First of all, I am nor suprised by any of this, because if you have a legit 100000/year income, you can get yourself a 7-series BMW, along with a bunch of other nice stuff. I think a lot of the issue is that many high-paying jobs require regular computer usage -- for intraoffice communication, making databases, whatever. THAT is probably the main reason people get computers at home -- 'cause they want to be able to do all the same things. I wouldn't dream about writing a paper without a computer to do it on, and I think that if I had a kid, I would make damn sure he/she had all the same benefits as I had. The problem here isn't that blacks don't want to use comptuers or whatever. It's that when you flip burgers, or haul luggage at the airport, you don't get to use a computer at work, and therefore you don't really know what to do with one at home, especially when you can get cable TV and a Sega console. The problem isn't racial at all, it is economic, and I really don't like it when somebody confuses the two.
And that economic problem ain't gonna be solved anytime soon, and I don't even know who might go about finding someone to think of how it might be done 20 years from now.
Re:They work when people stop calling them compute
on
Wearable PCs
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· Score: 1
What else are you going to call it? A calculator? a word processor? a telephone? Those are all taken, and all of those serve on specific function. The thing about a computer is that it can do almost anything, and limiting it to "Something that drives me around" or "something that lets me talk to people" is bad. The examples with cars and stuff are backwards -- these are older devices that got computers added to them. Then again, maybe you can call it a "control panel" and have a couple of terminals hanging on your walls, kind of like in the halls of the Enterprize, and they would show the status of the laundry, what channel your teenager is watching a 1am in the morning, a record of your traffic violations... Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather walk up to something and push buttons on it than walk around IN something. As a side note, it would be neat if the energy generated by walking and breathing could be used to power the wearable.
supercomputer in your armpit
on
Wearable PCs
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· Score: 1
The only question is how comfortable would it be to wear? I can handle having a battery attached to my belt, and *maybe* a pair of glasses that aren't too heavy that contain a small screen, but being loaded down with a full Borg armor suit can't be too appealing. It's a nice idea, but I'd rather just sit down and do my typing, as opposed to blindly stagger around on the street playing Quake and then getting hit by a bus 'cause I'm not paying any attention to where I'm walking.
On other other hand, going to the grocery store would be a lot more fun -- just imagine how freaked out the old lady that gives out free samples of ice cream would be.
In a couple of years, linux might be running some x86 thing, but it'll be from AMD and not Intel, if the whole K7 thing works as well as it possibly could. Just a side note. On the other hand, if you write all your programs in Java, you can use whatever OS/platform you want, 'cause where Linux is lacking, something else can take over. But it will be slower 'cause of the extra layer, which means that even though we'll be running 2GHz systems, Netscape (or whatever) will still take 10 seconds to load.
And if you're working on an encryption protocol on your remote shell, and probably using ssh to do it... Man, that'd get messy:) And what if you were using a shell on CyberYugo's server? you know, that thing that is its own country after they get 5 million ppl or something?
The really icky part would be collecting all those fruit flies and other insects, as well as poisonous spiders and very large snakes. Noah must have spent an awful lot of time in the African and South American jungles collecting worms and stuff. And let's not forget about every single species of E.Coli there is... But then again, those can live in the rotten wood or something. Must have been a pretty nasty job:)
I hate to say this, but I don't think that this is a real problem that you're having. Arguing over 50 megs seems kind of silly these days. In any case, I think that this whole notation thing is rather silly. I'm quite used to reading 100MB on a drive and seeing not 2*whatever bytes. YOu know, I just don't think it's worth changing notation for. BEsides, think of all the old programs that people still use that would use the old notation instead of the new -- it would be utter chaos, much worse than right now. I'm completely against the change 'cause I'm smart enough to figure out that some places use 2^10 and others use 10^2 and not be flustered.
The review here says that they plan to add a marketing department. If you remember, that's what brought down NirvanaCo, Dilber's employer-for-a-show. Hope they know what they're doing:)
Re:The best part of BWP..
