"Of course they aren't! If they were, the price for each item would be significantly lower, and the real GNP would be nowhere near what he is quoting. So in reality, if Norrath was a country, the GNP would not be as high as his estimate."
By your logic, the GDP of Japan isn't measurable from the US because the only way it could be measured is by forcing everybody in Japan to sell off their yen for US dollars. And since that would drop the yen through the floor, the numbers macroeconomists get for Japan are actually much higher than they really are. And the GDP for the US that Japanese economists get is much higher than it really is as well.
Of course, all of these measurements assumes that the value of the observer's currency is fixed, but nobody can prove they're the One True Currency because there's no ultimate frame of reference. Even using the gold standard is no good because the amount of gold in the market changes constantly.
An Apple that isn't an Apple is quite tempting. My main complaint about those things for most of my years has been the inability to build a frankenstein like you can with the old PC architecture.
I've been planning on getting myself a new computer in the next few months, and pretty much assumed I'd be getting a Thunderbird. But now... now this makes me think. On the plus side the PPCs will be able to run Mac OS X (or will they?), but they won't be able to run any flavor of Windows (which I need for games and such). Of course, the deciding factor may just be how much more Mandrake supports their PPC code after this.
PPCs... feels like I'm talking about BattleTech...
When your karma gets above a certain point, you get a free +1 bonus to your posts. My karma hasn't been below 47 for about a year or so, so I have the bonus. The only reason this post is at 1 is becuase I turned off the +1 bonus for this post.
If you notice, my first post started at two and had to be modded down twice to get down to 0.
OK, now I'm disturbed...
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 2, Flamebait
I make a one-line post about the apparent lack of attention to non-American deaths and I get smacked down as flamebait? I wasn't even intending to be flamebait!
THIS is flamebait:
If Apollo 11 can commemorate the deaths of Gagarin and Komarov alongside the friends they lost on Apollo 1, why can't I even reference Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 missions in passing on Slashdot?
Re:Rosaviakosmos, anyone?
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 2
"That's because there have been over 200 some Russians killed in their space program."
1.) Not all of those 200 Russians killed were cosmonauts. The vast majority of those deaths were ground crew killed in fuel-related explosions.
2.) Not all of those 200 were even working on the manned space program. The two accidents I can think of (1973 and 1980) weren't anywhere near Baikonur. Counting deaths at Plesetsk Cosmodrome would be like including deaths at Vandenberg AFB. (In fact, how did you arrive at 200, anyway?)
"More moderator points are being used to mod posts down than up."
That could be indicative of nothing more than a low signal-to-noise ratio, which seems to be true of human society in general.
"Furthermore, when modding a post up, every moderator seems to follow previous moderators in their choices, even when it's not a particularly interesting or clever post."
You assume that all the points came from different moderators. A single moderator may just be burning off their mod points to get rid of them.
"There are a LOT more +5 posts than +3 or +4."
But are there more mod points spent on +5 posts than +3 or +4? Remember, a poster that gets modded up often gets a +1 bonus on their post. A poster that often gets modded up three times will already have a 2 point starting point.
"Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards."
Now you've flip-flopped. Where before you were talking about final score instead of points applied, here you're talking about points applied insead of final score. Logged-in posters tend to have a higher starting point (1 or 2) than ACs (0). You might want to take this into account before jumping to conclusions about moderators.
"A lot of the modded down posts are actually quite clever, funny, etc., and they are only modded down because they are offtopic."
It's been my impression that "Offtopic" means just that. Funny and clever are all well and good, but when you're looking for information and opinions it's more important that a post is in the proper category than it be funny or clever. The site's logo is "News for Nerds," not necesarily "Jokes for Nerts."
A post may very well warrant reading, but it belongs someplace else ("There's a place for everything and everything has its place."). For example, your post may be both interesting and informative, but it still has jack to do with Oracle and its security. People came here to read information about Oracle. If you wanted to target an audience interested in moderation debates, you've missed your audience by putting this post here.
They had clips of the Enron hearings on the news, and it seemed like in the audience was everybody's favorite movie executive Jack Valenti. Why the hell was he there?
