Just saw this on memepool last night... I feel all ahead of the curve and stuff.
Pshaw! I saw 'Robot Stories' at the 3rd Sci-fi Film Festival in London at the end of January. That's being ahead of the curve, my boy!
Re:Aren't they doing that this season?
on
The Simpsons Movie
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· Score: 2, Informative
For those who don't know about this phenomenon, "jumping the shark" is a term a guy coined to describe when a TV show (or anything for that matter) has started to go downhill. It comes from Happy Days, when Fonzie jumped a shark on water skis. It was made up to be a scary and serious episode, but was clearly very very lame. After that, the show was never the same. See jumptheshark.com for more info.
For someone who even points to the webbage, you seem to be a little misguided. Fonzie jumping the shark was not 'very very lame', but when the show clearly reached its peak and could never achieve anything better than that moment, and it is from there that everything goes downhill.
'Jumping the shark' is when something has reached its peak and has nowhere to go but down. It is not when the show has all ready started to decline in quality.
ObRant: Why conceal this kind of knowledgebase article? Microsoft should have it in forty-foot-high letters of fire on their front page. No, more than that; it should be in every freaking news syndication everywhere for every single windows user to see and read, repeatedly, until they get the hint.
That's an interesting point; newspapers reach a huge audience every day and are no doubt read by many Windows and internet users who don't read up on security advisories or visit sites that carry them.
Considering the nigh-ubiquity of buggy Microsoft software and the effect it has or can have on people's everyday lives, why don't newspapers carry more short news articles detailing this kind of information?
You, sir, clearly know no Latin. With reference to this jargon file entry for 'ascii' it should be clear that the plural of 'virus' is, indeed, 'virii'.
You wouldn't say "many doofii", would you? It's "one doofus, many doofuses".
Of course I wouldn't say that. Even I know that it is 'one doofus, many doofes'.
Re:According to my own virtual tests
on
The Future of Flight
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· Score: 2, Informative
Fighters are inherently unstable, to allow the radical combat sequences dictated by dogfighting.
While it is true that modern fighters are inherently unstable, it is untrue that this is to add manoeuvrability. I have copied below an article, from someone who knows this better than me, in an attempt to stop this myth from continuing forever:
With reference to the recent column under the heading "Flying Off Balance", I'm afraid this caused much gnashing of teeth and bashing of the head against the proverbial brick wall! The concept that instability leads to high agility is a fallacy that dates back over 40 years to the days when autostabilisers were being developed to address the handling deficiencies of various early American jets and persists to this day.
OK, let's start with the basics:
1. Many modern supersonic jets have a negative Static Margin (ie they have the C of G behind the Neutral Point) which makes them aerodynamically unstable, and they are made controllable by use of a full-authority autostabilisation system. This is true.
2. These modern supersonic jets are designed with inherent instability to give enhanced agility. This is NOT true. Not only is it not the reason why the aircraft are designed in this way, it is also not true that an unstable aeroplane is more agile.
I know this is contrary to the received wisdom, but let's just examine what's going on. Most of the following is grossly oversimplified to avoid the use of mathematics, and is also rather over-generalised, but it is valid and accurate for the purposes of this discussion. Professional aerodynamicists are requested to stop reading this now and flip forward a few pages where there are some excellent kit reviews to read.
"Agility" of an aircraft in the pitching plane is determined by how quickly it can apply the lift forces to pull the 'G'. This in turn is dependant on how quickly the angle of attack can be increased - the pitch-plane angular acceleration, or more to the point the INSTANTANEOUS pitch-plane angular acceleration. Now a clever chap called Newton once showed that in any constant mass situation the acceleration of an object was dependant solely on the mass of the object and the sizes of the forces applied to it. The same is just as true for angular accelerations, except that we substitute "moments of inertia" for mass and use the "moments" of the forces as any attentive GCSE science pupil will be able to tell you. You will note that nothing has made reference to the "angular stability" of the object, because it's irrelevant and so we have just demonstrated that instability does NOT increase agility (QED).
Fine, so why DO we bother with all this negative-stability-and-fly-by-wire cockamamie? After all, it would be so much simpler, cheaper and more reliable to simply connect a conventional aircraft hydraulic system (or even a pushrod) between the stick and the control surfaces! The answer is simple - it reduces the supersonic fuel consumption.
