Slashdot jumped the shark. This is news? Go ahead, mod me down, I am maxed out. Oh Noes, if I am modded down too far I won't be able to MetaModerate or something. We need to stand up and reclaim this site as the old/., when it was relevant.
I would love to try this out, but as my tiny, high-rpm C: drive is dedicated to my bloated, monopolistic OS, there is no room for anything else. When, oh WHEN will the Google Gods add a path option in the advanced options?
No Palm or Treo works with Vista 64. Any Palm product only has "limited" capability even with Vista 32, and that doesn't even include the capability to install apps. Now how long has Vista been out?
But there is ANOTHER dot problem...
on
Gmail Mis.delivered?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Anything sent to my email address with dots added NEVER gets to me.
My wife too. We both have very early gmail accounts (within the first month or so). Back in the early days, were different people allowed to sign up for different dot-variation names? If so, the obvious fix would have been to remove the dot functionality on those combinations to avoid having email sent to the wrong accounts. Which may be what happened with our accounts. That would suck if true, as missing this functionality is a big loss.
Black hole collisions are theoretically possible, and has been simulated on a Cray
Yes, this is offtopic, but what is really wild is that they simulated that in 1994 on a Cray C90, which has a floating point speed of 16 gigaflops. Back here in 2006: the Playstation 3, a TOY, has a floating point speed of 2 teraflops.
May I reccommend a hush.ai address, as they're offshore.
They used to be. The servers are in Canada now. You know, the Country that tried to pass the Lawful Access bill last session to "compel all telephone and Internet companies to create and maintain infrastructures that are intercept capable and to provide access to basic subscriber contact information such as a name, address or telephone number."
Don't bother using encrypted emails, because if you're not sending anything incriminating, THERE'S NO NEED.
I love this type of thinking.
Check out the 60 minutes inteview on Echelon:
KROFT: (Voiceover) Is it possible for people like you and I, innocent civilians, to be targeted by Echelon?
Mr. FROST: Not only possible, not only probable, but factual. While I was at CSE, a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a--a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, 'Oh, Danny really bombed last night,' just like that. The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation w--was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.
KROFT: This is not urban legend you're talking about. This actually happened?
Mr. FROST: Factual. Absolutely fact. No legend here.
Am I the only one, having a somewhat strong immune system, that is not in the least bit worried about a pandemic?
Actually, this is to your disadvantage, as a strong immune system is probably what is going to kill you. Your immune system could trigger a Cytokine Storm which will basically dissolve your lungs through severe inflammation.
The "Privacy" "Security" and "Sony" icons? Anyone else think that slashdot needs to have a better, all-inclusive Sony icon, ala the classic microsoft borg icon?
The tokens representing your gear are fun, but are not really necessary. The point of True Dungeon is to solve puzzles (mainly). Indeed, the best tokens cannot be bought, but must be found in the dungeon itself as loot. One of the reason I did buy a limited number of tokens this year is I heard it was used to raise cash to build the town area (yes, there was an entire *town* before you went into the dungeon), and I wanted to support what is now Gencon's premier event. And by the way, the town turned out Amazing, full of hidden alleys, shops, etc.
I really can't give you detailed information on the money-making aspects of the event, but I can tell you that True Dungeon costs a _lot_ of money to build and run - It wouldn't be possible to do it without the hard work of many, many volunteers. I, myself, am a volunteer, and as far as I know there are no paid staff at all.
I assume it is *very* expensive, especially since True Dungeon rented out the largest ballroom in the City for the event. This is the kind of thing that in the past only Richard Garriott could afford, and I used to dream of as a kid.
True Dungeon is really made by gamers for gamers.
This is true. The True Dungeon board was holding a virtual gun to the head of the devs to get new tokens, more token runs etc.
