I'm a bit surprised that they're not considering OpenSolaris. Linux is nice, but Oracle has been supporting Sun Solaris for far longer.
I could be wrong, but Oracle used to be targeted towards Solaris and everything else was a port from that target, but in recent years Oracle has chosen Linux as the target. Again, I could be misremembering here.
Nonetheless, I think its about time that Oracle has become and OS, because it pretty much is an OS to begin with. An Oracle box is pretty much an Oracle box, hopefully firelled and/or on a private network. There are more tuning parameters that need to be done to an Oracle box than any other software package that I know of, and having the DB and OS bundled, pretty much configured, and ready to roll makes sense to me. I've thought that Oracle should have done this years ago.
Personally, I would have picked an OS, bundled it with the DB and shut down all of the other ports of the software. DB-in-a-box just like my wireless router is a router/nat-in-a-box. I mean, isn't that more "normal" ?
The maximize feature becomes useless if you're using a 30 inch monitor.
The maximize feature is useless most of the time anyway.
The exception is OS X and a well written application where the + button either maximizes the window to make sense according to the data involved, or go back to the previous size.
The whole "thou shalt maximized every window" went away with 800x600 monitor resolutions, MDI interfaces, and all of that crap from the mid 90s.
Personally, I prefer 2+ monitors between 15-30" in size each.
That everybody on the list just started programming, and most enhanced programming with education.
I firmly believe that programming is something that you are born with, and can do or pretty much can't do. Like everything else, its something where you can always learn more tricks, tips, and techniques, but I don't believe that it is something that can really be "learned". The attention to detail, troubleshooting, and all of those little skills that are necessary to program are tough.
To put it another way, I can program just fine. I can draw a stick person or something and another person can recognise it, and whatnot. I am by no means an artist, and never will be.
Some years ago, I worked on an mp3 playing device (no, not Apple). Our users were quite often complaining that our random was not truly random, and seems to be clustering, favoring, disliking some thing or another. Some would swear that there was some intelligence to it, picking particular songs. I've seen the shuffle code, it's a simple array swap. I ran a numerical simulation on the output and found that the distribution of the array elements from their original position equal throughout.
My car stereo has a "random" playback feature. The thing is that the seed is fixed either by the number of entries on the disk or by the ID of the disk or something that is constant to the disk. I get the exact same sequence of "random" songs every time I play the same disk. So, for that instance, random only means a different order than on the disk, which I guess to some people, that is random.
Now, with the original guy's gripe. If he has 90% of his collection with Steely Dan, then 9/10 times a song is played, its going to be Steely Dan. The thing is that if he really likes steely dan, odds are he also has higher scores to the steely dan songs, and that makes the probability go beyond random as well. I've seen the odds somewhere else, but the number of stars assigned to a track does something like increase the liklihood that that song will be played X times the number of stars.
I just got my first iPod, and havn't used it enough to tell if there are any randomness issues with it, but I have my doubts.
Even if teenagers had credit cards, I think teenagers would still more likely opt to illegally download mp3s just because it's "illegal", therefore it's cool to do so.
In the US, I have noticed a trend since the 60s and 70s to make more "normal" things illegal, and it makes the tension between the system and the government and the people very high. Abraham Lincoln said it best:
"Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
Which was then followed up by HS Thompson:
"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."
So much is illegal, but its not "that illegal", and that is crap. In societies where sex, alcohol, and drugs don't have these insane and intense laws and taboos against them, they do less of them than here. In societies where pornography and nudity are more tolerated, they have much less rape, child abuse, and teenage pregnancies than we do. In societies where drugs are legal, they do less of them than we do. And the legal consequences keep getting more severe here.
Back to MP3s, I think its completely stupid that after 10 years of them being around that its still basically illegal to get them. I just got an iPod, and nobody told me that I couldn't just put MP3s on it. What Apple did, was pretty slick to appease the record business, but its a PITA that I have to go through hoops to put my legal MP3s on it from multiple computers. Honestly, if I knew this from the beginning I wouldn't have bought it. I will never buy "legal" MP3s from "legit" sources, because my freedoms will be limited even more. Instead, my plan for new music is to buy used CDs, rip them, and sell them back. And even that takes a bunch of silly effort. I have so much music, and its a pain to manage it between my home, my car, and work, and elsewhere.
The other problem of showing tech in a belivable way is resolution. I run my terminal windows on a widescreen (2560x1600) monitor, with a fairly small font (big monitor.) In order to capture anything meaningful and show it on someone's television, they would need to use a 120 point font. They also don't want the screen cluttered with icons, other applications, etc. otherwise the viewer would be distracted from what they want you to focus on (the story.)
Give me a break. I remember back in the "good old days" when fiction on TV and film was about stories, not 120 point fonts and 2560x1600 pixel displays.
Shit, I've seen movies even recently about men bitten by a spider who put themselves in a homemade spider suit and would fly from building to building but could not even get into some girl's pants. I heard about another movie where some dude got gamma radiation, turned big and green when he got pissed and could do all kinds of stuff.
