I love it because I can not answer my phone and then tell the person that was trying to call that the phone system had crashed.
I also love it when it decides to just disconnect my phone conversations in the middle of a
It's like using a mobile phone, only without the convience of being wireless.
I want my POTS back. I want a phone that works when nothing else does. I want a phone with 99.99999% uptime, because it turns out that a phone with 97.2% uptime really, really sucks. You wouldn't think it, but those couple of percentage points are the difference between critical tool and useless gadget.
This would be perfect for government agencies, who really don't want any contact with the people they're supposed to be dealing with, but can't appear to be avoiding them. I see this being a major cost saver.
"Hello DMV, can I help you?" "I just want to know..." -click- beep beep beep beep beep
They can reduce time wasted on calls to an average of 2 seconds, all thanks to the miracle of VoIP.
The Atari 400 keyboard was perfectly flat, and purely two dimensional.
The reason that computer wasn't successful was because if the keyboard somehow became disconnected from the computer and turned sideways, you couldn't find it. Total pain in the ass. That's why keyboards nowadays have a third dimension to them.
We will all live on a cold, hard, sad chunk of rock drifting about space when that happens.
Maybe they think that by getting more people into the hobby of beekeeping someone will create a genetically-enhanced fungus resistant super-bee, if only they could get the geeeks to drop their X-Box controllers for ten minutes and get outside.
All of my coworkers are annoying,
on
Are You Annoying?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I'm just trying to fit in.
Re:How can you simulate God in games?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
So, if you'd read the stories, you'd understand that Asimov wasn't talking about programming at all - in fact, the positronic brains they give the to the robots are grown whole from some overall design that the human creators don't even really understand, and once they're in a robot the only way to interface with them is by talking to them and interacting with them in the real world. The robots are more like extremely smart children than computers as we know them.
Actually, one good thing about this movie is that they're also republishing the original "I, Robot" short stories in paperback form. It looks like it should be a crappy novelization of the movie, since it has Will Smith on the cover with the tagline "One Man Saw It Coming", but the stories in there are Asimov's as he wrote them. You should pick it up. The technology outside of the positronic brains hasn't aged well (e.g. cork spacesuits and robots filled with relays and tubes), and I never like how Asimov wrote his human characters, but the ideas explored are rather intersting.
What? Oh, please. This is exactly the kind of problem that we have in a lot of software, especially smaller projects. First of all, why should I tell the car where I live just because I want to find the nearest Taco Bell? A perfect (although unintended) example.
Ok. So we make the car have a "find the nearest Taco Bell" button. Because everyone wants to find the nearest Taco Bell. All those people that prefer some other fast food joint are SOL.
Of course, 75% of the population can't eat Taco Bell without getting the runs 15 mintues later, so we need to add a "find me the nearest public toilet" button.
Then when you get there you find the toilet is stopped up with about 30 pounds of mostly digested Nachos Del Grande, so you need to add a "find me the next nearest toilet, prefereably one not stuffed with other people's crap."
That proves a bit more difficult, and you wind up desperatley looking for someplace to go because of your high potty standards. You've also added a "nope, that toilet is covered in pee, find me another one" button and a "I'm not really sure what took place in there, but I bet the Pope wouldn't approve" button.
By that time you're at a gas station in a part of town you never even knew existed, there's a strange man in a fuzzy purple hat asking you if you wanna be his bitch, you're out of gas, spent all your money at Taco Bell, and have no idea of how to get home.
It sure would've been nice if your car knew where your house was. It's really too bad, since now you're turning tricks for the cash to buy gas and a map to get out of there.
Fair enough. But it's also fair for other people to wonder where exactly the problem is.
Because there's a public need to be served by warning people away from dealing with Dave Winer. He will, at first, seem to be a nice guy with some personal quirks. They're easy to overlook, and the benefits seem to outweigh the negatives. However, the negatives slowly build up until one day something happens to make you realize it's just not worth putting up with his crap. It's usually something huge, rather than a straw that breaks the camel's back, it's a pile of bricks out of nowhere.
I suspect that the people bitching about this here just had the pile of bricks dumped on them.
