Have you ever noticed there's -always- a "This is the best movie evar!" review on the Internet Movie Database? It's cute, but no - you CAN'T trust everything and everybody 100% - so what else is new?
So they're buying Wanted posters which has been done a million times before - what's the big deal - it's digital? ooh, it's the net! It only makes sense - more eyes, more chances to catch someone... But I've seen legitimate Have You Seen This Person? type ads on the net, so why not Wanted Dead or Alive ads?
Oops, for some reason I didn't realize there already was a direct link... Ah well, here's a copy of it in case it gets Slashdotted (gotta have a real reason to reply, right?):
"Planets May Form Faster than Scientists Thought"
Simulations at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center show that planets can form in hundreds of years.
PITTSBURGH, December 11, 2002 -- Taking advantage of the computing capability of LeMieux, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's terascale system, scientists have determined that large, Jupiter-like planets -- similar to those observed outside Earth's solar system -- can form in dramatically shorter periods of time than previously thought.
The findings, published in SCIENCE (Nov. 29), challenge accepted thinking that it takes millions of years for such planets to form from the pancake-shaped nebula of gas and dust swirling around young stars.
"We used a new model of planet formation," said University of Washington astrophysicist Thomas Quinn, who led the research team, "that couldn't adequately be tested without this kind of computing power, and we found that these giant planets can form in hundreds of years, rather than the millions that the standard model predicts."
Using LeMieux, the most powerful system in the United States committed to public research, the researchers carried out a series of planet formation simulations. Because of LeMieux, the researchers were able to include roughly ten times more detail than previous similar work, and this increased resolution led directly to the new findings.
Nearly 100 extrasolar planets have been detected within the past decade, with masses that range from roughly the size of Jupiter to ten times larger. These discoveries prompted thinking about how large planets, similar to Jupiter and Saturn, form. Called gas giant planets, these planets have most of their mass in a gaseous envelope that surrounds the solid core.
The standard model holds that a core of solid matter congeals from the swirling disk -- called a protoplanetary disk -- around young stars, a process thought to take a million years or so, with another million to ten million years to accumulate the gaseous envelope. The problem with this model, however, is that if the formation process takes too long, nearby stars will, in effect, boil off the gas envelope. "If a gas giant planet can't form quickly," said Quinn, "it probably won't form at all."
An alternative model holds that giant planets form directly from instabilities in the protoplanetary gas, without the need for a solid-matter core. Until the recent simulations, this model hadn't produced convincing results. "The main criticism," said Quinn, "was that this model wasn't ready. Nobody was making predictions with it. But that's because they didn't have enough computational horsepower."
The recent simulations -- using 30,000 processor hours on LeMieux -- produced a distribution of masses and orbits comparable to observed extrasolar planets. According to the astronomical findings since the mid-1990s, these gas giant planets appear to be fairly common. "If these planets can't form quickly," says Quinn, "they should be a relatively rare phenomenon, and if they form according to this mechanism they should be relatively common."
Authors of the research, besides Quinn, are Lucio Mayer, a former University of Washington post-doctoral researcher who recently joined the University of Zurich, James Wadsley of McMaster University, Ontario, Canada and Joachim Stadel at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Established with an August 2000 grant from the National Science Foundation, LeMieux comprises over 3,000 Compaq Alpha EV68 processors, providing over six teraflops (six trillion calculations a second) of computational capability to U.S. engineers and scientists.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with the Westinghouse Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.
Here's a direct link to PSC's article, which does -not- require registration (bah).
As mentioned by another post, we're talking about "Jupiter-like" gas giants, not Earths. The reason it can't take millions of years: "The problem with [the current model], however, is that if the formation process takes too long, nearby stars will, in effect, boil off the gas envelope."
You already mentioned you hated Buffy with other posts, so why do you keep posting on this story?
Some people like TV shows: Since I don't have cable, Buffy is one of the only good shows on TV and I ended up liking it. And since it's -20 Celcius right now, I'll choose indoors. It, sometimes the news and This Hour Has 22 Minutes are the only shows I watch on TV, so yes, I -do- have a life, 'geekoid'.
For good Buffy information (they had this story linked a while back I believe), check out Buffista. Their links page (http://www.buffistas.org/links.php) is quite extensive... Not bad.