"it's about keeping people from illegally pirating games."
1.) Having the ability to pirate and being a pirate are two very differen things.
2.) We may have two very different definitions of "piracy."
I have a mod chip on my original PSX. If I wanted to, I could play ISO images off of CD-Rs. But I don't. I got the chip solely for the purpose of playing import games. Now, whether you think that playing an import game on a domestic system is piracy, then yes I'm a pirate by your definition. But I had better not be one by the law's definition.
"Unfortunately, illegal copyiers force companies like SONY to take these steps to protect the profits of their company and the artisits that produce games. I am unahppy that this action was necassary, but untill the piracy stops SONY and others will take steps like this to keep it to a minimum."
The ends do not justify the means. If they want to try to stop illegal copying, fine. But they have no right to impose on my right to use what I have legally purchased while trying to do it.
From what I understand, Loki wasn't exactly kind to its employees. The management wanted as many games as possible translated for as little money as possible (which got reflected in their payroll and hiring practices), and they had a rather vigorous turn-over rate.
At any rate, I liked the N64 controller as a logo better than the 2600, but I'm probably biased anyhow.:)
"A multimeter reading of the batteries' voltage before the device started up showed a total of 48.9 volts. When it was switched off, a second reading showed 51.2 volts, indicating that, somehow, they had been reimbursed."
Why do I have the suspicious feeling that this amazing new "free energy" device is, in fact, a capacitor?
Nothing mentioned between 60 Hz and 27 MHz, so all those quacks on the AM band (535 kHz - 1605 kHz) are still able to talk to their gullible audiences about E-M sensitivity.
Also conveniently lacking are all your VHF TV channels. That gap between 27 MHz and 400 MHz is more than big enough for all channels between 2 and 13 (54 MHz - 88 MHz for channels 2 through 6, and 174 MHz - 215 MHz for 7 through 13). You may be sensitive to other parts of the spectrum, but at least you can still catch your Must See TV with no risk of odd sexual urges!
FM radio is also OK (88 MHz to 108 MHz), so NPR is still good for me. Thank heaven for little favors...
But some of you Dawson's Creek fanatics may be out of luck. The UHF TV channels are mostly harmless (470 MHz - 608 MHz for channels 14 to 36, 614 MHz - 806 MHz for 38 to 69), but as we can see, channel 69 may cause AIDS. Check your local listings!
New customers of satellite radio should be safe (they tend to sit in the S-band, between 2.31 GHz and 2.36 GHz, just under the frequencies for blisters and warts).
Unfortunately for Cox, Comcast and other cable companies is the way they get their feeds on the C-band (3.6 GHz to 7.025 GHz) Proof positive that too much late-night Cinemax can make you go blind!
Even worse for them, their competitors in the digital satellite market are sitting pretty in the ku-band (10.7 GHz - 14.5 GHz). Too energetic for any problems listed here.
On a slightly more serious note, I'm surprised they didn't mention the serious (proven) health risks of more energetic frequencies, like the severe burns that can be caused by EM waves in the 350 THz - 400 THz range, or the relation between skin cancer and frequencies over 750 THz. Hell, if you have too much of anything between 400 THz and 750 THz, you might go blind!
Only in California. Articles like these make me feel sorry for the poor bastards that have to live in the same state as these people. And they vote, too.
Seriously, if they're so electrically sensitive, why haven't they put up a giant umbrella to blot out the biggest E-M noisemaker in the solar system (more commonly known as "the sun")? Or why haven't they moved closer to the equator to make sure they're as far away from the aurora borealis as possible?
I'm willing to bet that, within five years of the first viable fusion reactor going on-line, somebody in California will have neutrino-related health problems. And THEN where will they move?
But how long can they keep it for?
on
VeriSign Buys .tv
·
· Score: 2
As I recall, Tuvalu has a slight problem with rising sea levels. Unless something happens soon, the entire country will disappear beneath the Pacific. And, to bastardize Eddie Izzard, no country, no TLD.