It's hard to imagine nowadays what an impact this made when it first came out, because of the GUI. The first shipment of Macs were shipped to three schools if I remember correctly - MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford. There was a huge line on delivery day. The serial numbers from CMU went all the way into the low 3 digits - the one I got was really low; 79 or 179 or something like that. It blew up as soon as I plugged it in. I brought it back and got one that was 600 and something.
This was the first time many of us had seen a GUI, as unlike the guys at Stanford we didn't have a PARC nearby. It is hard to imagine in 2005 what it was like to see a GUI for the first time. I was invited to a pre-release showing a few weeks before, and the small group I was with was stunned. I sold my Apple II the next day to get the money to put in an order for the Mac.
I have a feeling that once this pilot program gets going, it will be simple enough for the State to prepare a tax return whether we ask them to do it or not - just to compare with what we send in. A mini-audit in effect.
I don't know how many games of Catan I've played where the dice suddenly seemed to start rolling 2,3, and 4 over and over again then suddenly start rolling a huge long string of 9, 10, 11... Around here the Catan dice are infamous for that behavior.
Um, ALL sets of dice are infamous for clumping behavior. You might want to look at a basic book of statistics.
A famous example of clumping in real life (and how we perceive it) can be demonstrated by convincing two of your friends to perform a little experiment. Have one toss a coin 100 times and write down the results. Have the other write up a "random" assortment of 100 heads and tails that they came up with in their head. Don't let them tell you which person used which method, instead tell them you will figure it out. Ninety-five percent of the time, the person flipping the coin will generate a series of seven or more heads or tails in a row. You almost never see this in the list the other person makes up, as they invariable think that seven or more in a row will never happen.
In terms of what to expect in a game like Settlers, similar clumping of production numbers will occur. Just like the person making up the heads/tails, this will seem extremely unlikely (or really bad/good luck), but it isn't; what seems to be really strange clumping is in fact quite common.
You have to assume weird clumping will happen, and plan for it. For example, consider spreading out your production centers in the early game onto different numbers so this has less of a chance of happening to you. This is especially important if you are playing a strategy that emphasizes cities (i.e. the ore-grain strategy), as you will have less production centers (and by extension, be located next to fewer production numbers) to begin with, and therefore are at a greater risk from clumping.
I usually don't even check out these modding stories, but I am glad I looked at this one. It's the most beautiful case I have ever seen. Drop-dead amazing. Damn I want one.
For those of you that don't have Gmail yet, there is a little "Report Spam" button you can use to, well, report spam. When Gmail gets a few million users, and even 1% use this little button, you are going to see the spam detect rate skyrocket.
Another post says that the devs wouldn't make Jawas a player species because "they are supposed to be non-travelers and you cannot really customize a character that doesn't have a face", which seems to bolster the joke theory.
Gmail Team to me
More options 10:02am (31 minutes ago) Hello,
Thank you for your message and bug report regarding the incorrect quota amount listed in your Gmail account.
As always, each Gmail user is offered 1,000 megabytes (MB) of storage.
We apologize for any confusion this issue may have caused. We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution. In the meantime, sending and receiving email in your Gmail account will reset your storage limit counter to 1,000 MB. We appreciate your patience during our limited test period, and we thank you for taking the time to send us your feedback and concerns.
Mine is back down to a gig now. My theory is they were testing the future paid premium service. Hell, even if I didn't need a terabyte, I would pay for the premium service just for the bragging rights.
Lots of the 802.11g products that have been manufactured in the last few months 802.11g are able to be firmware upgraded to 802.11i. The big question is if this will be considered "support" from MS. I'm going to be pretty pissed if I am not going to be running AES encryption because MS decided to dump its customers.
I was developing numbness in my mousing hand at work, was sent to workers comp, and found out I had tendinitis (lucky it was only that). A few things I found out:
1) The computer screen should be directly in front of you, at eye level. Should be obvious, but quite a few people don't do it. If you are one of the dual-screen types (I expect there are a lot in the/. crowd), your primary one should be directly in front of you. Look on the back of your LCD screen if you have one - you will see a mounting area with 4 screws. These are all the same, and you can buy a monitor arm for them.
