We used to get up half an hour before we went to bed and orally recite the Monster Manual, stopping whenever a gazelle walked by to determine random encounters. Encumberance was determined by how much we could actually carry, and we never progressed pass level 1 since we hadn't yet invented base-10 math...we only had a maximum of 20 digits to count with.
But tell kids that today, and they won't believe you.
Our uber-geek superiority complex sidesteps the fact that probably a large number of people in the world still have "12:00" flashing on their VHS (Beta?) VCRs, they never upgrade or patch the operating system their computer ships with, and still think that a 486 is a good computer.
AOL targets the masses; they fill a niche that allow us geeks to play Battlefield 2 or compile code or peruse usenet, without having to answer a phone every 2 minutes explaining how to use "electronic mail...no you don't have to print it to read it, so yes you're right its not really like mail."
AOL also did something cool recently with regards to Live8 -- live streaming of the event, and high-bitrate streams of each city's concerts archive online. Give credit where its due...
PS Note I would rather peel off my fingernails one by one and douse them in hot sauce rather than use AOL on a daily basis, but that's just me.
Since Nvidia offered exlusive previews to hardware review sites, who will provide at the very least moderate amounts of praise if they want to receive such previews again in the future.
$450 USD is not mid-level...that would buy you a mid-level PC, not just a video card.
A 9800Pro or a 6600GT would be considered 'mid-level' or better-than-average performance for most users at this point.
#2. "Spirituality" cannot be physically proven; i think its all bunk..to suggest its an evolutionary goal is to mix pseudo-science with science.
All this said, i do agree with your point that observing something in nature does not make it socially acceptable -- rape for example, or murder. My point is that claiming something was 'unnatural' when there is evidence to the contrary is irrational.
Mod parent up.. on of the common cries of anti-gay groups is that 'its not natural' or its 'not what god intended'... except for the fact that many species display homosexual segments of their population -- and typically its the species who have a more stratified or tight-knit social structure.
We're here...we're queer...we're avian! (repeat)
/not gay //not that there's anything wrong with that
Slashdot allows for contrarian views, although to get it you should view all posts. In general, i find I get more value out of a Slashdot thread discussing a technology than any ZDNet whitepaper or CNet posted article. YMMV, but I'll vote for Slashdot.
Ever dealt with Law Enforcement? There's always what they ASK you do to and what the IMPLY you should do... unlike normal people doing normal jobs, Law Enforcement officers are trained never to rationalise, never to second guess, and to always assume that they're right. There's good reasons for this, but sometimes it has bad results.
ISP:"We won't give you our records without a court order."
Police officer:"Well, if I get a court order I'm going to ask for your whole ISP to be shut down. Don't make me waste my time."
ISP:"Oh crap! Here's not just the logs but the harddrives! Please don't shut us down..."
(10 minutes later) ISP Lawyer:"Call me first next time, this cop was yanking your chain."
I agree sex should be considered more acceptable to violence, but there's some theories around why society stigmatises one vs the other.
One theory from Sociology 101 I remember is the inner vs outer response -- sex is a submissive activity (e.g. expressing love to someone, getting naked and exposing oneself to a partner), whereas violence is something you do to someone else. e.g. you can commit violence without surrending something of yourself. (BTW, before you say 'rape', it would be considered a violent activity vs a sexual one). The basic psychological model is that its more acceptable subconciously to do someting to someone else, than to trust and let them do something to you. This premise gets reflected in societal convention in numerous, subtle ways.
The other theory is that sex is more immediately available and a natural activity, and societal convention dictates it needs to be surpressed. Think of it this way..we all agree sex is good, but I think we'd agree consentual sex between 12 year olds is not. More sex at an early age leads to more pregnancy and more diversions from the 'success' ladder of school -> more school -> career -> marriage -> 2.5 kids + suburban consumer. It is a societal defense mechanism to resist challenge to its structure, and teenage sex is a much greater threat than random violence which actually is very much under control.
Then of course you have the religious arguments...generally speaking religions are not focused on suicide bombers or violence, but rather on controlling social units... specifically family. i'm unaware of any mainstream religion that promotes self-pleasure or sex-for-fun... most focus on "respect your elders" or rules for marriage.
