Speaking as a person who possesses a lot of music:
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The problem is not collecting the music. The problem is that his music collection probably looks like this:
Frank Zappa - genre - Sheik Yerbouti - (no year) BRITNEY SPERS - pop - Oops I did it Again - 1900 Benni Benassi - Satisfaction vs In Da Club - Dance - 2004
etc. It would peeve the hell out of me to see that crap, and I see it all the time, because it seems like people who don't take the time/money to buy music also really don't give two shits about good tagging (or good ripping, but that situation is getting better). So, I find myself doing lots of manual work to fix the meta information, add valid "year" data, add track and disc number data, check off "compilation" for those, fix genres and spelling, etc. Most of the time, if it looks like the song has crap ID3 tags, I don't even bother downloading it, it's not worth the extra work. This is really the extra value you get out of using something like the iTunes Music Store to buy songs (and I do).
Thus, it becomes a rather huge management problem to fix tags and remove duplicates. And the process of removing duplicates is not even very logical, often- If the same exact song is on two separate albums, do you keep both? Without listening to both songs to see if one is ripped better, do you tend to remove the older or newer duplicate? What if the songs are actually the same but one of the titles is completely wrong so you can't tell? Etc. I won't even go into the logic for picking genres... I say Depeche Mode is "Goth/New Wave" and Nine Inch Nails is "Industrial", but nobody else seems to think so, for example. Perhaps the whole idea of "genre" is an archaic holdover from physical music stores, but it can be a useful extra tidbit to help create smart playlists from (in iTunes) as well as help discover new music related to what you already know.
I will shamelessly plug two things here: http://www.musicbrainz.org/ to help you tag music correctly, and the Roku Soundbridge to listen to your collection wirelessly.
The problem with 3rd parties is this: They do not share the overlapping platforms equally with the other 2 major parties.
If you vote Republican, your goal is not just to get a Republican into office (unless you're an idiot), you're voting based on the platforms that you and Republicans stand for, and you want the Republican sides of those platforms to be acted upon.
If a given platform (such as privacy rights) was shared by both Libertarians and Democrats, and this platform thus had a majority of the mindshare, the platform would still lose because the votes would be split between the two parties and the OTHER party would win, along with its less popular take on the given platform.
So basically (and paradoxically), the LESS popular sides of platforms will have a high tendency to win as long as the more popular sides are split between 2 or more candidates. Thus, a 2-party system is the ideal equilibrium, whether you like it or not, because it gets more of the popular positions of platforms acted upon over time, and that's what I think the ultimate goal of all this election crap is. That's how society moves forward, as opposed to backward. And thus, most intelligent Democrats hate the presence of Nader, Badnarik, etc., not because they disagree with their views, but because their views tend to coincide more with the Democratic attitudes on things, and thus split the vote.
See the discussion on this topic at talkorigins. I may have explained it inadequately. I believe I recall some factoid about the presence of any 2 of the ingredients (but not all 3) being very negative for the continued existence of the beetle- it would require all 3.
What the heck is up with the lack of quality of this submission? Inane article, and all the grammar errors? C'mon, Taco? Are you guys making so much money off hosting this site that you are losing touch with the juicy intellectual tidbits that the geek-tech world really needs to discuss? When's the last time any of you guys who run Slashdot worked in the IT department of a large corporation?
This reminds me of the phenomenon of comedians getting so popular that they lose the source of most of their material (i.e. "normal everyday life" that non-famous people live)
...crucial code, and assembly language monkeys are still worth having around =).
I don't see the big deal here. I'd like to see what this algorithm would do if fully-optimized on the other processors out there, including the 64-bit G5. Maybe even better, use an algorithm that would have more practical value (wasn't RC4 cracked a while back already?) Try cracking MD5 or SHA-1 or something...
My favorite creationist example of something that looks like it had to have been "by design" is the explosive defense of the bombardier beetle. It takes 3 simultaneous ingredients to make it work, and having all their production and injection systems arise simultaneously by chance seems to be highly unlikely.
Meanwhile, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it that any eye (or photosensitive cell) is better than no eye, and that better eyes are more likely to survive. In other words, every feature we possess was advantageous in its lesser forms also.
