The creator of the hardware and owner of its network and marketplace can't be so easily dismissed as just another "me too digital service." They face no legitimate competition here and will make a mint.
> Their CEO actively cultivated an age imbalance, bragging that he was "trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y'ers," because, "in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated."
Translation : young people have little to no idea about their true value and I can exploit them with shitty options, bad contracts and bonuses because I can sell them on some startup dream a hell of a lot easier than I can trick someone who has 'been there, done that.'
I think it's more probable that folks in Europe aren't "whipped" like those of us in the US, and are less willing to accept M$ as the "emperor of links." Maybe they're just trying to avoid the obvious beating they'll take for trying out their antics in non-US markets.
Yes, by George! If they're going to be fed ridiculous authoritarian rules/regulations and have their mind made up for them, it's going to be by the EU and no one else!
(for those of you confused by ballots, I'll explain: the greyed out areas are counties that voted for Gore.)
I suppose the whole point is moot given that florida was recently handed to bush, but I think it shows that the "will of the people" has been served; if you total the population of counties bush won, he beats gore. Why? More family type voted bush, plain and simple.
Holy mary mother of god, that tripe was moderated up?
For one, it's not the vast majority of "linux people" who have "skill". The people with the real knowledge are a tiny minority. But all it takes is one person to write a script to get around it and hundreds will download it. Now, do they have "skill" or not? I think the answer is painfully clear.
For two, people who try to cheat systems like that are, if not acting illegally, total assholes. If you've agreed to lease your computers time/bandwidth for something, what does that say about you as a person if you just turn right around and try to cheat your way out of it? It says "Hello, I'm a sneaky fuck who can't be trusted with a plastic straw much less any responsibility or a computer. Please tie me up in a burlap sack and hit me with tire irons, then throw the corpse in the river. Better yet, burn it."
Then again, that's just the impression I get... YMMV
Oh good god shut the hell up. There's no stereotype here but the ones you've burned on your own eyes.
Remember about a year or two ago where LL Cool J was on Conan? He sat and talked for like 5 minutes about how he was improving at chess. That's the only example that springs to mind (and really not the best, but you can cope), but you hear about the "stars" keeping a board and pieces around the set of a movie and playing with the crew all the time. The fact is, one doesn't have to be a geek to enjoy intellectually stimulating games, just as someone doesn't have to be a physically superior person to enjoy extreme sports, or any physical sport for that matter.
And the upper echelons of chess are just as exclusive and highly competitive as any of the socialites allegedly "elite" games.
The SSDF autoplays games between computer programs.
Among the group in the top 13, on the same hardware, Crafty (whose source is available, although under what license I do not know) places at the bottom.
I'm not sure as to the availability of the source to other chess programs.
While people regard chess as one of the best challenges of intelligence and mental agility, it turns out that brute force and a few *relatively* simple heuristics are all that's needed to play at world-class standard
That is completely off the mark. Completely.
Give Deep Blue the starting position of chess and no opening knowledge whatsoever. Any GM over 2600 would be able to trounce this machine.
No, chess is not a matter of "simple heuristics" (relative or not, that term is insulting) and brute force. It is about mental agility and intelligence. It's about seeing farther than your opponent. Calculating (not seeing) deeper via brute force can be effective, but it's not always what wins a game. There have been volumes written about "anti-computer play". And much of it is still relevant. Certian openings, styles of play... all lead to favorable positions for humans in these games. These "simple heuristics" of yours are unable to comprehend such simple human chess basics as pawn structure and potential.
And seeing farther due to intuition, or a feel for the position, is something that will never be expressed by one of your "simple heuristics".
Were he to play it, it most assuredly would be another incarnation of the machine.
As memory serves, Deep Blue was built expressly for the purpose of beating Kasparov, not to be lord of all chess computers. From having a complete history of his games to trying to play games that don't fit Kasparovs style, the machine might not fare as well against Kramnik. Then again, anything that calculates 15 plies deep in one second will put up a challenge to anyone.
I don't think this ordinance was meant to affect all medium of video games. The judges opinion appears to only affect 'coin operated' video games at arcades themselves, not deeming who can play what at their own house.
Although, the judge does get bonus points in my book for using the word 'tugid' in the opinion.
I was thinking that AMD at least could have made more customers by allowing overclocking still so we would invest in socket A motherboards and therefore, kinda lock us up in an AMD upgrade path for future processors
Would they have really made that many more customers? Does your average joe schmoe care about being able to OC his duron? No, of course he doesn't. He cares that processor A, at X MHz, will stomp the pants off processor B running at the same speed. Sometimes not even then. Sometimes he just cares which CPU has the bigger number before the MHz
Overclockers probably don't compose 5% of the people who buy Computers, and probably compose even less of a percentage of those who buy AMD. AMD wants to sell to everyone. They do this by producing a better product than the competition.
