It's a service, if you don't like it either don't
get it or put your tinfoil hat on the phone!
Some of us - Even adults for a good many years now - Believe
that kids have some right to privacy. Personal
experience demonstrated to me, at least, that the
more controlling someone's parents acted, the worse that
person turned out. You can let them know that they can
always turn to you for help, but you can't actually do
their thinking for them.
Therefore, you can either have them learn to think while
still safely under your wing, or you can have them turn
into human Spuds McKenzie impersonators their first year
of college. You get to choose the "when", not the "if".
I for one would probably use this, at least a little.
Then you, for one, will someday understand the meaning of
"false sense of security", when your merry little tracking
device tells you Jimmy hasn't left the neighborhood, when
he actually left the phone with a friend and has gone to a
rave in another state.
Also useful in emergencies of course.
Gee, if only Jimmy hadn't left his phone with a friend,
he could call when an emergency arises. Hope
he makes the best of "ass, grass, or ass", eh?
Basically, with DXM alone you'll usually throw up before you
can overdose.
Really depends on the form. The classic (still available?) Drixoral
Cough caps (removed from the capsule) very rarely cause more than
"nuissance" level nausea. Liquid couch syrups, OTOH, usualy have a base
of polyethylene glycol, which while considered "inert", can cause
nausea in large quantities. Additionally, you'll see guaifenesin as the single
most common active ingredient after dextromethorphan, and it acts
as a moderately strong emetic starting at just 10-20x the recommended dose.
For the record, DXM is a pretty tame drug as well
"Tame"? I'd hate to see what you consider "hard"!
A 4th plateau DXM-only trip compares in intensity (if in a totally
different way) to a 1.5mg+ LSD trip. Most people can't even
move at that point, chilling in their own heads (yet
conscious and vaguely responsive) in a dissasociative haze.
Or so I've heard. Stay in school, obey the law and Praise Jesus,
son.
Hmm, I'll take "systems that don't support some form of game storage
that non-EEs can readily make use of" for $1000, Alex.
Although the fact that people write "new" homebrew NES games may count as an
intellectual curiosity, almost nobody runs them on an actual NES.
"Because we are the only dedicated Homebrew Network on the web covering just
about all scenes"? STFU and GTFO, you suck.
Wow, bitter much? Which emu group do you belong to?
I'll grant that the FP link pretty much sucked, giving less info than a
quick read through of any given system-specific page on Zophar's; but
for a very high-level overview of systems actually running homebrew games
today, it does a passable job.
Because, as the parent post pointed out, the problem of how to describe
the measurement of a varying quantity does not actually pose a problem.
But with different usage-patterns you *will* get consinstant differences.
I agree the "hitting E" example seems a bit odd, but I would guess the parent
just needs a computer science course badly.;-)
Instead, do the same with a few typical real-world usage patterns (arranged
into a repeatable suite). Then divide the performance value by the watts
value, and you have a ballpark measure of performance-per-watt. Repeat the
test a few hundred times, and you can get the mean and standard deviation.
Now, your objection seems to center on the idea that not everyone will
use a computer with a similar usage pattern. I grant that as true,
almost trivially. But if you want a one-number rating, you need to
accept some averaging.
Personally, as someone who writes his own CPU heavy code, I might only
care about how efficiently it can process an inner loop of
"movq, psllq, pxor, pand, paddd, movq, psrlq, pxor, pand, paddd"
(a real example from a program I toyed with last year, which probably
single-handedly accounted for over half of my main PC's CPU time for
several months). But even having a highly unusual usage pattern,
I still get numbers in the same ballpark as published benchmarks. Why?
Because chipwide power consumption depends far more on architectural
considerations than it does on individual instruction-with-context
consumption.
Dropping to 90nm SOI gave AMD a huge leap over Intel when
they introduced the Winchester core Athlon 64s - Then an additional
boost with the "dual stress liner" Venice core. And now Intel has
come back with the 25W Core Duo (The M, Yonah's predecessor, did better
than the Athlon 64s, but cost an arm and a leg), which seems poised to
take the crown of MIPS-per-watt for a while. And how did it do this?
By further architectural changes such as the drop to 65nm and reduction
in the number of FPU pipelines. So although it might have poor FP
performance, the specific instruction mix won't matter as much as
overall "FP-heavy"ness - And then, similarly FP-heavy apps will get
similar MFLOPS-per-watt.
If you intentionally sabotage your employers offshoring efforts
you could acutally expose your self to a lawsuit.
For what? If you give glaringly dangerous instructions, sure, but
assuming you use just a bit of tact (a few well-chosen omissions, just
a dash of misleading info, etc), it would take a herculean effort to
prove deliberate sabotage rather than merely incompetance.
Basically your options depend on:
1) What you can get away with.
2) How much of the job your trainees already understand.
3) How well your trainees speak English (Hey, not my fault I speak in all four-syllable words!)
1. Your local labor laws.
"At-will". End of story.
2. What your empoyment contract states.
Contract? This story deals with telemarketers and low-level techs,
not executives.
3. How much backbone your union/labor association that is to say
if people in your line of work even have one these days.
Unions? In IT? Funny guy. Although we need a strong IT union,
the existing ones have nicely demonstrated themselves as nothing more
than corrupt extortion rackets over the past 20-30 years, stealing
from both sides and doing little to nothing to actually protect
their members.
When one's employer makes it clear they don't want you anymore for not
doing the job, find a new career. When one's employer makes it clear
they don't want you anymore, they chose to make it personal,
and you should respond accordingly.
Recently ultra-thin (less than 1mm) aerogel carbon supercapacitors were released
Not saying they don't make great dielectrics in a "normal" capacitor. But aerogels have
bubbles on the order of half to a few microns wide - Or up to two thousand interfaces per
millimeter.
Truely nanoscale materials have the same size difference in the opposite direction - You
have a thousand nanometers to one micron. So assuming this fairly cool new idea doesn't use
"nano" as a mere buzzword, you couldn't use an aerogel as the dielectric any more than you
can use a full-scale Ford Exploder on a slot-car track.
Probably AeroGel It's 99.8% air and IIRC it's one of
the best insulator materials we have available today.
Probably not, since the physical properties of aerogel only
exist on a macroscopic scale.
