Strange you say that, because it seems like half of the people working high-tech here in the States speaks terrible English (or is it Engrish?). From what I've seen on this thread, even if you barely speak the language, basically every country in the world is hurting so bad for IT workers that they will let you in.
Are you sure about this? Last time I checked, both GCC and VC++ did exactly this. Besides, it's not the compiler that runs the macros, it is the preprocessor. The preprocessor doesn't know anything about C syntax, and is in fact just a simple macro language tacked on to every C implementation, I've never seen a C preprocessor that understood C++ comments before, and in most of them you can even be burned by:
#define foo bar/* Some comments that are
too long to fit on a line */
Maybe the preprocessor has gotten better recently and I've just never noticed because I avoid comments on lines with macros like the plague?
Complex cumbersome apps are a big problem, but it's hopelessly naive to think the solution is to just write a new product with fewer features. It doesn't work. Even Microsoft tried that strategy once - Microsoft Write for Macintosh. It was a trimmed down version of Word 3.0 that sold for about half of Word's price. Sounds great, right? But Microsoft couldn't give it away.
That was because Microsoft was trying to compete with Write Now, which was a fabulous word processor on the Mac. I remember loading up Word on my old LC and remembering how sluggish it felt compared to good old Write Now. If only people didn't keep sending me blasted Word documents!
Actually, it's not the "Dangerously Dedicated" mode, that few people actually use. If that was the problem, you wouldn't be seeing this posted on Slashdot. The problem, as it appears now, is that IBM uses partition type 165 for it's suspend-to-disk feature, and when the bios boots it looks for a suspend-to-disk partition to reload. When it sees FreeBSD's huge partition the laptop freezes solid. Only completely wiping the disk with a "recovery CD" can bring the laptop back to life.
That will also tend to degrade your picture, if you are one of those people who really really care about getting the sharpest picture ever out of your DVD player (and into your 10 year old single coax cheapo TV).
Maybe you should spend more time looking at submicroscopic particles, bacteria, and the like. We are impossibly huge and important compared to the lowly gluon or protozoa, maybe that will make you feel all special and important. Like it's some sort of accomplishment to be larger than a bactera, or smaller than the Universe.
I had a Palm III just up and die on me one day. No combination of the buttons would bring it back to life, and I treated it with the utmost of care. Fortunatly Palm send me a replacement unit in 1 day and I've had no problems since.
Good thing HotSyncing is basically backing up your Palm every time you run it (execpt for the address book, those records never seem to make it back on the palm, Grrr). I'd bet the Palm Pilot users are among the best when it comes to backups for just this reason (even if these same people have never backed up their home/work computer).
Well, the problem is you have to get Mir outside of Earth's gravity well. This would basically involve filling the thing with fuel, attaching a booster, and sending up several refuel missions during its long long burn (during which it would probablly break up and fall back to Earth uncontrolled and full of explosive rocket fuel.) Basically, it is approximatly 1000x easier to just calculate a coarse trajectory that will land it in the pacific ocean (not a small target) and send it down there with the little bit of fuel Mir has left. I suspect the "controlled decent" part means that the Russians will try to light off the rockets at approximatly the right time for Mir to land in the ocean, and nothing more.
The thing is, Iridium antennas are much taller than regular cell phone antennas (they reach over the users head), plus they point upward, so most of the radiation is directed away from your head.
Alias/Wavefront has plugins for Maya that simulate hair/cloth, and has had them for quite some time. I've seen demos with hair/cloth turned on that are quite stunning. Unfortunatly I can't seem to find the link on their webpage
Alias/Wavefront, but they have a
demo movies section. In particular, watch
Bingo and look at the small girl's dress. This
is an old demo, but I think they used an early
version of the cloth plugin to make it (which is why the dress looks a little plasticy).
Not yet. DivX;-) is an extremely processer intensive codec to encode. Until you have an MPEG 4 encoder card (which exist, but are not widespread yet) or a very fast processer, your computer won't be able to encode the stream fast enough. In a couple of years computers should be fast enough to encode DivX;-) in realtime, if we're still using it then.
What mother would ever sacrifice her child to save herself?
Er, I think in the majority of these cases, when the mother dies, so does her unborn child. So the question might be better worded as: What mother would refuse to allow the doctor to save her life?
Besides, even if the child can be saved, it will be born motherless (perhaps even parentless if the father is dead/gone). Certainly we already have plenly of orphans in the world (just ask around in the Balkans). Besides, as cold as it sounds, the mother can have another child later after recovering from having to sacrafice her unborn child to save herself.
