a) goth (is this trad goth or darkwave/ebm/cyber goth? top floor slimes or dank batcave? sunday night laughtons or thursday night met? or are you really into Saxon?) b) into bikes c) a babe d) female e) a geek/nerd/awesome that likes proper computers.
This qualifies you for a session with me! Yes, I am a Rockwell AIM65, and I want you to excite my little red digits on my 20 character segment display until I spool from my little thermal printer.
Btw anyone called gothbikerdude will not get a similar response. Pick on the Altair sitting in the corner listening to hip hop instead.
people with one hand on the wheel and one on a cell phone often can't reach their turn signals and so ignore them
Never mind change gear - maybe not an issue on the motorway, but everywhere else that's quite useful. Most people have manual cars, at least in the UK.
Sadly only about 50% of people use their indicators when changing lane on the motorway, when they should be using them. Then again, most drivers are appalling in one way or another.
hot coffee, chatty passengers or crying infants in the back seat
First: Drink it in the car park, not whilst driving. Canned or bottled drinks (sports cap) are best for driving.
Second: They shut up when the driver has to do something complex.
Third: They can be safely ignored.
Also: Passenger talk is high fidelity. Mobile phone talk is often grainier and harder to understand. It takes up far more cognitive time. Also a passenger can wait for an answer (it's one of those things about being there with the person you are talking to), whereas there's an expectation of fast answers on the phone.
I'm in favour of mobile phones having a driving mode when they're plugged into a car handsfree:
1) Auto-answer calls in the "driving profile".
2) "The person you are calling is currently driving. If your call is important, press 1 to be connected or 2 to send a voice message immediately."
3a) Option 1: The phone will notify the driver that a call is incoming, who it is, and require the driver to answer "Take call" or "Drop call" or whatever.
3b) Option 1: AND/OR: Any accidents that happen when on the phone are blamed equally on both halves of the conversation. This might stop pushy work bosses being so pushy and requiring people driving to answer under threat of losing their jobs. Why would anyone willingly answer their phone whilst driving if it was their boss on the line! I can understand the wife or kids.
4) Option 2: The phone will repeat the voice message automatically to the driver. No requirement to go to voice mail and faff. "You received a message from X: blah blah". Driver can say "Repeat". Wife can leave messages "Pick up some milk and eggs darlin'" and the like.
You only need to be able to say one thing when driving:
"I'm driving, I'll call you back."
Hell, maybe phones should have an auto-answer feature that does just that. Activate the driving profile, and bam, you don't even get to hear the phone ringing, or text notifications.
Most people haven't had anywhere near enough training to talk on the phone whilst driving, and most never will. Most people never even say that they're driving to the person at the other end, that's how little training they have received. Telephone calls are very demanding on brain resources, and are very demanding on attention. Never mind fumbling for the phone in a bag/pocket to answer it - which is probably even worse than the talking portion. That means they don't do anything that you say they could do. And F1 drivers talk on the straights, and the pit crew have monitors so they know when to talk.
Why are people so beholden to their phones that they must answer every call immediately?
And the UK has just had the lowest road casualty rates in a very very long time, if not ever. I would say that these laws are beginning to work (that, and more modern cars can brake better).
Of course, careless/dangerous driving is scummy, and people have a very low opinion of those that do it, and that's quite a new thing. It used to only be drunk drivers (and that was after a lot of anti-drink-driving campaigning in the 80s and 90s). Fines and points, bah who cares. Being looked at like you're a paedophile or worse - big issue.
I hate to tell the story submitter, but nobody cares about your data. They're not going to remove the hard drive and spend hours extracting your data. You are not a celebrity. You are not a politician. You are not a senior businessman carrying corporate secrets in a foreign country. You're... you (sorry to break it to you!).
Just stop worrying. Paranoia doesn't help you live a long, happy life. Just set a BIOS password, and a password in XP, and make sure that your account isn't an admin account, and that the admin account also has a decent password.