"Why can't the Xbox do it all now? It's got 10 gig of hard disk, a hefty processor for whatever compression scheme they want to use (divx anyone?:), dolby sound (didn't that set off alarm bells for anyone else?), a broadband connector (great for a private network for delivering pay-per-view, too), and is it true that the Xbox has an extra port labelled "video in"!?"
You're still left with another problem: historically, console accessories and the games that require them have never done very well. While this may just be a software upgrade, unless Microsoft hands it out for free, they will have to find a way to convince everybody who already has an Xbox to fork over more money for it. Sega had trouble doing that with their Sega CD, Nintendo had trouble doing that with the Expansion Pak, and there's no reason to believe Microsoft will have a better time of it.
In fact, we already have a direct analog of Microsoft selling upgrade software for the Xbox: the Xbox DVD kit. How many Xbox owners do you think have it? 60%? 70%? Would you base your software sales on an accessory that only has 3/4 of 1/3 of the video game market?
As the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and PlayStation 2 have shown us, backwards compatability is a red herring. When the new system comes out and the old one isn't in production any more, both the consumers and the third-party publishers abandon the old and focus entirely on the new (though who abandons the old hardware first is debatable).
As soon as a new system hits the shelves, any new games you want to play will require that new system. Sure, for a few months, some of the games for the older system come out, but those are games that were already in the development pipe when the new system came out.
The only way Microsoft could get away with selling a shiney new console only a year after their last would be to guarantee forward compatability, the ability of the old hardware to play new games. But not only will that make it even more difficult for Microsoft to compete against themselves, but then you also make the Xbox exactly what Microsoft doesn't want it to be: a PC. They'd be in a situation where, instead of competing against GameCube or PS2 architecture, they'd be competing against PC and Macs. You'd have to look at the side of the game to see if your particular model Xbox can handle a particular Xbox game.
" If they retain the same game architecture/make it backwards-compatible, but add the new functionality and modify the interface some, they should have no problem attracting new users."
Even if they make it backwards compatible, they're still nailing down the lid on the coffin of the original Xbox. Microsoft will have essentially abandoned support of their old hardware by not making it any more, and both consumers and third-party game programmers will see it that way. The PS2 is backwards compatible, but I don't see many new PSX games coming out. Both the GBC and then the GBA are also backwards compatible, and as each came out, the games that ran on their predecessors dwindled.
"- It's Microsoft. Despite what they would tell you, I think there's a real stigma with having Microsoft's name attached to something at this point. Despite the reality, to the average Joe it means this thing is going to crash often and not work the way I want it to."
If I remember right, in this case this stigma was justified. I recall early on hearing about how UltimateTV had a bug where it kept on filling up its hard drive. I remember it required a (wait for it) software patch to fix it.
"It almost certainly means this functionality will be lumped into the Xbox's successor, which is fully in line with everything we've heard about that box so far."
Then they have a problem. XBox has only been on the market now for what, two months? If Xbox 2 hits stores less than a year after the release of the original, then it's going to fall flat on its face. One of the big reasons many have stayed away from Xbox is that they don't want to get on the vicious cycle of upgrades Microsoft is famous for, and releasing a new system less than a year after the old would just justify those fears. At the very least, they'll have many Xbox owners who see the new Xbox 2 come out, and decide to not spend their money and wait for Xbox 4 or 5 to come out before upgrading.
It's too early in the game for Microsoft to even think about competing with themselves in the console market. If they think the same rules for running their OS monopoly can be applied to today's three-way power struggle...
If you have to know crypto-analysis in order to get into college, where are you supposed to learn crypto-analysis? Or is Canada yet another of those countries where university != college?
Slashdot Mirror
"Of course they aren't! If they were, the price for each item would be significantly lower, and the real GNP would be nowhere near what he is quoting. So in reality, if Norrath was a country, the GNP would not be as high as his estimate."
By your logic, the GDP of Japan isn't measurable from the US because the only way it could be measured is by forcing everybody in Japan to sell off their yen for US dollars. And since that would drop the yen through the floor, the numbers macroeconomists get for Japan are actually much higher than they really are. And the GDP for the US that Japanese economists get is much higher than it really is as well.
