening in the next car. I could justify a law allowing such devices to broadcast on a single or small set of frequencies, but this device supposedly lets YOU pick the channel (though why you would do this, I have no idea), and it is this latter feature which is potentially the most troublesome for other users. You just KNOW there are dipshits out there who are going to have their ipods blasting Metallica on the channel that plays Justin Timberlake just to cause havoc; or even worse there will be guys driving around with say KKK propaganda broadcasting on the BBC channels.
The girls did not seem to appreciate our unauthorized transmissions.;)
Or, they did not appreciate the attention from a people who probably look like people who shop at Radio Shack and have enough time to wire up such a contraption.
For the first time, educators can look up a student's attendance, discipline, immigration status, grades, and test scores at one source and use that information to predict dropouts.
Or, they could just get their sysadmins to monitor how many times a user visits/. in a day.
Go ahead and buy your overpriced, useless LCD monitors and run them at suboptimal resolutions, as long as I don't have to look at them. It makes my next Trinitron cheaper.
Actually, as more people buy LCD monitors the price you are likely to pay for your next Trinitron will be higher.
Most forum software has the option to use/not use cookies (and as such sessions are passed through urls) so that shouldn't be a problem either for non-lazy coders.
Well, Slashdot "works" when you disable cookies until you try to post a message. Then it seems that you always post as an AC even if you entered your name and login first, and even when the preview page acknowledges your logging in.
I'm not sure if this is a bug or an intended design "feature", but it seems that despite all the hand-wringing here about cookies, my experience is that Slashdot itself requires its users to enable cookies if they want to post as anything but an AC.
(And if this goes out as an AC it's because of that same cookie problem).
Big surprise, another postive book review
on
Perl 6 Essentials
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It may come as a surprise that within the pages of 'Perl 6 Essentials'lies what could be two books
Not really, but what does NOT come as a surprise to me is that we have yet another glowing book review with a bn.com affiliate link. I've seen far too many glowing reviews on this site, about books that I know to suck donkey balls, to trust the reviews here anymore, especially knowing that readers are more likely to follow affiliate links when the review is positive than when it is not (And this from the same site where people so often rip stock analysts for writing glowing reviews of companies that garner their firms big i-banking fees). I wouldn't trust a movie review if I knew the reviewer was getting paid every time people went to saw the movie, and this is almost the same thing. Maybe Slashdot should put up a disclaimer...
If I see a book whose title sounds remotely interesting reviewed here, the first thing I do is go directly to amazon, and check out their user reviews. At least there you'll potentially see a bunch of negative reviews, instead of a chapter summary and a "this belongs on every Perl/PHP/Mysql/Linux geek's bookshelf".
Where else can you get a PIII-733 with graphics and audio for $180?
Well, I know that it's *easy* to buy a refurb or sometimes even new but remaindered P3 with higher specs than this, in Canada, for less than they sell an Xbox for. I have to assume the same is true for the U.S.
We have Brittany Spears because a record company invested millions of dollars in creating her
No, we have Britney Spears because people make it worthwhile for the record companies to invest lots of money creating her. If people don't want it, people won't buy it, no matter how much money is spent.
If you have read an introductory book or two about Python programming, but you are far from being an expert, then you will benefit a lot from reading this book. If you are a competent programmer in any other language, you will benefit from this book. If you are an expert Python programmer, you will also benefit from this book
And if you're the website posting this glowing review, and collecting affiliate fees, you will also benefit from this book.
BTW, how many slots do we really need? With so many USB peripherals, PCI and especially ISA slots aren't the important resources they once were.
I just put together a system with an ASUS A7n8X. This thing packs so much into it that what I'm really wanting for are not more PCI slots, but rather more PCI slot cutouts on the back of the case. Some modern motherboards come with SO many additional connectors on the back (this one comes with 4 USB 2.0, and TWO LANs, plus jacks for 5.1 audio, that with the ATX form factor a lot of their connectors have to go on breakouts (this one has one for IEE1394 and also one for 2 more USB jacks and a game port). On my machine, that means I have used 3/7 of the PCI cutouts on the back, and that is just with the motherboard and of course the video card.