And, of course, you have to check out TV Tome's Buffy page, with good reviews, show guide and spoilers...
Let's just pretend it's 128kb/s and the average song length in this bubble-gum chewing world is 3 minutes which makes each file approximately 3 megs... that still comes to 6gigs. That's a LOT of space - at least, it is to me, and I do digital archival work on a daily basis (huge, uncompressed TIF files)... If the ad says I'm getting a 40-gig hard drive, I -want- a 40-gig hard drive, not a 36 gig hard drive...
Gateway computers come with a recovery CD, don't they? (at least my friend's did). So what happens if something goes wrong and you lose your hard drive - since you paid to listen to those songs (through advertising, upped computer price, or through the 'free' trial), do you get them back? Do you have to redownload the 2000 songs you have 90 days free access to? I doubt they have a couple of DVDs of music in the box, ready to be reinstalled for you...
I can see some poor suck^M^M^M^Muser calling the tech support people crying for her Britney! *ack, the horror*
"After the free trials, consumers can get the Pressplay service, which provides more than 200,000 songs and additional features, with pricing options starting from $9.95 a month. "
So basically, it's a big ad? Nothing new here.. And we all know that the files will be cracked extremely quickly (of course, some geek will have to fess up and admit to buying one of these!). No matter, they'll all be songs I wouldn't want anyway - the "pop"ular stuff that the radio plays day in and day out, no doubt.
In general, it's a good idea, but if you think about it: 5 megs on average per file (guess) x 2000 = 10,000 megs... That's a LOT of wasted space for something you're not supposed to be using until you pay for! So, yeah, I'm paying extra to waste space. Nice.
Of course, as most likely already mentioned, you can get most of the "great" books at the Project Gutenberg website (http://gutenberg.net/).
But with that, maybe this is another great legal thing that P2P can come to the rescue of? Firing up KaZaA Lite, I was able to find PDFs of many of the same books that Gutenberg only has in ASCII form (PDF, in my mind, would be a lot nicer to read and could also retain graphics, styles and fonts). Maybe eDonkey has them too? You can always check for them at Share Reactor or Share Live...
People tend to not like Smith, I take it...
on
Will Smith as I, Robot
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But has anyone seen Six Degrees of Seperation? Honestly, the man -does- have talent... But, if you were in his shoes, wouldn't you rather make -fun- movies (MiB, etc.) and make a hundred times the money? I would...
But as has been mentioned, this kind of argument has been made a hundred times before... Look at the Batman's... some whom we thought would suck were actually quite good. And plus, look at Troyas' other casting decisions - Brandon Lee didn't seem like the best choice at the time either (but he was damned amazing).
Anyway, whatever... you know how these rumours go. I remember hearing that Leonardo DiCaprio was going to be in the Lord of the Rings many years back... (thank gods he wasn't).
Yes, I'll just wave my little magic pixie stick (and quit my day job) so that I'll learn how to write software. You do realize that not everyone knows the inside and outs of programming! This whole "write it yourself" philosophy is such crud... people like you must try to remember that there's more then one kind of computer user.
It's common knowledge that things that are advertised more - pushed down our throats - sell more then ones that aren't. Why do the music companies feel that Britney, N*Sync, etc. deserve more advertising then others? It may not be a gun - people still have a choice - but when knowledge of choice is limited, what do you expect to happen?
Honestly, if - for a short test period - every artist had the same amount of advertising and special offers/rebates - i.e. none - who would honestly sell more? Britney? Maybe at first, but I'd be of the opinion that it wouldn't last long.
Just wanted to point out a website called GameFAQS. It contains hundreds of FAQs, walkthrough, tricks, eastereggs, and user reviews all for free! (and for most console and computer systems out there, to boot). I'm trying to load it right now, and it's being a little slow, but the last time I used it (to find if I missed anything in Black and White I believe), it was extremely useful.
Maybe someone in Sony secretly didn't want her to come out of retirement (ugh), so they used her as a test case, hoping this'll push her right back in thanks to all of the bad publicity she'll get... or maybe that's just my hope?
Although I loved Sierra games, I always preferred certain other RPGs... For those who loved Ultima instead, there are remakes being made of them as well.
