From the article and abstract, the study takes a few things like 1. Being exposed to images of violence *temporarily* increases blood pressure, competitiveness, and paranoia, i.e. things they knew would happen *before* the study was conducted. 2. Concludes that violent video games cause violence in real life, fosters drug use, and brings general anarchy.
2 clearly does not follow from 1. 1 is a natural and healthy response to danger... 1 is adrenaline and is something they should take pains to *factor our* of their study to make it anything more than pseudo science. I would like to know, for one, how long *after* playing video games they waited before gathering behavioral data, but I didn't see that anywhere in the article and abstract.
The only meaningful conclusions about video game's effect on violence would have to be discovered by paying some people (who would not otherwise) play violent video games over a long period of several years, then seeing if they had increased criminal activity over a control group. This would be a more expensive study... but frankly, people like this who aren't willing to do real science, shouldn't be doing science at all.
Furthermore, it is a widely held belief among the elderly in our culture is the belief that drug use and violence is up in the current generation. This is a belief which is, of course, patently false, and has more grounding in pre-enlightenment religious that the world is in a constant state of rot and decay than actual fact.
In actuality, violent crime is down *quite a lot* over the part few decades. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm People will sometimes quote you "crime is up 1 million percent from 1960 to 1991" or whatever, but you have to ask yourself, why did they pick those particular years, and are they talking about *violent crime* or are they talking about things like *speeding tickets*, and violations of various nanny laws that have been passed recently... It is quite easy to distort the figures, but murder is most definitely *way down*.
Drug arrests do appear to be up... since we started the war on drugs and started arresting people in large numbers. A better question about drugs is, are they actually in wider use now then before? It was pretty hard for me to actually dig up that information... there's a lot of shock numbers out there about drug *arrents* (a number that raises and lowers with *enforcement* more than *use*) but info about how drug *use* is something that people don't always put out there.
This data seems do indicate that marijuana use peaked in 1978 and never got as high again (haha, little pun). The survey data doesn't seem to have all of the 90s in it though, and I think I've seen some other data that said that drug use may have gone up some during that time frame... alhough I'm not sure how much. Anecdotal experience suggests that programs like DARE were pretty effective. Actually and honestly telling people what kind of health side effects various drugs have, has been shown to be pretty effective. Most people are not self destructive. Policies of making claims about the connection between drug use and crime (essentially telling people they will become felons if they start smoking pot) have not been so effective, as people generally consider themselves in control of their own actions.
Also, I suspect the large numbers of arrests have been mostly a public relations maneuver by the government, and has done little to decrease drug use. I suppose it may have increased the street price of various drugs (would anyone with knowledge care to comment?), but I wonder if it's really worked as a deterrent to users?
Anyway, when people make claims about crime, drug use, and terrorism, always consider the source and look at the data for *yourself*. There are a lot of people in this country who imagine
>the most notorious being a company I'll call company "X" - which is believed to be backed by North >American mega-millionaires -- saw a loophole in the process.
wtf? company x? Just say who the fuck it is you are talking about.
The fanboy article seems like fairly idiotic nintendo bashing with no real points. I realize it is satire... but you can use satire to convey an essential truth and not just tell people what a moron you are.
As for myself, although I haven't bought a nintendo product, aside from a gameboy, in quite a while, I'll probably be getting a revolution if I get another console at all.
The xbox 360 seems thoroughly unimpressive considering how much it costs, limited compatability, small upgrade in graphics, and small life span of the last xbox. I mean... that don't even have a harddrive standard in the new xbox... isn't that a *downgrade*? Built in harddrive and NIC were the primary reasons why the last xbox was actually a pretty good buy over the ps2 considering the smaller game library and higher price...
Few details about the ps3 have been released... my guess is it will be fairly impressive graphics wise, maybe a real jump compared to the other consoles. I've heard a lot of people saying that it won't be as good as the 360... which doesn't make a lot of sense given the specs. What we do know about the ps3 is that it will have *9 cores*, and blu ray, which seems like a major jump up to *me*. Additionally, sony has given *no* indication that they will be charging for their online service ala microsoft. Free online play seems only sensible given that home users must already pay for their internet connection.
That said the ps3 sounds like it will be very expensive, given european prices, and will probably not do that well at launch if some people already have xbox 360s, although I don't know any who do.
The revolution looks like might it might squeek in as a success for gamers disgusted with the high prices and mediacre improvement of graphics of the current console generation. It sounds like that's what nintendo is betting on... and they've already done something similar with the DS.
>I'm guessing that English majors are generally more technically adept than engineering majors are grammatically adept.
That's patently false. The ability to write well is a major requirement in *all* of the math and sciences that I know about. I don't know that many people that make it through college without learning how to write well... although I suppose there are some. On the other hand, I might not be as familiar with historical English writers as an English major.
I actually don't know what jobs, outside of academia, that English majors have special ability in above any other college grad. I suppose the same could be said of philosophy. I'm not saying those aren't worthwhile pursuits, I love philosophy, but I just don't understand how people can defend English majoring on an "it makes me good at my job and I don't teach English" level.