"...he probably got his head bashed in after a drunken argument over someones wife, all generally misinterpreted, with the "injured party" sneaking back afterwards with his friends to do the deed."
Yeah, those damn Irish potato eating drunkards! They don't call it a paddy wagon for nothin! I think we should all round them up and...
Oh, you were talking about russia. Oops.
While I'm sure life in Russia is not a life of peace and happiness and sunny days, I doubt its as corrupt, violent, and ceaselessly oppressive as you sugest. Personally my gut feel is you just had a bad experience.
Because lets face it...you don't know psychology, Tom Cruise does (just like we don't know Russia, but you do).
Dude, their market cap is $70 BILLION. Who the heck is going to buy them out, Microsoft? Google? Not many companies can afford to acquire a $70B company, and the ones who might would get smacked with the anti-trust stick very very hard.
Certainly a possibility. Lots of Scottish engineers. I referenced Sanford Flemming though since both Flemming and Doohan were Canadian...Flemming was an expat Scot, who contributed greatly to the Canadian Pacific Railway (among other things). It would have been a more immediate example to Doohan, especially in the 1960s.
I'm using a 9700pro which is a 2 1/2 year old card. Its one generation, soon to be two generations, behind in terms of graphics chipset.
I get 50+ FPS playing at 1024x768 with all settings set to medium. As with most people who complain a game sucks because it doesnt' work on their hardware, you probably have a system tweaking issue or are running 3+ year old equipment. BF2 is made to sell as a popular game for 18-24 months. Its designed to have eye-candy that will appeal to an NVidia 7800 user, not a Voodoo3 user.
That said, most users find it necessary to have 1gb RAM due to the heavy caching of textures. Its seems to be the consensus on best bang-for-buck h/w upgrade to improve performance.
We have a province called "Nova Scotia" -- New Scotland. A large number of immigrants to Canada in the 18th century were Scots and it permeates many aspects of Canadian culture. Look at our early Prime Ministers... "MacDonald", "MacKenzie", etc.
Sir Sanford Flemming -- world famous Scottish engineer, Scottish descent. Probably the inspiration for Scotty given Doohan's Canadian origins.
Mike Meyers is known to do a scottish accent or two...
James Doohan was troubled by his typecasting in the years following ST:TOS cancellation, until his dentist told him: 'you're going to be scotty the rest of your life whether you like it or not'. After that Doohan says he just went with it and became a much happier person, and admitted that life had treated him very well.
Another tidbit...as like most good soldiers (David Niven comes to mind) he underplayed his WWII experience very much, when talking about it in public usually talked about how scared he was etc. He was at the Juno Beach landings on D-Day and took 6 bullets (including the loss of one of his fingers).
I never met him, but people I know who did claim he was probably the most charming, down-to-earth media personality they ever met. Old-school gentleman, with a great sense of humour and humilty. This can be contrasted slightly with Canada's OTHER contribution to Star Trek, William (Farking) Shanter...
Yeah, I'm *pissed* in case you haven't figured it out yet. After all, do you see people expecting to buy and use a car with zero training, no licence or maintenance? Why do they apply a different standard to computers?
The difference between a car and a computer is that improper use of a car can lead to death of the driver, passengers, or other people on the road. Improper computer use has only led to high bloodpressure and a string of 4 letter words based on what I've witnessed.
Joe DiMaggio is the legendary baseball player, "the Yankee Clipper", a 13 time all star and widely considered the most complete baseball player of all time.
John DiMaggio, on the other hand, is the talented one.
Its easy to explain actually -- you learn more from failure than success. This is less true for sports (e.g. Tiger Woods was a prodigy at 6, and he is now too), and there will always be certifiable once-in-a-lifetime geniuses like Mozart, but on the whole brilliant scientists or businessmen are the result of hard work. Trump may be an ass, and he's lost billions, but losing billions has allowed him to learn how to make billions. Most 'good' coders throw out more code than they use; same with writers; etc.
