Agreed on the 3rd party email. I can't believe that people get themselves tied up with an ISP or, worse, their workplace for their personal email account. But I'd still be reluctant to establish myself with any commercial provider for my main email account. Google isn't evil today, but they might be in a few years.
I use my alma mater for my permanent address. They've been around for almost two centuries and their mission statement includes "communicating, preserving and applying knowledge" rather than "turn a profit by any means necessary", so I trust them to be around and act in my interest for the extent of my life. Right now I pay them $10 a month for my email and web space, but they'll forward emails for free if I ever want to go the cheap route.
The "damn computers too slow" comment tells me that he really means the problem can't be solved numerically. A simple computer program can certainly tell you what will happen if you perform a certain burn. But it can't tell you what burn will achieve a certain outcome with minimal fuel expenditure. It can try to grind through all the possible variations, but if the variations are too numerous and the computations are too strenuous then it's not practical. Hence, the damn computers are too slow.
We found a book which had been checked out of the Denver Public Library in 1929. It was really fun returning it. I asked how much the fine was. The person at the circulation desk called the head librarian, and had a good laugh, a ferocious laugh, a cackle almost. Then the head librarian peered at me over her thick-rimmed glasses and grinned menacingly. She said, sternly, "Come with me." Then she lead me through the stacks, down a short stairway, and toward a dark, heavy door.
To continue following the librarian, turn to page 56.
I also remember some Congress person complaining about the government paying for volcano research. I think they were from Louisiana or Mississippi and they laughed at what a waste of money it is for their citizens to pay to study volcanoes. Don't we already know everything about them anyway?
Well, sir, this is why. If a volcano blows, it affects more than its immediate neighbors.
Does your hypothetical iPad have a web browser? Can it visit www.markfiore.com? Could he post an iPad-compatible version of his cartoons there? Then why do you need an app for that?
That's what really bugs me about all these smart phones and tablet computers advertising how many apps they have. We used to call most of those things "web pages". But now that they are "apps", we can't use them on our general purpose computers.
Where do you get the idea that US car companies don't invest in long term research and development? I worked at Ford in the 1990's, developing advanced technologies for manufacturing. My projects included new ways to measure the quality and appearance of paint so we could ensure the cars we produced looked pretty in the showroom, stayed pretty on the road, and endured all sorts of hostile environments. That involved technologies like ultrasound, lasers, and robotics; things that weren't part of the cars themselves but were important for improving cars from the rust buckets of the 1970's to the durable bodies of today.
I was working in short term R&D with a focus on technologies that would take 2 to 5 years to implement. But we also had long term R&D, Ford's Scientific Research Laboratories. They developed things like better catalytic converters and hydrogen-fueled vehicles. And they supported lots of university research on technologies that could take decades to reach the road. So I'd be interested to see what evidence you have that the foreign companies did research and the domestic companies did not.
Speaking of cold, dead digestive tracts: A few years ago, I got terribly ill while on vacation. Loss of appetite, waves of tremendous abdominal cramps, and vomiting. My intestines had plugged up and it took some intervention to get them moving again.
I put some of the blame on a sushi lunch I ate that day. I'd eaten sushi often before, but this restaurant used a lot more seaweed in the dishes than I was accustomed to. Even as I was eating, I had second thoughts about whether what I was putting into my mouth was actually edible. But I figured it seemed strange to me only because that Japanese restaurant was more authentic than the Americanized sushi places where I usually dined.
Now I wonder whether that seaweed would be edible to Japanese guts, but truly was inedible to mine.
Scrabble is not a language game. It's not about being well-read and knowing the definition of many words. It's about memorizing a list of acceptable patterns and applying those patterns to score points while denying points to your opponent.
Allowing proper nouns actually makes the game harder since it produces a much longer list to memorize and much more difficulty in preventing your opponent from scoring. So this optional rules change pleases the newbies ("Wow, that's so much easier!") and challenges the non-snobby pros ("Crap, I've got 50,000 names to memorize and evaluate.")
Old people don't have enough experience with video games. Younger people encounter a stuck accelerator and shift into Pole Position mode, finding a safe way to slow the car or mashing buttons until something clicks. Old people switch into TV mode, watching the scenery whizz by as they wait for someone to rescue them.
It's a real shame about the missing webcam. They'd make such nice portals if they had them:
Put two iPads back-to-back. You could see right through them.
Put two iPads on opposite sides of a wall. Instant window.
Mount an iPad in the kitchen; mail another to grandma and grandpa. An intergenerational wormhole for family to stay in touch.