Consoles suck for FPS games. Try sniping a guy a virtual mile away on a screen that is TV resolution, or using an analog joystick to strafe/dodge while firing and changing weapons.
Consoles suck for realtime strategy games. Try using your analog joystick to box a bunch of troops to send to a target. Try using it to select different groups of troops.
For all these, a mouse/keyboard combo is way better. And although consoles may work with those items, the games really aren't designed to use them.
From an interview at BoingBoing... "Of course they say they'd use it to bring down 'problem people', i.e. direct action leaders."
Doing the right thing so often means fighting the power... Sometimes, leading is leaving. Or pissing off. If you do what everyone wants you to do, you will have no real influence on the world whatsoever.
In my Dock: KDX: cheap fast secure cross-platform "meeting-ware" EyeTV: TV on your desktop iChat: AIM chat Adium X: supercool chat client, interfaces with all popular chat protocols as well as irc Mail.app: nice, but has all but been replaced by GMail Address Book: all nice Cocoa apps can use this OS-level address database iCal: all nice Cocoa apps can use this OS-level calendar with Internet synch capabilities Safari/Firefox: Great browsers, IE is nowhere in sight iPhoto: coolest digicam app ever Acquisition: coolest P2P app ever (well, one of them) iTunes: coolest mp3 app ever iEatBrainz: mp3/aac tag fixer that searches based on the actual sound profile of the song! VLC: one of the most versatile video players around (UT2004/Battlefield1942/DesertCombat/CallO fDuty/TR ON2.0/Homeworld2): Yes, I'm a Mac gamer, Mac games do exist, and these are good games WebGrazer: Best, uh, pr0n app ever invented. Point and click pr0n clip downloads, by category. NetFlix Freak: Awesome alternative to NetFlix's web-based interface to your queue Toast 6: Great disk image app. Both this and Apple's own Disk Utility beat the hell out of Nero as far as managing disk images. Preview: Apple's pdf and image viewer. It actually works better than Acrobat on either Mac or PC to view PDF's! (Note: You can also print to PDF from any OS X application.) Terminal: Here you go, a CLI! Mine has a dark blue background, ANSI color, and slightly transparent. Script Editor: AppleScript is pretty powerful, actually. Sorta like Visual Basic Script, except with fewer security holes;) SubEthaEdit: Amazing text editor with color coding and very cool Rendezvous collaborative work features Folding@home: My CPU folds proteins when idle Console: Like the Windows event log Bluetooth File Exchange: An Apple app that lets me send text files to my Bluetooth phone simply by selecting the file and hitting Command-Shift-B CronniX: Great app interface to Cron, the task scheduler HandBrake: Absolutely the best and easiest to use DVD ripping software on any platform, bar none. Excellent quality when ripping to.mp4 files (for personal use, of course... in my case I make them available on my wireless LAN so I can view them with the PC in my bedroom) VPC 6: For when I need to do Windows development X11: Self-explanatory, but a very nice implementation X48: This is my calculator. It's an accurate emulation of an HP-48. Guess I'm just a geek, but I love it.
And that's just on my Dock. (OK, I have a cinema display, so I can fit all that;) )
Other neat uses of my home Mac: Java apps run awesome. You can just double-click on a.jar file, and there it goes. Also, I was unhappy with my company's file backup solution, so I rolled my own. I installed cygwin on my work PC laptop, installed rsync, then set up a batch file to automatically synchronize my PC work files with my OS X machine at home, over a compressed and encrypted (using SSH) tunnel. Works like a charm, and very fast and efficient;)
Add in all the security problems I DON'T have to deal with, and I'm quite happy with the home Mac...
well dude, if you go into the thing with that shitty-ass attitude, no wonder your experience justified it. why not try finding another Mac user to tell you what's so great about it. it's not like you'd know it just by trying it. and also, Firefox has an OS X version which works just frickin dandy, actually. IE sucks on ANY platform.
I bet I could show you a 15 minute demo that would make your mouth drop. And I use Windows all day at work, developing ASP/SQL Server web apps. SQL Server is a nice piece of work, but as far as Windows and the rest of it? Blech...
