I count 17 actual rules and 6 "refer to rule X" clauses where the same rule applies to other situations.
The gist however is don't be an ass, do the right thing at the right event, be generous and buy the bloke a meal or drink. Seems like common sense to me. I guess it's not so common (especially for some of the less socially adept that attend these conventions).
I moved from Slackware to Redhat. When Fedora came I stopped using Linux for a long time. It was clear the motivation was commercial and not in the interests of the customer. These days if I run Linux it's mostly on VMWare. I've still got an old dual boot machine that runs a very very outdated version of Redhat but I've probably booted into Linux on that machine twice in the last 5 or 6 years. I plan on putting a more recent flavour of Linux on it when I've decided between Debian, Unbuntu, Fedora and CentOS. Guess which 2 are looking a lot less compelling to me.
Re:It's called "Idle" for a reason
on
Cat Talk
·
· Score: 1
If you really hate these stories so much, you can go into your preferences and disable idle stories from appearing for you at all. In the meantime, you need only suffer a tiny tiny fraction of main page area devoted to Idle links.
Translation: I REALLY, REALLY thought the girl was hot!
1. Find urban legend 2. Wonder out loud if urban legend is true 3. Dream up inadequate set of tests. Bonus points if the tests only work for a specific subset of what you're trying to proove. 4. Get special effects team to engineer something wacky to apply tests in 3. 5. Blow something up 6. Comment on how awesome it is and congratulate self on coolness 7. Come up with off hand summary of whether myth is busted. Bonus points for ignoring or manipulating facts to suit. 8. Profit!!!
What we all need to understand is regardless of the technology we use, we will always leave some sort of pollution and some sort environmental impact. The answers we should be looking for is how to minimize them; which is stated in the parent's post, and not to discard any technology because it's not perfect. Because if we sit around looking for the no-impact, no-footprint, no environmental harm solution, we'll just sit here burning our fossil fuels eventually doing more harm in the long run than we would ever have done by trying some other technologies.
That's fine, but I want to see the cost benefit analysis before changing my habits to use things that are 10 or more times the price to buy and may not do the job properly (I'm thinking of light globes and shopping bags not hybrid cars). Both items are less sturdy than claimed by manufacturers (fluro light globes do die, green shopping bags are always tearing) and don't always fulfil the same need (hard to get a dimmer switch and fluro globe that work for dimmable lights). I have plenty of interest in helping save the environment but no interest in making companies rich by lying to me.
Yeah "log in" was sloppy wording on my part, and made me sound like a total GPS ignoramus. I meant until it "locks on" to the satellites rather than "log in".
I assume the requirement for 3 satellites for a 2D fix and 4 for a 3D fix has to do with the trig you need to do. To triangulate any point on a 2D map requires 2 points from which to measure distance to find where the 2 lines intersect. On a 3D map it'd be easy to show you need 3. Then for height you'd need to do it against the perpendicular axis as well as against the sphere of the earth - presumably doing this accurately is harder because all the satellites are at similar heights so you're looking at the GPS from roughly the same plane (well not quite, the orbits are after all circular but those satellites visible to you near the surface of the earth are all in roughly the same plane.)
But so long as all the satellites are in sync with their atomic clocks showing the same time, does it matter??? Even without them being in sync, doesn't the GPS use time and rough location to locate the satellites (unitil it's logged on) and then isn't it the round trip time taken by signal that's being measured? Is there any dependancy on leap seconds?
I like certain libertarians ideals, but the fact is that regulation is to industry what police are to neighborhoods. If you take a cop off a beat, crime will go up. If you take your eyes off corporate shenanigans, they will go up. This has been obvious from the days of Enron.^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdawn of history.
You do know that the.VOB files can be renamed to.MPG or.AVI and will play just fine in windows media player (and others). Each item on a DVD menu usually triggers one VOB. (This all assumes you're using unencrypted DVD). Your only issues are then the legality of doing this, and renaming the VOB files. That'll be harder than just using a script to rename since some of the VOB files will correspond to the menu and copy warnings etc.
Call EA tech support at least once a day with DRM issues relating to the game. Will gets his payoff for designing a groundbreaking game, EA gets ginourmous support bills.
You're not thinking it through. The likely outcome if lots of people do this is EA starts charging for support, and also pays Will less for his next game, citing reduced profit due to excessive support costs.