Er, I got marked down as Troll? Why the hell for, 'cause I felt like helping being understand the background a bit more? (since Salon isn't the best at explaining things sometimes)... Sheesh.
In case anyone doubts what I just said, I might as well back it up (mostly because I'm bored):
In the United States the cooperation is not as well orchestrated as it is in Korea. It only takes a guild of 20 or 30 people to really take and hold a castle so it doesn't take a gigantic group.
Well, if you actually read anything about the game, you'd have realized that the popularity talked about is for Asia, which is currently at around 3 million players. Lord British and the gang are creating a whole new universe (ie new players) for non-Asian areas (in Garriott's own words, more or less, Asian players are too good at cooperating, and would destroy North American players in this type of game). So yeah, this version of the game isn't massively populated at the moment, but no, you're not beta testing... it's been through the ringer already.
It's not that the loss of Excite isn't causing any confusion, but for both Rogers@Home and Cogeco@Home, customers have been contacted weeks ago about the change (snail mail, television commercials, e-mails, and even phone calls). Rogers and Cogeco will simply be changing over to @rogers.com and @cogeco.com respectively, and, as long as no one has their system set up as a static IP (which it shouldn't), the user only needs to change their e-mail program of the change (and maybe reupload their website to the new domain).
The sad part is, Excite is definitely being a big dink about all of this. I had several usernames from Cogeco, and then
I moved to a Rogers-controlled area. Everything was fine until now - unfortunately, since Rogers wasn't the original creator of the usernames, they can't transfer it to @rogers.com - and since Cogeco can't get Excite to transfer them to Rogers, I'm rather stuck. Fine, I can just get Rogers to create some accounts for me when everything's settled, but Excite could have simply deleted the accounts and then Rogers could have had free access to them - but no, they froze the accounts, not allowing anyone to touch it. Ugh. Ah well, things will be MUCH better now that Excite is over with... at least from my end of things.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever noticed there's -always- a "This is the best movie evar!" review on the Internet Movie Database? It's cute, but no - you CAN'T trust everything and everybody 100% - so what else is new?
So they're buying Wanted posters which has been done a million times before - what's the big deal - it's digital? ooh, it's the net! It only makes sense - more eyes, more chances to catch someone... But I've seen legitimate Have You Seen This Person? type ads on the net, so why not Wanted Dead or Alive ads?
Oops, for some reason I didn't realize there already was a direct link... Ah well, here's a copy of it in case it gets Slashdotted (gotta have a real reason to reply, right?):
"Planets May Form Faster than Scientists Thought"
Simulations at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center show that planets can form in hundreds of years.
PITTSBURGH, December 11, 2002 -- Taking advantage of the computing capability of LeMieux, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's terascale system, scientists have determined that large, Jupiter-like planets -- similar to those observed outside Earth's solar system -- can form in dramatically shorter periods of time than previously thought.
The findings, published in SCIENCE (Nov. 29), challenge accepted thinking that it takes millions of years for such planets to form from the pancake-shaped nebula of gas and dust swirling around young stars.
"We used a new model of planet formation," said University of Washington astrophysicist Thomas Quinn, who led the research team, "that couldn't adequately be tested without this kind of computing power, and we found that these giant planets can form in hundreds of years, rather than the millions that the standard model predicts."
Using LeMieux, the most powerful system in the United States committed to public research, the researchers carried out a series of planet formation simulations. Because of LeMieux, the researchers were able to include roughly ten times more detail than previous similar work, and this increased resolution led directly to the new findings.
Nearly 100 extrasolar planets have been detected within the past decade, with masses that range from roughly the size of Jupiter to ten times larger. These discoveries prompted thinking about how large planets, similar to Jupiter and Saturn, form. Called gas giant planets, these planets have most of their mass in a gaseous envelope that surrounds the solid core.
The standard model holds that a core of solid matter congeals from the swirling disk -- called a protoplanetary disk -- around young stars, a process thought to take a million years or so, with another million to ten million years to accumulate the gaseous envelope. The problem with this model, however, is that if the formation process takes too long, nearby stars will, in effect, boil off the gas envelope. "If a gas giant planet can't form quickly," said Quinn, "it probably won't form at all."