They don't do it by allowing vendors/retailers to alter the state of their chip and selling it as something it's not. If they want to protect the end user from shady vendors (and there ARE shady vendors (I admit, I just like typing 'shady'))by disallowing people from altering the operation of the chip AMD sells them (or at least impeding alteration), and that doing so will lose them a very small amount of customers, do you think they're not going to do it?
The fact is, AMD makes a better product than Intel. And a cheaper one. If the only thing keeping you from "switching" is the fact that they now don't want you messing with their CPU, something's wrong.
PhuX0red, or perhaps some of the components (video card/sound card) aren't as up to date as the processor.
This is covered in the Winamp FAQ and/or help file (last time I checked), about why the music skips when someone scrolls in a window, etc... I'd presume it's the same problem, and not IE5's fault. If it turns out not to be, I'd agree with
you on the phuX0red diagnosis.
But hey, it's always easiest to blame microsoft, right?
What I don't get is why someone would be storing white noise on their server. I mean come on. The argument that it's not encrypted data and just white noise is kind of a flimsy one to use against inspectors or what not. Why in the world would you be wasting storage space with white noise unless it's something important? Maybe I just don't get it.
And you don't think that's a scary thing: Having to justify the existance of ANY file on your hard drive to ANYONE !? That sounds entirely horrifying to me.
Me: "I just had the file on my hard drive, sir"
Judge: "For what reason?"
Me: "I dunno, I just wanted to see what it would look like"
Judge: "Well, the state deems that it appears too random, and since you can't offer an acceptable explantion for its use, we have to assume it was for illegal purposes."
Scoff now, but it's been happening since the beginning of time.
If I want to sit there and read from/dev/random all day(not the best choice for real 'white noise', granted), NOTHING about that points to any illegal, or even 'suspicious', activity. It's one man, piping data to a file. When any incarnation of that, random or ordered, is considered illegal, I'm moving out.
McDonalds is soulless food for soulless people. I can't think of anything more dehumanizing than answering a series of beeps, whistles, and codified, standardized commands issuign forth from customers' and managers' lips. That's what McDonalds is like right now. And the food is crap. I can't understand why people even eat that stuff or why they even desire it other than the fact that it's there and they're in a hurry. But if people want to eat, and don't want to pack a lunch or cook dinner, then go ahead and eat from the hands of a Dalek or his human slave. Hell, why don't they just make a delicious "Burger Paste" so we can go up to the counter, pop in our quarter and suck it out of Grimace's plastic ass.
Geez, get abandoned at your 6th birthday party there or something? It's not so much soulless food as it is standard food. Is any loving care really put into it? No, and why should it? You're not genuinely appreciating the meal, are you? McDonalds and the like are there for unskilled labor to contribute to society in the form of fast, cheap nourishment for the masses.
And think about your statement about "than answering a series of beeps, whistles, and codified, standardized commands issuing"... Sounds a bit like debugging code, except it comes from the compilers lips, and not a humans. This is, IMO more 'soulless'.
What ever happened to the family-owned diner that was never more than half-full, where they know your name and what you like on a sandwich?
And yet you call the workers at McDonalds automata, when in the same breath you yearn for a sandwich made by someone who doesn't think about it ("and what you like on a sandwich? your words not mine)? How is this any different? Those places thrived on repeat business, the same as any other, and the same thing happened at McDonalds: there is repeat business, and certian people only ever order their burger a certian kind of way. Yes, I've worked there, no shame in it when you're 16 and mommy & daddy don't buy you everything (no I'm not implying you're spoiled, I'm just stating I wasn't).
I honestly believe places like McDonalds do good for society. It allows relatively unskilled labor a chance to earn a wage; not a GREAT wage, but then again, not all jobs should allow you to live high on the hog or whatever the statement is. It provides jobs for teenagers who, let's face it, are not the most exactly sought after employees of businesses. And as I said earlier, it provides fast, cheap food for millions of people a day, something that your homestyle resturaunts couldn't do. Now, I love little out of the way places like "grannys kitchen" or whatever, but when you've got a 30 minute lunch assigned to you, you can't wait around for home cooking. I grant you this isn't so much the fault of the resturaunt as it is the way our society has become, but for that, we should also not fault McDonalds for adapting to it; if it wasn't an accepted business practice, McDonalds, and for that matter all fast food chains, would have folded years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The creator of the hardware and owner of its network and marketplace can't be so easily dismissed as just another "me too digital service." They face no legitimate competition here and will make a mint.
> Their CEO actively cultivated an age imbalance, bragging that he was "trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y'ers," because, "in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated."
