> So too was Jonas Salk; if he developed a program to add tags to MP3 files instead of discovering penicillin and refining it for medical use, this would have been a disappointment.
If Jonas Salk had discovered penicillin and refined it for medical use, he'd have been busted for plagiarizing Fleming's work about 20something years after the fact, and would never have made it out of med school.
If Jonas Salk had developed a program to add tags to MP3 files, he would have been a hero. For revolutionizing the field of temporal dynamics, mind you, but a hero nonetheless... (Umm, and Karlheinz Brandenburg from Fraunhoefer IIS would have been busted for plagiarizing Salk's work 30something years after the fact, but that's another story.)
No wonder he invented a vaccine for polio instead.:)
> > You could actually write a makefile that utilizes the separate converters and outputs as wanted...
>
> make ogg >
> make mp3 >
> make wma >
> make rip >
>
Don't forget the all-important -
>
> make morediskspace
Ah just hack something together with a credit card number, and a few calls to wget, curl, and/or lynx to automatically process some HTTP transactions to www.newegg.com!
> Huckster: I didn't know that Hush Technologies made Media Center PCs, but they do. > >Country Rube: Then why is your picture on the case? > >Cue getaway music...
Well, it could be worse.
Huckster #2: "I didn't know that Hush Technologies had a webserver."
200,000 Slashdotting Rubes: "What webserver?"
Cue halon extinguisher activation in the server room.
> Sure, one ship against a whole fleet of pissed off starfleet officers.
> >No matter how bright Wesley is supposed to be or how great Picards father-complex is, the fleet would have vaporized them in days.
Wes: "I reprogrammed the holodeck so it was possible to rescue the ship."
Q: "What?"
Picard: "He cheated."
Wes: "I changed the conditions of the test. I got a commendation for original thinking. I don't like to lose."
Q: "Then you never faced that situation. Faced being written out of the series."
Wes: "I don't believe in the no-win scenario."
> The book boasts on its cover that it features a Foreword by Vin Diesel. >
Vin Diesel?! >
VIN DIESEL!!! >
*searches in his Bag of Holding for the first large, heavy weapon he can lay his hand on*
There's no need to sully a perfectly innocent +5 Mace of Encluement on this. Just empty your bag of holding and send to the editor, along with this:
*hands smoothwombat a portable hole*
The editor will do what comes naturally to him, and we'll all be the better for it.
> People separated written words with spaces from the time writing was invented up until around 30 years ago whenaspacebecameavaluableobjectnottobewasted
Tog, that whistling sound is the point going over your head.
30 years ago, we took spaces out of filenames not because we needed to save characters, but because we were all using a CLI, and we did it because we were using spaces to separate words.
then: vi ~fredfoo/stupidapp/stupid.cfg now: vi C:\Documents and Settings\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg
("/c:/documents: new file")
/curse
now, once more, with feeling:vi "C:\Documents and Settings\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg"
For the love of fuck, I'm not asking to go back to 8.3, but would it have killed you, Mr. Gates, to have named the two most commonly-used directories on a Windows box "/Programs" and "/Users"?
> It doesn't seem to include evil applications (or operating systems) that suddenly throw new windows on the screen to grab keyboard focus away from you just as you type something.
Or worse, evil applications that not only steal focus, but also float-to-top on mouseover. If I have to jump through a TweakUI hoop to select X-focus-follows-mouse without autoraise on XP/2K, I fucking mean that I fucking want focus to follow the fucking mouse, and not to fucking autoraise.
Adobe CS suite (which apart from this has a pretty good UI), I'm looking at you.
> > He mentions that computers shut-off without any juice. Not surprising that computers do that. I don't think this is a design flaw, simply because there are things in existence, known as UPS's, that are there to buy you time to save and close everything.
And dumber still, his proposed solution:
> Convert your existing software and write new software to perform Continuous Save, so users cannot lose more than the last few characters typed or gestures entered.
...thereby practically guaranteeing data loss unless the (expensive, takes 5 years to get through the standards-bodies) hardware solution of embedding a UPS into the case is also taken.
