Oh please, please someone post a release date for Duke Nukem Forever! Or a story about how Microsoft is publishing their source code base under the GPL.
Long ago I learned the best way to meet women is a) be injured, b) go shopping with a baby, and c) walk around a park with a cute dog.
I'm aged and married now so this tip is useless to me, but since I'm not stingy I figured I'd pass this along. =)
I bought a coffee at my favorite coffee shop near my college about a dozen years ago. As I rounded the bend I saw a kitten stuck in a snowdrift. It was pretty obvious he was recently placed there. Discarded would probably be the better word.
Couldn't abandon him, so I parked the car, grabbed the kitten and set about looking for the owner.
Walk into a college coffee shop with a kitten sometime. Thank me later.
Somewhat strongly in fact. I think experiment is the very essence of science. What you're chasing there is something different:
Misconceived ideas can be turned into accepted fact by flawed, or worse, deliberately contrived experimentation methodologies.
Well, of course.
But let's say some charlatan makes a bogus experiment and foists it on the scientific community. How do you refute their claim?
You got it - experimentally.
Remember a good experiment has a reproducible result. See cold fusion for examples in that arena. Cold fusion might be possible. But until you can reproduce it - by independent groups performing your experiment - it won't ever be science. Nature may have permitted it all along, but until you can experimentally verify it, it can never be science.
What attributes would you expect a Geek God to have? We're a bunch of 40 year olds with WoW accounts, Mame cabinets, and manga who ditch work to be the first in line to see The Watchmen. Of course our Deity is going to be adolescent and irresponsible.
Our chemistry teacher would have everyone as quietly as possible leave the room. Then he'd move the clock to 5pm. Then he'd leave and on the way out into the hall bang the door as loud as possible, waking the student up.
I hated practically every inch of it from the get-go
I hate to post the obvious, but I'll do it anyways.
Why watch it in the first place then?
Holy crap, man. Do you eat at restaurants you hate? "Man. Every time I come here I hate it. Disgusting food. See you next Thursday."
If anyone should be embarrassed, it's you. Four seasons worth of hour long shows and you watched them all, hating almost every single moment. Imagine what else you could have done with that time.
A lot of times when you see something like that, it is a cop out. But not in this case.
The story - in its entirety - was about something divine moving mankind/cylonkind like pawns. People have destinies in this show, real ones. All throughout.
So it's not like they just slapped a Deity into the ending to tie things up. Nothing else at that point would have sufficed.
In particular, how SUVs separate the driver's experience from the road in a dangerous way. And on the shopping habits of American car buyers in general. It's a favorite article of mine.
"In the Jetta, the engine is clearly audible. The steering is light and precise. The brakes are crisp. The wheelbase is short enough that the car picks up the undulations of the road. The car is so small and close to the ground, and so dwarfed by other cars on the road, that an intelligent driver is constantly reminded of the necessity of driving safely and defensively. An S.U.V. embodies the opposite logic. The driver is seated as high and far from the road as possible. The vehicle is designed to overcome its environment, not to respond to it. Even four-wheel drive, seemingly the most beneficial feature of the S.U.V., serves to reinforce this isolation. Having the engine provide power to all four wheels, safety experts point out, does nothing to improve braking, although many S.U.V. owners erroneously believe this to be the case. Nor does the feature necessarily make it safer to turn across a slippery surface: that is largely a function of how much friction is generated by the vehicle's tires. All it really does is improve what engineers call trackingâ"that is, the ability to accelerate without slipping in perilous conditions or in deep snow or mud. Champion says that one of the occasions when he came closest to death was a snowy day, many years ago, just after he had bought a new Range Rover. "Everyone around me was slipping, and I was thinking, Yeahhh. And I came to a stop sign on a major road, and I was driving probably twice as fast as I should have been, because I could. I had traction. But I also weighed probably twice as much as most cars. And I still had only four brakes and four tires on the road. I slid right across a four-lane road. " Four-wheel drive robs the driver of feedback. "The car driver whose wheels spin once or twice while backing out of the driveway knows that the road is slippery," Bradsher writes. "The SUV driver who navigates the driveway and street without difficulty until she tries to brake may not find out that the road is slippery until it is too late. " Jettas are safe because they make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling of safety isn't the solution; it's the problem."
