I don't get all these people saying that you should leave your laptop at home and just enjoy the trip- I think they must all associate the laptop with work or something.
I always take my laptop when I go on holiday- not for internet access, but so I can upload my digital pictures to it, play go in the hotel late at night if there's nothing else to do, type up notes on the trip (because I can't read my own handwriting) etc.
Also it's cool that I can go to Japan, buy PC software and then use it while I am there.
The philosopher's stone can turn base metals into gold, or 'green' as in "I have created a nugget of purest green!".
On the whole I think that 'philosopher' sounds less likely to enrage fundamentalists than 'sorcerer'. I mean 'sorcerer' sounds a lot more dodgy than 'wizard'.
Maybe they should have called it 'Harry Potter and the Stone of the Alternative but Acceptable Religion'.
Look- CmdrTaco is karma-whoring! You'd think he'd be an arch-wiz on this MUD by now anyway...
In all seriousness I am amazed that His Taconess hasn't been modded down into oblivion yet, just because people can.
I'd like to think that the people running/. have a better sense of humour than people who moan about trolls and crapflooders, but I'm probably wrong...
OK so I got March and April the wrong way round in the geek log. Just thought I'd point that out before anyone else did their "so geeks travel backwards through time" posts...
As someone already mentioned- p2p is the way to distribute stuff like this. I was thinking of actually using edonkey links on a web page that pointed to the video sequences. If at least I keep my vblogs (catcchy) shared, then people should be ablo to get them eventually.
What I fear is that many of these vblogs would end up like one of those sequeneces off SF shows where the heroes review the last few log entries on some space station or whatever in order to understand "what happened here", except they will be far more boring...
Final Log Entries SF version:
"September 21st. I have been experimenting on the strange samples Dr. Weisman brought back from the crater. They seem to have some strange properties- more work is needed.
September 23rd. I don't know how to say this, but it seems as if the samples are multiplying- not just with time, but almost as if my observing them causes them to thrive. I can't really believe the test results- nothing like this has ever been seen before.
September 26th. The samples are speaking to me! They now form a mass approximately 4 feet high! I have been keeping my findings from the other scientists for fear of alarming them.
September 27th. 'Bob' (my name for the sample-mass, which is now 7 feet tall) has killed Dr. Weisman. I fear I may be next as Bob is becoming difficult to reason with. His constant claim that humanity is 'a bunch of lamers who deserve death' unnerves me."
Final Log Entries Geek version:
'April 3rd. I had this really great idea to build a model of the Tokyo Tower out of lego. I have downloaded the specs from the net and worked out how many bricks I need. Now I am saving up to buy them.
April 4th. I got bored of waiting until I had saved up, so I used my mom's credit card to order the bricks. I'll work out how to tell how I've borrowed the money later. Now to wait for my bricks!
April 17th. My bricks finally arrived! Mom was a little suspicicous when she answered the door to the package guy, but I told her I had taken advantage of an offer on paperclips from the internet.
April 28th. My Tokyo Tower is nearlly complete! I have had to ban my mom from my room so she doesn't see it. It reaches nearly to the ceiling- check it out!
March 5th. Horror! Mom got her credit card bill and went insane! She came up to my room and stomped all over the Tokyo Tower- it was like something out of Godzilla. I have been banned from the internet so this will be my last log."
I'm going to make a new operating system and call it "Windoze" just to see if Microsoft come after me. I figure that about 5 years' hard work and judicious plagerism of the Linux source code will be worth it. You never know, I may even get my own slashdot headline!
It's been a while since I checked out KDE, and it's even been a while since I used a non-Windows platform, since I worked out that having 4 computers constantly on was costing me a lot in electricity, so I now only have 1 computer on all the time and it has to run XP because I'm a big emule user. (Yes, emule runs under WINE, but it runs like a bitch).
However, it was always my experience in the past that KDE and gnome were both bloated as WMs, so I ran windowmaker instead. The majority of programs with guis that I ran used gtk since it seemed that the whole KDE death star infrastructure that gets started up the first time you run a KDE app was even more bloated and crash-prone than the gnome equivalent.
My own programs that had a gui I wrote with gtk because I found it better using gtk with c; I am a huge opponent of c++.
I know the look and feel is a pretty petty way to judge widget sets or WMs, but KDE always gave the appearence of striving for Windows-user acceptance, while gnome seemed to be about Getting Things Done. Gnome had rough edges- at the time it didn't have anti-aliased fonts, but I still refused to use KDE apps just to get the nice looking fonts.
KDE apps always seemed less stable than their gnome counterparts. I had a lot of bad experiences with Konqueror crashing, especially in file explorer mode.