If my PC dies when I'm typing a memo, I reboot.
If my PC dies when the hard drive is being read, I reboot.
If my PC dies when the hard drive is being written to, I'm a lot more likely to end up in deep shit, even if the OS uses a journaling filesystem.
If we assume that power failures are equally likely at all times, then the only way to lower the probability that a power failure will occur during a write operation is to minimize the amount of time during which write operations are being performed.
I've never lost data under FAT32 and 9x due to either a power failure or a crash that necessitated a hard reset. When that unstable POS goes down, it goes down hard. I've lost data under NTFS/XP, because in the rare occurrences when the OS does go down (yeah, it was a game), the OS never went down "hard enough" to lock the thing up completely. Couldn't use the mouse or keyboard to shut it down cleanly, and enough processes kept running and reading/writing (presumably to swap) that it was a matter of guesswork as to when to hit the reset button. And after a few dozen such crashes, I finally guessed wrong.
Since the New York Times started reporting it. Of course, these are the same folks who also brought us Jayson Blair, so it's not like it's much of an endorsement these days.
If we make sense, then I demand a retraction. Or a fish looking at a melted clock dial. This is not a |.
> Our neurons can be a meter long or more, and there's next to no metabolic activity on the axonal end (when compared to the pericaryon, the neuron's body). So, for the rest of the neuron to feed and communicate with the axon, there are two transport systems that go both ways. Rabies simply hitchhikes the slow stream that goes upstream to the pericharyon to travel from the periphery to the middle of the body:)
So while we're at it -- how does that play in to the induced coma as part of the treatment? IANAMD, but I'm speculating that less neural activity (either in the brain or up/down the spinal cord for movement) means fewer neural firings, and consequently slower neural transport, and therefore more time for the vaccine to work?
> I'm an academic researcher who does his own programming -- I have to eat what I kill.
If you have tenure, you don't have to kill in order to eat. If the professor you're working for has tenure, he doesn't need you to kill in order to eat.
The reason people work 80+ hour weeks is because if the project doesn't ship on a certain date (and this is particularly prevalent in the games industry, in which payment is often contingent upon meeting milestones), they don't eat.
"OK, so why not set the milestones a little more properly -- so that you're not forced into such a situation to begin with?", I hear you cry.
If you're a game studio, and you demand sane milestones, the publishing house won't sign the contract. And that means you don't even get into the buffet line, let alone eat.
In academic terms: Nobody has tenure. And unless he was willing to sign his firstborn away as part of a contract that guarantees delivery of either a Nobel prize or a $500M IPO out of your research within six months, your professor doesn't even get to apply for the grant money.
From the article: > How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother?
<musicfan> Hey, anyone got The Smiths - How Soon Is Now.mp*THUMPTHUMPTHUMP* "FEDERAL COPYRIGHT CZAR SQUAD! PUT DOWN THE HEADPHONES AND STEP AWAY FROM THE IPOD!" *** Disconnected
> Congradulations. You have just discovered the dificulty in figuring out Cause and Effect vs. Correlation. This is the hardest thing for scientists and psychologists to figure out. Do I have a correlation here? Or do I have a cause and effect?
And that's the problem, but there's an easy solution: all them scientist-types need to go to law school, so they can become politicians.
Have you ever met a politicians who had trouble deciding the difference between correlation and causation? Of course not -- it's always causation!
> So, who's gonna be the first......to allow a piece of software created by 3 of the "big 4" to run on their system? > > You don't even need to be a tinfoil hat type to see that this is an extremely bad idea. I have no wish to be Pwn3d by the RIAA. > >
Can't wait to see what kinda packets people find this thing sending back to its masters.
And yet, about half the people on Slashdot seem to have no problem with Steam.
What happens when SafeDisc and SecuRom start to go this route, and you can't play anything by EA Games, or Take-Two, or Activision unless you have St-EA-my.exe, T2minator.exe, or Activ8n.exe running in the background?
RIAA and MPAA are several orders of magnitude more evil, but it seems pretty clear to me that the games industry is intent on catching up. And a lot of us are playing right into their hands.