Not only that, but another spin on this "statistic" is that file-sharing on sites like Grokster is up dramatically since approximately the time iTunes went on-line (give or take a few weeks). Someone who is less sympathetic to the whole file-sharing issue might wonder why this should be if the iTunes model is so great and if people *really* want to pay for something - even if it's only a buck - when they can still get it for free.
The argument that the statistic is meaningless is well-taken. Your argument, on the other hand, is nearly as anecdotal as the original article. *All other things being equal with no growth in file-sharing*, one would expect that absolute numbers related file-sharing ought to drop after the RIAA's threat of legal action. However, all other things are NOT equal.
I would wager that file-sharing was increasing exponentially before the latest attempts by the RIAA to stop it, and has probably increased exponentially since the very first days of Napster. So the real question as to whether the RIAA's latest actions are working is not whether or not filesharing has gone down, but rather whether or not filesharing has increased less than it would have sans RIAA threats.
Before anyone jumps to grand conclusions about what this means vis a vis desktops vs laptops:
I don't see anyone noting how laptops are inherently hard to upgrade. If your laptop is sluggish, you basically have two options: 1) add more RAM, and if that fails, 2) buy a new laptop. Whereas, with desktop PCs, you have several more options, like upgrading the CPU or buying a new graphics card. This means that the average desktop will have a longer upgradeable life than the average laptop.
A related factor is that the average desktop for under $1000 is way more powerful than the average $2000 laptop. So a desktop bought today is much less likely to be made obsolete by horsepower requirements within a given time frame than a laptop also bought today, if only because it has more horsepower right out of the box, even if that desktop costs a lot less.
And because of the inherent cost differential, people who can afford to buy laptops can afford to upgrade them faster.
Also, many people who buy laptops buy it for the chic factor, so they're going to upgrade (i.e. buy a new laptop) sooner than those people who buy the decidedly unchic desktop.
Laptops are undeniably at least partly about image, and people consume them every bit as conspicuously (and in the very same places !) as people consumed Filofaxes, cell phones, and PDAs before. And I've noticed many smirks or at least raised eyebrows when someone trundles in a 3-year old, heavy-as-hell-with-passive-matrix-screen laptop into a meeting. And many if not most of the laptop-advocates here are familiar with the satisfaction of hauling in the newest, coolest laptop, hearing the oohs-and-ahhs and having the neatest toy in the board room for the next month or so.
Hopefully this will make companies realize that the Internet isn't comprised of just IE users.
Moreover, I fail to see how tallying "We use Mozilla" would go very far in convincing anyone that Internet users aren't predominantly IE users, anymore than tallying "Who uses IE" responses on an MS-fanboy site would indicate IE's pre-eminence.
To build a convincing argument here you need scientifically conducted surveys, not optional queries aimed at users of a particular browser on a niche site with considerable user self-selection.
Let's see. You know that Microsoft is behind both products, and you believe Windows sucks. But at the same time, you would consider buying a product if the OS is called "PocketPC", but you wouldn't consider buying the SAME product if it was called "Windows Mobile".
Microsoft's marketing department is changing the product name precisely BECAUSE of people like you who are going to buy a product purely on name alone, its merits or lack of same notwithstanding. For more users than not, the Windows association is a *good* thing and the PocketPc nomenclature was probably confusing to many of them.
find it disgusting that companies and countries are sending people up for profit to a space station that was funded by taxpayer dollars intended ostensibly for research ? Does anyone find it disturbing that lives of astronauts could possibly be jeopardized by having relatively untrained personnel on board ?
referring to a Walmart "war chest" makes it sound like Walmart is bracing for some big battle of grand long-term significance with a formidable foe. Netflix is a (relatively) small operation, with a niche clientele, and the dollars in this niche aren't (by Walmart standards) large at all. Walmart doesn't need a warchast to win a war of attrition with Netflix, because Netflix is largely irrelevant to Walmart. Walmart can do whatever the hell they want to, with or without netflix.
If you do organize a mass walkout, which screws the rest of the company like you think it will, prepare for the likelihood that anyone who knows or hears anything about the incident - including your managers, people who know your managers, your co-workers, your friends, and even your collegaues who walk out with you - will remember that you were all sh*t disturbers who acted and colluded in a particular way to screw your company when things got tough. The world is smaller than you think.