An alternative model holds that giant planets form directly from instabilities in the protoplanetary gas, without the need for a solid-matter core. Until the recent simulations, this model hadn't produced convincing results. "The main criticism," said Quinn, "was that this model wasn't ready. Nobody was making predictions with it. But that's because they didn't have enough computational horsepower."
The recent simulations -- using 30,000 processor hours on LeMieux -- produced a distribution of masses and orbits comparable to observed extrasolar planets. According to the astronomical findings since the mid-1990s, these gas giant planets appear to be fairly common. "If these planets can't form quickly," says Quinn, "they should be a relatively rare phenomenon, and if they form according to this mechanism they should be relatively common."
Authors of the research, besides Quinn, are Lucio Mayer, a former University of Washington post-doctoral researcher who recently joined the University of Zurich, James Wadsley of McMaster University, Ontario, Canada and Joachim Stadel at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Established with an August 2000 grant from the National Science Foundation, LeMieux comprises over 3,000 Compaq Alpha EV68 processors, providing over six teraflops (six trillion calculations a second) of computational capability to U.S. engineers and scientists.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with the Westinghouse Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.
Here's a direct link to PSC's article, which does -not- require registration (bah).
As mentioned by another post, we're talking about "Jupiter-like" gas giants, not Earths. The reason it can't take millions of years: "The problem with [the current model], however, is that if the formation process takes too long, nearby stars will, in effect, boil off the gas envelope."
You already mentioned you hated Buffy with other posts, so why do you keep posting on this story?
Some people like TV shows: Since I don't have cable, Buffy is one of the only good shows on TV and I ended up liking it. And since it's -20 Celcius right now, I'll choose indoors. It, sometimes the news and This Hour Has 22 Minutes are the only shows I watch on TV, so yes, I -do- have a life, 'geekoid'.
For good Buffy information (they had this story linked a while back I believe), check out Buffista. Their links page (http://www.buffistas.org/links.php) is quite extensive... Not bad.
And, of course, you have to check out TV Tome's Buffy page, with good reviews, show guide and spoilers...
Any other good ones?
Let's just pretend it's 128kb/s and the average song length in this bubble-gum chewing world is 3 minutes which makes each file approximately 3 megs... that still comes to 6gigs. That's a LOT of space - at least, it is to me, and I do digital archival work on a daily basis (huge, uncompressed TIF files)... If the ad says I'm getting a 40-gig hard drive, I -want- a 40-gig hard drive, not a 36 gig hard drive...
Gateway computers come with a recovery CD, don't they? (at least my friend's did). So what happens if something goes wrong and you lose your hard drive - since you paid to listen to those songs (through advertising, upped computer price, or through the 'free' trial), do you get them back? Do you have to redownload the 2000 songs you have 90 days free access to? I doubt they have a couple of DVDs of music in the box, ready to be reinstalled for you...
I can see some poor suck^M^M^M^Muser calling the tech support people crying for her Britney! *ack, the horror*
Now pr0n, you just aren't bombarded by pr0n everyday
You don't know the Slashdot crowd very much, do you? Why do you think P2P is so popular *ducks and covers*
"After the free trials, consumers can get the Pressplay service, which provides more than 200,000 songs and additional features, with pricing options starting from $9.95 a month. "
So basically, it's a big ad? Nothing new here.. And we all know that the files will be cracked extremely quickly (of course, some geek will have to fess up and admit to buying one of these!). No matter, they'll all be songs I wouldn't want anyway - the "pop"ular stuff that the radio plays day in and day out, no doubt.
In general, it's a good idea, but if you think about it: 5 megs on average per file (guess) x 2000 = 10,000 megs... That's a LOT of wasted space for something you're not supposed to be using until you pay for! So, yeah, I'm paying extra to waste space. Nice.
Of course, as most likely already mentioned, you can get most of the "great" books at the Project Gutenberg website (http://gutenberg.net/).
But with that, maybe this is another great legal thing that P2P can come to the rescue of? Firing up KaZaA Lite, I was able to find PDFs of many of the same books that Gutenberg only has in ASCII form (PDF, in my mind, would be a lot nicer to read and could also retain graphics, styles and fonts). Maybe eDonkey has them too? You can always check for them at Share Reactor or Share Live...
But has anyone seen Six Degrees of Seperation? Honestly, the man -does- have talent... But, if you were in his shoes, wouldn't you rather make -fun- movies (MiB, etc.) and make a hundred times the money? I would...