> "...graduates should be plenty prepared for their future careers." > >
We should be trying to remedy this work situation, not prepare people for it.
Why not both?
"Included is a particularly touching story about a student who survived the 2002 Sari Club terrorist attack in Bali."
On the day when the EA employees collectively go postal, this guy will not only get out alive, he'll probably get one of the many newly-vacated corner offices!:)
> As to where that $20 million went, well, that's another story. If half did go to Ed Black then it seems to me that he's got a lot of explaining to do.
"Hold on a minute, Gillian Anderson and I have to open another magnum of Dom Perignon to help us wash down the beluga caviar grits we just finished licking outa Natalie Portman's belly button", he explained.
> 'Czar'? Weren't czar's, like, emperors who had ultimate rule in a non-free society?
> >Is that what it's come down to in 21st century America? 'Czar's?
> >At least the US gubment is going out in the open about it. No more of this pussy footing about the real intent here: screw freedom. Drug Czars, IP Czars, what next?
In Tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia came next.
You know the grand experiment in freedom has ended when Yakov Smirnoff jokes start sounding like a cross between Cold War era history textbooks and tonight's evening news.
russint (793669) writes: > Please, spare us the netcraft jokes.
Russint confirms... Netcraft jokes are dead.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Netcraft joke community when Slashdotter russint confirmed that Netcraft joke market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all Slashdot posts...
> If you have a steam account, just download the games through steam. No CD needed ever. Which is good for me, I have no idea what happened to the Half Life CD I bought 5 years ago...
Heh. Three Slashdot articles after the one that talks about US broadband penetration at 20%, someone suggests that people "just download the games through Steam".
Even if you have a backpack and a week's worth of supplies to walk the 120 miles to the nearest city with a CompUSA, you still have to spend a second week walking back home. But your point still applies -- with Steam, you can download the whole 4-5 gigabytes of content in as little as nine days! Don't you see how much more convenient Steam is?
How about a solution for people who actually take care of their CDs and know where their shit is at? (I have my original HL1 CDs and the original retail box, and two CD-Rs full of patches and mods I've accumulated over the years. They're sitting on a bookshelf. The images of those CDs and CD-Rs are sitting on my fileserver. There's a backup drive at my parents' place, and it's going to get swapped/reimaged this Thanksgiving weekend.)
My "content delivery system" has outlived dozens of "never gonna fail" companies including Origin, Infocom, and Microprose. Someday I'll add Valve to that list.
> Picture this: > >
Fighter helmet with mouth piece that sits against the pilots tongue. When the computer detects a threat it can stimulate the pilots tongue in relation to the direction and distance of the target. After a little training this sort of thing would really increase reaction time. > >
Though it would make a conversation with the tower a bit tough:)
Slashdot Mirror
If Jonas Salk had discovered penicillin and refined it for medical use, he'd have been busted for plagiarizing Fleming's work about 20something years after the fact, and would never have made it out of med school.
If Jonas Salk had developed a program to add tags to MP3 files, he would have been a hero. For revolutionizing the field of temporal dynamics, mind you, but a hero nonetheless... (Umm, and Karlheinz Brandenburg from Fraunhoefer IIS would have been busted for plagiarizing Salk's work 30something years after the fact, but that's another story.)
No wonder he invented a vaccine for polio instead. :)
> > make ogg
> > make mp3
> > make wma
> > make rip
>
> Don't forget the all-important -
>
> make morediskspace
Ah just hack something together with a credit card number, and a few calls to wget, curl, and/or lynx to automatically process some HTTP transactions to www.newegg.com!
>
>Country Rube: Then why is your picture on the case?
>
>Cue getaway music...
Well, it could be worse.
Huckster #2: "I didn't know that Hush Technologies had a webserver."
200,000 Slashdotting Rubes: "What webserver?"
Cue halon extinguisher activation in the server room.
>
>No matter how bright Wesley is supposed to be or how great Picards father-complex is, the fleet would have vaporized them in days.
Wes: "I reprogrammed the holodeck so it was possible to rescue the ship."
