Don't believe me? Look at Europe. In order to encourage us to drive more fuel efficient cars, and to get the government some cash, they tax gas to the rate where in the UK its effectively $12 a gallon. Now if you had cars that could do 150mpg and some idiots are still in trucks and SUVs what would the right response of the government be? The answer is to up the tax to get people out of those SUVs and into cars that demand less foreign oil and don't destroy the environment.
Cheap Gas is a stupid idea on a planet that is warming, its cars like these that will help the sensible parts of the US Government environmental policy to push up the prices.
I read a while back about mandatory biometric scanning of tourists
I'm really hoping you aren't a US citizen as getting into the US now requires the scanning of all your fingers and of course the answering of the 7 stupidest questions in the history of questioning.
The bio-scanning stuff is a pain in the arse, but its unfortunately not a UK invention, it started in the US for "Security" reasons. You also now have to have a printed out copy of your itinerary (like that would be hard to fake) as an electronic copy on a PDA or laptop just isn't good enough.
Come on is this a surprise? I've downloaded Chrome, I've used it for a little bit of time and then gone back to Firefox as its got the plug-ins and other bits that I use everyday. When Chrome becomes a full product and has the plug-ins that I need then I'd consider switching, but for now its just something I'll fire up when testing my web code and then use that open window for some browsing because I'm too lazy to switch to another window.
Hell personally I'm shocked they beat 1% of people, I'm stunned that 1% of people cared enough to download a new browser.
Oh yes its back the battle that everyone has been waiting for its the Rumble on the Desktop, the fight of the century, the challenger is the undisputed next year champion, fighting out of California by way of Finland it is the Penguin himself, Tux "next year" Linux.
And now the champion, dominating in the 70s, losing form in the 80s, disappeared as a recluse in the 90s and the start of the century but now he is back to claim his crown. With the black trunks and green trim its Thin "Latency is a Bitch" Client.
Lets have a good clean fight to finally decide who will be declared the Desktop champion of 2009.
This fight is sanctioned by the ODC (Optimistic Desktop Council) and will be fought under rules of low data, huge assumptions and a complete lack of understanding on the total size of the market.
Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards.
Was that standard "name which sound most like a Prison". Its good to get some measure of how good a team is but there are of course other approaches, one would be to have a league system with a set play-off format (rather than 100 "bowl" games) with a number if tiers, bottom few teams drop down a tier, winners of the various tiers below move up.
The whole point of the US News figures is that they are arbitrary, this isn't about really working out who is best over the course of the season its about having something to talk about around the water cooler, it would be miles more boring if you know that winning a game by 4 points when someone else loses by 2 means that your ranking goes up. You'd have commentators talking all the time about the "real time change" in the figures, it would be mind-numbingly boring.
Keep the arbitrary figures lets just have a proper league system instead rather than a flat "randomly play teams" format.
Its not about add funded games its about using games to sell targeted advertisements. All of those billboards in sports games and the "realistic" FPS games, perfect for slapping on an ad targeted just at YOU. Others in the game will see different adverts on exactly the same space.
Advertiser funded is old hat, this is about turning games into virtual billboard environments
Back in 1999 myself and some friends actually looked at creating a networked gaming infrastructure company, not creating games but focusing on the bit that (back then) games companies really sucked at, the actual software infrastructure required for distributed games. One of the things we proposed in there was the ability to serve targeted advertisements into games.
Trouble was in 1999 that everyone wanted to fund.coms and advertising revenue was just about eyeballs so targeting wasn't required apparently.
Expect this to very quickly go from Flash games into any game that connects to the internet, its a great new revenue stream for companies.
that effectively renders near to impossible to parse and execute Perl code outside of the perl binary
My god you are so right, I've been trying to debug someone else's Perl code for 2 days now... it DOES help if you just look at the binary being churned out by the perl interpretter, its WAY more readable than the original code.
Come on, they've discovered hugely dangerous things through their "scientific" discoveries. HIV and HCV kill millions of people every year and these people are being praised for discovering them. Much like the lauded Newton who discovered gravity which has led to millions of deaths through falling and having heavy things land on people it is typical of the scientific community to reward these people who discover things that only give harm to people. These claims of "evolving" viruses are really just more proof that scientists are waging a war against normal people.
