Especially for a google property, I find their flash player to be of really poor quality. The seek bar (or whatever it's called) never goes to where you drop it, and there are really only a handful of places you can seek to if you want to see a part over again. It seems like every other flash video player I've come across behaves as I'd expect it to.
And it's annoying as hell to have the dock-esque related videos pop up any time my mouse goes near the vid.
Mind you, if ISO is so vulnerable this does beg the question 'is it still relevant?' Maybe they're just better for things like high voltage electrical connections or things that are otherwise very safety-oriented (read: can catch on fire).
When it comes to things that could save nation-states guhzillions of dollars and maybe use that money for something more important...
Steve Ballmer will throw a chair (metaphorically) at anyone who gets in the way of his profits.
I remember a requirement for the computers merit badge was to explain why it is wrong to make copies of games and commercial software. I wasn't fooled for a moment that the argument of piracy destroying software was valid, so I said something along the lines of paying for software that makes your business operate makes more sense than gaming companies losing over casual piracy.
My friends and I would distribute games where everyone pays for the games they individually contribute. We just end up buying more games and learning about games we wouldn't have known about while buying future games from the same publisher/developer. Our kid money didn't carry the same weight as adults with full-time jobs (and less time to play as many games as we did), so it only made sense to pool together to maximize our gaming dollar. Despite the technical occurrences of piracy, all the money that sierra, lucasarts, bullfrog, interplay, electronic arts, sega, and nintendo (to name but a few) got from us certainly didn't hurt them any.
For my two cents, I don't think that the BSA's homosexual discrimination policy is particularly brave.
well, it was more my intent to be funny in reference to the "640k should be enough for anybody" quote.
But to be serious, that was 20 years ago and think of how much change will occur 20 years from now.
20 years ago: wow - 4 megs of ram is so much! I already have enough to have all my finances in spreadsheets and the text of so many books!
Let your imagination rub wild for a moment: What level of detail is hd video compared to an entire 3d environment with video textures? Consider data for tactile feedback and environmental effects like smell and climate. What if instead of an mp3 you have a music track with each instrument and effect independent so that you can emphasize what you want to hear, or even multiple vocal and instrument tracks so you don't get tired of hearing the same recording over and over?
Why have dumb AI, when you can have an aquarium program with realistic brain functions? Tap on the monitor and go "fishee fishee!" without the aquarium staff glaring at you.
Or y'know, do nuclear detonation experiments for the science fair.
What if instead of photos of your departed loved ones you have a holodeck experience you can cherish?
I could go on like this, but perhaps you get the idea by now.
pardon me for being such a math nerd, but I enjoy it so:
Each of those may be connected to 10^4 other neurons, so the total number of connections is about 10^15.
You're counting a lot of connections more than once (see permutations), not to mention your perilous assumption that a neural connection would only consume one byte in the hypothetical model.
If each one takes as much storage as a 5 Gb DVD, and IMDB has 400,000 movies listed [imdb.com], then that's a total of 2x10^15 bytes, which is 50 bits. That's 16,000 times smaller than a 64-bit address space.
Firstly, what you mean is GB(bytes) not Gb(bits). 2e15 bytes would need a 51-bit address space, and 16 exabytes is a little over 9223 times 2e15 bytes.
I love the daily show and the colbert report. I had been watch TDS since cason daily was hosting it even. Two years ago I was paying $40 a month for essentially those two shows.
But I quit watching during the writer strike and coincidentally I moved and started working more during that same time.
When the episodes had come back, I didn't get the memo and didn't want to go through the hassle of catching up on the week or so of shows I'd missed using bittorrent.
So I just quit watching. To viacom: you want to know why? Because it would just kill me to watch something so good by myself (or occasionally with a lady) and not be able to send friends links to particular segments on youtube. You want to selfishly hoard all your copyrighted content? Fine by me. I just won't watch it (even though I'm paying for it in some way). I won't tell my friends about it. And I won't buy anything on the commercials I'm not seeing.
