I've got a dual-core 1.5 GHz netbook with 2G of RAM. It's about a year old, they're still on sale, and they're great for taking places. Yes, that's what I worked on in 2000 to do development work. So what? I program embedded stuff, I don't just add RAM to a problem to make it faster.
They also don't cost $100 a month like a smartphone will.
It would be nice if the linux developers figured out how to get the touchpad working but that's about it.
Actually, the Wii was the only next-gen console out there when it launched. The 360 and PS3 were just shinier versions of their old consoles. With the Wii, Nintendo brought in motion control.
Sony directly copied it with the PS Move, and it was okay.
Microsoft did _nothing_ on the motion control front at all, and then
Kinect out of nowhere.
The Kinect is the winner in the console wars. It's the best control system I've seen in almost 30 years of gaming. Nintendo's next console is going to be some weird friggin touchpad device. The PS4 is, as Sony says, going to be less than impressive.
I cut my cable TV channels this weekend and got Netflix. I went from $140 a month to $70 a month including the new Netflix fees.
If M$ can do this, they are actually going to end up saving you a ton of money. (This would get the IRONIC tag on Fark.) Or in other words, they can end up saving you the cost of a Windows licence every single month.
Modern warships are basically floating generators powering the communications equipment.
They also have missiles, helicopters, and torpedoes. Usually for target engagement, you fire a missile off in the wrong direction, have it fly away for a bit, turn, and then correct course towards the target. The target is not aware of your correct location.
Now if you can see your target that's usually an intelligence failure or you're investigating without engaging. For example, if a Spanish fishing trawler is illegally catching fish off the Grand Banks and you decide to fire a warning shot when they don't pull over.
So where do lasers come in?
1. For defence, or incoming ballistics neutralization. The Phalanx (R2D2 / Dalek) can destroy most incoming ballistics BUT it goes through ammo like Charlie Sheen goes through hookers and Coke! (It fires 50 cal at 3000 RPM) so it's expensive to fire. Replace that with a laser and suddenly it's costing a gallon of fuel instead of $40k with of bullets. The target acquisition time with modern equipment is enough to destroy almost anything, and even better you can now destroy incoming shells with the lasers. You normally wouldn't be able to acquire / waste ammo on the smaller shells. Now you can.
2. For close-in target neutralization. If you can see the target, you can CUT OFF HER MASTS and then the ship is dark. There's no radar, no radio, and no way of acquiring targets without going outside and opening up a sextant and graph paper. And that's a warship. A civilian ship would be dead in the water.
3. Interdiction of small vessels. When the Cole was hit, even if they'd known that there was a threat there was a good chance they couldn't have repelled it. Warships are designed to hit warships, not two guys in a rowboat. They best they could have done was go down to the small arms locker and try to pick them off with machine gun fire. It wasn't until a few years later that they tried, and with remarkable success, using the Phalanx to hit small incoming craft. Again, that's a waste of money and ammo. With a laser, you can just cut them in half and throw the survivors a Kisby ring, OR switch carrier to a MASER and knock them out with the pain.
What you're buying is the temporary allowance to read that collection of words in that order, as the authour, or perhaps later editors, intended. You aren't buying a hardcover book or a mass-market paperback. What you're buying is your share of the time it took for the authour to write that book. It's not comparable to the older, dead-tree style of stenography and printing.
You could never photocopy a dead-tree book and loan that out. Likewise, why would you be allowed to make a digital copy of a book and send that out to your friends?
Look, it's Valentine's Day and I'm just getting a quick troll in before lunch.
Now, I have different usernames for a lot of different websites and IRL I don't have a beard. (I shaved it off in 2004.)
I was looking for a yoga mat; the "community" ones at the gym were a little more... used that I preferred for an item that I touch with my face. I am using IE7 since that's what corporate IT imposes. I was getting ads on/. for yoga classes and cheap yoga equipment. I volunteer at the YMCA and look up the schedule so I know what classes are on on a given day. I got ads for meeting "fitness singles".
I also, due to my work, look up a lot of military things. I was getting ads for martial arts training and "how to handle a handgun" and other things like that.