>And T.V. I can't remember what the exact numbers are, but the average household has the T.V. on for >something like 8 hours. But when you live in the sub/ex-urbs... what else is there to do? You can play in >parks, I guess. But you can't really walk anywhere else.
*yes*, the suburbs are boring as hell.
Parents move to the suburbs because they think it will be better to start a new family there... *wrong*. Since there's nothing for kids to *do* in the burbs, they tend to watch tv, do drugs, and get cheerleaders pregnant. It's even worse in rural areas. Methamphetamines have an extremely high incidence in the boonies, since.. what else are people going to do for fun?
Yet parents continue to move their families out to the suburbs, take hour or more commutes to work, so that they can neglect their new family in a suburban desert...
The burbs are a nice relatively affordable place for an adult to live, but you shouldn't try to raise a family there. That said, the schools often suck in urban areas...
I don't mind a little criticism, but I get tired of hearing what is essentially a bunch of name calling. Just because America isn't popular this year, doesn't give you the right to act like a little bitch.
Obesity is a problem in America more than elsewhere because *wealth* is *common* in America and food is relatively cheap. You can pretend to be disgusted, but if you had the opportunity to be in our shoes, you would take it.
We drive cars because 1. it is fun 2. although gas prices have risen, they are still low (especially when compared to european gas prices) 3. there are insufficient bus routes to most suburbs in America.
Number 3 could probably be fixed, but number 1 and 2 keeps us from caring enough to do it. The fact is we have a (relatively new) great highway system extending from end to end of the continent, so why not use it?
I can see the value in this, especially if you need to look something up while on the road, but...
You could do this by yourself *better*. You don't need a million sites that you would never visit. It would be better to write some frontend to wget that caches all top 10 sites that result from a series of google searches. If you parallelize that you couldn't get it done in reasonable time, for free, and use less HD space.
This kind of reminds me of when people used to sell encyclopedias on CD rom (with lots of nifty low res videos of the moon landing), but then suddenly the internet became better than any encyclopedia.
The one thing this company does that is cool is that it *reminds me* to make a local cache of wikipedia.
This guy is essentially right, although not with respect to his project where he actually has quite a bit of ram and flash memory to work with. Although linux probably suffers from less bloat than say, winxp, it still suffers from it, as do all modern operating system.
People who say things like, "oh, it's only that distro," or "you don't need to install of the graphical stuff from KDE" don't know what they are talking about. The problem isn't kde, or having mysql on your system, the problem is *the kernel*. Embedded solutions aren't going to use a standard distro or mysql anyway...
By default a lot of hardware support that you may or may not need is in the kernel. Distros also preemptively include drivers. This is a good thing for 99% of us. However, if you want to get modern linux to install and run on an ancient computer or an embedded system, it makes life hard on you. You can tear apart linux and only include the kernel modules you need, and you will get some reduction if you know what you are doing... but removing hardware support does reduce the flexibility of your device.
Really, the problem isn't linux at all, but the fact that so much hardware is out there that you probably want to support, but probably can't if you've only got 8 megs to work with.
The 100 dollar laptop project has looser constraints than many small linux projects, the main problem being lack of harddrive space for swap limits the ability to run complicated applications. I will say that even though it will be relatively easy for him, building your own distro seems like a fairly onerous task for someone trying to get things done on a budget and schedule.
because Cringely's track record suggests he doesn't know much about where apple is going.
However, it seems to me that if apple wanted people to get cheap macs, they wouldn't make a "generic mac os" since this would require them supporting too much software at too great an expense. It would make more sense to do what they did in the past, license specific computer manufacturers to produce mac compatible machines. It would then be Dell's or whoevers responsibility to either provide hardware that worked with osx, or write their own drivers.
Many don't remember, but in the past apple licensed a number of companies to produce low margin mac machines. Their market share actually increased quite a bit when they did this... but it ended up cutting into their revenue too much, so they axed the clones. At the time the apple clones were both better and cheaper than the originals... I still have a Power Computing machine. It was totally badass back in the day.
Anyway, licensing would probably be the option apple would take (if they wanted osx on non-apple's *at all*) because 1. They've done it before. 2. It leaves them in control to say *who* can make *how many* clones, and *what market* they can produce them for. Apple could stipulate for instance that the clone maker would only be allowed to sell sub $1k machines with limited upgradability while apple maintained a monopoly on the high end high margin workstations, which is what they are good at making anyway.
Dell, I believe has expressed interest in being in such a role. If I were Apple, I would consider such an offer, but only a year or two down the line when apple had gotten over some more bumps in the intel transition. Specifically, I would wait until Microsoft had finished ports of it's mac software to intel. If they made the move now, they would leave Microsoft in a position to sabotage Apple if Microsoft felt its marketshare threatened. Microsoft could always justify not porting to osx intel, as such machines can always dual boot osx.
Humor doesn't always involve suffering... we just enjoy it more that way.