Other stuff I've seen were movies where helicopters and cars always blew up when they crashed, which is nonsense, it happens in less than 1/10th of 1 percent of all crashes. I've seen these tricked out car chase scenes where the cars could not do such a thing without heavy modifications from real cars.
Shit, someone also told me that they don't even put real bullets in the guns or real explosives, and the blood was some kind of goo or even chocolate syrup!
OK, enough of the sarcasm. I guess my point is that the details simply should not be distracting from the plot, and for most people 120 pt fonts and 2560x1600 monitors displayed on a made for TV screen would be OK. Sure, most computers on TV and the movies beep every time an answer comes to the screen, but real computers don't do that. Its sufficient to tell the watcher that the actor is searching for something on the computer via dialog and then a quick beep or boop is returned telling the watcher that the search was ended, and the dialog can continue. Ever seen people type? They can't. Want to sit and watch someone fumble around on a computer and us get pissed off just like when we look over the shoulder of novice computer user?
This kinda reminds me of the other many stories where rogue terrorists invaded the locked server rooms and stole their RAID arrays.
Oh, that was a dream, I never heard of that.
WTF are people thinking about having important data on a laptop? It may of been another dream, but I heard of laptop harddrives dying, being ran over by cars, falling off the top of cars, taxis, or whatever. Laptops are in no way shape or form a reliable place to store data. In my server room, I have RAID arrays that are backed up to tape. Why? We value our data. Laptops are for portability, and with that portability, you lose performance and data integrity. All of my important data I have on my laptop I transfer to at least another desktop disk if not a backed up RAID array.
VNC or other ways of remotely accessing data over and encrypted channel is the way to do this crap securely. Today, internet connections are everywhere. Maybe another mass theft will give these guys some clue. Maybe.
Yeah, we all laughed at the sock puppet and the Superbowl ads, but there is still mega-profit in the.com world.
The coolest thing is that I heard on the news the other day where people at the other megacorps are realizing that there is profit in copyright infringement. Madonna's people are OK for uploaded stuff on youtube because they realize its free advertising. Much like the bands that allow taping of their concerts (we are looking at you Bob Weir). Who knows, maybe we can soon buy music in unencumbered digital formats at real market value. Maybe.
Cheating is a way of achieving. The thing is that it will come back to haunt you. When I was in HS and below, I cheated some, and I was not a good student then, and the classes I cheated in, I still did not do well. The classes I did not cheat in, I did well in. I too call BS on the numbers here, but I would guess that being that 50% seemed to be the norm, I would also bet that those were also in the bottom 50% of the class as well. It takes about as much effort to cheat your way though a course and get an A as doing it properly, and in the end all you learn is how to cheat.
I applaud your efforts in not cheating, doing poorly on the stuff, but learning and getting an A in the end. Besides the business guys, I don't know how cheating could benefit someone on the job or even in an interview. I would bet just like the homework example here, that the long term benefits simply do not add up.
College should be about learning, not socializing, binge drinking, wanton promiscuity, or what have you.
You attitude will probably change once you go to college.
That along the idea of bullshit "core courses" being required for me to get a "well rounded" education is precisely why I don't have a college degree. I'm getting along fine without it and refuse to put up with 4 years of High School Part 2 just to get to graduate school.
Oops, I must have spoken too quickly.
Learning is not limited to calculus and other classes offered by a university. College is about leaving adolescance, exploring the world, living outside of parents home, being poor, networking, binge drinking, promiscuity, and all of that. Its about learning how to lern. Its a rite of passage. About 50% of the people that go get a degree in 6 years, and of those that graduate, few learn direct skills to actually do something of "value" in the real world, but rather basic skills and abilities to learn things of value in the real world.
Today, specific facts and things like that are almost meaningless. Its so trivial to look them up, and they change all the time anyway, so its best to look them up anyway. Social skills and learning how to learn and other basic skills will take someone a long way.
I'm sorry but my $600 would be better spent if i gave it directly as cash to cancer research groups
Not necessarily. Aside from the processor time, you are also donating maintenance, networking, power and cooling.
No computational research group can get much with $600. Even the overhead involved with asking, storing, and deciding how to spend $600 would shrink the research value to much less than that.
It is called ASCAP and BMI licensing. This is what restaurants, bars, and music venues pay to cover the costs of licensing for cover songs, playing background music and whatnot. I've looked into this, and it appears as though for like $200/yr or so, anybody can get one of these licenses for less than 200 or whatever people and it be OK to download and play anything you want at any time.
In Britain, there is a TV license. Just out of curiosity, is there a possibility here in the US to get a music license and just be allowed to listen to what you want, when you want, or are we stuck with the buy plastic CD even though we don't want a plastic CD?
Dude, I would like to say that you are cool. It really seems as though you prefer the means over the ends and really care about what is good for people.
Lawyer dude: It's hard to generalize about that, because each person's facts, each person's personality, each person's intellect and ability, are different. Generally, there is no real good way to handle these cases, so anything anyone does is a mistake, in that sense. But in another sense, there are no mistakes, because there is no right answer.
Slashdot dude: Good gawd, no shit man. This is the best non-answer answer I've read in a long time. Information Content: big fat ZERO.
