Irrelevent. I'm talking from a pragmatic level, not a moral one. Terrorism feeds off the popularity of the cause. By giving people more reasons to hate the US, you increase the likelihood that terrorists will gain safe haven throughout the world.
The site doesn't appear to work at all with konqueror.
When the amount of money that konqueror users are going to spend at the games starts to match the amount of money that Windows users are going to spend at the games, you'll see some changes. Whining about entitlements will get you nowhere. I'm willing to bet that they feel they don't have time to worry about piddling issues like whether or not their website is w3c compliant or whatever.
Now, the Mac users have a legitimate gripe. But konqueror/galleon/mozilla/etc. users? I'm an open-source fanatic, but even I'm not going to get pissy that someone else's business plan doesn't involve catering to people in one of the smallest market demographics.
[ot] Anybody ever tried developing their own?
on
Writing Documentation
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· Score: 0, Troll
I've been wrestling with this problem myself lately, as I'm going to be getting into putting some seminar stuff I've written for my students into a portable format. Pretty much all the options have their drawbacks, and I figured what the hell, I'd roll my own.
Has anybody tried doing this? What approaches did you try? What language(s) did you use for parsing it? What problems came up? What general format guidelines did you have to settle on? Anything that you wanted to do and couldn't, for whatever reason?
Some interesting things I got out of that seminar, haven't had a chance to try most of these out for myself (so I can't personally testify to their value)...
1. You need 8 hours per day. Anything that deviates from 8 hours per day too much will come back to haunt you, the effect is cumulative.
2. If you nap, don't nap for more than 30 minutes. There's high-level and low-level sleep, and over 30 minutes takes you from high-level to low-level, at which point your body is preparing to shut itself down for a long time. Letting that happen outside of a normal sleep schedule will mess you up.
3. Coffee is bad bad bad. When eating, trying eating your proteins first in the morning, and your carbohydrates first in the evening. Whatever you eat first will affect your energy level, and proteins wake you up, while carbs mellow you down.
4. If you need anything to help you either fall asleep (pills) or wake up (alarm clock), you're not getting proper sleep. Good sleep patterns become habitual (apparently).
5. You need a perfectly dark room when you sleep. The only noise you have should be background stuff that drowns out random outbursts of noise.
Get a few Win32 apps to work well and ignore the rest.
Which brings up an intriguing idea.
What would happen if you could have multiple Windows Emulation modules, and associate different windows software programs with the module that best emulated windows to make it run?
Beautiful flash animation, though. I particularly like the fact that clicking the 'skip intro' button does absolutely nothing -- you get the flash garbage anyway.
Actually, no. What you're seeing is their new compression methodology in action, applied to their website. By clicking on Skip Intro, you're actually hurtled through a registration process at lightning speed and signed up to several of their services, but for security purposes in order to validate those services you're redirected to the main page. However, in order to expediate the service, the exact location of the time of your click on the Skip Intro is kept in a data file in your cookies folder (you might not see it there because, you guessed it, it's compressed to a single byte), and when redirected the cookie is read to get the exact location of your click in the Flash Intro so that the intro fast-forwards to that point in time when you clicked, giving the impression of seemless, uninterrupted animation.
Go on, give it a try. Try clicking the Skip Intro button multiple times, and you'll notice that once you click it'll look like nothing's changing, with no trace in a cookie file of where that spot is. Now THAT'S impressive. And they've got all of your personal information from that registration which you didn't even know you did compressed to a single byte on the server, just waiting to be uncompressed so they can start sending you more information (they just need to work the decompression kinks out).
It was only a matter of time before they started doing this. There are no more general-user niches to fill in software anymore that Microsoft doesn't already have. Moreover, you can't really pirate hardware like you can software.
Plus, if Linux is going to do anything it's push down the OS cost and also the cost of general server aps, potentially to the point of them being so close to free that MS can't make much money off them at the point of sale.
The move to hardware is a bit of a no-brainer. I'm surprised it took them this long to realize it. What'll be scary is if they succeed in using this to enforce new software protocols. THAT would be scary.
...by commiserating about Windows, by poking fun at the flaws that it has on every level, from technological to social, it serves only to further entrench people in a Windows monopoly.
For the love of God, don't you remember how to laugh?
He's not trivializing an issue at all. His issue is that he's a computer illiterate and he's using absurdism to show how. This is how he writes.
If you're hoping he'll let himself be co-opted into a political agenda, it's not going to happen and I'm glad for it. He makes his living on comedy about the human condition. Like it or not, the human condition with regards to the average person in the 20th century vis-a-vis computers is pretty much as he described it. Making himself part of someone else's cause would cheapen the humour, and if you don't believe me, think about what would happen if Barry chose the complete opposite point of view than the one you're hoping he'd take. People everywhere would be clamoring to get back to what he was good at, namely observational (rather than motivational) humour.