Apparently the ads computers think that yoga + military + YMCA = gay. I was getting ads for "meet local singles" with pictures of men. It was really weird until I realized that the ad servers think that I'm a fan of sausage. Or maybe they think I'm a woman; I look up vegan and vegetarian recipes and I'll look at knitting patterns to give my wife feedback. Oh, yeah, that makes more sense. They think I'm a woman.
(An ugly one...)
I've also got a quirk whereby the computers at work all go through the servers back east, so it also thinks that I live on the West Coast but work on the East coast; a 7000 mile trip can be covered in 30 minutes with ease.
We have two carriers here and they collude on prices. Any startups get bought by them and then the good plans are changed into the same old plans, and you already signed a contract so too bad for you.
The 911 fee is fraudulent and has nothing to do with accessing 911, it has to do with adding more money into the telcos. We have the same rules as the FCC where any phone must be able to call 911 even if there's no plan and no minutes.
I just looked up a plan, and they start at $50 a month for 100 minutes and 500MB of data plus the monthly connection fees, stealing from you fees (they call these "9-1-1 fees"), etc.
Why would you not have your cellular phone with you?
Because I do not OWN a cell phone. They're a huge fucking ripoff and until they get to the point where it's a reasonable price with vendors that aren't asshole oligopolies I will not get one.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a dual-core 1.5 GHz netbook with 2G of RAM. It's about a year old, they're still on sale, and they're great for taking places. Yes, that's what I worked on in 2000 to do development work. So what? I program embedded stuff, I don't just add RAM to a problem to make it faster.
They also don't cost $100 a month like a smartphone will.
It would be nice if the linux developers figured out how to get the touchpad working but that's about it.
Actually, the Wii was the only next-gen console out there when it launched. The 360 and PS3 were just shinier versions of their old consoles. With the Wii, Nintendo brought in motion control.
Sony directly copied it with the PS Move, and it was okay.
Microsoft did _nothing_ on the motion control front at all, and then
Kinect out of nowhere.
The Kinect is the winner in the console wars. It's the best control system I've seen in almost 30 years of gaming. Nintendo's next console is going to be some weird friggin touchpad device. The PS4 is, as Sony says, going to be less than impressive.
I have a 20kW electric furnace.
I often wonder how my life would have turned out if I was encouraged and fostered throughout it.
"Behind tie is a red herring" -- spads
You dress funny.
Eh, I'm type j
I cut my cable TV channels this weekend and got Netflix. I went from $140 a month to $70 a month including the new Netflix fees.
If M$ can do this, they are actually going to end up saving you a ton of money. (This would get the IRONIC tag on Fark.) Or in other words, they can end up saving you the cost of a Windows licence every single month.
(Posted from my Ubuntu machine)
Modern warships are basically floating generators powering the communications equipment.
They also have missiles, helicopters, and torpedoes. Usually for target engagement, you fire a missile off in the wrong direction, have it fly away for a bit, turn, and then correct course towards the target. The target is not aware of your correct location.
Now if you can see your target that's usually an intelligence failure or you're investigating without engaging. For example, if a Spanish fishing trawler is illegally catching fish off the Grand Banks and you decide to fire a warning shot when they don't pull over.
So where do lasers come in?
1. For defence, or incoming ballistics neutralization. The Phalanx (R2D2 / Dalek) can destroy most incoming ballistics BUT it goes through ammo like Charlie Sheen goes through hookers and Coke! (It fires 50 cal at 3000 RPM) so it's expensive to fire. Replace that with a laser and suddenly it's costing a gallon of fuel instead of $40k with of bullets. The target acquisition time with modern equipment is enough to destroy almost anything, and even better you can now destroy incoming shells with the lasers. You normally wouldn't be able to acquire / waste ammo on the smaller shells. Now you can.
2. For close-in target neutralization. If you can see the target, you can CUT OFF HER MASTS and then the ship is dark. There's no radar, no radio, and no way of acquiring targets without going outside and opening up a sextant and graph paper. And that's a warship. A civilian ship would be dead in the water.