Mash up a classroom full of iPads with chat roulette. Try to figure out who's match with whom. Turn to face a neighbor to make the longest continuous viewing path.
Two iPads, one bed. Fun views for you and your partner.
I enjoyed Independence Day and Men in Black, too. Both were fun, a little wacky, not terribly sophisticated, but they suck me in every time they're on TV.
So my only concern is the sequel part (Good Movie 2: The Quest for More Money). Men in Black (1997): 7.0/10.0 on IMDB. Men in Black II (2002): 5.6/10.0.
And shooting two sequels at once triggers the klaxon of bad movie alarms. See the Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies for two examples of twin sequel abominations.
A leap year miscalculation is no worse than the skewed random shuffle bug reported in Microsoft's browser selection screen yesterday. If that's the problem with these PS3's (which I doubt), it could be something similarly brain dead:
int year = getYear(); int shortYear = year % 10; bool leapYear = ( shortYear % 4 == 0 );
Somebody tested that on 2001 through 2009 and declared it good enough.
You're on the cutting edge of technology, so nothing seems magic to you. But my less technical family members thought many computing tasks were magical the first time they saw me do them:
Play CD-quality music without a physical record
Video chat
Install new software
Order greeting cards with family photos on them
Find the answer to any question in 60 seconds
See the weather forecast without waiting for the 6 o'clock news
Get driving directions for vacation without going to AAA
Some people can't program their VCR's (and don't even know the difference between a VCR and a DVR). A portable box that does 80% of what they would do on a PC but without needing me around to make it work would be magic.
While I agree with your sentiment, I'd like to point out the irony in posting to complain about how people shouldn't post to complain about stuff they don't like. I wonder if there's an xkcd about that.
Those game companies are all releasing cool games and then expanding the game with new missions, units, and game mechanics in the years that follow. What jerks!
Actually, I should have added:
Civilization IV Beyond the Sword (Mac) - July 2009
I'll be happier if they release the Mac versions of Civ V less than two years after the PC versions. Simultaneously would be delightful. And the ability to actually play online against PC owners without crashing two hours into the game would be superb.
Charge a fixed price for the amount of volume occupied by the passenger
I'm having terrible visions of ticket agents playing Tetris to figure out whether or not a plane is overbooked. One of them calls out over the airport public address system: "Is there a tall skinny person who wants to fly to Dallas? I need a tall skinny person!"
This is a law to create a thoughtcrime. Terrorists apparently aren't deterred by threats of punishment after committing their acts; they tend to administer the ultimate punishment to themselves. So governments want ways to prosecute illegal activities before they happen. Thus the threshold of illegal activity moves back from detonating a bomb to building a bomb to designing a bomb to talking about a bomb to thinking about a bomb. It's not irrational to prevent devastating acts by illegalizing their precedents; we already have laws against carrying certain weapons, even though just carrying a weapon doesn't hurt anybody. But when the laws start focusing on speech then the rational response becomes fuzzy.
The Map Publishing feature is interesting to me. I have released dozens of popular Starcraft maps and distribution has always been a problem. For one, maps are copied peer-to-peer, so the only way to get a new map is to find somebody else who happens to be hosting it at the moment you're looking. For another, maps are not cryptographically signed, so it's trivial for somebody to alter a map so they can cheat in the game. Although I have a reputation as a skilled mapmaker, there are maps circulating with my name still on them that are rigged or badly modified.
On the other hand, the viral transmission and mutation of maps is part of what keeps the mapmaking community alive. Players find a map they like, try to modify it, and set the new version loose in the wild. If it's good it will spread and become the basis for others to tinker with.
So the Marketplace sounds like a potentially good way to encourage the creation of polished maps. But I wonder if closed-source mapmaking can really keep pace with open-source development or if many players will accept (or even discover) pay maps.
I am underwhelmed by the iPad and watching the keynote presentation it looks like Steve Jobs is too. This is not an exciting device and Apple's marketing department is spinning its wheels like a Mini Cooper in a blizzard to hype it.
But you know what would be really cool? An iPad with amazingly good performance. Thirty-six hours of battery life instead of ten. Three hundred dot per inch screen instead of a conventional resolution. Ten terabytes of storage so you can carry all of your documents and media with you. A case the size and weight of a magazine. Or a price tag around $200 so people could afford to get it as their secondary or tertiary computer.
I do see a place for the iPad's configuration: simple, limited, and cheap. It could make a nice ebook reader, emagazine, photo viewer, video screen, navigator, board game, writing pad, magic tablet of fun. But its capabilities seem too tied to old-fashioned technology to be cool.