[What? Where did that come from? What's this guy been smoking!? I mean one minute I was dozing through a bit about stability and the next thing I know you're blathering on about fuel consumption. How can these be related?? - Ed].
To understand this we need to briefly look at another bit of aerodynamics, the concept of "Trim Drag". We all know that with a stable aeroplane you place the CG in front of the "centre of pressure" (I'd prefer to use "Neutral Point" but let's keep it simple) which makes the aeroplane pitch downwards. We oppose this by having a tailplane to push the tail down or a foreplane to lift the nose up and voila! We have a stable aeroplane. The actual amount of effort the tailplane/foreplane has to exert to do this depends on how far the CG is from the centre of pressure, and we call this the "Static Margin". Those who have paid a bit of attention, rather than chatting up the totty at the back, will also know that the act of generating lift inherently generates drag.
Uh, except that after Smith was destroyed all the people he had taken over did revert to their previous forms, just as if another agent had taken over.
Did you not see the Oracle lying in the hole in the road, precisely where the Agent Smith that had been battling Neo was defeated--the Smith that had quoted the Oracle's line to Neo?
iPod can hold 5,000-10,000 songs, that's like 500-1000 albums - that is a significant music library. Of course with AIFF it will only hold about a 10th of that
Not only that, but with the larger file sizes involved when the music is uncompressed the iPod will need to load songs in to its internal memory from the hard drive a lot more frequently. This will use up the battery in a much shorter time than the 8 hours of life that is quoted.
Can we think of an expermient to test whether the gubmint is 0 steps or 1 step ahead of counterfeitters?
It's not scientific, but ask yourself who knows about all the security features of these new currency notes and whether it is more likely to be the government or the counterfeiters.
The way I understand it, at least here in the UK, there are multiple security features designed in to each note and bankers and other people who need to check notes regularly are trained in recognising only some of those features at a time, until those features have been counterfeited, at which point the bankers are trained to recognise other security features to check against. Once a sufficient number of the features are being counterfeited, a new note is put in to circulation with the older note eventually being replaced.
The introduction of this new note is how I see the government staying one step ahead.
In 2001 they released a new bill design, and said "we want to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters". Before that the bill had been unchanged for, what, 30 years? And now three years later, they're releasing a new bill? Its being kept hush-hush, but this is a clear sign that our currency is being successfully counterfitted.
I see it more of a sign that they are keeping 'one step ahead' of the counterfeiters. That's the whole point--you change things before the counterfeiters can catch up with what you already have.
Much easier to use the good old left ring finger, left index finger, right index finger combination, espeiclaly when you can slam the right finger down with the appropriate disgust at your crappy OS dying again.
Why slam only your right finger down on the DEL key when so much more venom can be shown with a clenched fist?
I get the feeling that "person who never bought anything from us before" will always get the highest prices, and those who "opt out" of sharing info will as well. The price changes for sharing information will be then called "discounts".
This is already happening with 'reward' or 'loyalty' cards, where spending money at certain shops gets you 'points' that can be redeemed for discounts, all for the price of sharing your information.
It's interesting to note just how many people are either unaware of the purpose of these 'loyalty' cards or just don't care.
I doubt that the new iPods have buttons that I could even feel through my pocket, let alone reliably press.
I got my new iPod at the weekend, and am already using the scroll wheel and buttons through my pockets to control my music and change the volume.
Each button is in an individual depression, as is the scroll wheel, making them easy to find, and they respond well enough to presses through the material of my trousers.
When I have played SMS, there are too many times when Mario is obscured by an object and the camera doesn't compensate, so I can't see what I am doing. There are times when the camera moves around so that you can see what is approaching, like on the path up to the windmill, but these times are so rare that they catch me off guard and it disorientates me. This can also happen mid-jump, which can cause me to miss the landing. In contrast, I never had a problem when the camera reorientated in Mario 64.
Also, when the focus shifts from Mario to an event happening, like some fruit falling out of the pipeline, the camera zoom returns to the default setting, which can get irritating, because I prefer the camera to be a little further back. Why is this zoom setting not stored somewhere so that when the focus shifts from Mario and back again I don't have to move the camera?
Yes, I can move the camera, and more so than in Mario 64. It's just a shame that I have to move it so much. I never really noticed the camera in Mario 64, except to marvel that it was so well implemented that I almost never thought about it while in general gamplay. I can tell you that I am thinking about the camera and how it is interrupting my usually fluid gameplay in SMS far too much.