Translation : young people have little to no idea about their true value and I can exploit them with shitty options, bad contracts and bonuses because I can sell them on some startup dream a hell of a lot easier than I can trick someone who has 'been there, done that.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_fictional_ducks
May not be as protracted and vitriolic as some of the others but the disagreement over the notoriety of Jemima Puddleduck was hauntingly stupid.
I know. 6 digit UIDs are for suckers.
good programming practices aside, it isn't required to.
We all know we'll see it regardless. The hype and buildup over the past year have been phenomenal.
VARY INTELLEGENT SIRS.
*TWEET*
Improper use of jeffk-ism. 10 yard penalty. Repeat the down.
How about retarded idea?
The original contention was that texts online are FREE, so buying a 2nd monitor (vs a book) doesn't support that argument at all.
No, and ....
self depreciating sarcasm is hardly humor.
image here
(for those of you confused by ballots, I'll explain: the greyed out areas are counties that voted for Gore.)
I suppose the whole point is moot given that florida was recently handed to bush, but I think it shows that the "will of the people" has been served; if you total the population of counties bush won, he beats gore. Why? More family type voted bush, plain and simple.
Holy mary mother of god, that tripe was moderated up?
... YMMV
For one, it's not the vast majority of "linux people" who have "skill". The people with the real knowledge are a tiny minority. But all it takes is one person to write a script to get around it and hundreds will download it. Now, do they have "skill" or not? I think the answer is painfully clear.
For two, people who try to cheat systems like that are, if not acting illegally, total assholes. If you've agreed to lease your computers time/bandwidth for something, what does that say about you as a person if you just turn right around and try to cheat your way out of it? It says "Hello, I'm a sneaky fuck who can't be trusted with a plastic straw much less any responsibility or a computer. Please tie me up in a burlap sack and hit me with tire irons, then throw the corpse in the river. Better yet, burn it."
Then again, that's just the impression I get
Ha! I'd like to see someone sneak one of THESE puppies out of los alamos. Or have it wind up 2 weeks later behind a copying machine.
Oh good god shut the hell up. There's no stereotype here but the ones you've burned on your own eyes.
Remember about a year or two ago where LL Cool J was on Conan? He sat and talked for like 5 minutes about how he was improving at chess. That's the only example that springs to mind (and really not the best, but you can cope), but you hear about the "stars" keeping a board and pieces around the set of a movie and playing with the crew all the time. The fact is, one doesn't have to be a geek to enjoy intellectually stimulating games, just as someone doesn't have to be a physically superior person to enjoy extreme sports, or any physical sport for that matter.
And the upper echelons of chess are just as exclusive and highly competitive as any of the socialites allegedly "elite" games.
The SSDF autoplays games between computer programs. Among the group in the top 13, on the same hardware, Crafty (whose source is available, although under what license I do not know) places at the bottom. I'm not sure as to the availability of the source to other chess programs.
While people regard chess as one of the best challenges of intelligence and mental agility, it turns out that brute force and a few *relatively* simple heuristics are all that's needed to play at world-class standard
... all lead to favorable positions for humans in these games. These "simple heuristics" of yours are unable to comprehend such simple human chess basics as pawn structure and potential.
That is completely off the mark. Completely.
Give Deep Blue the starting position of chess and no opening knowledge whatsoever. Any GM over 2600 would be able to trounce this machine. No, chess is not a matter of "simple heuristics" (relative or not, that term is insulting) and brute force. It is about mental agility and intelligence. It's about seeing farther than your opponent. Calculating (not seeing) deeper via brute force can be effective, but it's not always what wins a game. There have been volumes written about "anti-computer play". And much of it is still relevant. Certian openings, styles of play
And seeing farther due to intuition, or a feel for the position, is something that will never be expressed by one of your "simple heuristics".
Were he to play it, it most assuredly would be another incarnation of the machine.
As memory serves, Deep Blue was built expressly for the purpose of beating Kasparov, not to be lord of all chess computers. From having a complete history of his games to trying to play games that don't fit Kasparovs style, the machine might not fare as well against Kramnik. Then again, anything that calculates 15 plies deep in one second will put up a challenge to anyone.
I don't think this ordinance was meant to affect all medium of video games. The judges opinion appears to only affect 'coin operated' video games at arcades themselves, not deeming who can play what at their own house.
Although, the judge does get bonus points in my book for using the word 'tugid' in the opinion.I was thinking that AMD at least could have made more customers by allowing overclocking still so we would invest in socket A motherboards and therefore, kinda lock us up in an AMD upgrade path for future processors
Would they have really made that many more customers? Does your average joe schmoe care about being able to OC his duron? No, of course he doesn't. He cares that processor A, at X MHz, will stomp the pants off processor B running at the same speed. Sometimes not even then. Sometimes he just cares which CPU has the bigger number before the MHz
Overclockers probably don't compose 5% of the people who buy Computers, and probably compose even less of a percentage of those who buy AMD. AMD wants to sell to everyone. They do this by producing a better product than the competition.