Yeah, I thought so too, especially the bold part. Plus the stuff about non-evidence being evidence that would not fly in another court system, and that basically the judges are biased towards the RIAA really said volumes to me.
I can't find the quote, but it goes something like "In a system where everybody is a criminal, then the only crime is stupidity in getting caught". That seems like that is true, and the real problem is that the real losers here are those "in the system". I fully agree and suggest that everybody basically does what they want, do it carefully, and odds are you will not be caught. USENET is a real good and safe place to get what you want with little to no probability in getting caught. I don't suggest buying CDs from RIAA companies, but if you do, do it out of convenience or if it really adds value to your life. Odds are, its just as good just to copy the CD from someone else. I also highly recommend used goods. Music is too damn expensive in 2006 given all of the other crap we have to pay for. The artists get almost nothing, so don't feel as though you are hurting them. Be careful, and just face it. You are a law abiding criminal, so just don't get caught and suffer the consequences.
I would like specific markup and a decent CSS style (maybe user configurable) to quote messages.
Right now, there is blockquotes and italics. Italics don't look as good since the change to sans serif font, and blockquotes are a little more difficult to work with and to me the lighter grey blockquote font color makes the comment more silent in my head vs italics (kinda like parenthesized stuff is more quiet then non-parenthesized text). Bold is loud and/or important! AND CAPS ARE LOUDER!
It also is kind of ironic. The people talking about choice and openess can't even get IE to work with their site. And since it's *only* 25% of the users, it's not a priority.
Its also ironic when we were "fringe" users and used browsers like various gecko based browsers or KHTML based browsers, had something like 10% marketshare and we complained that we ere not a target, nor a priority since 90% of the people used IE.
Wow, how things have changed.
Now, with the slashdot rewrite, I have 2 suggestions, one is old and one is new.
I know it is the desire for slashdot to reward fast over good, and its OK to have the bunches of pirst fost posts and whatnot, but I think its not worth rewarding earlier posts at the same thread level. By that if someone makes a witty one liner that provokes 10-20 good replies, only the top 3 or so good ones are likely to start a new thread. So, I would suggest randomizing the display of posts at any given thread level to increase the deeper threading and discussions vs the arbitrarily rewarding the top ones simply because they smashed the return button faster, yet faster may or may not be better.
Another thing I would suggest is that the message system be a little more sane and/or having more detailed information regarding the moderations to a given post. Right now if you get a message about a reply to one of your posts, you go to a list of them, and then you can either click on the your post or the reply or the article or other options. To me its an unnecessary click to get that info from the second page, and should be on the first (dunno if ad views come into play here or not), but it seems like an unnecessary hit on the DB and extra clicks for nothing. Another thing are the messages regarding moderation. Too many clicks here too, and too much irrelevant info. Some times I have a laundry list of comments that have + this - that, etc, and its easier just to look at my posting history to see what is going on via a summary. I would however like to know the raw data vs a percentage of how many times something has been moderated. Especially when I post something "controversial" and get bunches of + and - mods, but I would like to know if I had 100 + mods and 100 - mods to end up at 0 or if it was 1 + mod and 1 - mod.
Otherwise, I would welcome the expanding of threads with DHTML/layers or whatever makes that happen similar to the tags expansion. Slashdot has grown up over the years like me, but kinda slow like me too:)
OK, the MP and MHz wars are similar but there are differences. For one thing, consumers don't know how to interpret tech specs that well, and for computers there are bunches of them, and I realized the MHz war was silly when the first pentiums came out. But even synthetic and/or "real world" benchmarks are not that good, and different computer systems can score differently on differnet tasks. That will always be the case. There also is the "good enough" factor, and today just about any computer is now good enough for most every user's needs.
Now with MP, the difference is that to achieve 35mm resolution you need between 12 and 25 MP depending on how you look at it to get the same quality, and people who care know this. There is also larger formats like 70mm or exotic ones that would take HUGE MP cameras to reproduce. The difference, like MP3s, is cost, porability, instant gratification, and all that and quality is second to those other factors. For most people, 2-4 MP is more than sufficient.
Personally, I'm about to buy a Canon EOS 30D which is about 8.2MP, but I'm more picky than most snapshot people, but then again this camera is like $1,200, and then the computer, monitor, and software to make this happen costs too. One thing I really like about the higher MP stuff is that you can zoom in and crop to get cool looking abstract stuff that you simply cannot do on a lower MP camera. In all actuality, an 8.2MP picture is too high of a resolution for most purposes. A screen is typically around 2MP. A web browser window is often much less than that, especially if text or other images are on the page. I'm also interested in shooting in RAW, which is not a mainstream desire either. JPEG, like MP3 is OK for most people, even many professionals are OK with JPEG, but again I want the extra quality and control that comes with the RAW image, and then I will convert it to JPEG or PNG as a final product.
I think any laptop that overheats because of software is badly designed. Critical functionality, like running the fans etc., should not depend on the operating system.
I disagree on both counts here.