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 1
The real part that bugged me about the movie was that my girlfriend got a headache from the cameras jumping around. I loved it, though:)
As a side note, I saw Sixth Sense yesterday, and the people next to me were talking all the way through it, somewhere in the back there was a little baby that kept crying and getting smacked, a guy in front of me was crinkling some candy wrapper until his wife took it away... Man, that's one of the benefits of DVD -- you sit at home, the quality's just about the same, and you don't have a bunch of stupid-ass interruptions. (Unless ofcourse you're in a dorm room.(
I think that for the next year, all major elections should be hosted by slashdot, so we can see what happens when we get a good, clean, evenly distributed sample of voters;)
You know, there is a better side to all of this. Remember the last time you went to a restaurant, and got really crappy service? Or you were doing something that involved other people whom you couldn't understand because they were speaking in a horribly disfigured way? All your problems are solved -- no people, just some radio buttons and checkboxes (With fudge/Plain) and you're fine! Then when there's a widespread package delivery system, and a keyboard that can scan your fingers for what they would be typing if they were to move like you think they would if you made them, you could sit in a big chair and be fed extra-thick squishies through a straw.
subdermal antennas? Blah! What we need is a device that scans your brain for what you're thinking, and properly plans your daily activities. Great for management of traffic on highways, the internet, as well as general ppl-having. Next, the device could use unused brain cycles to process data. Then we could be like the borg.
You can already use your credit card to buy groceries, tools, computers, music, etc etc. I am not in favor of completely eliminating cash because I don't want the credit company to know every purchase I have made, and I'm sure that anybody who performs a small service for somebody else (like the kid down the street who mows your lawn) would much rather not pay taxes on the 5 bucks you give him for doing your front yard.
My ISP carries all those alt.binaries.* pr0n newsgroups, and it seems to mean that at least somebody on the administration staff likes them, which means they are around to stay. In any case, it won't become irrelevant because the people who run ISPs still read newsgroups (I'm hoping). So nothing is going anywhere, I'm pretty sure.
a geek is interested in a subject that has productive value while a nerd concerns him/herself with subjects that have very little real-world application
There's already a device out there call the MindDrive, I think. It's a game-pointing device that you put one of your fingers into, and by thinking "left" or "right" you can make the character on the screen go in that direction. Hypothetically. Real performace comes down to this: at CompUSA, the thing was hooked up to some skiing game, where you have to go left and right to avoid obstacles. The skier indiscriminantly twitches, and constantly changes directions, but when you're thinking "left" really hard, the twitching has a net movement to the left, and vice versa. Granted, with more practice, I'm sure it's possible to go in *gasp* all 4 directions. However, at this point, this isn't an effective way of gathering data from a human, especially when all 7 or 8 bits have to be right, consistently, over thousands of trials.
A lot of stuff in linux is completely counterintuitive from ther perspective of a dos/windows3.1/win95 user. I speak from experience: A couple of years ago, I downloaded slakware 'cause my dad said it would be a good idea 'cause one of his coworkers said that linux is cool. Once I got the monster running, got the long prompt, etc. I logged in as root... and didn't know what to do with it. How the hell are you supposed to know that startx is the thing you run to run x, and what if ls doesn't work, and you're stuck with dir, and it doesn't accept the command 'cause there isn't an alias in/etc/bashrc or wherever. Recently I installed Debian 2.1, and it is a lot better about that kind of stuff. Partitioning will still confuse a lot of people no matter what. The biggest problem with the Debian install is the 100 questions you have to answer while it's setting up the packages, and for anybody who doesn't know what they're doing, that can be very frustrating. Also, if you have a poorly supported vid card, you need to find drivers for it in the SUSE distribution, and download libgz while you're at it. Anyway, with the windows installation, it doesn't ask you nearly as many technical questions. "What timezone are you in" and "What parameters do you want for gpm" are 2 different things:)
So yes, installation is hard for somebody who hasn't done it at least 5 times before. After that it's easy. And after you install everything, you still need to have some kind of idea about how the system works to really make it work for you. It's not a rational alternative to put on the desktops of accountants who don't read slashdot.
I think the way interlocking works is that the movie actually comes on sevral reels that are contiguous frame to frame, with each one circa 15 minutes in length. Thereby, every quarter of an hour, they can start a new showing. If this is accurate, then these 'complicated feeds' are nothing more than high-school students taking a box from one projector and plugging it into the next one.