Jon and Stephen could do better. Personally I'd like to see them operate without viacom and have control over the content, but I know the challenges in making that work and making it profitable.
seriously, what specifically are strong features for a language? ANY language, not just php,perl,c,java,python,ruby,prolog, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
I find php interesting for being interpreted and therefore having the ability to call functions by name at runtime. Is this actually useful? Not to me, but maybe I don't know a good application for that feature.
Semaphore constructs, useful base libraries, concise solutions to common problems...
I'm really curious to know, slashdot audience, what FEATURES make languages good or useful, and in what languages do you find these features?
your point is interesting, but this project was hardly a gamble.
If he had held out for more money, they would have found someone else to do the work, which supports his argument of blaming the union.
Personally, I think he should be glowing over the fame and recognition. The 100k is just a sweet bonus!
As others have mentioned, there is waaaaay more talent that went into producing the wonder that is gta4 beyond the voice actors (who are also very talented). It's doubtful that they were paid on the same scale, but they are sure to find recognition as well.
As for movie actors being paid obscenely? I'm voting with my wallet by watching less movies (or waiting for them to be available cheaply) and spending more time with video games. Perhaps if the studios paid the major actors less and reduced the admission price, they'd see less "customer feedback" in terms of piracy. As it is, I'm paying too much for quality low-budget films to sponsor the high-budget crap hollywood stamps out.
Sorry to reply with a personal story, but I once had a server in a secured facility in the downtown of a major city. I signed up with the place because on their web site it said "you get 24 hour secured access to your server". Amongst the many false advertisements, they couldn't offer me this because they didn't want commoners such as their paying customers to run amok in the data center.
So I take off on one columbus day weekend for a 3-day holiday. That friday night (midnight on a saturday), they power down my machine, move it to a different rack, plug in the wrong network port, and forget to power it back on.
I called on the monday at 7:00pm and mention there is a problem and ask if I can come check it out (20 minutes walk away from where I am) or if they can look at it. Since it's after hours, they say I can come in at 9:00 the next morning or PAY to have someone look at it.
So I go in the next morning to find out what had happened, fix it, then get on the phone with them about how they violated my contract in so many different ways while exhibiting gross negligence.
I'm able to get out of my contract, which had renewed itself after one year (this is called an evergreeen clause, NEVER sign one), but they were extremely resistant to refund my money, let alone credit me for the downtime or violations of their contract and service level agreement. I did, after two months, get back the money I had paid for the 5 days in that month I actually had service.
So, with all the building access, video monitors, locked entries, and staffed facilities where they don't let their paying customers come in unannounced or in the evening - my security was thoroughly compromised by their great incompetence.
Oh and prior to this they accidentally tripped power to the whole floor and didn't feel like mentioning it to me.
The longer version of this story contains more details of outrageous "are you kidding me?" moments.
point: go with a data center you can trust who has real people that will work to solve your problems instead of passing you around to people who can't help you. Also watch out for anyone jerking you around in sales or with contracts.
You know, I fall in with the opinions of how they haven't made a good album since the self-titled one and how the anti-napster thing was a boneheaded move.
But honestly, if they make some music more true to their roots, or at least songs that rock harder than Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone", then I think I can listen to it.
Just because the metric system exists, it does not mean that the Imperial system should cease to exist. The practical applications of the "inferior" standard still exist, so it makes no sense to bitch and moan about it. I realize that the Imperial system of units is so entrenched that it's not going away any time soon. What I don't get is why mass is quantified in pounds and not slugs. And why don't metric-using folks quantify their weight in newtons?
For a real head-spin, check out the wikipedia article on pound mass. Here's a quote: "Historically, in different parts of the world, at different points in time, and for different applications, the pound (or its translation) has referred to broadly similar but not identical standards of mass or weight."
I posted this comment on an earlier story. I looked at the iso website here and found this little gem:
Standards ensure desirable characteristics of products and services such as quality, environmental friendliness, safety, reliability, efficiency and interchangeability - and at an economical cost.
