I think a larger part of this is racism. Look at the ads for gold on eBay. People actually say "not chinese gold" in their ads - as if the fact that a chinese person farmed it instead of a Westerner makes a difference!
Makes about as much sense as the "Buy American" campaign. If you're concerned about the US economy slipping into the backpocket of China, trying to keep your US dollars in the US is a small way to help. It's not going to change the world or your life, but neither is turning off the lights when you leave the room to save $.02 cents of electricity.
More to the point, someone who can't communicate with the rest of the party is a serious liability in any dangerous situation. For many people, the fun of games like this lies in cooperation with a group to overcome dangerous situations.
If you can't speak english, you have every right to play on an English server, but don't be surprised or upset that people don't want to play with you. It's just common sense to want a party that can operate as a party.
It was largely a solved problem 20 years ago, if anyone had listened.
If you're talking about Vaxen et al....those computers sucked.
They didn't have IM, they didn't have IE, they didn't play games over UDP. As far as the modern day consumer is concerned, there was not a single useful application on them.
It simply isn't fair to expect modern machines to hold up to the standards of security that their simpler predecessors did. My pocket calculator is also immune to viruses and trojans (although I'll bet the HP 48-SX was vulnerable to IR-port worms).
Now that's not to say they couldn't be doing a better job. OS X is a great example of how asking for the admin password every time a modification of the central system is requested makes worms all but impossible and trojans much more difficult.
But it drives me up a wall when people expect more complex systems to be as easy to write and debug as simpler ones. Security gets harder as complexity increases, it's about as fundamental a law to computers as thermodynamics is to physics.
You seem to be more worried about how you could trash the system after resigning (if the necessity arose). The solution, of course, is to set up scripts *before you resign* that poll an external web address and take their instruction via http (or maybe a tunnel). I'm sure you can think of something.
It's no great feat to hit a small target if you're using feedback to course correct as you go. The hard part is deploying the probe, not getting there.
The difference is that consoles are a static gaming platform, and they're running a small batch of rigidly defined, non configurable software (the release titles).
This is about as easy as QA testing gets so there is absolutely no excuse for crashes of any kind on the release lineup.
More to the point, something like this is certainly newsworthy, especially in the Games section. Even without the Microsoft shadenfreude,/.'ers are being warned to stay away from the 360 until these bugs are ironed out.
Yeah, you heard me. It literally DOES NOT MATTER if I vote. When the reciepient of "my" support is already a forgone conclusion.
You are wrong for two reasons:
The popular vote may not decide the president but it does affect his perceived legitimacy. If Bush won the electoral college and yet had only 45% of the vote he wouldn't have as much power.
More importantly: One day it may not be a foregone conclusion, but you won't know until it's too late, so you might as well not take the chance.
This is about the worst advice for verifying the engineering of a complex device that I could think of.
The person's ability to play it cool under this kind of unsually direct question is probably inversely correlated with their ability to program.
You described a litmus test for good CEO's, not good engineers. A good engineer is aware of the complexities of the real world, doesn't see things in black and white. When pressed in this manner, a good engineer is immediately going to start second guessing themselves for the thousandth time, as they should.
At the moment, wireless AP's don't have to worry about frequent switching.
But if everyone and their brother started using these things, suddenly a given AP is going to have to deal with a huge amount of hookup requests.
Now admittedly I don't know much about the guts of an AP, and how limited their processing ability is (apart from bandwidth)... but this certainly isn't what they were designed for. I would be surprised if they could handle this kind of abuse from multiple users.
I think they use this for stopping early cavities here in the UK. They call it ozone treatment.
I had a treatment done in which they shaved off part of my tooth, blasted the hell out of it with some special ozone application gizmo (a cup attached to a tube that is placed over the tube surface.)
It sucked, my teeth hurt for months from the shaving, it was expensive and I had to go in twice for it.
This is the argument people always bring when a community site is shut down, whether it's a chat room, or a P2P network.
But any shutdown is damage to the social infrastructure. Most people who had chatted before will find new places to hang out, but some won't (not that this is necessarily a bad thing but beside the point).