Is the consistency of effort and the strength of will that usually ends in results... this girl will potentially get all of the MS certifications and maybe a good programming degree, but she'll never lead a fortune 500 company or invent the next internet. She's already following a path of 'learn what people tell me to learn'.
This was true even 2-3 years ago, but I think even *that* pool of OS/2 deployments has pretty much dried up. Certainly in Canada they're almost all Win2k or Linux based now...our bank (pick one of the five haha) was the last to my knowledge and we killed the last off late last year.
I was using gopher and mosaic on OS/2 when Microsoft was still debating shipping a TCP/IP stack w/ Windows 95.
RIP OS/2. They built you bigger, better, faster, but you were steamrolled by MS WalMart OS.
Mod parent up. A comparable example was microchannel architecutre by IBM... it certainly beat the pants of the ISA bus of the day, but it was proprietary and the genie was out of the bottle...the market opted otherwise.
Only now, years and years after Itanium was supposed to rock our worlds, is the Itanium2 now available in quantity at competitive prices...and I attribute that to the presence of a solid AMD Opteron offering.
If I was building a supercomputer I'd pick the Itanium2 based on the performance identified, but for most of my other datacentre tasks I can get away with better alternatives.
Its called "gallows humour" and is a very natural and human reaction. It is unnatural and unhealthy to try and absorb and empathize with the enormity of a situation as tragic as this all at once.
Hey, I'll offer some historical examples of some good jokes, which may or may not be apocryphal....
Peter Lorre and Vincent Price at Bela Legosi's Funeral:
(long pause) Lorre - "Do you think we should put in a stake...you know, just to be sure?"
On Oscar Wilde's deathbed - "This room looks atrocious...either that wallpaper has to go or I do."
There's lots of others...feel free to add to the thread.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Whittling knives and green boxes? You were lucky.
We used to get up half an hour before we went to bed and orally recite the Monster Manual, stopping whenever a gazelle walked by to determine random encounters. Encumberance was determined by how much we could actually carry, and we never progressed pass level 1 since we hadn't yet invented base-10 math...we only had a maximum of 20 digits to count with.
But tell kids that today, and they won't believe you.
... and you've received a fatal dose! Report to sector 17 for Re-Nedification.
Our uber-geek superiority complex sidesteps the fact that probably a large number of people in the world still have "12:00" flashing on their VHS (Beta?) VCRs, they never upgrade or patch the operating system their computer ships with, and still think that a 486 is a good computer.
AOL targets the masses; they fill a niche that allow us geeks to play Battlefield 2 or compile code or peruse usenet, without having to answer a phone every 2 minutes explaining how to use "electronic mail...no you don't have to print it to read it, so yes you're right its not really like mail."
AOL also did something cool recently with regards to Live8 -- live streaming of the event, and high-bitrate streams of each city's concerts archive online. Give credit where its due...
PS Note I would rather peel off my fingernails one by one and douse them in hot sauce rather than use AOL on a daily basis, but that's just me.
Since when did $450 become a "mid-level" price?
Since Nvidia offered exlusive previews to hardware review sites, who will provide at the very least moderate amounts of praise if they want to receive such previews again in the future.
$450 USD is not mid-level...that would buy you a mid-level PC, not just a video card.
A 9800Pro or a 6600GT would be considered 'mid-level' or better-than-average performance for most users at this point.
#1. We are animals, so we are not above them.
#2. "Spirituality" cannot be physically proven; i think its all bunk..to suggest its an evolutionary goal is to mix pseudo-science with science.
All this said, i do agree with your point that observing something in nature does not make it socially acceptable -- rape for example, or murder. My point is that claiming something was 'unnatural' when there is evidence to the contrary is irrational.
Mod parent up.. on of the common cries of anti-gay groups is that 'its not natural' or its 'not what god intended'... except for the fact that many species display homosexual segments of their population -- and typically its the species who have a more stratified or tight-knit social structure.
/not gay
//not that there's anything wrong with that
We're here...we're queer...we're avian! (repeat)
Slashdot allows for contrarian views, although to get it you should view all posts. In general, i find I get more value out of a Slashdot thread discussing a technology than any ZDNet whitepaper or CNet posted article. YMMV, but I'll vote for Slashdot.
