... What exactly are you referring to? I have a MS intellimouse and mouse scroll works great. INdeed it works better because you can just click the middle mouse button and then move up/down in the page by just moving the mouse.
I agree with that the game should be more realisitc, the shopkeepers should move around, etc. But if you are going to get that realistic.. I mean how realistic is it for a huge city like vivec to have (maybe) 200 people living in it?
Morrowind is a good step in the right direction for totally immersive game enviroment but the RPG genre as a whole has a long way to go. I expect as years go buy and more RPG's are produced (and computers get more powerful) we will start having more and more realisitc game enviroments, where there are thousands (or 10's of thousands) of people in a town instead of a hundred.
It takes the average Joe/Jane too much time to get active
Indeed it does. One of the tennants of political science theory (rational choice theory iirc) is that being active in the political process, as a rule, gains you nothing. It isn't rational . Your one vote doesn't count, your one letter doesn't count, you don't have much influence, if any, on politics. And, for that matter, politics on the whole doesn't effect your daily life enough to make it rational to participate and, for all intents and purposes, waste your time.
What you are looking for, and a lot of people, is when it starts effecting peoples lives enough that it becomes rational, and therefore productive, to actually participate in the political process. When a group of self declared nerds won't take the time the participate - i.e. isn't productive enough for their time - why would the general populace care?
Empirical scientific peer review of the study? Sure.
1.) This study says the 5 year TOC for windows 2000 is less than linux. Notice that says 5 years... windows 2000 has, of course, only been out for 2. The other 3 years is, of course, nothing more than a projection.
2.) MS financed the study.
3.) Study also makes no mention of what the 6th year projection would be.. considering MS doesn't support systems past 5 years.
4.) Asssumes no upgrade during those 5 years. How realistic is that with current MS liscensing schemes?
I thought of that after I wrote that. You are right, she is darn close which might explain why all three won the hugo (nebula?) awards. Damm good series. Still not quite as cool as Dune though =).
Frank Herbert's writing sytle is also something to be admired. I have never, ever come across somebody who writes Science Fiction like he does. I mean it is like he is a historian giving you the entire picture, including background, language, culture, the works. He really doesn't skimp out on anything in his books - except maybe tech he focuses more on culture. His stories are so in-depth and the culture he presents so consitent throughout that it puts most writers of Sci-fi to shame. Some sci-fi writers (Niven) provide wonderful technological backgrounds to their stories, Herbert provides a cultural background to his stories letting that influence the entire book, from eating, religon, warfare, etc. He uses technology certainely but the universe he presents in Dune is largely technologically static.
I also think one of the things that fascinates people most with his Dune series is it's focus on people, and their power. I mean first you have Paul Atreides (sp?) and later the God Emperor, then you have the Emperor, the sisterhood, the bene tleilaxu(sp?) it goes on and on. PEOPLE run the show/book.
I can only imagine how much research/how many pages his notes are for his books with the attention to detail he puts in them. I have been bitterly disappointed with the new dune series that have recently come out. It just isn't Frank Herberts Dune. The writing is fine, they aren't bad stories but it just *isn't* the same.
Well it's just like any new distro coming out. I mean they post that and they are basically ads. How is this any different? People are interested in buying it so why not.
A distro is nothing more than a hard disk filled with mostly free software.
This must be some prestigious organization if a 19 year old is offering to serve on the board...
Ageism. Nice. You know like racism except it is focused on discrimination because of age. I've met plenty of 19 year olds with more intelligence, class, and maturity than 40 year olds. And, by the looks of it, you.
I stand corrected still he should've at least mentioned that in his post rather than make a blatant "victory for open source" without explaining why exactly this would be/is a victory for open source.
RTFA. Massive isn't open-source and their is no mention of what hardware they used either. If this is a victory for anything it is the company for producing what looks to be like a very nice piece of software.
I understand your problem with it but you have to look at it from the IS point of view. Here we limit dorm bandwith to something like 60mbit/second which is, in theory, a lot of bandwith. Except when you get 5,000 students all having kazaa on at once. Before they limited it this was sucking up, literally, close to 150-180mbit/second of bandwith. I mean they where taking nearly all of our bandwith just downloading music/pr0n/games/etc.
