I was listening to NPR today. FEMA has ground personel going door to door and registering people for relif. Most people in the affected areas don't even have electrticity and just now got water, although it's not drinkable. Hopfully by the time people can actually file their claims online, they'll fix this.
Because a lot of users will be at libraries trying to file their claim on public computers which are probably not running IE6 and will probably be running Win98
I've been disappointed with many of the Gnome release, however for some reason I keep on using it. I will never like Ephanie as I think Galleon was much superior, however it hasn't really been maintained in a while.
Anyone using the Gentoo unstable tree has seen some of the more recent Gnome features including stability in Nautilus. Going from Nautilus 2.8 to 2.10 I noticed it was a lot faster, however it crashed every 10 minutes (I'm not exaggerating). However in several of the point releases since then, I've noticed improved stability and even the cool tree view thing in the browser.
I am hopeful for Gnome 2.12. Hopefully it won't suck anywhere near as bad as the initial release of the other Gnome versions.
Back when I got into computers in elementry school, I'd play all those nice Sierra Adventure games. I kept playing adventure games into high school until the genre died. I miss games like Zork, Lesuire Suit Larry (I have actually played the new one which is pretty funny), Space Quest, Return to Zork, Full Throrrle, etc.
Thanks to ScummVM I've played some of those old games in Linux, but I haven't really been able to keep up with new games in a very long time. I played Counter Strike in college and back when I still had a Windows box and lived in the dorms, I played Tony Hawk (3 I believe) on the Lan.
Since I moved out of the dorms I just kinda quit playing games. The fastest video card I have is in my dieing laptop, a GForce 440 Go and guess what, the laptop runs Linux.
The second fastest card I have is a GForce2. I just don't have time to play games anymore and I don't have the money to spend in buying a better video card and hoping games work under Cedega. I tried playing SimCiy4 and TheSims2 once upon a time on my lappy, and it was fun for a while, but the graphics took their tole on the crappy GForce 4 Go.
My genre died off and now I'm trying to figure out why I'm a computer scientist. I think I wanted to create adventure games, but I wanted to do more of the story part than the programming. I wish I had majored in English or Psychology. Don't get me wrong, I'm a damn good computer scientist, but I hate working in a room filled with cubes.
I have a full Computer Science degree, love Linux and make $25k a year. I work for a check and credit card processing company and write PHP scripts, manage users (LDAP), the Windows NT Domain (Samba3+LDAP), backups (DVDs and off-site rsync), maintain and build into the website (client tools, time clocks, etc).
Lots of MySQL, PHP, Bash and more recently I'll have to write some first order logic stuff (probably using Prolog) for Sales Commissions Reports. I make $25,000 a year (first job out of college) and that's because my boss had to pay $5k to the recruiting company he hired me through.
It really sucks. The debt collectors, some which have never graduated high school, earn more than me. There are only three people in the entire local office (oh and I maintain 5 other offices in different states remotely) that are on Salary (vs commission) and the only other IT guy there, besides my boss, is some dipshit who went to a school called "New Horizons" and isn't qualified to do shit.
I had a bad recommendation on my resume and didn't realize it. It cost me several $30k jobs in Nashville. My advice to all your people starting out, check your references.
I will say one thing about the company I work for, they do let me work 35 hour work weeks while I got to graduate school. I hope to get my Masters, start teaching at a community college while I work on a PhD and get out of this shit hole.
It is rare when someone comes up with an entirely new architecture and instruction set. The IA64 was a complete break and had it been pushed correctly, AMD would be rushing to make IA64 clones instead of Intel supporting AMDs 64-bit extension.
If I remember correctly, the IA64 has 128 general purpose registers and 128 floating point registers. It's a load/store machine and it's pretty close to a RISC arch (really it's an "very long word" instruction set, but lets not get picky).
It was a chance to make a clean break from the old 32-bit legacy chips, however the price was and is too high and AMDs are cheaper and still very powerful.
I really hope this chip doesn't die off. At least with limited support in the new Windows, it will still have a strong server market, but I think a lot of companies are going to be afraid to buy because of running into compatibility problems. I know at where I work, we'd like to have servers that can do anything/general purpose. You put a limit on what the OS can do and then you're afraid of old legacy or propriety software not working correctly
But hey as long as you use Linux, the IA64 is fairly well supported, and it will be better supported in Linux than in Windows!