While undeniably very cool stuff, it amounts to nothing more
than an extremely efficient way to pack a vast number of
air/glass interfaces into a small space.
A slap on the wrist? For what??? Daring to
not break the law?
Get some perspective here, people! Rockstar did
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
And even if you give two squirts of a rat's ass about
what the goddamned Christian Wrong have to say on the
matter - This "content" didn't even exist in the
game, as released - It took out-of-game action on the
part of the player to make the scene accessible.
Time to get the FCC back to just spectrum allocation
rather than blatant censorship; the FTC back to protecting
consumers from exploding cellphones rather than blatant
censorship; And to burn the PTC and Jackoff Thompson at the
motherfucking stake!
And yes, I used some four-letter words above - The fact that
we consider censorship even remotely acceptible, even
if only with a token punishment, seriously pushes a few of
my buttons. We don't need to debate the content, or the ease
of accessing it, or the fines, or the technical authority to
impose such fines. We need to get each and every last one
of these worthless trips who would tell us what we can and
can't see/say/read/write/hear/think/feel up against
the wall - while we need to do it while we still have
the capacity to have such thoughts!
No. The contract (that both parties agreed to) states the governing jurisdiction.
Thus the problem here...
Norway has basically said that a Norwegian company selling to Norwegians can't cherry-pick
a jurisdiction outside Norway. Simple as that.
If Sun's Java license instead said "Any action related to this Agreement will be governed by
Saudi law and controlling Sharia law", would you still feel inclined to just accept that
their words make it so? Even though it would make you, (probably) a US citizen, downloading
a product in the US from a US company, subject to execution for using it to denounce Islam?
Incidentally, it's a bit sad that I get moderated down for stating trivially
correct legal principles. I think some people are in denial...
I agree - You'll notice that I responded to, rather than modded, your
post.
When a UK user downloads from allofmp3 then allofmp3 is operating
in the UK, and in breach of UK copyright law.
You probably have more familiarity with that issue than I do, but I
had the impression that the idea of "where does a download occur"
still remains very much up in the air. And, even if you pick one
end or the other, I wouldn't think that would settle the matter...
If you pick "at the server", then the sale seems no different than
someone travelling to Mexico to buy a suitcase full of prescription-in-the-US
painkillers - The buyer might not have broken Mexican law, but they would
break US law in the act of bringing the drugs back into the US.
If you pick "at the recipient", then I would extend the above situation to
a mail-order Mexican pharmacy, where again, the recipient rather than
the perfectly-legal-in-Mexico seller would have broken the law.
No doubt I miss some subtlety here (or, perhaps I just can't accept the
glaringly obvious but ethically reprehensible answer that "we have the
biggest stick, so US law applies).
But your assumption that a jurisdiction cannot make laws
applying to people in other countries is incorrect.
While you almost certainly have precedent on your side (our
current little mess in Iraq demonstrates that much), I
gave the Martian example to demonstrate the absurdidty of taking
that idea to an extreme - "Law" exists as nothing more than
a codified body of fiction describing how we should behave
toward one another. The right of one group to enforce their
ficitons on another (unwilling) group depends entirely
on the ability to force compliance on that second group.
We could not force the Martians to obey US copyright law,
as a simple practical matter - We can barely get unmanned scientific
missions there, much less wage war with any potential inhabitants.
Now, the Russians... We could probably force them into compliance
with US laws they don't feel inclined to obey, but the attempt might
not leave any sort of civilization to which the idea of copyright
has meaning.
Or to put it yet another way - I can make a "house rule" that
BobTheLawyer has to wear pink suspenders. You, however, have
absolutely no obligation to comply with that rule.
Does the drive automatically know and manage which
files to put into flash(i.e. like a smart cache), or
is this down to the OS to explicitly add/delete files
in the flash?
From the links (which don't give much detail), it sounds
like the drive "looks" like a normal HDD to the machine.
It just happens to have a nonvolatile cache built in, which
means it can start serving files even before it spins up
(which most likely explains the faster booting and restoring
from hibernation); and for certain types of annoying "whack
the disc twice per second" activity that Windows seems so
very fond of doing, the drive doesn't need to spin up at
all (thus the huge power savings).
If its the drive, then that sucks because the drive would
need to know about the filesystems in use, and chances are
it would only support Microsoft filesystems.
Not necessarily, for the same reason having 16MB of RAM cache
on modern drives gives a pretty big performance boost - The
drive itself just caches sectors, rather than whole files.
Not only does it not need to "speak" NTFS that way, but if
you have a 100MB file of which only a handful of sectors
get used 99% of the time, it can just keep track of what actually
gets used. With a RAM cache, the big boost comes from not needing
to seek as often; with these hybrid drives, you get that same
perk along with not needing to spin up the drive so often.
Whatever the (murky) position in Russia may be, allofmp3 does plainly not have the right
to licence copyright to the BPI's artists in the UK.
Hypothetical for ya...
If underground Martians intercepted broadcasts of BPI-licensed music, and
have a thriving business of large-scale commercial distribution and
relicensing of that same music - Purely on Mars, of course - Have they
broken the law?
It seems to me the problem here involves jurisdiction rather than a
true boolean "legal or illegal". What AllOfMp3 does would
break UK copyright laws - If it happened in the UK. But AllOfMp3
does not operate in the UK (arguments about where a "download" actually
happens aside), and at least up until January 1st 2006, did not
violate Russian law.
IANAL. Feel free to make the standard snide comback of "it shows". But
it doesn't take a law degree to know that US law doesn't directly apply
in German, except where international treatiesharmonize the laws between
the two - And even then, "US" law doesn't apply, only the compatible
German law passed in compliance with the treaty.
However with unlockable content you still have new things to do even after you have
begun to exhaust the possibilities of the game play provided at the beginning.
Do you have any idea how many times I've beaten Metroid for the original NES?
SMB3? Contra and SuperContra? Hell, even classic "puzzle" games like Tetris or Puzzle
Bobble (does that actually have an "end"?), or a classic adventure/RPG like Zelda: Link
to the Past?
They still have replay value. I've probably put more time into the above-mentioned
handful (no, I don't actually have seven fingers, you insensitive clod) of games than I
spent doing homework in my entire life (and just to stave off the wisecracks, I graduated
from my university with honors, with multiple degrees).
