I'll second the wavebird as the best controller of all time. It fits very well in the hands and is easy to grip. Analog stick and d-pad are in much more natural positions since most games require you use the stick anyway. The button layout also makes it really easy to keep track of what button you're pushing because of their orientation and shape. Being a PS2 owner for years I always thought the wavebird looked stupid, but recapping on gamecube games with a Wii I got a wavebird and now having held one in my hands, I'm actually surprised at how nice it is.
Cars have circumvented public transportation because of their popularity, the American mentality, and marketing.
I live around Scranton PA - it's known as the electric city because it had the first successful electric trolley system in the U.S.. You could go pretty much anywhere using public transportation. Stops were frequent and the grid reached just about everywhere. Today the trolley system is no more. It was replaced by buses for a time, which worked pretty well, but is now reduced to about 8 bus routes that are not even a skeleton of what they once were. More often than not it takes you an hour to walk to the point where the bus will pick you up, and they show up once an hour.
I'm not saying that urban sprawl hasn't made it much of a catastrophe, but this area tends to show that even if you had the infrastructure in place in the first place, it's not a given that people will use it when given the option to drive cars.
He's probably thinking someone would be insane enough to run a 2.6 kernel and such a critical task. Linux is only truly stable when running 2.4 as things currently stand.
People have been saying this with all new car technology. Look at an engine from the 70's and an engine from 2007. There's an unreal number of extra electrical gizmo's on today's engines. People said Honda wouldn't go anywhere with Vtec because it made the engine too complex. After years of being the "performance" model, Vtec is now standard in al Civics. Cars are more reliable then they've ever been despite the fact that they have way more things inside.
Reality is actually pretty strange. You want to know why car companies are afraid of electric cars? Because they require a fraction of the maintenance of regular cars, and companies like GM make the majority of their money at the dealership.
Well look forward to this being rehashed over and over again for people who don't really get what the Wii is. It's not just a gamecube 1.5 because hardware is xx% faster than the previous generation, it is an entire reorientation in what gaming today IS. One of the most intriguing things I read was a comment from a Nintendo engineer who said something to the effect of: "We saw a trend that if we gave people X, people wanted X + Y, you give them that and then they still want more. There is no way you can every really satisfy people with hardware, it is a loosing battle and one that only raises the cost of the console the more you try to please those who cannot be pleased".
Reality is Nintendo is going after NON gamers, and people who just want to have fun. Think grandma and grandpa care about graphics? You're deluding yourself (they probably can't see that well:) Simple truth is that people don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a console, and they want to have fun. Nintendo's innovation isn't with the hardware, it's what they do with the hardware.
Probably little since Ford tested this shit in the 70's. This is old news really. Much of your engine torque curve is due to the timing done with the valves and ignition. So it didn't take a genius to figure out that you could use electric solenoids for the valves. The problem? It's not reliable. Think of how well your engine works when one of the valves mysteriously just quits. While mechanical valves are not the most efficient, it is extremely reliable. Right now some technology like VTEC can change the valve timing to boost efficiency (many car manufacturers have adapted this type of technology). Modern VTEC (iVTEC) also retards the igntion timing as appropriate - I think that was pioneered by Toyota.
Anyway Ford / GM aren't going to squash this development because it's OLD NEWS in engine technology. The problem is in the details. If they've found a good way to do this reliably, then this is probably the holy grail many combustion engine designers have been trying to solve for quite some time.
I'd say it's probably due to specialization. In the past you had "men of science". Take Ben Franklin for example; a man who discovered electricity and had multiple inventions. In modern times a Geek who is at the cutteng edge of any science probably isn't disciplined in more than a few areas at most, and more than likely is focused on the one area specifically. Standing on the shoulders of giants and having many many people extremely focused on one area, it seems more natural that science advances a bit faster.
While I agree with you, this also depends upon the people who manage you. Just the other day my boss came in and I was re-routing some wires in our main rack, and my boss noted how easy it was to find things (all labeled of course). He also remembered the rats nest of wires we had 10 years ago at an old fascility.
My point being is that he accepted that 1) it was worth the effort and 2) that someone had to actually do it. I've seen a lot of operations where if you were "improving" situations that were already working, you were wasting time because it already worked. Such places do not reward good architecture, redundancy, or efficiency - places with continual fires to be extinguished. Those types of managers are exactly the ones who will toss you out when everything appears to work fine, and unfortunately there isn't much to make them understand because that's just the way they are. It's also scary because there are a LOT of places out there like that. But either way you're probably better off being a bit vocal just in case someone does manage to casually pick up on you doing a good job.