Employee misbehavior spans an entire spectrum of seriousness, from stealing paper clips to embezzling billions.
And some interesting and occasionally humorous anecdotes about this sort of thing (but not so much in the IT sector) can be found in the book Sabotage in the American Workplace.
> Criminal masterminds are pretty few and far between. Mostly criminals are kinda dim.
You probably only think that because it is mostly the dumb criminals that are caught. There are many smart criminals out there, but they are clever enough not to broadcast that they are breaking the law in ingenious ways.
That was my first thought as well, but surely we could benefit from evacuating areas that would be affected? Blowing up such a threat isn't the only solution and a lot of people would be better off if they could be moved away from areas that would be directly affected by an impact, despite the obvious destruction and mayhem that would ensue.
Slashdot Mirror
You dont need to see why a phrase is in top position at the moment - as there is one factor that trumps all - anchortext (the text used as the link).
Does that mean that if one performs a search for "click here" we can find the least functional web sites?
'This is my handle, and this is my spout.'
Ah, Shooting Fish has shown us the future with the Verbitech computer.
The point of punitive damages is to disincentivize bad behavior even when its effects are not costly in terms of money.
That's good, because I'm going to sue the pants off you for causing me mental anguish by using 'disincentivize' in that sentence.
There has never been an expoit without a patch. Just the one.
One! One exploit without a patch, and that other one against Internet Explorer.
Okay, two exploits without a patch. Unless you count the many against Outlook Express.
AMONGST THE EXPLOITS WITHOUT A PATCH ARE... Can we start the interview again?
I thought 'one more G4 for the Powerbook' meant that it would be getting dual-processors to speed things up.
I guess if Apple did that, they would then add an extra 17" screen to create the DSBook.
Just saw this on memepool last night... I feel all ahead of the curve and stuff.
Pshaw! I saw 'Robot Stories' at the 3rd Sci-fi Film Festival in London at the end of January. That's being ahead of the curve, my boy!
For those who don't know about this phenomenon, "jumping the shark" is a term a guy coined to describe when a TV show (or anything for that matter) has started to go downhill. It comes from Happy Days, when Fonzie jumped a shark on water skis. It was made up to be a scary and serious episode, but was clearly very very lame. After that, the show was never the same. See jumptheshark.com for more info.
For someone who even points to the webbage, you seem to be a little misguided. Fonzie jumping the shark was not 'very very lame', but when the show clearly reached its peak and could never achieve anything better than that moment, and it is from there that everything goes downhill.
'Jumping the shark' is when something has reached its peak and has nowhere to go but down. It is not when the show has all ready started to decline in quality.
In 1999, I editorialized that [...]
'Editorialized'? What the fuck is wrong with 'wrote an editorial about'? What a horrible word.
ObRant: Why conceal this kind of knowledgebase article? Microsoft should have it in forty-foot-high letters of fire on their front page. No, more than that; it should be in every freaking news syndication everywhere for every single windows user to see and read, repeatedly, until they get the hint.
That's an interesting point; newspapers reach a huge audience every day and are no doubt read by many Windows and internet users who don't read up on security advisories or visit sites that carry them.
Considering the nigh-ubiquity of buggy Microsoft software and the effect it has or can have on people's everyday lives, why don't newspapers carry more short news articles detailing this kind of information?
Hurrah!
You do know, of course, that that entry is a joke.
Yeah, I wrote it myself, for use in the great 'viruses/virii' debates like this one. Sorry.
However, in the original latin, "virus" [...]
Personally I think it should be "viruses".
You, sir, clearly know no Latin. With reference to this jargon file entry for 'ascii' it should be clear that the plural of 'virus' is, indeed, 'virii'.
You wouldn't say "many doofii", would you? It's "one doofus, many doofuses".
Of course I wouldn't say that. Even I know that it is 'one doofus, many doofes'.
While it is true that modern fighters are inherently unstable, it is untrue that this is to add manoeuvrability. I have copied below an article, from someone who knows this better than me, in an attempt to stop this myth from continuing forever:
Uh, except that after Smith was destroyed all the people he had taken over did revert to their previous forms, just as if another agent had taken over.
