Of course not! I mean, if the bible says it's 400 forearms(?) long and 150 forearms wide then it must be Noah's Ark and therefore God exists.
Or not.
What you're saying is equivalent to "In the Matrix there was a guy named 'Agent Smith'. It turns out that there really is an 'Agent Smith' in the FBI, therefore the entire Matrix trilogy is true."
Sure, it would be unusual if there were a boat on top of a mountain. It would be even more unusual if the specs for the boat matched those for the ark in the bible. It would be even more unusual if there were animal carcases all around as well, and none of those species existed today. But even that would not be proof that it was Noah's Ark or that anything in the bible was true. If the alternatives are "It's an elaborate hoax", "Trickster aliens did it as a joke" or "The bible is factual", I think the least likely possibility is that the bible is factual.
But it is the case! It's the way the headphone-jack part of the case connects to the rest of the stuff inside. I think they said "mini" because the headphone jack isn't like the big ones on old-time stereos, not because it's a small design flaw. Anyhow, sleep well!
Have you talked to artists? I have. A friend of mine got a record contract a few months ago. She's highly in favor of people swapping her music around. It gets her heard. She signed with an indie label, and they too are in favour of that.
If you're a small, independant musician, then the 'net is great, it gets your music out to people who would never hear about it otherwise. If you're a small record label, the same applies. You know who p2p sharing of copyrighted stuff hurts? The ones who don't benefit from the advertising -- the ones who are so heavily advertised that you already know about them. But guess what, These are the monstrously huge acts. These 'artists', including the pop band du jour, the current cute boy band, the mass-produced "edgy" rocker, etc. are not ones I have much sympathy for.
So yes, I've talked to an artist. A non-big-name, just-getting-started-in-the-bizz artist. She, and her company, are in favour of their songs getting out over the Internet, even if they don't make money from it.
Suffer no injuries? I doubt that. The military really discourages people from admitting to any injuries, other than extremely serious ones. I know that after basic training my knees were shot, and it took months for them to heal.
Actually, you need to look at your electric bill again. You're billed in kilowatt-hours, not kilowatts/hour. Take a power measurement, multiply it by time, and you get an energy measurement. The electric company bills you for the number of Joules you use -- the amount of energy you use, just in different units. If they billed you in kilowatts/hour, they'd be billing you for the rate of change of energy usage -- not terribly useful, right?
A 100 Watt lightbulb, running for an hour, uses 100 Watt-hours of energy. Equivalent to 100*3600 or 360,000 Joules.
Thanks for playing though! For next time, remember the old saying "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt".
A Watt is a unit of power, not of energy. Saying a server uses 300 Watts of power per second is like saying a car drives at "300 miles per hour per second!"
Besides, the steady-state power a typical computer uses is far less than 300 Watts, even the new P4 beasts. The reason the supplies are rated as high as they are is to provide the peak power required -- you know, if your CD drive, hard drive, graphics card, and CPU are all drawing lots of power at the same time. If you have an MP3 server on the network, don't attach a monitor to it (and don't have some silly 3d screensaver going while the monitor isn't even attached) and don't use the cd or hard drives in unusual ways, your steady-state power usage is likely to be 100W or less. That's one bright incandescent lightbulb.
That's easy: very large spherical wheels on a very small spherical road-planet.
Re:How about the article itself?
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Argh. Not this again.
The wonderful appeal to the inferiority complex: "Look, there are a heck of alot of really smart people out there who can't even check their email. They make more money than you, get laid more often than you, and are probably happier than you."
These days, if someone remotely involved with computers can't figure out how to check their email, then they probably are stupid.
As for making money, or getting laid. Sure. There are bound to be people who are better or worse off than the average geek. But so what? Do you really want to be the rich guy who wrote spam software, who can't tell anybody what he did because it's so unethical? Geeks involved in the spam business probably make better cash than your average Linux enthusiast. What about getting laid? Sure, if you spend hours studying NLP you might be able to trick or coerce a girl into sleeping with you. Wow. Aren't you great. But really, sex is also the cause of a lot of problems: pregnancy, STDs, and an emotional rollercoaster. Wouldn't you rather be able to feel good about yourself, and have your partner feel good about you?