Irony does not require suffering at all. People often expect the suffering though, are looking for it more than the irony itself, and so will miss the irony altogether if no suffering is involved.
I remember reading Stranger In A Strange Land, and thinking that Heinlein was a total dumbass because, among other things, he suggested that humor was immoral.
Only someone who doesn't *have* a sense of humor would suggest that all humor is essentially slapstick.
Anyway, time to end this rather humorless discussion of humor.
Yeah... The video was hilarious way back in the day... but your average ass hole on the street has obviously ruined the joke by actually approaching the kid.. and laughing in his face. Which I suppose it what the kids at his school did initially.
I'm starting to wonder if this was an invasion of privacy, not just committed by the kids who distributed the video, but everyone else who kept distributing it after that, and everyone watching it. This video, sex tapes for paris hilton (not my favorite person, but still), seem to show that up until now most of us haven't thought much about invading people's privacies in ways that we'd probably be outraged if someone did this to us.
I mean, the slashdot crowd gets pretty upset about government wiretapping, and marketers collecting their personal data and sending them unsolicited advertisements, etc. Maybe it's about time we showed some consistency and agreed to stop violating *each others* privacy. There are certain social mores on the internet, not always followed *everywhere* but generally recognized as being extent. Maybe, not distributing or watching videos of a private nature of people you don't know should be added to them? It makes sense to me. I sure don't want somebody scanning my diary and uploading it to the internet.
I would really love to have usable wine... It really seems like there isn't as much steam behind that project as there should be. It would be cool if some of the major OS vendors (apple, sun, redhat) started putting some resources behind that project.
Supposedly wine has pretty decent compatibility already... but making the software *run* is a bitch. The wine team needs to spend a little more time making their software easy to configure and run for common uses (video games).
>We can prevent "Pedro" from working here. If he can't work here, he probably won't come. And most of >the jobs illegal immigrants take CAN'T be outsourced. Some industries might. Granted people may >decide that lawncare or janitorial work isn't worth paying for anymore....
Ugh, you are entirely missing the point. The problem isn't that janitorial and lawncare jobs are being taken away, if those were the only jobs under competition from illegal immigrants, no one would care that much. The problem isn't the service sector at all. Really, the service sector can hardly be called an industry...
This is all about our ability to make products we can export cheaply. If we can't do that, and we can't right now, than nobody buys anything from us (the US). When that happens, the dollar no longer has value. When that happens... we become a third world country. In some sense that solves the problem, but only after it ceases to have meaning.
FF7 was one of the worst?! Because of story?! It actually *had* a story, and characters... that puts it miles ahead of the rest of final fantasy.
You hated materia? because then you didn't have to mindlessly level up all your chars?
The point of materia was that you got to *create* a new character from scratch by giving him whatever kind of abilities you wanted to. Kind of like the sphere grid, except you could do it over and over again. I personally thought this was fun.
My main beef with final fantasy is that you shouldn't have to spend so mach god damn time leveling up your chars. Materia made the task at least a little more interesting, by allowing you to level up whatever abilities that you thought were cool, instead of just linearly improving your characters hp and mana.
*all* ff is well known as being a mindless mob grind, not just FFXI. I don't know the system in particular, but it would be hard to make any worse than the *have your characters line up and take turns attacking the enemy* system.
I never played FF7 as a kid... I can assure you I enjoy it as an adult.
When people solved problems with bullies with good old fashioned violence.
Seriously, though... I know it's not politically correct to say that violence is the answer, but when dealing with bullies it usually is. The primary reason why things get this bad is because teachers and parents often tell kids that "violence is never the answer," or "use your words" in a situation where that clearly will never win the respect of any peers or gain any satisfaction for the bullied child. All that happens is that bullied children are forced to repress their rage, and bullies are left unpunished and learn that their behavior will be tolerated.
For members of the younger generation, whatever your parents might tell you, in some situations you are better off standing your ground and getting into a fight.
I just want to say this is totally sweet. This finally means that if I want to play video games, I don't need to buy an entirely separate computer. I can't wait to play oblivion on a mac book pro.
This will certainly mean of high end pc games being ported to the mac... but that's fine with me. The ports are almost always late and deficient anyway. Besides, there are still some mac native game developers like ambrosia that should still keep at it to some degree.
probably want a naked machine. OEM windows is generally not as good as off the shelf windows, so many choose to buy another better copy of windows even after already paying the implicit microsoft tax once.
The OEMs usually package a bunch of crappy software that you don't want in their versions of windows, often slowing done your system. Furthermore if they give you an installer disk at all, it is often a disk that just copies an image of windows directly to the harddrive, totally nuking all partitions. My laptop came with one of these... totally useless if you want to have more than one partition, or want to use the installer disk for any kind of repair that *doesn't* nuke your data. Also, since there's no real installer disk, what if you want to install non default packages? Like asian language files? Or IIS? You are then screwed.