With a PC, I have to upgrade my hardware almost every year just to play the latest and greatest games. With a console, I just buy a game for my console and it's guaranteed to perform decent because the game developers develop specifically for that hardware.
No you don't. Truly you don't. Just don't pick the most graphics intensive title every time. Or better yet, DON'T buy the latest and greatest. Take a look at the bargain bin. Also your upgrade to your PC benefits you for other things - be it office documents or coding, picture editing etc. Consoles mostly don't do that at all in standard configurations. (I'm sure someone will tell me about running gimp on their PS3 or some such nonsense but it's not easy or standard)
With a PC, I have to install the game, download updated drivers and deal with software incompatibilities. In addition, most technical support departments are awful at helping users with these issues and more often than not leave them to fend for themselves. With a console game, it just works out of the box....or not at all. When a game's got a glitch it may be impossible to finish it, or even get very far in it. With a PC game there's a good chance you'll get the patch. Sure it's more hassle because game publishers come to depend on patching on the PC but would you rather more hassle to download a patch or to be stuck with a brilliant game that falls short due to a bug that wasn't caught in testing. As for compatibility issues, it's gotten much better lately. Stick with standard graphics (NVidia and ATI) and a fairly common sound chipset and you'll do just fine. Software incompatibilities? Well yes, but I've got a box with a few dozen high end titles and no conflicts so far. Just keep the thing relatively up to date.
I can play a console game on as many consoles as I wish but it can only be one console at a time. I can only play a PC game on a certain number of PC's and after that I have to go through a time-consuming, annoying process to make my case to get additional activations.
Only if you buy games that have activation or other mindless DRM. I am an avid flight simmer but I'm on MS Flight Sim 2004 and not FSX for exactly that reason. MS can keep their activation schemes. They're BS. All PC games are using this kind of mindless DRM only because it's being accepted. However there are a few places where games have been hard hit due to DRM madness. For example take a look at what happened to Lockon Modern Air Combat thanks largely due to Starforce copy protection: I can't even find it in stores anymore.
This adding of leap seconds based on decisions by panels of experts or authoritative bodies is a nonsense.
If you're going to do this sort of thing - adding seconds to the clock here or there - it shouldn't be decided upon by some review committee. There should be a planned algorithm that kicks in, and the simplest one that actually does the job should be used. The bottom line is that a watch should be able to do it. If you do this, you're able to program devices to account for leap seconds instead of having to manually put in fudges which is an error prone process. You also get the possibility of adding leap milli-seconds or micro-seconds so fine grained adjustments are possible where required, whereas it would be much harder (though not impossible) to do that if you're manually correcting.
I'd be interested in hearing about specific instances where people work with equipment where this is a concern. I don't think I even own a time keep device where this level of accuracy matters. Perhaps my GPS???...
I keep telling people, corks in cows arses is the way to go, but every time i tell someone they try to have me committed. Why won't anyone listen to me!? The cows are EVIL I tells you.
When I was using Altavista it was good. As for finding everything you want 99% of the time you must be pretty esay to satisify. Half the time I need to go to specialist sites to find things (arxiv.org for astronomy, pubmed for medial for example, price watch sites for price comparison). If I just used Google I'd miss all of that. If you think Google is the end all be all, you're missing out on a lot.
Re:It's easy to forget
on
Google Turns 10
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Good to it's people? Are you talking about the 75% increase in childcare that they provide (effectively slashing parent's salaries), or the health care benefits that's been in the news because it's worse than that offered by Microsoft, but apparently they decided that the cost of equaling it was too much (then tried to tell employees it's the price of working for such an innovative company)? They're not struggling. They don't need to act that way.
As for the free products they give away - they're always in beta and buggy, they have terms and conditions that mean Google owns or has unlimited license to your data, they're happy to install spyware and crapware that's difficult to remove (like Google update) and they usually buy out the competition.
You pick your location and it'll give you a list of satellites. Not as flashy as this new Google Earth plugin, but if you're interested in satellite spotting, it's probably the way to go.
Re:It's easy to forget
on
Google Turns 10
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
how bad search really was before Google. For that matter it's easy to forget that it used to take work to find information at all. Our culture has just barely begun to come to terms with how revolutionary this change really is.
I'm TIRED of hearing about Google as some sort of saviour.
Search engines weren't bad before Google. In fact Altavista was great in its day. It didn't survive competition with Google (and probably wouldn't have scaled well).