But as has been mentioned, this kind of argument has been made a hundred times before... Look at the Batman's... some whom we thought would suck were actually quite good. And plus, look at Troyas' other casting decisions - Brandon Lee didn't seem like the best choice at the time either (but he was damned amazing).
Anyway, whatever... you know how these rumours go. I remember hearing that Leonardo DiCaprio was going to be in the Lord of the Rings many years back... (thank gods he wasn't).
Yes, I'll just wave my little magic pixie stick (and quit my day job) so that I'll learn how to write software. You do realize that not everyone knows the inside and outs of programming! This whole "write it yourself" philosophy is such crud ... people like you must try to remember that there's more then one kind of computer user.
This is the funniest thing I've read in days... *wipes tear from eye*
It's common knowledge that things that are advertised more - pushed down our throats - sell more then ones that aren't. Why do the music companies feel that Britney, N*Sync, etc. deserve more advertising then others? It may not be a gun - people still have a choice - but when knowledge of choice is limited, what do you expect to happen?
Honestly, if - for a short test period - every artist had the same amount of advertising and special offers/rebates - i.e. none - who would honestly sell more? Britney? Maybe at first, but I'd be of the opinion that it wouldn't last long.
Just wanted to point out a website called GameFAQS. It contains hundreds of FAQs, walkthrough, tricks, eastereggs, and user reviews all for free! (and for most console and computer systems out there, to boot). I'm trying to load it right now, and it's being a little slow, but the last time I used it (to find if I missed anything in Black and White I believe), it was extremely useful.
(No, I'm not affiliated).
Maybe someone in Sony secretly didn't want her to come out of retirement (ugh), so they used her as a test case, hoping this'll push her right back in thanks to all of the bad publicity she'll get... or maybe that's just my hope?
Ultima 1: A Legend is Reborn - http://www.peroxide.dk/ultima/
Ultima 4: The Dawn of Virtue - http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/ultima4/
Ultima 5: Lazarus - http://www.u5lazarus.com
Ultima 6: Prophecy - www.laymeduck.com/u6
Ultima 9: Eriadain - http://eriadain.multimania.com
Ultima 9: Redemption - http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~fountain
Also, Bard's Tale is being remade into Devil Whiskey (Bard's Tale 4). It can be seen at http://www.bardslegacy.com
Kinda sad, if you think about it... although, there's no point thinking about it too much then, is there?
Er, I got marked down as Troll? Why the hell for, 'cause I felt like helping being understand the background a bit more? (since Salon isn't the best at explaining things sometimes)... Sheesh.
http://pc.ign.com/news/40083.html
Well, if you actually read anything about the game, you'd have realized that the popularity talked about is for Asia, which is currently at around 3 million players. Lord British and the gang are creating a whole new universe (ie new players) for non-Asian areas (in Garriott's own words, more or less, Asian players are too good at cooperating, and would destroy North American players in this type of game). So yeah, this version of the game isn't massively populated at the moment, but no, you're not beta testing... it's been through the ringer already.
It's not that the loss of Excite isn't causing any confusion, but for both Rogers@Home and Cogeco@Home, customers have been contacted weeks ago about the change (snail mail, television commercials, e-mails, and even phone calls). Rogers and Cogeco will simply be changing over to @rogers.com and @cogeco.com respectively, and, as long as no one has their system set up as a static IP (which it shouldn't), the user only needs to change their e-mail program of the change (and maybe reupload their website to the new domain).
The sad part is, Excite is definitely being a big dink about all of this. I had several usernames from Cogeco, and then
I moved to a Rogers-controlled area. Everything was fine until now - unfortunately, since Rogers wasn't the original creator of the usernames, they can't transfer it to @rogers.com - and since Cogeco can't get Excite to transfer them to Rogers, I'm rather stuck. Fine, I can just get Rogers to create some accounts for me when everything's settled, but Excite could have simply deleted the accounts and then Rogers could have had free access to them - but no, they froze the accounts, not allowing anyone to touch it. Ugh. Ah well, things will be MUCH better now that Excite is over with... at least from my end of things.
I hate to do this, but, uh, dude, Mojo Jojo talks that way on the Powerpuff Girls TV show... it was a joke. ha. ha. ha.