Re:How's it feel to be a middle man?
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The thing is, as more of those jobs move to overseas they bring the standard of living in those countries up. As the standard of living goes up, so does the salary those overseas workers start to command. After awhile they become almost as expensive as the native labor, and have other disadvantages that will make them unattractive to companies (don't speak the language, time zone issues, etc...). I don't see the doomsday scenerio you suggest, rather I see everybody competing on a more even basis and the worldwide standard of living improving.
Re:Some words it needs to attract the slashdot cro
on
A Word a Day
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· Score: 1
This reminds me, wouldn't it be great to incorperate the word-of-the-day functionality into the moderation system? That'd keep the moderators on their toes (or at least on their dictionaries). Besides there are a lot of AC posts that make me pine for a -1 Emetic moderation.
Dunno if it is US power, but with all laptops I've had recently (all Dells actually), the battery indicator never gets about 99% after about a month of having the laptop. After a few more months it'll never get about 98%. I always figured it was just the batteries getting older, I mean they're only like $100 to replace. I was actually rather annoyed awhile back when Dell announced that they'd replace batteries that may catch on fire (I'd had my laptop about 8 months by that point) and mine wasn't one of the suseptable ones. I was rather hoping for a free battery replacment.
Because in Windows regular user accounts almost always need the Administrator flag because lots of software won't work unless you're the administrator. Even stuff like userland applications can fail (and do fail) if you aren't administrator. Worse, they usually fail in mysterious ways, so you cannot just open up the single permission it needs to run, because it won't tell you exactly where it failed.
What's next? A Duke Nukem Forever release? I remember checking out this site back before I ever got the 3D acceleration working on FreeBSD. I'd always figured they were going the same route as Stars! Supernova Genesis. It's great to see that it's going to be Open Source as well. It'll be great to play something beyond the ancient LAN demo.
Actually the longer a series is, the more likely you are to have a long series of S or Z pieces. In fact once you start looking at "long enough" sequences you are almost guarenteed to have a long string of S or Z pieces, assuming your random number generator is truly random.
You can never play a non-losing game because the "win" is open-ended. Even if you play for a million years and never loose, you still havn't had the never-loose game. In an infinatly long game, the probabiliy of encountering the S or Z sequence is 1.
People have been clamoring for years for a cigarette that still tastes terrible, makes you smell, and kills you but doesn't get you high. I'll bet these will be really popular among the total idiot crowd.
Reminds me of an old Larry Niven quote about smoking. (sorry if I must paraphrase, I cannot remember the exact wording) "I love smoking, I think it's one of the few joys in life. If they ever make a cigarette that doesn't kill you, I'd start smoking again in a flash."
Re:They didn't SOLVE it...
on
Tetris AI System
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually, I think Tetris has been proven to be impossible to win (where "win" is defined as being able to play forever). There's a research paper that explains why.
We'll ask again in a year if your Emachine is still even running. I probably won't have to ask about the HP. Name brand may not matter, but quality of construction certainly matters.
Re:Not this crap again. - FAST FORWARD better VHS
on
Why VHS Was Better
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· Score: 1
Excellent troll. Hoping that nobody on Slashdot would have enough technical knowledge of archaic hardware to yell "bullshit".
Is he using the same mplayer I use? Lemme see. It does change aspect ratio when you resize, which is strange at best, so I'll give him that, however it does not change the aspect ratio when you go fullscreen. Most of my videos have little black bars at the top and bottom because my screen (1280x1024) isn't 4:3. No titlebars on windows? The main video window has a titlebar, the control panel doesn't. Because I use Windowmaker, I move windows around with an alt-click, but I can't give mplayer credit for that. Lousy skinned interface: yeah, but I hope he wasn't planning on using any media player for Windows, or Mac. Everybody does these stupid skins (if they havn't then it's because the product isn't finished yet it seems). The default skin is not too bad, my only major complaint being lack of DVD controls when in DVD mode. The mouse zoom thing doesn't happen for me, and mplayer rarely complains anyway.
As for complaining about the console, these program are still under development. A lot of that is debugging information. The 1.0 version will hopefully have no output unless you specify a command line switch.
Hey, the hex-colon notation isn't ugly. It's butt fugly. I mean seriously, to generate a colon on any standard keyboard, you have to hold shift and hit the semicolon key. Worse, you can't use the number pad for quick entry because there are a bunch of hex digits in there as well (plus there's no colon on the digit pad). Despite all of the talk about never needing to input an IP address again with DNS, we all know how often you are forced back to the ip only world when things go wrong.