Basically my experience of KDE was of a pretty gui that emulated Windows, but the code behind it was either not finished yet or buggy. "All front", you might say.
Gnome started to go this way too- nautilus, despite being absolutely beautiful and useful too, was very much an example of "All front" with the bugginess and incompleteness.
So what exactly am I rambling on about here? Hmm- I think the take-home message is that big bloaty window managers suck, windowmaker roolz, c++ sux but hey, I'm actually running Windows anyway.
(But spreading it out over more lines makes it look less like flamebait;) )
Did you have another computer available ? Normally if linux seems to hand you can still telnet/ssh in and analyse the problem, then shut it down safely.
Ugh- the scrolling on Boulder Dash for the Spectrum made me violently ill. Rockford would not stay in the middle of the screen, so if you ran really fast you could actually run off the edge and had to wait for the scrolling to catch up. I always preferred the Amstrad CPC version (I didn't have a C64 at the time).
Yeah, see, I am a big fan of SG1 but they damn near cancelled that a while back too.
I am sorry for slagging off Highlander now- I can't see its merits, but I reminded myself too much of the people slagging Buffy off and lo! I was ashamed...
But the cancellation of Farscape, Odyssey 5, Birds of Prey and Firefly annoyed me. Especially Odyssey 5 since it must be quite cheap to make- they even had an in-joke where the main characters were explaining the "real" plot of the show to a SF writer to get his input on their problems and someone said that having artificial humans as villians was just what TV did to cut make-up costs...
I can see why people disliked Firefly, but I think it had potential- most great shows improve a lot over the series.
Birds of prey was not too cerebral- but it had chix (tm) and ok fights and special effects. Yes, it was very "monster of the week", but it was still fun to watch, and there was the promise of a lot of interesting characters from the comic to be brought in.
I just hate being reminded that US TV shows are all about "how much does it cost to make per episode?" and "What are the viewing figures and demographic so we can sell adverts?".
Even our beloved BBC in the UK, with no advertising caters very often to the lowest common demoninator and relies on viewing figures- hence the cancellation of Dr. Who (over 10 years' ago now, but I'm *still* bitter).
graspee
golden-age SF- over or under-estimate of today?
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 1
Did you know that the Slashdot website is responsible for the cyberspace (ugh) equivalent of the phenomenon you described in "Flash Crowds" ?
Interestingly it came true, except instead of teleporting in to geographical places on hearing of the latest tragedy people point their web browsers at CNN or the BBC instead.
OK, so if it were an exact comparison you would have written originally about people teleporting into people's houses to check out their latest computer case mod with built-in aquarium and neon lights, or the scale model of the Tokyo Tower made out of lego, but you get the idea.
And just in case you thought that this whole post was just a statement rather than a question, I'm asking: Did golden-age SF under or over-estimate today's society ? I mean, we don't have like "Venus Base 1", "Moon Colony Alpha", matter transportation or FTL drive, but we do have communications equipment and infrastructure that goes WAY beyond the comms they were using even in these planetary bases, and it has revolutionized our lives...
" Or when Adrian Paul didn't really want to do a 6th season of Highlander "
Jesus Christ- there were 5 series of Highlander?
This is the stuff that pisses me off- they cancel Firefly, Odyssey 5 and Birds of Prey after a single season and there were 5 series of Highlander? What the hell is the world coming to?
Especially Odyssey 5 was a fantastic series. It gets cancelled after one series and yet other stuff carries on regardless. Charmed, anyone? Like, hell no.
" If someone makes a clone of Outlook (Evolution comes to my mind) "
The sucky thing about evolution is that when it encounters an error during mail collection it stops collecting mail and puts up an alert dialog you have to ok to continue.
OK, so it's easy to fix- but it just shows how not clued up the evolution team is about testing and "user experiences" and all that.
Slashdot Mirror
"I have far less problems debugging a Flash site between browsers"
far fewer problems...
graspee
I don't get all these people saying that you should leave your laptop at home and just enjoy the trip- I think they must all associate the laptop with work or something.
I always take my laptop when I go on holiday- not for internet access, but so I can upload my digital pictures to it, play go in the hotel late at night if there's nothing else to do, type up notes on the trip (because I can't read my own handwriting) etc.
Also it's cool that I can go to Japan, buy PC software and then use it while I am there.
graspee
"Microsoft is attempting to do away with DLL version conflicts"
Imagine Bill Gates in a black mask and with a much cooler voice:
"There is no conflict".
graspee
The philosopher's stone can turn base metals into gold, or 'green' as in "I have created a nugget of purest green!".
On the whole I think that 'philosopher' sounds less likely to enrage fundamentalists than 'sorcerer'. I mean 'sorcerer' sounds a lot more dodgy than 'wizard'.
