Wow, considering that the definition of CD-ROM is "compact disc, read-only memory" it is quite the technical achievement to write to it. Just imagine what Puppy Linux could do with a CD-R!
I see the huge ass memory leak is still not fixed with this release. Leave your browser on overnight and memory used goes from a reasonable 30mb to 100mb+. How did a bug like this not make it through testing? Does noone in mozilla-land leave their browser open for a couple days?
I love FireFox now but I don't seem to recall IE ever having these kind of problems.
Single player video games are bad enough, being easy escapism from actually having to live. MM games are much worse. Since MM games are based in a live online world, you cannot save your game at any time and return to it just as you left it later. When playing with other people it is socially hard to stop in the middle of a quest, since you will waste your teammates' time in finding a replacement for your group. You are in constant competition with others in your guild, etc to level up. If you fall to far behind you will no longer be able to do quests with your friends. Finally, the way MM games are financed, you pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited usage. Someone who plays 20 hrs a week gets twice as much "game time per dollar" as someone who plays 10 hrs. This provides a further incentive to play as much as you can. Playing World of Warcraft sucked up a huge percentage of my free time. Even after I stopped playing, I still havn't worked up the courage to cancel my account yet because I don't want to lose my character.
Where's one of those twelve step programs when you need them? "-Hi my name is Greg and I am a WOW addict. -Hi Greg!"
B is for briefcase, with money bring to me. C is for candlestick, I hit you in the knee. D is for Deutschland, for Deutschland victory. K is for KOMPRESSOR, KOMPRESSOR is for me!
K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOR.
F is for Frenchman, I dump them in the sea. G is for Germans, we do not watch TV. H is for Hatred, we do not like to ski, and K is for KOMPRESSOR, KOMPRESSOR is for me.
K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOOOOOOOOOR!!!! K K K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOR. K is for KOMPRESSOR!
Better to start WWIII now when they only make up 1/8th the world population than 200 years from now when they make up 2/5. The growth rate in Muslim countries is higher than the rest of the world and MUCH higher than the west. By then they will probably have tons of nukes themselves as well.
If there is a way to perpetually avoid the jihad then fine, but/IF/ war is inevitable I would rather have it now while we are strongest. But that is a big/IF/, and I am not keen on killing a billion people because of what their descendants MIGHT do.
You can't possibly be equating a child watching their father beating his mother to a child watching something violent on TV (be it movies or videogames)...one is very real, the other is not.
The two are certainly do not influence kids the same amount, but both real and fictional violence have an effect. Fictional stories were far more "real" to me when I was a child than histories or the news.
If I see someone actually get shot in front of me, I'll probably scream like a woman...
True most people would not be influenced enough by video games etc. to rejoice at someone being shot in front of them, but I bet if you saw a shootout on the local news you might say "Cool!" (after a couple months of GTA). While video games might influence YOU relatively little compared to some wacky folks, your mind is still being changed.
Are you telling me the governmnent needs to tell me how to raise my child?
Certainly not! If a parent decides to buy violent game for their kid, the government shouldn't be kicking down their doors. That said, we all know that kids buy games themselves most of the time, and noone in the store gives a rat's ass about who they sell to.
This argument has already been played out for decades with music (and movies, pr0n, etc), namely whether they influence culture or merely reflect it. Of course the answer is both. Music gets it's initial impetus from some street culture (hippies, punks, gangsta rappers) but as it becomes popular it influnces more people to percieve said culture as a "good thing". Studies have been done that show that people exposed to pr0n in controlled environments show a marked shift in internal attitudes, such as considering sexual promiscuty as common/desireable and not wanting to have daughters (wacky!).
Video games are no different than any other input to our brains. Anything we experience influences us in some way, and if we experience blowing people away as a fun, of course we will have a shift in values that is more tolerant of violence. Children are especially vulnerable to programming by experience (see the results of wife-beater/drunk parents), so I could certainly see society want to stop kids having access to these ideas.