Ok, so now who is having the problem distinguishing between reality and make-believe?
All the schizophreniacs out there. Which brings me back to the point -- has the kid had a history of being nuts? 14-20 IS (I believe) the normal age of onset of schizophrenia.
That reminds me of that time when the CIA had an opening for Director of Operations or some such position. It came down to 3 candidates. The last test was that they would be given a gun, and told to enter a room and shoot their spouse. So the first guy comes into the room, closes the door behind him... then a couple of minutes later comes back and says 'I just couldn't do it.' Then the second guy does the same thing. The third finalist is a woman. She goes into the room, closes the door behind her. All of a sudden you hear 2 gunshots, and then several more. Then a lot of thrashing and breaking-sounds, screams of pain, etc. Finally it gets quiet, and the woman comes out of the door, saying "Why didn't you tell me they were blanks? I had to beat him to death with a chair!"
I wonder if jokes like that would influence somebody to beat the crap out of somebody else.... hm...
This brings up the same point brought up in that article about college students suing their college for failing classes, about how a lot of people are stupid, and that there's no good way of dealing with it. I'd just like to know if the kid had some kind of psychological problems that went untreated, or if his family has an inbred-stupidity problem or something.
mp3 reminds me of the jpeg format -- compression isn't lossless, but I can't tell the difference, so I don't care. I said this a month or two ago, but I wrote an mp3-compressed and decompressed track to a CD, and I couldn't tell the two apart, therefore quality isn't an issue. The other thing is that jpeg didn't seem to be too popular before computers got fast enough to display the format faster relatively quickly. Granted, you're not seeing jpeg-based photo-CD's, but most of the pics out there are in jpeg. Therefore, I don't see why anybody thinks mp3 is doomed. All we need now is a dvd-based iso9660-reading mp3 player for the car, and a dvd-r for the computer. All of your cd's on one convenient package.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, maybe if we all use the Think method, all our problems will go away.
First of all, I am nor suprised by any of this, because if you have a legit 100000/year income, you can get yourself a 7-series BMW, along with a bunch of other nice stuff.
I think a lot of the issue is that many high-paying jobs require regular computer usage -- for intraoffice communication, making databases, whatever. THAT is probably the main reason people get computers at home -- 'cause they want to be able to do all the same things. I wouldn't dream about writing a paper without a computer to do it on, and I think that if I had a kid, I would make damn sure he/she had all the same benefits as I had. The problem here isn't that blacks don't want to use comptuers or whatever. It's that when you flip burgers, or haul luggage at the airport, you don't get to use a computer at work, and therefore you don't really know what to do with one at home, especially when you can get cable TV and a Sega console. The problem isn't racial at all, it is economic, and I really don't like it when somebody confuses the two.
And that economic problem ain't gonna be solved anytime soon, and I don't even know who might go about finding someone to think of how it might be done 20 years from now.
What else are you going to call it? A calculator? a word processor? a telephone? Those are all taken, and all of those serve on specific function. The thing about a computer is that it can do almost anything, and limiting it to "Something that drives me around" or "something that lets me talk to people" is bad. The examples with cars and stuff are backwards -- these are older devices that got computers added to them.
Then again, maybe you can call it a "control panel" and have a couple of terminals hanging on your walls, kind of like in the halls of the Enterprize, and they would show the status of the laundry, what channel your teenager is watching a 1am in the morning, a record of your traffic violations... Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather walk up to something and push buttons on it than walk around IN something.
As a side note, it would be neat if the energy generated by walking and breathing could be used to power the wearable.
The only question is how comfortable would it be to wear? I can handle having a battery attached to my belt, and *maybe* a pair of glasses that aren't too heavy that contain a small screen, but being loaded down with a full Borg armor suit can't be too appealing. It's a nice idea, but I'd rather just sit down and do my typing, as opposed to blindly stagger around on the street playing Quake and then getting hit by a bus 'cause I'm not paying any attention to where I'm walking.
On other other hand, going to the grocery store would be a lot more fun -- just imagine how freaked out the old lady that gives out free samples of ice cream would be.