Maybe they should have called it 'Harry Potter and the Stone of the Alternative but Acceptable Religion'.
graspee
Look- CmdrTaco is karma-whoring! You'd think he'd be an arch-wiz on this MUD by now anyway...
/. have a better sense of humour than people who moan about trolls and crapflooders, but I'm probably wrong...
In all seriousness I am amazed that His Taconess hasn't been modded down into oblivion yet, just because people can.
I'd like to think that the people running
graspee
OK so I got March and April the wrong way round in the geek log. Just thought I'd point that out before anyone else did their "so geeks travel backwards through time" posts...
graspee
As someone already mentioned- p2p is the way to distribute stuff like this. I was thinking of actually using edonkey links on a web page that pointed to the video sequences. If at least I keep my vblogs (catcchy) shared, then people should be ablo to get them eventually.
What I fear is that many of these vblogs would end up like one of those sequeneces off SF shows where the heroes review the last few log entries on some space station or whatever in order to understand "what happened here", except they will be far more boring...
Final Log Entries SF version:
"September 21st. I have been experimenting on the strange samples Dr. Weisman brought back from the crater. They seem to have some strange properties- more work is needed.
September 23rd. I don't know how to say this, but it seems as if the samples are multiplying- not just with time, but almost as if my observing them causes them to thrive. I can't really believe the test results- nothing like this has ever been seen before.
September 26th. The samples are speaking to me! They now form a mass approximately 4 feet high! I have been keeping my findings from the other scientists for fear of alarming them.
September 27th. 'Bob' (my name for the sample-mass, which is now 7 feet tall) has killed Dr. Weisman. I fear I may be next as Bob is becoming difficult to reason with. His constant claim that humanity is 'a bunch of lamers who deserve death' unnerves me."
Final Log Entries Geek version:
'April 3rd. I had this really great idea to build a model of the Tokyo Tower out of lego. I have downloaded the specs from the net and worked out how many bricks I need. Now I am saving up to buy them.
April 4th. I got bored of waiting until I had saved up, so I used my mom's credit card to order the bricks. I'll work out how to tell how I've borrowed the money later. Now to wait for my bricks!
April 17th. My bricks finally arrived! Mom was a little suspicicous when she answered the door to the package guy, but I told her I had taken advantage of an offer on paperclips from the internet.
April 28th. My Tokyo Tower is nearlly complete! I have had to ban my mom from my room so she doesn't see it. It reaches nearly to the ceiling- check it out!
March 5th. Horror! Mom got her credit card bill and went insane! She came up to my room and stomped all over the Tokyo Tower- it was like something out of Godzilla. I have been banned from the internet so this will be my last log."
graspee
"Us lowly consumers are lucky to get 2-3 hours of playtime per product we buy."
Speak for yourself, I can fit 9 albums on a CD with MP3 and 6 movies on a DVD with divx or xvid.
graspee
"And what is the red light, huh?"
I see Five Lights!
graspee
" Born with a silver spoon up his nose."
Der Iff Doh Zpoon!
graspee
I'm going to make a new operating system and call it "Windoze" just to see if Microsoft come after me. I figure that about 5 years' hard work and judicious plagerism of the Linux source code will be worth it. You never know, I may even get my own slashdot headline!
graspee
"They have signs right out there that say, "No non-Japanese""
Where are these signs?
graspee
" Maybe he doesnt speak German? "
So? Google has translation built in, or you can use babelfish. Honestly this has to be one of the lamest ask slashdots I have ever seen.
graspee
It's been a while since I checked out KDE, and it's even been a while since I used a non-Windows platform, since I worked out that having 4 computers constantly on was costing me a lot in electricity, so I now only have 1 computer on all the time and it has to run XP because I'm a big emule user. (Yes, emule runs under WINE, but it runs like a bitch).
;) )
However, it was always my experience in the past that KDE and gnome were both bloated as WMs, so I ran windowmaker instead. The majority of programs with guis that I ran used gtk since it seemed that the whole KDE death star infrastructure that gets started up the first time you run a KDE app was even more bloated and crash-prone than the gnome equivalent.
My own programs that had a gui I wrote with gtk because I found it better using gtk with c; I am a huge opponent of c++.
I know the look and feel is a pretty petty way to judge widget sets or WMs, but KDE always gave the appearence of striving for Windows-user acceptance, while gnome seemed to be about Getting Things Done. Gnome had rough edges- at the time it didn't have anti-aliased fonts, but I still refused to use KDE apps just to get the nice looking fonts.
KDE apps always seemed less stable than their gnome counterparts. I had a lot of bad experiences with Konqueror crashing, especially in file explorer mode.