The fact is, aside from perhaps being introverted, geeky, and male, the average Slashdot reader has something else in common: morals. Look how often freedom is mentioned here. Look at how the argument agains Microsoft is about their unfair actions. There's a cost for everything. If I cared only about money, I'd be making more than I am now, but many of my friends would lose respect for me. If I wanted to get laid more, I could treat girls like they were disposable, but I'd lose respect of my friends for that too. No thanks, I'm pretty happy with who I am.
A few years ago I bought a game. I went to install it and it asked me for the CD key. I looked on the jewel case and in the little box where the CD key was supposed to be printed there was nothing. I'm 99% sure this was a fully legal game. The manuals, discs, and box all looked fully authentic. I think they just had a printing error.
So I called up the game company's support line, and after an hour on hold, someone came online and I explained my problem. I asked if I could be sent a working CD key. Not quite. The only solution they were willing to accept was that I mail them my box, CD and jewel case. They would verify that the copy was legal and that it didn't include the CD key, and then they'd send it back. The estimated time for this process? 6 to 8 weeks. The one paying for the shipping? Me.
Returning the game wasn't an option, since I had already opened the shrinkwrap, so I was stuck.
Luckily, I was able to look online, find a crack, and play the game that night.
Lots of people have argued that publishers benefit from the 'warez' scene. It gets the game known, and if it's good enough, a lot of people will go out and buy it for the missing things -- online play, full movies, etc. I'd also argue that it lets them get away with otherwise fatal mistakes. When they use a copy protection scheme that's broken, people just turn to the online cracks.
I noticed that you said things like "our robot warriors", so I assume that you think it will be your country that will develop these creatures.
So why would your country down a bloodthirsty dictator? Unless there was something to gain, why bother? The only reason I can think of would be to install a bloodthirsty dictator who was more willing to exploit his country's people and other resources for your country. Why create a democracy when a democracy might decide to not treat your country favourably. This is the way the US has operated for decades, overthrowing democracies to install more friendly dictators.
Uh... or in Los Angeles... It's in a desert, you know. The fact you can turn on the tap and have water there is only because they pump it in from hundreds of miles away.
Did you know that the US is considering buying water from Canada in large quantities because parts don't have enough?
Gas is short for gasoline. Petrol is short for petroleum. You don't put
petroleum in a car, otherwise really bad things happen.
Before cars, there were both boots and trunks.
Trunks were big cases used for storing things, like clothing. Boots were the things you put your feet inside. Which one of those two better describes how the storage area in your car is used?
Hood is the only one that doesn't have a strong case for it. Both hoods and bonnets are typically head coverings. Neither makes much sense when it comes to describing part of a car, but neither is better than the other.
Funny that. I just read an article in Game Developer magazine about just how hard it was to port a mouse-and-keyboard game to a console. They talked about how much time it took to tweak the controls so they still felt responsive, but allowed someone to aim with precision. They also had to do all kinds of things that would never be acceptable on a PC: dumbing down the AI so the targets were easier to hit, providing default auto-aim so that you hit what you shot at, etc.
If FPS games "feel" good on a console, thank the people who did a good job of getting the same feeling with a vastly inferior controller. The simple fact is, having a mouse for aiming is much, much better than a thumbstick. It has far higher resolution, and other useful properties too, like not auto-centering.
On a PC I have a stick-type joystick for flying games, a gamepad for sports games, and a mouse and keyboard for everything else. On my consoles, I just have gamepads. Are modern gamepads good? Of course, but they're still from the ideal interface to FPS or RTS games. Try to spin 180 degrees and aim precisely at something above eye level in a console FPS. It isn't easy. With a mouse it's just a matter of slipping it over and up, and stopping your hand's motion when you're lined up right.
If you're really into PC FPS games, you'll probably feel handcuffed by the controller. Does this mean that you can't have fun playing FPS games on a console? No. Just admit that the interface is inferior, accept it, and enjoy.
Then you'll love what is, for me, one of the killer features of KDE 3.2: prevention of focus stealing.
Go to "Desktop", "Window Behaviour", "Advanced" and at the bottom there's an option "Focus stealing prevention level". I've set mine to 'high' and I love it. Never again will a popup in another application, window, or desktop mess with what I'm typing. This is especially important for me because I have to deal with a flaky mail server all the time, and at least once while I was typing this short message, it popped up a window saying "... the server may have gone down or there may be a network problem".
