I'm always amazed at the average, well to do, middle to upper class perception of what most computers people are using. They're generally the type that will refer to anything under 500Mhz as ancient and nearly a joke. I on the other hand say that i've you got something better then a pentium, you're fine.
Look, i've heard quite a few comments about formalized education providing students with only a very narrow set of skills. If that's been your experience, then I'm sorry; you've recieved some shitty education.
Good education, be it in admining, programing, engineering, humanities, whatatever...should provide you with a broad set of fundamentals and the skills and confidence needed to learn the more specific practical stuff on your own. Over the long term, a class that deals with linux fundamentals and why things work the way they do, and where to find additional help is going to be far more useful then a course that just provides checklists for setting up and running apache.
I work at a engineering firm, and while quite a few people will work in CAD most of the day, many of the older engineers will not. If they're not in a meeting somewhere they'll mostly be marking up paper on their desk and passing it off to CAD people: their computer is really only there for email and to compose the occasional letter. If they've got solitare open on it it doesn't mean they're not working. Maybe they opened it during breakfast or lunch and havn't used the computer since. It happens...quite a bit.
Secondly, I also know the type previous posters have mentioned: those who are concerned more with what others are doing then themselves. The drawbacks to these types are at least twofold: Not only are they getting little work done themselves, they're also easily duped by someone who looks like they're doing work, but isn't...either do to deception or gross ineffciency. What's worst is when these people aren't part of your group so they really have no understanding of your actual output.
Thirdly, no one likes a snitch. If you were asked to do it by someone higher up that's one thing, but it's definately not something you want to perform unilateraly. If the bigwigs didn't care about it before, why the hell will they care about it now? Eventually you just have to accept the fact that people are complete wastes and let it be. Besides, that's what happy hour is for: bitching about useless coworkers:-)
First off, an in-dash dvd player can be used safely, namely for entertaining a passanger in one of the other 1+ seats in the car. It does however require that a driver have the sense and discipline to keep his attention on the road.
Second, regardless of if the state laws explicitly mention DVD's in their laws, this would still have to fall under distracted driver laws...those same laws that ensure that I can't play solitare on the dashboard. Which is a good thing...because I suck at solitare.
Have you ever tried to describe highly technical concepts to highly non-technical people? As you go on and you realize that they don't understand basic required concepts...you find yourself simplifying things so much such that anyone in the know who overheard you would think you're a blittering idiot. If this savy eavesdropper only arrived to hear your final version of the explaination, he would probably think you have no clue what you're talking about. I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but it's harder then it looks you know.
Look guys....i've got to jump in here to defend flourescents. They've gotten quite a bit better in the last 50 years and they're not all sickly blueish white with a circa 1950 magnetic ballasts. Modern Flourescents use high frequency electronic ballets with no detectible flicker, and warmer temperature bulbs are available that better approximate sunlight. You can also get fixtures with a largely vertical distibution pattern to avoid screen glare and eye fatigue.
In general in a computer based office, providing general flourescent lighting at a low light level and then brighter task ligthing at each desk is the way to go.
Huh? What??? Are you on crack? Almost every book of Chomsky's I've ever read has been choc-a-block with footnotes and citations. Picking the first Chomsky book at random off my shelf (Year 501: The Conquest continues) I find that there's 20 dense pages of footnotes at the end, followed by 6 pages of bibliography. That's a fairly lightweight set of citations, by Noam's standards.
:::reaches over to::::his:::: shelf and grabs a copy of Understanding Power....flips through and finds little to no citation yet lots of hand waving. Now given....the book is a sequence of Q&A sessions so maybe I choose a bad example, but it's the first book of his I read and the lack of background did turn me off. It you think it's good enough to be printing as a book...you should probably go back and cite it.
[blockquote]How is it that no more than 4 days ago the slashdot poll dealt with 'hacker' films and not a single film wasn't beaten to a pulp for factual errors but this post gets a +4 Insightful for basically saying that factual errors aren't a big deal? I know of no crowd more critical of facts than Slashdot but here this is getting praise? What's going on with that?[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Also, as a side note and not a political statement, if you have a valid point do you really neeed "exploited sensationalism" and "factual errors" to make them?[/blockquote]
No one said that the factual errors and sensationalism:::were::: the good points he raised. It's just like anything else....there's both good and bad; All I'm saying is that there was lots of good amist the bad. You imply contradiction where none exists.
Movies, by nature, are not scholarly works. The power of movies is that they can appeal to a wider audience and more directly manipulate emotions. How often do you see citations in a movie? It's just not common practice.
That being said, I'd say bowling for columbine was rather good. Yes parts of it exploited sensationalism and there were some factual errors, but it:::did::: raise a number of excellent questions.
Also...give one of Moore's books a skim sometimes. I wouldn't have expected it, but Moore does a better job providing evidence for his claims then the supposedly more prestigious Noam Chomsky. Noam likes to make wild claims while assuming you'll take his word for it...Moore at least cites his sources.