I think the only thing that even makes this noteworthy is the inflammatory slashdot summary which claims "wish they had something better to do". It makes it sound like the article is from a person that can't comprehend someone would program for enjoyment. But then again the article doesn't use that terminology at all...
Having watched the tech demo about ZFS I have to say it's pretty awesome technology. However I can see their point about the layering. FreeBSD recently added support for ZFS, but from my understanding it will basically put UFS on top of ZFS. I guess the idea there is that if you can Add/Remove volumes and such in a manner that is okay with files, then a file system on top of it would be okay too. That strikes me as a sort of disappointing approach to the problem since I'd like to see all Unixes adopt ZFS natively so I can share drives with my Mac/Linux/BSD easily. It does look like DragonFly BSD may fully incorporate this technology so I guess we may actually get proof if using ZFS top to bottom really yields as many benefits as they say.
Europe has a pretty good system. If a student doesn't show aptitude for higher learning, send them to a different type of high school... one that is geared towards learning a trade.
It's a good theory (that I agree with) but it's not going to fly in the U.S. I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Generally if you got a good blue collar job or worked in a trade it was all the same since you got paid well. Personally I decided to go into engineering for whatever reason and went between a few colleges and I've been around the country a bit more. And I was in fact sort of surprised by what I saw. People simply refusing to go into blue collar jobs because they involved "work". They'll go to college to be a programmer and get fired and work at McDonald's just fine, but wound never consider being a garbage man. I've also seen an absurd number of kids in college who were simply shoved there by their parents. They have no direction and typically flunk out after a time.
In both ways the parents wouldn't want their kids going to the "dumb" (practical) school, and all kids seem to think they are entitled to a white collar job where they sit on their ass and get paid a lot. It's too bad because I think the European system certainly has its merits.
well technically "molten" is a relative term. To beings on Pluto the earth would be covered with rivers of molten water. So perhaps from the perspective of hot compared to a star, then magma might be cold.
Funny but true to some extent. I work in a nice corporate environment. The rules are all pretty much defined. If you have problems you go talk to ADULTS. In contrast to a school with an virtually unlimited supply of kids trying to get around every security you have in place - and an entire new crop every year with random ones leveling up skills at a fearsome rate. And in the end if they do manage to view some porn? Now the parents throw a fit, the school board is talking about why this happened, etc.
Work at a school? No thanks. I'll take a university job because the environment is worth it, but no way I'd step into the line of fire with primary education. Hats off to you guys who have the guts to do it:)
There's actually a lot of other cool things about it as well. I've been using Jscript to do stuff since Win2k (screw that VBscript garbage) but there are obvious limitations at the scripting level, but in the end you're always stuck in cmd.exe
I was skeptical when I first heard about Monad. I mean it seemed obvious to me that Microsoft just didn't get the point of a "shell" which is supposed to be simple. With a pending install of Exchange 2007, the power shell is required so I figured I'd start to dig into it. I have to say I'm rather impressed.
First of all, it is actually simple. Not only that, but the syntax is EXTREMELY CONSISTENT. And honestly I cannot stress that enough, because if you think you know part of a command you can usually figure out the verb/noun syntax to use. It also allows shortcut versions of commands so you don't have to type the entire "wordy" version of the command. Aliases are supported too. Another cool feature? You can navigate the registry like the rest of the file heirarchy.
I'm a big fan of bash, but I must admit that at times it gets old shuffling stuff with awk and cut and so forth. By getting objects you can take what you want out of it, and not worry about the biggest Unix terror - the text output changing. If whatever you're trying to do doesn't support.net objects, you can still pipe text.
Overall it's pretty awesome technology and I must give MS credit where it's due. Not that I'll be switching any of my FreeBSD servers to Windows because of it, but it makes windows administration orders of magnitude better. Too bad it got dumped in Vista. I've heard it will be included in service pack 1 though.
Re:50K doesn't seem that much I guess...
on
Obama's MySpace Drama
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, that's what stinks about this whole episode. Politicians spend $50k on a lot of other crap that doesn't benefit them half as much as this site probably did. It's truly chump change to them, which is why the money was probably a setup to begin with. I imagine the result would have been the same with $10k or $80k - after all, these sound like really big numbers to regular people. So just make an offer, act shocked that this guy is trying to profit, then take over the site (which was what you were going to do in the first place). Then cover your ass with the money offer thing.