I was all about developing this ninja monk guy, best HTH, etc. etc. I was going to get the glowing eyes at level 20! Then at some point I realized that I severely f*cked up a major quest somehow which was worth a lot of XP, and pretty much got stuck, and didn't have any savegames to retreat to. I was pissed!
So I found some cheat codes, added a few stats to myself here and there, then got carried away and jumped up to lvl20 "just to see the glowing eyes"... And then quickly lost interest in the game!
So the solution to getting yourself away from a game is: Find the cheat codes, use them, and it will simply ruin the punishment/reward system keeping you playing...
From kindergarten through 12th grade, my mom yelled at me until my homework got done. I got pretty good grades and ultimately got into Cornell (with my mom also yelling at me to get the applications done all the while).
I went as a physics major since I got a 5 on the AP and aced the regents. Within one year I got so molested by engineering calculus that I was asked to leave for a while. At the same time I was getting sucked into playing the early network games (early 90's, on Macs... Spectre, in case anyone recalls). It got to the point where my friends had an intervention and removed the hard drive from my computer! I still ended up leaving for awhile, joining the USAF, living it up in California for 4 years while traveling the world, coming back to Cornell as a Psych major, and did OK.
My point is- Even though she meant well and I know she loves me, my mom didn't know the first damn thing about how to instill discipline in me at all! All she taught me how to do was to work in response to a very negative stimulus, and when that stimulus was removed (and suddenly), I was completely unprepared. To this day I struggle with motivational issues (and I verge on game addiction, but only when a cool new game comes out for OS X, which fortunately is not that frequently, heh).
So don't be so quick to blame the parents, unless you also have a plan to train them on how to instill motivation/discipline in their children. Unfortunately, there is no "parenting class", and as parents like to joke among themselves, "you are the best parent your kid will ever know." Most parents care a ton about their kids, but the natural skill seems to vary...
All this is so retarded. Here's my proposed solution.
1) Voting machines are running webpages in kiosk mode. 2) Web/database server set up to receive votes. Second backup server up and running and ready to go if there's a problem. 3) All votes are recorded THRICE... once to the "main" database, once to the second backup server database within a transaction, and once... printing out each vote, at the point of voting, line-by-line to one of 2 dot-matrix printers!
Redundancies: If a client machine goes down, replacing it with another one is easy. If the server goes down, there is always the other one. If the printer goes down or runs out of ink or paper, you swap it with the other one (maybe have a 3rd as spare).
The only hack this would require is getting an old dot-matrix printer to talk to a modern server and only print out one line at a time.
The software part is E-Z. And the clients would of course have touchscreens.
Now go make a killing off my idea. Just credit "Lectrick", a mysterious man from the Net underground...
True democracy comes from within. We can't impose it on a country and it keeps looking like we're trying to do that even though a simple examination of the historical evidence indicates that this is a difficult if not impossible task at beset.
It is my humble but thoughtful opinion that most of the current strength of the U.S. was actually forged during the time of the physical, bloody rejection of British governance 225 years ago. Ironically, as a result I wonder if the ideal solution to the Iraqi problem would actually be to pull out and allow the forces at work there to believe they HAD fought for their independence and won.
I look at Germany (the homeland of my parents) as a rare, good, but definitely not ideal, outcome of "nation-building". Germany to this day continues to struggle (I feel) with a definition of itself that works in this century. Why else are there these irrational resurgences in interest in Nazi ideas. It was the last time that Germany was the world leader in engineering, science, and was getting lots of attention. Now they're known as the source of oom-pah music, all kinds of wurst, that country that Mike Myers makes fun of, kinky porn, and beer. Ideally, I think the people of a country would like a better fate than that. A defining moment... Where is Iraq's defining moment??