Of course, all of these measurements assumes that the value of the observer's currency is fixed, but nobody can prove they're the One True Currency because there's no ultimate frame of reference. Even using the gold standard is no good because the amount of gold in the market changes constantly.
Sounds like special relativity, don't it?
Aren't Outlook and OE users punished enough for their foolishness by the likes of sircam? :)
An Apple that isn't an Apple is quite tempting. My main complaint about those things for most of my years has been the inability to build a frankenstein like you can with the old PC architecture.
I've been planning on getting myself a new computer in the next few months, and pretty much assumed I'd be getting a Thunderbird. But now... now this makes me think. On the plus side the PPCs will be able to run Mac OS X (or will they?), but they won't be able to run any flavor of Windows (which I need for games and such). Of course, the deciding factor may just be how much more Mandrake supports their PPC code after this.
PPCs... feels like I'm talking about BattleTech...
When your karma gets above a certain point, you get a free +1 bonus to your posts. My karma hasn't been below 47 for about a year or so, so I have the bonus. The only reason this post is at 1 is becuase I turned off the +1 bonus for this post.
If you notice, my first post started at two and had to be modded down twice to get down to 0.
I make a one-line post about the apparent lack of attention to non-American deaths and I get smacked down as flamebait? I wasn't even intending to be flamebait!
THIS is flamebait:
If Apollo 11 can commemorate the deaths of Gagarin and Komarov alongside the friends they lost on Apollo 1, why can't I even reference Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 missions in passing on Slashdot?
"That's because there have been over 200 some Russians killed in their space program."
1.) Not all of those 200 Russians killed were cosmonauts. The vast majority of those deaths were ground crew killed in fuel-related explosions.
2.) Not all of those 200 were even working on the manned space program. The two accidents I can think of (1973 and 1980) weren't anywhere near Baikonur. Counting deaths at Plesetsk Cosmodrome would be like including deaths at Vandenberg AFB. (In fact, how did you arrive at 200, anyway?)
3.) Not all killed cosmonauts were Russian.
4.) Ten deaths are a tragedy, 200 are a statistic? Where have I heard that before?
"Having only had a handful of Americans killed is quite an accomplishement if you ask me."
Apollo 1 + STS-51L = 10
Soyuz 1 + Soyuz 11 = 4
Maybe I haven't been paying attention closely enough, but I don't recall seeing articles commemorating the deaths of cosmonauts on /.
"More moderator points are being used to mod posts down than up."
That could be indicative of nothing more than a low signal-to-noise ratio, which seems to be true of human society in general.
"Furthermore, when modding a post up, every moderator seems to follow previous moderators in their choices, even when it's not a particularly interesting or clever post."
You assume that all the points came from different moderators. A single moderator may just be burning off their mod points to get rid of them.
"There are a LOT more +5 posts than +3 or +4."
But are there more mod points spent on +5 posts than +3 or +4? Remember, a poster that gets modded up often gets a +1 bonus on their post. A poster that often gets modded up three times will already have a 2 point starting point.
"Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards."
Now you've flip-flopped. Where before you were talking about final score instead of points applied, here you're talking about points applied insead of final score. Logged-in posters tend to have a higher starting point (1 or 2) than ACs (0). You might want to take this into account before jumping to conclusions about moderators.
"A lot of the modded down posts are actually quite clever, funny, etc., and they are only modded down because they are offtopic."
It's been my impression that "Offtopic" means just that. Funny and clever are all well and good, but when you're looking for information and opinions it's more important that a post is in the proper category than it be funny or clever. The site's logo is "News for Nerds," not necesarily "Jokes for Nerts."
A post may very well warrant reading, but it belongs someplace else ("There's a place for everything and everything has its place."). For example, your post may be both interesting and informative, but it still has jack to do with Oracle and its security. People came here to read information about Oracle. If you wanted to target an audience interested in moderation debates, you've missed your audience by putting this post here.