IR devices are kinda neat. I've never used one personally, and the drivers for my laptop IR port stopped working when I went up to the 2.6 kernel way back when, but I have seen people at my old roommates work just plot their laptop or palm down next to an HP printer and instantly be able to connect and print via IR.
I like the fact that this new speed increase doesn't involve buying new hardware, which will help it a lot considering IR is starting to fade out.
IR has its limitations, such as line of sight and whatnot, but with 100Mbit speeds, its worth another look now.
I've seen a lot of stuff about WinFS and I do RTFA, but I'm still a little puzzled. Is this supposed to be like a labeling file-system where instead of having folders you apply labels to each file (document, music, etc.) similar to Google Mail's system? That's what I think of when I think of "relational" as in database design.
But from what I've heard, WinFS sits atop of NTFS and simply connects it to a SQL database for indexing. How the hell is this revolutionary. You could place all your files in a "My Documents" folder and then make a nice pretty front end to it, categorizing each file, and then hacking the file chooser to use your interface.
I really think Microsoft should have though harder about this and made it a real filesystem with a new structure and layout on disk. It could have really be different and revolunatory, but from what I can tell, it's just a layer now and offers nothing really new or innovative.
Geeze, no image verification, no e-mail verification...it's like they don't even care. Oh yea they don't. I wonder how many Seemore Butts or Ipee Freely will be included on that DVD that include on the craft.
So does this mean the probe will somehow connect with the borg and turn into a living being that returns to earth 50,000 years later like one of the worst Sci-Fi movies out of a certain series I won't mention?
I went to school in a place called Cookeville. It was only about an hour and a half away from the city of Chattanooga where I grew up, and before I knew it, I totally hated the small town feel. Cookeville was a place where old people went to die and it drained the life out of everyone there.
If you're thinking about going to Tennessee Tech, don't! It's the worst school in Tennessee; probably the entire south.
While there a lot of my friends got jobs in call centers for SunTrust Bank. There was even a data center there for Fleetguard and the traditional factories.
I guess if you dig that environment, it's not to bad. They did have a wallmart and a StarBucks on campus.
I do miss the $300/2 bed room places sometimes compared to living back in the city, and the nice parks and waterfalls, but other than that I really don't miss bumble-fuck backwater America.
Seriously, do we need this much coverage of Google? Hey look google now does this and now does that and now does stuff that's been OFFERED BY EVERYONE ELSE.
Granded they do make things better than everyone else, but it's really getting old. There should be a limit to 1 google article a week.
The reason for their distribution pattern is a little to prevent abuse, a little to create a community network and to be honest, it was a really good beta testing idea.
It prevents spammers auto-registering a ton (if someone starts to invite a bunch of spam bots, you can easily trace and break the propagation chain) and prevented the server from being overloaded during the initial run.
From a Computer Science and Social Engineering standpoint, it was/is a good setup. Get over it.
I can't remember who it's from, famous mathematician, who said, "All models are wrong, but some are useful."
A corrolation in data doesn't mean causation. Even an 80% corolation isn't enough to say A causes B. And even if you get 98%, you still haven't explained why.
I agree totally. Playing GTA3 doesn't make me want to go out and kill people, but the driving force in articles like these is that "It will make you kill people."
I hate the arguement "Not everyone who plays violent games will kill people; not everyone who watches a Lexus ad buys a Lexus, but some do..."
That doesn't make any sense no matter how you phrase it. Buying a car for transportation due to a suggestive ad and killing someone are two unrelatable concepts. The biggest difference being the game doesn't advocate killing people, it's just done in pretend land. Unlike a car simulator where you drive a Lexus in a virtual world, in real life you know which fantasy is legal and which one isn't.
The core problem is social deviance. We lock people up for crimes without trying to understand why and find ways to keep others from making the same mistakes. It's so much easier to blame a video game then try and find real solutions.
...and in Europe their TV has lots of playful nudity, but they are very anti-violence, whereas here we have lots of violent stuff on basic cable, but no nudity...