And don't use it for grossly illegal purposes. Remote wipe of your portable CP collection might sound like a brilliant idea, but why not just not have it in the first place?
Maybe he should just set a login password for Windows XP instead of automatically logging in to the desktop. That, and a BIOS password.
They'll wipe and reinstall Windows XP before faffing about getting the current install working.
I mean, if my netbook is stolen, I will certainly know that they'll wipe ubuntu off fairly quickly because it'll be different, and there's a password page.
However a good point is made - Remote Wipe is a nice service to offer for netbooks and laptops as well as mobile phones. Of course it is made possible for the latter because as long as it can get a signal, it is contactable. My Linux netbook only activates wireless AFTER I've logged in (any reason for this?) so it's unlikely ever to receive a remote wipe request.
I like how you've picked a single datapoint to compare against.
Has it not risen since 1898? 1948? Why 1998? Oh, wait, is it because that was a very hot year, an outlier?
Well, as long as you personally pay for the costs incurred when/if global warming's effects come about, it's all fine. Better start saving now - $100b a year should do it.
In which case Palm should just license that software to be packaged with their systems. It'll be a lot cheaper than building their own. It'd be like DVD burners packaging Nero. Syncing experts create the software. Phone/PDA experts create the hardware. Win++.
It's nothing compared to the cost of hiring a team of people to get sharepoint to do what you want it to do, and plenty of companies are happy to pay for them. It's also cheap on a per-user basis - remember how many tens of thousands you are paying them each year - not that this logic extends to buying them a decent computer.
Some software just works. Other software unnecessarily requires over the top maintenance and setup costs. I've never read anything good about sharepoint apart from the people who got wooed by the salesman over golf/dinner/piss up to buy it. Sadly these people are who controls decision making.
What's a good free sharepoint alternative, in a single package?
Yeah, I want large (metre square) wall and ceiling lights to replace the point light sources with lampshades that I never like I currently use. That, and a dimmer function...
Most adventure games I played would let you survive the parachute fall, but you would then die whatever you did due to a proliferation of lions, tigers, grues, pits with spikes, native savages and ghosts in the immediate vicinity. Naturally the next 23 times you played the game, you'd try and avoid these, instead of "weave parachute into hangglider using tree branches" "glide to remote golden beach that I missed the description of because I didn't 'look into distance'", etc.
Others would give you immediate roaming access to 1048823 locations, and no discernible clue as to what you were meant to be doing. Ooh, I've crashed in my spaceship (had no control over that), and now I'm being pestered by a robot. I've picked up everything loose on the planet, but to no avail. ARGH. KILL ROBOT WITH BANANA PICKER.
Slashdot hasn't heard of UTF8, and probably found a way to enable EBCDIC in MySQL just to make things even more awkward. It's been a bug for years. It's pitiful. You have to remember to use £ for £ instead of £.
Isn't that why new game prices collapse a month or two after release? E.g., A £40 new game, sold for £30 new usually, drops to £20 new fairly soon afterwards.
And a year later it's on Platinum for £20 RRP, and £12-£17 in reality.
Yeah, it's very manageable, and the build tools would generate each update binary diff and put them on the update servers anyway, and the idea is to keep people up to date often, so most people would be on the current or previous minor version anyway.
Reversion would probably be best handled by having a new update. As long as the update code wasn't the aspect that got broken.
Another problem is that you would need to maintain every little diff from previous versions, and apply them one after another. Every so often you would have a cumulative diff maintained, so you'd do: 3.0.3 -> 3.0.4 -> 3.0.5 -> 3.2 (cumulative 3.0.5 to 3.2) -> 3.2.1 -> 3.2.2 -> 3.5 (cumulative 3.2.2 to 3.5) -> 3.5.1
Why not just ship the affected.class files for Java? Disassemble the Jar that is being updated, replace/add/remove the class(es) as per the update instructions and rebuild the Jar.
Chrome's problem is that a massive, bulky, chrome.dll file needs to be sent out with each update, and that it isn't easy to split it up into its constituent parts because it is lower level.