What has Google brought us? Google news? Nope the bought Deja. Gmail? Sure, that was theirs. Google has also produced some brilliant toolkits and their image search is good. However their "do no evil" is a joke? Their terms of service are onerous even when they have bothered to vet them to prevent copy and paste errors. They install crapware on the computer (GoogleUpdate) that's quite hard to get rid of (doesn't uinstall), and are quite liberal about having their apps phone home. Sure they were once (during the boom) a fantastic employer providing all sorts of facilities, free food and sharing the wealth with employees. However they've been in the news lately for clawing back employee benefits.
So I'm tired of hearing how great the company is. Sure they're historically significant, and influential and newsworthy, but they're not God's gift to computing. The brand loyalty and fanboyism on this board has reached epic proportions. Google, Apple, Linux good (no matter what they do wrong). Ugh. Get some perspective.
How about instead of looking into the vulnerabilities they have a show on blowing RFID tags up. Or dropping them from a crane. Or perhaps strapping lots of them to a plane and taxiing around while "testing" their effects on the instruments?
No on second thoughts lets just stick with blowing them up! That's what Mythbusters do best.
Why? Virtual telescope is a lot more meaningful to people who aren't radio astronomers
I'll tell you why. Because it leaves people with the impression that large telescopes are of no value and are a waste of money since you can build a "virtual telescope" out of lots of little ones. In fact all you can do is improve the resolution you're seeing with an array of smaller telescopes and this doesn't replace large instruments. This is the sort of oversimplification that sees a lot of science budgets cut. Forgetting the potential damage, there's also the fact that it just isn't accurate and some people want to know what's actually happening in reality instead of some dumbed down oversimplification.
If you don't have the time or inclination to look up a technical term, what are you doing reading slashdot? Go read a gossip column or something equally braindead instead of trying to make slashdot braindead itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Stephen Goldin's 23 rules
I count 17 actual rules and 6 "refer to rule X" clauses where the same rule applies to other situations.
The gist however is don't be an ass, do the right thing at the right event, be generous and buy the bloke a meal or drink. Seems like common sense to me. I guess it's not so common (especially for some of the less socially adept that attend these conventions).
I moved from Slackware to Redhat. When Fedora came I stopped using Linux for a long time. It was clear the motivation was commercial and not in the interests of the customer. These days if I run Linux it's mostly on VMWare. I've still got an old dual boot machine that runs a very very outdated version of Redhat but I've probably booted into Linux on that machine twice in the last 5 or 6 years. I plan on putting a more recent flavour of Linux on it when I've decided between Debian, Unbuntu, Fedora and CentOS. Guess which 2 are looking a lot less compelling to me.
If you really hate these stories so much, you can go into your preferences and disable idle stories from appearing for you at all. In the meantime, you need only suffer a tiny tiny fraction of main page area devoted to Idle links.
Translation: I REALLY, REALLY thought the girl was hot!
The new Mythbusters scientific method:
1. Find urban legend
2. Wonder out loud if urban legend is true
3. Dream up inadequate set of tests. Bonus points if the tests only work for a specific subset of what you're trying to proove.
4. Get special effects team to engineer something wacky to apply tests in 3.
5. Blow something up
6. Comment on how awesome it is and congratulate self on coolness
7. Come up with off hand summary of whether myth is busted. Bonus points for ignoring or manipulating facts to suit.
8. Profit!!!
What we all need to understand is regardless of the technology we use, we will always leave some sort of pollution and some sort environmental impact. The answers we should be looking for is how to minimize them; which is stated in the parent's post, and not to discard any technology because it's not perfect. Because if we sit around looking for the no-impact, no-footprint, no environmental harm solution, we'll just sit here burning our fossil fuels eventually doing more harm in the long run than we would ever have done by trying some other technologies.
That's fine, but I want to see the cost benefit analysis before changing my habits to use things that are 10 or more times the price to buy and may not do the job properly (I'm thinking of light globes and shopping bags not hybrid cars). Both items are less sturdy than claimed by manufacturers (fluro light globes do die, green shopping bags are always tearing) and don't always fulfil the same need (hard to get a dimmer switch and fluro globe that work for dimmable lights). I have plenty of interest in helping save the environment but no interest in making companies rich by lying to me.
Moderation sucks. This should be moderated.
Moderate: +5: Quoted Susan Ivanova. or +5: Babylon 5 reference.
Call me when he can create an 20-something Kelly LeBrock and I'll be more interested.