I have one of the new Motorola HD-DVR boxes that Comcast puts out, and a handy-dandy new Dual 2.5ghz G5 with 30" cinema (don't hate me, I just sold my primary residence and took a little profit, is all...). I'm able to connect the two boxes via FireWire and record (through a couple of clunky apps out there) the packetized MPEG2 stream to a disk file, and play it back with VLC... but all I want to be able to do is VIEW the cablebox signal via the FireWire connection and use the 30" cinema display as an HD screen, avoiding the cost of a separate (redundant hardware!) HDTV... It already has a PVR so I don't need to record.
Does ANYONE know of anything out there (or that will be out there) that will accomplish this?
The problem is that in some user-interface scenarios (switching weapons in FPS games?), the "notched-wheel" type tactile feedback becomes an asset. When you're trying to smooth-scroll, however, you run into what you complain about. Of course, in the former case, you could simply make touching the upper area of the strip a "click forward" and touching the lower area a "click backward"... but I suppose it wouldn't feel the same.
I love UI problems... there's never an ideal solution but a good compromise can be very useful/profitable...
...procuring a used laptop? Low power, and all the creature comforts of a full-fledged computer.
(aside) But, I have to also say. I have NEVER even MET a woman who has HEARD of bsd. I had to argue with a Comcast Cable woman today who hadn't even heard of FireWire. I considered it a victory when I got my g/f to run Folding@Home. She was even game for Red Hat, but it was too difficult for her to find a wireless driver for the Thinkpad built-in 802.11... but hey, at least she tried!
Here's to... if not geek, then geek-compatible women! love 'em.
You will get distracted and sucked in by people going to parties inviting you along, people ordering pizza, people watching a reality show, people playing multiplayer games, women you want to flirt with walking by, people shooting water balloons between dorms with a big rubber slingshot, people doing all sorts of stuff but actual schoolwork.
Take it from me (I did really poorly freshman year and had to take some time off from Cornell). Bring your work to a LIBRARY on campus, find a quiet corner, and plunge right into the work. Take a short break every hour. Get done and go home feeling a LOT better about goofing off. (Note: Do NOT do your work in the computer room of the library. Too easy to websurf.)
Just do NOT try to do work in the dorm. Even if you see people working... they are not you. You are distracted by shiny things, and rightfully so. Working is less shiny, yet enables you to continue to stay at school and enjoy ogling all those fine women and use that insanely-fast internet connection for who-knows-what....Find a library.
Oh, and if you have an empty period in between classes, don't goof it off. Do some classroom reading under a tree somewhere. You will enjoy your extra free time.
then after seeing how quickly the queue downloaded (I had assumed real-time-play speeds... thank you, space-efficient m4a files!)
"oh sh**"
Well, this party won't last long... but I guess it was only a matter of time. Apple can easily help to "rectify" this with a speed-limiter on the upstream side.
I actually just registered for Second Life last night. It's kinda interesting. I don't think it qualifies as a conventional "roleplaying" game, although you do have an avatar in a massive multiplayer online world, and you can configure how you look and amass all sorts of objects in an inventory... as well as virtual money. But there's no "experience", per se.
One aspect that may definitely disqualify it as a MMORPG for sure, is that it actually has women in it.;)
Second Life has a scripting language (C++-based) and basically allows anyone to create freeform objects with behaviors and properties. The economic model is interesting. You can do things like create an automated dispenser which charges people to create copies of objects you have created. You can also own virtual real estate.
Someone has created an adventure-within-a-world in it that tracks experience. I haven't checked it out yet, but it sounds interesting. You have to "buy" an Adventurer's Pack which gives you all the relevant objects.
So I don't know if it counts. What do you think?
My name in it is Roark Spinnaker, in the event you run into me while I'm flying around in it. I haven't decided yet if I will stay after the free week trial is over.
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The problem is not collecting the music. The problem is that his music collection probably looks like this:
Frank Zappa - genre - Sheik Yerbouti - (no year)
BRITNEY SPERS - pop - Oops I did it Again - 1900
Benni Benassi - Satisfaction vs In Da Club - Dance - 2004
etc. It would peeve the hell out of me to see that crap, and I see it all the time, because it seems like people who don't take the time/money to buy music also really don't give two shits about good tagging (or good ripping, but that situation is getting better). So, I find myself doing lots of manual work to fix the meta information, add valid "year" data, add track and disc number data, check off "compilation" for those, fix genres and spelling, etc. Most of the time, if it looks like the song has crap ID3 tags, I don't even bother downloading it, it's not worth the extra work. This is really the extra value you get out of using something like the iTunes Music Store to buy songs (and I do).