Now I have a beef with the Mozilla/Thunderbird developers for such a stupid UI and way of dealing with transient network issues, but that's another topic.
The other benefit of Firewire is that it doesn't require a root node. You can, in theory, plug a Firewire camera into a Firewire VCR with no computer involved. USB is centered around a computer containing a root node.
Ugh. I think the first one is far better. I have a first generation one, but a friend has both. He tells me that when he reaches for it it is far too easy to bump the buttons by accident. Add to that the fact that I can control the main buttons on mine through a jacket pocket, and you have another deficiency of the second one.
When I drop a ball, it goes down. Gravity is a fact. Do you dispute this?
Theory A says that there are "gravitons" that are exchanged between particles that cause them to move together. Theory B says that it's the work of elves. Theory C says that it's actually an unbalanced nuclear charge. These are all theories about why the ball falls when I drop it.
Before Darwin, evolution had been observed, it just hadn't been explained. Darwin simply had a theory about what caused the observed fact.
My grade 1 teacher is probably turning over in her grave fast enough to power a small town, but it's true. My cursive writing got so bad that I stopped using it. I then switched to printing... that works, but I can barely read it. Based on my writing alone, you'd think that I'd be some kind of doctor -- no, a master brain surgeon, but alas, I'm only a computer geek.
I would imagine a tablet PC would be great for me because I could type things that I'd otherwise be illegibly scrawling, but when it came to diagrams or other things that are difficult to type, I could simply draw them onscreen. In school, I did a degree in Engineering Physics. Physics classes are something that would be very difficult if not impossible to take notes in without the option to draw. There are so many diagrams, equations, and funky symbols that would be really tough to simply type in. With a tablet, I imagine it could actually work...
Slashdot Mirror
Of course not! I mean, if the bible says it's 400 forearms(?) long and 150 forearms wide then it must be Noah's Ark and therefore God exists.
Or not.
What you're saying is equivalent to "In the Matrix there was a guy named 'Agent Smith'. It turns out that there really is an 'Agent Smith' in the FBI, therefore the entire Matrix trilogy is true."
Sure, it would be unusual if there were a boat on top of a mountain. It would be even more unusual if the specs for the boat matched those for the ark in the bible. It would be even more unusual if there were animal carcases all around as well, and none of those species existed today. But even that would not be proof that it was Noah's Ark or that anything in the bible was true. If the alternatives are "It's an elaborate hoax", "Trickster aliens did it as a joke" or "The bible is factual", I think the least likely possibility is that the bible is factual.
But it is the case! It's the way the headphone-jack part of the case connects to the rest of the stuff inside. I think they said "mini" because the headphone jack isn't like the big ones on old-time stereos, not because it's a small design flaw. Anyhow, sleep well!
Have you talked to artists? I have. A friend of mine got a record contract a few months ago. She's highly in favor of people swapping her music around. It gets her heard. She signed with an indie label, and they too are in favour of that.
If you're a small, independant musician, then the 'net is great, it gets your music out to people who would never hear about it otherwise. If you're a small record label, the same applies. You know who p2p sharing of copyrighted stuff hurts? The ones who don't benefit from the advertising -- the ones who are so heavily advertised that you already know about them. But guess what, These are the monstrously huge acts. These 'artists', including the pop band du jour, the current cute boy band, the mass-produced "edgy" rocker, etc. are not ones I have much sympathy for.
So yes, I've talked to an artist. A non-big-name, just-getting-started-in-the-bizz artist. She, and her company, are in favour of their songs getting out over the Internet, even if they don't make money from it.
Suffer no injuries? I doubt that. The military really discourages people from admitting to any injuries, other than extremely serious ones. I know that after basic training my knees were shot, and it took months for them to heal.
Actually, you need to look at your electric bill again. You're billed in kilowatt-hours, not kilowatts/hour. Take a power measurement, multiply it by time, and you get an energy measurement. The electric company bills you for the number of Joules you use -- the amount of energy you use, just in different units. If they billed you in kilowatts/hour, they'd be billing you for the rate of change of energy usage -- not terribly useful, right?
A 100 Watt lightbulb, running for an hour, uses 100 Watt-hours of energy. Equivalent to 100*3600 or 360,000 Joules.
Thanks for playing though! For next time, remember the old saying "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt".