It's not a new idea, but quite impressive that they've actually gone and worked it all out so that it is reliable. And nicer than patching via jumps (noop the old code, add a jump to new code, append new code to end).
"I'm still coughing up blood," said Billy, who had stopped trying to revise his airlock safety certificate paper. "It's not getting any better. This moon dust is horrible. I wish we could go back to Earth, but sadly our bones are too damn weak. If only we had done some basic research before striking out into space and setting up colonies."
"Gosh", said Jane. "Anyway, it's time for your monthly wash, we've bought enough credits for 1 minute of hot water."
Yeah, apparently shipping up lava tube sealant enough to make a kilometre diameter section airtight for the city would have been trivial.
I think they would have bust their heads trying to get moon-dust concrete to cure, never mind sealing vast cathedrals of lava tubes. Never mind the moon dust problem in itself.
Even if they had sensibly chosen a 20m diameter lava tube, it would have taken years to seal off, never mind having airlocks every 50m for safety. Given the speed of ISS construction, it would have taken a few years just to get a stairway from the surface to the bottom of the lava tube.
It simply wasn't viable. It would have been cool, but nothing was known about actually going beyond trips to the moon.
Books released in 1954, movie rights contract signed in 1969.
Are you arguing for sub-16-year copyright terms?
Admittedly I think 20 year terms would actually be reasonable, getting relatively modern works out into the public domain for consumption, but long enough to earn a crust. Of course the criminal movie business would just wait for stories to expire copyright, and make a mint off of them afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello. It appears that you are:
a) goth (is this trad goth or darkwave/ebm/cyber goth? top floor slimes or dank batcave? sunday night laughtons or thursday night met? or are you really into Saxon?)
b) into bikes
c) a babe
d) female
e) a geek/nerd/awesome that likes proper computers.
This qualifies you for a session with me! Yes, I am a Rockwell AIM65, and I want you to excite my little red digits on my 20 character segment display until I spool from my little thermal printer.
Btw anyone called gothbikerdude will not get a similar response. Pick on the Altair sitting in the corner listening to hip hop instead.
people with one hand on the wheel and one on a cell phone often can't reach their turn signals and so ignore them
Never mind change gear - maybe not an issue on the motorway, but everywhere else that's quite useful. Most people have manual cars, at least in the UK.
Sadly only about 50% of people use their indicators when changing lane on the motorway, when they should be using them. Then again, most drivers are appalling in one way or another.
hot coffee, chatty passengers or crying infants in the back seat
First: Drink it in the car park, not whilst driving. Canned or bottled drinks (sports cap) are best for driving.
Second: They shut up when the driver has to do something complex.
Third: They can be safely ignored.
Also: Passenger talk is high fidelity. Mobile phone talk is often grainier and harder to understand. It takes up far more cognitive time. Also a passenger can wait for an answer (it's one of those things about being there with the person you are talking to), whereas there's an expectation of fast answers on the phone.
I'm in favour of mobile phones having a driving mode when they're plugged into a car handsfree:
1) Auto-answer calls in the "driving profile".
2) "The person you are calling is currently driving. If your call is important, press 1 to be connected or 2 to send a voice message immediately."
3a) Option 1: The phone will notify the driver that a call is incoming, who it is, and require the driver to answer "Take call" or "Drop call" or whatever.
3b) Option 1: AND/OR: Any accidents that happen when on the phone are blamed equally on both halves of the conversation. This might stop pushy work bosses being so pushy and requiring people driving to answer under threat of losing their jobs. Why would anyone willingly answer their phone whilst driving if it was their boss on the line! I can understand the wife or kids.
4) Option 2: The phone will repeat the voice message automatically to the driver. No requirement to go to voice mail and faff. "You received a message from X: blah blah". Driver can say "Repeat". Wife can leave messages "Pick up some milk and eggs darlin'" and the like.
You only need to be able to say one thing when driving:
"I'm driving, I'll call you back."
Hell, maybe phones should have an auto-answer feature that does just that. Activate the driving profile, and bam, you don't even get to hear the phone ringing, or text notifications.