I kind of figured that's how you felt; I think it's important to explain it to people a bit though.
Sorry for being unclear, and thanks for calling me out on the carpet and making me clarify my position a bit.
On the contrary, the power that comes with the knowledge that one can make decisions to move towards ones goals is astounding.
Oh, absolutely. For me it came by accident but the end result was the same. I started off like the original AC's post. Angry and angst ridden. What you don't know when you live your life that way is that you're hurting yourself. The anger is yours. Maybe you didn't start it, but you're the one cultivating it years down the road. If you let it go, things improve almost overnight. Did for me anyways.
I feel bad when I run into my friends from back then. I've been called a sell-out by people who can't afford basic health care. It's mind boggling.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the "boring, polite and pointless" life the original poster was railing against is actually full of freedom and joy. They might see an office cube where I have to sit for 8 hours a day, but instead I see a lifetime of health care, paid bills, and hugs from my kid. I gain everything, and all I had to do was give up hating everyone for "being normal".
There are struggles that are worthwhile and there are struggles that are pointless, but to say that no struggle matters is speaking from both ignorance and arrogance. I mean no offense, we're all ignorant and arrogant to some extent.
None taken.
I'm not suggesting that no struggle matters - quite the contrary. What I am saying is that there are struggles that can make a difference to you, and there are those that can't. Being a perpetual outsider because the whole world sucks is an example of just such a pointless struggle.
doesn't make you any better or make your life more worthwhile or valueable than someone who can't afford to fix their teeth. Their pain and alienation may be far more meaningful than your "boring life" (your words).
Boring was from the OP, I was quoting. I'm happy with my lot.
I'm not placing more value on my life than anyone else's. In the end, we're all just about twenty bucks worth of water and salt anyways.
What I am saying is that using pain and alienation to make your life meaningful is a waste. Stop carving My Chemical Romance lyrics up your arms up and enjoy what you've got.
Life ends. Surprisingly quickly, too. So make the most of what you have.
All I'm saying is you don't have to settle for assimilation, blind hate, futility, alienation, mediocrity or ambivalence or comfort. Do something with your life and make the world a better place, but don't "sell out" or become so bitter that you are divorced from the world. It's not worth it for you or anybody else.
I'm not even vaguely bitter - I think we're arguing at cross purposes here. I'm saying be happy because life is short. Too short to waste it with useless meaningless teenaged angst. I have friends in their late 40's who are still clinging to it. All it buys them is suffering. There isn't any meaning to it. There isn't any point to it. Or any beauty or truth either. It's just pain and you don't need it.
If you want to go out and help people, do it. If you want to grow roses, do that. Do whatever you can to wring as much joy out of your short years as possible. What worked for me was to stop fighting things and join the human race.
I have never been as happy and fulfilled as I am right now. When I look down my street and see people going about their lives I don't see drones, or sell-outs, or mindless zombies. I see people who are probably as happy and blessed as I am. And rather than cook up a list of reasons why they suck, nowadays I think they're probably a lot like me. And hopefully just as happy, too.
Yeah, I was all angsty in my 20's too. I had long frizzled hair and wore an army jacket with patches all over it, and hated the world and all the stupid morons in it.
I'm now in my 40's. I have a haircut, I'm sitting in an office cube wearing a polo shirt.
And I've got some news for you. It's *all* pointless. The end is the same for everybody. We're all worm food. Doesn't matter if you rage against the machine or oil its gears. In a hundred years, I promise you it won't matter one whit.
What does matter is what you do with the time your have. And I'll say this - I'm happier now at 40 with a nice job, nice house, nice car and a family I love dearly - however boring and polite it may be - than I *ever* was at 20 running around rebelling against everything mocking the stupid sheeple.
My advice would be to take whatever brilliance you may have and apply it to your own life, if you're able. Solve your own problems. Find whatever happiness you can. Because sitting around picking at your own wounds to keep them fresh doesn't do a single bit of good.
I have friends who never "sold out". They're miserable. Most are too poor to fix their missing teeth. If you sit around and tend a harvest of misery your whole life, then that will be your reward.
To sum up, life only sucks if you work at making it suck. Let it go.
I wrote a battery driver for a Windows CE device once. Here's how we did that.
