Agree, we use Yammer at work and it's fairly useful to have somewhere to share thoughts or problems with others, especially for something that isn't worth interrupting others for, but if you post it up then someone may have a useful comment on.
It isn't really a 'social network' - the resemblence to Facebook is only skin-deep - but it does form a useful channel of communication.
Then again, I like my colleagues and trust my boss - perhaps the cases where people don't want to engage are revealing a more fundamental problem of lack of trust within the workplace.
I use Git to good effect in a fairly traditional corporate environment. We're much better off since switching over from SVN.
Never mind the 'distributed' part - the big challenge for source control in a traditional setup is when two people have both modified different parts of the same files, and the second guy goes to check in. Git is much better at handling conflicts than SVN is - conflicts that would cause real pain in SVN often merge smoothly in Git.
It's also much better at handling branches, e.g. a release branch. Remember 'tree conflicts' in SVN? Not an issue in Git.
Git is a better SVN, as well as being a distributed source control system.
My company has its website hosted from a nuclear bunker. Very secure, reliable, etc etc. Actually getting the guys there to DO anything for us, (like upgrade MySQL), is an exercise in frustration, to the point that it is a real limitation on our ability to develop our product.
So, when looking for hosting or backup, don't allow 'OMG Mega Nuke-proof Security' to distract you from also evaluating all the other relevant criteria (such as responsiveness and know-how).
TW are probably HOPING to lose 10% of their customers... the 10% who use 90% of the bandwidth. By biasing their customer base towards those who just want to read their email and check CNN online, they can carry on collecting the fees and not bother with the costs of providing greater bandwidth.
One man's meat... I loved the countryside in San Andreas, weaving through traffic at ridiculous speeds, going vigilante in the copter, etc. The missions in the countryside were pretty fun, too. Possibly driving-game fans like me are the only ones who like the wide open rural areas, though.
Surely someone employed in Homeland Security should be au fait with current affairs ? The Danish cartoons were big news for well over a week not that long ago, and are obviously related to questions of terrorism and, well, Homeland Security. Obviously the qualifications for winning a quiz show are more stringent than landing a job with Homeland Security.
Interesting point; perhaps, turn-based games like Civilisation and Advance Wars would be more suited to making tournaments that would be considered worth watching in the West?
Actually, I'm pretty sure (Europe as a whole) is a larger videogame market than either the USA or Japan, by revenue. Of course, the individual countries aren't so big, but to neglect a whole region is actually pretty significant, revenue-wise.
Windows + Mozilla is generally much more secure and usable than Windows + IE, especially for older versions of Windows. So Windows' cause is actually being helped by having a trustworthy browser available for it (as in, more people would switch to Linux otherwise).
So perhaps MS is simply recognising this, and acting to support it ?
As far as I can see, the patent simply describes an epicyclic gearbox used in a car, with an electric motor/generator on the third shaft. The epicyclic gearbox is not at all novel (it was used in the Model T Ford). While using it in conjunction with an electric motor is a good idea, I don't really think it would count as novel or non-obvious. The epicyclic is the prototypical three-way gearbox, and thus would be the obvious solution to allowing two engines (petrol and electric) to drive the wheels of a car.
Taking another angle, large Japanese companies like Toyota tend to be very careful about patents. If they haven't settled yet, they probably know they can win.
Out of all those who are paid enough to afford nice cars, only a certain proportion actually will do, true. But if you go to the carpark of a racing game company (where the original poster works) and see 100% old bangers excepting the marked Director slots, that tells you something.
ISTR that the Concordski was climbing fast, and suddenly saw the Mirage (French spy plane) above. The pilot levelled off the dive suddenly, which interrupted the airflow into the engines.
All 4 engines stalled, and the plane went into a dive from which it did not recover.
Arguably a combination of the Mirage being where it should not have been, and a design weakness in the Russian plane.
Every gallon of diesel a Hummer burns has to be delivered to the front lines somehow. These supply columns need to be protected, diverting resources from the actual fighting. Many advances have been strangled by overstretched supply-lines. So if you can make Humvees use half the juice, you can increase the effective 'reach' of your units, given the same logistical back-up.
Moreover, if it's twice as efficient it's putting out half the heat, making it harder for the enemy to see / fire heat-seeking missiles at.
So yes, efficiency does matter to the armed forces.
Couple of guys show up in a white van. Go into the school and start loading up some rather valuable antique wooden chairs. Student arrives. 'Can I help you take those chairs out ?' A couple of students helped the criminals load up in double-quick time. Needless to say, several thousand quid's worth of chairs were never seen again.
I never implied that the guy was innocent, or that we have a right to record films. However, several aspects of this case are cause for concern;
- the severity of the potential punishment - the use of extensive public resources (police, court and prison) to protect the media industry in what would otherwise be a private civil matter - the fact that we are now being surreptitiously watched while we watch a film - the potential for all sorts of innocent devices (mobile phones, portable audio players) to lead to arrest
At the least, people should be aware of these aspects, even if they feel that they are justified in order to prevent copyright infringement.