Q: "What?"
Picard: "He cheated."
Wes: "I changed the conditions of the test. I got a commendation for original thinking. I don't like to lose."
Q: "Then you never faced that situation. Faced being written out of the series."
Wes: "I don't believe in the no-win scenario."
> Vin Diesel?!
> VIN DIESEL!!!
> *searches in his Bag of Holding for the first large, heavy weapon he can lay his hand on*
There's no need to sully a perfectly innocent +5 Mace of Encluement on this. Just empty your bag of holding and send to the editor, along with this:
*hands smoothwombat a portable hole*
The editor will do what comes naturally to him, and we'll all be the better for it.
> People separated written words with spaces from the time writing was invented up until around 30 years ago whenaspacebecameavaluableobjectnottobewasted
Tog, that whistling sound is the point going over your head.
30 years ago, we took spaces out of filenames not because we needed to save characters, but because we were all using a CLI, and we did it because we were using spaces to separate words.
then: vi ~fredfoo/stupidapp/stupid.cfg
now: vi C:\Documents and Settings\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg
("/c:/documents: new file")
now, once more, with feeling:vi "C:\Documents and Settings\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg"
For the love of fuck, I'm not asking to go back to 8.3, but would it have killed you, Mr. Gates, to have named the two most commonly-used directories on a Windows box "/Programs" and "/Users"?
Or worse, evil applications that not only steal focus, but also float-to-top on mouseover. If I have to jump through a TweakUI hoop to select X-focus-follows-mouse without autoraise on XP/2K, I fucking mean that I fucking want focus to follow the fucking mouse, and not to fucking autoraise.
Adobe CS suite (which apart from this has a pretty good UI), I'm looking at you.
And dumber still, his proposed solution:
> Convert your existing software and write new software to perform Continuous Save, so users cannot lose more than the last few characters typed or gestures entered.
If my PC dies when I'm typing a memo, I reboot.
If my PC dies when the hard drive is being read, I reboot.
If my PC dies when the hard drive is being written to, I'm a lot more likely to end up in deep shit, even if the OS uses a journaling filesystem.
If we assume that power failures are equally likely at all times, then the only way to lower the probability that a power failure will occur during a write operation is to minimize the amount of time during which write operations are being performed.
I've never lost data under FAT32 and 9x due to either a power failure or a crash that necessitated a hard reset. When that unstable POS goes down, it goes down hard. I've lost data under NTFS/XP, because in the rare occurrences when the OS does go down (yeah, it was a game), the OS never went down "hard enough" to lock the thing up completely. Couldn't use the mouse or keyboard to shut it down cleanly, and enough processes kept running and reading/writing (presumably to swap) that it was a matter of guesswork as to when to hit the reset button. And after a few dozen such crashes, I finally guessed wrong.
But at least the knees can jerk!
Since the New York Times started reporting it. Of course, these are the same folks who also brought us Jayson Blair, so it's not like it's much of an endorsement these days.
If we make sense, then I demand a retraction. Or a fish looking at a melted clock dial. This is not a |.
Are you nuts?! If it can't vaporize a city, how the hell are we supposed to get the funding to build it?
Drop the failsafe and put the DoD on it. You can sneak the failsafe into the plans after we get the funding.
So while we're at it -- how does that play in to the induced coma as part of the treatment? IANAMD, but I'm speculating that less neural activity (either in the brain or up/down the spinal cord for movement) means fewer neural firings, and consequently slower neural transport, and therefore more time for the vaccine to work?
Because pr0n is addictive. And Pixie dust is just IBM's way of saying you've got too goddamn much pr0n.
If you have tenure, you don't have to kill in order to eat. If the professor you're working for has tenure, he doesn't need you to kill in order to eat.
The reason people work 80+ hour weeks is because if the project doesn't ship on a certain date (and this is particularly prevalent in the games industry, in which payment is often contingent upon meeting milestones), they don't eat.
"OK, so why not set the milestones a little more properly -- so that you're not forced into such a situation to begin with?", I hear you cry.