Most people haven't had anywhere near enough training to talk on the phone whilst driving, and most never will. Most people never even say that they're driving to the person at the other end, that's how little training they have received. Telephone calls are very demanding on brain resources, and are very demanding on attention. Never mind fumbling for the phone in a bag/pocket to answer it - which is probably even worse than the talking portion. That means they don't do anything that you say they could do. And F1 drivers talk on the straights, and the pit crew have monitors so they know when to talk.
Why are people so beholden to their phones that they must answer every call immediately?
And the UK has just had the lowest road casualty rates in a very very long time, if not ever. I would say that these laws are beginning to work (that, and more modern cars can brake better).
Of course, careless/dangerous driving is scummy, and people have a very low opinion of those that do it, and that's quite a new thing. It used to only be drunk drivers (and that was after a lot of anti-drink-driving campaigning in the 80s and 90s). Fines and points, bah who cares. Being looked at like you're a paedophile or worse - big issue.
I hate to tell the story submitter, but nobody cares about your data. They're not going to remove the hard drive and spend hours extracting your data. You are not a celebrity. You are not a politician. You are not a senior businessman carrying corporate secrets in a foreign country. You're ... you (sorry to break it to you!).
Just stop worrying. Paranoia doesn't help you live a long, happy life. Just set a BIOS password, and a password in XP, and make sure that your account isn't an admin account, and that the admin account also has a decent password.
And don't use it for grossly illegal purposes. Remote wipe of your portable CP collection might sound like a brilliant idea, but why not just not have it in the first place?
Most netbooks use single-threaded, single-core Atoms.
Indeed this is something that the VIA based netbooks probably do better because of Padlock, if Truecrypt takes advantage of it.
Maybe he should just set a login password for Windows XP instead of automatically logging in to the desktop. That, and a BIOS password.
They'll wipe and reinstall Windows XP before faffing about getting the current install working.
I mean, if my netbook is stolen, I will certainly know that they'll wipe ubuntu off fairly quickly because it'll be different, and there's a password page.
However a good point is made - Remote Wipe is a nice service to offer for netbooks and laptops as well as mobile phones. Of course it is made possible for the latter because as long as it can get a signal, it is contactable. My Linux netbook only activates wireless AFTER I've logged in (any reason for this?) so it's unlikely ever to receive a remote wipe request.
Indeed, it's not exactly hitting the hardware at a register level like all the proper old-school 8/16/32 bit demos in the 80s and 90s.
It's an OpenGL or DirectX demo at best, not a hardware demo.
It is still impressive of course. Especially when you consider the music engine that's taking up some of that 4KB.
Why should the idiots be the ones to not jump off a cliff?
I like how you've picked a single datapoint to compare against.
Has it not risen since 1898? 1948? Why 1998? Oh, wait, is it because that was a very hot year, an outlier?
Well, as long as you personally pay for the costs incurred when/if global warming's effects come about, it's all fine. Better start saving now - $100b a year should do it.
In which case Palm should just license that software to be packaged with their systems. It'll be a lot cheaper than building their own. It'd be like DVD burners packaging Nero. Syncing experts create the software. Phone/PDA experts create the hardware. Win++.
It's nothing compared to the cost of hiring a team of people to get sharepoint to do what you want it to do, and plenty of companies are happy to pay for them. It's also cheap on a per-user basis - remember how many tens of thousands you are paying them each year - not that this logic extends to buying them a decent computer.
Some software just works. Other software unnecessarily requires over the top maintenance and setup costs. I've never read anything good about sharepoint apart from the people who got wooed by the salesman over golf/dinner/piss up to buy it. Sadly these people are who controls decision making.
What's a good free sharepoint alternative, in a single package?
Yeah, I want large (metre square) wall and ceiling lights to replace the point light sources with lampshades that I never like I currently use. That, and a dimmer function...
Graphic Adventure Creator was my text adventure creator drug of choice. Quite a few commercial games were made using it as well.