Furthermore, virtually every windows user *already owns a copy of windows* when they buy their machine. At this point microsoft is coming out with new editions of windows at a slower rate than most people buy new computers. Why should I buy another copy of windows for the machine that replaced my old windows machine? It's perfectly legal to transfer over the license.
In summation, OEM windows is the biggest scam ever, forcing you to pay for software you already own again and again. I think we can all agree that it is quite literally worse than the holocaust.
Pointing out that microsoft has done some unethical things is fine... although extremely old news. This is 2006, the anti trust thing started when?
What I don't like about this article, is that it tries to demonize the Microsoft leadership, and that it comes from Cringely. To my knowledge Paul Allen has never complained publicly about getting screwed out of majority shares. Furthermore, Cringely *regularly* comes up with bizarre conspiracy theories that do not pan out. He has no credibility whatsoever. Why should I believe him if he says that he overheard some story? He once proposed that Microsoft was planning to break IP compatibility...
Why is slashdot still posting his articles anyway? All of the ones I've seen have been bullshit...
Except for one or two major features, or of course in the case of the manual. If your app has feature X, it should be sufficient to just say so in a feature list on your website.
Otherwise, when I'm looking at a screenshot of an app, I use it to get an overall sense of quality. I want to see that the interface is nicely and consistently put together. If your primary interface is nice looking, and intuitive to use, I can generally infer that you put the same quality into the UI for each individual feature.
Hmm... one other tip, don't include your desktop in the screenshot. A lot of people have funky looking desktops, and assume that viewers will be amused by looking at it. This may be true, but it also distracts from what you are showing, and makes it less convenient to look at. You can generally just copy an image of the window in question, and then have plenty of space next to it for text.
However, whether it makes sense to you or not, standard English is now whatever dialect happens to be spoken by the guys on CNN, no longer those on BBC.
Also, it should be noted that "I could care less" is an idiom, like "all your base are belong to us," and thus is not required to make internal sense... although personally I tend to say "I could not care less," and avoid the idiom altogether.
>The people in charge can control the borders. They just choose not to.
Yes. What surprises me, is that people think that this is a bad thing. The government, and most businesses *do* want *more* immigrants, not less, by whatever means necessary. Lots of cheap labor will help businesses compete internationally.
The are hampered by a populist movement that believes they can maintain their jobs and high wages by keeping out foreign workers. *rolls eyes* What these people need to realize, is that if you can't compete for your job with pedro, you are screwed no matter what. Either the immigrants will come here to work, and at least contribute to our society, pay taxes, etc, or they will work in foreign countries and your job will either be outsourced there, or the market will simply be taken over by foreign countries.
I have pretty low respect for populist movement in general... our government may not be the brightest, but the average guy on the street should *not* be running the country, and this is exactly why. There's a reason that america is *not* a democracy, but a republic.
One reason that we can't compete, is because of cost of living issues, wages, etc, which will naturally collect themselves in time if our industry doesn't go to crap immediately. Afterall, this country is relatively underpopulated, and has excess food production capacity, that will keep us permanently ahead of most of the other industrialized countries in terms of low cost of living. It won't keep us ahead of the *industrializing* countries, but industrializing countries become industrialized after not too long...
The other reason we can't compete... which will certainly not correct itself, is that the american public education system has pretty much collapsed. Uneven funding, teacher unions, and general apathy towards the youth shown by the government (they don't vote, so why spend money on them?) have made most american schools into daycare facilities whose primary purpose is to keep kids off the streets. Lack of education has in turn made the young pretty politically unimpowered in this generation, which has in turn given the government free reign to cut back on education programs and put more money into things that older americans care about... like prescription medicine, or killing muslims.
There doesn't seem to be anything special about a quasar here... essentially all they are saying is that large amounts of random data can be used for quick and easy one time pad encryption, which to my knowledge is unbreakable, although I am not particularly well versed in cryptography...
For those that don't know, the idea behind a one time pad is that your key is random, and the same size as the data being sent. For example, if binary data is sent, simple xor encryption can be used as follows
unencrypted data: 10110000 pad data : 10111001
xor the pad against the key and you get
encrypted data : 00001001
xor the same pad against the *encrypted* key again to get
original data : 10110001 tada
One time pads have two major problems 1. Both parties need the key. 2. The key is large, thus cumbersome to carry around and likely to be discovered.
Problem 2 can be solved, while losing some randomness, by using a popular book as the pad. Then you could just head down to the library and check out catcher in the rye, or whatever book you agreed upon beforehand, and begin decoding.
I suppose that this could be used in conjunction with public key cryptography, so that public key cryptography is used to encrypt the coordinates of the quasar you want to use... but I really don't see why you need the quasar at all. Also, aren't there only 12,000 of them visible? If this technology became widespread and quasars were persistently used as sources of random data... someone with enough resources could just monitor them all and decrypt any data transmitted by checking it against all the data received from pulsars at that time.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article and abstract, the study takes a few things like
1. Being exposed to images of violence *temporarily* increases blood pressure, competitiveness, and paranoia, i.e. things they knew would happen *before* the study was conducted.
