Would someone please explain to me the point of Myst? I spent all of 30 minutes playing it ten years ago. Needless to say it didn't grab my attention.
Reviews at the time kept raving about its great graphics and calling it revolutionary. I don't understand what was so revolutionary about high-res stills that loaded from CD every time you clicked on something.
Probably like a lot of people here, I found Myst random and pointless with pretty things to look at, kind of like, oh, everything that is beloved by the unwashed masses and despised by the more practical-minded.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for alternatives to the first-person shoot-'em-up style games that dominate the market. I spent lots of time playing 7th Guest; it seemed fairly straightforward. Myst, otoh, still befuddles me.
Would someone enlighten me?
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New VOIP App. Profiled
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I'd say that giving the terrorists video conferencing would doom them to a middle-management bureaucratic hell and actually *prevent* them from completing their nefarious schemes, but that's just me...
One of the national news broadcasts just had a couple people talking about 'computer problems' as a factor in the East Coast blackout. A transcript of the first few minutes of the outage had technicians complaining that their computers were acting strangely and that they couldn't diagnose the problem because of that.
The CEO of the company that had the 'original' problem asserted that there must have been systems failures at other sites in order to bring down the entire grid. He said his company alone could not have caused the problems that occurred.
I wonder if any of the MS worms that were circulating at the time actually were to blame for the outage as has been speculated here before?
The webcast of the hearing will be available here when it's ready.
Have nearly every minute of the day accounted for.
It doesn't matter. If you take a list of things to management for them to prioritize, it will invariably include only two types of tasks: immediate problems and future problems. What management never realizes in IT, though, is that future problems, when neglected, multiply into lots and lots of immediate problems later on.
Instead of ignoring immediate problems to stop future problems before they multiply, your PHB will have you spend all of your time working on immediate problems, since he's usually not involved enough to realize the implications of future problems and the immediate problems are the ones that his boss is yelling at him about.
When those future problems that you ignored end up multiplying, you'll fall even farther behind and everyone will assume it is because of your own incompetence. After all, you're working every minute of the day and things are getting worse.
I liken IT to a biological disaster. You have to triage out the patients that are going to die anyways in order to concentrate on saving the ones that can be saved. The doctor, not the accountants, are the only people who know who will survive and who won't.
Because their costs are not in manufacturing; they're in design. If they had to design two different products, both would cost more.
I think we're just beginning to see these types of products emerge, but soon every product will follow this paradigm. As more and more menial tasks are automated, the costs of manufacturing plummet in relation to the costs of design.
I'd hate to see the day when the same refrigerator is artificially differentiated and priced based upon its energy efficiency, but I wouldn't be suprised.
3) They plan to license their closed-source driver to OEM's that create standalone Linux products for niche markets, a la Broadcom and Linksys.
I think this one fits this particular situation perfectly. If VIA can withold the one piece of the puzzle (hardware decoding) that opens the door to easy, cheap, upgradeable DVR boxes and license that piece to lots of different companies, VIA wins.
The mirroring/stiping is actually done by the driver.
What's the point of that? I've always looked at hardware RAID with a sideways glance because of designs like that. None of these 'low-end' cards really advertise the fact that they are crippled in that way, either.
Wouldn't it be more redundant and just as fast to have two regular IDE controllers and just use the RAID capability of the OS? I always thought that when the drive goes, there's a fair probability that it will take the controller down with it.
If your OS doesn't have RAID built-in by now, you're not going to find drivers for it anyways.
Maybe from 8-noon you handle new requests and 1-quitting you're on project stuff?
God, no, don't do that. Stuff breaks 24/7 and people need help *now*. You'd just end up doing what you don't want to do all day long and what doesn't get you any recognition from upstairs: helpdesk stuff.
If you're really not getting any support from your bosses, don't go to them and ask them to prioritize stuff. Most of the time they'll get it wrong and you'll still get blamed.
Oh, and open source is a godsend for the 1-man IT department. Learn it, use it, don't tell your boss until it's already done.
Who needs Fish farmers -- or any kind of farmer for that matter -- in a post-nanotech Economy?
People who would still like to eat without being beholden to those who own the IP rights for 'salmon'.
Besides, we're nowhere near 'post-nanotech' and I'm not inclined to risk my current standard of living on pie-in-the-sky predictions of what 'post-nanotech' will be like.