Still you have Japan which has lots of both and even erotic adult cartoons, yet their crime rates are lower...and their suicide rates are higher
So what does it prove? Absolutely nothing. Come on people, think! Art reflects culture, our culture does not rise from art.
If violent games and porn are high selling items, it is because our culture wants it. Could pushing such media make people want it more? Maybe, but that doesn't change that is it because the culture brings it about.
If we really want to stop violent crimes, hate, etc, we need to attack the real problems. Attacking video games, art, etc. is a way to push the focus away from the real problems because its much much easier to boycot a game then try to give low income families the support they need to put their kids through college and pay their medical bills.
Abuse? If I can publish it on a piece of paper I should be able to put it on the Internet and in the United States, there aren't restrictions what I can put on a piece of paper or say to the masses as long as it's not obscene.
Wild West period of the Internet? Give me a break. That's what the Internet is and SHOULD BE! It is an opertunity for legit reports and amature idiots to post all their ideas and leave the masses to sort through and choose on their own who to trust.
It's the nature of the beast and I hope for the sake of real freedom, that it never changes.
As far as I know, emergency personal use plain old radio to communicate with ocasional use of cell phones. They don't e-mail each other.
The phone infrastructure in place around the world is something even many 3rd world countries are familiar with and its analogue nature makes it difficult to "hack into" even with the more modern digital variants.
Sure terroist could kill Internet communication, but we did that ourselves after 9/11 when cnn.com, msnbc.com and every major news network went down from server load.
Anyone with enough technical knowledge could build a jammer to kill radio communication for police. You could blow up a switching station and kill phone communication for entire blocks.
Sure people can communicate anonymously in Internet cafes, but when we start getting paranoid, we start violating civil rights. Anonymous communication is a good thing in many cases. If an employe finds out his companies product had a dangerous flaw, he can get the message out without risking his identity and job.
We've know terroist use electronic communication for a long time. It just means the US intellegence needs to work overtime to get the right information while not violating anyone's civil rights.
The article is madly extensive. I'm sure most rocket scientists or MEs/EEs will enjoy it. As a computer scientist, I'm just chugging through it.
I remember learning in Software Engineering II that NASA recomends less than 10% code resuse. The reason goes back to a rocket launched by Europe. The ESU designed navigation code written in Ada. They wanted to avoid writing an exception class, so they mathmatically proved the exception could never occur.
Years later they reused the navigation code on a new rocket, but the specifications for the rocket changed. The navigation system failed because it couldn't convert an int (I believe it was a 16-bit to a 64-bit int or something like that).
So now we're trying to reuse a lot of the old components. NASA is insane about testing and redundancy so I'm sure they'll retro-test every new component they make with all the old parts, but in the long run I really wish congress would just give them the funding they need to make a good spacecraft that will last several decades like the current shuttle has.
My ears are sensetive and I've never been able to get use to the high pitch whine from home theater style DLP projectors (under $1k). I use a Viewsonic LCD now and the quality is much better, not to mention it doesn't hurt my ears
It's true. The SR-71, once in the air, has no fuel. The seals under the tanks can't hold with that massive amount of heat. It's leaking fuel as it takes off. Once in the air and at full burn, the titanium expands and fills in the cracks, but the SR-71 has to be refuled in-flight right after takeoff.
In the two years since the shuttle program has been grounded, you think out goverment could have pumped more money into NASA to build a new transport craft.
The Space Shuttle fleet is decades old technologically speaking and desperatly needs to be retired. There have been several attempts. I think it was the X2 I watched live collapse as one of its tripod legs broke.
The shuttle simply shouldn't even be in use today. I realize the cost of a replacment design would probably reach into the billions, which seems like an awful waste of money with all the problems we face here on the Earth, but it is something that NASA and Congress have put off for way too long. The shuttle needs to be retired.
Slashdot Mirror
I was listening to NPR today. FEMA has ground personel going door to door and registering people for relif. Most people in the affected areas don't even have electrticity and just now got water, although it's not drinkable. Hopfully by the time people can actually file their claims online, they'll fix this.