So how exactly does the FBI police a foreign server? On the other hand, the US hasn't had a great track record lately about honoring the autonomy of other countries....maybe it's all part of the plan.
Dr. Emmett Brown: 1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts?
Marty McFly: What the hell is a gigawatt?
That being said, a combination of fusion power on the grid and fuel cells driving our cars and powering our portable devices...Man that would be awesome. Bye bye OPEC.
Now... back to the game industry. What can anyone do with $10K these days? That would hardly be enough money to purchase one high-end workstation with Maya and other requisite software tools. You see, people are EXPECTING highly polished graphics and gameplay out of each new video game. Long gone are the days where a single Russian program can whip out Tetris in a few weeks of effort, and create a sensation.
I seem to recall a little game named Snood that nearly half of the free world was playing back in 1998 or so, and this was when there were other titles like Jedi Knight and Doom2 out as well. It didn't have fancy motion capture....3d graphics....or any of that stuff. It was just fun.
And there's another element you're leaving out...women. It seemed that the time that while some of the guys were playing Jedi Knight, both guys and gals were playing Snood. It seems games like these might appeal to a larger audience then the blockbuster 3D shooters you hear so much hype about.
As has been hinted at in previous posts, many times in life there's the "Official Policy" and the "Unofficial Policy". Check to see what the unofficial policy is before complaining about the offical one. It's what seperates the elites from the nobbs...
Look guys...we really gotta get going on these things if we ever hope to hold the machines out of Zion. We can't just sit around all day eating hot grits and waiting for some mythical messiah to come save us.
As I recall, the 486SX had more to do with marketing then it did with having a "bad batch of chips". The SX was introduced as a cheaper and lower power alternative to the DX, as AMD was even then starting to gobble up Intel's share on the low end.
http://www.pcmech.com/show/processors/35/2
I'm also a bit surprised at this overall level of shock to something like this; this is normal business proceedure and has been for quite some time.
Tooling an assembly line is expensive; if multiple products can be made on the same line then it has a major impact on a companies bottom line. Besides, most of the money goes into development of a new board, tech support and software development; not production.
Other examples which come to mind:
-Promise Ultra66 vs Fasttrack66 : solder on a resistor and flash the bios. -Liteon burners going form 40X to 48X to 52X with only a firmware upgrade.
Again, once you've done the development, the rest is mostly just marketing.
I wonder if there's a major difference between tuners....or maybe just one between ears. I'm not using an FM modulator and the installation is top notch.
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming that:
A laptop with a 100MB hard drive came with a cdrom
The motherboard supprts booting from cdroms
A laptop with a 100MB hard drive has enough memory to run a modern linux distro.
Beyond all that, laptop hard drives are not designed to run 24/7...Chances are it'll tank in pretty short order.
-Chris
I'm always amazed at the average, well to do, middle to upper class perception of what most computers people are using. They're generally the type that will refer to anything under 500Mhz as ancient and nearly a joke. I on the other hand say that i've you got something better then a pentium, you're fine.
-Chris
Well after they came out with the EMacs toolbar, i pretty much knew anything was possible....
Well god bless them. I remember the day vividly when my shiney new Pentium 3 arrived, and i was finally able to browse the internet.
And why hardware limitation exactly are they refering to; heat from your cpu exhaust instantly melting through your patch cable?
-Chris
Queue Linus quote in 3....2....1....
:-)
Ah, there it is
-Chris
Look, i've heard quite a few comments about formalized education providing students with only a very narrow set of skills. If that's been your experience, then I'm sorry; you've recieved some shitty education.
Good education, be it in admining, programing, engineering, humanities, whatatever...should provide you with a broad set of fundamentals and the skills and confidence needed to learn the more specific practical stuff on your own. Over the long term, a class that deals with linux fundamentals and why things work the way they do, and where to find additional help is going to be far more useful then a course that just provides checklists for setting up and running apache.
-Chris
A few thoughts:
I work at a engineering firm, and while quite a few people will work in CAD most of the day, many of the older engineers will not. If they're not in a meeting somewhere they'll mostly be marking up paper on their desk and passing it off to CAD people: their computer is really only there for email and to compose the occasional letter. If they've got solitare open on it it doesn't mean they're not working. Maybe they opened it during breakfast or lunch and havn't used the computer since. It happens...quite a bit.
Secondly, I also know the type previous posters have mentioned: those who are concerned more with what others are doing then themselves. The drawbacks to these types are at least twofold: Not only are they getting little work done themselves, they're also easily duped by someone who looks like they're doing work, but isn't...either do to deception or gross ineffciency. What's worst is when these people aren't part of your group so they really have no understanding of your actual output.