If this process continued ad-infinitum, the community is whittled down gradually and ends up smaller, even if not wiped out. This has certainly happened with internet piracy, and the same would happened to internet chat services if more followed Yahoo's example.
Yes, consumers would spend the same, but advertising would be a better way for a company to spend its budget than on... say... product quality and salaries
Hence, marketing would become an even larger slice of the pie, and the more money spent on marketing, the less is spent on production.
Nike and Reebok are no longer shoe companies really, they just sell the brand name to various apparel manufacturers. It's a scary world we're approaching in which companies spend more and more of their money manipulating the minds of their consumers and less and less on making good products. The better they are at convincing us we need their product, the less effort they have to put into making sure it's actually well made.
As to your second point, we are only at the beginning of the targeted advertising age. In the next few years these companies will employ legions of psychologists, especially those dealing with visual perception, to learn how to control exogenous orienting based on expectation of what's salient to that person (booze, smokes, women, shoes, etc).
It is a big deal, because directed advertising is more profitable.
And because it's more profitable there will be more of it.
So given the choice of less undirected advertising and more directed advertising, I'll take the former.
Also, directed advertising is harder to ignore. The more they know about how your brain works the better they'll be able to create ads that draw your attention to them.
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 1
I think "liking" an OS is a bit of an odd concept
It only seems odd to you because you've gotten so used to not liking your OS that you've been forced to stop worrying about it.
But to those of using computers that actually help us do what we need, rather than getting in the way, "liking" an OS doesn't seem odd at all.
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows? I DO!
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 1
none of which pertain to the question: do you LIKE to use Windows?
AI doesn't mean "Learning", it means Artificial Intelligence. Said poster is probably a stage in his life where his visual system is relatively stable from day to day. Whether it got there by being hard wired by his designer or through learning is irrelevant. His intelligent behavior (barring perhaps said post) on a moment to moment basis is the result of his pre-wired system, not some kind of fabulously amazing learning algorithm.
Some of the engineers attacking this problem are using machine learning, others are using pre-fab algorithm, most are using a combination of both. They're all true AI by any stretch of the definition.
And let us not forget that there are certain physical practicalities to the shape of a circle that make it the only real choice for a rotating control dial. Maybe it should be a triangle instead? Perhaps a trapezoid or non rectangular parallelogram?
They are a corporation and therefore charged with the sole mandate to make money for their stockholders.
Do not blame them for this, it is reason that they exist. What you're doing is getting upset at a shark for eating fish.
As for why they choose to artificially create popularity, rather than letting it flow naturally from the talents of the artist, the answer is simply that it's more efficient for them to do so. Betting on artist talent is a huge gamble, and that was how the business used to behave.
By obtaining control of marketing and distribution channels, they have figured out that they can turn what used to be a gamble into a (more or less) fixed rate of return on their investment. It's good business on their part to do so, and you shouldn't be surprised that these companies are trying so hard to do what they are supposed to do: make money.
If you want to get upset at someone, get upset at judges that allow this sort of behavior. THEY are the ones responsible for curtailing this sort of stupidity and keeping the corporations under control.
Hey don't tar us all with that brush. I'm an academic, and while mobile phones aren't my business, the first thought that popped into my head when I saw this was that I could put that pretty picture together in one afternoon with matlab and a database of cell tower use.
It's also great the way they take the same data and run it through 3 or 4 different graphing algorithms and proudly present them as different analyses.
But the real culprits behind this are the funding bodies.
They've obviously put money into this, so you can hardly blame the lab for spending a single afternoon to knock together justification for their grant, before turning back to their real research, which is probably more useful, but harder to explain to the grant review committee.
Seriously though, it sounds like you're trying too hard.
Don't build a desk that's comfortable enough to spend huge amounts of time at, it's not healthy physically or emotionally. If you plan to waste your hours at your desk, you'll do it, whether or not it's good for your career.
You, as the layperson, may forget, but people in the relevant domain have a long and grudge filled memory. Humiliation in the eyes of the field will leave a black eye on your career for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh it's more fun alright....when you die because your non English speaking party member can't understand the plan.
Loads of fun.
Like going to Disney World.