Mac laptops (and I guess others as well) have software controlled fans. Fans take electricity to run and make noise. I monitor my CPU usage and promptly re-turn off flash if one is pegging my CPU at 100% so that I can view a nice advertisement or something (a clear example of poor software that is overheating my laptop). If there was no software controlled hardware, then the only choice is to run a very slow CPU at "full blast". Very slow computers are very cool and have excellent battery life. They just don't seem very popular with humans that want to run modern software.
Windows NT ran fine on PowerPC, Alpha, and (I believe) MIPS. The problem was the applications. Very few were ever ported to anything else, and most people wanted to run legacy DOS applications. If you had an Alpha, you could run x86 applications using DEC's FX32! to emulate it, but that somewhat defeated the point of using a fast chip.
No. Windows did not run as well as other operating systems did on non x86 platforms. To blame it on the apps is unfair also. Apps drive an OS, not the other way around. Apple is the poster child for architecture changes. The x86 rollout for them is brand new, and just about every app is already available and supported for both architectures that are either one binary (a fat one:), or separate downloads for larger packages. Oh, and Apple comes with a free and quality development environment that can create fat binaries fairly easily. MS's dev studio is pretty good, but its cross platform capabilities are not its strong points.
NT on Alphas was not that good. I've known people that ran it, and it had more issues than the x86 architecture. I believe the same was true for PowerPCs as well, but I could be projecting a bias here.
Yes, there are a number of OSes that run on different architectures. To date, Linux is THE poster child for an architecture independant OS. AFAIK, Apple's OS X's ability to migrate platforms was inheirited from NeXt. Solaris has x86 and SPARC targets that work pretty well. BeOS ran on x86 and PowerPC but didn't have apps, but was a very promising OS. Microsoft simply has not the skill and/or desire to run well on multiple architectures, and again, I believe this has hurt the adoption and progress in the hardware markets. If it were not for Linux, things like the Opteron and Itanium would have both been complete failures. I'm not a fan of x86 much, but their price/performance and groovy feeling of having a product since the 70s does establish some credibility. Opterons are OK with HTX and whatnot, but the x86ness does not give me warm fuzzies. Itaniums are very nice. Much nicer in the low voltage models. SPARC was OK, but has lost the price/performance game. Same for the power stuff.
Keep only one credit card, one that has no annual fee and as low interest rate as possible.
I have multiple with high limits and very low rates. I use them for loans at better than my student loans, banks, and my mortgage. In other words, let the numbers (low fixed interest rates) do the talking.
Never use it, unless everything below fails and what you are buying is an absolute necessity like food. Except if you are 18 and need to establish some credit, then you can allow yourself to charge whatever you know you can pay on the next bill.
I charge everything. It saves me from having cash. I pay my bill at the end of the month. I can see what I spent money on at the end of the month or back in time if I'm interested. I can dispute the charge if necessary. It also makes me an attractive customer for other credit cards, and I can negotiate interest rates with them because they get something like 1% of my charges from the merchant.
Buy everything except cars, homes, and educations with cash.
Only pay for hookers and drugs with cash:) Seriously, I'm not into going into debt for a car. I'm just cheap this way, but it does help your credit to pay all the extra expenses for a car and insurance vs cash for a car, but I prefer my money in my pocket and to pay for electronics, trips, and more expensive houses that appreciate vs a car that depreciates. Education is an investment too, its worth going in debt for that. Cars are dependent on the individual.
Put a little bit of money every paycheck into a rainy day savings account until you have enough for at least 3 months of expenses.
I would recommend 6 months. You can get away with less if you have a VERY stable job or career.
Never believe what your loan officer claims you can afford. Figure out a monthly payment with some breathing room in case overtime gets cut, tell the loan officer what you can afford, and stick to it. Don't get a bigger house just because the mortgage company qualifies you for that amount.
I recommend the most expensive house you can afford to make payments and do maintenance on. I recommend a compounding interest calculator to figure out how much things REALLY cost, and how much you can save by paying extra on interest bearing accounts. It can save you TONS of money to pay a little extra on your payments if you can afford to do so. If you get extra money like a tax refund or a bonus, its worth doing something besides blowing it on something you don't need.
When your car is paid off, continue paying your car payment to your savings account. Chances are, you'll need to buy another car one day, and it will be difficult if you became accustomed to the "extra" money.
Excellent tip. But I've never had a car payment before. I've bought 4 cars in my 20+ years of driving. I've always paid a minimum for insurance, something less than 6-700/yr at its highest. I've never gotten a girl because of my cars though:(
Finances are simple math. But it takes time and effort to run the numbers and play "what-if" games, but they should be fun for your average slashdotter.
Half of the Unvideo searches I ran were more expensive than the DVDs.
Same goes for Music video DVDs vs audio CDs.
Video DVDs have multiple audio tracks (aka, more production work to make them). Video (again, more work). And frequently, if not almost always, have more minutes of material than audio CDs, yet audio CDs often cost more than the video counterpart. And not just a couple of cents like the 12 monkeys example.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a bit surprised that they're not considering OpenSolaris. Linux is nice, but Oracle has been supporting Sun Solaris for far longer.
I could be wrong, but Oracle used to be targeted towards Solaris and everything else was a port from that target, but in recent years Oracle has chosen Linux as the target. Again, I could be misremembering here.