The argument is that even if only a few of them *aren't* sterile, and manage to breed in the wild, the fact that they are about 4x the size of normal salmon would give them a *huge* advantage in breeding and they would quickly replace the normal salmon population, until they died out from not being able to hunt enough food to live, of course.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that either of the two major parties do anything merely on it's own merit. Don't expect anything that is "an invasive pain in the ass" to be done away with unless doing so is in the ruling party's interest.
If feeding Christians to lions would get them (re)elected, both Republicans and Democrats would jump at the opportunity.
Didn't mean for my comment to be so contentious. I actually was responding because I was suprised that your comment hadn't been modded up. Windows *does* suck and you point out just one of the reasons why.
You are absolutely right about latency and scheduling being the problem, but it isn't limited to GUI and audio apps. A client of mine had the exact same problem with a SCO box with telnet-only access.
There was one person in the company who did nothing but max out the CPU and raid array with database reports all day. The way it was originally set up, this person's processes were given the exact same scheduling priority as everyone elses'. He caused the entire company to come to a grinding halt for 20 minutes at a time several times a day! I lowered his task priority and that fixed the problem, except his reports now took almost an hour to complete.
The company was not completely satisfied with this solution. The person in particular seemed to think that the company was 'punishing' him by setting his priority at a lower setting. Somehow, they came up with the idea that merely upgrading the hardware without altering the scheduling would fix the problem.
The company's IT people presented their wonderful idea to me as though I were an idiot for having suggested to alter the task priority to begin with. These weren't just dumb executives, btw, it was the network sysadmin and his boss, the head of IT, who came up with this. I had to slowly explain to them why just upgrading the server would merely lessen the problem instead of fixing it.
Sorry it wasn't clear, but I wasn't complaining of bias. Sometimes I think it would be more efficient if Slashdot actually *had* a 'Windows Sucks' moderation, sort of a subset of 'Informative':)
What was that sci-fi movie in which hot chicks from the future have to smoke when they come to our time because the air in the future is so polluted? I think it involved kidnapping people from airplanes...
So, are you saying that it was Democrats who voted down 'invasive' environmental regulations?
If this is what you're talking about, I'm afraid it didn't end ten years ago:
Motor vehicle emissions testing ended in the State of Florida on June 29, 2000.
Besides, even if it did, what also happened around ten years ago? Here's a hint:
he took over the position in 1996, leading a Republican revolution in Florida government that saw both houses of the Legislature and the Governor's Mansion controlled by the GOP
You can whine all you want, but unless you come up with a better theory, I'm afraid that I'm right:(
Let me just say from experience that if someone cuts you off, you should make sure you hit them.
Anything less, and the bad guy keeps on driving and the cop figures that you just *decided* to drive your car off the road. Oh, and your insurance goes up either way, probably less if you manage to do a lot of damage to the back half of his car.
It's a fact of life that cops are pretty stupid, insurance companies are greedy, and criminals are, well, criminals.
Sure, milk is milk and it probably won't hurt too much if it isn't.
Giant, sterile genetically-modified salmon, otoh, could end up being a real problem if they got out into the regular population. No one thought about that until the fish-farms were already built.
The ethical dilemma is that, once these technologies become available, companies will use GM foods and nanotech to make a quick buck without another thought to the unintended consequences.
Even worse, in the case of GM foods, would it really hurt the fish farmers if natural salmon were to become extinct? Would it really hurt Monsanto if native crops became infested with GM strains?
I was curious about your assertion that Japanese electors are apathetic, so I searched for "Japan election" on Yahoo! and this came up as the first link, lol! Masked wrestler wins Japan election
The same way Hussein could not resist the crazed ex patriot American and Canuck Gerald Bull and his mega gun technology.
Do you mean in the penis-enhancing "look at me I've got a big gun" type of way or as a means of rectifying the nuclear power imbalance in the Middle East?
I've got a 1500 lumen Viewsonic that does just fine with the lights on. Granted, with the lights out, it looks *superb*, but I think it does much better than the plasma screens I've seen, especially considering the price.
I'd suggest anyone who's looking for one to go down to CompUSA and test out a few models before deciding. Make sure to test it in a well lit area and take things like distance from the screen into account. I also think that they get dimmer with higher resolution. I use mine at 800x600, so 1920x1200 might be worse than what I'm used to.
Nowadays, even the cheap models are almost twice as bright as those just a few years ago, though, so it's not as big a deal as you make it out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Would someone please explain to me the point of Myst? I spent all of 30 minutes playing it ten years ago. Needless to say it didn't grab my attention.
Reviews at the time kept raving about its great graphics and calling it revolutionary. I don't understand what was so revolutionary about high-res stills that loaded from CD every time you clicked on something.