(Disclaimer: Actually I find this kind of science fascinating, but that doesn't aid in making a joke)
Yes but in most cases this time can presumably be measured without regard to leap seconds so long as it's measured consistently.
Yeah "log in" was sloppy wording on my part, and made me sound like a total GPS ignoramus. I meant until it "locks on" to the satellites rather than "log in".
I assume the requirement for 3 satellites for a 2D fix and 4 for a 3D fix has to do with the trig you need to do. To triangulate any point on a 2D map requires 2 points from which to measure distance to find where the 2 lines intersect. On a 3D map it'd be easy to show you need 3. Then for height you'd need to do it against the perpendicular axis as well as against the sphere of the earth - presumably doing this accurately is harder because all the satellites are at similar heights so you're looking at the GPS from roughly the same plane (well not quite, the orbits are after all circular but those satellites visible to you near the surface of the earth are all in roughly the same plane.)
Definitely your GPS. It cares about nanoseconds.
But so long as all the satellites are in sync with their atomic clocks showing the same time, does it matter??? Even without them being in sync, doesn't the GPS use time and rough location to locate the satellites (unitil it's logged on) and then isn't it the round trip time taken by signal that's being measured? Is there any dependancy on leap seconds?
I like certain libertarians ideals, but the fact is that regulation is to industry what police are to neighborhoods. If you take a cop off a beat, crime will go up. If you take your eyes off corporate shenanigans, they will go up. This has been obvious from the days of Enron.^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdawn of history.
Fixed it for you.
You do know that the .VOB files can be renamed to .MPG or .AVI and will play just fine in windows media player (and others). Each item on a DVD menu usually triggers one VOB. (This all assumes you're using unencrypted DVD). Your only issues are then the legality of doing this, and renaming the VOB files. That'll be harder than just using a script to rename since some of the VOB files will correspond to the menu and copy warnings etc.
Call EA tech support at least once a day with DRM issues relating to the game. Will gets his payoff for designing a groundbreaking game, EA gets ginourmous support bills.
You're not thinking it through. The likely outcome if lots of people do this is EA starts charging for support, and also pays Will less for his next game, citing reduced profit due to excessive support costs.
With a PC, I have to upgrade my hardware almost every year just to play the latest and greatest games. With a console, I just buy a game for my console and it's guaranteed to perform decent because the game developers develop specifically for that hardware.
No you don't. Truly you don't. Just don't pick the most graphics intensive title every time. Or better yet, DON'T buy the latest and greatest. Take a look at the bargain bin. Also your upgrade to your PC benefits you for other things - be it office documents or coding, picture editing etc. Consoles mostly don't do that at all in standard configurations. (I'm sure someone will tell me about running gimp on their PS3 or some such nonsense but it's not easy or standard)
With a PC, I have to install the game, download updated drivers and deal with software incompatibilities. In addition, most technical support departments are awful at helping users with these issues and more often than not leave them to fend for themselves. With a console game, it just works out of the box. ...or not at all. When a game's got a glitch it may be impossible to finish it, or even get very far in it. With a PC game there's a good chance you'll get the patch. Sure it's more hassle because game publishers come to depend on patching on the PC but would you rather more hassle to download a patch or to be stuck with a brilliant game that falls short due to a bug that wasn't caught in testing. As for compatibility issues, it's gotten much better lately. Stick with standard graphics (NVidia and ATI) and a fairly common sound chipset and you'll do just fine. Software incompatibilities? Well yes, but I've got a box with a few dozen high end titles and no conflicts so far. Just keep the thing relatively up to date.
I can play a console game on as many consoles as I wish but it can only be one console at a time. I can only play a PC game on a certain number of PC's and after that I have to go through a time-consuming, annoying process to make my case to get additional activations.
Only if you buy games that have activation or other mindless DRM. I am an avid flight simmer but I'm on MS Flight Sim 2004 and not FSX for exactly that reason. MS can keep their activation schemes. They're BS. All PC games are using this kind of mindless DRM only because it's being accepted. However there are a few places where games have been hard hit due to DRM madness. For example take a look at what happened to Lockon Modern Air Combat thanks largely due to Starforce copy protection: I can't even find it in stores anymore.
This adding of leap seconds based on decisions by panels of experts or authoritative bodies is a nonsense.