Unfortuantely, by the time that happens you've already invested tons of time and energy into whatever it was you were working on using his stuff, and it's not just a simple matter of switching providers. It could set your schedule back by months or years to switch to some other platform, or (as in this case) you could lose a significant percentage of readers who won't be able to find your stuff because you had to change URLs without warning.
Plus, bitching about assholes is good therapy.
Personally, I used to froth and rant about what a dick Dave is whenever the subject came up, but now I just think he's bipolar. He can't help it, he's just sick and not medicated.
Thank you. That was the argument that I wanted to make, but for some reason (I think I'm upset by Douglas Adams' passing) that it was pretty much just all swear words, and I chose to not post it.
Perhaps it may be time for Slashdot to invest in some training for their editors. Just a couple of classes on how essays should be structured and how to use a style guide might help prevent such nonsensical stuff as this from being published on the front page.
I understand they're not journalists, and I really don't have a problem with that, but there are some really basic things that they could do to prevent train wrecks like this from happening on the front page.
The problem with nuking them is that it's not predictable how they'll break apart, and thus, rather than having one big asteroid that may or may not hit, you'll have lots of smaller, more radioactive ones, some of which would hit, some of which wouldn't.
Which would be bad. Maybe not as bad as getting hit by the whole thing, but for a sufficently large asteroid, it wouldn't make much of a difference to us.
That has a much clearer picture of what's up in the 5ghz range - Aircraft Navigation being the primary use, with bits of Maratime Nav and a little slice of "Amateur" in there near 5.8ghz.
I'd be most worried about the line of sight issue. The higher your frequency, you can send more data, but more things are going to block your signal. Something operating at this frequency is going to have problems going through a wall or a pane of glass. It might work ok through a wood frame/drywall construction house's interior walls, but I suspect that if you've got steel frame or even lath & plaster with hardware cloth backing, you're not going to get very far, or get very good performance if you do.
I just installed the Mac version, (download was very fast, either nobody is downloading or they've got serious hardware spewing it out) and it crashed instantly. Giving the program more memory meant it crashed with a different error.
This is sad, I was defending them the other day, saying that their release schedule made sense. Of course, I assumed that their insistance on not adding any new code was because they were busy fixing current bugs, but apparently I was wrong.
Mozilla hasn't been bad, once someone pointed out the Debug->Install PSM option to get SSL.
And if you want to remove the red eye from the snapshots of your friends you took last night you can always do a grep for the pupils, and pipe it to an awk script to replace the red with black....
Er, no, actually, you can't.
This is a good example of the saying "If your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems start looking like nails". A command line interface is great if your data is text. If your data is images, or otherwise is not easily represented by text, then a GUI is often needed.
It's all about the idea of using the right tool for the job. Just sitting here, I really can't think of a good reason to use a 3d enviroment over a 2d, but I'm sure there are people out there that can. Just as there are people out there that can't figure out why people would want to use a GUI over a CLI. The computer should work the way that's best for the user, not the other way around.
Egad! If you did that, your web pages would LOAD FAST! People would quickly and easily GET INFORMATION! Oh, goodness. That would be a total disaster.
It's so much better to hide the fact that the site has no real purpose behind randomly placed rollover buttons (that requre the download of no fewer than six images for a single button) and little starts swirling around the cursor.
What this is, pure and simple, is schemey way of getting around various pesky nuclear test ban treaties. It's probalby not even a nuclear test to statisfy actual research, it's most likely a purely political manuver.
They want to do it in Tibet because Tibet is nice and close to India and Pakistan, China's recently nuclear powered neighbors. China would like to remind these upstarts that they're playing in the big leauges now, and there's no better way to do that then to send some seismographs shakin in New Delhi and Islamabad.
Because China, if it were really looking for the most cost effective solution and were really looking to level a couple of mountains, would just give a few million people pickaxes and shovels and say "have at it!" They might even throw in some wheelbarrows, but only if they're in a hurry to get it done. This is how all of their other massive public works projects are done.
First of all, if I were a manager, and another manager from another department tried to fire one of my own employees, I would probably tell them to go take a long walk off a short pier.