3. Interdiction of small vessels. When the Cole was hit, even if they'd known that there was a threat there was a good chance they couldn't have repelled it. Warships are designed to hit warships, not two guys in a rowboat. They best they could have done was go down to the small arms locker and try to pick them off with machine gun fire. It wasn't until a few years later that they tried, and with remarkable success, using the Phalanx to hit small incoming craft. Again, that's a waste of money and ammo. With a laser, you can just cut them in half and throw the survivors a Kisby ring, OR switch carrier to a MASER and knock them out with the pain.
Thank you for the links. I was hoping someone would post them.
The PDF is pretty good. The idea is brilliant in its simplicity and damn, it works. Good for these folks, this is remarkable work.
I don't remember a "zeroth law" in the book.
No, I read the book.
I have always followed a rule for programming or hardware chicanery:
If it asks me to stop, I stop.
So far, so good.
I would prefer that if I so ask it, the device will obey me even at my peril or its own.
Sometimes human beings have to die, just a little, for something really spectacular to happen.
You aren't buying a book.
What you're buying is the temporary allowance to read that collection of words in that order, as the authour, or perhaps later editors, intended. You aren't buying a hardcover book or a mass-market paperback. What you're buying is your share of the time it took for the authour to write that book. It's not comparable to the older, dead-tree style of stenography and printing.
You could never photocopy a dead-tree book and loan that out. Likewise, why would you be allowed to make a digital copy of a book and send that out to your friends?
Look, it's Valentine's Day and I'm just getting a quick troll in before lunch.
Yes.
Now, I have different usernames for a lot of different websites and IRL I don't have a beard. (I shaved it off in 2004.)
I was looking for a yoga mat; the "community" ones at the gym were a little more... used that I preferred for an item that I touch with my face. I am using IE7 since that's what corporate IT imposes. I was getting ads on /. for yoga classes and cheap yoga equipment. I volunteer at the YMCA and look up the schedule so I know what classes are on on a given day. I got ads for meeting "fitness singles".
I also, due to my work, look up a lot of military things. I was getting ads for martial arts training and "how to handle a handgun" and other things like that.
Apparently the ads computers think that yoga + military + YMCA = gay. I was getting ads for "meet local singles" with pictures of men. It was really weird until I realized that the ad servers think that I'm a fan of sausage. Or maybe they think I'm a woman; I look up vegan and vegetarian recipes and I'll look at knitting patterns to give my wife feedback. Oh, yeah, that makes more sense. They think I'm a woman.
(An ugly one...)
I've also got a quirk whereby the computers at work all go through the servers back east, so it also thinks that I live on the West Coast but work on the East coast; a 7000 mile trip can be covered in 30 minutes with ease.
I just wanted to let you know that I got the reference and I laughed.
(And the sig reference too...)
Look, Jock, I hate to break it to you but the moon landings were faked.
Admittedly, the sound stage they used was on the moon, but the landings themselves were staged for the camera.
That's why I always wear a lead-lined jockstrap.
-S. Gunn.
Definitely geek.
Any proposal that entails more than $1000 worth of technical gear including computers and charts is a geek proposal. ;)
My view is that if you aren't set up in such a way that a programmer can't sabotage you, then you deserve it.
Maybe someone could leak the names of some CMS their way.
We have two carriers here and they collude on prices. Any startups get bought by them and then the good plans are changed into the same old plans, and you already signed a contract so too bad for you.
The 911 fee is fraudulent and has nothing to do with accessing 911, it has to do with adding more money into the telcos. We have the same rules as the FCC where any phone must be able to call 911 even if there's no plan and no minutes.
Are you even remotely serious?
I just looked up a plan, and they start at $50 a month for 100 minutes and 500MB of data plus the monthly connection fees, stealing from you fees (they call these "9-1-1 fees"), etc.
How is that not an abject ripoff?
Why would you not have your cellular phone with you?
Because I do not OWN a cell phone. They're a huge fucking ripoff and until they get to the point where it's a reasonable price with vendors that aren't asshole oligopolies I will not get one.
It's got a real name now? Wow, I remember when that was just called the "wearing the juice" study.
Where can I download this fantasy distro that you're using?