A rock and a hard place. What can you do.. on one hand you royally piss off the students since they all still have kazaa on but now they just get crap for ping times/bandwith. I'm talking the dorms are barely better than dial-up for web surfing because of the amount of bandwith these guys suck up. And they have a point, paying 175$/credit hour should get you decent internet but.. on the other hand you royally piss off the faculty who want to use the internet to do 'cool' things or actual academic stuff.
I don't know what to tell you. It's a tough decision.
Ugh. Stay far, far, far,far away from gateways. We have about 200 where I work and I hate them.. with a passion. There tech support is horrible for corporations so I can only imagine what it is like for single user, their case designs use stuff like plastic clips (which break on touch of course) and daughterboards, non-standard designs (personaly favourite was a case that would only take one type of AGP card because of the way it fit it) and all sorts of crap. I suppose if you just want one and never expect it to break go for it but I wouldn't recommend them to anyone
Here Here! While I have no problems supporting or helping my family with computers (hey, they ARE family) I get somewhat.. annoyed when friends/friends of friends want me to fix their computers. The worst part of it all is that if you fix it, and something breaks on it, it will forever be your fault. YOU broke it when you fixed it last time come and repair your damage, etc, etc. And of course if you work in an IT department of a company you always get those lovely people who decide they can stop you in the halls and ask computer questions about their home systems. My personal favorite.
I have a friend who works at Best Buy in the 'tech' department. They have like a computer tune-up service for about 100$. I asked him what they do and it was pretty simple; defrag/scandisk and wipe out every piece of spywear on the computer/multiple installed programs, etc, etc. He said they never notice and 9 times out of 10 they say their computer runs so much faster. Heh, that's what I've started to do. Just wipe the darn thing as clean as you can make it - chances are they will never notice and, if they do, pull a BOFH and just make an excuse "your IDE hard drive driver was conflicting with your network interface card so I had to delete Bonzai Buddy. Just trust me"
Argh. I also just started billing people, makes my life so much easier.
I'm sure it performs well but what about space? Upgradeability? In particular I am getting very tired of case designs that have no space on this inside making all repairs/upgrading a chore. Allthought the shuttle doesn't have this particular flaw yet, I am also getting tired of the use of plastic clips and plastic everything for the case.
Why do people want to buy these? I just don't get it. I would much rather have a nice full tower case that is roomy enough for all my stuff as well as not having any sharp edges/angles to cut myself on or curse at because I can't get to Part A without Removing Parts B,C, and D. I mean one/two PCI slots and a single AGP? Sure everything is intergrated but, personally, most of that intergrated stuff is junk. Compare their integrated audio to a nice sound blaster audigy or the integrated ethernet to a nice 3com gigabit NIC. It only has room for 2 hard drives assuming you don't want a floppy... I am baffled why anyone would buy one of these. To me it makes no sense...
The optiputer will initially consist of about 500 processors linked via the optical switching system that will permit parts of the computer to share information at the speed of light.
In other breaking news electromagnetic radiation (read: electricty) doesn't travel at the speed of light! Coming Soon to Fox: When Reporters Get Confused
At any rate that article was darn short on details, and the company's website wasn't any better. Anybody have any relevant data on exactly how fast this switching system is? I'm curious about their optical router at the heart of the system as well. It is my understanding that the slowest part of any fiber-based system is the router since the signals must be converted from light to electrical than back to light signals again. One would assume that such a design would be entirely too slow to be used as a bus. Of course, I may be entirely wrong...
Actually, quite a bit more are the result of IE which, since it is embedded into the os, makes the entire OS not secure. Therefor you can't just say 'windows 2000 is secure except for IIS and OE' because it isn't. IIRC there have been 9 security patches for IE *This year*, and that doesn't count the individual fixes of vulnerabilities that where taken care of in Service Pack 3, IE service pack 1, or the 'cumulative patch for IE 6.0'.
You really start to notice the vulnerabilites if you install a fresh copy of win2k and have to patch it up. Takes about 30 minutes and 7-8 reboots. You are partially correct though, the actual win2k system itself has had very few vulnerabilites, most are due to the add-ons such as IE, OE, and IIS.
indeed. I forgot to mention alot of people do post things in.pdf's - it just depends on if the department spent enough to buy the liscense for whatever product be it distiller or acrobat. Or if they know/have the inclination to spend the money which kindof gets back to the original point of believing microsoft *is* the standard.