There is an A/D line on the AC97 codec that we use as a measurement probe to the battery. Used that to determine the actual voltage being seen. Charged the device 24 hours, and ran a program that dumped that output to a file until it died.
Then fit a third order polynomial to the data. We use that to predict where you're at percentage-wise on the draining curve. Then we made the mistake of looking at the metrics for other batteries we got from the manufacturer.
As it turns out, the characteristics from one battery to the next varied wildly. Even after you average a dozen or so batteries you'd still get better results throwing darts at a dartboard.
In short, that 3DMark06 test is probably reading battery capacity from something similar. That would be worth looking at for another source of possibly bogus readings.
Steal a CD, you're guilty of a $20 crime. But if you do it with a computer somehow you're liable for (14*$750=$10,500) dollars worth of damage.
Or in this poor sap's case, 6 months in a federal lockup for daring to offend his corporate masters.
Amazing, isn't it? That the feds and corporate America are actually making the case that it's better to physically rob a store rather than simply downloading an mp3? It's unreal.
It wasn't a success, but it wasn't a brick, either.
I remember those kinds of CE devices from that era. You're right. Not a brick, not a success. Definitely something in-between.
I just can't see CE as a desktop OS, no matter how small. You need Platform Builder to tweak the OS. No swap file, so you have a hard limit on memory. No native compilers. Maximum number of processes is 32, unless you run CE6 where they bumped it up to 32k.
Try to imagine Openoffice running on a CE device, what that would be like. Unusable, if you could even get it to port I'd guess.
I just look at CE and think "gadget". The MS office apps are teensy and nearly unusable. Same for the web browser.
It's like the difference between.NET and.NET Embedded. You just can't do very much with the embedded version - most of the interesting and useful stuff is missing.
That's the impression CE gives me. If you want to run some small embedded user interface program in kiosk mode, sure. Fine for that. But I just can't see anyone getting any desktop-type work done on one. The OS seems simply too paired down to be that widely useful.
I'm a developer who ports Windows CE to devices. All day, every day. Teach classes on it even. Been doing it since CE 3.0. Currently on 6.0.
CE makes a passable embedded/PDA device, but there is no way in the world you'd want it on a laptop.
It just isn't made for that kind of a setup. No native compilers, no swap file. Expensive license restrictions. It's less like a computer and more like a gadget in terms of overall feel.
A thousand years? Come on. That's the difference between the viking raids and landing on the moon. A lot can happen in a thousand years.
And FYI, RTFA. The thing has a maximum theoretical payoff roughly ten to one in terms of input/output, which they're predicting by 2010. 2MJ goes in, 20 comes out. If they only manage half that, you still have a x5 payoff. Which is still a massive win.
I don't know about you, but that much energy out of a nugget of 2mm nugget of beryllium sounds pretty freakin commercializable to me.
I'm thinking all sorts of great things can come from this. Uber cheap electricity, plug in hybrids to end the fuel crisis, shutting down coal/oil electricity plants, ion drives...there are lots of applications.
And you're not going to have to wait 1000 freaking years for them, either.
who can't appreciate movies as a separate form of art.
Because they're not. If you want to tell your own story - by all means do so. If you want to tell someone else's - then do that. Don't say "I'm going to make Dune into a movie" and then have Irulan sleep with Feyd, or have it rain as Paul takes the throne.
If you're feeling creative - write your own damn story.
Are there any book to movie translations you do approve of?
No.
Everything I've seen gets an X out of 10 rating and nobody has hit a ten yet. LoTR (first movie) gets about an 8 though. About the best I've seen yet. It isn't too bad.
Slashdot Mirror
"Slashdot Is Broken Day!"
Oh please, please someone post a release date for Duke Nukem Forever! Or a story about how Microsoft is publishing their source code base under the GPL.
IT'S NOT TIRED AND BORING AT ALL.
I really dont get it why people dislike the movie.
This guy explains it more eloquently than I can. NSFW language.
I could have had a V8!
Long ago I learned the best way to meet women is a) be injured, b) go shopping with a baby, and c) walk around a park with a cute dog.
I'm aged and married now so this tip is useless to me, but since I'm not stingy I figured I'd pass this along. =)
I bought a coffee at my favorite coffee shop near my college about a dozen years ago. As I rounded the bend I saw a kitten stuck in a snowdrift. It was pretty obvious he was recently placed there. Discarded would probably be the better word.