2. Concludes that violent video games cause violence in real life, fosters drug use, and brings general anarchy.
2 clearly does not follow from 1. 1 is a natural and healthy response to danger... 1 is adrenaline and is something they should take pains to *factor our* of their study to make it anything more than pseudo science. I would like to know, for one, how long *after* playing video games they waited before gathering behavioral data, but I didn't see that anywhere in the article and abstract.
The only meaningful conclusions about video game's effect on violence would have to be discovered by paying some people (who would not otherwise) play violent video games over a long period of several years, then seeing if they had increased criminal activity over a control group. This would be a more expensive study... but frankly, people like this who aren't willing to do real science, shouldn't be doing science at all.
Furthermore, it is a widely held belief among the elderly in our culture is the belief that drug use and violence is up in the current generation. This is a belief which is, of course, patently false, and has more grounding in pre-enlightenment religious that the world is in a constant state of rot and decay than actual fact.
In actuality, violent crime is down *quite a lot* over the part few decades. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm
People will sometimes quote you "crime is up 1 million percent from 1960 to 1991" or whatever, but you have to ask yourself, why did they pick those particular years, and are they talking about *violent crime* or are they talking about things like *speeding tickets*, and violations of various nanny laws that have been passed recently... It is quite easy to distort the figures, but murder is most definitely *way down*.
Drug arrests do appear to be up... since we started the war on drugs and started arresting people in large numbers. A better question about drugs is, are they actually in wider use now then before? It was pretty hard for me to actually dig up that information... there's a lot of shock numbers out there about drug *arrents* (a number that raises and lowers with *enforcement* more than *use*) but info about how drug *use* is something that people don't always put out there.
http://oas.samhsa.gov/NHSDA/BabyBoom/chapter2.htm
This data seems do indicate that marijuana use peaked in 1978 and never got as high again (haha, little pun). The survey data doesn't seem to have all of the 90s in it though, and I think I've seen some other data that said that drug use may have gone up some during that time frame... alhough I'm not sure how much. Anecdotal experience suggests that programs like DARE were pretty effective. Actually and honestly telling people what kind of health side effects various drugs have, has been shown to be pretty effective. Most people are not self destructive. Policies of making claims about the connection between drug use and crime (essentially telling people they will become felons if they start smoking pot) have not been so effective, as people generally consider themselves in control of their own actions.
Also, I suspect the large numbers of arrests have been mostly a public relations maneuver by the government, and has done little to decrease drug use. I suppose it may have increased the street price of various drugs (would anyone with knowledge care to comment?), but I wonder if it's really worked as a deterrent to users?
Anyway, when people make claims about crime, drug use, and terrorism, always consider the source and look at the data for *yourself*. There are a lot of people in this country who imagine
>the most notorious being a company I'll call company "X" - which is believed to be backed by North
>American mega-millionaires -- saw a loophole in the process.
wtf? company x? Just say who the fuck it is you are talking about.
The fanboy article seems like fairly idiotic nintendo bashing with no real points. I realize it is satire... but you can use satire to convey an essential truth and not just tell people what a moron you are.
As for myself, although I haven't bought a nintendo product, aside from a gameboy, in quite a while, I'll probably be getting a revolution if I get another console at all.
The xbox 360 seems thoroughly unimpressive considering how much it costs, limited compatability, small upgrade in graphics, and small life span of the last xbox. I mean... that don't even have a harddrive standard in the new xbox... isn't that a *downgrade*? Built in harddrive and NIC were the primary reasons why the last xbox was actually a pretty good buy over the ps2 considering the smaller game library and higher price...
Few details about the ps3 have been released... my guess is it will be fairly impressive graphics wise, maybe a real jump compared to the other consoles. I've heard a lot of people saying that it won't be as good as the 360... which doesn't make a lot of sense given the specs. What we do know about the ps3 is that it will have *9 cores*, and blu ray, which seems like a major jump up to *me*. Additionally, sony has given *no* indication that they will be charging for their online service ala microsoft. Free online play seems only sensible given that home users must already pay for their internet connection.
That said the ps3 sounds like it will be very expensive, given european prices, and will probably not do that well at launch if some people already have xbox 360s, although I don't know any who do.
The revolution looks like might it might squeek in as a success for gamers disgusted with the high prices and mediacre improvement of graphics of the current console generation. It sounds like that's what nintendo is betting on... and they've already done something similar with the DS.
>I'm guessing that English majors are generally more technically adept than engineering majors are grammatically adept.
That's patently false. The ability to write well is a major requirement in *all* of the math and sciences that I know about. I don't know that many people that make it through college without learning how to write well... although I suppose there are some. On the other hand, I might not be as familiar with historical English writers as an English major.
I actually don't know what jobs, outside of academia, that English majors have special ability in above any other college grad. I suppose the same could be said of philosophy. I'm not saying those aren't worthwhile pursuits, I love philosophy, but I just don't understand how people can defend English majoring on an "it makes me good at my job and I don't teach English" level.