If you're a game studio, and you demand sane milestones, the publishing house won't sign the contract. And that means you don't even get into the buffet line, let alone eat.
In academic terms: Nobody has tenure. And unless he was willing to sign his firstborn away as part of a contract that guarantees delivery of either a Nobel prize or a $500M IPO out of your research within six months, your professor doesn't even get to apply for the grant money.
> How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother?
<musicfan> Hey, anyone got The Smiths - How Soon Is Now.mp *THUMPTHUMPTHUMP* "FEDERAL COPYRIGHT CZAR SQUAD! PUT DOWN THE HEADPHONES AND STEP AWAY FROM THE IPOD!"
*** Disconnected
And that's the problem, but there's an easy solution: all them scientist-types need to go to law school, so they can become politicians.
Have you ever met a politicians who had trouble deciding the difference between correlation and causation? Of course not -- it's always causation!
>
> You don't even need to be a tinfoil hat type to see that this is an extremely bad idea. I have no wish to be Pwn3d by the RIAA.
>
> Can't wait to see what kinda packets people find this thing sending back to its masters.
And yet, about half the people on Slashdot seem to have no problem with Steam.
What happens when SafeDisc and SecuRom start to go this route, and you can't play anything by EA Games, or Take-Two, or Activision unless you have St-EA-my.exe, T2minator.exe, or Activ8n.exe running in the background?
RIAA and MPAA are several orders of magnitude more evil, but it seems pretty clear to me that the games industry is intent on catching up. And a lot of us are playing right into their hands.
>
> We should be trying to remedy this work situation, not prepare people for it.
Why not both?
"Included is a particularly touching story about a student who survived the 2002 Sari Club terrorist attack in Bali."
On the day when the EA employees collectively go postal, this guy will not only get out alive, he'll probably get one of the many newly-vacated corner offices! :)
"Hold on a minute, Gillian Anderson and I have to open another magnum of Dom Perignon to help us wash down the beluga caviar grits we just finished licking outa Natalie Portman's belly button", he explained.
>
>Is that what it's come down to in 21st century America? 'Czar's?
>
>At least the US gubment is going out in the open about it. No more of this pussy footing about the real intent here: screw freedom. Drug Czars, IP Czars, what next?
In Tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia came next.
You know the grand experiment in freedom has ended when Yakov Smirnoff jokes start sounding like a cross between Cold War era history textbooks and tonight's evening news.
> Please, spare us the netcraft jokes.
Russint confirms... Netcraft jokes are dead.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Netcraft joke community when Slashdotter russint confirmed that Netcraft joke market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all Slashdot posts...
Heh. Three Slashdot articles after the one that talks about US broadband penetration at 20%, someone suggests that people "just download the games through Steam".
Even if you have a backpack and a week's worth of supplies to walk the 120 miles to the nearest city with a CompUSA, you still have to spend a second week walking back home. But your point still applies -- with Steam, you can download the whole 4-5 gigabytes of content in as little as nine days! Don't you see how much more convenient Steam is?
How about a solution for people who actually take care of their CDs and know where their shit is at? (I have my original HL1 CDs and the original retail box, and two CD-Rs full of patches and mods I've accumulated over the years. They're sitting on a bookshelf. The images of those CDs and CD-Rs are sitting on my fileserver. There's a backup drive at my parents' place, and it's going to get swapped/reimaged this Thanksgiving weekend.)
My "content delivery system" has outlived dozens of "never gonna fail" companies including Origin, Infocom, and Microprose. Someday I'll add Valve to that list.
>
> Fighter helmet with mouth piece that sits against the pilots tongue. When the computer detects a threat it can stimulate the pilots tongue in relation to the direction and distance of the target. After a little training this sort of thing would really increase reaction time.
>
> Though it would make a conversation with the tower a bit tough
You must taste... in Russian!
In Thoviat Rutthia, Firefoth flieth thoo?
"Thyre rearwurdth mitthile, dammit!"
[nothing happens]
"Mmmmm.... Borscht!"
[*KABOOM*, second Firefox burninated]
"Better ithe up a cold one boyth, I'th comin' home!"