Oh well. The avalance has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.
I guess I should have been more specific. I was referring to Computer Language Academics. Computer Scientests mostly. Some of these guys aren't happy unless the language is completely impractical for any real world use though (ever try to program a Turing machine?) Much of the time the resentment comes from languages that don't include their pet theory, like complete orthogonality or instruction set minimization. The Bioinformatics people are probably using Perl to solve the simple problems they have so they can get back to work with the stuff that really interests them.
I've always thought the negative press about Perl came from two sources:
1. Academics, who see Perl as the new BASIC. Perl wasn't designed with a lot of the "principals of language design" or whatever they're called these days. It's not orthogonal, it's a relatively modern language that isn't OO. It's not functional. Perl was designed to make simple solutions to common problems. Academics don't deal with common problems, so Perl is largely worthless in their eyes. People in the real world love it because they deal with common problems all day long and hate writing hundreds of lines of C/Java for every new problem.
One particuarly telling example (in the Camel book IIRC) was dealing with regular expressions. In a "proper" language, you would not need the "+" (match one or more of the previous item) because you already have the "*" (match 0 or more of the previous item). Hence, a+ can be written as aa* and should be eliminated. In the real world, nobody wants to retype a 14 character token.
2. People who have never programmed in Perl hate it because it uses a lot of punctuation characters.
How in the world are they supposed to expect the end user to secure the box they leased from the phone company and are told not to touch? They didn't even tell people HOW to change the password.
So heres, the situation. Joe Consumer gets a DSL modem, has it set up for him, goes through a small checklist on the sheet they provided for him, and he's online. Great. Unfortunatly his modem is now vulnerable to whatever nastyness this exploit allows. Now the Sprint guy is blaming Joe for not doing the thing they didn't tell him about?
Actually, that was where my backhanded reference for Xft came in. I've never managed to get Xft to actually pay attention to that setting ever. I've tried about half a dozen times over the past few years, and it just never seems to work. It doesn't help that the documentation for Xft is lousy to boot and that it occasionaly blows up in mysterious ways. Heck I still have a screenshot from last time I tried using Xft: Mozilla.
Wow, where do you shop? Around here, the difference between organic and regular is about 3-5x the cost. That bell pepper might cost you $2 regularly, or $6-$10 if it has that little organic sticker on it. Plus it will be smaller and probably deformed a good bit. Plus half of the time it will taste like manure. Yet people still buy them (although ALL produce around here is pretty expensive already, so people are used to it), even in the lower end grocery stores (Shoppers Food Warehouse for instance).
Yeah, I'm sure GWB is going to create a department he has no hope of ever pronouncing correctly. Can you imagine the speech where he announces the creation of this department? It would take him an hour just to get the name out.
Besides, according to the law of inverse names, it would have to be called something like "Department of Personal Rights" or something.
Actually, I've always thought that the big advantage of Windows antialiasing is that it turns off when the text is small enough. Every time I try to enable the antialiasing in FreeBSD/Linux, I discover that the mechanism to disable antialiasing below a certain pixel size is either broken or nonfunctional. Antialiasing small text makes it fuzzy and hard to read.
As a caveat, some people always hate antialising. Even in Windows they dive right for the "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts" checkbox. All programs that antialias should include a simple method for disabling it, or you are going to annoy some of your users.
If by "broke" you mean "exploded". Just because your player breaks down doesn't mean you don't have the media anymore (although you may need a screwdriver and a crowbar to get to it).
Newsflash: Zip disks have always been horribly overpriced. That's why the readers were comparatively cheap (compared to the previous generation Syquest and IOmega drives at least). That's also why nobody uses zip disks anymore, CDs are much more cost effective. Even write once CDr discs can be bought for $0.10/each down at my local Best Buy (and I don't live in a cheap area). 100Mb Zip disks cost $10/each in bulk in the same store (and just about everywhere else). Not to mention the drives are still slow as can be and fewer and fewer computers have zip drives on them at all these days (while nearly every computer has a CD-ROM on it).
While you couldn't do that (the spec for the AGP slot doesn't give you enough room above the card) for your standard product, it seems to me like you could also create a reversed product with a disclaimer that the user should verify that it fits before buying the card. Most Mobos won't have a problem and it will have the added advantage of giving your video card a clearer air intake (and will reduce the amount of heat trapped on the bottom of the card).