Because a lot of users will be at libraries trying to file their claim on public computers which are probably not running IE6 and will probably be running Win98
I've been disappointed with many of the Gnome release, however for some reason I keep on using it. I will never like Ephanie as I think Galleon was much superior, however it hasn't really been maintained in a while.
Anyone using the Gentoo unstable tree has seen some of the more recent Gnome features including stability in Nautilus. Going from Nautilus 2.8 to 2.10 I noticed it was a lot faster, however it crashed every 10 minutes (I'm not exaggerating). However in several of the point releases since then, I've noticed improved stability and even the cool tree view thing in the browser.
I am hopeful for Gnome 2.12. Hopefully it won't suck anywhere near as bad as the initial release of the other Gnome versions.
SumDog
Back when I got into computers in elementry school, I'd play all those nice Sierra Adventure games. I kept playing adventure games into high school until the genre died. I miss games like Zork, Lesuire Suit Larry (I have actually played the new one which is pretty funny), Space Quest, Return to Zork, Full Throrrle, etc.
Thanks to ScummVM I've played some of those old games in Linux, but I haven't really been able to keep up with new games in a very long time. I played Counter Strike in college and back when I still had a Windows box and lived in the dorms, I played Tony Hawk (3 I believe) on the Lan.
Since I moved out of the dorms I just kinda quit playing games. The fastest video card I have is in my dieing laptop, a GForce 440 Go and guess what, the laptop runs Linux.
The second fastest card I have is a GForce2. I just don't have time to play games anymore and I don't have the money to spend in buying a better video card and hoping games work under Cedega. I tried playing SimCiy4 and TheSims2 once upon a time on my lappy, and it was fun for a while, but the graphics took their tole on the crappy GForce 4 Go.
My genre died off and now I'm trying to figure out why I'm a computer scientist. I think I wanted to create adventure games, but I wanted to do more of the story part than the programming. I wish I had majored in English or Psychology. Don't get me wrong, I'm a damn good computer scientist, but I hate working in a room filled with cubes.
Sumdog
I have a full Computer Science degree, love Linux and make $25k a year. I work for a check and credit card processing company and write PHP scripts, manage users (LDAP), the Windows NT Domain (Samba3+LDAP), backups (DVDs and off-site rsync), maintain and build into the website (client tools, time clocks, etc).
Lots of MySQL, PHP, Bash and more recently I'll have to write some first order logic stuff (probably using Prolog) for Sales Commissions Reports. I make $25,000 a year (first job out of college) and that's because my boss had to pay $5k to the recruiting company he hired me through.
It really sucks. The debt collectors, some which have never graduated high school, earn more than me. There are only three people in the entire local office (oh and I maintain 5 other offices in different states remotely) that are on Salary (vs commission) and the only other IT guy there, besides my boss, is some dipshit who went to a school called "New Horizons" and isn't qualified to do shit.
I had a bad recommendation on my resume and didn't realize it. It cost me several $30k jobs in Nashville. My advice to all your people starting out, check your references.
I will say one thing about the company I work for, they do let me work 35 hour work weeks while I got to graduate school. I hope to get my Masters, start teaching at a community college while I work on a PhD and get out of this shit hole.
Sumdog
You know I can't seem to get to the site. Ah the slashdot effect on...well...slashdot. It's almost poetic
It is rare when someone comes up with an entirely new architecture and instruction set. The IA64 was a complete break and had it been pushed correctly, AMD would be rushing to make IA64 clones instead of Intel supporting AMDs 64-bit extension.
If I remember correctly, the IA64 has 128 general purpose registers and 128 floating point registers. It's a load/store machine and it's pretty close to a RISC arch (really it's an "very long word" instruction set, but lets not get picky).
It was a chance to make a clean break from the old 32-bit legacy chips, however the price was and is too high and AMDs are cheaper and still very powerful.
I really hope this chip doesn't die off. At least with limited support in the new Windows, it will still have a strong server market, but I think a lot of companies are going to be afraid to buy because of running into compatibility problems. I know at where I work, we'd like to have servers that can do anything/general purpose. You put a limit on what the OS can do and then you're afraid of old legacy or propriety software not working correctly
But hey as long as you use Linux, the IA64 is fairly well supported, and it will be better supported in Linux than in Windows!