2) Your knees should be at a 90 degree angle. This might mean a new chair.
3) Your forearms should be parallel to the ground when typing on the keyboard. This might mean a keyboard tray, which is a wise investment.
4) Your forearms should also be parallel to the ground when using the mouse. No putting it on the top of the desk.
5) If you read from documents while you are working, you should seriously consider a copy holder that puts it near eye level (many monitor stands have this feature, or you can get a model that puts the document next to the monitor).
6) Look for ergonomic equipment. For mice, I use a Humanscale mouse, which forces my wrist to be straight when I use it. Trackballs are good for people as well. The split keyboards are very useful for some. You can actually get mice you can operate with your feet as well.
7) Learn to use the mouse with your opposite hand, and trade off.
8) Learn keyboard shortcuts.
I'm not a doctor, don't take this as medical advice, blah blah blah.
I've looked through this treaty, and it appears that the only explicit mention of encryption is that each participating country must ensure that if they have encryption keys needed to help another participating country, they should hand them over...Presumably, the key must be obtained by legal means in country A before it can be given to country B
Nope. From the treaty:
"Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to empower its competent authorities to order any person who has knowledge about the functioning of the computer system or measures applied to protect the computer data therein" [i.e. encryption] "to provide, as is reasonable, the necessary information."
Of course, Slashdot would run a story that debates a treaty with a link to the treaty language itself [privacyinternational.org] because we reject all government actions without even needing to read what they're proposing.
Considering the treaty was clearly linked in the original article (check out the underlined and different colored hyperlink), I kind of thought it was redundant. Guess I underestimated the number of/. readers who comment without reading the original story.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot jumped the shark. This is news? Go ahead, mod me down, I am maxed out. Oh Noes, if I am modded down too far I won't be able to MetaModerate or something. We need to stand up and reclaim this site as the old /., when it was relevant.
I would love to try this out, but as my tiny, high-rpm C: drive is dedicated to my bloated, monopolistic OS, there is no room for anything else. When, oh WHEN will the Google Gods add a path option in the advanced options?
No Palm or Treo works with Vista 64. Any Palm product only has "limited" capability even with Vista 32, and that doesn't even include the capability to install apps. Now how long has Vista been out?
Anything sent to my email address with dots added NEVER gets to me.
My wife too. We both have very early gmail accounts (within the first month or so). Back in the early days, were different people allowed to sign up for different dot-variation names? If so, the obvious fix would have been to remove the dot functionality on those combinations to avoid having email sent to the wrong accounts. Which may be what happened with our accounts. That would suck if true, as missing this functionality is a big loss.
Black hole collisions are theoretically possible, and has been simulated on a Cray
Yes, this is offtopic, but what is really wild is that they simulated that in 1994 on a Cray C90, which has a floating point speed of 16 gigaflops. Back here in 2006: the Playstation 3, a TOY, has a floating point speed of 2 teraflops.
May I reccommend a hush.ai address, as they're offshore.
They used to be. The servers are in Canada now. You know, the Country that tried to pass the Lawful Access bill last session to "compel all telephone and Internet companies to create and maintain infrastructures that are intercept capable and to provide access to basic subscriber contact information such as a name, address or telephone number."
Don't bother using encrypted emails, because if you're not sending anything incriminating, THERE'S NO NEED.
p osts
I love this type of thinking.
Check out the 60 minutes inteview on Echelon:
KROFT: (Voiceover) Is it possible for people like you and I, innocent civilians, to be targeted by Echelon?
Mr. FROST: Not only possible, not only probable, but factual. While I was at CSE, a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a--a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, 'Oh, Danny really bombed last night,' just like that. The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation w--was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.
KROFT: This is not urban legend you're talking about. This actually happened?
Mr. FROST: Factual. Absolutely fact. No legend here.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1543347/
Am I the only one, having a somewhat strong immune system, that is not in the least bit worried about a pandemic?