>And T.V. I can't remember what the exact numbers are, but the average household has the T.V. on for
>something like 8 hours. But when you live in the sub/ex-urbs... what else is there to do? You can play in
>parks, I guess. But you can't really walk anywhere else.
*yes*, the suburbs are boring as hell.
Parents move to the suburbs because they think it will be better to start a new family there... *wrong*. Since there's nothing for kids to *do* in the burbs, they tend to watch tv, do drugs, and get cheerleaders pregnant. It's even worse in rural areas. Methamphetamines have an extremely high incidence in the boonies, since.. what else are people going to do for fun?
Yet parents continue to move their families out to the suburbs, take hour or more commutes to work, so that they can neglect their new family in a suburban desert...
The burbs are a nice relatively affordable place for an adult to live, but you shouldn't try to raise a family there. That said, the schools often suck in urban areas...
I don't mind a little criticism, but I get tired of hearing what is essentially a bunch of name calling. Just because America isn't popular this year, doesn't give you the right to act like a little bitch.
Obesity is a problem in America more than elsewhere because *wealth* is *common* in America and food is relatively cheap. You can pretend to be disgusted, but if you had the opportunity to be in our shoes, you would take it.
We drive cars because
1. it is fun
2. although gas prices have risen, they are still low (especially when compared to european gas prices)
3. there are insufficient bus routes to most suburbs in America.
Number 3 could probably be fixed, but number 1 and 2 keeps us from caring enough to do it. The fact is we have a (relatively new) great highway system extending from end to end of the continent, so why not use it?
I can see the value in this, especially if you need to look something up while on the road, but...
You could do this by yourself *better*. You don't need a million sites that you would never visit. It would be better to write some frontend to wget that caches all top 10 sites that result from a series of google searches. If you parallelize that you couldn't get it done in reasonable time, for free, and use less HD space.
This kind of reminds me of when people used to sell encyclopedias on CD rom (with lots of nifty low res videos of the moon landing), but then suddenly the internet became better than any encyclopedia.
The one thing this company does that is cool is that it *reminds me* to make a local cache of wikipedia.
This guy is essentially right, although not with respect to his project where he actually has quite a bit of ram and flash memory to work with. Although linux probably suffers from less bloat than say, winxp, it still suffers from it, as do all modern operating system.
People who say things like, "oh, it's only that distro," or "you don't need to install of the graphical stuff from KDE" don't know what they are talking about. The problem isn't kde, or having mysql on your system, the problem is *the kernel*. Embedded solutions aren't going to use a standard distro or mysql anyway...
By default a lot of hardware support that you may or may not need is in the kernel. Distros also preemptively include drivers. This is a good thing for 99% of us. However, if you want to get modern linux to install and run on an ancient computer or an embedded system, it makes life hard on you. You can tear apart linux and only include the kernel modules you need, and you will get some reduction if you know what you are doing... but removing hardware support does reduce the flexibility of your device.
Really, the problem isn't linux at all, but the fact that so much hardware is out there that you probably want to support, but probably can't if you've only got 8 megs to work with.
The 100 dollar laptop project has looser constraints than many small linux projects, the main problem being lack of harddrive space for swap limits the ability to run complicated applications. I will say that even though it will be relatively easy for him, building your own distro seems like a fairly onerous task for someone trying to get things done on a budget and schedule.
because Cringely's track record suggests he doesn't know much about where apple is going.
However, it seems to me that if apple wanted people to get cheap macs, they wouldn't make a "generic mac os" since this would require them supporting too much software at too great an expense. It would make more sense to do what they did in the past, license specific computer manufacturers to produce mac compatible machines. It would then be Dell's or whoevers responsibility to either provide hardware that worked with osx, or write their own drivers.
Many don't remember, but in the past apple licensed a number of companies to produce low margin mac machines. Their market share actually increased quite a bit when they did this... but it ended up cutting into their revenue too much, so they axed the clones. At the time the apple clones were both better and cheaper than the originals... I still have a Power Computing machine. It was totally badass back in the day.
Anyway, licensing would probably be the option apple would take (if they wanted osx on non-apple's *at all*) because
1. They've done it before.
2. It leaves them in control to say *who* can make *how many* clones, and *what market* they can produce them for. Apple could stipulate for instance that the clone maker would only be allowed to sell sub $1k machines with limited upgradability while apple maintained a monopoly on the high end high margin workstations, which is what they are good at making anyway.
Dell, I believe has expressed interest in being in such a role. If I were Apple, I would consider such an offer, but only a year or two down the line when apple had gotten over some more bumps in the intel transition. Specifically, I would wait until Microsoft had finished ports of it's mac software to intel. If they made the move now, they would leave Microsoft in a position to sabotage Apple if Microsoft felt its marketshare threatened. Microsoft could always justify not porting to osx intel, as such machines can always dual boot osx.
Humor doesn't always involve suffering... we just enjoy it more that way.
Irony does not require suffering at all. People often expect the suffering though, are looking for it more than the irony itself, and so will miss the irony altogether if no suffering is involved.