So instead of buying a game that gives you 30 hours of fun you have bought
a game that gives you 50 hours of fun. I would call that a good thing.
No.
Instead of buying a game that gives you 50 hours of fun, you've found a
form of work that gives you a 30 hour advance, tells you your game "ended
poorly" or some such crap, and makes you work like a madman for the last 20 hours
(tediously repeating those 30 hours you might have enjoyed the first time
through)... And then what? You've found the hidden 40% of the game.
End of story, throw the game away.
Meanwhile... I think I'll load up Super Mario World in SNES9x and enjoy
another few hours playing a game that I've beaten countless
times already.
Seriously, HD DVD formats on a laptop are laughable. LCD displays
are limited in resolution, and for that matter, so are current
HDTV monitors/displays. Your HD DVD would look the same on a 17"
widescreen laptop as a non HD DVD, unless you're lucky.
Virtally all laptops now support at least 1280x1024 (which
allows 720p, or 1280x720), and many now come with 1920x1200
(allowing 1080p at 1920x1080).
Now, will that look good on a 17" display? Across a room, from the
TV stand to the couch - no. On your lap? It makes NTSC look like
NTSC did old 8mm home movies by comparison.
You'll most notice the difference in text, though. Although
plenty of dongles exist to let you use an old NTSC TV as your
monitor, any text thereupon needed at least a 40pt font for
the barest of legibility, and the flickering of any sharp
transitions (such as the edges of those huge letters) would
give you a headache after five minutes. On an HDTV (better
yet an HDTV-compatible LCD) you can read text literally as
easily as you can on a monitor of the same resolution.
None of this bullshit bingo that seems to be infesting
every cranny of IT - clear, plain language.
I largely agreed with you right up until that line...
You compain about IT playing "bullshit bingo", compared with
judges and financial guys?
IT may overnominalize, but (unlike law and accounting), we
tend not to completely redefine perfectly good words for our
own uses. Learning what a TCP/IP stack does takes some effort,
but once you know the phrase, you know the phrase.
By comparison, every time I get into an argument with a
law-geek and they play the "but that word doesn't mean the
same legally as it does in English" card, I just want to
serve up some serious hurting.
Now, I agree that judges and CFOs most likely understand the
apparent BS they speak fluently. But don't try to
complain about geek jargon as magically worse.
The Oxford American Dictionary definition of "ad hominem" is:
While I don't care to make this a "my dictionary vs your dictionary" discussion,
if you want to use a specifially Latin phrase, I think you have to accept its actual
translation as the definition. IMO.
(of an argument or reaction) arising from or appealing to the
emotions and not reason or logic.
You could describe almost half of all nonvalidating argument types under that
same definition (with most of the other half as variation on improper syllogisms).
This is a blatantly untrue, ad hominen attack on the Patriot Act.
Unless the USAPATRIOT act has somehow taken on a human avatar, you cannot
physically make an "ad hominem" attack against it.
Now you can make ad hominem attacks against its authors - Such
as "Don't trust him, he helped write the USAPATRIOT act!" or "Yo mamma so
stupid, she voted for the USAPATRIOT act!".
But you can't attack "against the man", against a document.
On a more serious note - Please, people, the USAPATRIOT act
has so many real flaws - You don't need to make
stuff up to properly ridicule it. Additionally - You don't get much
further from patriotism than the USAPATRIOT act. So do try to
refrain from referring to it by its "common" name, and write it
correctly, as a meaningless feel-good acronym.
When I telecommuted, I got up every morning, got dressed, and put in my
8 hours. That makes all the difference, having the personal
discipline to still "go to work", even if that means sitting in my own
living room at a laptop. Not to say that I didn't squeeze a little
more flexibility out of my time that I would in an office (can't easily
take a porn break while at the office), but at least 90% comparable to
non-telecommuting, I put in a standard 9-to-5.
Teamwork.
...Doesn't exist, at least not in the touchy-feely happy productivity
boosting cooperation sense in which most companies believe. Teamwork in IT
means spending as little time physically together as possible, coming
up with a solid API, and everyone goes off and implements their alloted
portion of it. Anything more intimate than that (like the farce they
call "paired programming") just pisses developers off and wastes multiple
people for each one-man job.
And when I do need to get together with my coworkers, I can phone or IM
them in less time than it would take me to walk down the insanely long hallway
around which all companies seem to design offices, to physically visit that coworker.
And even in the office, I get far, far more calls and IMs than
actual visitors. And, even in the off chance that we need a physical meeting,
I have no problem with the idea of coming into the office once a week to take
care of such business - that doesn't mean I need to stay there the other four
days of the work week to efficiently do my job.
how will you develop something like Teamspirit and good cooperation
"Team" has no "I" in it. Remember that. Let's keep it that way.
I go to work to do a job (which I happen to enjoy) and get paid. Period. I don't
go there to make friends (though I do have friends with whom I work), I don't
go there to win a game-called-commerce, I don't go there for the sake of getting
out of the house every day. I go there to get a paycheck. So spare me the
"yay us!" and "go team!" and "now fall backward and we'll catch you" team spirit
BS - Just leave me the hell alone and let me do the work you want done.
line between work and home
See point #1 - Personal discipline. If you have it, no problems here. If you
lack it, don't ask to telecommute.
it requires.NET. Thanks. I don't mind downloading and installing
30MB's of framework just to play with a Rubik's cube. Really, I don't.
I see you've gotten spanked as a troll... Unfortunate. Personally, I
don't suspect you of trolling, just stating a fact. However...
Whether you like it or not (and I say this as a.NET developer who
does not), since Visual Studio 2005 builds to.NET 2.0, just about
everything will use it within a year or two. Add to that Vista's
intended use of WinFX (basically just.NET 3) as the core API, and you
can pretty much kiss Win32 goodbye.
A pity, really, because.NET has truly abysmal performance. Who cares
about the size on disk - I care far more that it eats memory like
a kid with a box of tic-tacs. (Cue someone parroting that you can get 4GB
for about $250 nowadays, which I think you'll agree completely misses the
point).
Regardless, you would do yourself a favor to get used to.NET; Sooner
or later you will have no choice, so why deprive yourself of
cool toys that (unfortunately) use it now?