Thus, it becomes a rather huge management problem to fix tags and remove duplicates. And the process of removing duplicates is not even very logical, often- If the same exact song is on two separate albums, do you keep both? Without listening to both songs to see if one is ripped better, do you tend to remove the older or newer duplicate? What if the songs are actually the same but one of the titles is completely wrong so you can't tell? Etc. I won't even go into the logic for picking genres... I say Depeche Mode is "Goth/New Wave" and Nine Inch Nails is "Industrial", but nobody else seems to think so, for example. Perhaps the whole idea of "genre" is an archaic holdover from physical music stores, but it can be a useful extra tidbit to help create smart playlists from (in iTunes) as well as help discover new music related to what you already know.
I will shamelessly plug two things here: http://www.musicbrainz.org/ to help you tag music correctly, and the Roku Soundbridge to listen to your collection wirelessly.
Since when did a little competition in the marketplace cause the ones first to market to simply up and leave?
The proper response is to figure out a way to differentiate yourself. Maybe Konfabulator could be better at XMLHTTP or some other technology.
The fact that you can burn cd's natively in OS X doesn't seem to have hurt Toast that much, probably because Toast provides a slew of other options.
The problem with 3rd parties is this: They do not share the overlapping platforms equally with the other 2 major parties.
If you vote Republican, your goal is not just to get a Republican into office (unless you're an idiot), you're voting based on the platforms that you and Republicans stand for, and you want the Republican sides of those platforms to be acted upon.
If a given platform (such as privacy rights) was shared by both Libertarians and Democrats, and this platform thus had a majority of the mindshare, the platform would still lose because the votes would be split between the two parties and the OTHER party would win, along with its less popular take on the given platform.
So basically (and paradoxically), the LESS popular sides of platforms will have a high tendency to win as long as the more popular sides are split between 2 or more candidates. Thus, a 2-party system is the ideal equilibrium, whether you like it or not, because it gets more of the popular positions of platforms acted upon over time, and that's what I think the ultimate goal of all this election crap is. That's how society moves forward, as opposed to backward. And thus, most intelligent Democrats hate the presence of Nader, Badnarik, etc., not because they disagree with their views, but because their views tend to coincide more with the Democratic attitudes on things, and thus split the vote.
See the discussion on this topic at talkorigins. I may have explained it inadequately. I believe I recall some factoid about the presence of any 2 of the ingredients (but not all 3) being very negative for the continued existence of the beetle- it would require all 3.
What the heck is up with the lack of quality of this submission? Inane article, and all the grammar errors? C'mon, Taco? Are you guys making so much money off hosting this site that you are losing touch with the juicy intellectual tidbits that the geek-tech world really needs to discuss? When's the last time any of you guys who run Slashdot worked in the IT department of a large corporation?
This reminds me of the phenomenon of comedians getting so popular that they lose the source of most of their material (i.e. "normal everyday life" that non-famous people live)
...crucial code, and assembly language monkeys are still worth having around =) .
I don't see the big deal here. I'd like to see what this algorithm would do if fully-optimized on the other processors out there, including the 64-bit G5. Maybe even better, use an algorithm that would have more practical value (wasn't RC4 cracked a while back already?) Try cracking MD5 or SHA-1 or something...
My favorite creationist example of something that looks like it had to have been "by design" is the explosive defense of the bombardier beetle. It takes 3 simultaneous ingredients to make it work, and having all their production and injection systems arise simultaneously by chance seems to be highly unlikely.
Meanwhile, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it that any eye (or photosensitive cell) is better than no eye, and that better eyes are more likely to survive. In other words, every feature we possess was advantageous in its lesser forms also.
Only crazy people say "all" and "none".
Consoles suck for FPS games. Try sniping a guy a virtual mile away on a screen that is TV resolution, or using an analog joystick to strafe/dodge while firing and changing weapons.