It would take me about 1 second to decide toss a resume of a guy in your situation who did what you plan to. Nobody needs agitators, least of all a company in somewhat dire straits.
If things are so bad, quit, by yourself. If things are bad for others, they'll probably quit too. But getting others involved in an organized fashion for the explicit purpose of making it tough for the company is unprofessional and will rightly brand you as a trouble maker.
Forget Diablo II. I'm having anticipatory nightmares about the problems the first OS X version of Quark is going to have.
My wife runs a graphic design company that is all on Macs running OS 9, and they just bought a stockpile of the G4s that will still run OS 9 before Apple shuts the door on OS9 completely. The reason ? They're having a hell of a time with the new OS X software, and a hell of a time getting it OSX to do the things they want to do. From Filemaker to Photoshop to simple things like printing, it's been a nightmare for them. There are *lots* of things that don't "just work".
Not to mention, when I went to *boot* her new G3 iBook into OS X for the first time, the damn thing locked up and would no longer boot, even off the CD, just presenting some weird message to cycle the power. You'd think this would be covered under Apple's warranty - hell, if the computer crashes when you do exactly what it says in the booklet, there's something wrong and it should be fixed under warranty - but she had to call her service company up, and pay for their time during which they pulled the drive and had to do a fresh install of the whole thing. What did they tell her ? They recommended that she *not run OSX* !! Her service company also SELLS Macs, by the way.
It's telling when people are buying older computers just because they don't want to get pushed kicking and screaming into the latest thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it function in the grand tradition of AMD products and also double as a space-heater ?
I could care less about almost all of the speces except one: does it use Reverse Polish Notation ? I couldn't find the answer in the article. There's a reason that the HP12C is still one of the - if not THE - dominant calculator in the world of finance (indeed, AIMR requires CFA candidates to use it or a single type of TI calculator on their exams), and that reason is RPN. (I know it's not because of speed because it is up to 10 times slower than the TI calculator which costs a fraction of an HP 12C).
Maybe the other third are just hypocrites.
Yup, don't be fooled by the big dollars going to the big game publishers, indie gaming is definitely where it's at. I'm working on an open-source market simulator. It's a simulation of the various forces - market, natural, and other - that affect the operation of a small lemonade stand. I'm thinking of calling it either "Lemonade" or "Lemonade Stand.
My biggest problem is getting people who can do 3-d - we need people who can do rendering and animation of lemonade pitchers filling, for instance - but otherwise, the game is going great (even though we've had trouble licensing the Quake engine) and the community is giving us lots of support. And the best news is, it is GPL'ed - so come on and check out our site at Sourceforge !
I mean, can't they ratify laws to allow low power FM devices access? The transmission radius of the device is a meer 10 to 30 feet.
I think you just answered your own question Even TEN feet is enough to potentially interfere with someone's radio listening in the next car. I could justify a law allowing such devices to broadcast on a single or small set of frequencies, but this device supposedly lets YOU pick the channel (though why you would do this, I have no idea), and it is this latter feature which is potentially the most troublesome for other users.
You just KNOW there are dipshits out there who are going to have their ipods blasting Metallica on the channel that plays Justin Timberlake just to cause havoc; or even worse there will be guys driving around with say KKK propaganda broadcasting on the BBC channels.
The girls did not seem to appreciate our unauthorized transmissions. ;)
Or, they did not appreciate the attention from a people who probably look like people who shop at Radio Shack and have enough time to wire up such a contraption.
I guess that in this case, information doesn't need to be free.
For the first time, educators can look up a student's attendance, discipline, immigration status, grades, and test scores at one source and use that information to predict dropouts.
/. in a day.
Or, they could just get their sysadmins to monitor how many times a user visits
Go ahead and buy your overpriced, useless LCD monitors and run them at suboptimal resolutions, as long as I don't have to look at them. It makes my next Trinitron cheaper.
Actually, as more people buy LCD monitors the price you are likely to pay for your next Trinitron will be higher.
Most forum software has the option to use/not use cookies (and as such sessions are passed through urls) so that shouldn't be a problem either for non-lazy coders.
Well, Slashdot "works" when you disable cookies until you try to post a message. Then it seems that you always post as an AC even if you entered your name and login first, and even when the preview page acknowledges your logging in.