If you're going to do this sort of thing - adding seconds to the clock here or there - it shouldn't be decided upon by some review committee. There should be a planned algorithm that kicks in, and the simplest one that actually does the job should be used. The bottom line is that a watch should be able to do it. If you do this, you're able to program devices to account for leap seconds instead of having to manually put in fudges which is an error prone process. You also get the possibility of adding leap milli-seconds or micro-seconds so fine grained adjustments are possible where required, whereas it would be much harder (though not impossible) to do that if you're manually correcting.
I'd be interested in hearing about specific instances where people work with equipment where this is a concern. I don't think I even own a time keep device where this level of accuracy matters. Perhaps my GPS???...
Anywho, cows etc BURP the gas, not fart it, they burp a heck of a lot, thats how they emit the gas.
Yes but a fart is funnier than a burp and this was a joke not a serious comment on what was causing greenhouse warming.
Looks like someone needs to brush up on their buzzwords, specifically "mission critical" and "services no longer required".
More like "Would you like fries with that?" and "Would you like to upsize?"
I keep telling people, corks in cows arses is the way to go, but every time i tell someone they try to have me committed. Why won't anyone listen to me!? The cows are EVIL I tells you.
When I was using Altavista it was good. As for finding everything you want 99% of the time you must be pretty esay to satisify. Half the time I need to go to specialist sites to find things (arxiv.org for astronomy, pubmed for medial for example, price watch sites for price comparison). If I just used Google I'd miss all of that. If you think Google is the end all be all, you're missing out on a lot.
Good to it's people? Are you talking about the 75% increase in childcare that they provide (effectively slashing parent's salaries), or the health care benefits that's been in the news because it's worse than that offered by Microsoft, but apparently they decided that the cost of equaling it was too much (then tried to tell employees it's the price of working for such an innovative company)? They're not struggling. They don't need to act that way.
As for the free products they give away - they're always in beta and buggy, they have terms and conditions that mean Google owns or has unlimited license to your data, they're happy to install spyware and crapware that's difficult to remove (like Google update) and they usually buy out the competition.
How do you have difficulty seeing the evil?
Here's a service that's been doing satellite tracking for years:
http://www.heavens-above.com/
You pick your location and it'll give you a list of satellites. Not as flashy as this new Google Earth plugin, but if you're interested in satellite spotting, it's probably the way to go.
how bad search really was before Google. For that matter it's easy to forget that it used to take work to find information at all. Our culture has just barely begun to come to terms with how revolutionary this change really is.
I'm TIRED of hearing about Google as some sort of saviour.
Search engines weren't bad before Google. In fact Altavista was great in its day. It didn't survive competition with Google (and probably wouldn't have scaled well).
What has Google brought us? Google news? Nope the bought Deja. Gmail? Sure, that was theirs. Google has also produced some brilliant toolkits and their image search is good. However their "do no evil" is a joke? Their terms of service are onerous even when they have bothered to vet them to prevent copy and paste errors. They install crapware on the computer (GoogleUpdate) that's quite hard to get rid of (doesn't uinstall), and are quite liberal about having their apps phone home. Sure they were once (during the boom) a fantastic employer providing all sorts of facilities, free food and sharing the wealth with employees. However they've been in the news lately for clawing back employee benefits.
So I'm tired of hearing how great the company is. Sure they're historically significant, and influential and newsworthy, but they're not God's gift to computing. The brand loyalty and fanboyism on this board has reached epic proportions. Google, Apple, Linux good (no matter what they do wrong). Ugh. Get some perspective.
How about instead of looking into the vulnerabilities they have a show on blowing RFID tags up. Or dropping them from a crane. Or perhaps strapping lots of them to a plane and taxiing around while "testing" their effects on the instruments?
No on second thoughts lets just stick with blowing them up! That's what Mythbusters do best.
Why? Virtual telescope is a lot more meaningful to people who aren't radio astronomers
I'll tell you why. Because it leaves people with the impression that large telescopes are of no value and are a waste of money since you can build a "virtual telescope" out of lots of little ones. In fact all you can do is improve the resolution you're seeing with an array of smaller telescopes and this doesn't replace large instruments. This is the sort of oversimplification that sees a lot of science budgets cut. Forgetting the potential damage, there's also the fact that it just isn't accurate and some people want to know what's actually happening in reality instead of some dumbed down oversimplification.
If you don't have the time or inclination to look up a technical term, what are you doing reading slashdot? Go read a gossip column or something equally braindead instead of trying to make slashdot braindead itself.