/.'s attitude of "It's okay to copy anything I want" is really, really getting tiring.
While I somewhat agree, you need to realize that (unlike most geek-oriented issues),
that attitude reflects what the majority of humans feel.
People do not, and did not ever, respect the concept of copyright as more than a good
idea in theory if not in implementation. But until very recently (historically
speaking), individuals didn't have the option of violating copyrights on any
significant scale, so the system remained basically intact.
Even prior to last 50 years, "piracy" still occurred (how many hand-painted
copies of the Mona Lisa exist? I recall reading a number in the thousands recently).
It just took much longer, and the resources necessary to pull it off on a
large scale almost guaranteed detection.
But from moment photocopiers gained widepread availability, college students have
photocopied textbooks. The introduction of the cassette tape also saw the introduction
of massive music sharing - likewise for the VCR. As soon as software-compatible PCs
appeared, everyone swapped software among friends. When CD burners appeared
on the scene, they just replaced the cassette tape, and likewise for DVD burners.
And when the internet made piracy ever so much easier, people flocked to using
it for exactly that purpose. When P2P made finding and downloading copyrighted content
as close to trivial as any user-initiated action can get, the P2P networks turned into
nothing short of massively distributed digital radio stations with the users as the
program directors.
So why do I write the above? For perspective. You say that in-your-face piracy as a form
of civil disobedience won't work for swaying minds - But no one's mind needs swaying.
Society has seen the idea of copyright, and rejected it outright whenever physically
possible.
We don't need to win mindshare buy-in - The media producers need to come
up with a model that allows them to make money while accepting that people will
copy their work regardless of the law.
And if P2P scares the RIAA, wait until the next step. Some wireless-enabled portable music
players already allow sharing songs actively, but it still takes too much effort to
consider more than a quirk. When (not if) that turns into a passive action, compatible with
devices just about everyone has (whether iPod-like players, or cell phones, or PDAs, or
wrist watches, or some new killer toy we haven't even imagined yet) - When everyone you
pass in rush-hour traffic, or on a busy sidewalk, or in a crowded mall, automatically sends
you their entire music library almost instantly and without the need for you to even
click "okay" - I think that really will mean the absolute death of anything
similar to our modern content-selling industries. And what I just described will
happen - Some portable music players already can do exactly that, they just need
faster transfer rates, more storage space, and most importantly, either ubiquity or
compatibility with other devices.
The RIAA and MPAA has until then to come up with a new trick. If they want to focus
their energy on litigation, or even on a laughable anti-piracy PR campaign - They may
as well close up shop today.
So when you see geeks saying "I will pirate it if I can, stick it to The Man!",
don't bother getting annoyed - Whether or not such people know their "real" motives,
they don't say anything new, or surprising, or even express an unpopular sentiment.
Instead, look at them as a symptom of a badly broken system, broken from the start
and finally approaching complete disintigration.
A web browser, I can see the use of (though currently
most non-text-only pages look like crap on tiny cellphone
screens, and even text-only doesn't look great). An email
client, sure. A terminal emulator (aka "telnet/ssh client"
for you whippersnappers) so I can connect to and manage
a remote web server (if absolutely necessary - see point 3
below), yuppers.
But an actual web server?
First, my phone has an okay battery just sitting idle, but in actual
use it dies within a few hours. Running a web server implies
basically continuous use, so the thing would end up always on a leash
to either a car or AC outlet.
Second, although I have pretty good cell coverage in my area, I do
still drop the occasional call. Do we really want to add a http error
code, "604: server drove into a tunnel"? (And yes, I do realize that
would probably come back as a 503... Just a weak joke).
Third - I would not want to use a phone's crude keypad to try to
maintain a web site. Even if I bought into the rest of the idea, I could
see myself realistically connecting to my phone remotely from a real PC
to do any updates or maintenance.
I just don't see the point. This smells like a solution in need of a
problem, IMO.
Now sir, you might not be a shill, but in my humble opinion, certainly a troll
Neither, actually - I simply don't "suffer fools gladly". I also
have a peeve regarding the trademarking of common or trivially-derived
prases. I further don't accept an apology as "real" when it comes as
a way to save face rather than as an expression of true regret.
Now, I do occasionally post very inflammatory comments as a
result of my opinions. If you want to mod me down, have a ball.
But I post how I really feel, and excepting a respondant demonstrating
a post of mine as factually incorrect, I stand by what I write.
and a near inarticulate one. And I say that despite the fact that
English is not my first language.
Heavy sarcasm doesn't translate well. Don't take it personally.
This was before Web 2.0 became such a popular term
Ah, I see the perfect sanity in that.
I wonder if the Slashdot admins will let me change my
handle to "NoTheory (580275) 2.0", as it would clearly
represent a radical (and trademarkable) departure from
any existing user's account here.
Or, better yet, I should rush out and trademark "Web 2.1"!
Thanks, you've just made me rich!
O'Reilly as an INSTUTION apologized
As an institition? WTF does that mean, exactly? Can I apologize
as a DIRIGIBLE for offending you with my previous post?
O'Reilly CITES Torvolds and others as examples of trademark holders who
also want to protect their trademarks.
You make it sound so tame - Guess what? That particular fallacy has
a formal name - "Tu quo que", or to use the more common English phrasing,
"But Billy did it, too, and his mom didn't ground him!".
TOR : I apologize to IT@Cork for the organizational failure that led
to them getting a legal letter rather than a simple email query or phone call.
Wow.
"Gee, buddy, sorry my butler let the dogs chew you a new one, but no
hard feelings, right? Hey, here's a twenty for ostomy bags - Let's
call it even, 'kay?"
Once you set the lawyers on someone, an "apology" doesn't cut it, Tim.
You AT LEAST owe him a beer. Quite possibly a hooker.
And requesting an apology in return? Poor form indeed!
"So, perhaps now that I've graciously extended a plastic olive branch,
you should apologize for trespassing on my carefully manicured lawn in the
first place, dontchathink?"
No, Tim, we don't. Rafferty drew attention to some asshole (ie, you)
TRADEMARKING yet another already-ubiquitous term. And you find that
a tad inconvenient? Not even remotely cool.
And then, trying to shift the blame for your arrogance to Linus and RMS?