Actually, this is to your disadvantage, as a strong immune system is probably what is going to kill you. Your immune system could trigger a Cytokine Storm which will basically dissolve your lungs through severe inflammation.
The "Privacy" "Security" and "Sony" icons? Anyone else think that slashdot needs to have a better, all-inclusive Sony icon, ala the classic microsoft borg icon?
And I for one really appreciate it.
The tokens representing your gear are fun, but are not really necessary. The point of True Dungeon is to solve puzzles (mainly). Indeed, the best tokens cannot be bought, but must be found in the dungeon itself as loot. One of the reason I did buy a limited number of tokens this year is I heard it was used to raise cash to build the town area (yes, there was an entire *town* before you went into the dungeon), and I wanted to support what is now Gencon's premier event. And by the way, the town turned out Amazing, full of hidden alleys, shops, etc.
I really can't give you detailed information on the money-making aspects of the event, but I can tell you that True Dungeon costs a _lot_ of money to build and run - It wouldn't be possible to do it without the hard work of many, many volunteers. I, myself, am a volunteer, and as far as I know there are no paid staff at all.
I assume it is *very* expensive, especially since True Dungeon rented out the largest ballroom in the City for the event. This is the kind of thing that in the past only Richard Garriott could afford, and I used to dream of as a kid.
True Dungeon is really made by gamers for gamers.
This is true. The True Dungeon board was holding a virtual gun to the head of the devs to get new tokens, more token runs etc.
It's hard to imagine nowadays what an impact this made when it first came out, because of the GUI. The first shipment of Macs were shipped to three schools if I remember correctly - MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford. There was a huge line on delivery day. The serial numbers from CMU went all the way into the low 3 digits - the one I got was really low; 79 or 179 or something like that. It blew up as soon as I plugged it in. I brought it back and got one that was 600 and something.
This was the first time many of us had seen a GUI, as unlike the guys at Stanford we didn't have a PARC nearby. It is hard to imagine in 2005 what it was like to see a GUI for the first time. I was invited to a pre-release showing a few weeks before, and the small group I was with was stunned. I sold my Apple II the next day to get the money to put in an order for the Mac.
I have a feeling that once this pilot program gets going, it will be simple enough for the State to prepare a tax return whether we ask them to do it or not - just to compare with what we send in. A mini-audit in effect.
As usual, the FA is not as bad as the slashdot headline.
Sigh. My headline as entered was PGP ruled as "evidence of criminal intent"
I don't know how many games of Catan I've played where the dice suddenly seemed to start rolling 2,3, and 4 over and over again then suddenly start rolling a huge long string of 9, 10, 11... Around here the Catan dice are infamous for that behavior.
Um, ALL sets of dice are infamous for clumping behavior. You might want to look at a basic book of statistics.
A famous example of clumping in real life (and how we perceive it) can be demonstrated by convincing two of your friends to perform a little experiment. Have one toss a coin 100 times and write down the results. Have the other write up a "random" assortment of 100 heads and tails that they came up with in their head. Don't let them tell you which person used which method, instead tell them you will figure it out. Ninety-five percent of the time, the person flipping the coin will generate a series of seven or more heads or tails in a row. You almost never see this in the list the other person makes up, as they invariable think that seven or more in a row will never happen.
In terms of what to expect in a game like Settlers, similar clumping of production numbers will occur. Just like the person making up the heads/tails, this will seem extremely unlikely (or really bad/good luck), but it isn't; what seems to be really strange clumping is in fact quite common.
You have to assume weird clumping will happen, and plan for it. For example, consider spreading out your production centers in the early game onto different numbers so this has less of a chance of happening to you. This is especially important if you are playing a strategy that emphasizes cities (i.e. the ore-grain strategy), as you will have less production centers (and by extension, be located next to fewer production numbers) to begin with, and therefore are at a greater risk from clumping.
Apparently Kerry doesn't like the lights either.
Maybe not, but Kerry has years of experience with them in the Senate. They use the same system.