As far as the war on drugs goes, the indirectness of any harm done, the fact that a significant proportion of the population consider it acceptable, and the consequent efforts to "educate" people to do what they're told, all group copyright infringement and drug abuse together as distinct from crimes like murder, robbery or assault, where there is a clear consensus that law and morality are aligned. So, I think the comparison is one that helps us to understand the current situation. If you have some reasons why it's not a helpful analogy, rather than simply telling me I'm wrong, then I am all ears.
So you live near both Kyoto and Redmond simultaneously ? Wow.
MS contracts outside devcos to produce games which they then publish (secondparties such as Bungie). But overall, Nintendo actually make more games inhouse as first parties than MS do.
You can't buy a great games development team for all the money in the world. MS know this, which is why they put so much effort into wooing outside devcos, especially the big Japanese ones.
I think the whole load times thing is overrated anyway, it is basically caused by laziness / rushed releases, rather than inherent technical limitations of optical media.
If disc games were optimised as much as cartridge ones are, in terms of compressing the data and placing it on the disc, you'd barely notice load times. See Aerowings on DC, which is lightning fast at I/O. Also Tokyo Extreme Racer, streaming data from disc in advance as you race.
Don't forget the original PSX Ridge Racer, which served up a game of Galaxians while it loaded the data:) An equally good answer to the problem IMHO
Read the gamasutra story of porting Resident Evil to the N64. They spent lots and lots of time trying to compress the data to get it onto the cart, without throwing quality out of the window.
In general, games are made with uncompressed data, and then compressed to fit onto the target system. The more space is available, the less time has to be spent slimming it down to fit.
If you can find a 2nd hand Gateway AnyKey keyboard on eBay, that's fully macro-able (any key can launch a macro). Plug it into the PS/2 slot, your regular keyboard into USB, and you should be set I think.
Some users will set personal modifiers on different categories, ie flamebait = -3.
The point of the mod system is not to filter out views you don't agree with, it's to filter out junk that's of no use to anyone. If someone thought the iPod Mini was going to bomb, that's worth knowing, even if it turns out to be wrong.
Moderation is to get rid of the 'noise' (GNAA, repetition, etc) and leave the 'signal'. It is not a tool to shape the signal into one you agree with.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree, we use Yammer at work and it's fairly useful to have somewhere to share thoughts or problems with others, especially for something that isn't worth interrupting others for, but if you post it up then someone may have a useful comment on.
It isn't really a 'social network' - the resemblence to Facebook is only skin-deep - but it does form a useful channel of communication.
Then again, I like my colleagues and trust my boss - perhaps the cases where people don't want to engage are revealing a more fundamental problem of lack of trust within the workplace.
I use Git to good effect in a fairly traditional corporate environment. We're much better off since switching over from SVN.
Never mind the 'distributed' part - the big challenge for source control in a traditional setup is when two people have both modified different parts of the same files, and the second guy goes to check in. Git is much better at handling conflicts than SVN is - conflicts that would cause real pain in SVN often merge smoothly in Git.
It's also much better at handling branches, e.g. a release branch. Remember 'tree conflicts' in SVN? Not an issue in Git.
Git is a better SVN, as well as being a distributed source control system.
My company has its website hosted from a nuclear bunker. Very secure, reliable, etc etc. Actually getting the guys there to DO anything for us, (like upgrade MySQL), is an exercise in frustration, to the point that it is a real limitation on our ability to develop our product.
So, when looking for hosting or backup, don't allow 'OMG Mega Nuke-proof Security' to distract you from also evaluating all the other relevant criteria (such as responsiveness and know-how).
TW are probably HOPING to lose 10% of their customers... the 10% who use 90% of the bandwidth. By biasing their customer base towards those who just want to read their email and check CNN online, they can carry on collecting the fees and not bother with the costs of providing greater bandwidth.
One man's meat... I loved the countryside in San Andreas, weaving through traffic at ridiculous speeds, going vigilante in the copter, etc. The missions in the countryside were pretty fun, too. Possibly driving-game fans like me are the only ones who like the wide open rural areas, though.
Surely someone employed in Homeland Security should be au fait with current affairs ? The Danish cartoons were big news for well over a week not that long ago, and are obviously related to questions of terrorism and, well, Homeland Security. Obviously the qualifications for winning a quiz show are more stringent than landing a job with Homeland Security.
Interesting point; perhaps, turn-based games like Civilisation and Advance Wars would be more suited to making tournaments that would be considered worth watching in the West?
Actually, I'm pretty sure (Europe as a whole) is a larger videogame market than either the USA or Japan, by revenue. Of course, the individual countries aren't so big, but to neglect a whole region is actually pretty significant, revenue-wise.
So perhaps MS is simply recognising this, and acting to support it ?
As far as I can see, the patent simply describes an epicyclic gearbox used in a car, with an electric motor/generator on the third shaft. The epicyclic gearbox is not at all novel (it was used in the Model T Ford). While using it in conjunction with an electric motor is a good idea, I don't really think it would count as novel or non-obvious. The epicyclic is the prototypical three-way gearbox, and thus would be the obvious solution to allowing two engines (petrol and electric) to drive the wheels of a car.