However, if the IT department isn't keeping on top of things like this, then they suck. If they don't, today, October 21st 2000, already have a policy on Linux, I would wonder, probably aloud, about where the hell they've been for the past five years, whether they had developed a plan to deal with the release of Windows 3.1 yet, if they'd heard of this newfangled thing called the "Inter-net", and how their horseless carriage has been working out for them.
Thirdly, I think most people understand the need for IT departments to have control over their networks, and that it is important to get permission to modify settings on a machine on the network. However, what many IT departments don't realize is that many of them have no clear path for getting said permission, and it usually comes down to a purely political decision by someone who doens't understand or even care about the user's needs.
So, IT people, before you start flaming people for complaing that it sucks that they don't have any control over their computers, pose as an average employee and see if it's possible, using the resources an average employee would have (IE, not being able to just log in as root and do it) to, for example, switch operating systems, or even just get something installed that would make their lives easier.
though a saucepan that fits nicely over your head might not be a bad idea either, in addition to affording you protection from sonic lasers fired from black hellicopters. But the aluminum foil is much more fashionable. For example, you could form it into the shape of a swan, like they do for leftovers at fancy resturaunts.
Honestly? About ten minutes ago. I was playing tetris dx on my color gameboy and all of a sudden the game just stopped, mid drop. The batteries are fresh, the cart is fully seated, and the game isn't that old.
Though, this is the first time I've ever seen that in about a kajillion hours playing gameboy games.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see anything like that in my photoshop either.
The jpeg artifiacts are really obvious looking at the individual channels, but I don't see any text.
A hoax inside of a hoax. What's next, someone saying that the "fake" text is actually esperanto for "real", and the pics are actually legit?
We got a VoIP system at work a couple months ago.
I love it because I can not answer my phone and then tell the person that was trying to call that the phone system had crashed.
I also love it when it decides to just disconnect my phone conversations in the middle of a
It's like using a mobile phone, only without the convience of being wireless.
I want my POTS back. I want a phone that works when nothing else does. I want a phone with 99.99999% uptime, because it turns out that a phone with 97.2% uptime really, really sucks. You wouldn't think it, but those couple of percentage points are the difference between critical tool and useless gadget.
This would be perfect for government agencies, who really don't want any contact with the people they're supposed to be dealing with, but can't appear to be avoiding them. I see this being a major cost saver.
"Hello DMV, can I help you?"
"I just want to know..."
-click- beep beep beep beep beep
They can reduce time wasted on calls to an average of 2 seconds, all thanks to the miracle of VoIP.
Not all of them.
The Atari 400 keyboard was perfectly flat, and purely two dimensional.
The reason that computer wasn't successful was because if the keyboard somehow became disconnected from the computer and turned sideways, you couldn't find it. Total pain in the ass. That's why keyboards nowadays have a third dimension to them.
All the bees are dying from some sort of fungus.
Soon there will be no honey.
We will all live on a cold, hard, sad chunk of rock drifting about space when that happens.
Maybe they think that by getting more people into the hobby of beekeeping someone will create a genetically-enhanced fungus resistant super-bee, if only they could get the geeeks to drop their X-Box controllers for ten minutes and get outside.
I'm just trying to fit in.
So, if you'd read the stories, you'd understand that Asimov wasn't talking about programming at all - in fact, the positronic brains they give the to the robots are grown whole from some overall design that the human creators don't even really understand, and once they're in a robot the only way to interface with them is by talking to them and interacting with them in the real world. The robots are more like extremely smart children than computers as we know them.
Actually, one good thing about this movie is that they're also republishing the original "I, Robot" short stories in paperback form. It looks like it should be a crappy novelization of the movie, since it has Will Smith on the cover with the tagline "One Man Saw It Coming", but the stories in there are Asimov's as he wrote them. You should pick it up. The technology outside of the positronic brains hasn't aged well (e.g. cork spacesuits and robots filled with relays and tubes), and I never like how Asimov wrote his human characters, but the ideas explored are rather intersting.
What? Oh, please. This is exactly the kind of problem that we have in a lot of software, especially smaller projects. First of all, why should I tell the car where I live just because I want to find the nearest Taco Bell? A perfect (although unintended) example.