Finally, isn't it a sin to commit suicide? Isn't this what the mother does when she doesn't get an abortion when the growing child will kill both of them?
Because when you are trapped on a standard MS box (with no permissions to install anything) the only thing you have is telnet. Windows doesn't ship with ssh, but it does come with a program named "telnet" (although weather it really counts is debatable).
Quite franky, you cannot assume that you will have SSH access anywhere you go. I still have telnet turned on back home because many firewall admins only allow HTTP and Telnet traffic through the firewall. Also, many PHB types won't allow you to install sshd because it is "open source" and therefore unreliable in their view. (For some reason people don't consder telnet open source, go figure).
You missed the point. Why are people going to bother buying a $200 DVD player when their VCR works just fine (and all of the movies still come out on VHS)? However, if they buy a PS2 they might start looking at those couple of shelves of DVDs at BallBuster. Really, for most people, there is no reason to buy a DVD player yet, since their VCR works fine (and the DVD player doesn't let them time-shift (a term they don't even know)), but the PS2 is super keen an nifty, and omygosh, it can play DVDs too!
(Sorry if this post shows up twice, Mozilla acted a little funny there).
Man, Bush is going to take a beating for some of his stated opinions above. More money for the War on Drugs? Lock up more people for nonviolent drug offenses? He might as well advocate making the internet illegal and suggest that anyone reading slashdot is a dingleberry. In fact, in almost every comment posted, I could hear thousands of Slashdot readers shouting in unison "Wrong Cretin!". At least Haglin isn't likely to draw a lot of flak (his answers seemed downright sane in comparison.)
All I can say is: On election day, may the better man win. Even if I don't belive this is going to happen.
But the jokes on you, since you didn't beat them, xboard did. (Actually whoever developed xboard did). Really, all you showed was a willingness to let the other person play the computer using your computer instead of theirs for the opponent, wasting your time but not theirs (they came for a game of Chess, they got a game of Chess).
You lose.:)
hahahahaha
PS: Why you felt the need to advertise your modest hardware is a mystery to me.
There are marked advantages to console systems, like fighting / puzzle games, which have never achieved success on the PC. Just as RTS, and FPS will probably never be serious on the consoles. I have yet to see a viable version of Street Fighter, or Tekken appear on my PC. Also, console games rarely have bugs. How many Quake 3, UT, Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft patches have you downloaded? Its nice and simple.
This isn't entirely fair. Many console games have bugs (and they are just plain never fixed). Usually these aren't the showstoppers you find in PC games fortunatly, however the multitude of Starcraft patches (for example) have been to fine tune the play balance of the game and to fix extremly obscure network exploits. There was only one actual "crash the game" bug fixed that I can remember, and it was some sort of oddity with the last Terrain campaign that triggered only very rarely AFAIK. One of the weaknesses for consoles is that you can't patch a game once it is released (which DOES lead to better release quality games) which can lead to games with festering bugs. Just look how many people say character x is the only character I play, because that character is slightly (or sometimes grossly) unbalanced. Of course these munchkins also wonder why nobody wants to play with them.
Because congress won't let them. Apparently the Census folks asked Congress if they could use statistical sampling to improve their accuracy and Congress said no. Apparently older richer people are more likely to fill out Census forms, which determines how funding is distributed. With the current system, richer neighborhoods tend to recieve more money proportionally than poorer neighborhoods. Some well connected people apparently didn't want to give that up.
Personally I can't really see the justification behind forcing everyone to fill out these forms anymore.
I think you're thinking of the Atari 2600, not the Nintendo. The C64 was a much more limited gaming platform than the Nintendo (the lack of tiled backgrounds, scrollable buffers, per scanline interrupts, and multi-window modes made the C64 much more limited than a Nintendo). Of course it has been so long since I fired up a C64 that I may be talking out of my ass.
Until you try to get broadband into every bar/pub/arcade/K-Mart in the country and realize that most of these places have a tough enough time getting phone lines installed. A couple of weeks ago I went down to the Radio Shack in the mall (seems they were giving away free barcode readers;) and I noticed that they were showing "internet connections" using a standard dialup, worse apparently the store only had one dialup line, so whever someone went and showed off "that internet thingie" the people at the counter would have to wait (apparently there computers have to be dialed up to do anything). Talking to the guy behind the counter, I learned that they had applied for an ISDN line (the only kind of "broadband" you can get in the mall) over 6 months ago and still hadn't recieved it. Is this the kind of hassle you want people to face when they put your box in their back room? No, most owners would just return it and buy something that didn't require them to deal with the phone company.