On the otherhand, I have seen some motherboards that stick big capacitors right above the AGP slot which would cause problems for your "HUGE" cooling solution.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, as more of those jobs move to overseas they bring the standard of living in those countries up. As the standard of living goes up, so does the salary those overseas workers start to command. After awhile they become almost as expensive as the native labor, and have other disadvantages that will make them unattractive to companies (don't speak the language, time zone issues, etc...). I don't see the doomsday scenerio you suggest, rather I see everybody competing on a more even basis and the worldwide standard of living improving.
This reminds me, wouldn't it be great to incorperate the word-of-the-day functionality into the moderation system? That'd keep the moderators on their toes (or at least on their dictionaries). Besides there are a lot of AC posts that make me pine for a -1 Emetic moderation.
Did anyone else just check their prefrences to see if there was a word-of-the-day Slashbox? I know, I was disappointed too.
Dunno if it is US power, but with all laptops I've had recently (all Dells actually), the battery indicator never gets about 99% after about a month of having the laptop. After a few more months it'll never get about 98%. I always figured it was just the batteries getting older, I mean they're only like $100 to replace. I was actually rather annoyed awhile back when Dell announced that they'd replace batteries that may catch on fire (I'd had my laptop about 8 months by that point) and mine wasn't one of the suseptable ones. I was rather hoping for a free battery replacment.
Because in Windows regular user accounts almost always need the Administrator flag because lots of software won't work unless you're the administrator. Even stuff like userland applications can fail (and do fail) if you aren't administrator. Worse, they usually fail in mysterious ways, so you cannot just open up the single permission it needs to run, because it won't tell you exactly where it failed.
What's next? A Duke Nukem Forever release? I remember checking out this site back before I ever got the 3D acceleration working on FreeBSD. I'd always figured they were going the same route as Stars! Supernova Genesis. It's great to see that it's going to be Open Source as well. It'll be great to play something beyond the ancient LAN demo.
Actually the longer a series is, the more likely you are to have a long series of S or Z pieces. In fact once you start looking at "long enough" sequences you are almost guarenteed to have a long string of S or Z pieces, assuming your random number generator is truly random.
You can never play a non-losing game because the "win" is open-ended. Even if you play for a million years and never loose, you still havn't had the never-loose game. In an infinatly long game, the probabiliy of encountering the S or Z sequence is 1.
People have been clamoring for years for a cigarette that still tastes terrible, makes you smell, and kills you but doesn't get you high. I'll bet these will be really popular among the total idiot crowd.
Reminds me of an old Larry Niven quote about smoking. (sorry if I must paraphrase, I cannot remember the exact wording) "I love smoking, I think it's one of the few joys in life. If they ever make a cigarette that doesn't kill you, I'd start smoking again in a flash."
Actually, I think Tetris has been proven to be impossible to win (where "win" is defined as being able to play forever). There's a research paper that explains why.
We'll ask again in a year if your Emachine is still even running. I probably won't have to ask about the HP. Name brand may not matter, but quality of construction certainly matters.
Excellent troll. Hoping that nobody on Slashdot would have enough technical knowledge of archaic hardware to yell "bullshit".
Is he using the same mplayer I use? Lemme see. It does change aspect ratio when you resize, which is strange at best, so I'll give him that, however it does not change the aspect ratio when you go fullscreen. Most of my videos have little black bars at the top and bottom because my screen (1280x1024) isn't 4:3. No titlebars on windows? The main video window has a titlebar, the control panel doesn't. Because I use Windowmaker, I move windows around with an alt-click, but I can't give mplayer credit for that. Lousy skinned interface: yeah, but I hope he wasn't planning on using any media player for Windows, or Mac. Everybody does these stupid skins (if they havn't then it's because the product isn't finished yet it seems). The default skin is not too bad, my only major complaint being lack of DVD controls when in DVD mode. The mouse zoom thing doesn't happen for me, and mplayer rarely complains anyway.
As for complaining about the console, these program are still under development. A lot of that is debugging information. The 1.0 version will hopefully have no output unless you specify a command line switch.
Hey, the hex-colon notation isn't ugly. It's butt fugly. I mean seriously, to generate a colon on any standard keyboard, you have to hold shift and hit the semicolon key. Worse, you can't use the number pad for quick entry because there are a bunch of hex digits in there as well (plus there's no colon on the digit pad). Despite all of the talk about never needing to input an IP address again with DNS, we all know how often you are forced back to the ip only world when things go wrong.
Oh well. The avalance has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.