Probably like a lot of people here, I found Myst random and pointless with pretty things to look at, kind of like, oh, everything that is beloved by the unwashed masses and despised by the more practical-minded.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for alternatives to the first-person shoot-'em-up style games that dominate the market. I spent lots of time playing 7th Guest; it seemed fairly straightforward. Myst, otoh, still befuddles me.
Would someone enlighten me?
I'd say that giving the terrorists video conferencing would doom them to a middle-management bureaucratic hell and actually *prevent* them from completing their nefarious schemes, but that's just me...
One of the national news broadcasts just had a couple people talking about 'computer problems' as a factor in the East Coast blackout. A transcript of the first few minutes of the outage had technicians complaining that their computers were acting strangely and that they couldn't diagnose the problem because of that.
The CEO of the company that had the 'original' problem asserted that there must have been systems failures at other sites in order to bring down the entire grid. He said his company alone could not have caused the problems that occurred.
I wonder if any of the MS worms that were circulating at the time actually were to blame for the outage as has been speculated here before?
The webcast of the hearing will be available here when it's ready.
Slashdot = Doesn't want to hear about it anymore
Linux = Alternative that you should look into...
Have nearly every minute of the day accounted for.
It doesn't matter. If you take a list of things to management for them to prioritize, it will invariably include only two types of tasks: immediate problems and future problems. What management never realizes in IT, though, is that future problems, when neglected, multiply into lots and lots of immediate problems later on.
Instead of ignoring immediate problems to stop future problems before they multiply, your PHB will have you spend all of your time working on immediate problems, since he's usually not involved enough to realize the implications of future problems and the immediate problems are the ones that his boss is yelling at him about.
When those future problems that you ignored end up multiplying, you'll fall even farther behind and everyone will assume it is because of your own incompetence. After all, you're working every minute of the day and things are getting worse.
I liken IT to a biological disaster. You have to triage out the patients that are going to die anyways in order to concentrate on saving the ones that can be saved. The doctor, not the accountants, are the only people who know who will survive and who won't.
Because their costs are not in manufacturing; they're in design. If they had to design two different products, both would cost more.
I think we're just beginning to see these types of products emerge, but soon every product will follow this paradigm. As more and more menial tasks are automated, the costs of manufacturing plummet in relation to the costs of design.
I'd hate to see the day when the same refrigerator is artificially differentiated and priced based upon its energy efficiency, but I wouldn't be suprised.
3) They plan to license their closed-source driver to OEM's that create standalone Linux products for niche markets, a la Broadcom and Linksys.
I think this one fits this particular situation perfectly. If VIA can withold the one piece of the puzzle (hardware decoding) that opens the door to easy, cheap, upgradeable DVR boxes and license that piece to lots of different companies, VIA wins.
The mirroring/stiping is actually done by the driver.
What's the point of that? I've always looked at hardware RAID with a sideways glance because of designs like that. None of these 'low-end' cards really advertise the fact that they are crippled in that way, either.
Wouldn't it be more redundant and just as fast to have two regular IDE controllers and just use the RAID capability of the OS? I always thought that when the drive goes, there's a fair probability that it will take the controller down with it.
If your OS doesn't have RAID built-in by now, you're not going to find drivers for it anyways.
Mr Burns: I see it all, now. You're just a bunch of yes-men. I was making the wrong moves and you were too gutless to tell me! Isn't that right??
Yes-men: Oh, yes, sure, etc.
Smithers: Right on, sir.
Maybe from 8-noon you handle new requests and 1-quitting you're on project stuff?
God, no, don't do that. Stuff breaks 24/7 and people need help *now*. You'd just end up doing what you don't want to do all day long and what doesn't get you any recognition from upstairs: helpdesk stuff.
If you're really not getting any support from your bosses, don't go to them and ask them to prioritize stuff. Most of the time they'll get it wrong and you'll still get blamed.
Oh, and open source is a godsend for the 1-man IT department. Learn it, use it, don't tell your boss until it's already done.
Who needs Fish farmers -- or any kind of farmer for that matter -- in a post-nanotech Economy?
People who would still like to eat without being beholden to those who own the IP rights for 'salmon'.
Besides, we're nowhere near 'post-nanotech' and I'm not inclined to risk my current standard of living on pie-in-the-sky predictions of what 'post-nanotech' will be like.
Heh, good job. You found the error in my post.
The argument is that even if only a few of them *aren't* sterile, and manage to breed in the wild, the fact that they are about 4x the size of normal salmon would give them a *huge* advantage in breeding and they would quickly replace the normal salmon population, until they died out from not being able to hunt enough food to live, of course.