You can almost make out the words:
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
"If i tried the linez he did in the movie, i'd be talking to the police right now."
See, that's your problem. You're worried about the reprocussions. It's attractive when you flat-out don't care.
Everybody knows that beautiful, attractive women invariably go for the guys that abuse them most. :)
"Evil empire" was first used by Reagan himself to describe the USSR (then lead by Brezhnev, I believe).
They had clips of the Enron hearings on the news, and it seemed like in the audience was everybody's favorite movie executive Jack Valenti. Why the hell was he there?
"it's about keeping people from illegally pirating games."
1.) Having the ability to pirate and being a pirate are two very differen things.
2.) We may have two very different definitions of "piracy."
I have a mod chip on my original PSX. If I wanted to, I could play ISO images off of CD-Rs. But I don't. I got the chip solely for the purpose of playing import games. Now, whether you think that playing an import game on a domestic system is piracy, then yes I'm a pirate by your definition. But I had better not be one by the law's definition.
"Unfortunately, illegal copyiers force companies like SONY to take these steps to protect the profits of their company and the artisits that produce games. I am unahppy that this action was necassary, but untill the piracy stops SONY and others will take steps like this to keep it to a minimum."
The ends do not justify the means. If they want to try to stop illegal copying, fine. But they have no right to impose on my right to use what I have legally purchased while trying to do it.
From what I understand, Loki wasn't exactly kind to its employees. The management wanted as many games as possible translated for as little money as possible (which got reflected in their payroll and hiring practices), and they had a rather vigorous turn-over rate.
:)
At any rate, I liked the N64 controller as a logo better than the 2600, but I'm probably biased anyhow.
"A multimeter reading of the batteries' voltage before the device started up showed a total of 48.9 volts. When it was switched off, a second reading showed 51.2 volts, indicating that, somehow, they had been reimbursed."
Why do I have the suspicious feeling that this amazing new "free energy" device is, in fact, a capacitor?
There are some pretty big holes in this chart.
Nothing mentioned between 60 Hz and 27 MHz, so all those quacks on the AM band (535 kHz - 1605 kHz) are still able to talk to their gullible audiences about E-M sensitivity.
Also conveniently lacking are all your VHF TV channels. That gap between 27 MHz and 400 MHz is more than big enough for all channels between 2 and 13 (54 MHz - 88 MHz for channels 2 through 6, and 174 MHz - 215 MHz for 7 through 13). You may be sensitive to other parts of the spectrum, but at least you can still catch your Must See TV with no risk of odd sexual urges!
FM radio is also OK (88 MHz to 108 MHz), so NPR is still good for me. Thank heaven for little favors...
But some of you Dawson's Creek fanatics may be out of luck. The UHF TV channels are mostly harmless (470 MHz - 608 MHz for channels 14 to 36, 614 MHz - 806 MHz for 38 to 69), but as we can see, channel 69 may cause AIDS. Check your local listings!
New customers of satellite radio should be safe (they tend to sit in the S-band, between 2.31 GHz and 2.36 GHz, just under the frequencies for blisters and warts).
Unfortunately for Cox, Comcast and other cable companies is the way they get their feeds on the C-band (3.6 GHz to 7.025 GHz) Proof positive that too much late-night Cinemax can make you go blind!
Even worse for them, their competitors in the digital satellite market are sitting pretty in the ku-band (10.7 GHz - 14.5 GHz). Too energetic for any problems listed here.
On a slightly more serious note, I'm surprised they didn't mention the serious (proven) health risks of more energetic frequencies, like the severe burns that can be caused by EM waves in the 350 THz - 400 THz range, or the relation between skin cancer and frequencies over 750 THz. Hell, if you have too much of anything between 400 THz and 750 THz, you might go blind!
Only in California. Articles like these make me feel sorry for the poor bastards that have to live in the same state as these people. And they vote, too.
Seriously, if they're so electrically sensitive, why haven't they put up a giant umbrella to blot out the biggest E-M noisemaker in the solar system (more commonly known as "the sun")? Or why haven't they moved closer to the equator to make sure they're as far away from the aurora borealis as possible?