I work in a student computer lab for a fairly large university, about 28,000 students. You wouldn't *believe* the problems I have to deal with because of stupid, and I stress stupid, professors using stuff like MSword/powerpoint for their class notes and webpages.
I'll give you a few examples. Powerpoint is the most common for posting class notes. All good and fine because thanks to OpenOffice even a linux box can read pp slides just fine. The problem is printing them. Since we have only dot matrix printers (long story...) if the professor uses too weird a color scheme the slides don't print worth a damm, even with 'print only black/white' option checked. Problem #1.
The bigger problem is when they use MSword to post syllabi, notes, etc. Students have a problem viewing them at home for whatever reason (most likely they are using an old version of word) and they have to come back to campus to look at this stuff. It is insane. I always direct them to install OpenOffice but sometimes they might only have a modem so it isn't really an option. And if you talk to these professors about only posting stuff in MSWord they get defensive and say such things like 'everyone uses it' and other to the like. Try pointing out that just clicking 'save as rich text format' will cover 99% of the stuff they publish just doesn't work. Sigh. It is becoming a real problem. Same with webpages - what standards, microsoft is a stanard, I'm sure this would work fine if you would use a *microsoft* browser, etc, etc.
Not that all professors are dumb, a lot use things like rich text format and try to stay away from word but alot don't. It is a major headache to some students, and for me. And don't even get me started about how IE handles word documents - has the nasty tendancy to embed them within the current frame which causes havoc with printing, saving, etc - at least for your average student.
Seriously, more teachers need to be educated on thigns like open formats. For instance, it wouldn't be that hard to devolp a campus-wide XML format and a nice little front-end for making syllabus's, class notes, outlines, etc available to all faculty. That way you could ensure that everyone had equal access to the documents instead of forcing students to use MS products.
Slashdot Mirror
I have lost much faith in my beloved slashdot for posting such total unofficial rumored bullshit.
You must be new here... welcome to slashdot where nobody is quite sure exactly what the editors do.
... What exactly are you referring to? I have a MS intellimouse and mouse scroll works great. INdeed it works better because you can just click the middle mouse button and then move up/down in the page by just moving the mouse.
I agree with that the game should be more realisitc, the shopkeepers should move around, etc. But if you are going to get that realistic.. I mean how realistic is it for a huge city like vivec to have (maybe) 200 people living in it?
Morrowind is a good step in the right direction for totally immersive game enviroment but the RPG genre as a whole has a long way to go. I expect as years go buy and more RPG's are produced (and computers get more powerful) we will start having more and more realisitc game enviroments, where there are thousands (or 10's of thousands) of people in a town instead of a hundred.
Personally, I can't wait =).
Check out Elder Scrolls: Morrowind if you haven't already. You can easily get lost in that game for days at a time without touching the main story.
/me Hugs his real player 8.
Seriously I agree with you on this one, Real One is the bane of my existence. But luckily enough you can still find real player 8 still around.
It takes the average Joe/Jane too much time to get active
Indeed it does. One of the tennants of political science theory (rational choice theory iirc) is that being active in the political process, as a rule, gains you nothing. It isn't rational . Your one vote doesn't count, your one letter doesn't count, you don't have much influence, if any, on politics. And, for that matter, politics on the whole doesn't effect your daily life enough to make it rational to participate and, for all intents and purposes, waste your time.
What you are looking for, and a lot of people, is when it starts effecting peoples lives enough that it becomes rational, and therefore productive, to actually participate in the political process. When a group of self declared nerds won't take the time the participate - i.e. isn't productive enough for their time - why would the general populace care?
Empirical scientific peer review of the study? Sure.
1.) This study says the 5 year TOC for windows 2000 is less than linux. Notice that says 5 years... windows 2000 has, of course, only been out for 2. The other 3 years is, of course, nothing more than a projection.
2.) MS financed the study.
3.) Study also makes no mention of what the 6th year projection would be.. considering MS doesn't support systems past 5 years.
4.) Asssumes no upgrade during those 5 years. How realistic is that with current MS liscensing schemes?
I thought of that after I wrote that. You are right, she is darn close which might explain why all three won the hugo (nebula?) awards. Damm good series. Still not quite as cool as Dune though =).