Politics is in everything, especially politics.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that either of the two major parties do anything merely on it's own merit. Don't expect anything that is "an invasive pain in the ass" to be done away with unless doing so is in the ruling party's interest.
If feeding Christians to lions would get them (re)elected, both Republicans and Democrats would jump at the opportunity.
Didn't mean for my comment to be so contentious. I actually was responding because I was suprised that your comment hadn't been modded up. Windows *does* suck and you point out just one of the reasons why.
You are absolutely right about latency and scheduling being the problem, but it isn't limited to GUI and audio apps. A client of mine had the exact same problem with a SCO box with telnet-only access.
There was one person in the company who did nothing but max out the CPU and raid array with database reports all day. The way it was originally set up, this person's processes were given the exact same scheduling priority as everyone elses'. He caused the entire company to come to a grinding halt for 20 minutes at a time several times a day! I lowered his task priority and that fixed the problem, except his reports now took almost an hour to complete.
The company was not completely satisfied with this solution. The person in particular seemed to think that the company was 'punishing' him by setting his priority at a lower setting. Somehow, they came up with the idea that merely upgrading the hardware without altering the scheduling would fix the problem.
The company's IT people presented their wonderful idea to me as though I were an idiot for having suggested to alter the task priority to begin with. These weren't just dumb executives, btw, it was the network sysadmin and his boss, the head of IT, who came up with this. I had to slowly explain to them why just upgrading the server would merely lessen the problem instead of fixing it.
Sorry it wasn't clear, but I wasn't complaining of bias. Sometimes I think it would be more efficient if Slashdot actually *had* a 'Windows Sucks' moderation, sort of a subset of 'Informative' :)
What was that sci-fi movie in which hot chicks from the future have to smoke when they come to our time because the air in the future is so polluted? I think it involved kidnapping people from airplanes...
So, are you saying that it was Democrats who voted down 'invasive' environmental regulations?
:(
If this is what you're talking about, I'm afraid it didn't end ten years ago:
Motor vehicle emissions testing ended in the State of Florida on June 29, 2000.
Besides, even if it did, what also happened around ten years ago? Here's a hint:
he took over the position in 1996, leading a Republican revolution in Florida government that saw both houses of the Legislature and the Governor's Mansion controlled by the GOP
You can whine all you want, but unless you come up with a better theory, I'm afraid that I'm right
Let me just say from experience that if someone cuts you off, you should make sure you hit them.
Anything less, and the bad guy keeps on driving and the cop figures that you just *decided* to drive your car off the road. Oh, and your insurance goes up either way, probably less if you manage to do a lot of damage to the back half of his car.
It's a fact of life that cops are pretty stupid, insurance companies are greedy, and criminals are, well, criminals.
You got rid of emissions testing in Florida because your new Republican overlords needed some pittance to throw to the masses.
We got rid of safety inspections in Oklahoma for the same reason.
That is completely untrue.
Micromachines rool.
Sure, milk is milk and it probably won't hurt too much if it isn't.
Giant, sterile genetically-modified salmon, otoh, could end up being a real problem if they got out into the regular population. No one thought about that until the fish-farms were already built.
The ethical dilemma is that, once these technologies become available, companies will use GM foods and nanotech to make a quick buck without another thought to the unintended consequences.
Even worse, in the case of GM foods, would it really hurt the fish farmers if natural salmon were to become extinct? Would it really hurt Monsanto if native crops became infested with GM strains?
I was curious about your assertion that Japanese electors are apathetic, so I searched for "Japan election" on Yahoo! and this came up as the first link, lol!
Masked wrestler wins Japan election
Do you mean in the penis-enhancing "look at me I've got a big gun" type of way or as a means of rectifying the nuclear power imbalance in the Middle East?
from the It's-Not-Your-Old-Ass-Computer-It's-The-Shitty-Mic rosoft-Software Dept.
I've got a 1500 lumen Viewsonic that does just fine with the lights on. Granted, with the lights out, it looks *superb*, but I think it does much better than the plasma screens I've seen, especially considering the price.
I'd suggest anyone who's looking for one to go down to CompUSA and test out a few models before deciding. Make sure to test it in a well lit area and take things like distance from the screen into account. I also think that they get dimmer with higher resolution. I use mine at 800x600, so 1920x1200 might be worse than what I'm used to.
Nowadays, even the cheap models are almost twice as bright as those just a few years ago, though, so it's not as big a deal as you make it out to be.