When products and services meet our expectations, we tend to take this for granted and be unaware of the role of standards. However, when standards are absent, we soon notice. We soon care when products turn out to be of poor quality, do not fit, are incompatible with equipment that we already have, are unreliable or dangerous.
When products, systems, machinery and devices work well and safely, it is often because they meet standards. And the organization responsible for many thousands of the standards which benefit the world is ISO.
saying that open standards are intended to save money sounds overly simplistic. I looked at the iso website here and found this little gem:
Standards ensure desirable characteristics of products and services such as quality, environmental friendliness, safety, reliability, efficiency and interchangeability - and at an economical cost.
When products and services meet our expectations, we tend to take this for granted and be unaware of the role of standards. However, when standards are absent, we soon notice. We soon care when products turn out to be of poor quality, do not fit, are incompatible with equipment that we already have, are unreliable or dangerous.
When products, systems, machinery and devices work well and safely, it is often because they meet standards. And the organization responsible for many thousands of the standards which benefit the world is ISO.
As others have commented, you could not be more wrong about the teardrop attack. Teardrop worked by fragmenting a tcp packet such that when your tcp/ip stack reassembled it, it would buffer overflow and usually just crash the system.
I had LOTS of fun with this back in '96 - (pre-google) I'd search for sites using the "powered by backoffice" image, which made certain that it was vulnerable to this.
I just saw this for the first time on a delta flight. I was really excited to see tux in the upper left while all the kernel messages ran down the little screen and seeing this happen on everyone else's screen. Every screen was not showing the exact same thing at the same time, so I'm thinking every seat has its own virtual machine. It seemed to be running an older version of redhat, but I don't remember what specifically I saw.
I thought it would be really cool to just play chess to pass the time until I tried and it wanted to charge me $5 for doing that.
What a great comment! I was 8 when the first sound blaster came out, and I was very enthusiastic about PC gaming at the time. I of course followed up with my awareness and attention to the cards creative labs came out with following the SB1, but never really knew as much about it as I learned reading your post just now. Thanks!
Slashdot Mirror
Especially for a google property, I find their flash player to be of really poor quality. The seek bar (or whatever it's called) never goes to where you drop it, and there are really only a handful of places you can seek to if you want to see a part over again. It seems like every other flash video player I've come across behaves as I'd expect it to.
And it's annoying as hell to have the dock-esque related videos pop up any time my mouse goes near the vid.
When it comes to things that could save nation-states guhzillions of dollars and maybe use that money for something more important...
Steve Ballmer will throw a chair (metaphorically) at anyone who gets in the way of his profits.
I remember a requirement for the computers merit badge was to explain why it is wrong to make copies of games and commercial software. I wasn't fooled for a moment that the argument of piracy destroying software was valid, so I said something along the lines of paying for software that makes your business operate makes more sense than gaming companies losing over casual piracy.
My friends and I would distribute games where everyone pays for the games they individually contribute. We just end up buying more games and learning about games we wouldn't have known about while buying future games from the same publisher/developer. Our kid money didn't carry the same weight as adults with full-time jobs (and less time to play as many games as we did), so it only made sense to pool together to maximize our gaming dollar. Despite the technical occurrences of piracy, all the money that sierra, lucasarts, bullfrog, interplay, electronic arts, sega, and nintendo (to name but a few) got from us certainly didn't hurt them any.
For my two cents, I don't think that the BSA's homosexual discrimination policy is particularly brave.
well, it was more my intent to be funny in reference to the "640k should be enough for anybody" quote.
But to be serious, that was 20 years ago and think of how much change will occur 20 years from now.
20 years ago: wow - 4 megs of ram is so much! I already have enough to have all my finances in spreadsheets and the text of so many books!