In a couple of years, linux might be running some x86 thing, but it'll be from AMD and not Intel, if the whole K7 thing works as well as it possibly could. Just a side note.
On the other hand, if you write all your programs in Java, you can use whatever OS/platform you want, 'cause where Linux is lacking, something else can take over. But it will be slower 'cause of the extra layer, which means that even though we'll be running 2GHz systems, Netscape (or whatever) will still take 10 seconds to load.
And if you're working on an encryption protocol on your remote shell, and probably using ssh to do it... Man, that'd get messy :)
And what if you were using a shell on CyberYugo's server? you know, that thing that is its own country after they get 5 million ppl or something?
The really icky part would be collecting all those fruit flies and other insects, as well as poisonous spiders and very large snakes. Noah must have spent an awful lot of time in the African and South American jungles collecting worms and stuff. And let's not forget about every single species of E.Coli there is... But then again, those can live in the rotten wood or something. Must have been a pretty nasty job :)
I hate to say this, but I don't think that this is a real problem that you're having. Arguing over 50 megs seems kind of silly these days. In any case, I think that this whole notation thing is rather silly. I'm quite used to reading 100MB on a drive and seeing not 2*whatever bytes. YOu know, I just don't think it's worth changing notation for. BEsides, think of all the old programs that people still use that would use the old notation instead of the new -- it would be utter chaos, much worse than right now. I'm completely against the change 'cause I'm smart enough to figure out that some places use 2^10 and others use 10^2 and not be flustered.
The review here says that they plan to add a marketing department. If you remember, that's what brought down NirvanaCo, Dilber's employer-for-a-show. Hope they know what they're doing :)
The real part that bugged me about the movie was that my girlfriend got a headache from the cameras jumping around. I loved it, though :)
As a side note, I saw Sixth Sense yesterday, and the people next to me were talking all the way through it, somewhere in the back there was a little baby that kept crying and getting smacked, a guy in front of me was crinkling some candy wrapper until his wife took it away... Man, that's one of the benefits of DVD -- you sit at home, the quality's just about the same, and you don't have a bunch of stupid-ass interruptions. (Unless ofcourse you're in a dorm room.(
I think that for the next year, all major elections should be hosted by slashdot, so we can see what happens when we get a good, clean, evenly distributed sample of voters ;)
You know, there is a better side to all of this. Remember the last time you went to a restaurant, and got really crappy service? Or you were doing something that involved other people whom you couldn't understand because they were speaking in a horribly disfigured way?
All your problems are solved -- no people, just some radio buttons and checkboxes (With fudge/Plain) and you're fine! Then when there's a widespread package delivery system, and a keyboard that can scan your fingers for what they would be typing if they were to move like you think they would if you made them, you could sit in a big chair and be fed extra-thick squishies through a straw.
subdermal antennas? Blah! What we need is a device that scans your brain for what you're thinking, and properly plans your daily activities. Great for management of traffic on highways, the internet, as well as general ppl-having. Next, the device could use unused brain cycles to process data. Then we could be like the borg.
You can already use your credit card to buy groceries, tools, computers, music, etc etc. I am not in favor of completely eliminating cash because I don't want the credit company to know every purchase I have made, and I'm sure that anybody who performs a small service for somebody else (like the kid down the street who mows your lawn) would much rather not pay taxes on the 5 bucks you give him for doing your front yard.
My ISP carries all those alt.binaries.* pr0n newsgroups, and it seems to mean that at least somebody on the administration staff likes them, which means they are around to stay. In any case, it won't become irrelevant because the people who run ISPs still read newsgroups (I'm hoping). So nothing is going anywhere, I'm pretty sure.
I disagree -- I think the perfect market for it is 18.5 - 19 years of age. These people can get tickets AND enjoy the movie in all its goodness.
a geek is interested in a subject that has productive value while a nerd concerns him/herself with subjects that have very little real-world application
Ah, but where do dorks come in?