Ok. So we make the car have a "find the nearest Taco Bell" button. Because everyone wants to find the nearest Taco Bell. All those people that prefer some other fast food joint are SOL.
Of course, 75% of the population can't eat Taco Bell without getting the runs 15 mintues later, so we need to add a "find me the nearest public toilet" button.
Then when you get there you find the toilet is stopped up with about 30 pounds of mostly digested Nachos Del Grande, so you need to add a "find me the next nearest toilet, prefereably one not stuffed with other people's crap."
That proves a bit more difficult, and you wind up desperatley looking for someplace to go because of your high potty standards. You've also added a "nope, that toilet is covered in pee, find me another one" button and a "I'm not really sure what took place in there, but I bet the Pope wouldn't approve" button.
By that time you're at a gas station in a part of town you never even knew existed, there's a strange man in a fuzzy purple hat asking you if you wanna be his bitch, you're out of gas, spent all your money at Taco Bell, and have no idea of how to get home.
It sure would've been nice if your car knew where your house was. It's really too bad, since now you're turning tricks for the cash to buy gas and a map to get out of there.
Manila had that feature, but the users of weblogs.com didn't have access to that feature.
This is the smartest thing I've ever seen on slashdot.
What the hell are you doing here?
jesus better use some forwarder (that he will have absolute control over) to the blog as his visible address as well..
Aw, well, shit. Now I'm boned.
Fair enough. But it's also fair for other people to wonder where exactly the problem is.
Because there's a public need to be served by warning people away from dealing with Dave Winer. He will, at first, seem to be a nice guy with some personal quirks. They're easy to overlook, and the benefits seem to outweigh the negatives. However, the negatives slowly build up until one day something happens to make you realize it's just not worth putting up with his crap. It's usually something huge, rather than a straw that breaks the camel's back, it's a pile of bricks out of nowhere.
I suspect that the people bitching about this here just had the pile of bricks dumped on them.
Unfortuantely, by the time that happens you've already invested tons of time and energy into whatever it was you were working on using his stuff, and it's not just a simple matter of switching providers. It could set your schedule back by months or years to switch to some other platform, or (as in this case) you could lose a significant percentage of readers who won't be able to find your stuff because you had to change URLs without warning.
Plus, bitching about assholes is good therapy.
Personally, I used to froth and rant about what a dick Dave is whenever the subject came up, but now I just think he's bipolar. He can't help it, he's just sick and not medicated.
Thank you. That was the argument that I wanted to make, but for some reason (I think I'm upset by Douglas Adams' passing) that it was pretty much just all swear words, and I chose to not post it.
Perhaps it may be time for Slashdot to invest in some training for their editors. Just a couple of classes on how essays should be structured and how to use a style guide might help prevent such nonsensical stuff as this from being published on the front page.
I understand they're not journalists, and I really don't have a problem with that, but there are some really basic things that they could do to prevent train wrecks like this from happening on the front page.
The problem with nuking them is that it's not predictable how they'll break apart, and thus, rather than having one big asteroid that may or may not hit, you'll have lots of smaller, more radioactive ones, some of which would hit, some of which wouldn't.
Which would be bad. Maybe not as bad as getting hit by the whole thing, but for a sufficently large asteroid, it wouldn't make much of a difference to us.
Microsoft has a very large campus in Mountain View (read: in Silicon Valley). It's on La Vienda off of Shorline. You can see it from the 101.
Just thought you'd like to know.
Do you have the peice of paper that says that opening AIM was a condition of the merger?
No, really, do you? I'm genuinely interested to see it.
US Frequency Allocation Chart
That has a much clearer picture of what's up in the 5ghz range - Aircraft Navigation being the primary use, with bits of Maratime Nav and a little slice of "Amateur" in there near 5.8ghz.
I'd be most worried about the line of sight issue. The higher your frequency, you can send more data, but more things are going to block your signal. Something operating at this frequency is going to have problems going through a wall or a pane of glass. It might work ok through a wood frame/drywall construction house's interior walls, but I suspect that if you've got steel frame or even lath & plaster with hardware cloth backing, you're not going to get very far, or get very good performance if you do.