I think a larger part of this is racism. Look at the ads for gold on eBay. People actually say "not chinese gold" in their ads - as if the fact that a chinese person farmed it instead of a Westerner makes a difference!
Makes about as much sense as the "Buy American" campaign. If you're concerned about the US economy slipping into the backpocket of China, trying to keep your US dollars in the US is a small way to help. It's not going to change the world or your life, but neither is turning off the lights when you leave the room to save $.02 cents of electricity.
More to the point, someone who can't communicate with the rest of the party is a serious liability in any dangerous situation. For many people, the fun of games like this lies in cooperation with a group to overcome dangerous situations.
If you can't speak english, you have every right to play on an English server, but don't be surprised or upset that people don't want to play with you. It's just common sense to want a party that can operate as a party.
By that logic, half the goddamned internet is exploting Safari.
You're living in a dream world. Complexity is always a problem. The more complex something is, the more vulnerabilities it has.
And this pertains to everything.
Witness the durability of bacteria compared to a human being.
It was largely a solved problem 20 years ago, if anyone had listened.
If you're talking about Vaxen et al....those computers sucked.
They didn't have IM, they didn't have IE, they didn't play games over UDP. As far as the modern day consumer is concerned, there was not a single useful application on them.
It simply isn't fair to expect modern machines to hold up to the standards of security that their simpler predecessors did. My pocket calculator is also immune to viruses and trojans (although I'll bet the HP 48-SX was vulnerable to IR-port worms).
Now that's not to say they couldn't be doing a better job. OS X is a great example of how asking for the admin password every time a modification of the central system is requested makes worms all but impossible and trojans much more difficult.
But it drives me up a wall when people expect more complex systems to be as easy to write and debug as simpler ones. Security gets harder as complexity increases, it's about as fundamental a law to computers as thermodynamics is to physics.
Exactly.
You seem to be more worried about how you could trash the system after resigning (if the necessity arose). The solution, of course, is to set up scripts *before you resign* that poll an external web address and take their instruction via http (or maybe a tunnel). I'm sure you can think of something.
better luck next time!
It's no great feat to hit a small target if you're using feedback to course correct as you go. The hard part is deploying the probe, not getting there.
The difference is that consoles are a static gaming platform, and they're running a small batch of rigidly defined, non configurable software (the release titles).
/.'ers are being warned to stay away from the 360 until these bugs are ironed out.
This is about as easy as QA testing gets so there is absolutely no excuse for crashes of any kind on the release lineup.
More to the point, something like this is certainly newsworthy, especially in the Games section. Even without the Microsoft shadenfreude,
Yeah, you heard me. It literally DOES NOT MATTER if I vote. When the reciepient of "my" support is already a forgone conclusion.
You are wrong for two reasons:
The popular vote may not decide the president but it does affect his perceived legitimacy. If Bush won the electoral college and yet had only 45% of the vote he wouldn't have as much power.
More importantly: One day it may not be a foregone conclusion, but you won't know until it's too late, so you might as well not take the chance.
This is about the worst advice for verifying the engineering of a complex device that I could think of.
The person's ability to play it cool under this kind of unsually direct question is probably inversely correlated with their ability to program.
You described a litmus test for good CEO's, not good engineers. A good engineer is aware of the complexities of the real world, doesn't see things in black and white. When pressed in this manner, a good engineer is immediately going to start second guessing themselves for the thousandth time, as they should.
At the moment, wireless AP's don't have to worry about frequent switching.
But if everyone and their brother started using these things, suddenly a given AP is going to have to deal with a huge amount of hookup requests.
Now admittedly I don't know much about the guts of an AP, and how limited their processing ability is (apart from bandwidth)... but this certainly isn't what they were designed for. I would be surprised if they could handle this kind of abuse from multiple users.
Or am I completely off base?
I think they use this for stopping early cavities here in the UK. They call it ozone treatment.
I had a treatment done in which they shaved off part of my tooth, blasted the hell out of it with some special ozone application gizmo (a cup attached to a tube that is placed over the tube surface.)
It sucked, my teeth hurt for months from the shaving, it was expensive and I had to go in twice for it.
What's wrong with a filling?
And copy the replies to the most recent global warming story into this one.