Couldn't abandon him, so I parked the car, grabbed the kitten and set about looking for the owner.
Walk into a college coffee shop with a kitten sometime. Thank me later.
Somewhat strongly in fact. I think experiment is the very essence of science. What you're chasing there is something different:
Misconceived ideas can be turned into accepted fact by flawed, or worse, deliberately contrived experimentation methodologies.
Well, of course.
But let's say some charlatan makes a bogus experiment and foists it on the scientific community. How do you refute their claim?
You got it - experimentally.
Remember a good experiment has a reproducible result. See cold fusion for examples in that arena. Cold fusion might be possible. But until you can reproduce it - by independent groups performing your experiment - it won't ever be science. Nature may have permitted it all along, but until you can experimentally verify it, it can never be science.
The Myth Busters truly are gods among geeks.
Adolescent and irresponsible
What attributes would you expect a Geek God to have? We're a bunch of 40 year olds with WoW accounts, Mame cabinets, and manga who ditch work to be the first in line to see The Watchmen. Of course our Deity is going to be adolescent and irresponsible.
BTW, if you want to know how truly great of a Geek God Adam Savage is, watch this. I always liked him, but after I saw this I am simply awestruck by the man. Geek God indeed.
Our chemistry teacher would have everyone as quietly as possible leave the room. Then he'd move the clock to 5pm. Then he'd leave and on the way out into the hall bang the door as loud as possible, waking the student up.
Good times. =)
And here's the oblig XKCD showing you why.
If robots are ever more intelligent than us, they'll also be intelligent enough to make good decisions.
Two points to bring up.
Point the first. Intelligence does not equal good will. Don't make me Godwin this thread.
Point the second. Good decisions...for whom? Us or them? Your robots may have different notions than you have.
I hated practically every inch of it from the get-go
I hate to post the obvious, but I'll do it anyways.
Why watch it in the first place then?
Holy crap, man. Do you eat at restaurants you hate? "Man. Every time I come here I hate it. Disgusting food. See you next Thursday."
If anyone should be embarrassed, it's you. Four seasons worth of hour long shows and you watched them all, hating almost every single moment. Imagine what else you could have done with that time.
The god explanation is such a cop out.
A lot of times when you see something like that, it is a cop out. But not in this case.
The story - in its entirety - was about something divine moving mankind/cylonkind like pawns. People have destinies in this show, real ones. All throughout.
So it's not like they just slapped a Deity into the ending to tie things up. Nothing else at that point would have sufficed.
...the Patent Wars have.
*cue John Williams orchestra music*
Like the God Amen, Slackware created himself.
I thought that was Gentoo.
In particular, how SUVs separate the driver's experience from the road in a dangerous way. And on the shopping habits of American car buyers in general. It's a favorite article of mine.
Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety
"In the Jetta, the engine is clearly audible. The steering is light and precise. The brakes are crisp. The wheelbase is short enough that the car picks up the undulations of the road. The car is so small and close to the ground, and so dwarfed by other cars on the road, that an intelligent driver is constantly reminded of the necessity of driving safely and defensively. An S.U.V. embodies the opposite logic. The driver is seated as high and far from the road as possible. The vehicle is designed to overcome its environment, not to respond to it. Even four-wheel drive, seemingly the most beneficial feature of the S.U.V., serves to reinforce this isolation. Having the engine provide power to all four wheels, safety experts point out, does nothing to improve braking, although many S.U.V. owners erroneously believe this to be the case. Nor does the feature necessarily make it safer to turn across a slippery surface: that is largely a function of how much friction is generated by the vehicle's tires. All it really does is improve what engineers call trackingâ"that is, the ability to accelerate without slipping in perilous conditions or in deep snow or mud. Champion says that one of the occasions when he came closest to death was a snowy day, many years ago, just after he had bought a new Range Rover. "Everyone around me was slipping, and I was thinking, Yeahhh. And I came to a stop sign on a major road, and I was driving probably twice as fast as I should have been, because I could. I had traction. But I also weighed probably twice as much as most cars. And I still had only four brakes and four tires on the road. I slid right across a four-lane road. " Four-wheel drive robs the driver of feedback. "The car driver whose wheels spin once or twice while backing out of the driveway knows that the road is slippery," Bradsher writes. "The SUV driver who navigates the driveway and street without difficulty until she tries to brake may not find out that the road is slippery until it is too late. " Jettas are safe because they make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling of safety isn't the solution; it's the problem."