I'm not sure if this is a bug or an intended design "feature", but it seems that despite all the hand-wringing here about cookies, my experience is that Slashdot itself requires its users to enable cookies if they want to post as anything but an AC.
(And if this goes out as an AC it's because of that same cookie problem).
It may come as a surprise that within the pages of 'Perl 6 Essentials'lies what could be two books
Not really, but what does NOT come as a surprise to me is that we have yet another glowing book review with a bn.com affiliate link. I've seen far too many glowing reviews on this site, about books that I know to suck donkey balls, to trust the reviews here anymore, especially knowing that readers are more likely to follow affiliate links when the review is positive than when it is not (And this from the same site where people so often rip stock analysts for writing glowing reviews of companies that garner their firms big i-banking fees). I wouldn't trust a movie review if I knew the reviewer was getting paid every time people went to saw the movie, and this is almost the same thing. Maybe Slashdot should put up a disclaimer...
If I see a book whose title sounds remotely interesting reviewed here, the first thing I do is go directly to amazon, and check out their user reviews. At least there you'll potentially see a bunch of negative reviews, instead of a chapter summary and a "this belongs on every Perl/PHP/Mysql/Linux geek's bookshelf".
Where else can you get a PIII-733 with graphics and audio for $180?
Well, I know that it's *easy* to buy a refurb or sometimes even new but remaindered P3 with higher specs than this, in Canada, for less than they sell an Xbox for. I have to assume the same is true for the U.S.
We have Brittany Spears because a record company invested millions of dollars in creating her
No, we have Britney Spears because people make it worthwhile for the record companies to invest lots of money creating her. If people don't want it, people won't buy it, no matter how much money is spent.
If you have read an introductory book or two about Python programming, but you are far from being an expert, then you will benefit a lot from reading this book. If you are a competent programmer in any other language, you will benefit from this book. If you are an expert Python programmer, you will also benefit from this book
And if you're the website posting this glowing review, and collecting affiliate fees, you will also benefit from this book.
BTW, how many slots do we really need? With so many USB peripherals, PCI and especially ISA slots aren't the important resources they once were.
I just put together a system with an ASUS A7n8X. This thing packs so much into it that what I'm really wanting for are not more PCI slots, but rather more PCI slot cutouts on the back of the case. Some modern motherboards come with SO many additional connectors on the back (this one comes with 4 USB 2.0, and TWO LANs, plus jacks for 5.1 audio, that with the ATX form factor a lot of their connectors have to go on breakouts (this one has one for IEE1394 and also one for 2 more USB jacks and a game port). On my machine, that means I have used 3/7 of the PCI cutouts on the back, and that is just with the motherboard and of course the video card.
Not only that, but another spin on this "statistic" is that file-sharing on sites like Grokster is up dramatically since approximately the time iTunes went on-line (give or take a few weeks). Someone who is less sympathetic to the whole file-sharing issue might wonder why this should be if the iTunes model is so great and if people *really* want to pay for something - even if it's only a buck - when they can still get it for free.
The argument that the statistic is meaningless is well-taken. Your argument, on the other hand, is nearly as anecdotal as the original article. *All other things being equal with no growth in file-sharing*, one would expect that absolute numbers related file-sharing ought to drop after the RIAA's threat of legal action. However, all other things are NOT equal.
I would wager that file-sharing was increasing exponentially before the latest attempts by the RIAA to stop it, and has probably increased exponentially since the very first days of Napster. So the real question as to whether the RIAA's latest actions are working is not whether or not filesharing has gone down, but rather whether or not filesharing has increased less than it would have sans RIAA threats.
Before anyone jumps to grand conclusions about what this means vis a vis desktops vs laptops:
I don't see anyone noting how laptops are inherently hard to upgrade. If your laptop is sluggish, you basically have two options: 1) add more RAM, and if that fails, 2) buy a new laptop. Whereas, with desktop PCs, you have several more options, like upgrading the CPU or buying a new graphics card. This means that the average desktop will have a longer upgradeable life than the average laptop.
A related factor is that the average desktop for under $1000 is way more powerful than the average $2000 laptop. So a desktop bought today is much less likely to be made obsolete by horsepower requirements within a given time frame than a laptop also bought today, if only because it has more horsepower right out of the box, even if that desktop costs a lot less.