Only the other day I was hearing that scientists were poisoning our children by suggesting that di-Hydrogen Monoxide should be drunk instead of Sunny Delight, its appalling what we let these scientists get away with.
Brought to you by the people who think that Evolution is a scientific conspiracy.
As an engineer I was always taught, "test twice, release once" which was the IT version of "measure twice, cut once". Slashdot has taught me the error of my ways.
This can only come from the parents. Personally I find FoxNews objectionable as its absolute slanted trash, other parents think its education for their kids. Personally I find the god channels objectionable for their "send money for redemption" pitches and homophobic and other outbursts, other parents find this stuff uplifting and important that their kids should watch.
Kids shouldn't be left in front of the TV with the remote. It really isn't difficult and TV should be a minimum thing, a treat, not the basic right that is in every kids' room.
There are a bunch of people offering this sort of service (or build your own) on Amazon's S3. It has the advantage of being accessible to everyone, has the security built in and you only have to worry about the data not server availability.
Backup not on the cloud just doesn't make much sense to me these days.
Of course what they don't tell you is that most people just ripped the wax cylinders into an oral history form and passed it on that way via a peer to peer approach.
People complained that the problem with the P2P network was that you couldn't tell what was the original and what was either a bad copy or just some virus put in there by someone else to mislead people, but people in South Texas claimed it was the only way they could do it as the Wax cylinders were not available in their area due to them melting.
Come on, we all know why this hasn't been released. Its because Sequoia will be claiming trade secrets based on their proprietary code. Now in a normal case this would make sense. If you made an aircraft engine control system that was 20% more efficient that the market average and someone in a court case claimed you used some of their code then you'd be pretty annoyed if your internal secrets were then published.
The issue here however is that this is about democracy and the counting of votes. There are no trade secrets in the counting of votes, it is a public process and it should be, indeed is required to be, publicly auditable. The problem here is that the Judge has applied commercial thinking to a public interest case, understandable but wrong.
There is a fundamental problem in the US right now around the audit and accountability of the democratic process. To borrow a phrase from the justice arena, Democracy mustn't just be done, it must seen to be done. A closed and proprietary voting system with no external verification does not enable this to happen. No-one in the US system (with its 98% re-elect rates) appears to care about this.
Now personally though the guy referenced here has done a good job in the write up I was personally more impressed that Brian Kernighan was part of the review team.
Two kids, not only do they have their own email addresses but they have their own domains which I registered at birth. I'm a geek, of course my kids had email addresses before they could type.
This isn't really a surprise and its something that matches well with the podcast & channel concepts that are a major way that people track stuff they are interested in. For "traditional" bands who want a full album around a concept then it doesn't make any sense but for pop bands and satire/comedy it fits perfectly with the sort of instant response and dispose way that people consume the music today. Something like the "Multi-pass" concept on iTunes makes perfect sense for areas where people are interested in a given area and its responsive to current events (The Daily Show for instance).
Its not the death of the album for long term bands but it is the sort of direction that singles chart targeted artists and media companies will want to go after. You can easily see a music company creating a channel around their latest factory bands and having snippets in there to get people to go and buy a single track and keep updating it with the latest "hot" genetically engineered concept band every week, or day.
For someone like Wierd Al who works on parody its ideal to have the parody available while the original is still popular, especially if it could be seen as a counter culture to the manufactured band. Lets face it if there was a piece of crap at the top of the Billboard wouldn't it be funny to see a parody of the piece of crap at number one the following week? Its the sort of thing that short term internet crazes are made of.
Smart move and not at all weird. Now if he'd said he was only going to release his next album on vinyl then THAT would have been genuinely weird.
I've got all the email addresses I want so lets just consider the internet closed to new entrants. I know it sounds draconian but I think we should build a great big firewall around the internet to stop all these illegal immigrants^H^H^H^H^spammers getting in.
Either that or can we just turn a blind eye while Google DDoSes every server associated with these people into oblivion.
scam artists who use fake security alerts to frighten consumers into paying for worthless computer security software
It was an Apple thing I think warning about some company who was pushing some "extra secure" version of its operating system which in fact gave you less performance and kept nagging at you the whole time. Yup I thought so.