I remember reading Stranger In A Strange Land, and thinking that Heinlein was a total dumbass because, among other things, he suggested that humor was immoral.
Only someone who doesn't *have* a sense of humor would suggest that all humor is essentially slapstick.
Anyway, time to end this rather humorless discussion of humor.
Yeah... The video was hilarious way back in the day... but your average ass hole on the street has obviously ruined the joke by actually approaching the kid.. and laughing in his face. Which I suppose it what the kids at his school did initially.
I'm starting to wonder if this was an invasion of privacy, not just committed by the kids who distributed the video, but everyone else who kept distributing it after that, and everyone watching it. This video, sex tapes for paris hilton (not my favorite person, but still), seem to show that up until now most of us haven't thought much about invading people's privacies in ways that we'd probably be outraged if someone did this to us.
I mean, the slashdot crowd gets pretty upset about government wiretapping, and marketers collecting their personal data and sending them unsolicited advertisements, etc. Maybe it's about time we showed some consistency and agreed to stop violating *each others* privacy. There are certain social mores on the internet, not always followed *everywhere* but generally recognized as being extent. Maybe, not distributing or watching videos of a private nature of people you don't know should be added to them? It makes sense to me. I sure don't want somebody scanning my diary and uploading it to the internet.
Let's say it's a kind of ceasefire arrangement.
I would really love to have usable wine... It really seems like there isn't as much steam behind that project as there should be. It would be cool if some of the major OS vendors (apple, sun, redhat) started putting some resources behind that project.
Supposedly wine has pretty decent compatibility already... but making the software *run* is a bitch. The wine team needs to spend a little more time making their software easy to configure and run for common uses (video games).
>We can prevent "Pedro" from working here. If he can't work here, he probably won't come. And most of
>the jobs illegal immigrants take CAN'T be outsourced. Some industries might. Granted people may
>decide that lawncare or janitorial work isn't worth paying for anymore....
Ugh, you are entirely missing the point. The problem isn't that janitorial and lawncare jobs are being taken away, if those were the only jobs under competition from illegal immigrants, no one would care that much. The problem isn't the service sector at all. Really, the service sector can hardly be called an industry...
This is all about our ability to make products we can export cheaply. If we can't do that, and we can't right now, than nobody buys anything from us (the US). When that happens, the dollar no longer has value. When that happens... we become a third world country. In some sense that solves the problem, but only after it ceases to have meaning.
FF7 was one of the worst?! Because of story?! It actually *had* a story, and characters... that puts it miles ahead of the rest of final fantasy.
You hated materia? because then you didn't have to mindlessly level up all your chars?
The point of materia was that you got to *create* a new character from scratch by giving him whatever kind of abilities you wanted to. Kind of like the sphere grid, except you could do it over and over again. I personally thought this was fun.
My main beef with final fantasy is that you shouldn't have to spend so mach god damn time leveling up your chars. Materia made the task at least a little more interesting, by allowing you to level up whatever abilities that you thought were cool, instead of just linearly improving your characters hp and mana.
*all* ff is well known as being a mindless mob grind, not just FFXI. I don't know the system in particular, but it would be hard to make any worse than the *have your characters line up and take turns attacking the enemy* system.
I never played FF7 as a kid... I can assure you I enjoy it as an adult.
When people solved problems with bullies with good old fashioned violence.
Seriously, though... I know it's not politically correct to say that violence is the answer, but when dealing with bullies it usually is. The primary reason why things get this bad is because teachers and parents often tell kids that "violence is never the answer," or "use your words" in a situation where that clearly will never win the respect of any peers or gain any satisfaction for the bullied child. All that happens is that bullied children are forced to repress their rage, and bullies are left unpunished and learn that their behavior will be tolerated.
For members of the younger generation, whatever your parents might tell you, in some situations you are better off standing your ground and getting into a fight.
wow
Can't say I'm impressed with the UI... looks like the pico of email emailers.
I just want to say this is totally sweet. This finally means that if I want to play video games, I don't need to buy an entirely separate computer. I can't wait to play oblivion on a mac book pro.
This will certainly mean of high end pc games being ported to the mac... but that's fine with me. The ports are almost always late and deficient anyway. Besides, there are still some mac native game developers like ambrosia that should still keep at it to some degree.
probably want a naked machine. OEM windows is generally not as good as off the shelf windows, so many choose to buy another better copy of windows even after already paying the implicit microsoft tax once.
The OEMs usually package a bunch of crappy software that you don't want in their versions of windows, often slowing done your system. Furthermore if they give you an installer disk at all, it is often a disk that just copies an image of windows directly to the harddrive, totally nuking all partitions. My laptop came with one of these... totally useless if you want to have more than one partition, or want to use the installer disk for any kind of repair that *doesn't* nuke your data. Also, since there's no real installer disk, what if you want to install non default packages? Like asian language files? Or IIS? You are then screwed.