Slashdot Mirror
George Foreman
Agreed on the 3rd party email. I can't believe that people get themselves tied up with an ISP or, worse, their workplace for their personal email account. But I'd still be reluctant to establish myself with any commercial provider for my main email account. Google isn't evil today, but they might be in a few years.
I use my alma mater for my permanent address. They've been around for almost two centuries and their mission statement includes "communicating, preserving and applying knowledge" rather than "turn a profit by any means necessary", so I trust them to be around and act in my interest for the extent of my life. Right now I pay them $10 a month for my email and web space, but they'll forward emails for free if I ever want to go the cheap route.
The "damn computers too slow" comment tells me that he really means the problem can't be solved numerically. A simple computer program can certainly tell you what will happen if you perform a certain burn. But it can't tell you what burn will achieve a certain outcome with minimal fuel expenditure. It can try to grind through all the possible variations, but if the variations are too numerous and the computations are too strenuous then it's not practical. Hence, the damn computers are too slow.
We found a book which had been checked out of the Denver Public Library in 1929. It was really fun returning it. I asked how much the fine was. The person at the circulation desk called the head librarian, and had a good laugh, a ferocious laugh, a cackle almost. Then the head librarian peered at me over her thick-rimmed glasses and grinned menacingly. She said, sternly, "Come with me." Then she lead me through the stacks, down a short stairway, and toward a dark, heavy door.
To continue following the librarian, turn to page 56.
To apologize and walk away, turn to page 129.
I also remember some Congress person complaining about the government paying for volcano research. I think they were from Louisiana or Mississippi and they laughed at what a waste of money it is for their citizens to pay to study volcanoes. Don't we already know everything about them anyway?
Well, sir, this is why. If a volcano blows, it affects more than its immediate neighbors.
Does your hypothetical iPad have a web browser? Can it visit www.markfiore.com? Could he post an iPad-compatible version of his cartoons there? Then why do you need an app for that?
That's what really bugs me about all these smart phones and tablet computers advertising how many apps they have. We used to call most of those things "web pages". But now that they are "apps", we can't use them on our general purpose computers.
You can make it happen. Come up with a method to encode alt.binaries in 140-character chunks and the Library will archive them all for you.
Where do you get the idea that US car companies don't invest in long term research and development? I worked at Ford in the 1990's, developing advanced technologies for manufacturing. My projects included new ways to measure the quality and appearance of paint so we could ensure the cars we produced looked pretty in the showroom, stayed pretty on the road, and endured all sorts of hostile environments. That involved technologies like ultrasound, lasers, and robotics; things that weren't part of the cars themselves but were important for improving cars from the rust buckets of the 1970's to the durable bodies of today.
I was working in short term R&D with a focus on technologies that would take 2 to 5 years to implement. But we also had long term R&D, Ford's Scientific Research Laboratories. They developed things like better catalytic converters and hydrogen-fueled vehicles. And they supported lots of university research on technologies that could take decades to reach the road. So I'd be interested to see what evidence you have that the foreign companies did research and the domestic companies did not.
FTFY
P.S. Why could I not find an online homonym generator?
Speaking of cold, dead digestive tracts: A few years ago, I got terribly ill while on vacation. Loss of appetite, waves of tremendous abdominal cramps, and vomiting. My intestines had plugged up and it took some intervention to get them moving again.
I put some of the blame on a sushi lunch I ate that day. I'd eaten sushi often before, but this restaurant used a lot more seaweed in the dishes than I was accustomed to. Even as I was eating, I had second thoughts about whether what I was putting into my mouth was actually edible. But I figured it seemed strange to me only because that Japanese restaurant was more authentic than the Americanized sushi places where I usually dined.
Now I wonder whether that seaweed would be edible to Japanese guts, but truly was inedible to mine.
Scrabble is not a language game. It's not about being well-read and knowing the definition of many words. It's about memorizing a list of acceptable patterns and applying those patterns to score points while denying points to your opponent.
Allowing proper nouns actually makes the game harder since it produces a much longer list to memorize and much more difficulty in preventing your opponent from scoring. So this optional rules change pleases the newbies ("Wow, that's so much easier!") and challenges the non-snobby pros ("Crap, I've got 50,000 names to memorize and evaluate.")
Old people don't have enough experience with video games. Younger people encounter a stuck accelerator and shift into Pole Position mode, finding a safe way to slow the car or mashing buttons until something clicks. Old people switch into TV mode, watching the scenery whizz by as they wait for someone to rescue them.
It's a real shame about the missing webcam. They'd make such nice portals if they had them:
Put two iPads back-to-back. You could see right through them.