Hey, this could be an interesting busines strategy for cruise lines and the like that own their own islands. Just get a top level domain registered for you island (say Sexopia or Moviegaria or something) and sell off your tld to the highest bidder.
If that isn't enough, you might even be able to change the name of your country and get ANOTHER tld to sell off. Or maybe I'm just nuts.
I don't think the Feds should get involved with filters at all. I believe the decision rests in the hands of the cities and counties alone. What is offensive in one county may not be so in another county. Forcing everyone to the same "standard" od morality is rediculus.
Why should Cities and Counties get involved with filters at all? If you don't think the federal government should mandate filter usage, why stop at the city and county level? Why not bring it down the family or even personal level? Your last line is especially telling in this regard. Forcing everybody in a city or county to the same "standard" of morality is rediculous. Personally, I think it rests with the family unit, as they are generally considered the place where morality and ethics are tought (although church and school play a role, the family has the lions share of the responsiblity).
At this point in time, filters are less than worthless. When the technology gets to the point where it bolcks 99.99% over "inoffensive" material and 0% of the "non-offensive" material then let them install them.
But this is in direct opposition to your previous point. 99.99% of the "offensive" material (I hope you don't want filters blocking most "inoffensive" material!) in one family/community is going to be different than 99.99% of the offensive material in another family/community. One of the inherent limitations in filter technology today it that it assumes everyone has the ideas on what makes something "offensive." There are no doubt some communities that don't find sex offensive, but are offended by violence (directly opposite of the current filter implementations). The only compromise I can think of is a configuration screen with a series of checkboxes like: 1. nudity, 2. anti-semetic, 3. non-christian, etc..., although I doubt a system like this is feasable (it is very hard to categorize topics like this, many people are very passionate on the subject and will attack your decisions no matter how valid you think they are).
Slashdot Mirror
Strange you say that, because it seems like half of the people working high-tech here in the States speaks terrible English (or is it Engrish?). From what I've seen on this thread, even if you barely speak the language, basically every country in the world is hurting so bad for IT workers that they will let you in.
Are you sure about this? Last time I checked, both GCC and VC++ did exactly this. Besides, it's not the compiler that runs the macros, it is the preprocessor. The preprocessor doesn't know anything about C syntax, and is in fact just a simple macro language tacked on to every C implementation, I've never seen a C preprocessor that understood C++ comments before, and in most of them you can even be burned by:
/* Some comments that are
#define foo bar
too long to fit on a line */
Maybe the preprocessor has gotten better recently and I've just never noticed because I avoid comments on lines with macros like the plague?
Complex cumbersome apps are a big problem, but it's hopelessly naive to think the solution is to just write a new product with fewer features. It doesn't work. Even Microsoft tried that strategy once - Microsoft Write for Macintosh. It was a trimmed down version of Word 3.0 that sold for about half of Word's price. Sounds great, right? But Microsoft couldn't give it away.
That was because Microsoft was trying to compete with Write Now, which was a fabulous word processor on the Mac. I remember loading up Word on my old LC and remembering how sluggish it felt compared to good old Write Now. If only people didn't keep sending me blasted Word documents!
Actually, it's not the "Dangerously Dedicated" mode, that few people actually use. If that was the problem, you wouldn't be seeing this posted on Slashdot. The problem, as it appears now, is that IBM uses partition type 165 for it's suspend-to-disk feature, and when the bios boots it looks for a suspend-to-disk partition to reload. When it sees FreeBSD's huge partition the laptop freezes solid. Only completely wiping the disk with a "recovery CD" can bring the laptop back to life.
That will also tend to degrade your picture, if you are one of those people who really really care about getting the sharpest picture ever out of your DVD player (and into your 10 year old single coax cheapo TV).
Maybe you should spend more time looking at submicroscopic particles, bacteria, and the like. We are impossibly huge and important compared to the lowly gluon or protozoa, maybe that will make you feel all special and important. Like it's some sort of accomplishment to be larger than a bactera, or smaller than the Universe.
I had a Palm III just up and die on me one day. No combination of the buttons would bring it back to life, and I treated it with the utmost of care. Fortunatly Palm send me a replacement unit in 1 day and I've had no problems since.