A Watt is a unit of power, not of energy. Saying a server uses 300 Watts of power per second is like saying a car drives at "300 miles per hour per second!"
Besides, the steady-state power a typical computer uses is far less than 300 Watts, even the new P4 beasts. The reason the supplies are rated as high as they are is to provide the peak power required -- you know, if your CD drive, hard drive, graphics card, and CPU are all drawing lots of power at the same time. If you have an MP3 server on the network, don't attach a monitor to it (and don't have some silly 3d screensaver going while the monitor isn't even attached) and don't use the cd or hard drives in unusual ways, your steady-state power usage is likely to be 100W or less. That's one bright incandescent lightbulb.
As of 2004-04-06T12:27-05:00
For those of you who can't see it, it appears to be a page with an asian looking girl smiling and hugging a white looking guy.
P.S. Happy Birthday April, whoever you are.
Um, how can a tricycle design (3 wheels) be common among recumbant bikes (bicycle = 2 wheels).
Sincerely, Lieutenant Nitpick
That's easy: very large spherical wheels on a very small spherical road-planet.
Argh. Not this again.
The wonderful appeal to the inferiority complex: "Look, there are a heck of alot of really smart people out there who can't even check their email. They make more money than you, get laid more often than you, and are probably happier than you."
These days, if someone remotely involved with computers can't figure out how to check their email, then they probably are stupid.
As for making money, or getting laid. Sure. There are bound to be people who are better or worse off than the average geek. But so what? Do you really want to be the rich guy who wrote spam software, who can't tell anybody what he did because it's so unethical? Geeks involved in the spam business probably make better cash than your average Linux enthusiast. What about getting laid? Sure, if you spend hours studying NLP you might be able to trick or coerce a girl into sleeping with you. Wow. Aren't you great. But really, sex is also the cause of a lot of problems: pregnancy, STDs, and an emotional rollercoaster. Wouldn't you rather be able to feel good about yourself, and have your partner feel good about you?
The fact is, aside from perhaps being introverted, geeky, and male, the average Slashdot reader has something else in common: morals. Look how often freedom is mentioned here. Look at how the argument agains Microsoft is about their unfair actions. There's a cost for everything. If I cared only about money, I'd be making more than I am now, but many of my friends would lose respect for me. If I wanted to get laid more, I could treat girls like they were disposable, but I'd lose respect of my friends for that too. No thanks, I'm pretty happy with who I am.
Um... your eyes don't refresh at 160Hz either...
Linking a story about nukulur satellites to Dumbya? How could you even try to do that?
I thought it was Bush who couldn't pronounce it properly. Homer, Bush... no big surprise I confused them I guess.
A few years ago I bought a game. I went to install it and it asked me for the CD key. I looked on the jewel case and in the little box where the CD key was supposed to be printed there was nothing. I'm 99% sure this was a fully legal game. The manuals, discs, and box all looked fully authentic. I think they just had a printing error.
So I called up the game company's support line, and after an hour on hold, someone came online and I explained my problem. I asked if I could be sent a working CD key. Not quite. The only solution they were willing to accept was that I mail them my box, CD and jewel case. They would verify that the copy was legal and that it didn't include the CD key, and then they'd send it back. The estimated time for this process? 6 to 8 weeks. The one paying for the shipping? Me.
Returning the game wasn't an option, since I had already opened the shrinkwrap, so I was stuck.
Luckily, I was able to look online, find a crack, and play the game that night.
Lots of people have argued that publishers benefit from the 'warez' scene. It gets the game known, and if it's good enough, a lot of people will go out and buy it for the missing things -- online play, full movies, etc. I'd also argue that it lets them get away with otherwise fatal mistakes. When they use a copy protection scheme that's broken, people just turn to the online cracks.
Hmm... where's the "no, it's stupid" option?
I noticed that you said things like "our robot warriors", so I assume that you think it will be your country that will develop these creatures.
So why would your country down a bloodthirsty dictator? Unless there was something to gain, why bother? The only reason I can think of would be to install a bloodthirsty dictator who was more willing to exploit his country's people and other resources for your country. Why create a democracy when a democracy might decide to not treat your country favourably. This is the way the US has operated for decades, overthrowing democracies to install more friendly dictators.