Put two iPads on opposite sides of a wall. Instant window.
Mount an iPad in the kitchen; mail another to grandma and grandpa. An intergenerational wormhole for family to stay in touch.
Mash up a classroom full of iPads with chat roulette. Try to figure out who's match with whom. Turn to face a neighbor to make the longest continuous viewing path.
Two iPads, one bed. Fun views for you and your partner.
I enjoyed Independence Day and Men in Black, too. Both were fun, a little wacky, not terribly sophisticated, but they suck me in every time they're on TV.
So my only concern is the sequel part (Good Movie 2: The Quest for More Money). Men in Black (1997): 7.0/10.0 on IMDB. Men in Black II (2002): 5.6/10.0.
And shooting two sequels at once triggers the klaxon of bad movie alarms. See the Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies for two examples of twin sequel abominations.
Actually, there is a demo to download. You just have to move your mouse along the w-axis to reach the link.
Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets into Hi-Res Samples
A leap year miscalculation is no worse than the skewed random shuffle bug reported in Microsoft's browser selection screen yesterday. If that's the problem with these PS3's (which I doubt), it could be something similarly brain dead:
Somebody tested that on 2001 through 2009 and declared it good enough.
You're on the cutting edge of technology, so nothing seems magic to you. But my less technical family members thought many computing tasks were magical the first time they saw me do them:
Some people can't program their VCR's (and don't even know the difference between a VCR and a DVR). A portable box that does 80% of what they would do on a PC but without needing me around to make it work would be magic.
While I agree with your sentiment, I'd like to point out the irony in posting to complain about how people shouldn't post to complain about stuff they don't like. I wonder if there's an xkcd about that.
Or they could follow their own lead:
Those game companies are all releasing cool games and then expanding the game with new missions, units, and game mechanics in the years that follow. What jerks!
Actually, I should have added:
I'll be happier if they release the Mac versions of Civ V less than two years after the PC versions. Simultaneously would be delightful. And the ability to actually play online against PC owners without crashing two hours into the game would be superb.
Do not try to dodge the atoms - that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there are no atoms.
I'm having terrible visions of ticket agents playing Tetris to figure out whether or not a plane is overbooked. One of them calls out over the airport public address system: "Is there a tall skinny person who wants to fly to Dallas? I need a tall skinny person!"
This is a law to create a thoughtcrime. Terrorists apparently aren't deterred by threats of punishment after committing their acts; they tend to administer the ultimate punishment to themselves. So governments want ways to prosecute illegal activities before they happen. Thus the threshold of illegal activity moves back from detonating a bomb to building a bomb to designing a bomb to talking about a bomb to thinking about a bomb. It's not irrational to prevent devastating acts by illegalizing their precedents; we already have laws against carrying certain weapons, even though just carrying a weapon doesn't hurt anybody. But when the laws start focusing on speech then the rational response becomes fuzzy.
The Map Publishing feature is interesting to me. I have released dozens of popular Starcraft maps and distribution has always been a problem. For one, maps are copied peer-to-peer, so the only way to get a new map is to find somebody else who happens to be hosting it at the moment you're looking. For another, maps are not cryptographically signed, so it's trivial for somebody to alter a map so they can cheat in the game. Although I have a reputation as a skilled mapmaker, there are maps circulating with my name still on them that are rigged or badly modified.
On the other hand, the viral transmission and mutation of maps is part of what keeps the mapmaking community alive. Players find a map they like, try to modify it, and set the new version loose in the wild. If it's good it will spread and become the basis for others to tinker with.
So the Marketplace sounds like a potentially good way to encourage the creation of polished maps. But I wonder if closed-source mapmaking can really keep pace with open-source development or if many players will accept (or even discover) pay maps.
TheNevermind
I am underwhelmed by the iPad and watching the keynote presentation it looks like Steve Jobs is too. This is not an exciting device and Apple's marketing department is spinning its wheels like a Mini Cooper in a blizzard to hype it.
But you know what would be really cool? An iPad with amazingly good performance. Thirty-six hours of battery life instead of ten. Three hundred dot per inch screen instead of a conventional resolution. Ten terabytes of storage so you can carry all of your documents and media with you. A case the size and weight of a magazine. Or a price tag around $200 so people could afford to get it as their secondary or tertiary computer.
I do see a place for the iPad's configuration: simple, limited, and cheap. It could make a nice ebook reader, emagazine, photo viewer, video screen, navigator, board game, writing pad, magic tablet of fun. But its capabilities seem too tied to old-fashioned technology to be cool.