Let your imagination rub wild for a moment: What level of detail is hd video compared to an entire 3d environment with video textures? Consider data for tactile feedback and environmental effects like smell and climate. What if instead of an mp3 you have a music track with each instrument and effect independent so that you can emphasize what you want to hear, or even multiple vocal and instrument tracks so you don't get tired of hearing the same recording over and over?
Why have dumb AI, when you can have an aquarium program with realistic brain functions? Tap on the monitor and go "fishee fishee!" without the aquarium staff glaring at you.
Or y'know, do nuclear detonation experiments for the science fair.
What if instead of photos of your departed loved ones you have a holodeck experience you can cherish?
I could go on like this, but perhaps you get the idea by now.
this is really neat, but the mandarin font shows boxes because I don't have a suitable font. Any ideas on how to fix this?
pardon me for being such a math nerd, but I enjoy it so:
Each of those may be connected to 10^4 other neurons, so the total number of connections is about 10^15.
You're counting a lot of connections more than once (see permutations), not to mention your perilous assumption that a neural connection would only consume one byte in the hypothetical model.
If each one takes as much storage as a 5 Gb DVD, and IMDB has 400,000 movies listed [imdb.com], then that's a total of 2x10^15 bytes, which is 50 bits. That's 16,000 times smaller than a 64-bit address space.
Firstly, what you mean is GB(bytes) not Gb(bits). 2e15 bytes would need a 51-bit address space, and 16 exabytes is a little over 9223 times 2e15 bytes.
I like the direction of your ideas though.
y'know, in the future we'll look back on this time and laugh at how silly it was to say "16 exabytes should be enough for anyone"
lol! That's who I was thinking of - I remember an episode where craig ferguson hi-fived jon over taking shows away from him.
I love the daily show and the colbert report. I had been watch TDS since cason daily was hosting it even. Two years ago I was paying $40 a month for essentially those two shows.
But I quit watching during the writer strike and coincidentally I moved and started working more during that same time.
When the episodes had come back, I didn't get the memo and didn't want to go through the hassle of catching up on the week or so of shows I'd missed using bittorrent.
So I just quit watching. To viacom: you want to know why? Because it would just kill me to watch something so good by myself (or occasionally with a lady) and not be able to send friends links to particular segments on youtube. You want to selfishly hoard all your copyrighted content? Fine by me. I just won't watch it (even though I'm paying for it in some way). I won't tell my friends about it. And I won't buy anything on the commercials I'm not seeing.
Jon and Stephen could do better. Personally I'd like to see them operate without viacom and have control over the content, but I know the challenges in making that work and making it profitable.
seriously, what specifically are strong features for a language? ANY language, not just php,perl,c,java,python,ruby,prolog, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
I find php interesting for being interpreted and therefore having the ability to call functions by name at runtime. Is this actually useful? Not to me, but maybe I don't know a good application for that feature.
Semaphore constructs, useful base libraries, concise solutions to common problems...
I'm really curious to know, slashdot audience, what FEATURES make languages good or useful, and in what languages do you find these features?
Eminent Domain, sucka!
your point is interesting, but this project was hardly a gamble.
If he had held out for more money, they would have found someone else to do the work, which supports his argument of blaming the union.
Personally, I think he should be glowing over the fame and recognition. The 100k is just a sweet bonus!
As others have mentioned, there is waaaaay more talent that went into producing the wonder that is gta4 beyond the voice actors (who are also very talented). It's doubtful that they were paid on the same scale, but they are sure to find recognition as well.
As for movie actors being paid obscenely? I'm voting with my wallet by watching less movies (or waiting for them to be available cheaply) and spending more time with video games. Perhaps if the studios paid the major actors less and reduced the admission price, they'd see less "customer feedback" in terms of piracy. As it is, I'm paying too much for quality low-budget films to sponsor the high-budget crap hollywood stamps out.
(looking sad)
but... but... my id fits in a signed 16-bit integer!
I downloaded it and I'm playing it now. I wouldn't fund this crap either!