You have GOT to mean that as a joke, man! Would you also try to blame
Mother Theresa for the spread of AIDS in Africa?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a service, if you don't like it either don't get it or put your tinfoil hat on the phone!
Some of us - Even adults for a good many years now - Believe that kids have some right to privacy. Personal experience demonstrated to me, at least, that the more controlling someone's parents acted, the worse that person turned out. You can let them know that they can always turn to you for help, but you can't actually do their thinking for them.
Therefore, you can either have them learn to think while still safely under your wing, or you can have them turn into human Spuds McKenzie impersonators their first year of college. You get to choose the "when", not the "if".
I for one would probably use this, at least a little.
Then you, for one, will someday understand the meaning of "false sense of security", when your merry little tracking device tells you Jimmy hasn't left the neighborhood, when he actually left the phone with a friend and has gone to a rave in another state.
Also useful in emergencies of course.
Gee, if only Jimmy hadn't left his phone with a friend, he could call when an emergency arises. Hope he makes the best of "ass, grass, or ass", eh?
ok... so it was a simple hack (the site is officially slashdotted so I can't see what he did exactly) - give him a break :)
Not having seen the page, you missed just how simple of a "hack" he did.
He plugged...
A 12cm DC fan...
Into...
A DC power supply.
Nothing more. End of hack. Still think we should cut the FP poster some slack on this one?
Basically, with DXM alone you'll usually throw up before you can overdose.
Really depends on the form. The classic (still available?) Drixoral Cough caps (removed from the capsule) very rarely cause more than "nuissance" level nausea. Liquid couch syrups, OTOH, usualy have a base of polyethylene glycol, which while considered "inert", can cause nausea in large quantities. Additionally, you'll see guaifenesin as the single most common active ingredient after dextromethorphan, and it acts as a moderately strong emetic starting at just 10-20x the recommended dose.
For the record, DXM is a pretty tame drug as well
"Tame"? I'd hate to see what you consider "hard"!
A 4th plateau DXM-only trip compares in intensity (if in a totally different way) to a 1.5mg+ LSD trip. Most people can't even move at that point, chilling in their own heads (yet conscious and vaguely responsive) in a dissasociative haze.
Or so I've heard. Stay in school, obey the law and Praise Jesus, son.
What's missing from the forum thread?
Hmm, I'll take "systems that don't support some form of game storage that non-EEs can readily make use of" for $1000, Alex.
Although the fact that people write "new" homebrew NES games may count as an intellectual curiosity, almost nobody runs them on an actual NES.
"Because we are the only dedicated Homebrew Network on the web covering just about all scenes"? STFU and GTFO, you suck.
Wow, bitter much? Which emu group do you belong to?
I'll grant that the FP link pretty much sucked, giving less info than a quick read through of any given system-specific page on Zophar's; but for a very high-level overview of systems actually running homebrew games today, it does a passable job.
Why?
;-)
Because, as the parent post pointed out, the problem of how to describe the measurement of a varying quantity does not actually pose a problem.
But with different usage-patterns you *will* get consinstant differences.
I agree the "hitting E" example seems a bit odd, but I would guess the parent just needs a computer science course badly.
Instead, do the same with a few typical real-world usage patterns (arranged into a repeatable suite). Then divide the performance value by the watts value, and you have a ballpark measure of performance-per-watt. Repeat the test a few hundred times, and you can get the mean and standard deviation.
Now, your objection seems to center on the idea that not everyone will use a computer with a similar usage pattern. I grant that as true, almost trivially. But if you want a one-number rating, you need to accept some averaging.
Personally, as someone who writes his own CPU heavy code, I might only care about how efficiently it can process an inner loop of "movq, psllq, pxor, pand, paddd, movq, psrlq, pxor, pand, paddd" (a real example from a program I toyed with last year, which probably single-handedly accounted for over half of my main PC's CPU time for several months). But even having a highly unusual usage pattern, I still get numbers in the same ballpark as published benchmarks. Why? Because chipwide power consumption depends far more on architectural considerations than it does on individual instruction-with-context consumption.
Dropping to 90nm SOI gave AMD a huge leap over Intel when they introduced the Winchester core Athlon 64s - Then an additional boost with the "dual stress liner" Venice core. And now Intel has come back with the 25W Core Duo (The M, Yonah's predecessor, did better than the Athlon 64s, but cost an arm and a leg), which seems poised to take the crown of MIPS-per-watt for a while. And how did it do this? By further architectural changes such as the drop to 65nm and reduction in the number of FPU pipelines. So although it might have poor FP performance, the specific instruction mix won't matter as much as overall "FP-heavy"ness - And then, similarly FP-heavy apps will get similar MFLOPS-per-watt.
If you intentionally sabotage your employers offshoring efforts you could acutally expose your self to a lawsuit.
For what? If you give glaringly dangerous instructions, sure, but assuming you use just a bit of tact (a few well-chosen omissions, just a dash of misleading info, etc), it would take a herculean effort to prove deliberate sabotage rather than merely incompetance.
Basically your options depend on:
1) What you can get away with.
2) How much of the job your trainees already understand.
3) How well your trainees speak English (Hey, not my fault I speak in all four-syllable words!)
1. Your local labor laws.
"At-will". End of story.
2. What your empoyment contract states.
Contract? This story deals with telemarketers and low-level techs, not executives.
3. How much backbone your union/labor association that is to say if people in your line of work even have one these days.
Unions? In IT? Funny guy. Although we need a strong IT union, the existing ones have nicely demonstrated themselves as nothing more than corrupt extortion rackets over the past 20-30 years, stealing from both sides and doing little to nothing to actually protect their members.
When one's employer makes it clear they don't want you anymore for not doing the job, find a new career. When one's employer makes it clear they don't want you anymore, they chose to make it personal, and you should respond accordingly.
Recently ultra-thin (less than 1mm) aerogel carbon supercapacitors were released
Not saying they don't make great dielectrics in a "normal" capacitor. But aerogels have bubbles on the order of half to a few microns wide - Or up to two thousand interfaces per millimeter.
Truely nanoscale materials have the same size difference in the opposite direction - You have a thousand nanometers to one micron. So assuming this fairly cool new idea doesn't use "nano" as a mere buzzword, you couldn't use an aerogel as the dielectric any more than you can use a full-scale Ford Exploder on a slot-car track.