Consoles suck for realtime strategy games. Try using your analog joystick to box a bunch of troops to send to a target. Try using it to select different groups of troops.
For all these, a mouse/keyboard combo is way better. And although consoles may work with those items, the games really aren't designed to use them.
From an interview at BoingBoing... "Of course they say they'd use it to bring down 'problem people', i.e. direct action leaders."
Doing the right thing so often means fighting the power... Sometimes, leading is leaving. Or pissing off. If you do what everyone wants you to do, you will have no real influence on the world whatsoever.
I like her attitude.
Once I found WebGrazer, I pretty much never needed to search for pr0n ever again.
;)
For OS X only
In my Dock:O fDuty/TR ON2.0/Homeworld2): Yes, I'm a Mac gamer, Mac games do exist, and these are good games ;) .mp4 files (for personal use, of course... in my case I make them available on my wireless LAN so I can view them with the PC in my bedroom)
;) )
.jar file, and there it goes. ;)
KDX: cheap fast secure cross-platform "meeting-ware"
EyeTV: TV on your desktop
iChat: AIM chat
Adium X: supercool chat client, interfaces with all popular chat protocols as well as irc
Mail.app: nice, but has all but been replaced by GMail
Address Book: all nice Cocoa apps can use this OS-level address database
iCal: all nice Cocoa apps can use this OS-level calendar with Internet synch capabilities
Safari/Firefox: Great browsers, IE is nowhere in sight
iPhoto: coolest digicam app ever
Acquisition: coolest P2P app ever (well, one of them)
iTunes: coolest mp3 app ever
iEatBrainz: mp3/aac tag fixer that searches based on the actual sound profile of the song!
VLC: one of the most versatile video players around
(UT2004/Battlefield1942/DesertCombat/Call
WebGrazer: Best, uh, pr0n app ever invented. Point and click pr0n clip downloads, by category.
NetFlix Freak: Awesome alternative to NetFlix's web-based interface to your queue
Toast 6: Great disk image app. Both this and Apple's own Disk Utility beat the hell out of Nero as far as managing disk images.
Preview: Apple's pdf and image viewer. It actually works better than Acrobat on either Mac or PC to view PDF's! (Note: You can also print to PDF from any OS X application.)
Terminal: Here you go, a CLI! Mine has a dark blue background, ANSI color, and slightly transparent.
Script Editor: AppleScript is pretty powerful, actually. Sorta like Visual Basic Script, except with fewer security holes
SubEthaEdit: Amazing text editor with color coding and very cool Rendezvous collaborative work features
Folding@home: My CPU folds proteins when idle
Console: Like the Windows event log
Bluetooth File Exchange: An Apple app that lets me send text files to my Bluetooth phone simply by selecting the file and hitting Command-Shift-B
CronniX: Great app interface to Cron, the task scheduler
HandBrake: Absolutely the best and easiest to use DVD ripping software on any platform, bar none. Excellent quality when ripping to
VPC 6: For when I need to do Windows development
X11: Self-explanatory, but a very nice implementation
X48: This is my calculator. It's an accurate emulation of an HP-48. Guess I'm just a geek, but I love it.
And that's just on my Dock. (OK, I have a cinema display, so I can fit all that
Other neat uses of my home Mac: Java apps run awesome. You can just double-click on a
Also, I was unhappy with my company's file backup solution, so I rolled my own. I installed cygwin on my work PC laptop, installed rsync, then set up a batch file to automatically synchronize my PC work files with my OS X machine at home, over a compressed and encrypted (using SSH) tunnel. Works like a charm, and very fast and efficient
Add in all the security problems I DON'T have to deal with, and I'm quite happy with the home Mac...
well dude, if you go into the thing with that shitty-ass attitude, no wonder your experience justified it. why not try finding another Mac user to tell you what's so great about it. it's not like you'd know it just by trying it. and also, Firefox has an OS X version which works just frickin dandy, actually. IE sucks on ANY platform.
I bet I could show you a 15 minute demo that would make your mouth drop. And I use Windows all day at work, developing ASP/SQL Server web apps. SQL Server is a nice piece of work, but as far as Windows and the rest of it? Blech...