Oh wait this is some OTHER companies who use security as a scare threat via nagging messages to get you to buy software.
So therefore, the universe should appear to have different properties in different directions. Has anybody seen that?
I was just talking about this the other day when I was in B'tslashdoaut which is in a galaxy far far away. Oddly everything there looks like the universe was created out of cheese but that could be because of the unusual configurations of solid matter with grey holes (like black holes but not as bad) all over the place.
this is the "Hi res" 28k JPG image on the site. Anyone else get the feeling that they rushed up there to watch it and then someone said "I thought you said you'd bring the cameras" so it was then out with the mobile phones.
The only real surprise is that these clips didn't hit Youtube first with a Tramps "Disco Inferno" sound track. Very cool stuff and it practically demands HD for a fireworks display with a billion dollar budget
Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe. Dan Quayle, 8/11/89
Okay so this is great a list of some very very smart guys that most of us will never directly work with. What we really need is the list of the top 1000 infamous programmers. The guys who destroy projects and create the biggest turd burger frameworks in existence. These are the people who you bitch and moan about in a bar at a conference somewhere and hear the words "you gave Hank X a job? But the guy is a complete idiot" from a few chairs down, a couple of hours later you have the Hank X depreciation society formed and it turns out that this gormless numpty has been screwing up projects since the day he was born.
A nice anonymous list somewhere that needs to include posted code to verify the stupidity level with a least 3 people from a project voting for the muppetry level.
Now that would be great so we could find out just how rubbish a person the HR person has hired and the PHB has approved.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't believe me? Look at Europe. In order to encourage us to drive more fuel efficient cars, and to get the government some cash, they tax gas to the rate where in the UK its effectively $12 a gallon. Now if you had cars that could do 150mpg and some idiots are still in trucks and SUVs what would the right response of the government be? The answer is to up the tax to get people out of those SUVs and into cars that demand less foreign oil and don't destroy the environment.
Cheap Gas is a stupid idea on a planet that is warming, its cars like these that will help the sensible parts of the US Government environmental policy to push up the prices.
I read a while back about mandatory biometric scanning of tourists
I'm really hoping you aren't a US citizen as getting into the US now requires the scanning of all your fingers and of course the answering of the 7 stupidest questions in the history of questioning.
The bio-scanning stuff is a pain in the arse, but its unfortunately not a UK invention, it started in the US for "Security" reasons. You also now have to have a printed out copy of your itinerary (like that would be hard to fake) as an electronic copy on a PDA or laptop just isn't good enough.
Come on is this a surprise? I've downloaded Chrome, I've used it for a little bit of time and then gone back to Firefox as its got the plug-ins and other bits that I use everyday. When Chrome becomes a full product and has the plug-ins that I need then I'd consider switching, but for now its just something I'll fire up when testing my web code and then use that open window for some browsing because I'm too lazy to switch to another window.
Hell personally I'm shocked they beat 1% of people, I'm stunned that 1% of people cared enough to download a new browser.
Oh yes its back the battle that everyone has been waiting for its the Rumble on the Desktop, the fight of the century, the challenger is the undisputed next year champion, fighting out of California by way of Finland it is the Penguin himself, Tux "next year" Linux.
And now the champion, dominating in the 70s, losing form in the 80s, disappeared as a recluse in the 90s and the start of the century but now he is back to claim his crown. With the black trunks and green trim its Thin "Latency is a Bitch" Client.
Lets have a good clean fight to finally decide who will be declared the Desktop champion of 2009.
This fight is sanctioned by the ODC (Optimistic Desktop Council) and will be fought under rules of low data, huge assumptions and a complete lack of understanding on the total size of the market.
Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards.
Was that standard "name which sound most like a Prison". Its good to get some measure of how good a team is but there are of course other approaches, one would be to have a league system with a set play-off format (rather than 100 "bowl" games) with a number if tiers, bottom few teams drop down a tier, winners of the various tiers below move up.