Probably AeroGel It's 99.8% air and IIRC it's one of the best insulator materials we have available today.
Probably not, since the physical properties of aerogel only exist on a macroscopic scale.
While undeniably very cool stuff, it amounts to nothing more than an extremely efficient way to pack a vast number of air/glass interfaces into a small space.
...what a total slap on the wrist.
A slap on the wrist? For what??? Daring to not break the law?
Get some perspective here, people! Rockstar did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
And even if you give two squirts of a rat's ass about what the goddamned Christian Wrong have to say on the matter - This "content" didn't even exist in the game, as released - It took out-of-game action on the part of the player to make the scene accessible.
Time to get the FCC back to just spectrum allocation rather than blatant censorship; the FTC back to protecting consumers from exploding cellphones rather than blatant censorship; And to burn the PTC and Jackoff Thompson at the motherfucking stake!
And yes, I used some four-letter words above - The fact that we consider censorship even remotely acceptible, even if only with a token punishment, seriously pushes a few of my buttons. We don't need to debate the content, or the ease of accessing it, or the fines, or the technical authority to impose such fines. We need to get each and every last one of these worthless trips who would tell us what we can and can't see/say/read/write/hear/think/feel up against the wall - while we need to do it while we still have the capacity to have such thoughts!
No. The contract (that both parties agreed to) states the governing jurisdiction.
Thus the problem here...
Norway has basically said that a Norwegian company selling to Norwegians can't cherry-pick a jurisdiction outside Norway. Simple as that.
If Sun's Java license instead said "Any action related to this Agreement will be governed by Saudi law and controlling Sharia law", would you still feel inclined to just accept that their words make it so? Even though it would make you, (probably) a US citizen, downloading a product in the US from a US company, subject to execution for using it to denounce Islam?
Incidentally, it's a bit sad that I get moderated down for stating trivially correct legal principles. I think some people are in denial...
I agree - You'll notice that I responded to, rather than modded, your post.
When a UK user downloads from allofmp3 then allofmp3 is operating in the UK, and in breach of UK copyright law.
You probably have more familiarity with that issue than I do, but I had the impression that the idea of "where does a download occur" still remains very much up in the air. And, even if you pick one end or the other, I wouldn't think that would settle the matter...
If you pick "at the server", then the sale seems no different than someone travelling to Mexico to buy a suitcase full of prescription-in-the-US painkillers - The buyer might not have broken Mexican law, but they would break US law in the act of bringing the drugs back into the US.
If you pick "at the recipient", then I would extend the above situation to a mail-order Mexican pharmacy, where again, the recipient rather than the perfectly-legal-in-Mexico seller would have broken the law.
No doubt I miss some subtlety here (or, perhaps I just can't accept the glaringly obvious but ethically reprehensible answer that "we have the biggest stick, so US law applies).
But your assumption that a jurisdiction cannot make laws applying to people in other countries is incorrect.
While you almost certainly have precedent on your side (our current little mess in Iraq demonstrates that much), I gave the Martian example to demonstrate the absurdidty of taking that idea to an extreme - "Law" exists as nothing more than a codified body of fiction describing how we should behave toward one another. The right of one group to enforce their ficitons on another (unwilling) group depends entirely on the ability to force compliance on that second group.
We could not force the Martians to obey US copyright law, as a simple practical matter - We can barely get unmanned scientific missions there, much less wage war with any potential inhabitants. Now, the Russians... We could probably force them into compliance with US laws they don't feel inclined to obey, but the attempt might not leave any sort of civilization to which the idea of copyright has meaning.
Or to put it yet another way - I can make a "house rule" that BobTheLawyer has to wear pink suspenders. You, however, have absolutely no obligation to comply with that rule.
Does the drive automatically know and manage which files to put into flash(i.e. like a smart cache), or is this down to the OS to explicitly add/delete files in the flash?
From the links (which don't give much detail), it sounds like the drive "looks" like a normal HDD to the machine. It just happens to have a nonvolatile cache built in, which means it can start serving files even before it spins up (which most likely explains the faster booting and restoring from hibernation); and for certain types of annoying "whack the disc twice per second" activity that Windows seems so very fond of doing, the drive doesn't need to spin up at all (thus the huge power savings).
If its the drive, then that sucks because the drive would need to know about the filesystems in use, and chances are it would only support Microsoft filesystems.
Not necessarily, for the same reason having 16MB of RAM cache on modern drives gives a pretty big performance boost - The drive itself just caches sectors, rather than whole files. Not only does it not need to "speak" NTFS that way, but if you have a 100MB file of which only a handful of sectors get used 99% of the time, it can just keep track of what actually gets used. With a RAM cache, the big boost comes from not needing to seek as often; with these hybrid drives, you get that same perk along with not needing to spin up the drive so often.
Trust me, I'm a lawyer.
Great tagline!
Whatever the (murky) position in Russia may be, allofmp3 does plainly not have the right to licence copyright to the BPI's artists in the UK.
Hypothetical for ya...
If underground Martians intercepted broadcasts of BPI-licensed music, and have a thriving business of large-scale commercial distribution and relicensing of that same music - Purely on Mars, of course - Have they broken the law?
It seems to me the problem here involves jurisdiction rather than a true boolean "legal or illegal". What AllOfMp3 does would break UK copyright laws - If it happened in the UK. But AllOfMp3 does not operate in the UK (arguments about where a "download" actually happens aside), and at least up until January 1st 2006, did not violate Russian law.
IANAL. Feel free to make the standard snide comback of "it shows". But it doesn't take a law degree to know that US law doesn't directly apply in German, except where international treatiesharmonize the laws between the two - And even then, "US" law doesn't apply, only the compatible German law passed in compliance with the treaty.
However with unlockable content you still have new things to do even after you have begun to exhaust the possibilities of the game play provided at the beginning.
Do you have any idea how many times I've beaten Metroid for the original NES? SMB3? Contra and SuperContra? Hell, even classic "puzzle" games like Tetris or Puzzle Bobble (does that actually have an "end"?), or a classic adventure/RPG like Zelda: Link to the Past?