I guess I should have been more specific. I was referring to Computer Language Academics. Computer Scientests mostly. Some of these guys aren't happy unless the language is completely impractical for any real world use though (ever try to program a Turing machine?) Much of the time the resentment comes from languages that don't include their pet theory, like complete orthogonality or instruction set minimization. The Bioinformatics people are probably using Perl to solve the simple problems they have so they can get back to work with the stuff that really interests them.
I've always thought the negative press about Perl came from two sources:
1. Academics, who see Perl as the new BASIC. Perl wasn't designed with a lot of the "principals of language design" or whatever they're called these days. It's not orthogonal, it's a relatively modern language that isn't OO. It's not functional. Perl was designed to make simple solutions to common problems. Academics don't deal with common problems, so Perl is largely worthless in their eyes. People in the real world love it because they deal with common problems all day long and hate writing hundreds of lines of C/Java for every new problem. One particuarly telling example (in the Camel book IIRC) was dealing with regular expressions. In a "proper" language, you would not need the "+" (match one or more of the previous item) because you already have the "*" (match 0 or more of the previous item). Hence, a+ can be written as aa* and should be eliminated. In the real world, nobody wants to retype a 14 character token.
2. People who have never programmed in Perl hate it because it uses a lot of punctuation characters.
How in the world are they supposed to expect the end user to secure the box they leased from the phone company and are told not to touch? They didn't even tell people HOW to change the password.
So heres, the situation. Joe Consumer gets a DSL modem, has it set up for him, goes through a small checklist on the sheet they provided for him, and he's online. Great. Unfortunatly his modem is now vulnerable to whatever nastyness this exploit allows. Now the Sprint guy is blaming Joe for not doing the thing they didn't tell him about?
Actually, that was where my backhanded reference for Xft came in. I've never managed to get Xft to actually pay attention to that setting ever. I've tried about half a dozen times over the past few years, and it just never seems to work. It doesn't help that the documentation for Xft is lousy to boot and that it occasionaly blows up in mysterious ways. Heck I still have a screenshot from last time I tried using Xft: Mozilla.
That's fine, but I'd better not be hearing you complain about how Slashdot has gone downhill since Taco added the customizeable moderation options.
Wow, where do you shop? Around here, the difference between organic and regular is about 3-5x the cost. That bell pepper might cost you $2 regularly, or $6-$10 if it has that little organic sticker on it. Plus it will be smaller and probably deformed a good bit. Plus half of the time it will taste like manure. Yet people still buy them (although ALL produce around here is pretty expensive already, so people are used to it), even in the lower end grocery stores (Shoppers Food Warehouse for instance).
Yeah, I'm sure GWB is going to create a department he has no hope of ever pronouncing correctly. Can you imagine the speech where he announces the creation of this department? It would take him an hour just to get the name out.
Besides, according to the law of inverse names, it would have to be called something like "Department of Personal Rights" or something.
Actually, I've always thought that the big advantage of Windows antialiasing is that it turns off when the text is small enough. Every time I try to enable the antialiasing in FreeBSD/Linux, I discover that the mechanism to disable antialiasing below a certain pixel size is either broken or nonfunctional. Antialiasing small text makes it fuzzy and hard to read.
As a caveat, some people always hate antialising. Even in Windows they dive right for the "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts" checkbox. All programs that antialias should include a simple method for disabling it, or you are going to annoy some of your users.
If by "broke" you mean "exploded". Just because your player breaks down doesn't mean you don't have the media anymore (although you may need a screwdriver and a crowbar to get to it).
Newsflash: Zip disks have always been horribly overpriced. That's why the readers were comparatively cheap (compared to the previous generation Syquest and IOmega drives at least). That's also why nobody uses zip disks anymore, CDs are much more cost effective. Even write once CDr discs can be bought for $0.10/each down at my local Best Buy (and I don't live in a cheap area). 100Mb Zip disks cost $10/each in bulk in the same store (and just about everywhere else). Not to mention the drives are still slow as can be and fewer and fewer computers have zip drives on them at all these days (while nearly every computer has a CD-ROM on it).
Since the primary market for these things is cars, yes. They don't use directional antennas because of that.
While you couldn't do that (the spec for the AGP slot doesn't give you enough room above the card) for your standard product, it seems to me like you could also create a reversed product with a disclaimer that the user should verify that it fits before buying the card. Most Mobos won't have a problem and it will have the added advantage of giving your video card a clearer air intake (and will reduce the amount of heat trapped on the bottom of the card).
On the otherhand, I have seen some motherboards that stick big capacitors right above the AGP slot which would cause problems for your "HUGE" cooling solution.