The whole point of the US News figures is that they are arbitrary, this isn't about really working out who is best over the course of the season its about having something to talk about around the water cooler, it would be miles more boring if you know that winning a game by 4 points when someone else loses by 2 means that your ranking goes up. You'd have commentators talking all the time about the "real time change" in the figures, it would be mind-numbingly boring.
Keep the arbitrary figures lets just have a proper league system instead rather than a flat "randomly play teams" format.
Its not about add funded games its about using games to sell targeted advertisements. All of those billboards in sports games and the "realistic" FPS games, perfect for slapping on an ad targeted just at YOU. Others in the game will see different adverts on exactly the same space.
Advertiser funded is old hat, this is about turning games into virtual billboard environments
Back in 1999 myself and some friends actually looked at creating a networked gaming infrastructure company, not creating games but focusing on the bit that (back then) games companies really sucked at, the actual software infrastructure required for distributed games. One of the things we proposed in there was the ability to serve targeted advertisements into games.
Trouble was in 1999 that everyone wanted to fund .coms and advertising revenue was just about eyeballs so targeting wasn't required apparently.
Expect this to very quickly go from Flash games into any game that connects to the internet, its a great new revenue stream for companies.
But the question we are all asking ourselves is
Who got the first post?
The answer is Exact Black String Solutions in Three Dimensions by James H. Horne and Gary T. Horowitz
Slightly better than the "Fkrst Pist" attempts on Slashdot!
that effectively renders near to impossible to parse and execute Perl code outside of the perl binary
My god you are so right, I've been trying to debug someone else's Perl code for 2 days now... it DOES help if you just look at the binary being churned out by the perl interpretter, its WAY more readable than the original code.
Come on, they've discovered hugely dangerous things through their "scientific" discoveries. HIV and HCV kill millions of people every year and these people are being praised for discovering them. Much like the lauded Newton who discovered gravity which has led to millions of deaths through falling and having heavy things land on people it is typical of the scientific community to reward these people who discover things that only give harm to people. These claims of "evolving" viruses are really just more proof that scientists are waging a war against normal people.
Only the other day I was hearing that scientists were poisoning our children by suggesting that di-Hydrogen Monoxide should be drunk instead of Sunny Delight, its appalling what we let these scientists get away with.
Brought to you by the people who think that Evolution is a scientific conspiracy.
Seriously, this is a surprise?
The world's biggest commercial data search and profiling company is going to profile yet more online, public information.
I just wonder if the folks at Langley will sit up and say "prior art".
As an engineer I was always taught, "test twice, release once" which was the IT version of "measure twice, cut once". Slashdot has taught me the error of my ways.
This can only come from the parents. Personally I find FoxNews objectionable as its absolute slanted trash, other parents think its education for their kids. Personally I find the god channels objectionable for their "send money for redemption" pitches and homophobic and other outbursts, other parents find this stuff uplifting and important that their kids should watch.
Kids shouldn't be left in front of the TV with the remote. It really isn't difficult and TV should be a minimum thing, a treat, not the basic right that is in every kids' room.
There are a bunch of people offering this sort of service (or build your own) on Amazon's S3. It has the advantage of being accessible to everyone, has the security built in and you only have to worry about the data not server availability.
Backup not on the cloud just doesn't make much sense to me these days.
Of course what they don't tell you is that most people just ripped the wax cylinders into an oral history form and passed it on that way via a peer to peer approach.
People complained that the problem with the P2P network was that you couldn't tell what was the original and what was either a bad copy or just some virus put in there by someone else to mislead people, but people in South Texas claimed it was the only way they could do it as the Wax cylinders were not available in their area due to them melting.
Come on, we all know why this hasn't been released. Its because Sequoia will be claiming trade secrets based on their proprietary code. Now in a normal case this would make sense. If you made an aircraft engine control system that was 20% more efficient that the market average and someone in a court case claimed you used some of their code then you'd be pretty annoyed if your internal secrets were then published.
The issue here however is that this is about democracy and the counting of votes. There are no trade secrets in the counting of votes, it is a public process and it should be, indeed is required to be, publicly auditable. The problem here is that the Judge has applied commercial thinking to a public interest case, understandable but wrong.