Lots of people preferred PAW though, when that came out.
Most adventure games I played would let you survive the parachute fall, but you would then die whatever you did due to a proliferation of lions, tigers, grues, pits with spikes, native savages and ghosts in the immediate vicinity. Naturally the next 23 times you played the game, you'd try and avoid these, instead of "weave parachute into hangglider using tree branches" "glide to remote golden beach that I missed the description of because I didn't 'look into distance'", etc.
Others would give you immediate roaming access to 1048823 locations, and no discernible clue as to what you were meant to be doing. Ooh, I've crashed in my spaceship (had no control over that), and now I'm being pestered by a robot. I've picked up everything loose on the planet, but to no avail. ARGH. KILL ROBOT WITH BANANA PICKER.
Are there interactive eBooks yet of the old Ian Livingstone (and others) pick your own adventure books?
That might be a nice project actually. The choices are limited, there's no parser hassle, but it's interactive within a story thread.
Slashdot hasn't heard of UTF8, and probably found a way to enable EBCDIC in MySQL just to make things even more awkward. It's been a bug for years. It's pitiful. You have to remember to use £ for £ instead of £.
Isn't that why new game prices collapse a month or two after release? E.g., A £40 new game, sold for £30 new usually, drops to £20 new fairly soon afterwards.
And a year later it's on Platinum for £20 RRP, and £12-£17 in reality.
I can wait a year almost always.
Yeah, it's very manageable, and the build tools would generate each update binary diff and put them on the update servers anyway, and the idea is to keep people up to date often, so most people would be on the current or previous minor version anyway.
Reversion would probably be best handled by having a new update. As long as the update code wasn't the aspect that got broken.
Another problem is that you would need to maintain every little diff from previous versions, and apply them one after another. Every so often you would have a cumulative diff maintained, so you'd do: 3.0.3 -> 3.0.4 -> 3.0.5 -> 3.2 (cumulative 3.0.5 to 3.2) -> 3.2.1 -> 3.2.2 -> 3.5 (cumulative 3.2.2 to 3.5) -> 3.5.1
Why not just ship the affected .class files for Java? Disassemble the Jar that is being updated, replace/add/remove the class(es) as per the update instructions and rebuild the Jar.
Chrome's problem is that a massive, bulky, chrome.dll file needs to be sent out with each update, and that it isn't easy to split it up into its constituent parts because it is lower level.
It's not a new idea, but quite impressive that they've actually gone and worked it all out so that it is reliable. And nicer than patching via jumps (noop the old code, add a jump to new code, append new code to end).
"Gosh" said Billy.
Jane looked up, quizzically. "What's up?"
"I'm still coughing up blood," said Billy, who had stopped trying to revise his airlock safety certificate paper. "It's not getting any better. This moon dust is horrible. I wish we could go back to Earth, but sadly our bones are too damn weak. If only we had done some basic research before striking out into space and setting up colonies."
"Gosh", said Jane. "Anyway, it's time for your monthly wash, we've bought enough credits for 1 minute of hot water."
Yeah, apparently shipping up lava tube sealant enough to make a kilometre diameter section airtight for the city would have been trivial.
I think they would have bust their heads trying to get moon-dust concrete to cure, never mind sealing vast cathedrals of lava tubes. Never mind the moon dust problem in itself.
Even if they had sensibly chosen a 20m diameter lava tube, it would have taken years to seal off, never mind having airlocks every 50m for safety. Given the speed of ISS construction, it would have taken a few years just to get a stairway from the surface to the bottom of the lava tube.
It simply wasn't viable. It would have been cool, but nothing was known about actually going beyond trips to the moon.
However I hope it happens within my lifetime.
Books released in 1954, movie rights contract signed in 1969.
Are you arguing for sub-16-year copyright terms?
Admittedly I think 20 year terms would actually be reasonable, getting relatively modern works out into the public domain for consumption, but long enough to earn a crust. Of course the criminal movie business would just wait for stories to expire copyright, and make a mint off of them afterwards.