I kind of figured that's how you felt; I think it's important to explain it to people a bit though.
Sorry for being unclear, and thanks for calling me out on the carpet and making me clarify my position a bit.
On the contrary, the power that comes with the knowledge that one can make decisions to move towards ones goals is astounding.
Oh, absolutely. For me it came by accident but the end result was the same. I started off like the original AC's post. Angry and angst ridden. What you don't know when you live your life that way is that you're hurting yourself. The anger is yours. Maybe you didn't start it, but you're the one cultivating it years down the road. If you let it go, things improve almost overnight. Did for me anyways.
I feel bad when I run into my friends from back then. I've been called a sell-out by people who can't afford basic health care. It's mind boggling.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the "boring, polite and pointless" life the original poster was railing against is actually full of freedom and joy. They might see an office cube where I have to sit for 8 hours a day, but instead I see a lifetime of health care, paid bills, and hugs from my kid. I gain everything, and all I had to do was give up hating everyone for "being normal".
It can't be the professional wrestling or Mansquito. It's obviously the name that's the problem! Quick! Change the name!
There are struggles that are worthwhile and there are struggles that are pointless, but to say that no struggle matters is speaking from both ignorance and arrogance. I mean no offense, we're all ignorant and arrogant to some extent.
None taken.
I'm not suggesting that no struggle matters - quite the contrary. What I am saying is that there are struggles that can make a difference to you, and there are those that can't. Being a perpetual outsider because the whole world sucks is an example of just such a pointless struggle.
doesn't make you any better or make your life more worthwhile or valueable than someone who can't afford to fix their teeth. Their pain and alienation may be far more meaningful than your "boring life" (your words).
Boring was from the OP, I was quoting. I'm happy with my lot.
I'm not placing more value on my life than anyone else's. In the end, we're all just about twenty bucks worth of water and salt anyways.
What I am saying is that using pain and alienation to make your life meaningful is a waste. Stop carving My Chemical Romance lyrics up your arms up and enjoy what you've got.
Life ends. Surprisingly quickly, too. So make the most of what you have.
All I'm saying is you don't have to settle for assimilation, blind hate, futility, alienation, mediocrity or ambivalence or comfort. Do something with your life and make the world a better place, but don't "sell out" or become so bitter that you are divorced from the world. It's not worth it for you or anybody else.
I'm not even vaguely bitter - I think we're arguing at cross purposes here. I'm saying be happy because life is short. Too short to waste it with useless meaningless teenaged angst. I have friends in their late 40's who are still clinging to it. All it buys them is suffering. There isn't any meaning to it. There isn't any point to it. Or any beauty or truth either. It's just pain and you don't need it.
If you want to go out and help people, do it. If you want to grow roses, do that. Do whatever you can to wring as much joy out of your short years as possible. What worked for me was to stop fighting things and join the human race.
I have never been as happy and fulfilled as I am right now. When I look down my street and see people going about their lives I don't see drones, or sell-outs, or mindless zombies. I see people who are probably as happy and blessed as I am. And rather than cook up a list of reasons why they suck, nowadays I think they're probably a lot like me. And hopefully just as happy, too.
Yeah, I was all angsty in my 20's too. I had long frizzled hair and wore an army jacket with patches all over it, and hated the world and all the stupid morons in it.
I'm now in my 40's. I have a haircut, I'm sitting in an office cube wearing a polo shirt.
And I've got some news for you. It's *all* pointless. The end is the same for everybody. We're all worm food. Doesn't matter if you rage against the machine or oil its gears. In a hundred years, I promise you it won't matter one whit.
What does matter is what you do with the time your have. And I'll say this - I'm happier now at 40 with a nice job, nice house, nice car and a family I love dearly - however boring and polite it may be - than I *ever* was at 20 running around rebelling against everything mocking the stupid sheeple.