How do these things hold up to earthquakes anyway? I mean obviously Japan is in an earthquake zone and they already use maglevs, but it seems like the tolerances must be very small in such tech as far as the rails go.
And you know that's the thing that is sort of sad about people looking at third parties. I thought of myself as part of the reform party before it more or less disintegrated. Now I consider myself more of a libertarian and I thought Badnarik was a great candidate. You hear people screaming about the libertarians legalizing all drugs, disbanding all government regulation and so forth - and I'm sure there's a few insane libertarians that believe that.
However when asked if he would implement such things, Badnarik gave a very honest reply that although he was the candidate for libertarians, he would also be the president of the American people. That means attempting some minor reforms in attempting to relinquish some of the governments control, but in a manner that would be acceptable to the people.
But of course that always gets lost in "You libertarians want anarchy" speeches.
Well I wouldn't say the M16 exactly qualifies as "awesome" but it is adiquate. Well the starting with the A2, the A1 while fun on full auto was hard to keep from lifting. But if you read the other posts there is a common theme with reliability. As you say CLP does wonders but what happens when you run out? The AK47 has practically no limits to what it can take. The M16 is a weapon that is set up much like the modern U.S. army : an armed force that expects that it's supply chain will always be there, and will always be able to get required goods eventually. If we ever get into a REAL war again and things really go in the crapper, an M16 would become much more of a liability.
That's probably a conflict of interest for MS. If you were really that concerned about being a webmaster, they probably want you to purchase visual studio.
Some people have legit reasons for waiting. I filed mine back in January, only to find out that the IRS rejected my W-7. So I spent a LONG time running around trying to figure out if my taxes were thrown out or going though. I only found out last week that there is essentially no record of me even filing now. But I don't file electronically anyway. A 1040EZ takes about 15 minutes if you check through it 3 times after you're done.
You mean like Corel Office, or the dozens of other Office Suite carcases left by the roadside in application history? MS has a stranglehold on the entire market right now. As soon as someone brings up Open Office everyone bitches about quirks with importing MS formats - comparisons on its own merits are usually secondary. The reality is that with Microsoft's position, everyone tries to carve out a nitch as best they can and hope that MS doesn't bundle something that further expands its reach.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll second the wavebird as the best controller of all time. It fits very well in the hands and is easy to grip. Analog stick and d-pad are in much more natural positions since most games require you use the stick anyway. The button layout also makes it really easy to keep track of what button you're pushing because of their orientation and shape. Being a PS2 owner for years I always thought the wavebird looked stupid, but recapping on gamecube games with a Wii I got a wavebird and now having held one in my hands, I'm actually surprised at how nice it is.
Strange coincidence, my wife is from Poznan...
Cars have circumvented public transportation because of their popularity, the American mentality, and marketing.
I live around Scranton PA - it's known as the electric city because it had the first successful electric trolley system in the U.S.. You could go pretty much anywhere using public transportation. Stops were frequent and the grid reached just about everywhere. Today the trolley system is no more. It was replaced by buses for a time, which worked pretty well, but is now reduced to about 8 bus routes that are not even a skeleton of what they once were. More often than not it takes you an hour to walk to the point where the bus will pick you up, and they show up once an hour.
I'm not saying that urban sprawl hasn't made it much of a catastrophe, but this area tends to show that even if you had the infrastructure in place in the first place, it's not a given that people will use it when given the option to drive cars.
He's probably thinking someone would be insane enough to run a 2.6 kernel and such a critical task. Linux is only truly stable when running 2.4 as things currently stand.
People have been saying this with all new car technology. Look at an engine from the 70's and an engine from 2007. There's an unreal number of extra electrical gizmo's on today's engines. People said Honda wouldn't go anywhere with Vtec because it made the engine too complex. After years of being the "performance" model, Vtec is now standard in al Civics. Cars are more reliable then they've ever been despite the fact that they have way more things inside.
Reality is actually pretty strange. You want to know why car companies are afraid of electric cars? Because they require a fraction of the maintenance of regular cars, and companies like GM make the majority of their money at the dealership.
Well look forward to this being rehashed over and over again for people who don't really get what the Wii is. It's not just a gamecube 1.5 because hardware is xx% faster than the previous generation, it is an entire reorientation in what gaming today IS. One of the most intriguing things I read was a comment from a Nintendo engineer who said something to the effect of: "We saw a trend that if we gave people X, people wanted X + Y, you give them that and then they still want more. There is no way you can every really satisfy people with hardware, it is a loosing battle and one that only raises the cost of the console the more you try to please those who cannot be pleased".