There's already a device out there call the MindDrive, I think. It's a game-pointing device that you put one of your fingers into, and by thinking "left" or "right" you can make the character on the screen go in that direction. Hypothetically. Real performace comes down to this: at CompUSA, the thing was hooked up to some skiing game, where you have to go left and right to avoid obstacles. The skier indiscriminantly twitches, and constantly changes directions, but when you're thinking "left" really hard, the twitching has a net movement to the left, and vice versa. Granted, with more practice, I'm sure it's possible to go in *gasp* all 4 directions. However, at this point, this isn't an effective way of gathering data from a human, especially when all 7 or 8 bits have to be right, consistently, over thousands of trials.
A lot of stuff in linux is completely counterintuitive from ther perspective of a dos/windows3.1/win95 user. I speak from experience: A couple of years ago, I downloaded slakware 'cause my dad said it would be a good idea 'cause one of his coworkers said that linux is cool. Once I got the monster running, got the long prompt, etc. I logged in as root... and didn't know what to do with it. How the hell are you supposed to know that startx is the thing you run to run x, and what if ls doesn't work, and you're stuck with dir, and it doesn't accept the command 'cause there isn't an alias in /etc/bashrc or wherever. :)
Recently I installed Debian 2.1, and it is a lot better about that kind of stuff. Partitioning will still confuse a lot of people no matter what. The biggest problem with the Debian install is the 100 questions you have to answer while it's setting up the packages, and for anybody who doesn't know what they're doing, that can be very frustrating. Also, if you have a poorly supported vid card, you need to find drivers for it in the SUSE distribution, and download libgz while you're at it. Anyway, with the windows installation, it doesn't ask you nearly as many technical questions. "What timezone are you in" and "What parameters do you want for gpm" are 2 different things
So yes, installation is hard for somebody who hasn't done it at least 5 times before. After that it's easy. And after you install everything, you still need to have some kind of idea about how the system works to really make it work for you. It's not a rational alternative to put on the desktops of accountants who don't read slashdot.
Can't play minesweeper? I don't think so :)
Most linux distro's come with hundreds, if not thousands (at least a couple) of games.
I think the way interlocking works is that the movie actually comes on sevral reels that are contiguous frame to frame, with each one circa 15 minutes in length. Thereby, every quarter of an hour, they can start a new showing. If this is accurate, then these 'complicated feeds' are nothing more than high-school students taking a box from one projector and plugging it into the next one.
Ok, so now who is having the problem distinguishing between reality and make-believe?
All the schizophreniacs out there.
Which brings me back to the point -- has the kid had a history of being nuts? 14-20 IS (I believe) the normal age of onset of schizophrenia.
Heh... That's damn funny.
That reminds me of that time when the CIA had an opening for Director of Operations or some such position. It came down to 3 candidates. The last test was that they would be given a gun, and told to enter a room and shoot their spouse. So the first guy comes into the room, closes the door behind him... then a couple of minutes later comes back and says 'I just couldn't do it.' Then the second guy does the same thing. The third finalist is a woman. She goes into the room, closes the door behind her. All of a sudden you hear 2 gunshots, and then several more. Then a lot of thrashing and breaking-sounds, screams of pain, etc. Finally it gets quiet, and the woman comes out of the door, saying "Why didn't you tell me they were blanks? I had to beat him to death with a chair!"
I wonder if jokes like that would influence somebody to beat the crap out of somebody else.... hm...
This brings up the same point brought up in that article about college students suing their college for failing classes, about how a lot of people are stupid, and that there's no good way of dealing with it.
I'd just like to know if the kid had some kind of psychological problems that went untreated, or if his family has an inbred-stupidity problem or something.
mp3 reminds me of the jpeg format -- compression isn't lossless, but I can't tell the difference, so I don't care. I said this a month or two ago, but I wrote an mp3-compressed and decompressed track to a CD, and I couldn't tell the two apart, therefore quality isn't an issue.
The other thing is that jpeg didn't seem to be too popular before computers got fast enough to display the format faster relatively quickly. Granted, you're not seeing jpeg-based photo-CD's, but most of the pics out there are in jpeg. Therefore, I don't see why anybody thinks mp3 is doomed.
All we need now is a dvd-based iso9660-reading mp3 player for the car, and a dvd-r for the computer. All of your cd's on one convenient package.