Good thing HotSyncing is basically backing up your Palm every time you run it (execpt for the address book, those records never seem to make it back on the palm, Grrr). I'd bet the Palm Pilot users are among the best when it comes to backups for just this reason (even if these same people have never backed up their home/work computer).
Well, the problem is you have to get Mir outside of Earth's gravity well. This would basically involve filling the thing with fuel, attaching a booster, and sending up several refuel missions during its long long burn (during which it would probablly break up and fall back to Earth uncontrolled and full of explosive rocket fuel.) Basically, it is approximatly 1000x easier to just calculate a coarse trajectory that will land it in the pacific ocean (not a small target) and send it down there with the little bit of fuel Mir has left. I suspect the "controlled decent" part means that the Russians will try to light off the rockets at approximatly the right time for Mir to land in the ocean, and nothing more.
The thing is, Iridium antennas are much taller than regular cell phone antennas (they reach over the users head), plus they point upward, so most of the radiation is directed away from your head.
Worse, you can't even legally copy copy protected media! No backups of your favorite movies, no fair use.
Alias/Wavefront has plugins for Maya that simulate hair/cloth, and has had them for quite some time. I've seen demos with hair/cloth turned on that are quite stunning. Unfortunatly I can't seem to find the link on their webpage Alias/Wavefront, but they have a demo movies section. In particular, watch Bingo and look at the small girl's dress. This is an old demo, but I think they used an early version of the cloth plugin to make it (which is why the dress looks a little plasticy).
Not yet. DivX ;-) is an extremely processer intensive codec to encode. Until you have an MPEG 4 encoder card (which exist, but are not widespread yet) or a very fast processer, your computer won't be able to encode the stream fast enough. In a couple of years computers should be fast enough to encode DivX ;-) in realtime, if we're still using it then.
What mother would ever sacrifice her child to save herself?
Er, I think in the majority of these cases, when the mother dies, so does her unborn child. So the question might be better worded as: What mother would refuse to allow the doctor to save her life?
Besides, even if the child can be saved, it will be born motherless (perhaps even parentless if the father is dead/gone). Certainly we already have plenly of orphans in the world (just ask around in the Balkans). Besides, as cold as it sounds, the mother can have another child later after recovering from having to sacrafice her unborn child to save herself.
Finally, isn't it a sin to commit suicide? Isn't this what the mother does when she doesn't get an abortion when the growing child will kill both of them?
Gak, I can't believe I replied on this thread!
Because when you are trapped on a standard MS box (with no permissions to install anything) the only thing you have is telnet. Windows doesn't ship with ssh, but it does come with a program named "telnet" (although weather it really counts is debatable).
Quite franky, you cannot assume that you will have SSH access anywhere you go. I still have telnet turned on back home because many firewall admins only allow HTTP and Telnet traffic through the firewall. Also, many PHB types won't allow you to install sshd because it is "open source" and therefore unreliable in their view. (For some reason people don't consder telnet open source, go figure).
You missed the point. Why are people going to bother buying a $200 DVD player when their VCR works just fine (and all of the movies still come out on VHS)? However, if they buy a PS2 they might start looking at those couple of shelves of DVDs at BallBuster. Really, for most people, there is no reason to buy a DVD player yet, since their VCR works fine (and the DVD player doesn't let them time-shift (a term they don't even know)), but the PS2 is super keen an nifty, and omygosh, it can play DVDs too!
(Sorry if this post shows up twice, Mozilla acted a little funny there).
Man, Bush is going to take a beating for some of his stated opinions above. More money for the War on Drugs? Lock up more people for nonviolent drug offenses? He might as well advocate making the internet illegal and suggest that anyone reading slashdot is a dingleberry. In fact, in almost every comment posted, I could hear thousands of Slashdot readers shouting in unison "Wrong Cretin!". At least Haglin isn't likely to draw a lot of flak (his answers seemed downright sane in comparison.)
All I can say is: On election day, may the better man win. Even if I don't belive this is going to happen.
But the jokes on you, since you didn't beat them, xboard did. (Actually whoever developed xboard did). Really, all you showed was a willingness to let the other person play the computer using your computer instead of theirs for the opponent, wasting your time but not theirs (they came for a game of Chess, they got a game of Chess).
:)
You lose.
hahahahaha
PS: Why you felt the need to advertise your modest hardware is a mystery to me.
What's scarier, you can even plug them in backwards and have the system work perfectly. Seems the PS/2 bus really is a bus.