Sumdog
IR devices are kinda neat. I've never used one personally, and the drivers for my laptop IR port stopped working when I went up to the 2.6 kernel way back when, but I have seen people at my old roommates work just plot their laptop or palm down next to an HP printer and instantly be able to connect and print via IR.
I like the fact that this new speed increase doesn't involve buying new hardware, which will help it a lot considering IR is starting to fade out.
IR has its limitations, such as line of sight and whatnot, but with 100Mbit speeds, its worth another look now.
I've seen a lot of stuff about WinFS and I do RTFA, but I'm still a little puzzled. Is this supposed to be like a labeling file-system where instead of having folders you apply labels to each file (document, music, etc.) similar to Google Mail's system? That's what I think of when I think of "relational" as in database design.
But from what I've heard, WinFS sits atop of NTFS and simply connects it to a SQL database for indexing. How the hell is this revolutionary. You could place all your files in a "My Documents" folder and then make a nice pretty front end to it, categorizing each file, and then hacking the file chooser to use your interface.
I really think Microsoft should have though harder about this and made it a real filesystem with a new structure and layout on disk. It could have really be different and revolunatory, but from what I can tell, it's just a layer now and offers nothing really new or innovative.
Geeze, no image verification, no e-mail verification...it's like they don't even care. Oh yea they don't. I wonder how many Seemore Butts or Ipee Freely will be included on that DVD that include on the craft.
So does this mean the probe will somehow connect with the borg and turn into a living being that returns to earth 50,000 years later like one of the worst Sci-Fi movies out of a certain series I won't mention?
I went to school in a place called Cookeville. It was only about an hour and a half away from the city of Chattanooga where I grew up, and before I knew it, I totally hated the small town feel. Cookeville was a place where old people went to die and it drained the life out of everyone there.
If you're thinking about going to Tennessee Tech, don't! It's the worst school in Tennessee; probably the entire south.
While there a lot of my friends got jobs in call centers for SunTrust Bank. There was even a data center there for Fleetguard and the traditional factories.
I guess if you dig that environment, it's not to bad. They did have a wallmart and a StarBucks on campus.
I do miss the $300/2 bed room places sometimes compared to living back in the city, and the nice parks and waterfalls, but other than that I really don't miss bumble-fuck backwater America.
So are all these web masters so stupid they don't know how to make a simple robots.txt file? I mean seriously...it's not that hard people!
Seriously, do we need this much coverage of Google? Hey look google now does this and now does that and now does stuff that's been OFFERED BY EVERYONE ELSE.
Granded they do make things better than everyone else, but it's really getting old. There should be a limit to 1 google article a week.
You're being sarcastic right?
None of google's websites have a DOCTYPE nor do they validate. If anything Microsoft is trying harder to conform to web standards than Google!
The reason for their distribution pattern is a little to prevent abuse, a little to create a community network and to be honest, it was a really good beta testing idea.
It prevents spammers auto-registering a ton (if someone starts to invite a bunch of spam bots, you can easily trace and break the propagation chain) and prevented the server from being overloaded during the initial run.
From a Computer Science and Social Engineering standpoint, it was/is a good setup. Get over it.
I can't remember who it's from, famous mathematician, who said, "All models are wrong, but some are useful."
A corrolation in data doesn't mean causation. Even an 80% corolation isn't enough to say A causes B. And even if you get 98%, you still haven't explained why.
I agree totally. Playing GTA3 doesn't make me want to go out and kill people, but the driving force in articles like these is that "It will make you kill people."
I hate the arguement "Not everyone who plays violent games will kill people; not everyone who watches a Lexus ad buys a Lexus, but some do..."
That doesn't make any sense no matter how you phrase it. Buying a car for transportation due to a suggestive ad and killing someone are two unrelatable concepts. The biggest difference being the game doesn't advocate killing people, it's just done in pretend land. Unlike a car simulator where you drive a Lexus in a virtual world, in real life you know which fantasy is legal and which one isn't.
The core problem is social deviance. We lock people up for crimes without trying to understand why and find ways to keep others from making the same mistakes. It's so much easier to blame a video game then try and find real solutions.