They don't do it by allowing vendors/retailers to alter the state of their chip and selling it as something it's not. If they want to protect the end user from shady vendors (and there ARE shady vendors (I admit, I just like typing 'shady'))by disallowing people from altering the operation of the chip AMD sells them (or at least impeding alteration), and that doing so will lose them a very small amount of customers, do you think they're not going to do it?
The fact is, AMD makes a better product than Intel. And a cheaper one. If the only thing keeping you from "switching" is the fact that they now don't want you messing with their CPU, something's wrong.
PhuX0red, or perhaps some of the components (video card/sound card) aren't as up to date as the processor.
... I'd presume it's the same problem, and not IE5's fault. If it turns out not to be, I'd agree with
This is covered in the Winamp FAQ and/or help file (last time I checked), about why the music skips when someone scrolls in a window, etc
you on the phuX0red diagnosis.
But hey, it's always easiest to blame microsoft, right?
hork \Hork\, v 1. To toss ones cookies; to blow chunks; to hurl. see also: spew
What I don't get is why someone would be storing white noise on their server. I mean come on. The argument that it's not encrypted data and just white noise is kind of a flimsy one to use against inspectors or what not. Why in the world would you be wasting storage space with white noise unless it's something important? Maybe I just don't get it.
/dev/random all day(not the best choice for real 'white noise', granted), NOTHING about that points to any illegal, or even 'suspicious', activity. It's one man, piping data to a file. When any incarnation of that, random or ordered, is considered illegal, I'm moving out.
And you don't think that's a scary thing: Having to justify the existance of ANY file on your hard drive to ANYONE !? That sounds entirely horrifying to me.
Me: "I just had the file on my hard drive, sir"
Judge: "For what reason?"
Me: "I dunno, I just wanted to see what it would look like"
Judge: "Well, the state deems that it appears too random, and since you can't offer an acceptable explantion for its use, we have to assume it was for illegal purposes."
Scoff now, but it's been happening since the beginning of time.
If I want to sit there and read from
McDonalds is soulless food for soulless people. I can't think of anything more dehumanizing than answering a series of beeps, whistles, and codified, standardized commands issuign forth from customers' and managers' lips. That's what McDonalds is like right now. And the food is crap. I can't understand why people even eat that stuff or why they even desire it other than the fact that it's there and they're in a hurry. But if people want to eat, and don't want to pack a lunch or cook dinner, then go ahead and eat from the hands of a Dalek or his human slave. Hell, why don't they just make a delicious "Burger Paste" so we can go up to the counter, pop in our quarter and suck it out of Grimace's plastic ass.
Geez, get abandoned at your 6th birthday party there or something? It's not so much soulless food as it is standard food. Is any loving care really put into it? No, and why should it? You're not genuinely appreciating the meal, are you? McDonalds and the like are there for unskilled labor to contribute to society in the form of fast, cheap nourishment for the masses.
And think about your statement about "than answering a series of beeps, whistles, and codified, standardized commands issuing" ... Sounds a bit like debugging code, except it comes from the compilers lips, and not a humans. This is, IMO more 'soulless'.
What ever happened to the family-owned diner that was never more than half-full, where they know your name and what you like on a sandwich?
And yet you call the workers at McDonalds automata, when in the same breath you yearn for a sandwich made by someone who doesn't think about it ("and what you like on a sandwich? your words not mine)? How is this any different? Those places thrived on repeat business, the same as any other, and the same thing happened at McDonalds: there is repeat business, and certian people only ever order their burger a certian kind of way. Yes, I've worked there, no shame in it when you're 16 and mommy & daddy don't buy you everything (no I'm not implying you're spoiled, I'm just stating I wasn't).
I honestly believe places like McDonalds do good for society. It allows relatively unskilled labor a chance to earn a wage; not a GREAT wage, but then again, not all jobs should allow you to live high on the hog or whatever the statement is. It provides jobs for teenagers who, let's face it, are not the most exactly sought after employees of businesses. And as I said earlier, it provides fast, cheap food for millions of people a day, something that your homestyle resturaunts couldn't do. Now, I love little out of the way places like "grannys kitchen" or whatever, but when you've got a 30 minute lunch assigned to you, you can't wait around for home cooking. I grant you this isn't so much the fault of the resturaunt as it is the way our society has become, but for that, we should also not fault McDonalds for adapting to it; if it wasn't an accepted business practice, McDonalds, and for that matter all fast food chains, would have folded years ago.
if(BURGERFELL=TRUE) {
is this to imply that the burger always falls? =)