Uh... or in Los Angeles... It's in a desert, you know. The fact you can turn on the tap and have water there is only because they pump it in from hundreds of miles away.
Did you know that the US is considering buying water from Canada in large quantities because parts don't have enough?
Way offtopic now, but "booting a computer" comes from "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". As in, helping yourself up without help from others.
And if the trunk was indeed called a "boot box", that would make sense, or at least as much as "trunk" or "glove box". But just "boot"??
Gas is short for gasoline. Petrol is short for petroleum. You don't put petroleum in a car, otherwise really bad things happen.
Before cars, there were both boots and trunks. Trunks were big cases used for storing things, like clothing. Boots were the things you put your feet inside. Which one of those two better describes how the storage area in your car is used?
Hood is the only one that doesn't have a strong case for it. Both hoods and bonnets are typically head coverings. Neither makes much sense when it comes to describing part of a car, but neither is better than the other.
Funny that. I just read an article in Game Developer magazine about just how hard it was to port a mouse-and-keyboard game to a console. They talked about how much time it took to tweak the controls so they still felt responsive, but allowed someone to aim with precision. They also had to do all kinds of things that would never be acceptable on a PC: dumbing down the AI so the targets were easier to hit, providing default auto-aim so that you hit what you shot at, etc.
If FPS games "feel" good on a console, thank the people who did a good job of getting the same feeling with a vastly inferior controller. The simple fact is, having a mouse for aiming is much, much better than a thumbstick. It has far higher resolution, and other useful properties too, like not auto-centering.
On a PC I have a stick-type joystick for flying games, a gamepad for sports games, and a mouse and keyboard for everything else. On my consoles, I just have gamepads. Are modern gamepads good? Of course, but they're still from the ideal interface to FPS or RTS games. Try to spin 180 degrees and aim precisely at something above eye level in a console FPS. It isn't easy. With a mouse it's just a matter of slipping it over and up, and stopping your hand's motion when you're lined up right.
If you're really into PC FPS games, you'll probably feel handcuffed by the controller. Does this mean that you can't have fun playing FPS games on a console? No. Just admit that the interface is inferior, accept it, and enjoy.
Then you'll love what is, for me, one of the killer features of KDE 3.2: prevention of focus stealing.
Go to "Desktop", "Window Behaviour", "Advanced" and at the bottom there's an option "Focus stealing prevention level". I've set mine to 'high' and I love it. Never again will a popup in another application, window, or desktop mess with what I'm typing. This is especially important for me because I have to deal with a flaky mail server all the time, and at least once while I was typing this short message, it popped up a window saying "... the server may have gone down or there may be a network problem".
Now I have a beef with the Mozilla/Thunderbird developers for such a stupid UI and way of dealing with transient network issues, but that's another topic.
The other benefit of Firewire is that it doesn't require a root node. You can, in theory, plug a Firewire camera into a Firewire VCR with no computer involved. USB is centered around a computer containing a root node.
Ugh. I think the first one is far better. I have a first generation one, but a friend has both. He tells me that when he reaches for it it is far too easy to bump the buttons by accident. Add to that the fact that I can control the main buttons on mine through a jacket pocket, and you have another deficiency of the second one.
Gravity.
When I drop a ball, it goes down. Gravity is a fact. Do you dispute this?
Theory A says that there are "gravitons" that are exchanged between particles that cause them to move together. Theory B says that it's the work of elves. Theory C says that it's actually an unbalanced nuclear charge. These are all theories about why the ball falls when I drop it.
Before Darwin, evolution had been observed, it just hadn't been explained. Darwin simply had a theory about what caused the observed fact.
My grade 1 teacher is probably turning over in her grave fast enough to power a small town, but it's true. My cursive writing got so bad that I stopped using it. I then switched to printing... that works, but I can barely read it. Based on my writing alone, you'd think that I'd be some kind of doctor -- no, a master brain surgeon, but alas, I'm only a computer geek.
I would imagine a tablet PC would be great for me because I could type things that I'd otherwise be illegibly scrawling, but when it came to diagrams or other things that are difficult to type, I could simply draw them onscreen. In school, I did a degree in Engineering Physics. Physics classes are something that would be very difficult if not impossible to take notes in without the option to draw. There are so many diagrams, equations, and funky symbols that would be really tough to simply type in. With a tablet, I imagine it could actually work...