...and in Europe their TV has lots of playful nudity, but they are very anti-violence, whereas here we have lots of violent stuff on basic cable, but no nudity...
Still you have Japan which has lots of both and even erotic adult cartoons, yet their crime rates are lower...and their suicide rates are higher
So what does it prove? Absolutely nothing. Come on people, think! Art reflects culture, our culture does not rise from art.
If violent games and porn are high selling items, it is because our culture wants it. Could pushing such media make people want it more? Maybe, but that doesn't change that is it because the culture brings it about.
If we really want to stop violent crimes, hate, etc, we need to attack the real problems. Attacking video games, art, etc. is a way to push the focus away from the real problems because its much much easier to boycot a game then try to give low income families the support they need to put their kids through college and pay their medical bills.
Abuse? If I can publish it on a piece of paper I should be able to put it on the Internet and in the United States, there aren't restrictions what I can put on a piece of paper or say to the masses as long as it's not obscene.
Wild West period of the Internet? Give me a break. That's what the Internet is and SHOULD BE! It is an opertunity for legit reports and amature idiots to post all their ideas and leave the masses to sort through and choose on their own who to trust.
It's the nature of the beast and I hope for the sake of real freedom, that it never changes.
Thanks to adding to the fear with your ignorance.
As far as I know, emergency personal use plain old radio to communicate with ocasional use of cell phones. They don't e-mail each other.
The phone infrastructure in place around the world is something even many 3rd world countries are familiar with and its analogue nature makes it difficult to "hack into" even with the more modern digital variants.
Sure terroist could kill Internet communication, but we did that ourselves after 9/11 when cnn.com, msnbc.com and every major news network went down from server load.
Anyone with enough technical knowledge could build a jammer to kill radio communication for police. You could blow up a switching station and kill phone communication for entire blocks.
Sure people can communicate anonymously in Internet cafes, but when we start getting paranoid, we start violating civil rights. Anonymous communication is a good thing in many cases. If an employe finds out his companies product had a dangerous flaw, he can get the message out without risking his identity and job.
We've know terroist use electronic communication for a long time. It just means the US intellegence needs to work overtime to get the right information while not violating anyone's civil rights.
The article is madly extensive. I'm sure most rocket scientists or MEs/EEs will enjoy it. As a computer scientist, I'm just chugging through it.
I remember learning in Software Engineering II that NASA recomends less than 10% code resuse. The reason goes back to a rocket launched by Europe. The ESU designed navigation code written in Ada. They wanted to avoid writing an exception class, so they mathmatically proved the exception could never occur.
Years later they reused the navigation code on a new rocket, but the specifications for the rocket changed. The navigation system failed because it couldn't convert an int (I believe it was a 16-bit to a 64-bit int or something like that).
So now we're trying to reuse a lot of the old components. NASA is insane about testing and redundancy so I'm sure they'll retro-test every new component they make with all the old parts, but in the long run I really wish congress would just give them the funding they need to make a good spacecraft that will last several decades like the current shuttle has.
Sumdog
My ears are sensetive and I've never been able to get use to the high pitch whine from home theater style DLP projectors (under $1k). I use a Viewsonic LCD now and the quality is much better, not to mention it doesn't hurt my ears
Sumit
It's true. The SR-71, once in the air, has no fuel. The seals under the tanks can't hold with that massive amount of heat. It's leaking fuel as it takes off. Once in the air and at full burn, the titanium expands and fills in the cracks, but the SR-71 has to be refuled in-flight right after takeoff.
In the two years since the shuttle program has been grounded, you think out goverment could have pumped more money into NASA to build a new transport craft.
The Space Shuttle fleet is decades old technologically speaking and desperatly needs to be retired. There have been several attempts. I think it was the X2 I watched live collapse as one of its tripod legs broke.
The shuttle simply shouldn't even be in use today. I realize the cost of a replacment design would probably reach into the billions, which seems like an awful waste of money with all the problems we face here on the Earth, but it is something that NASA and Congress have put off for way too long. The shuttle needs to be retired.
-Sumit
I like your argument. You read the article and supported your claims.