Did you not see the Oracle lying in the hole in the road, precisely where the Agent Smith that had been battling Neo was defeated--the Smith that had quoted the Oracle's line to Neo?
iPod can hold 5,000-10,000 songs, that's like 500-1000 albums - that is a significant music library. Of course with AIFF it will only hold about a 10th of that
Not only that, but with the larger file sizes involved when the music is uncompressed the iPod will need to load songs in to its internal memory from the hard drive a lot more frequently. This will use up the battery in a much shorter time than the 8 hours of life that is quoted.
Can we think of an expermient to test whether the gubmint is 0 steps or 1 step ahead of counterfeitters?
It's not scientific, but ask yourself who knows about all the security features of these new currency notes and whether it is more likely to be the government or the counterfeiters.
The way I understand it, at least here in the UK, there are multiple security features designed in to each note and bankers and other people who need to check notes regularly are trained in recognising only some of those features at a time, until those features have been counterfeited, at which point the bankers are trained to recognise other security features to check against. Once a sufficient number of the features are being counterfeited, a new note is put in to circulation with the older note eventually being replaced.
The introduction of this new note is how I see the government staying one step ahead.
In 2001 they released a new bill design, and said "we want to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters". Before that the bill had been unchanged for, what, 30 years? And now three years later, they're releasing a new bill? Its being kept hush-hush, but this is a clear sign that our currency is being successfully counterfitted.
I see it more of a sign that they are keeping 'one step ahead' of the counterfeiters. That's the whole point--you change things before the counterfeiters can catch up with what you already have.
Much easier to use the good old left ring finger, left index finger, right index finger combination, espeiclaly when you can slam the right finger down with the appropriate disgust at your crappy OS dying again.
Why slam only your right finger down on the DEL key when so much more venom can be shown with a clenched fist?
For the record, Summer ends with the Solstice around Sept. 20/21.
That's the Autumnal Equinox, but is indeed when Summer ends. The Summer Solstice occurs on the 21st June.
I get the feeling that "person who never bought anything from us before" will always get the highest prices, and those who "opt out" of sharing info will as well. The price changes for sharing information will be then called "discounts".
This is already happening with 'reward' or 'loyalty' cards, where spending money at certain shops gets you 'points' that can be redeemed for discounts, all for the price of sharing your information.
It's interesting to note just how many people are either unaware of the purpose of these 'loyalty' cards or just don't care.
I doubt that the new iPods have buttons that I could even feel through my pocket, let alone reliably press.
I got my new iPod at the weekend, and am already using the scroll wheel and buttons through my pockets to control my music and change the volume.
Each button is in an individual depression, as is the scroll wheel, making them easy to find, and they respond well enough to presses through the material of my trousers.
Mario Sunshine has a worse camera than Mario 64?
I think so.
When I have played SMS, there are too many times when Mario is obscured by an object and the camera doesn't compensate, so I can't see what I am doing. There are times when the camera moves around so that you can see what is approaching, like on the path up to the windmill, but these times are so rare that they catch me off guard and it disorientates me. This can also happen mid-jump, which can cause me to miss the landing. In contrast, I never had a problem when the camera reorientated in Mario 64.
Also, when the focus shifts from Mario to an event happening, like some fruit falling out of the pipeline, the camera zoom returns to the default setting, which can get irritating, because I prefer the camera to be a little further back. Why is this zoom setting not stored somewhere so that when the focus shifts from Mario and back again I don't have to move the camera?
Yes, I can move the camera, and more so than in Mario 64. It's just a shame that I have to move it so much. I never really noticed the camera in Mario 64, except to marvel that it was so well implemented that I almost never thought about it while in general gamplay. I can tell you that I am thinking about the camera and how it is interrupting my usually fluid gameplay in SMS far too much.
Commodore 64 I NEVER was personaly a fan of.
No, but Yoda a fan of are you.
And some interesting and occasionally humorous anecdotes about this sort of thing (but not so much in the IT sector) can be found in the book Sabotage in the American Workplace.
> Criminal masterminds are pretty few and far between. Mostly criminals are kinda dim.
You probably only think that because it is mostly the dumb criminals that are caught. There are many smart criminals out there, but they are clever enough not to broadcast that they are breaking the law in ingenious ways.
> ..is tell us when we're all going to die.
That was my first thought as well, but surely we could benefit from evacuating areas that would be affected? Blowing up such a threat isn't the only solution and a lot of people would be better off if they could be moved away from areas that would be directly affected by an impact, despite the obvious destruction and mayhem that would ensue.