Ever dealt with Law Enforcement? There's always what they ASK you do to and what the IMPLY you should do... unlike normal people doing normal jobs, Law Enforcement officers are trained never to rationalise, never to second guess, and to always assume that they're right. There's good reasons for this, but sometimes it has bad results.
ISP:"We won't give you our records without a court order."
Police officer:"Well, if I get a court order I'm going to ask for your whole ISP to be shut down. Don't make me waste my time."
ISP:"Oh crap! Here's not just the logs but the harddrives! Please don't shut us down..."
(10 minutes later) ISP Lawyer:"Call me first next time, this cop was yanking your chain."
A very likely set of events IMHO.
I agree sex should be considered more acceptable to violence, but there's some theories around why society stigmatises one vs the other.
One theory from Sociology 101 I remember is the inner vs outer response -- sex is a submissive activity (e.g. expressing love to someone, getting naked and exposing oneself to a partner), whereas violence is something you do to someone else. e.g. you can commit violence without surrending something of yourself. (BTW, before you say 'rape', it would be considered a violent activity vs a sexual one). The basic psychological model is that its more acceptable subconciously to do someting to someone else, than to trust and let them do something to you. This premise gets reflected in societal convention in numerous, subtle ways.
The other theory is that sex is more immediately available and a natural activity, and societal convention dictates it needs to be surpressed. Think of it this way..we all agree sex is good, but I think we'd agree consentual sex between 12 year olds is not. More sex at an early age leads to more pregnancy and more diversions from the 'success' ladder of school -> more school -> career -> marriage -> 2.5 kids + suburban consumer. It is a societal defense mechanism to resist challenge to its structure, and teenage sex is a much greater threat than random violence which actually is very much under control.
Then of course you have the religious arguments...generally speaking religions are not focused on suicide bombers or violence, but rather on controlling social units... specifically family. i'm unaware of any mainstream religion that promotes self-pleasure or sex-for-fun... most focus on "respect your elders" or rules for marriage.
"...he probably got his head bashed in after a drunken argument over someones wife, all generally misinterpreted, with the "injured party" sneaking back afterwards with his friends to do the deed."
http://www.lireland.com/
Yeah, those damn Irish potato eating drunkards! They don't call it a paddy wagon for nothin! I think we should all round them up and...
Oh, you were talking about russia. Oops.
While I'm sure life in Russia is not a life of peace and happiness and sunny days, I doubt its as corrupt, violent, and ceaselessly oppressive as you sugest. Personally my gut feel is you just had a bad experience.
Because lets face it...you don't know psychology, Tom Cruise does (just like we don't know Russia, but you do).
No, that luggage belongs to Sam...Samuel?...ah yes, SAMSONITE!
Dude, their market cap is $70 BILLION. Who the heck is going to buy them out, Microsoft? Google? Not many companies can afford to acquire a $70B company, and the ones who might would get smacked with the anti-trust stick very very hard.
Certainly a possibility. Lots of Scottish engineers. I referenced Sanford Flemming though since both Flemming and Doohan were Canadian...Flemming was an expat Scot, who contributed greatly to the Canadian Pacific Railway (among other things). It would have been a more immediate example to Doohan, especially in the 1960s.
I'm using a 9700pro which is a 2 1/2 year old card. Its one generation, soon to be two generations, behind in terms of graphics chipset.
I get 50+ FPS playing at 1024x768 with all settings set to medium. As with most people who complain a game sucks because it doesnt' work on their hardware, you probably have a system tweaking issue or are running 3+ year old equipment. BF2 is made to sell as a popular game for 18-24 months. Its designed to have eye-candy that will appeal to an NVidia 7800 user, not a Voodoo3 user.
That said, most users find it necessary to have 1gb RAM due to the heavy caching of textures. Its seems to be the consensus on best bang-for-buck h/w upgrade to improve performance.