I was all about developing this ninja monk guy, best HTH, etc. etc. I was going to get the glowing eyes at level 20! Then at some point I realized that I severely f*cked up a major quest somehow which was worth a lot of XP, and pretty much got stuck, and didn't have any savegames to retreat to. I was pissed!
So I found some cheat codes, added a few stats to myself here and there, then got carried away and jumped up to lvl20 "just to see the glowing eyes"... And then quickly lost interest in the game!
So the solution to getting yourself away from a game is: Find the cheat codes, use them, and it will simply ruin the punishment/reward system keeping you playing...
From kindergarten through 12th grade, my mom yelled at me until my homework got done. I got pretty good grades and ultimately got into Cornell (with my mom also yelling at me to get the applications done all the while).
I went as a physics major since I got a 5 on the AP and aced the regents. Within one year I got so molested by engineering calculus that I was asked to leave for a while. At the same time I was getting sucked into playing the early network games (early 90's, on Macs... Spectre, in case anyone recalls). It got to the point where my friends had an intervention and removed the hard drive from my computer! I still ended up leaving for awhile, joining the USAF, living it up in California for 4 years while traveling the world, coming back to Cornell as a Psych major, and did OK.
My point is- Even though she meant well and I know she loves me, my mom didn't know the first damn thing about how to instill discipline in me at all! All she taught me how to do was to work in response to a very negative stimulus, and when that stimulus was removed (and suddenly), I was completely unprepared. To this day I struggle with motivational issues (and I verge on game addiction, but only when a cool new game comes out for OS X, which fortunately is not that frequently, heh).
So don't be so quick to blame the parents, unless you also have a plan to train them on how to instill motivation/discipline in their children. Unfortunately, there is no "parenting class", and as parents like to joke among themselves, "you are the best parent your kid will ever know." Most parents care a ton about their kids, but the natural skill seems to vary...
All this is so retarded. Here's my proposed solution.
1) Voting machines are running webpages in kiosk mode.
2) Web/database server set up to receive votes. Second backup server up and running and ready to go if there's a problem.
3) All votes are recorded THRICE... once to the "main" database, once to the second backup server database within a transaction, and once... printing out each vote, at the point of voting, line-by-line to one of 2 dot-matrix printers!
Redundancies: If a client machine goes down, replacing it with another one is easy. If the server goes down, there is always the other one. If the printer goes down or runs out of ink or paper, you swap it with the other one (maybe have a 3rd as spare).
The only hack this would require is getting an old dot-matrix printer to talk to a modern server and only print out one line at a time.
The software part is E-Z. And the clients would of course have touchscreens.
Now go make a killing off my idea. Just credit "Lectrick", a mysterious man from the Net underground...
True democracy comes from within. We can't impose it on a country and it keeps looking like we're trying to do that even though a simple examination of the historical evidence indicates that this is a difficult if not impossible task at beset.
It is my humble but thoughtful opinion that most of the current strength of the U.S. was actually forged during the time of the physical, bloody rejection of British governance 225 years ago. Ironically, as a result I wonder if the ideal solution to the Iraqi problem would actually be to pull out and allow the forces at work there to believe they HAD fought for their independence and won.
I look at Germany (the homeland of my parents) as a rare, good, but definitely not ideal, outcome of "nation-building". Germany to this day continues to struggle (I feel) with a definition of itself that works in this century. Why else are there these irrational resurgences in interest in Nazi ideas. It was the last time that Germany was the world leader in engineering, science, and was getting lots of attention. Now they're known as the source of oom-pah music, all kinds of wurst, that country that Mike Myers makes fun of, kinky porn, and beer. Ideally, I think the people of a country would like a better fate than that. A defining moment... Where is Iraq's defining moment??