Thirdly, no one likes a snitch. If you were asked to do it by someone higher up that's one thing, but it's definately not something you want to perform unilateraly. If the bigwigs didn't care about it before, why the hell will they care about it now? Eventually you just have to accept the fact that people are complete wastes and let it be. Besides, that's what happy hour is for: bitching about useless coworkers
-Chris
"Sara, please cancel all my appointments; I'll be spending the day compiling E17 final and playing Duke Nukem Forever....."
-Chris
Two points here:
First off, an in-dash dvd player can be used safely, namely for entertaining a passanger in one of the other 1+ seats in the car. It does however require that a driver have the sense and discipline to keep his attention on the road.
Second, regardless of if the state laws explicitly mention DVD's in their laws, this would still have to fall under distracted driver laws...those same laws that ensure that I can't play solitare on the dashboard. Which is a good thing...because I suck at solitare.
-Chris
Have you ever tried to describe highly technical concepts to highly non-technical people? As you go on and you realize that they don't understand basic required concepts...you find yourself simplifying things so much such that anyone in the know who overheard you would think you're a blittering idiot. If this savy eavesdropper only arrived to hear your final version of the explaination, he would probably think you have no clue what you're talking about. I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but it's harder then it looks you know.
-Chris
What do software piracy and masterbation have in common? They're both things you indulge in private, yet deny in public.
-Chris
Look guys....i've got to jump in here to defend flourescents. They've gotten quite a bit better in the last 50 years and they're not all sickly blueish white with a circa 1950 magnetic ballasts. Modern Flourescents use high frequency electronic ballets with no detectible flicker, and warmer temperature bulbs are available that better approximate sunlight. You can also get fixtures with a largely vertical distibution pattern to avoid screen glare and eye fatigue.
In general in a computer based office, providing general flourescent lighting at a low light level and then brighter task ligthing at each desk is the way to go.
-Chris
Movies, by nature, are not scholarly works. The power of movies is that they can appeal to a wider audience and more directly manipulate emotions. How often do you see citations in a movie? It's just not common practice.
:::did::: raise a number of excellent questions.
That being said, I'd say bowling for columbine was rather good. Yes parts of it exploited sensationalism and there were some factual errors, but it
Also...give one of Moore's books a skim sometimes. I wouldn't have expected it, but Moore does a better job providing evidence for his claims then the supposedly more prestigious Noam Chomsky. Noam likes to make wild claims while assuming you'll take his word for it...Moore at least cites his sources.
-Chris
So how exactly does the FBI police a foreign server? On the other hand, the US hasn't had a great track record lately about honoring the autonomy of other countries....maybe it's all part of the plan.
-Chris
Marty McFly: What the hell is a gigawatt?
That being said, a combination of fusion power on the grid and fuel cells driving our cars and powering our portable devices...Man that would be awesome. Bye bye OPEC.
-Chris
I seem to recall a little game named Snood that nearly half of the free world was playing back in 1998 or so, and this was when there were other titles like Jedi Knight and Doom2 out as well. It didn't have fancy motion capture....3d graphics....or any of that stuff. It was just fun.
And there's another element you're leaving out...women. It seemed that the time that while some of the guys were playing Jedi Knight, both guys and gals were playing Snood. It seems games like these might appeal to a larger audience then the blockbuster 3D shooters you hear so much hype about.
-Chris
As has been hinted at in previous posts, many times in life there's the "Official Policy" and the "Unofficial Policy". Check to see what the unofficial policy is before complaining about the offical one. It's what seperates the elites from the nobbs...
-Chris
Getting slower.....slower......slower....stopping...
Hmmm, you know....this is one of those sites I just really don't mind slashdotting.
-Chris
The inductance of the power lines change because of the presence of the bulbs.
A new spin on the "Tree falling in the forest" enigma, isn't it? :-)
-Chris
ln -s /usr/bin/nano /usr/bin/pico
-Chris
Look guys...we really gotta get going on these things if we ever hope to hold the machines out of Zion. We can't just sit around all day eating hot grits and waiting for some mythical messiah to come save us.
-Chris
As I recall, the 486SX had more to do with marketing then it did with having a "bad batch of chips". The SX was introduced as a cheaper and lower power alternative to the DX, as AMD was even then starting to gobble up Intel's share on the low end.
http://www.pcmech.com/show/processors/35/2
I'm also a bit surprised at this overall level of shock to something like this; this is normal business proceedure and has been for quite some time.
Tooling an assembly line is expensive; if multiple products can be made on the same line then it has a major impact on a companies bottom line. Besides, most of the money goes into development of a new board, tech support and software development; not production.
Other examples which come to mind:
-Promise Ultra66 vs Fasttrack66 : solder on a resistor and flash the bios.
-Liteon burners going form 40X to 48X to 52X with only a firmware upgrade.
Again, once you've done the development, the rest is mostly just marketing.
-Chris
I wonder if there's a major difference between tuners....or maybe just one between ears. I'm not using an FM modulator and the installation is top notch.
-Chris