Taking up our cause would be a major betrayal against art, and a huge victory for propaganda.
Why are you thinking about getting a tech degree? Many of these programs are going to be geared towards people who are hoping to get the knowledge you probably already have.
There are accelerated programs (2 years, tops) for business that you can take that will move you up the ladder into managerial or directorial roles.
I know that's a simplistic answer, but I'd hate to think that someone would enroll in university with high expectations about what they're going to get only to have the expectations dashed, and stuck with 4 years of fees to pay. Just a thought.
A ludicrous article, but here's something neat:
on
XBox Defects Draw Ire
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· Score: 1
People have already done the math on the statistics, and have found that this is basically a non-news story.
So why IS it a news story? On CNN, no less?
Karma, baby. You don't pull the shit that Microsoft has pulled and expect to get away with it. You won't hear the complaints if the PS2 or NGC approach this level of failure rate coupled with poor customer service.
(I guess it doesn't hurt that CNN and MSNBC are rival networks, either.)
I totally agree with this. Firstly, consider for a moment the possibility that you won't get a fulltime job as a straight-up programmer. Yeah, life sucks, you get over it. Unless you're lucky enough to get into a firm somewhere, you'd have to spend half your time trying to set up contracts anyway.
Meanwhile, if you can take some courses in Visual Basic and database programming, you could probably get yourself another job in the industry, only this time as an office administrator or something. This might not sound great, but keep in mind your education options -- either you go back to university to get a degree, or go to professional college where this is the sort of job they're training students for anyway.
Meanwhile, with the experience you have, you already know how to deal with people, follow procedures, give different options for different trouble scenarios, maybe even manage a person or two... This is your trump card.
And while office automation might not sound like much when it comes to programming, there's plenty of ways to use it as a learning tool for sexier programming skills. When you get given a database to design, go overkill and do a data dictionary with DFDs, ERDs, etc. If you need an office-wide system coordinating reports, try to code it with modular design so that bits and pieces can be interchanged. Maybe even do up a bunch of UML diagrams for it, or figure out how to deploy it with a simple Install wizard. Want to use Excel's charting tools but your data is all stored in a text? Visual Basic's Excel library can help you automate that. Need tracking software? Win2K comes with IIS, which will have an ASP engine. Store it all on a central server and feed it off as web pages (can make pretty things without too much effort). Need to change platforms completely? Brush up on your protocols like XML or CORBA...
Sky's the limit. You only have to be creative and make sure you're not biting off more than you can chew on your projects. Not until you have seniority again, at least.
It will tie into Microsoft's.NET strategy, delivering video-on-demand...
I guess the jury's out on whether the article is a hoax, but this idea is pretty scary. Just imagine: they've trumped everyone else for the home desktop system, and so they dip into territory previously ruled by video stores, Pay Per View, and speciality movie channels.
Monopoly? Nah. Monopoly would be too good a word to use for them.
This was actually one of the concerns that I had over LOTR being done as a film. Adventure movies made these days don't survive without giving the bad guy lots of screen time, and the literary version focusses in on the ring being the embodiment of evil rather than Sauron, who gets very little treatment through the books. Most of the action involves his henchmen or his armies.
I was really worried that LOTR would get ruined in much the same way that James and the Giant Peach was ruined when the stop-motion version came out. All of the dark parts were taken out and the plot was reconfigured to fit overused Joseph Campbell paradigms.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if the director sticks with Tolkien's original intent and leaves Sauron out of the foreground for the most part.
Obi Wan and Luke are walking through Mos Eisley, right after they leave the cantina, and they're talking about selling off the speeder. For a brief second, a long, thin pair of legs, stilt-like, walk across the foreground. No picture of the body or the feet. No second pair of legs, as though half a camel just walked through the shot.
The genius is how the rest of the alien's appearance is left up to the imagination. I mean, what fluke of gravity was that creature?
More importantly, how does Lucas's creative insight go from that to Jar Jar? He used to have a pretty keen eye for subtle details. Now it's like getting an ice pick through the brain.
Slashdot Mirror
Irrelevent. I'm talking from a pragmatic level, not a moral one. Terrorism feeds off the popularity of the cause. By giving people more reasons to hate the US, you increase the likelihood that terrorists will gain safe haven throughout the world.
Wrong!
People love the US so much they are dying to get into it.
Funny choice of words. The terrorists on Sept 11th were dying to get into the U.S. too.
... "Why do they hate us so much?"