My advice would be to take whatever brilliance you may have and apply it to your own life, if you're able. Solve your own problems. Find whatever happiness you can. Because sitting around picking at your own wounds to keep them fresh doesn't do a single bit of good.
I have friends who never "sold out". They're miserable. Most are too poor to fix their missing teeth. If you sit around and tend a harvest of misery your whole life, then that will be your reward.
To sum up, life only sucks if you work at making it suck. Let it go.
I wrote a battery driver for a Windows CE device once. Here's how we did that.
There is an A/D line on the AC97 codec that we use as a measurement probe to the battery. Used that to determine the actual voltage being seen. Charged the device 24 hours, and ran a program that dumped that output to a file until it died.
Then fit a third order polynomial to the data. We use that to predict where you're at percentage-wise on the draining curve. Then we made the mistake of looking at the metrics for other batteries we got from the manufacturer.
As it turns out, the characteristics from one battery to the next varied wildly. Even after you average a dozen or so batteries you'd still get better results throwing darts at a dartboard.
In short, that 3DMark06 test is probably reading battery capacity from something similar. That would be worth looking at for another source of possibly bogus readings.
Less risk. Is WalMart going to claim each track on that CD you stole is worth $750?
Steal a CD, you're guilty of a $20 crime. But if you do it with a computer somehow you're liable for (14*$750=$10,500) dollars worth of damage.
Or in this poor sap's case, 6 months in a federal lockup for daring to offend his corporate masters.
Amazing, isn't it? That the feds and corporate America are actually making the case that it's better to physically rob a store rather than simply downloading an mp3? It's unreal.
It wasn't a success, but it wasn't a brick, either.
I remember those kinds of CE devices from that era. You're right. Not a brick, not a success. Definitely something in-between.
I just can't see CE as a desktop OS, no matter how small. You need Platform Builder to tweak the OS. No swap file, so you have a hard limit on memory. No native compilers. Maximum number of processes is 32, unless you run CE6 where they bumped it up to 32k.
Try to imagine Openoffice running on a CE device, what that would be like. Unusable, if you could even get it to port I'd guess.
I just look at CE and think "gadget". The MS office apps are teensy and nearly unusable. Same for the web browser.
It's like the difference between .NET and .NET Embedded. You just can't do very much with the embedded version - most of the interesting and useful stuff is missing.
That's the impression CE gives me. If you want to run some small embedded user interface program in kiosk mode, sure. Fine for that. But I just can't see anyone getting any desktop-type work done on one. The OS seems simply too paired down to be that widely useful.
I'm a developer who ports Windows CE to devices. All day, every day. Teach classes on it even. Been doing it since CE 3.0. Currently on 6.0.
CE makes a passable embedded/PDA device, but there is no way in the world you'd want it on a laptop.
It just isn't made for that kind of a setup. No native compilers, no swap file. Expensive license restrictions. It's less like a computer and more like a gadget in terms of overall feel.
Use Linux instead.
Creed.
He should probably wash his hands next.
A thousand years? Come on. That's the difference between the viking raids and landing on the moon. A lot can happen in a thousand years.
And FYI, RTFA. The thing has a maximum theoretical payoff roughly ten to one in terms of input/output, which they're predicting by 2010. 2MJ goes in, 20 comes out. If they only manage half that, you still have a x5 payoff. Which is still a massive win.
I don't know about you, but that much energy out of a nugget of 2mm nugget of beryllium sounds pretty freakin commercializable to me.
I'm thinking all sorts of great things can come from this. Uber cheap electricity, plug in hybrids to end the fuel crisis, shutting down coal/oil electricity plants, ion drives...there are lots of applications.
And you're not going to have to wait 1000 freaking years for them, either.
You seem to be a picky book nerd
Totally guilty. I'll own up to that one 100%.
who can't appreciate movies as a separate form of art.
Because they're not. If you want to tell your own story - by all means do so. If you want to tell someone else's - then do that. Don't say "I'm going to make Dune into a movie" and then have Irulan sleep with Feyd, or have it rain as Paul takes the throne.
If you're feeling creative - write your own damn story.
Are there any book to movie translations you do approve of?
No.
Everything I've seen gets an X out of 10 rating and nobody has hit a ten yet. LoTR (first movie) gets about an 8 though. About the best I've seen yet. It isn't too bad.