Frank Herbert's writing sytle is also something to be admired. I have never, ever come across somebody who writes Science Fiction like he does. I mean it is like he is a historian giving you the entire picture, including background, language, culture, the works. He really doesn't skimp out on anything in his books - except maybe tech he focuses more on culture. His stories are so in-depth and the culture he presents so consitent throughout that it puts most writers of Sci-fi to shame. Some sci-fi writers (Niven) provide wonderful technological backgrounds to their stories, Herbert provides a cultural background to his stories letting that influence the entire book, from eating, religon, warfare, etc. He uses technology certainely but the universe he presents in Dune is largely technologically static.
I also think one of the things that fascinates people most with his Dune series is it's focus on people, and their power. I mean first you have Paul Atreides (sp?) and later the God Emperor, then you have the Emperor, the sisterhood, the bene tleilaxu(sp?) it goes on and on. PEOPLE run the show/book.
I can only imagine how much research/how many pages his notes are for his books with the attention to detail he puts in them. I have been bitterly disappointed with the new dune series that have recently come out. It just isn't Frank Herberts Dune. The writing is fine, they aren't bad stories but it just *isn't* the same.
Well it's just like any new distro coming out. I mean they post that and they are basically ads. How is this any different? People are interested in buying it so why not.
A distro is nothing more than a hard disk filled with mostly free software.
I'm guessing they are doing it now to serve as an 'example' the next time they release some sort of encoding.
They want to scare the people who might crack the code, of course I think userfriendly explained it the best.
we grant them further rights...in general for society this happens at about age 18.
Which would be my point this kid is 19 and is entrusted to vote. blah. I shouldn't be feeding the trolls.
This must be some prestigious organization if a 19 year old is offering to serve on the board...
Ageism. Nice. You know like racism except it is focused on discrimination because of age. I've met plenty of 19 year olds with more intelligence, class, and maturity than 40 year olds. And, by the looks of it, you.
I stand corrected still he should've at least mentioned that in his post rather than make a blatant "victory for open source" without explaining why exactly this would be/is a victory for open source.
RTFA. Massive isn't open-source and their is no mention of what hardware they used either. If this is a victory for anything it is the company for producing what looks to be like a very nice piece of software.
woohoo! I've been trolled! Thanks, it makes my day.
God I'm a geek. I actually thought about if that would really work for a few moments...
I understand your problem with it but you have to look at it from the IS point of view. Here we limit dorm bandwith to something like 60mbit/second which is, in theory, a lot of bandwith. Except when you get 5,000 students all having kazaa on at once. Before they limited it this was sucking up, literally, close to 150-180mbit/second of bandwith. I mean they where taking nearly all of our bandwith just downloading music/pr0n/games/etc.
A rock and a hard place. What can you do.. on one hand you royally piss off the students since they all still have kazaa on but now they just get crap for ping times/bandwith. I'm talking the dorms are barely better than dial-up for web surfing because of the amount of bandwith these guys suck up. And they have a point, paying 175$/credit hour should get you decent internet but.. on the other hand you royally piss off the faculty who want to use the internet to do 'cool' things or actual academic stuff.
I don't know what to tell you. It's a tough decision.
Ugh. Stay far, far, far,far away from gateways. We have about 200 where I work and I hate them.. with a passion. There tech support is horrible for corporations so I can only imagine what it is like for single user, their case designs use stuff like plastic clips (which break on touch of course) and daughterboards, non-standard designs (personaly favourite was a case that would only take one type of AGP card because of the way it fit it) and all sorts of crap. I suppose if you just want one and never expect it to break go for it but I wouldn't recommend them to anyone
Here Here! While I have no problems supporting or helping my family with computers (hey, they ARE family) I get somewhat.. annoyed when friends/friends of friends want me to fix their computers. The worst part of it all is that if you fix it, and something breaks on it, it will forever be your fault. YOU broke it when you fixed it last time come and repair your damage, etc, etc. And of course if you work in an IT department of a company you always get those lovely people who decide they can stop you in the halls and ask computer questions about their home systems. My personal favorite.
I have a friend who works at Best Buy in the 'tech' department. They have like a computer tune-up service for about 100$. I asked him what they do and it was pretty simple; defrag/scandisk and wipe out every piece of spywear on the computer/multiple installed programs, etc, etc. He said they never notice and 9 times out of 10 they say their computer runs so much faster. Heh, that's what I've started to do. Just wipe the darn thing as clean as you can make it - chances are they will never notice and, if they do, pull a BOFH and just make an excuse "your IDE hard drive driver was conflicting with your network interface card so I had to delete Bonzai Buddy. Just trust me"
Argh. I also just started billing people, makes my life so much easier.