:) Simple truth is that people don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a console, and they want to have fun. Nintendo's innovation isn't with the hardware, it's what they do with the hardware.
Reality is Nintendo is going after NON gamers, and people who just want to have fun. Think grandma and grandpa care about graphics? You're deluding yourself (they probably can't see that well
Probably little since Ford tested this shit in the 70's. This is old news really. Much of your engine torque curve is due to the timing done with the valves and ignition. So it didn't take a genius to figure out that you could use electric solenoids for the valves. The problem? It's not reliable. Think of how well your engine works when one of the valves mysteriously just quits. While mechanical valves are not the most efficient, it is extremely reliable. Right now some technology like VTEC can change the valve timing to boost efficiency (many car manufacturers have adapted this type of technology). Modern VTEC (iVTEC) also retards the igntion timing as appropriate - I think that was pioneered by Toyota.
Anyway Ford / GM aren't going to squash this development because it's OLD NEWS in engine technology. The problem is in the details. If they've found a good way to do this reliably, then this is probably the holy grail many combustion engine designers have been trying to solve for quite some time.
I'd say it's probably due to specialization. In the past you had "men of science". Take Ben Franklin for example; a man who discovered electricity and had multiple inventions. In modern times a Geek who is at the cutteng edge of any science probably isn't disciplined in more than a few areas at most, and more than likely is focused on the one area specifically. Standing on the shoulders of giants and having many many people extremely focused on one area, it seems more natural that science advances a bit faster.
While I agree with you, this also depends upon the people who manage you. Just the other day my boss came in and I was re-routing some wires in our main rack, and my boss noted how easy it was to find things (all labeled of course). He also remembered the rats nest of wires we had 10 years ago at an old fascility.
My point being is that he accepted that 1) it was worth the effort and 2) that someone had to actually do it. I've seen a lot of operations where if you were "improving" situations that were already working, you were wasting time because it already worked. Such places do not reward good architecture, redundancy, or efficiency - places with continual fires to be extinguished. Those types of managers are exactly the ones who will toss you out when everything appears to work fine, and unfortunately there isn't much to make them understand because that's just the way they are. It's also scary because there are a LOT of places out there like that. But either way you're probably better off being a bit vocal just in case someone does manage to casually pick up on you doing a good job.
Maybe they're emerging using gentoo on a 486
Then thank god that day will never come =)
I think the only thing that even makes this noteworthy is the inflammatory slashdot summary which claims "wish they had something better to do". It makes it sound like the article is from a person that can't comprehend someone would program for enjoyment. But then again the article doesn't use that terminology at all...
Having watched the tech demo about ZFS I have to say it's pretty awesome technology. However I can see their point about the layering. FreeBSD recently added support for ZFS, but from my understanding it will basically put UFS on top of ZFS. I guess the idea there is that if you can Add/Remove volumes and such in a manner that is okay with files, then a file system on top of it would be okay too. That strikes me as a sort of disappointing approach to the problem since I'd like to see all Unixes adopt ZFS natively so I can share drives with my Mac/Linux/BSD easily. It does look like DragonFly BSD may fully incorporate this technology so I guess we may actually get proof if using ZFS top to bottom really yields as many benefits as they say.
Europe has a pretty good system. If a student doesn't show aptitude for higher learning, send them to a different type of high school... one that is geared towards learning a trade.
It's a good theory (that I agree with) but it's not going to fly in the U.S. I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Generally if you got a good blue collar job or worked in a trade it was all the same since you got paid well. Personally I decided to go into engineering for whatever reason and went between a few colleges and I've been around the country a bit more. And I was in fact sort of surprised by what I saw. People simply refusing to go into blue collar jobs because they involved "work". They'll go to college to be a programmer and get fired and work at McDonald's just fine, but wound never consider being a garbage man. I've also seen an absurd number of kids in college who were simply shoved there by their parents. They have no direction and typically flunk out after a time.
In both ways the parents wouldn't want their kids going to the "dumb" (practical) school, and all kids seem to think they are entitled to a white collar job where they sit on their ass and get paid a lot. It's too bad because I think the European system certainly has its merits.
well technically "molten" is a relative term. To beings on Pluto the earth would be covered with rivers of molten water. So perhaps from the perspective of hot compared to a star, then magma might be cold.