They still have replay value. I've probably put more time into the above-mentioned handful (no, I don't actually have seven fingers, you insensitive clod) of games than I spent doing homework in my entire life (and just to stave off the wisecracks, I graduated from my university with honors, with multiple degrees).
So instead of buying a game that gives you 30 hours of fun you have bought a game that gives you 50 hours of fun. I would call that a good thing.
No.
Instead of buying a game that gives you 50 hours of fun, you've found a form of work that gives you a 30 hour advance, tells you your game "ended poorly" or some such crap, and makes you work like a madman for the last 20 hours (tediously repeating those 30 hours you might have enjoyed the first time through)... And then what? You've found the hidden 40% of the game. End of story, throw the game away.
Meanwhile... I think I'll load up Super Mario World in SNES9x and enjoy another few hours playing a game that I've beaten countless times already.
Seriously, HD DVD formats on a laptop are laughable. LCD displays are limited in resolution, and for that matter, so are current HDTV monitors/displays. Your HD DVD would look the same on a 17" widescreen laptop as a non HD DVD, unless you're lucky.
Virtally all laptops now support at least 1280x1024 (which allows 720p, or 1280x720), and many now come with 1920x1200 (allowing 1080p at 1920x1080).
Now, will that look good on a 17" display? Across a room, from the TV stand to the couch - no. On your lap? It makes NTSC look like NTSC did old 8mm home movies by comparison.
You'll most notice the difference in text, though. Although plenty of dongles exist to let you use an old NTSC TV as your monitor, any text thereupon needed at least a 40pt font for the barest of legibility, and the flickering of any sharp transitions (such as the edges of those huge letters) would give you a headache after five minutes. On an HDTV (better yet an HDTV-compatible LCD) you can read text literally as easily as you can on a monitor of the same resolution.
None of this bullshit bingo that seems to be infesting every cranny of IT - clear, plain language.
I largely agreed with you right up until that line...
You compain about IT playing "bullshit bingo", compared with judges and financial guys?
IT may overnominalize, but (unlike law and accounting), we tend not to completely redefine perfectly good words for our own uses. Learning what a TCP/IP stack does takes some effort, but once you know the phrase, you know the phrase.
By comparison, every time I get into an argument with a law-geek and they play the "but that word doesn't mean the same legally as it does in English" card, I just want to serve up some serious hurting.
Now, I agree that judges and CFOs most likely understand the apparent BS they speak fluently. But don't try to complain about geek jargon as magically worse.
The Oxford American Dictionary definition of "ad hominem" is:
While I don't care to make this a "my dictionary vs your dictionary" discussion, if you want to use a specifially Latin phrase, I think you have to accept its actual translation as the definition. IMO.
(of an argument or reaction) arising from or appealing to the emotions and not reason or logic.
You could describe almost half of all nonvalidating argument types under that same definition (with most of the other half as variation on improper syllogisms).
This is a blatantly untrue, ad hominen attack on the Patriot Act.
Unless the USAPATRIOT act has somehow taken on a human avatar, you cannot physically make an "ad hominem" attack against it.
Now you can make ad hominem attacks against its authors - Such as "Don't trust him, he helped write the USAPATRIOT act!" or "Yo mamma so stupid, she voted for the USAPATRIOT act!".
But you can't attack "against the man", against a document.
On a more serious note - Please, people, the USAPATRIOT act has so many real flaws - You don't need to make stuff up to properly ridicule it. Additionally - You don't get much further from patriotism than the USAPATRIOT act. So do try to refrain from referring to it by its "common" name, and write it correctly, as a meaningless feel-good acronym.
My problem is distraction
...Doesn't exist, at least not in the touchy-feely happy productivity
boosting cooperation sense in which most companies believe. Teamwork in IT
means spending as little time physically together as possible, coming
up with a solid API, and everyone goes off and implements their alloted
portion of it. Anything more intimate than that (like the farce they
call "paired programming") just pisses developers off and wastes multiple
people for each one-man job.
YOUR problem. Not mine.
When I telecommuted, I got up every morning, got dressed, and put in my 8 hours. That makes all the difference, having the personal discipline to still "go to work", even if that means sitting in my own living room at a laptop. Not to say that I didn't squeeze a little more flexibility out of my time that I would in an office (can't easily take a porn break while at the office), but at least 90% comparable to non-telecommuting, I put in a standard 9-to-5.
Teamwork.
And when I do need to get together with my coworkers, I can phone or IM them in less time than it would take me to walk down the insanely long hallway around which all companies seem to design offices, to physically visit that coworker. And even in the office, I get far, far more calls and IMs than actual visitors. And, even in the off chance that we need a physical meeting, I have no problem with the idea of coming into the office once a week to take care of such business - that doesn't mean I need to stay there the other four days of the work week to efficiently do my job.
how will you develop something like Teamspirit and good cooperation
"Team" has no "I" in it. Remember that. Let's keep it that way.
I go to work to do a job (which I happen to enjoy) and get paid. Period. I don't go there to make friends (though I do have friends with whom I work), I don't go there to win a game-called-commerce, I don't go there for the sake of getting out of the house every day. I go there to get a paycheck. So spare me the "yay us!" and "go team!" and "now fall backward and we'll catch you" team spirit BS - Just leave me the hell alone and let me do the work you want done.
line between work and home
See point #1 - Personal discipline. If you have it, no problems here. If you lack it, don't ask to telecommute.
it requires .NET. Thanks. I don't mind downloading and installing
30MB's of framework just to play with a Rubik's cube. Really, I don't.
.NET developer who
does not), since Visual Studio 2005 builds to .NET 2.0, just about
everything will use it within a year or two. Add to that Vista's
intended use of WinFX (basically just .NET 3) as the core API, and you
can pretty much kiss Win32 goodbye.
.NET has truly abysmal performance. Who cares
about the size on disk - I care far more that it eats memory like
a kid with a box of tic-tacs. (Cue someone parroting that you can get 4GB
for about $250 nowadays, which I think you'll agree completely misses the
point).
.NET; Sooner
or later you will have no choice, so why deprive yourself of
cool toys that (unfortunately) use it now?
I see you've gotten spanked as a troll... Unfortunate. Personally, I don't suspect you of trolling, just stating a fact. However...