I'm sure it performs well but what about space? Upgradeability? In particular I am getting very tired of case designs that have no space on this inside making all repairs/upgrading a chore. Allthought the shuttle doesn't have this particular flaw yet, I am also getting tired of the use of plastic clips and plastic everything for the case.
Why do people want to buy these? I just don't get it. I would much rather have a nice full tower case that is roomy enough for all my stuff as well as not having any sharp edges/angles to cut myself on or curse at because I can't get to Part A without Removing Parts B,C, and D. I mean one/two PCI slots and a single AGP? Sure everything is intergrated but, personally, most of that intergrated stuff is junk. Compare their integrated audio to a nice sound blaster audigy or the integrated ethernet to a nice 3com gigabit NIC. It only has room for 2 hard drives assuming you don't want a floppy... I am baffled why anyone would buy one of these. To me it makes no sense...
The optiputer will initially consist of about 500 processors linked via the optical switching system that will permit parts of the computer to share information at the speed of light.
In other breaking news electromagnetic radiation (read: electricty) doesn't travel at the speed of light! Coming Soon to Fox: When Reporters Get Confused
At any rate that article was darn short on details, and the company's website wasn't any better. Anybody have any relevant data on exactly how fast this switching system is? I'm curious about their optical router at the heart of the system as well. It is my understanding that the slowest part of any fiber-based system is the router since the signals must be converted from light to electrical than back to light signals again. One would assume that such a design would be entirely too slow to be used as a bus. Of course, I may be entirely wrong...
Actually, quite a bit more are the result of IE which, since it is embedded into the os, makes the entire OS not secure. Therefor you can't just say 'windows 2000 is secure except for IIS and OE' because it isn't. IIRC there have been 9 security patches for IE *This year*, and that doesn't count the individual fixes of vulnerabilities that where taken care of in Service Pack 3, IE service pack 1, or the 'cumulative patch for IE 6.0'.
You really start to notice the vulnerabilites if you install a fresh copy of win2k and have to patch it up. Takes about 30 minutes and 7-8 reboots. You are partially correct though, the actual win2k system itself has had very few vulnerabilites, most are due to the add-ons such as IE, OE, and IIS.
indeed. I forgot to mention alot of people do post things in .pdf's - it just depends on if the department spent enough to buy the liscense for whatever product be it distiller or acrobat. Or if they know/have the inclination to spend the money which kindof gets back to the original point of believing microsoft *is* the standard.
Ok... you tripped mode.
I work in a student computer lab for a fairly large university, about 28,000 students. You wouldn't *believe* the problems I have to deal with because of stupid, and I stress stupid, professors using stuff like MSword/powerpoint for their class notes and webpages.
I'll give you a few examples. Powerpoint is the most common for posting class notes. All good and fine because thanks to OpenOffice even a linux box can read pp slides just fine. The problem is printing them. Since we have only dot matrix printers (long story...) if the professor uses too weird a color scheme the slides don't print worth a damm, even with 'print only black/white' option checked. Problem #1.
The bigger problem is when they use MSword to post syllabi, notes, etc. Students have a problem viewing them at home for whatever reason (most likely they are using an old version of word) and they have to come back to campus to look at this stuff. It is insane. I always direct them to install OpenOffice but sometimes they might only have a modem so it isn't really an option. And if you talk to these professors about only posting stuff in MSWord they get defensive and say such things like 'everyone uses it' and other to the like. Try pointing out that just clicking 'save as rich text format' will cover 99% of the stuff they publish just doesn't work. Sigh. It is becoming a real problem. Same with webpages - what standards, microsoft is a stanard, I'm sure this would work fine if you would use a *microsoft* browser, etc, etc.
Not that all professors are dumb, a lot use things like rich text format and try to stay away from word but alot don't. It is a major headache to some students, and for me. And don't even get me started about how IE handles word documents - has the nasty tendancy to embed them within the current frame which causes havoc with printing, saving, etc - at least for your average student.
Seriously, more teachers need to be educated on thigns like open formats. For instance, it wouldn't be that hard to devolp a campus-wide XML format and a nice little front-end for making syllabus's, class notes, outlines, etc available to all faculty. That way you could ensure that everyone had equal access to the documents instead of forcing students to use MS products.