Furthermore, virtually every windows user *already owns a copy of windows* when they buy their machine. At this point microsoft is coming out with new editions of windows at a slower rate than most people buy new computers. Why should I buy another copy of windows for the machine that replaced my old windows machine? It's perfectly legal to transfer over the license.
In summation, OEM windows is the biggest scam ever, forcing you to pay for software you already own again and again. I think we can all agree that it is quite literally worse than the holocaust.
Pointing out that microsoft has done some unethical things is fine... although extremely old news. This is 2006, the anti trust thing started when?
What I don't like about this article, is that it tries to demonize the Microsoft leadership, and that it comes from Cringely. To my knowledge Paul Allen has never complained publicly about getting screwed out of majority shares. Furthermore, Cringely *regularly* comes up with bizarre conspiracy theories that do not pan out. He has no credibility whatsoever. Why should I believe him if he says that he overheard some story? He once proposed that Microsoft was planning to break IP compatibility...
Why is slashdot still posting his articles anyway? All of the ones I've seen have been bullshit...
Except for one or two major features, or of course in the case of the manual. If your app has feature X, it should be sufficient to just say so in a feature list on your website.
Otherwise, when I'm looking at a screenshot of an app, I use it to get an overall sense of quality. I want to see that the interface is nicely and consistently put together. If your primary interface is nice looking, and intuitive to use, I can generally infer that you put the same quality into the UI for each individual feature.
Hmm... one other tip, don't include your desktop in the screenshot. A lot of people have funky looking desktops, and assume that viewers will be amused by looking at it. This may be true, but it also distracts from what you are showing, and makes it less convenient to look at. You can generally just copy an image of the window in question, and then have plenty of space next to it for text.
if blizzard did something other than add stuff to world of warcraft! Seriously, what is up with them? Don't they made games anymore?
Eight years later, all of their fans are still waiting for starcraft II...
but I know what you meant ;)
However, whether it makes sense to you or not, standard English is now whatever dialect happens to be spoken by the guys on CNN, no longer those on BBC.
Also, it should be noted that "I could care less" is an idiom, like "all your base are belong to us," and thus is not required to make internal sense... although personally I tend to say "I could not care less," and avoid the idiom altogether.
>The people in charge can control the borders. They just choose not to.
Yes. What surprises me, is that people think that this is a bad thing. The government, and most businesses *do* want *more* immigrants, not less, by whatever means necessary. Lots of cheap labor will help businesses compete internationally.
The are hampered by a populist movement that believes they can maintain their jobs and high wages by keeping out foreign workers. *rolls eyes* What these people need to realize, is that if you can't compete for your job with pedro, you are screwed no matter what. Either the immigrants will come here to work, and at least contribute to our society, pay taxes, etc, or they will work in foreign countries and your job will either be outsourced there, or the market will simply be taken over by foreign countries.
I have pretty low respect for populist movement in general... our government may not be the brightest, but the average guy on the street should *not* be running the country, and this is exactly why. There's a reason that america is *not* a democracy, but a republic.
One reason that we can't compete, is because of cost of living issues, wages, etc, which will naturally collect themselves in time if our industry doesn't go to crap immediately. Afterall, this country is relatively underpopulated, and has excess food production capacity, that will keep us permanently ahead of most of the other industrialized countries in terms of low cost of living. It won't keep us ahead of the *industrializing* countries, but industrializing countries become industrialized after not too long...
The other reason we can't compete... which will certainly not correct itself, is that the american public education system has pretty much collapsed. Uneven funding, teacher unions, and general apathy towards the youth shown by the government (they don't vote, so why spend money on them?) have made most american schools into daycare facilities whose primary purpose is to keep kids off the streets. Lack of education has in turn made the young pretty politically unimpowered in this generation, which has in turn given the government free reign to cut back on education programs and put more money into things that older americans care about... like prescription medicine, or killing muslims.
There doesn't seem to be anything special about a quasar here... essentially all they are saying is that large amounts of random data can be used for quick and easy one time pad encryption, which to my knowledge is unbreakable, although I am not particularly well versed in cryptography...
For those that don't know, the idea behind a one time pad is that your key is random, and the same size as the data being sent. For example, if binary data is sent, simple xor encryption can be used as follows
unencrypted data: 10110000
pad data : 10111001
xor the pad against the key and you get
encrypted data : 00001001
xor the same pad against the *encrypted* key again to get
original data : 10110001
tada
One time pads have two major problems
1. Both parties need the key.
2. The key is large, thus cumbersome to carry around and likely to be discovered.
Problem 2 can be solved, while losing some randomness, by using a popular book as the pad. Then you could just head down to the library and check out catcher in the rye, or whatever book you agreed upon beforehand, and begin decoding.
I suppose that this could be used in conjunction with public key cryptography, so that public key cryptography is used to encrypt the coordinates of the quasar you want to use... but I really don't see why you need the quasar at all. Also, aren't there only 12,000 of them visible? If this technology became widespread and quasars were persistently used as sources of random data... someone with enough resources could just monitor them all and decrypt any data transmitted by checking it against all the data received from pulsars at that time.