And it's making me violent...
actually - it's not bad, but very patronizing. I'll give it a B+ and positive remarks on the report card.
Sorry to reply with a personal story, but I once had a server in a secured facility in the downtown of a major city. I signed up with the place because on their web site it said "you get 24 hour secured access to your server". Amongst the many false advertisements, they couldn't offer me this because they didn't want commoners such as their paying customers to run amok in the data center.
So I take off on one columbus day weekend for a 3-day holiday. That friday night (midnight on a saturday), they power down my machine, move it to a different rack, plug in the wrong network port, and forget to power it back on.
I called on the monday at 7:00pm and mention there is a problem and ask if I can come check it out (20 minutes walk away from where I am) or if they can look at it. Since it's after hours, they say I can come in at 9:00 the next morning or PAY to have someone look at it.
So I go in the next morning to find out what had happened, fix it, then get on the phone with them about how they violated my contract in so many different ways while exhibiting gross negligence.
I'm able to get out of my contract, which had renewed itself after one year (this is called an evergreeen clause, NEVER sign one), but they were extremely resistant to refund my money, let alone credit me for the downtime or violations of their contract and service level agreement. I did, after two months, get back the money I had paid for the 5 days in that month I actually had service.
So, with all the building access, video monitors, locked entries, and staffed facilities where they don't let their paying customers come in unannounced or in the evening - my security was thoroughly compromised by their great incompetence.
Oh and prior to this they accidentally tripped power to the whole floor and didn't feel like mentioning it to me.
The longer version of this story contains more details of outrageous "are you kidding me?" moments.
point: go with a data center you can trust who has real people that will work to solve your problems instead of passing you around to people who can't help you. Also watch out for anyone jerking you around in sales or with contracts.
You know, I fall in with the opinions of how they haven't made a good album since the self-titled one and how the anti-napster thing was a boneheaded move.
But honestly, if they make some music more true to their roots, or at least songs that rock harder than Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone", then I think I can listen to it.
For a real head-spin, check out the wikipedia article on pound mass. Here's a quote: "Historically, in different parts of the world, at different points in time, and for different applications, the pound (or its translation) has referred to broadly similar but not identical standards of mass or weight."
When products and services meet our expectations, we tend to take this for granted and be unaware of the role of standards. However, when standards are absent, we soon notice. We soon care when products turn out to be of poor quality, do not fit, are incompatible with equipment that we already have, are unreliable or dangerous.
When products, systems, machinery and devices work well and safely, it is often because they meet standards. And the organization responsible for many thousands of the standards which benefit the world is ISO.
When products and services meet our expectations, we tend to take this for granted and be unaware of the role of standards. However, when standards are absent, we soon notice. We soon care when products turn out to be of poor quality, do not fit, are incompatible with equipment that we already have, are unreliable or dangerous.
When products, systems, machinery and devices work well and safely, it is often because they meet standards. And the organization responsible for many thousands of the standards which benefit the world is ISO.
As others have commented, you could not be more wrong about the teardrop attack. Teardrop worked by fragmenting a tcp packet such that when your tcp/ip stack reassembled it, it would buffer overflow and usually just crash the system.
I had LOTS of fun with this back in '96 - (pre-google) I'd search for sites using the "powered by backoffice" image, which made certain that it was vulnerable to this.
I just saw this for the first time on a delta flight. I was really excited to see tux in the upper left while all the kernel messages ran down the little screen and seeing this happen on everyone else's screen. Every screen was not showing the exact same thing at the same time, so I'm thinking every seat has its own virtual machine. It seemed to be running an older version of redhat, but I don't remember what specifically I saw.
I thought it would be really cool to just play chess to pass the time until I tried and it wanted to charge me $5 for doing that.
What a great comment! I was 8 when the first sound blaster came out, and I was very enthusiastic about PC gaming at the time. I of course followed up with my awareness and attention to the cards creative labs came out with following the SB1, but never really knew as much about it as I learned reading your post just now. Thanks!