Nonetheless, I think its about time that Oracle has become and OS, because it pretty much is an OS to begin with. An Oracle box is pretty much an Oracle box, hopefully firelled and/or on a private network. There are more tuning parameters that need to be done to an Oracle box than any other software package that I know of, and having the DB and OS bundled, pretty much configured, and ready to roll makes sense to me. I've thought that Oracle should have done this years ago.
Personally, I would have picked an OS, bundled it with the DB and shut down all of the other ports of the software. DB-in-a-box just like my wireless router is a router/nat-in-a-box. I mean, isn't that more "normal" ?
The maximize feature becomes useless if you're using a 30 inch monitor.
The maximize feature is useless most of the time anyway.
The exception is OS X and a well written application where the + button either maximizes the window to make sense according to the data involved, or go back to the previous size.
The whole "thou shalt maximized every window" went away with 800x600 monitor resolutions, MDI interfaces, and all of that crap from the mid 90s.
Personally, I prefer 2+ monitors between 15-30" in size each.
Isn't the electricity used to generate the light already taxed?
Ever looked at your phone bill?
In Texas, they just stopped taxing phone service to fund the Spanish-American war.
Currently, my phone taxes are over 40% of my phone bill.
how about make world?
That everybody on the list just started programming, and most enhanced programming with education.
I firmly believe that programming is something that you are born with, and can do or pretty much can't do. Like everything else, its something where you can always learn more tricks, tips, and techniques, but I don't believe that it is something that can really be "learned". The attention to detail, troubleshooting, and all of those little skills that are necessary to program are tough.
To put it another way, I can program just fine. I can draw a stick person or something and another person can recognise it, and whatnot. I am by no means an artist, and never will be.
Some years ago, I worked on an mp3 playing device (no, not Apple). Our users were quite often complaining that our random was not truly random, and seems to be clustering, favoring, disliking some thing or another. Some would swear that there was some intelligence to it, picking particular songs. I've seen the shuffle code, it's a simple array swap. I ran a numerical simulation on the output and found that the distribution of the array elements from their original position equal throughout.
My car stereo has a "random" playback feature. The thing is that the seed is fixed either by the number of entries on the disk or by the ID of the disk or something that is constant to the disk. I get the exact same sequence of "random" songs every time I play the same disk. So, for that instance, random only means a different order than on the disk, which I guess to some people, that is random.
Now, with the original guy's gripe. If he has 90% of his collection with Steely Dan, then 9/10 times a song is played, its going to be Steely Dan. The thing is that if he really likes steely dan, odds are he also has higher scores to the steely dan songs, and that makes the probability go beyond random as well. I've seen the odds somewhere else, but the number of stars assigned to a track does something like increase the liklihood that that song will be played X times the number of stars.
I just got my first iPod, and havn't used it enough to tell if there are any randomness issues with it, but I have my doubts.
Even if teenagers had credit cards, I think teenagers would still more likely opt to illegally download mp3s just because it's "illegal", therefore it's cool to do so.
In the US, I have noticed a trend since the 60s and 70s to make more "normal" things illegal, and it makes the tension between the system and the government and the people very high. Abraham Lincoln said it best:
"Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things
that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
Which was then followed up by HS Thompson:
"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."
So much is illegal, but its not "that illegal", and that is crap. In societies where sex, alcohol, and drugs don't have these insane and intense laws and taboos against them, they do less of them than here. In societies where pornography and nudity are more tolerated, they have much less rape, child abuse, and teenage pregnancies than we do. In societies where drugs are legal, they do less of them than we do. And the legal consequences keep getting more severe here.
Back to MP3s, I think its completely stupid that after 10 years of them being around that its still basically illegal to get them. I just got an iPod, and nobody told me that I couldn't just put MP3s on it. What Apple did, was pretty slick to appease the record business, but its a PITA that I have to go through hoops to put my legal MP3s on it from multiple computers. Honestly, if I knew this from the beginning I wouldn't have bought it. I will never buy "legal" MP3s from "legit" sources, because my freedoms will be limited even more. Instead, my plan for new music is to buy used CDs, rip them, and sell them back. And even that takes a bunch of silly effort. I have so much music, and its a pain to manage it between my home, my car, and work, and elsewhere.
Americans used to breed slaves. Does using `created` slaves make it ok?
As long as they are in china or are here from south of the border, sure its OK.
The other problem of showing tech in a belivable way is resolution. I run my terminal windows on a widescreen (2560x1600) monitor, with a fairly small font (big monitor.) In order to capture anything meaningful and show it on someone's television, they would need to use a 120 point font. They also don't want the screen cluttered with icons, other applications, etc. otherwise the viewer would be distracted from what they want you to focus on (the story.)
Give me a break. I remember back in the "good old days" when fiction on TV and film was about stories, not 120 point fonts and 2560x1600 pixel displays.
Shit, I've seen movies even recently about men bitten by a spider who put themselves in a homemade spider suit and would fly from building to building but could not even get into some girl's pants. I heard about another movie where some dude got gamma radiation, turned big and green when he got pissed and could do all kinds of stuff.