We have a province called "Nova Scotia" -- New Scotland. A large number of immigrants to Canada in the 18th century were Scots and it permeates many aspects of Canadian culture. Look at our early Prime Ministers... "MacDonald", "MacKenzie", etc.
Sir Sanford Flemming -- world famous Scottish engineer, Scottish descent. Probably the inspiration for Scotty given Doohan's Canadian origins.
Mike Meyers is known to do a scottish accent or two...
James Doohan was troubled by his typecasting in the years following ST:TOS cancellation, until his dentist told him: 'you're going to be scotty the rest of your life whether you like it or not'. After that Doohan says he just went with it and became a much happier person, and admitted that life had treated him very well.
Another tidbit...as like most good soldiers (David Niven comes to mind) he underplayed his WWII experience very much, when talking about it in public usually talked about how scared he was etc. He was at the Juno Beach landings on D-Day and took 6 bullets (including the loss of one of his fingers).
I never met him, but people I know who did claim he was probably the most charming, down-to-earth media personality they ever met. Old-school gentleman, with a great sense of humour and humilty. This can be contrasted slightly with Canada's OTHER contribution to Star Trek, William (Farking) Shanter...
Yeah, I'm *pissed* in case you haven't figured it out yet. After all, do you see people expecting to buy and use a car with zero training, no licence or maintenance? Why do they apply a different standard to computers?
The difference between a car and a computer is that improper use of a car can lead to death of the driver, passengers, or other people on the road. Improper computer use has only led to high bloodpressure and a string of 4 letter words based on what I've witnessed.
Joe DiMaggio is the legendary baseball player, "the Yankee Clipper", a 13 time all star and widely considered the most complete baseball player of all time.
;)
John DiMaggio, on the other hand, is the talented one.
Its easy to explain actually -- you learn more from failure than success. This is less true for sports (e.g. Tiger Woods was a prodigy at 6, and he is now too), and there will always be certifiable once-in-a-lifetime geniuses like Mozart, but on the whole brilliant scientists or businessmen are the result of hard work. Trump may be an ass, and he's lost billions, but losing billions has allowed him to learn how to make billions. Most 'good' coders throw out more code than they use; same with writers; etc.
Is the consistency of effort and the strength of will that usually ends in results... this girl will potentially get all of the MS certifications and maybe a good programming degree, but she'll never lead a fortune 500 company or invent the next internet. She's already following a path of 'learn what people tell me to learn'.
This was true even 2-3 years ago, but I think even *that* pool of OS/2 deployments has pretty much dried up. Certainly in Canada they're almost all Win2k or Linux based now...our bank (pick one of the five haha) was the last to my knowledge and we killed the last off late last year.
I was using gopher and mosaic on OS/2 when Microsoft was still debating shipping a TCP/IP stack w/ Windows 95.
RIP OS/2. They built you bigger, better, faster, but you were steamrolled by MS WalMart OS.
... to power their websites.
slashdot effect in... er... effect.
Mod parent up. A comparable example was microchannel architecutre by IBM... it certainly beat the pants of the ISA bus of the day, but it was proprietary and the genie was out of the bottle...the market opted otherwise.
Only now, years and years after Itanium was supposed to rock our worlds, is the Itanium2 now available in quantity at competitive prices...and I attribute that to the presence of a solid AMD Opteron offering.
If I was building a supercomputer I'd pick the Itanium2 based on the performance identified, but for most of my other datacentre tasks I can get away with better alternatives.
Its okay, most Bulgarians I know have a good sense of humour and won't mind being compared to Missouri.
You're just envious of users #1-2750.
;)
Its called "gallows humour" and is a very natural and human reaction. It is unnatural and unhealthy to try and absorb and empathize with the enormity of a situation as tragic as this all at once.
:)
Hey, I'll offer some historical examples of some good jokes, which may or may not be apocryphal....
Peter Lorre and Vincent Price at Bela Legosi's Funeral:
(long pause) Lorre - "Do you think we should put in a stake...you know, just to be sure?"
On Oscar Wilde's deathbed - "This room looks atrocious...either that wallpaper has to go or I do."
There's lots of others...feel free to add to the thread.