It's a PC running EtherPeek.
Wow.
They spent (at least) $5,000,000 of taxpayer money on a system that could have been put together by a 12 year old kid in less than an hour.
Most Impressive.
I'm no longer particularly worried about carnivore. I'm now worried about what they're REALLY doing with that money.
I just installed the Mac version, (download was very fast, either nobody is downloading or they've got serious hardware spewing it out) and it crashed instantly. Giving the program more memory meant it crashed with a different error.
This is sad, I was defending them the other day, saying that their release schedule made sense. Of course, I assumed that their insistance on not adding any new code was because they were busy fixing current bugs, but apparently I was wrong.
Mozilla hasn't been bad, once someone pointed out the Debug->Install PSM option to get SSL.
Oh well. Better luck next time.
And if you want to remove the red eye from the snapshots of your friends you took last night you can always do a grep for the pupils, and pipe it to an awk script to replace the red with black....
Er, no, actually, you can't.
This is a good example of the saying "If your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems start looking like nails". A command line interface is great if your data is text. If your data is images, or otherwise is not easily represented by text, then a GUI is often needed.
It's all about the idea of using the right tool for the job. Just sitting here, I really can't think of a good reason to use a 3d enviroment over a 2d, but I'm sure there are people out there that can. Just as there are people out there that can't figure out why people would want to use a GUI over a CLI. The computer should work the way that's best for the user, not the other way around.
Egad! If you did that, your web pages would LOAD FAST! People would quickly and easily GET INFORMATION! Oh, goodness. That would be a total disaster.
It's so much better to hide the fact that the site has no real purpose behind randomly placed rollover buttons (that requre the download of no fewer than six images for a single button) and little starts swirling around the cursor.
What this is, pure and simple, is schemey way of getting around various pesky nuclear test ban treaties. It's probalby not even a nuclear test to statisfy actual research, it's most likely a purely political manuver.
They want to do it in Tibet because Tibet is nice and close to India and Pakistan, China's recently nuclear powered neighbors. China would like to remind these upstarts that they're playing in the big leauges now, and there's no better way to do that then to send some seismographs shakin in New Delhi and Islamabad.
Because China, if it were really looking for the most cost effective solution and were really looking to level a couple of mountains, would just give a few million people pickaxes and shovels and say "have at it!" They might even throw in some wheelbarrows, but only if they're in a hurry to get it done. This is how all of their other massive public works projects are done.
First of all, if I were a manager, and another manager from another department tried to fire one of my own employees, I would probably tell them to go take a long walk off a short pier.
However, if the IT department isn't keeping on top of things like this, then they suck. If they don't, today, October 21st 2000, already have a policy on Linux, I would wonder, probably aloud, about where the hell they've been for the past five years, whether they had developed a plan to deal with the release of Windows 3.1 yet, if they'd heard of this newfangled thing called the "Inter-net", and how their horseless carriage has been working out for them.
Thirdly, I think most people understand the need for IT departments to have control over their networks, and that it is important to get permission to modify settings on a machine on the network. However, what many IT departments don't realize is that many of them have no clear path for getting said permission, and it usually comes down to a purely political decision by someone who doens't understand or even care about the user's needs.
So, IT people, before you start flaming people for complaing that it sucks that they don't have any control over their computers, pose as an average employee and see if it's possible, using the resources an average employee would have (IE, not being able to just log in as root and do it) to, for example, switch operating systems, or even just get something installed that would make their lives easier.
He was born with a steerin' wheel in his hand...
though a saucepan that fits nicely over your head might not be a bad idea either, in addition to affording you protection from sonic lasers fired from black hellicopters. But the aluminum foil is much more fashionable. For example, you could form it into the shape of a swan, like they do for leftovers at fancy resturaunts.
And when's the last time you say a gameboy crash?
Honestly? About ten minutes ago. I was playing tetris dx on my color gameboy and all of a sudden the game just stopped, mid drop. The batteries are fresh, the cart is fully seated, and the game isn't that old.
Though, this is the first time I've ever seen that in about a kajillion hours playing gameboy games.