I have one of the new Motorola HD-DVR boxes that Comcast puts out, and a handy-dandy new Dual 2.5ghz G5 with 30" cinema (don't hate me, I just sold my primary residence and took a little profit, is all...). I'm able to connect the two boxes via FireWire and record (through a couple of clunky apps out there) the packetized MPEG2 stream to a disk file, and play it back with VLC... but all I want to be able to do is VIEW the cablebox signal via the FireWire connection and use the 30" cinema display as an HD screen, avoiding the cost of a separate (redundant hardware!) HDTV... It already has a PVR so I don't need to record.
Does ANYONE know of anything out there (or that will be out there) that will accomplish this?
The problem is that in some user-interface scenarios (switching weapons in FPS games?), the "notched-wheel" type tactile feedback becomes an asset. When you're trying to smooth-scroll, however, you run into what you complain about. Of course, in the former case, you could simply make touching the upper area of the strip a "click forward" and touching the lower area a "click backward"... but I suppose it wouldn't feel the same.
I love UI problems... there's never an ideal solution but a good compromise can be very useful/profitable...
...procuring a used laptop? Low power, and all the creature comforts of a full-fledged computer.
(aside)
But, I have to also say. I have NEVER even MET a woman who has HEARD of bsd. I had to argue with a Comcast Cable woman today who hadn't even heard of FireWire. I considered it a victory when I got my g/f to run Folding@Home. She was even game for Red Hat, but it was too difficult for her to find a wireless driver for the Thinkpad built-in 802.11... but hey, at least she tried!
Here's to... if not geek, then geek-compatible women! love 'em.
...oh, wait. Too late!
You will get distracted and sucked in by people going to parties inviting you along, people ordering pizza, people watching a reality show, people playing multiplayer games, women you want to flirt with walking by, people shooting water balloons between dorms with a big rubber slingshot, people doing all sorts of stuff but actual schoolwork.
...Find a library.
Take it from me (I did really poorly freshman year and had to take some time off from Cornell). Bring your work to a LIBRARY on campus, find a quiet corner, and plunge right into the work. Take a short break every hour. Get done and go home feeling a LOT better about goofing off. (Note: Do NOT do your work in the computer room of the library. Too easy to websurf.)
Just do NOT try to do work in the dorm. Even if you see people working... they are not you. You are distracted by shiny things, and rightfully so. Working is less shiny, yet enables you to continue to stay at school and enjoy ogling all those fine women and use that insanely-fast internet connection for who-knows-what.
Oh, and if you have an empty period in between classes, don't goof it off. Do some classroom reading under a tree somewhere. You will enjoy your extra free time.
That stupid line from that dumb android from Cherry 2000 is somehow stuck in my brain... forever.
I liked the movie. More memorable than a lot of other movies I've seen, in any event, even if it's a silly predictable love story at heart.
They will do fine.
Note about MSN- Contrary to you folk apparently, all MY friends have moved to AIM. Perhaps there are pockets of users that use one or the other.
Note about offline messages- I have also bemoaned this ICQ feature lacking in MSN/AIM. But really, that sort of functionality is what email is for.
"oh... snap"
then after seeing how quickly the queue downloaded (I had assumed real-time-play speeds... thank you, space-efficient m4a files!)
"oh sh**"
Well, this party won't last long... but I guess it was only a matter of time. Apple can easily help to "rectify" this with a speed-limiter on the upstream side.
I actually just registered for Second Life last night. It's kinda interesting. I don't think it qualifies as a conventional "roleplaying" game, although you do have an avatar in a massive multiplayer online world, and you can configure how you look and amass all sorts of objects in an inventory... as well as virtual money. But there's no "experience", per se.
;)
One aspect that may definitely disqualify it as a MMORPG for sure, is that it actually has women in it.
Second Life has a scripting language (C++-based) and basically allows anyone to create freeform objects with behaviors and properties. The economic model is interesting. You can do things like create an automated dispenser which charges people to create copies of objects you have created. You can also own virtual real estate.
Someone has created an adventure-within-a-world in it that tracks experience. I haven't checked it out yet, but it sounds interesting. You have to "buy" an Adventurer's Pack which gives you all the relevant objects.
So I don't know if it counts. What do you think?
My name in it is Roark Spinnaker, in the event you run into me while I'm flying around in it. I haven't decided yet if I will stay after the free week trial is over.