Other stuff I've seen were movies where helicopters and cars always blew up when they crashed, which is nonsense, it happens in less than 1/10th of 1 percent of all crashes. I've seen these tricked out car chase scenes where the cars could not do such a thing without heavy modifications from real cars.
Shit, someone also told me that they don't even put real bullets in the guns or real explosives, and the blood was some kind of goo or even chocolate syrup!
OK, enough of the sarcasm. I guess my point is that the details simply should not be distracting from the plot, and for most people 120 pt fonts and 2560x1600 monitors displayed on a made for TV screen would be OK. Sure, most computers on TV and the movies beep every time an answer comes to the screen, but real computers don't do that. Its sufficient to tell the watcher that the actor is searching for something on the computer via dialog and then a quick beep or boop is returned telling the watcher that the search was ended, and the dialog can continue. Ever seen people type? They can't. Want to sit and watch someone fumble around on a computer and us get pissed off just like when we look over the shoulder of novice computer user?
This kinda reminds me of the other many stories where rogue terrorists invaded the locked server rooms and stole their RAID arrays.
Oh, that was a dream, I never heard of that.
WTF are people thinking about having important data on a laptop? It may of been another dream, but I heard of laptop harddrives dying, being ran over by cars, falling off the top of cars, taxis, or whatever. Laptops are in no way shape or form a reliable place to store data. In my server room, I have RAID arrays that are backed up to tape. Why? We value our data. Laptops are for portability, and with that portability, you lose performance and data integrity. All of my important data I have on my laptop I transfer to at least another desktop disk if not a backed up RAID array.
VNC or other ways of remotely accessing data over and encrypted channel is the way to do this crap securely. Today, internet connections are everywhere. Maybe another mass theft will give these guys some clue. Maybe.
Wow, now its a 5 step plan, pretty soon 12
Yeah, we all laughed at the sock puppet and the Superbowl ads, but there is still mega-profit in the
The coolest thing is that I heard on the news the other day where people at the other megacorps are realizing that there is profit in copyright infringement. Madonna's people are OK for uploaded stuff on youtube because they realize its free advertising. Much like the bands that allow taping of their concerts (we are looking at you Bob Weir). Who knows, maybe we can soon buy music in unencumbered digital formats at real market value. Maybe.
Cheating is a way of achieving. The thing is that it will come back to haunt you. When I was in HS and below, I cheated some, and I was not a good student then, and the classes I cheated in, I still did not do well. The classes I did not cheat in, I did well in. I too call BS on the numbers here, but I would guess that being that 50% seemed to be the norm, I would also bet that those were also in the bottom 50% of the class as well. It takes about as much effort to cheat your way though a course and get an A as doing it properly, and in the end all you learn is how to cheat.
I applaud your efforts in not cheating, doing poorly on the stuff, but learning and getting an A in the end. Besides the business guys, I don't know how cheating could benefit someone on the job or even in an interview. I would bet just like the homework example here, that the long term benefits simply do not add up.
College should be about learning, not socializing, binge drinking, wanton promiscuity, or what have you.
You attitude will probably change once you go to college.
That along the idea of bullshit "core courses" being required for me to get a "well rounded" education is precisely why I don't have a college degree. I'm getting along fine without it and refuse to put up with 4 years of High School Part 2 just to get to graduate school.
Oops, I must have spoken too quickly.
Learning is not limited to calculus and other classes offered by a university. College is about leaving adolescance, exploring the world, living outside of parents home, being poor, networking, binge drinking, promiscuity, and all of that. Its about learning how to lern. Its a rite of passage. About 50% of the people that go get a degree in 6 years, and of those that graduate, few learn direct skills to actually do something of "value" in the real world, but rather basic skills and abilities to learn things of value in the real world.
Today, specific facts and things like that are almost meaningless. Its so trivial to look them up, and they change all the time anyway, so its best to look them up anyway. Social skills and learning how to learn and other basic skills will take someone a long way.
I'm sorry but my $600 would be better spent if i gave it directly as cash to cancer research groups
Not necessarily. Aside from the processor time, you are also donating maintenance, networking, power and cooling.
No computational research group can get much with $600. Even the overhead involved with asking, storing, and deciding how to spend $600 would shrink the research value to much less than that.
It is called ASCAP and BMI licensing. This is what restaurants, bars, and music venues pay to cover the costs of licensing for cover songs, playing background music and whatnot. I've looked into this, and it appears as though for like $200/yr or so, anybody can get one of these licenses for less than 200 or whatever people and it be OK to download and play anything you want at any time.
In Britain, there is a TV license. Just out of curiosity, is there a possibility here in the US to get a music license and just be allowed to listen to what you want, when you want, or are we stuck with the buy plastic CD even though we don't want a plastic CD?
Dude, I would like to say that you are cool. It really seems as though you prefer the means over the ends and really care about what is good for people.
Lawyer dude: It's hard to generalize about that, because each person's facts, each person's personality, each person's intellect and ability, are different. Generally, there is no real good way to handle these cases, so anything anyone does is a mistake, in that sense. But in another sense, there are no mistakes, because there is no right answer.