The site doesn't appear to work at all with konqueror.
When the amount of money that konqueror users are going to spend at the games starts to match the amount of money that Windows users are going to spend at the games, you'll see some changes. Whining about entitlements will get you nowhere. I'm willing to bet that they feel they don't have time to worry about piddling issues like whether or not their website is w3c compliant or whatever.
Now, the Mac users have a legitimate gripe. But konqueror/galleon/mozilla/etc. users? I'm an open-source fanatic, but even I'm not going to get pissy that someone else's business plan doesn't involve catering to people in one of the smallest market demographics.
I've been wrestling with this problem myself lately, as I'm going to be getting into putting some seminar stuff I've written for my students into a portable format. Pretty much all the options have their drawbacks, and I figured what the hell, I'd roll my own.
Has anybody tried doing this? What approaches did you try? What language(s) did you use for parsing it? What problems came up? What general format guidelines did you have to settle on? Anything that you wanted to do and couldn't, for whatever reason?
This is, of course, not counting the slightly philosophical argument that .NET is the first .NET virus.
Some interesting things I got out of that seminar, haven't had a chance to try most of these out for myself (so I can't personally testify to their value)...
1. You need 8 hours per day. Anything that deviates from 8 hours per day too much will come back to haunt you, the effect is cumulative.
2. If you nap, don't nap for more than 30 minutes. There's high-level and low-level sleep, and over 30 minutes takes you from high-level to low-level, at which point your body is preparing to shut itself down for a long time. Letting that happen outside of a normal sleep schedule will mess you up.
3. Coffee is bad bad bad. When eating, trying eating your proteins first in the morning, and your carbohydrates first in the evening. Whatever you eat first will affect your energy level, and proteins wake you up, while carbs mellow you down.
4. If you need anything to help you either fall asleep (pills) or wake up (alarm clock), you're not getting proper sleep. Good sleep patterns become habitual (apparently).
5. You need a perfectly dark room when you sleep. The only noise you have should be background stuff that drowns out random outbursts of noise.
Get a few Win32 apps to work well and ignore the rest.
Which brings up an intriguing idea.
What would happen if you could have multiple Windows Emulation modules, and associate different windows software programs with the module that best emulated windows to make it run?
Or would this just not be possible?
Ahh heck, lets just call it Clippy.
Uh oh. "Flippy".
Why the hell do all open source applications have an animal mascot?
Quiet you. What would you rather? Paperclips?
Not bad, eh? EH?
Beautiful flash animation, though. I particularly like the fact that clicking the 'skip intro' button does absolutely nothing -- you get the flash garbage anyway.
Actually, no. What you're seeing is their new compression methodology in action, applied to their website. By clicking on Skip Intro, you're actually hurtled through a registration process at lightning speed and signed up to several of their services, but for security purposes in order to validate those services you're redirected to the main page. However, in order to expediate the service, the exact location of the time of your click on the Skip Intro is kept in a data file in your cookies folder (you might not see it there because, you guessed it, it's compressed to a single byte), and when redirected the cookie is read to get the exact location of your click in the Flash Intro so that the intro fast-forwards to that point in time when you clicked, giving the impression of seemless, uninterrupted animation.
Go on, give it a try. Try clicking the Skip Intro button multiple times, and you'll notice that once you click it'll look like nothing's changing, with no trace in a cookie file of where that spot is. Now THAT'S impressive. And they've got all of your personal information from that registration which you didn't even know you did compressed to a single byte on the server, just waiting to be uncompressed so they can start sending you more information (they just need to work the decompression kinks out).
Cool, huh? I'm giving them all my money.
It was only a matter of time before they started doing this. There are no more general-user niches to fill in software anymore that Microsoft doesn't already have. Moreover, you can't really pirate hardware like you can software.
Plus, if Linux is going to do anything it's push down the OS cost and also the cost of general server aps, potentially to the point of them being so close to free that MS can't make much money off them at the point of sale.
The move to hardware is a bit of a no-brainer. I'm surprised it took them this long to realize it. What'll be scary is if they succeed in using this to enforce new software protocols. THAT would be scary.
I'm getting pretty sick of Bruce Willis.
...by commiserating about Windows, by poking fun at the flaws that it has on every level, from technological to social, it serves only to further entrench people in a Windows monopoly.
For the love of God, don't you remember how to laugh?
He's not trivializing an issue at all. His issue is that he's a computer illiterate and he's using absurdism to show how. This is how he writes.