I'm willing to bet that, within five years of the first viable fusion reactor going on-line, somebody in California will have neutrino-related health problems. And THEN where will they move?
As I recall, Tuvalu has a slight problem with rising sea levels. Unless something happens soon, the entire country will disappear beneath the Pacific. And, to bastardize Eddie Izzard, no country, no TLD.
"Why can't the Xbox do it all now? It's got 10 gig of hard disk, a hefty processor for whatever compression scheme they want to use (divx anyone? :), dolby sound (didn't that set off alarm bells for anyone else?), a broadband connector (great for a private network for delivering pay-per-view, too), and is it true that the Xbox has an extra port labelled "video in"!?"
You're still left with another problem: historically, console accessories and the games that require them have never done very well. While this may just be a software upgrade, unless Microsoft hands it out for free, they will have to find a way to convince everybody who already has an Xbox to fork over more money for it. Sega had trouble doing that with their Sega CD, Nintendo had trouble doing that with the Expansion Pak, and there's no reason to believe Microsoft will have a better time of it.
In fact, we already have a direct analog of Microsoft selling upgrade software for the Xbox: the Xbox DVD kit. How many Xbox owners do you think have it? 60%? 70%? Would you base your software sales on an accessory that only has 3/4 of 1/3 of the video game market?
As the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and PlayStation 2 have shown us, backwards compatability is a red herring. When the new system comes out and the old one isn't in production any more, both the consumers and the third-party publishers abandon the old and focus entirely on the new (though who abandons the old hardware first is debatable).
As soon as a new system hits the shelves, any new games you want to play will require that new system. Sure, for a few months, some of the games for the older system come out, but those are games that were already in the development pipe when the new system came out.
The only way Microsoft could get away with selling a shiney new console only a year after their last would be to guarantee forward compatability, the ability of the old hardware to play new games. But not only will that make it even more difficult for Microsoft to compete against themselves, but then you also make the Xbox exactly what Microsoft doesn't want it to be: a PC. They'd be in a situation where, instead of competing against GameCube or PS2 architecture, they'd be competing against PC and Macs. You'd have to look at the side of the game to see if your particular model Xbox can handle a particular Xbox game.
" If they retain the same game architecture/make it backwards-compatible, but add the new functionality and modify the interface some, they should have no problem attracting new users."
Even if they make it backwards compatible, they're still nailing down the lid on the coffin of the original Xbox. Microsoft will have essentially abandoned support of their old hardware by not making it any more, and both consumers and third-party game programmers will see it that way. The PS2 is backwards compatible, but I don't see many new PSX games coming out. Both the GBC and then the GBA are also backwards compatible, and as each came out, the games that ran on their predecessors dwindled.
"- It's Microsoft. Despite what they would tell you, I think there's a real stigma with having Microsoft's name attached to something at this point. Despite the reality, to the average Joe it means this thing is going to crash often and not work the way I want it to."
If I remember right, in this case this stigma was justified. I recall early on hearing about how UltimateTV had a bug where it kept on filling up its hard drive. I remember it required a (wait for it) software patch to fix it.
"It almost certainly means this functionality will be lumped into the Xbox's successor, which is fully in line with everything we've heard about that box so far."
Then they have a problem. XBox has only been on the market now for what, two months? If Xbox 2 hits stores less than a year after the release of the original, then it's going to fall flat on its face. One of the big reasons many have stayed away from Xbox is that they don't want to get on the vicious cycle of upgrades Microsoft is famous for, and releasing a new system less than a year after the old would just justify those fears. At the very least, they'll have many Xbox owners who see the new Xbox 2 come out, and decide to not spend their money and wait for Xbox 4 or 5 to come out before upgrading.
It's too early in the game for Microsoft to even think about competing with themselves in the console market. If they think the same rules for running their OS monopoly can be applied to today's three-way power struggle...
If you have to know crypto-analysis in order to get into college, where are you supposed to learn crypto-analysis? Or is Canada yet another of those countries where university != college?