Funny but true to some extent. I work in a nice corporate environment. The rules are all pretty much defined. If you have problems you go talk to ADULTS. In contrast to a school with an virtually unlimited supply of kids trying to get around every security you have in place - and an entire new crop every year with random ones leveling up skills at a fearsome rate. And in the end if they do manage to view some porn? Now the parents throw a fit, the school board is talking about why this happened, etc.
:)
Work at a school? No thanks. I'll take a university job because the environment is worth it, but no way I'd step into the line of fire with primary education. Hats off to you guys who have the guts to do it
There's actually a lot of other cool things about it as well. I've been using Jscript to do stuff since Win2k (screw that VBscript garbage) but there are obvious limitations at the scripting level, but in the end you're always stuck in cmd.exe
.net objects, you can still pipe text.
I was skeptical when I first heard about Monad. I mean it seemed obvious to me that Microsoft just didn't get the point of a "shell" which is supposed to be simple. With a pending install of Exchange 2007, the power shell is required so I figured I'd start to dig into it. I have to say I'm rather impressed.
First of all, it is actually simple. Not only that, but the syntax is EXTREMELY CONSISTENT. And honestly I cannot stress that enough, because if you think you know part of a command you can usually figure out the verb/noun syntax to use. It also allows shortcut versions of commands so you don't have to type the entire "wordy" version of the command. Aliases are supported too. Another cool feature? You can navigate the registry like the rest of the file heirarchy.
I'm a big fan of bash, but I must admit that at times it gets old shuffling stuff with awk and cut and so forth. By getting objects you can take what you want out of it, and not worry about the biggest Unix terror - the text output changing. If whatever you're trying to do doesn't support
Overall it's pretty awesome technology and I must give MS credit where it's due. Not that I'll be switching any of my FreeBSD servers to Windows because of it, but it makes windows administration orders of magnitude better. Too bad it got dumped in Vista. I've heard it will be included in service pack 1 though.
Yeah, that's what stinks about this whole episode. Politicians spend $50k on a lot of other crap that doesn't benefit them half as much as this site probably did. It's truly chump change to them, which is why the money was probably a setup to begin with. I imagine the result would have been the same with $10k or $80k - after all, these sound like really big numbers to regular people. So just make an offer, act shocked that this guy is trying to profit, then take over the site (which was what you were going to do in the first place). Then cover your ass with the money offer thing.
How do these things hold up to earthquakes anyway? I mean obviously Japan is in an earthquake zone and they already use maglevs, but it seems like the tolerances must be very small in such tech as far as the rails go.
Think I'd rather spend an extra $20 and get Windows 2003 Web edition.
And you know that's the thing that is sort of sad about people looking at third parties. I thought of myself as part of the reform party before it more or less disintegrated. Now I consider myself more of a libertarian and I thought Badnarik was a great candidate. You hear people screaming about the libertarians legalizing all drugs, disbanding all government regulation and so forth - and I'm sure there's a few insane libertarians that believe that.
However when asked if he would implement such things, Badnarik gave a very honest reply that although he was the candidate for libertarians, he would also be the president of the American people. That means attempting some minor reforms in attempting to relinquish some of the governments control, but in a manner that would be acceptable to the people.
But of course that always gets lost in "You libertarians want anarchy" speeches.
Well I wouldn't say the M16 exactly qualifies as "awesome" but it is adiquate. Well the starting with the A2, the A1 while fun on full auto was hard to keep from lifting. But if you read the other posts there is a common theme with reliability. As you say CLP does wonders but what happens when you run out? The AK47 has practically no limits to what it can take. The M16 is a weapon that is set up much like the modern U.S. army : an armed force that expects that it's supply chain will always be there, and will always be able to get required goods eventually. If we ever get into a REAL war again and things really go in the crapper, an M16 would become much more of a liability.
That's probably a conflict of interest for MS. If you were really that concerned about being a webmaster, they probably want you to purchase visual studio.
Some people have legit reasons for waiting. I filed mine back in January, only to find out that the IRS rejected my W-7. So I spent a LONG time running around trying to figure out if my taxes were thrown out or going though. I only found out last week that there is essentially no record of me even filing now. But I don't file electronically anyway. A 1040EZ takes about 15 minutes if you check through it 3 times after you're done.
You mean like Corel Office, or the dozens of other Office Suite carcases left by the roadside in application history? MS has a stranglehold on the entire market right now. As soon as someone brings up Open Office everyone bitches about quirks with importing MS formats - comparisons on its own merits are usually secondary. The reality is that with Microsoft's position, everyone tries to carve out a nitch as best they can and hope that MS doesn't bundle something that further expands its reach.