And because of the inherent cost differential, people who can afford to buy laptops can afford to upgrade them faster.
Also, many people who buy laptops buy it for the chic factor, so they're going to upgrade (i.e. buy a new laptop) sooner than those people who buy the decidedly unchic desktop.
Laptops are undeniably at least partly about image, and people consume them every bit as conspicuously (and in the very same places !) as people consumed Filofaxes, cell phones, and PDAs before. And I've noticed many smirks or at least raised eyebrows when someone trundles in a 3-year old, heavy-as-hell-with-passive-matrix-screen laptop into a meeting. And many if not most of the laptop-advocates here are familiar with the satisfaction of hauling in the newest, coolest laptop, hearing the oohs-and-ahhs and having the neatest toy in the board room for the next month or so.
Hopefully this will make companies realize that the Internet isn't comprised of just IE users.
Moreover, I fail to see how tallying "We use Mozilla" would go very far in convincing anyone that Internet users aren't predominantly IE users, anymore than tallying "Who uses IE" responses on an MS-fanboy site would indicate IE's pre-eminence.
To build a convincing argument here you need scientifically conducted surveys, not optional queries aimed at users of a particular browser on a niche site with considerable user self-selection.
I dont care about anything but one thing, how many mandrake club members are there?
Not enough ?
Let's see. You know that Microsoft is behind both products, and you believe Windows sucks. But at the same time, you would consider buying a product if the OS is called "PocketPC", but you wouldn't consider buying the SAME product if it was called "Windows Mobile".
Microsoft's marketing department is changing the product name precisely BECAUSE of people like you who are going to buy a product purely on name alone, its merits or lack of same notwithstanding. For more users than not, the Windows association is a *good* thing and the PocketPc nomenclature was probably confusing to many of them.
find it disgusting that companies and countries are sending people up for profit to a space station that was funded by taxpayer dollars intended ostensibly for research ? Does anyone find it disturbing that lives of astronauts could possibly be jeopardized by having relatively untrained personnel on board ?
referring to a Walmart "war chest" makes it sound like Walmart is bracing for some big battle of grand long-term significance with a formidable foe. Netflix is a (relatively) small operation, with a niche clientele, and the dollars in this niche aren't (by Walmart standards) large at all. Walmart doesn't need a warchast to win a war of attrition with Netflix, because Netflix is largely irrelevant to Walmart. Walmart can do whatever the hell they want to, with or without netflix.
If you do organize a mass walkout, which screws the rest of the company like you think it will, prepare for the likelihood that anyone who knows or hears anything about the incident - including your managers, people who know your managers, your co-workers, your friends, and even your collegaues who walk out with you - will remember that you were all sh*t disturbers who acted and colluded in a particular way to screw your company when things got tough. The world is smaller than you think.
It would take me about 1 second to decide toss a resume of a guy in your situation who did what you plan to. Nobody needs agitators, least of all a company in somewhat dire straits.
If things are so bad, quit, by yourself. If things are bad for others, they'll probably quit too. But getting others involved in an organized fashion for the explicit purpose of making it tough for the company is unprofessional and will rightly brand you as a trouble maker.
Anyone else getting a flashback
Forget Diablo II. I'm having anticipatory nightmares about the problems the first OS X version of Quark is going to have.
My wife runs a graphic design company that is all on Macs running OS 9, and they just bought a stockpile of the G4s that will still run OS 9 before Apple shuts the door on OS9 completely. The reason ? They're having a hell of a time with the new OS X software, and a hell of a time getting it OSX to do the things they want to do. From Filemaker to Photoshop to simple things like printing, it's been a nightmare for them. There are *lots* of things that don't "just work".
Not to mention, when I went to *boot* her new G3 iBook into OS X for the first time, the damn thing locked up and would no longer boot, even off the CD, just presenting some weird message to cycle the power. You'd think this would be covered under Apple's warranty - hell, if the computer crashes when you do exactly what it says in the booklet, there's something wrong and it should be fixed under warranty - but she had to call her service company up, and pay for their time during which they pulled the drive and had to do a fresh install of the whole thing. What did they tell her ? They recommended that she *not run OSX* !! Her service company also SELLS Macs, by the way.
It's telling when people are buying older computers just because they don't want to get pushed kicking and screaming into the latest thing.