There is a fundamental problem in the US right now around the audit and accountability of the democratic process. To borrow a phrase from the justice arena, Democracy mustn't just be done, it must seen to be done. A closed and proprietary voting system with no external verification does not enable this to happen. No-one in the US system (with its 98% re-elect rates) appears to care about this.
Now personally though the guy referenced here has done a good job in the write up I was personally more impressed that Brian Kernighan was part of the review team.
Two kids, not only do they have their own email addresses but they have their own domains which I registered at birth. I'm a geek, of course my kids had email addresses before they could type.
This isn't really a surprise and its something that matches well with the podcast & channel concepts that are a major way that people track stuff they are interested in. For "traditional" bands who want a full album around a concept then it doesn't make any sense but for pop bands and satire/comedy it fits perfectly with the sort of instant response and dispose way that people consume the music today. Something like the "Multi-pass" concept on iTunes makes perfect sense for areas where people are interested in a given area and its responsive to current events (The Daily Show for instance).
Its not the death of the album for long term bands but it is the sort of direction that singles chart targeted artists and media companies will want to go after. You can easily see a music company creating a channel around their latest factory bands and having snippets in there to get people to go and buy a single track and keep updating it with the latest "hot" genetically engineered concept band every week, or day.
For someone like Wierd Al who works on parody its ideal to have the parody available while the original is still popular, especially if it could be seen as a counter culture to the manufactured band. Lets face it if there was a piece of crap at the top of the Billboard wouldn't it be funny to see a parody of the piece of crap at number one the following week? Its the sort of thing that short term internet crazes are made of.
Smart move and not at all weird. Now if he'd said he was only going to release his next album on vinyl then THAT would have been genuinely weird.
I've got all the email addresses I want so lets just consider the internet closed to new entrants. I know it sounds draconian but I think we should build a great big firewall around the internet to stop all these illegal immigrants^H^H^H^H^spammers getting in.
Either that or can we just turn a blind eye while Google DDoSes every server associated with these people into oblivion.
scam artists who use fake security alerts to frighten consumers into paying for worthless computer security software
It was an Apple thing I think warning about some company who was pushing some "extra secure" version of its operating system which in fact gave you less performance and kept nagging at you the whole time. Yup I thought so.
Oh wait this is some OTHER companies who use security as a scare threat via nagging messages to get you to buy software.
So therefore, the universe should appear to have different properties in different directions. Has anybody seen that?
I was just talking about this the other day when I was in B'tslashdoaut which is in a galaxy far far away. Oddly everything there looks like the universe was created out of cheese but that could be because of the unusual configurations of solid matter with grey holes (like black holes but not as bad) all over the place.
this is the "Hi res" 28k JPG image on the site. Anyone else get the feeling that they rushed up there to watch it and then someone said "I thought you said you'd bring the cameras" so it was then out with the mobile phones.
The only real surprise is that these clips didn't hit Youtube first with a Tramps "Disco Inferno" sound track. Very cool stuff and it practically demands HD for a fireworks display with a billion dollar budget
Canadian Scientist: We'd like some money to look for Snow on Mars
Canadian Funding: Errr we have lots of Snow already
CS: Ahh but if we find snow on Mars then we can ski-doo on Mars
CF: Errr we can ski-doo here
CS: Well yes but if we find the snow first we'll get first tracks which means the Yanks will have to let us go on the manned mission
CF: Sweeeeet
Yes folks, its all about finding freshies and there is no lengths to which Canadians will not go in the search for fresh powder.
Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
Dan Quayle, 8/11/89
Turns out Dan was right ;)
Okay so this is great a list of some very very smart guys that most of us will never directly work with. What we really need is the list of the top 1000 infamous programmers. The guys who destroy projects and create the biggest turd burger frameworks in existence. These are the people who you bitch and moan about in a bar at a conference somewhere and hear the words "you gave Hank X a job? But the guy is a complete idiot" from a few chairs down, a couple of hours later you have the Hank X depreciation society formed and it turns out that this gormless numpty has been screwing up projects since the day he was born.
A nice anonymous list somewhere that needs to include posted code to verify the stupidity level with a least 3 people from a project voting for the muppetry level.
Now that would be great so we could find out just how rubbish a person the HR person has hired and the PHB has approved.