Whether you like it or not (and I say this as a
A pity, really, because
Regardless, you would do yourself a favor to get used to
/.'s attitude of "It's okay to copy anything I want" is really, really getting tiring.
While I somewhat agree, you need to realize that (unlike most geek-oriented issues), that attitude reflects what the majority of humans feel.
People do not, and did not ever, respect the concept of copyright as more than a good idea in theory if not in implementation. But until very recently (historically speaking), individuals didn't have the option of violating copyrights on any significant scale, so the system remained basically intact.
Even prior to last 50 years, "piracy" still occurred (how many hand-painted copies of the Mona Lisa exist? I recall reading a number in the thousands recently). It just took much longer, and the resources necessary to pull it off on a large scale almost guaranteed detection.
But from moment photocopiers gained widepread availability, college students have photocopied textbooks. The introduction of the cassette tape also saw the introduction of massive music sharing - likewise for the VCR. As soon as software-compatible PCs appeared, everyone swapped software among friends. When CD burners appeared on the scene, they just replaced the cassette tape, and likewise for DVD burners.
And when the internet made piracy ever so much easier, people flocked to using it for exactly that purpose. When P2P made finding and downloading copyrighted content as close to trivial as any user-initiated action can get, the P2P networks turned into nothing short of massively distributed digital radio stations with the users as the program directors.
So why do I write the above? For perspective. You say that in-your-face piracy as a form of civil disobedience won't work for swaying minds - But no one's mind needs swaying. Society has seen the idea of copyright, and rejected it outright whenever physically possible.
We don't need to win mindshare buy-in - The media producers need to come up with a model that allows them to make money while accepting that people will copy their work regardless of the law.
And if P2P scares the RIAA, wait until the next step. Some wireless-enabled portable music players already allow sharing songs actively, but it still takes too much effort to consider more than a quirk. When (not if) that turns into a passive action, compatible with devices just about everyone has (whether iPod-like players, or cell phones, or PDAs, or wrist watches, or some new killer toy we haven't even imagined yet) - When everyone you pass in rush-hour traffic, or on a busy sidewalk, or in a crowded mall, automatically sends you their entire music library almost instantly and without the need for you to even click "okay" - I think that really will mean the absolute death of anything similar to our modern content-selling industries. And what I just described will happen - Some portable music players already can do exactly that, they just need faster transfer rates, more storage space, and most importantly, either ubiquity or compatibility with other devices.
The RIAA and MPAA has until then to come up with a new trick. If they want to focus their energy on litigation, or even on a laughable anti-piracy PR campaign - They may as well close up shop today.
So when you see geeks saying "I will pirate it if I can, stick it to The Man!", don't bother getting annoyed - Whether or not such people know their "real" motives, they don't say anything new, or surprising, or even express an unpopular sentiment. Instead, look at them as a symptom of a badly broken system, broken from the start and finally approaching complete disintigration.
I just don't get it.
A web browser, I can see the use of (though currently most non-text-only pages look like crap on tiny cellphone screens, and even text-only doesn't look great). An email client, sure. A terminal emulator (aka "telnet/ssh client" for you whippersnappers) so I can connect to and manage a remote web server (if absolutely necessary - see point 3 below), yuppers.
But an actual web server?
First, my phone has an okay battery just sitting idle, but in actual use it dies within a few hours. Running a web server implies basically continuous use, so the thing would end up always on a leash to either a car or AC outlet.
Second, although I have pretty good cell coverage in my area, I do still drop the occasional call. Do we really want to add a http error code, "604: server drove into a tunnel"? (And yes, I do realize that would probably come back as a 503... Just a weak joke).
Third - I would not want to use a phone's crude keypad to try to maintain a web site. Even if I bought into the rest of the idea, I could see myself realistically connecting to my phone remotely from a real PC to do any updates or maintenance.
I just don't see the point. This smells like a solution in need of a problem, IMO.
Now sir, you might not be a shill, but in my humble opinion, certainly a troll
Neither, actually - I simply don't "suffer fools gladly". I also have a peeve regarding the trademarking of common or trivially-derived prases. I further don't accept an apology as "real" when it comes as a way to save face rather than as an expression of true regret.
Now, I do occasionally post very inflammatory comments as a result of my opinions. If you want to mod me down, have a ball. But I post how I really feel, and excepting a respondant demonstrating a post of mine as factually incorrect, I stand by what I write.
and a near inarticulate one. And I say that despite the fact that English is not my first language.
Heavy sarcasm doesn't translate well. Don't take it personally.
This was before Web 2.0 became such a popular term
Ah, I see the perfect sanity in that.
I wonder if the Slashdot admins will let me change my handle to "NoTheory (580275) 2.0", as it would clearly represent a radical (and trademarkable) departure from any existing user's account here.
Or, better yet, I should rush out and trademark "Web 2.1"! Thanks, you've just made me rich!
O'Reilly as an INSTUTION apologized
As an institition? WTF does that mean, exactly? Can I apologize as a DIRIGIBLE for offending you with my previous post?
O'Reilly CITES Torvolds and others as examples of trademark holders who also want to protect their trademarks.
You make it sound so tame - Guess what? That particular fallacy has a formal name - "Tu quo que", or to use the more common English phrasing, "But Billy did it, too, and his mom didn't ground him!".
TOR : I apologize to IT@Cork for the organizational failure that led to them getting a legal letter rather than a simple email query or phone call.
Wow.
"Gee, buddy, sorry my butler let the dogs chew you a new one, but no hard feelings, right? Hey, here's a twenty for ostomy bags - Let's call it even, 'kay?"
Once you set the lawyers on someone, an "apology" doesn't cut it, Tim.
You AT LEAST owe him a beer. Quite possibly a hooker.
And requesting an apology in return? Poor form indeed!
"So, perhaps now that I've graciously extended a plastic olive branch, you should apologize for trespassing on my carefully manicured lawn in the first place, dontchathink?"
No, Tim, we don't. Rafferty drew attention to some asshole (ie, you) TRADEMARKING yet another already-ubiquitous term. And you find that a tad inconvenient? Not even remotely cool.
And then, trying to shift the blame for your arrogance to Linus and RMS? You have GOT to mean that as a joke, man! Would you also try to blame Mother Theresa for the spread of AIDS in Africa?
Un-frickin'-believable.