Basically my experience of KDE was of a pretty gui that emulated Windows, but the code behind it was either not finished yet or buggy. "All front", you might say.
Gnome started to go this way too- nautilus, despite being absolutely beautiful and useful too, was very much an example of "All front" with the bugginess and incompleteness.
So what exactly am I rambling on about here? Hmm- I think the take-home message is that big bloaty window managers suck, windowmaker roolz, c++ sux but hey, I'm actually running Windows anyway.
(But spreading it out over more lines makes it look less like flamebait
graspee
Did you have another computer available ? Normally if linux seems to hand you can still telnet/ssh in and analyse the problem, then shut it down safely.
graspee
"IN SOVIET RUSSIA asshat moderates YOU down!"
Slashdot is based in Soviet Russia now?
graspee
Ugh- the scrolling on Boulder Dash for the Spectrum made me violently ill. Rockford would not stay in the middle of the screen, so if you ran really fast you could actually run off the edge and had to wait for the scrolling to catch up. I always preferred the Amstrad CPC version (I didn't have a C64 at the time).
graspee
"If I was the DOJ, i'd seriously consider hiring some semi-intelligent contractors to overhaul their network."
If I were the DOJ I'd do 2 chicks at the same time.
graspee
"Aluminum ingestion has been linked to Alzheimer's,"
So don't eat the can!
Anyway, smoking in itself for some bizarre reason actually helps prevent Alzheimer's, so it all probably evens out.
graspee
Yeah, see, I am a big fan of SG1 but they damn near cancelled that a while back too.
I am sorry for slagging off Highlander now- I can't see its merits, but I reminded myself too much of the people slagging Buffy off and lo! I was ashamed...
But the cancellation of Farscape, Odyssey 5, Birds of Prey and Firefly annoyed me. Especially Odyssey 5 since it must be quite cheap to make- they even had an in-joke where the main characters were explaining the "real" plot of the show to a SF writer to get his input on their problems and someone said that having artificial humans as villians was just what TV did to cut make-up costs...
I can see why people disliked Firefly, but I think it had potential- most great shows improve a lot over the series.
Birds of prey was not too cerebral- but it had chix (tm) and ok fights and special effects. Yes, it was very "monster of the week", but it was still fun to watch, and there was the promise of a lot of interesting characters from the comic to be brought in.
I just hate being reminded that US TV shows are all about "how much does it cost to make per episode?" and "What are the viewing figures and demographic so we can sell adverts?".
Even our beloved BBC in the UK, with no advertising caters very often to the lowest common demoninator and relies on viewing figures- hence the cancellation of Dr. Who (over 10 years' ago now, but I'm *still* bitter).
graspee
Did you know that the Slashdot website is responsible for the cyberspace (ugh) equivalent of the phenomenon you described in "Flash Crowds" ?
Interestingly it came true, except instead of teleporting in to geographical places on hearing of the latest tragedy people point their web browsers at CNN or the BBC instead.
OK, so if it were an exact comparison you would have written originally about people teleporting into people's houses to check out their latest computer case mod with built-in aquarium and neon lights, or the scale model of the Tokyo Tower made out of lego, but you get the idea.
And just in case you thought that this whole post was just a statement rather than a question, I'm asking: Did golden-age SF under or over-estimate today's society ? I mean, we don't have like "Venus Base 1", "Moon Colony Alpha", matter transportation or FTL drive, but we do have communications equipment and infrastructure that goes WAY beyond the comms they were using even in these planetary bases, and it has revolutionized our lives...
graspee
"An Immortal playboy swordsman who goes thru the centuries laying beautiful women and decapitating his enemies. What more could you possibly ask for?"
How about about an Immortal playgirl swordswoman who goes through the centuries laying her enemies and decapitating beautiful men ?
graspee
Well, if you like Highlander, good for you- and sorry I implied it was worse than the shows I mentioned.
The Canadian Situation seems interesting- I wish shows I liked were Canadian.
graspee
" Or when Adrian Paul didn't really want to do a 6th season of Highlander "
Jesus Christ- there were 5 series of Highlander?
This is the stuff that pisses me off- they cancel Firefly, Odyssey 5 and Birds of Prey after a single season and there were 5 series of Highlander? What the hell is the world coming to?
Especially Odyssey 5 was a fantastic series. It gets cancelled after one series and yet other stuff carries on regardless. Charmed, anyone? Like, hell no.
graspee
" If someone makes a clone of Outlook (Evolution comes to my mind) "
The sucky thing about evolution is that when it encounters an error during mail collection it stops collecting mail and puts up an alert dialog you have to ok to continue.
OK, so it's easy to fix- but it just shows how not clued up the evolution team is about testing and "user experiences" and all that.
graspee