Taking another angle, large Japanese companies like Toyota tend to be very careful about patents. If they haven't settled yet, they probably know they can win.
Out of all those who are paid enough to afford nice cars, only a certain proportion actually will do, true. But if you go to the carpark of a racing game company (where the original poster works) and see 100% old bangers excepting the marked Director slots, that tells you something.
ISTR that the Concordski was climbing fast, and suddenly saw the Mirage (French spy plane) above. The pilot levelled off the dive suddenly, which interrupted the airflow into the engines.
All 4 engines stalled, and the plane went into a dive from which it did not recover.
Arguably a combination of the Mirage being where it should not have been, and a design weakness in the Russian plane.
Every gallon of diesel a Hummer burns has to be delivered to the front lines somehow. These supply columns need to be protected, diverting resources from the actual fighting. Many advances have been strangled by overstretched supply-lines. So if you can make Humvees use half the juice, you can increase the effective 'reach' of your units, given the same logistical back-up.
Moreover, if it's twice as efficient it's putting out half the heat, making it harder for the enemy to see / fire heat-seeking missiles at.
So yes, efficiency does matter to the armed forces.
Funniest thing I've read all day. Makes lots of seemingly 'implausible' films about unauthorised nuke launches and hacking, a lot less implausible.
'Hmm.. it's asking for a password ? Try zero zero zero'
I'd back up the comments about old people not having to be weak. I'm currently taught kendo by an extremely active 82-year-old guy. Don't give in !
Couple of guys show up in a white van. Go into the school and start loading up some rather valuable antique wooden chairs.
Student arrives. 'Can I help you take those chairs out ?'
A couple of students helped the criminals load up in double-quick time. Needless to say, several thousand quid's worth of chairs were never seen again.
is it just me or is the detective work of trying to figure out what hardware to buy for the linux box one of the real problems?
Not really. You just go to www.dell.com, pick a computer, enter your card details, and order.
Never had any problems with this method.
I never implied that the guy was innocent, or that we have a right to record films. However, several aspects of this case are cause for concern;
- the severity of the potential punishment
- the use of extensive public resources (police, court and prison) to protect the media industry in what would otherwise be a private civil matter
- the fact that we are now being surreptitiously watched while we watch a film
- the potential for all sorts of innocent devices (mobile phones, portable audio players) to lead to arrest
At the least, people should be aware of these aspects, even if they feel that they are justified in order to prevent copyright infringement.
As far as the war on drugs goes, the indirectness of any harm done, the fact that a significant proportion of the population consider it acceptable, and the consequent efforts to "educate" people to do what they're told, all group copyright infringement and drug abuse together as distinct from crimes like murder, robbery or assault, where there is a clear consensus that law and morality are aligned. So, I think the comparison is one that helps us to understand the current situation.
If you have some reasons why it's not a helpful analogy, rather than simply telling me I'm wrong, then I am all ears.
...certainly isn't going very fast now it's been /.ed !
Ok, I used/ instal l_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz
f or more links
http://macromedia.mplug.org/tarball/generic
I think. Works for me with Mozilla 1.7a on Fedora x86.
BTW I also got Flash Click-to-play, which stalls each animation until you click to activate it.
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Check
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux.html
So you live near both Kyoto and Redmond simultaneously ? Wow.
MS contracts outside devcos to produce games which they then publish (secondparties such as Bungie). But overall, Nintendo actually make more games inhouse as first parties than MS do.
You can't buy a great games development team for all the money in the world. MS know this, which is why they put so much effort into wooing outside devcos, especially the big Japanese ones.
I think the whole load times thing is overrated anyway, it is basically caused by laziness / rushed releases, rather than inherent technical limitations of optical media.
:) An equally good answer to the problem IMHO
If disc games were optimised as much as cartridge ones are, in terms of compressing the data and placing it on the disc, you'd barely notice load times. See Aerowings on DC, which is lightning fast at I/O. Also Tokyo Extreme Racer, streaming data from disc in advance as you race.
Don't forget the original PSX Ridge Racer, which served up a game of Galaxians while it loaded the data
Read the gamasutra story of porting Resident Evil to the N64. They spent lots and lots of time trying to compress the data to get it onto the cart, without throwing quality out of the window.
In general, games are made with uncompressed data, and then compressed to fit onto the target system. The more space is available, the less time has to be spent slimming it down to fit.
If you can find a 2nd hand Gateway AnyKey keyboard on eBay, that's fully macro-able (any key can launch a macro). Plug it into the PS/2 slot, your regular keyboard into USB, and you should be set I think.
Sadly, some of the keys on mine have died
Some users will set personal modifiers on different categories, ie flamebait = -3.
The point of the mod system is not to filter out views you don't agree with, it's to filter out junk that's of no use to anyone. If someone thought the iPod Mini was going to bomb, that's worth knowing, even if it turns out to be wrong.
Moderation is to get rid of the 'noise' (GNAA, repetition, etc) and leave the 'signal'. It is not a tool to shape the signal into one you agree with.