If you're hoping he'll let himself be co-opted into a political agenda, it's not going to happen and I'm glad for it. He makes his living on comedy about the human condition. Like it or not, the human condition with regards to the average person in the 20th century vis-a-vis computers is pretty much as he described it. Making himself part of someone else's cause would cheapen the humour, and if you don't believe me, think about what would happen if Barry chose the complete opposite point of view than the one you're hoping he'd take. People everywhere would be clamoring to get back to what he was good at, namely observational (rather than motivational) humour.
Taking up our cause would be a major betrayal against art, and a huge victory for propaganda.
Why are you thinking about getting a tech degree? Many of these programs are going to be geared towards people who are hoping to get the knowledge you probably already have.
There are accelerated programs (2 years, tops) for business that you can take that will move you up the ladder into managerial or directorial roles.
I know that's a simplistic answer, but I'd hate to think that someone would enroll in university with high expectations about what they're going to get only to have the expectations dashed, and stuck with 4 years of fees to pay. Just a thought.
People have already done the math on the statistics, and have found that this is basically a non-news story.
So why IS it a news story? On CNN, no less?
Karma, baby. You don't pull the shit that Microsoft has pulled and expect to get away with it. You won't hear the complaints if the PS2 or NGC approach this level of failure rate coupled with poor customer service.
(I guess it doesn't hurt that CNN and MSNBC are rival networks, either.)
Yeah, well, you start there.
I totally agree with this. Firstly, consider for a moment the possibility that you won't get a fulltime job as a straight-up programmer. Yeah, life sucks, you get over it. Unless you're lucky enough to get into a firm somewhere, you'd have to spend half your time trying to set up contracts anyway.
Meanwhile, if you can take some courses in Visual Basic and database programming, you could probably get yourself another job in the industry, only this time as an office administrator or something. This might not sound great, but keep in mind your education options -- either you go back to university to get a degree, or go to professional college where this is the sort of job they're training students for anyway.
Meanwhile, with the experience you have, you already know how to deal with people, follow procedures, give different options for different trouble scenarios, maybe even manage a person or two... This is your trump card.
And while office automation might not sound like much when it comes to programming, there's plenty of ways to use it as a learning tool for sexier programming skills. When you get given a database to design, go overkill and do a data dictionary with DFDs, ERDs, etc. If you need an office-wide system coordinating reports, try to code it with modular design so that bits and pieces can be interchanged. Maybe even do up a bunch of UML diagrams for it, or figure out how to deploy it with a simple Install wizard. Want to use Excel's charting tools but your data is all stored in a text? Visual Basic's Excel library can help you automate that. Need tracking software? Win2K comes with IIS, which will have an ASP engine. Store it all on a central server and feed it off as web pages (can make pretty things without too much effort). Need to change platforms completely? Brush up on your protocols like XML or CORBA...
Sky's the limit. You only have to be creative and make sure you're not biting off more than you can chew on your projects. Not until you have seniority again, at least.
It will tie into Microsoft's .NET strategy, delivering video-on-demand...
I guess the jury's out on whether the article is a hoax, but this idea is pretty scary. Just imagine: they've trumped everyone else for the home desktop system, and so they dip into territory previously ruled by video stores, Pay Per View, and speciality movie channels.
Monopoly? Nah. Monopoly would be too good a word to use for them.
I just know Bin Laden and his evil computer hacking cronies are pissed off about this. Way to go FBI!
Pshaw! Who needs to detect bombs in shoes when we got THIS. Al Quaida, we ownz joo, baby!
This was actually one of the concerns that I had over LOTR being done as a film. Adventure movies made these days don't survive without giving the bad guy lots of screen time, and the literary version focusses in on the ring being the embodiment of evil rather than Sauron, who gets very little treatment through the books. Most of the action involves his henchmen or his armies.
I was really worried that LOTR would get ruined in much the same way that James and the Giant Peach was ruined when the stop-motion version came out. All of the dark parts were taken out and the plot was reconfigured to fit overused Joseph Campbell paradigms.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if the director sticks with Tolkien's original intent and leaves Sauron out of the foreground for the most part.
What mother of an SQL statement are you running to get these posts to display?
Gotta be some kind of a record.
I just patented the process of complaining about patents. Slashdot readers everywhere, I ownz joo!
Obi Wan and Luke are walking through Mos Eisley, right after they leave the cantina, and they're talking about selling off the speeder. For a brief second, a long, thin pair of legs, stilt-like, walk across the foreground. No picture of the body or the feet. No second pair of legs, as though half a camel just walked through the shot.
The genius is how the rest of the alien's appearance is left up to the imagination. I mean, what fluke of gravity was that creature?
More importantly, how does Lucas's creative insight go from that to Jar Jar? He used to have a pretty keen eye for subtle details. Now it's like getting an ice pick through the brain.