That said, noone should feel they have the right to tell any grown adult what to think or experience. If a video game makes me more violent, let it be on MY head if I go out and shoot someone. However, the best way to ensure that video games for adults are not banned outright is to make sure that they stay out of the hands of kids. As everyone knows, enforcement of the ratings system is a joke.
We need to get off our asses and start lobbying congress to pass a bill that forces companies to release copyrights if they aren't using them. Unless you are contributing money or time to some lobbying organization copyrights will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future. The squeaky wheel gets the grease!
One of the problems with law for digital/information issues is that traditional examples of crime do not apply. Let's try a different set of examples:
Theft - You sneak into Nintendo headquarters, make a copy of their disk, and start handing out the copies.
Fraud - You convince Nintendo you are hardware developers and they give you a copy of the disk to play around with, which you copy and distribute.
Copyright Infringement - You buy a disk from the store with a with an wrapper agreement stating you cannot give out copies to your friends. You ignore the wrapper and give them out anyway.
All of these are crimes, but they treated differently by the law. Con-artists will in general get less jail time then burglers, and I would hope copyright infringers would just be fined. Yes all of these deprive Nintendo of potential earnings, but so does competition. The question is the degree of harm and the answer is rarely black and white.
In the "real" world, people don't run around stealing from each other because they are afraid of being caught. Although many mechanisms (voting, spy programs) to boot cheaters exist now, they seem to be temporary solutions. That is, cheaters simply log back in again and try some more, protected by their anonymity.
We need to uniquely identify each gamer, and (more or less) permanently ban gamers found to be cheating. I propose using credit cards, since people have a finite number of them. While cheaters with more than one credit card could have multiple identities, they eventually all would get caught.
For online gaming services the solution seems simple. Gamers caught blatently cheating would have their account revoked with no refund. The cannot login using any account payed for with the same credit card. Revokations could last a month to start, and be permanent for serial abusers. Since online services have resources, they could devote "detectives" to find and ban cheaters. Banned gamers could appeal their revokation, but the vast majority of cheaters will prolly just slink away into the shadows. Since real money is involved, cheaters have a strong incentive to stay honest.
For free (no monthly fee) network games, independent companies could provide the service of identifing gamers. People would pay a small fee ($10?) to get an gamer-id (and password), with only ONE gamer-id for each credit card. All online games would require a this gamer-id. Game servers would communicate with the id companies to verify the identity of logged in gamers. These identities would be there for everyone to see, so people with a bad reputation would quickly be kicked. At the very least, you could refuse to play with a gamer you suspect of being a cheater.
PC stands for Personal Computer. A Mac is a Personal Computer. A Windows box is a Personal Computer. PC should be use not to distinguish OS but to distinguish the ROLE of the computer (ie: PC vrs Server vrs Mainframe)
"A Tower Whose Top May Reach Unto Heaven"
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 1
I am not religious but I thought this was an appropriate time for a bible quote.
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, "Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
And they said, "Come, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built.
And the LORD said, "Behold, the people are one and they have all one language, and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be withheld from them which they have imagined to do.
Come, let Us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off building the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel [that is, Confusion], because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
When will companies stop pricing things ending in.99? It is deceptive because it is an attempt to disguise the true price of a product ("Oh it's only a couple cents, not dollars."). It is annonying because I actually have to THINK (bog forbid) about it to figure out the real price and it makes it hard to do math ("hmm 3 tracks are.99 x 3 = $2.97" instead of just $3).
Even if it is too much expect companies to change at there very least we can stop perpuating their pricing games in everyday conversation and writing. Next time you post a price, round up!
I understand that there are too many risks to allow people to fly unscreened, but I would like to see a system that does not force people to prove their innocence every time they fly. One alternative might be what I call "security clearance ids". Flyers apply for an id, and get a background check. If they check out, then all those with IDs should be free to pass through checkpoints without screening or interrogation. One advantage of this method is that the screening is done offline, so if there is a problem, you have time to appeal your clearance rejection, instead of missing your flight because of an overzealous guard. I don't see this as any worse than what many federal-related employees have to go through. Another advantage is that your personal information is only looked at by the certifying bureau and not at every airport database. This would also be MORE secure, since for questionable people you could investigate further in ways that would not be possible at an airport, like interviews with family members.