Slashdot dude: Good gawd, no shit man. This is the best non-answer answer I've read in a long time. Information Content: big fat ZERO.
Yeah, I thought so too, especially the bold part. Plus the stuff about non-evidence being evidence that would not fly in another court system, and that basically the judges are biased towards the RIAA really said volumes to me.
I can't find the quote, but it goes something like "In a system where everybody is a criminal, then the only crime is stupidity in getting caught". That seems like that is true, and the real problem is that the real losers here are those "in the system". I fully agree and suggest that everybody basically does what they want, do it carefully, and odds are you will not be caught. USENET is a real good and safe place to get what you want with little to no probability in getting caught. I don't suggest buying CDs from RIAA companies, but if you do, do it out of convenience or if it really adds value to your life. Odds are, its just as good just to copy the CD from someone else. I also highly recommend used goods. Music is too damn expensive in 2006 given all of the other crap we have to pay for. The artists get almost nothing, so don't feel as though you are hurting them. Be careful, and just face it. You are a law abiding criminal, so just don't get caught and suffer the consequences.
I would like specific markup and a decent CSS style (maybe user configurable) to quote messages.
Right now, there is blockquotes and italics. Italics don't look as good since the change to sans serif font, and blockquotes are a little more difficult to work with and to me the lighter grey blockquote font color makes the comment more silent in my head vs italics (kinda like parenthesized stuff is more quiet then non-parenthesized text). Bold is loud and/or important! AND CAPS ARE LOUDER!
It also is kind of ironic. The people talking about choice and openess can't even get IE to work with their site. And since it's *only* 25% of the users, it's not a priority.
:)
Its also ironic when we were "fringe" users and used browsers like various gecko based browsers or KHTML based browsers, had something like 10% marketshare and we complained that we ere not a target, nor a priority since 90% of the people used IE.
Wow, how things have changed.
Now, with the slashdot rewrite, I have 2 suggestions, one is old and one is new.
I know it is the desire for slashdot to reward fast over good, and its OK to have the bunches of pirst fost posts and whatnot, but I think its not worth rewarding earlier posts at the same thread level. By that if someone makes a witty one liner that provokes 10-20 good replies, only the top 3 or so good ones are likely to start a new thread. So, I would suggest randomizing the display of posts at any given thread level to increase the deeper threading and discussions vs the arbitrarily rewarding the top ones simply because they smashed the return button faster, yet faster may or may not be better.
Another thing I would suggest is that the message system be a little more sane and/or having more detailed information regarding the moderations to a given post. Right now if you get a message about a reply to one of your posts, you go to a list of them, and then you can either click on the your post or the reply or the article or other options. To me its an unnecessary click to get that info from the second page, and should be on the first (dunno if ad views come into play here or not), but it seems like an unnecessary hit on the DB and extra clicks for nothing. Another thing are the messages regarding moderation. Too many clicks here too, and too much irrelevant info. Some times I have a laundry list of comments that have + this - that, etc, and its easier just to look at my posting history to see what is going on via a summary. I would however like to know the raw data vs a percentage of how many times something has been moderated. Especially when I post something "controversial" and get bunches of + and - mods, but I would like to know if I had 100 + mods and 100 - mods to end up at 0 or if it was 1 + mod and 1 - mod.
Otherwise, I would welcome the expanding of threads with DHTML/layers or whatever makes that happen similar to the tags expansion. Slashdot has grown up over the years like me, but kinda slow like me too
OK, the MP and MHz wars are similar but there are differences. For one thing, consumers don't know how to interpret tech specs that well, and for computers there are bunches of them, and I realized the MHz war was silly when the first pentiums came out. But even synthetic and/or "real world" benchmarks are not that good, and different computer systems can score differently on differnet tasks. That will always be the case. There also is the "good enough" factor, and today just about any computer is now good enough for most every user's needs.
Now with MP, the difference is that to achieve 35mm resolution you need between 12 and 25 MP depending on how you look at it to get the same quality, and people who care know this. There is also larger formats like 70mm or exotic ones that would take HUGE MP cameras to reproduce. The difference, like MP3s, is cost, porability, instant gratification, and all that and quality is second to those other factors. For most people, 2-4 MP is more than sufficient.
Personally, I'm about to buy a Canon EOS 30D which is about 8.2MP, but I'm more picky than most snapshot people, but then again this camera is like $1,200, and then the computer, monitor, and software to make this happen costs too. One thing I really like about the higher MP stuff is that you can zoom in and crop to get cool looking abstract stuff that you simply cannot do on a lower MP camera. In all actuality, an 8.2MP picture is too high of a resolution for most purposes. A screen is typically around 2MP. A web browser window is often much less than that, especially if text or other images are on the page. I'm also interested in shooting in RAW, which is not a mainstream desire either. JPEG, like MP3 is OK for most people, even many professionals are OK with JPEG, but again I want the extra quality and control that comes with the RAW image, and then I will convert it to JPEG or PNG as a final product.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/
Wow. I remember that story, and it seemed like 6 months ago. Scary.
I think any laptop that overheats because of software is badly designed. Critical functionality, like running the fans etc., should not depend on the operating system.