I usually don't even check out these modding stories, but I am glad I looked at this one. It's the most beautiful case I have ever seen. Drop-dead amazing. Damn I want one.
For those of you that don't have Gmail yet, there is a little "Report Spam" button you can use to, well, report spam. When Gmail gets a few million users, and even 1% use this little button, you are going to see the spam detect rate skyrocket.
Second page of that thread says it's a joke.
Another post says that the devs wouldn't make Jawas a player species because "they are supposed to be non-travelers and you cannot really customize a character that doesn't have a face", which seems to bolster the joke theory.
Gmail Team to me
More options 10:02am (31 minutes ago)
Hello,
Thank you for your message and bug report regarding the incorrect quota
amount listed in your Gmail account.
As always, each Gmail user is offered 1,000 megabytes (MB) of storage.
We apologize for any confusion this issue may have caused. We are aware of
this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution.
In the meantime, sending and receiving email in your Gmail account will
reset your storage limit counter to 1,000 MB. We appreciate your patience
during our limited test period, and we thank you for taking the time to
send us your feedback and concerns.
We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
Mine is back down to a gig now. My theory is they were testing the future paid premium service. Hell, even if I didn't need a terabyte, I would pay for the premium service just for the bragging rights.
Lots of the 802.11g products that have been manufactured in the last few months 802.11g are able to be firmware upgraded to 802.11i. The big question is if this will be considered "support" from MS. I'm going to be pretty pissed if I am not going to be running AES encryption because MS decided to dump its customers.
According to calculations by the IEE, in a paper about the Google cluster, a rack with 88 dual-CPU machines used to cost about $278,000
Um, don't you think if you were buying 899 racks you might actually, you know, negotiate for a better price?
This isn't the only assumption in your analysis, and the problems with them will be compounded. What's the point of this, really?
I was developing numbness in my mousing hand at work, was sent to workers comp, and found out I had tendinitis (lucky it was only that). A few things I found out:
/. crowd), your primary one should be directly in front of you. Look on the back of your LCD screen if you have one - you will see a mounting area with 4 screws. These are all the same, and you can buy a monitor arm for them.
1) The computer screen should be directly in front of you, at eye level. Should be obvious, but quite a few people don't do it. If you are one of the dual-screen types (I expect there are a lot in the
2) Your knees should be at a 90 degree angle. This might mean a new chair.
3) Your forearms should be parallel to the ground when typing on the keyboard. This might mean a keyboard tray, which is a wise investment.
4) Your forearms should also be parallel to the ground when using the mouse. No putting it on the top of the desk.
5) If you read from documents while you are working, you should seriously consider a copy holder that puts it near eye level (many monitor stands have this feature, or you can get a model that puts the document next to the monitor).
6) Look for ergonomic equipment. For mice, I use a Humanscale mouse, which forces my wrist to be straight when I use it. Trackballs are good for people as well. The split keyboards are very useful for some. You can actually get mice you can operate with your feet as well.
7) Learn to use the mouse with your opposite hand, and trade off.
8) Learn keyboard shortcuts.
I'm not a doctor, don't take this as medical advice, blah blah blah.
I've looked through this treaty, and it appears that the only explicit mention of encryption is that each participating country must ensure that if they have encryption keys needed to help another participating country, they should hand them over...Presumably, the key must be obtained by legal means in country A before it can be given to country B
Nope. From the treaty:
"Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to empower its competent authorities to order any person who has knowledge about the functioning of the computer system or measures applied to protect the computer data therein" [i.e. encryption] "to provide, as is reasonable, the necessary information."
Of course, Slashdot would run a story that debates a treaty with a link to the treaty language itself [privacyinternational.org] because we reject all government actions without even needing to read what they're proposing.
/. readers who comment without reading the original story.
Considering the treaty was clearly linked in the original article (check out the underlined and different colored hyperlink), I kind of thought it was redundant. Guess I underestimated the number of