We can keep the current system in place with searches and questions for (hopefully) the minority of travellers who would't have an id. If you can take the time to get a driver's license once every couple years, you can take the time to get a background check too.
Who Actually USES These Patterns?
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When I was taking CE courses design I was fascinated by the Design Patterns book. I thought it would take OOD concepts one step further and offer a new framework for software development. I went out and bought the book, and while it was very interesting, I never really thought that I would be in a position where I could use any of the patterns.
They seem overly complex, and although they try to be general, I can't imagine that they could be easily adapted to any but a few (large) software projects. I don't have enough good examples, but I get the feeling that every major software project will come up with its own "design patterns", and they probably bear little resemblance to the ones in the book (and will be a lot simpler as well). My wife likes them, and she thinks that they provide a common vocabulary for developers to use in developing their own patterns, although I am not convinced.
What has been the experience of/.ers who actually use this book in their (non-educational) software development projects?
Does this mean that MIT is subtly implying that all infantry in the future should be bordline aneorxic chicks with breast implants? Thats quite an advance from the current policy of refusing women ground combat duty. Mmmmm.... can't wait for the day I see my Vasquez handling a smart gun in real life. Now THATS a real woman soldier.
Hudson: Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?
Vasquez: No, have you
The military is currently spending millions of dollars on next gen drone technology like like the Predator and Global Hawk when stuff like model airplanes has been under their noses the whole time. If this can fly to Iceland it can certainly fly around Afghanistan for a day or two. This model airplane couldn't have cost more than a couple thousand to make. Stuff an satellite phone and a webcam in there and you have cheap drone for less than $10k. You could buy hundreds of these for the price of one of those big drones. Imagine them swarming the skies, looking for baddies. Lot harder to avoid and hide from than one big drone. Big plus is model airplanes are SMALL! Give a pair to every special forces unit on the ground and they have quick intelligance in a pinch. Too bad military procurement is controlled by expensive-toy-loving generals and profit-seeking industrialists.
I don't really think this will be too much a problem. Because of the huge amount of personal data being generated, some representative sample will almost certainly be passed on to the future. It doesn't have to be a large percent to tell you a lot about the times.
This Is An Ancient Problem
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem of saving old data has existed as long as there has been writing. More than 90% of the works of ancient the more famous Roman or Greek authors have vanished, to say nothing of the more lesser known writers. We know this because they are mentioned in other texts but the actual text is lost.
The solution to both saving ancient works on paper can work just as well for digital media. Keep copying the work to the latest storage media! None of the original texts that we do have have survied. They are all copies made from generation to generation. Thus with digital media. The best of the web (lets say, research articles) will be preserved and transferred to new storage media as it develops. Your blog about your day at the beach prolly won't.
Solaris has already been made into a movie by famed director Andrei Tarkovsky (Russian) in 1972. Here is the IMDB entry.
The Solaris mission has established a base on a planet that appears to host some kind of intelligence, but the details are hazy and very secret. After the mysterious demise of one of the three scientists on the base, the main character is sent out to replace him. He finds the station run-down and the two remaining scientists cold and secretive. When he also encounters his wife who has been dead for seven years, he begins to appreciate the baffling nature of the alien intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
IP theft in China reminds me of Casablanca:
-"I am shocked, shocked to find gambling in this establishment!"
-"Your winning's sir."
Wow, considering that the definition of CD-ROM is "compact disc, read-only memory" it is quite the technical achievement to write to it. Just imagine what Puppy Linux could do with a CD-R!
I see the huge ass memory leak is still not fixed with this release. Leave your browser on overnight and memory used goes from a reasonable 30mb to 100mb+. How did a bug like this not make it through testing? Does noone in mozilla-land leave their browser open for a couple days?
I love FireFox now but I don't seem to recall IE ever having these kind of problems.