I disagree on both counts here.
Mac laptops (and I guess others as well) have software controlled fans. Fans take electricity to run and make noise. I monitor my CPU usage and promptly re-turn off flash if one is pegging my CPU at 100% so that I can view a nice advertisement or something (a clear example of poor software that is overheating my laptop). If there was no software controlled hardware, then the only choice is to run a very slow CPU at "full blast". Very slow computers are very cool and have excellent battery life. They just don't seem very popular with humans that want to run modern software.
Windows NT ran fine on PowerPC, Alpha, and (I believe) MIPS. The problem was the applications. Very few were ever ported to anything else, and most people wanted to run legacy DOS applications. If you had an Alpha, you could run x86 applications using DEC's FX32! to emulate it, but that somewhat defeated the point of using a fast chip.
:), or separate downloads for larger packages. Oh, and Apple comes with a free and quality development environment that can create fat binaries fairly easily. MS's dev studio is pretty good, but its cross platform capabilities are not its strong points.
No. Windows did not run as well as other operating systems did on non x86 platforms. To blame it on the apps is unfair also. Apps drive an OS, not the other way around. Apple is the poster child for architecture changes. The x86 rollout for them is brand new, and just about every app is already available and supported for both architectures that are either one binary (a fat one
NT on Alphas was not that good. I've known people that ran it, and it had more issues than the x86 architecture. I believe the same was true for PowerPCs as well, but I could be projecting a bias here.
Yes, there are a number of OSes that run on different architectures. To date, Linux is THE poster child for an architecture independant OS. AFAIK, Apple's OS X's ability to migrate platforms was inheirited from NeXt. Solaris has x86 and SPARC targets that work pretty well. BeOS ran on x86 and PowerPC but didn't have apps, but was a very promising OS. Microsoft simply has not the skill and/or desire to run well on multiple architectures, and again, I believe this has hurt the adoption and progress in the hardware markets. If it were not for Linux, things like the Opteron and Itanium would have both been complete failures. I'm not a fan of x86 much, but their price/performance and groovy feeling of having a product since the 70s does establish some credibility. Opterons are OK with HTX and whatnot, but the x86ness does not give me warm fuzzies. Itaniums are very nice. Much nicer in the low voltage models. SPARC was OK, but has lost the price/performance game. Same for the power stuff.
Keep only one credit card, one that has no annual fee and as low interest rate as possible.
:) Seriously, I'm not into going into debt for a car. I'm just cheap this way, but it does help your credit to pay all the extra expenses for a car and insurance vs cash for a car, but I prefer my money in my pocket and to pay for electronics, trips, and more expensive houses that appreciate vs a car that depreciates. Education is an investment too, its worth going in debt for that. Cars are dependent on the individual.
:(
I have multiple with high limits and very low rates. I use them for loans at better than my student loans, banks, and my mortgage. In other words, let the numbers (low fixed interest rates) do the talking.
Never use it, unless everything below fails and what you are buying is an absolute necessity like food. Except if you are 18 and need to establish some credit, then you can allow yourself to charge whatever you know you can pay on the next bill.
I charge everything. It saves me from having cash. I pay my bill at the end of the month. I can see what I spent money on at the end of the month or back in time if I'm interested. I can dispute the charge if necessary. It also makes me an attractive customer for other credit cards, and I can negotiate interest rates with them because they get something like 1% of my charges from the merchant.
Buy everything except cars, homes, and educations with cash.
Only pay for hookers and drugs with cash
Put a little bit of money every paycheck into a rainy day savings account until you have enough for at least 3 months of expenses.
I would recommend 6 months. You can get away with less if you have a VERY stable job or career.
Never believe what your loan officer claims you can afford. Figure out a monthly payment with some breathing room in case overtime gets cut, tell the loan officer what you can afford, and stick to it. Don't get a bigger house just because the mortgage company qualifies you for that amount.
I recommend the most expensive house you can afford to make payments and do maintenance on. I recommend a compounding interest calculator to figure out how much things REALLY cost, and how much you can save by paying extra on interest bearing accounts. It can save you TONS of money to pay a little extra on your payments if you can afford to do so. If you get extra money like a tax refund or a bonus, its worth doing something besides blowing it on something you don't need.
When your car is paid off, continue paying your car payment to your savings account. Chances are, you'll need to buy another car one day, and it will be difficult if you became accustomed to the "extra" money.
Excellent tip. But I've never had a car payment before. I've bought 4 cars in my 20+ years of driving. I've always paid a minimum for insurance, something less than 6-700/yr at its highest. I've never gotten a girl because of my cars though
Finances are simple math. But it takes time and effort to run the numbers and play "what-if" games, but they should be fun for your average slashdotter.
Half of the Unvideo searches I ran were more expensive than the DVDs.
Same goes for Music video DVDs vs audio CDs.
Video DVDs have multiple audio tracks (aka, more production work to make them). Video (again, more work). And frequently, if not almost always, have more minutes of material than audio CDs, yet audio CDs often cost more than the video counterpart. And not just a couple of cents like the 12 monkeys example.