There are marked advantages to console systems, like fighting / puzzle games, which have never achieved success on the PC. Just as RTS, and FPS will probably never be serious on the consoles. I have yet to see a viable version of Street Fighter, or Tekken appear on my PC. Also, console games rarely have bugs. How many Quake 3, UT, Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft patches have you downloaded? Its nice and simple.
This isn't entirely fair. Many console games have bugs (and they are just plain never fixed). Usually these aren't the showstoppers you find in PC games fortunatly, however the multitude of Starcraft patches (for example) have been to fine tune the play balance of the game and to fix extremly obscure network exploits. There was only one actual "crash the game" bug fixed that I can remember, and it was some sort of oddity with the last Terrain campaign that triggered only very rarely AFAIK. One of the weaknesses for consoles is that you can't patch a game once it is released (which DOES lead to better release quality games) which can lead to games with festering bugs. Just look how many people say character x is the only character I play, because that character is slightly (or sometimes grossly) unbalanced. Of course these munchkins also wonder why nobody wants to play with them.
Because congress won't let them. Apparently the Census folks asked Congress if they could use statistical sampling to improve their accuracy and Congress said no. Apparently older richer people are more likely to fill out Census forms, which determines how funding is distributed. With the current system, richer neighborhoods tend to recieve more money proportionally than poorer neighborhoods. Some well connected people apparently didn't want to give that up.
Personally I can't really see the justification behind forcing everyone to fill out these forms anymore.
How exactly are rubber nuts supposed to save the life of a whino?
I think you're thinking of the Atari 2600, not the Nintendo. The C64 was a much more limited gaming platform than the Nintendo (the lack of tiled backgrounds, scrollable buffers, per scanline interrupts, and multi-window modes made the C64 much more limited than a Nintendo). Of course it has been so long since I fired up a C64 that I may be talking out of my ass.
Until you try to get broadband into every bar/pub/arcade/K-Mart in the country and realize that most of these places have a tough enough time getting phone lines installed. A couple of weeks ago I went down to the Radio Shack in the mall (seems they were giving away free barcode readers ;) and I noticed that they were showing "internet connections" using a standard dialup, worse apparently the store only had one dialup line, so whever someone went and showed off "that internet thingie" the people at the counter would have to wait (apparently there computers have to be dialed up to do anything). Talking to the guy behind the counter, I learned that they had applied for an ISDN line (the only kind of "broadband" you can get in the mall) over 6 months ago and still hadn't recieved it. Is this the kind of hassle you want people to face when they put your box in their back room? No, most owners would just return it and buy something that didn't require them to deal with the phone company.
Hey, this could be an interesting busines strategy for cruise lines and the like that own their own islands. Just get a top level domain registered for you island (say Sexopia or Moviegaria or something) and sell off your tld to the highest bidder.
If that isn't enough, you might even be able to change the name of your country and get ANOTHER tld to sell off. Or maybe I'm just nuts.
I don't think the Feds should get involved with filters at all. I believe the decision rests in the hands of the cities and counties alone. What is offensive in one county may not be so in another county. Forcing everyone to the same "standard" od morality is rediculus.
Why should Cities and Counties get involved with filters at all? If you don't think the federal government should mandate filter usage, why stop at the city and county level? Why not bring it down the family or even personal level? Your last line is especially telling in this regard. Forcing everybody in a city or county to the same "standard" of morality is rediculous. Personally, I think it rests with the family unit, as they are generally considered the place where morality and ethics are tought (although church and school play a role, the family has the lions share of the responsiblity).
At this point in time, filters are less than worthless. When the technology gets to the point where it bolcks 99.99% over "inoffensive" material and 0% of the "non-offensive" material then let them install them.
But this is in direct opposition to your previous point. 99.99% of the "offensive" material (I hope you don't want filters blocking most "inoffensive" material!) in one family/community is going to be different than 99.99% of the offensive material in another family/community. One of the inherent limitations in filter technology today it that it assumes everyone has the ideas on what makes something "offensive." There are no doubt some communities that don't find sex offensive, but are offended by violence (directly opposite of the current filter implementations). The only compromise I can think of is a configuration screen with a series of checkboxes like: 1. nudity, 2. anti-semetic, 3. non-christian, etc..., although I doubt a system like this is feasable (it is very hard to categorize topics like this, many people are very passionate on the subject and will attack your decisions no matter how valid you think they are).