Single player video games are bad enough, being easy escapism from actually having to live. MM games are much worse. Since MM games are based in a live online world, you cannot save your game at any time and return to it just as you left it later. When playing with other people it is socially hard to stop in the middle of a quest, since you will waste your teammates' time in finding a replacement for your group. You are in constant competition with others in your guild, etc to level up. If you fall to far behind you will no longer be able to do quests with your friends. Finally, the way MM games are financed, you pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited usage. Someone who plays 20 hrs a week gets twice as much "game time per dollar" as someone who plays 10 hrs. This provides a further incentive to play as much as you can. Playing World of Warcraft sucked up a huge percentage of my free time. Even after I stopped playing, I still havn't worked up the courage to cancel my account yet because I don't want to lose my character.
Where's one of those twelve step programs when you need them? "-Hi my name is Greg and I am a WOW addict. -Hi Greg!"
B is for briefcase, with money bring to me.
C is for candlestick, I hit you in the knee.
D is for Deutschland, for Deutschland victory.
K is for KOMPRESSOR, KOMPRESSOR is for me!
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
F is for Frenchman, I dump them in the sea.
G is for Germans, we do not watch TV.
H is for Hatred, we do not like to ski, and
K is for KOMPRESSOR, KOMPRESSOR is for me.
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOOOOOOOOOR!!!!
K
K
K
is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOR.
K is for KOMPRESSOR!
Better to start WWIII now when they only make up 1/8th the world population than 200 years from now when they make up 2/5. The growth rate in Muslim countries is higher than the rest of the world and MUCH higher than the west. By then they will probably have tons of nukes themselves as well.
/IF/ war is inevitable I would rather have it now while we are strongest. But that is a big /IF/, and I am not keen on killing a billion people because of what their descendants MIGHT do.
If there is a way to perpetually avoid the jihad then fine, but
It is something to consider though...
You can't possibly be equating a child watching their father beating his mother to a child watching something violent on TV (be it movies or videogames)...one is very real, the other is not.
The two are certainly do not influence kids the same amount, but both real and fictional violence have an effect. Fictional stories were far more "real" to me when I was a child than histories or the news.
If I see someone actually get shot in front of me, I'll probably scream like a woman...
True most people would not be influenced enough by video games etc. to rejoice at someone being shot in front of them, but I bet if you saw a shootout on the local news you might say "Cool!" (after a couple months of GTA). While video games might influence YOU relatively little compared to some wacky folks, your mind is still being changed.
Are you telling me the governmnent needs to tell me how to raise my child?
Certainly not! If a parent decides to buy violent game for their kid, the government shouldn't be kicking down their doors. That said, we all know that kids buy games themselves most of the time, and noone in the store gives a rat's ass about who they sell to.
gdp
This argument has already been played out for decades with music (and movies, pr0n, etc), namely whether they influence culture or merely reflect it. Of course the answer is both. Music gets it's initial impetus from some street culture (hippies, punks, gangsta rappers) but as it becomes popular it influnces more people to percieve said culture as a "good thing". Studies have been done that show that people exposed to pr0n in controlled environments show a marked shift in internal attitudes, such as considering sexual promiscuty as common/desireable and not wanting to have daughters (wacky!).
Video games are no different than any other input to our brains. Anything we experience influences us in some way, and if we experience blowing people away as a fun, of course we will have a shift in values that is more tolerant of violence. Children are especially vulnerable to programming by experience (see the results of wife-beater/drunk parents), so I could certainly see society want to stop kids having access to these ideas.
That said, noone should feel they have the right to tell any grown adult what to think or experience. If a video game makes me more violent, let it be on MY head if I go out and shoot someone. However, the best way to ensure that video games for adults are not banned outright is to make sure that they stay out of the hands of kids. As everyone knows, enforcement of the ratings system is a joke.
gdp
We need to get off our asses and start lobbying congress to pass a bill that forces companies to release copyrights if they aren't using them. Unless you are contributing money or time to some lobbying organization copyrights will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future. The squeaky wheel gets the grease!
One of the problems with law for digital/information issues is that traditional examples of crime do not apply. Let's try a different set of examples:
Theft - You sneak into Nintendo headquarters, make a copy of their disk, and start handing out the copies.
Fraud - You convince Nintendo you are hardware developers and they give you a copy of the disk to play around with, which you copy and distribute.
Copyright Infringement - You buy a disk from the store with a with an wrapper agreement stating you cannot give out copies to your friends. You ignore the wrapper and give them out anyway.
All of these are crimes, but they treated differently by the law. Con-artists will in general get less jail time then burglers, and I would hope copyright infringers would just be fined. Yes all of these deprive Nintendo of potential earnings, but so does competition. The question is the degree of harm and the answer is rarely black and white.
sigless
We need to uniquely identify each gamer, and (more or less) permanently ban gamers found to be cheating. I propose using credit cards, since people have a finite number of them. While cheaters with more than one credit card could have multiple identities, they eventually all would get caught.
For online gaming services the solution seems simple. Gamers caught blatently cheating would have their account revoked with no refund. The cannot login using any account payed for with the same credit card. Revokations could last a month to start, and be permanent for serial abusers. Since online services have resources, they could devote "detectives" to find and ban cheaters. Banned gamers could appeal their revokation, but the vast majority of cheaters will prolly just slink away into the shadows. Since real money is involved, cheaters have a strong incentive to stay honest.
For free (no monthly fee) network games, independent companies could provide the service of identifing gamers. People would pay a small fee ($10?) to get an gamer-id (and password), with only ONE gamer-id for each credit card. All online games would require a this gamer-id. Game servers would communicate with the id companies to verify the identity of logged in gamers. These identities would be there for everyone to see, so people with a bad reputation would quickly be kicked. At the very least, you could refuse to play with a gamer you suspect of being a cheater.
Err, needed to fix the title
PC stands for Personal Computer. A Mac is a Personal Computer. A Windows box is a Personal Computer. PC should be use not to distinguish OS but to distinguish the ROLE of the computer (ie: PC vrs Server vrs Mainframe)
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, "Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
And they said, "Come, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built.
And the LORD said, "Behold, the people are one and they have all one language, and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be withheld from them which they have imagined to do.
Come, let Us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off building the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel [that is, Confusion], because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
When will companies stop pricing things ending in .99? It is deceptive because it is an attempt to disguise the true price of a product ("Oh it's only a couple cents, not dollars."). It is annonying because I actually have to THINK (bog forbid) about it to figure out the real price and it makes it hard to do math ("hmm 3 tracks are .99 x 3 = $2.97" instead of just $3).
Even if it is too much expect companies to change at there very least we can stop perpuating their pricing games in everyday conversation and writing. Next time you post a price, round up!
END OFFTOPIC RANT
We can keep the current system in place with searches and questions for (hopefully) the minority of travellers who would't have an id. If you can take the time to get a driver's license once every couple years, you can take the time to get a background check too.
They seem overly complex, and although they try to be general, I can't imagine that they could be easily adapted to any but a few (large) software projects. I don't have enough good examples, but I get the feeling that every major software project will come up with its own "design patterns", and they probably bear little resemblance to the ones in the book (and will be a lot simpler as well). My wife likes them, and she thinks that they provide a common vocabulary for developers to use in developing their own patterns, although I am not convinced.
What has been the experience of /.ers who actually use this book in their (non-educational) software development projects?
Hudson: Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?
Vasquez: No, have you
Here is link of efforts to convert old Cessnas to drones. Lot cheaper than $4.5 mil.
sigless
He is clearly making fun of modding devices for obscure purposes. sigless
I don't really think this will be too much a problem. Because of the huge amount of personal data being generated, some representative sample will almost certainly be passed on to the future. It doesn't have to be a large percent to tell you a lot about the times.
The solution to both saving ancient works on paper can work just as well for digital media. Keep copying the work to the latest storage media! None of the original texts that we do have have survied. They are all copies made from generation to generation. Thus with digital media. The best of the web (lets say, research articles) will be preserved and transferred to new storage media as it develops. Your blog about your day at the beach prolly won't.
The court has struck down the specific 1954 act of congress inserting "Under God" into the pledge.