I certainly wouldn't notice the difference, and so much productivity would be saved by everyone not having to rehash the same old arguments again.
This is the argument people always bring when a community site is shut down, whether it's a chat room, or a P2P network.
But any shutdown is damage to the social infrastructure. Most people who had chatted before will find new places to hang out, but some won't (not that this is necessarily a bad thing but beside the point).
If this process continued ad-infinitum, the community is whittled down gradually and ends up smaller, even if not wiped out. This has certainly happened with internet piracy, and the same would happened to internet chat services if more followed Yahoo's example.
Yes, consumers would spend the same, but advertising would be a better way for a company to spend its budget than on... say... product quality and salaries
Hence, marketing would become an even larger slice of the pie, and the more money spent on marketing, the less is spent on production.
Nike and Reebok are no longer shoe companies really, they just sell the brand name to various apparel manufacturers. It's a scary world we're approaching in which companies spend more and more of their money manipulating the minds of their consumers and less and less on making good products. The better they are at convincing us we need their product, the less effort they have to put into making sure it's actually well made.
As to your second point, we are only at the beginning of the targeted advertising age. In the next few years these companies will employ legions of psychologists, especially those dealing with visual perception, to learn how to control exogenous orienting based on expectation of what's salient to that person (booze, smokes, women, shoes, etc).
It could get pretty ugly.
It is a big deal, because directed advertising is more profitable.
And because it's more profitable there will be more of it.
So given the choice of less undirected advertising and more directed advertising, I'll take the former.
Also, directed advertising is harder to ignore. The more they know about how your brain works the better they'll be able to create ads that draw your attention to them.
I think "liking" an OS is a bit of an odd concept
It only seems odd to you because you've gotten so used to not liking your OS that you've been forced to stop worrying about it.
But to those of using computers that actually help us do what we need, rather than getting in the way, "liking" an OS doesn't seem odd at all.
none of which pertain to the question: do you LIKE to use Windows?
He doesn't know the mean of the phrase AI.
AI doesn't mean "Learning", it means Artificial Intelligence. Said poster is probably a stage in his life where his visual system is relatively stable from day to day. Whether it got there by being hard wired by his designer or through learning is irrelevant. His intelligent behavior (barring perhaps said post) on a moment to moment basis is the result of his pre-wired system, not some kind of fabulously amazing learning algorithm.
Some of the engineers attacking this problem are using machine learning, others are using pre-fab algorithm, most are using a combination of both. They're all true AI by any stretch of the definition.
And let us not forget that there are certain physical practicalities to the shape of a circle that make it the only real choice for a rotating control dial. Maybe it should be a triangle instead? Perhaps a trapezoid or non rectangular parallelogram?
They are a corporation and therefore charged with the sole mandate to make money for their stockholders.
Do not blame them for this, it is reason that they exist. What you're doing is getting upset at a shark for eating fish.
As for why they choose to artificially create popularity, rather than letting it flow naturally from the talents of the artist, the answer is simply that it's more efficient for them to do so. Betting on artist talent is a huge gamble, and that was how the business used to behave.
By obtaining control of marketing and distribution channels, they have figured out that they can turn what used to be a gamble into a (more or less) fixed rate of return on their investment. It's good business on their part to do so, and you shouldn't be surprised that these companies are trying so hard to do what they are supposed to do: make money.
If you want to get upset at someone, get upset at judges that allow this sort of behavior. THEY are the ones responsible for curtailing this sort of stupidity and keeping the corporations under control.
Hey don't tar us all with that brush. I'm an academic, and while mobile phones aren't my business, the first thought that popped into my head when I saw this was that I could put that pretty picture together in one afternoon with matlab and a database of cell tower use.
It's also great the way they take the same data and run it through 3 or 4 different graphing algorithms and proudly present them as different analyses.
But the real culprits behind this are the funding bodies.
They've obviously put money into this, so you can hardly blame the lab for spending a single afternoon to knock together justification for their grant, before turning back to their real research, which is probably more useful, but harder to explain to the grant review committee.
Seriously though, it sounds like you're trying too hard.
Don't build a desk that's comfortable enough to spend huge amounts of time at, it's not healthy physically or emotionally. If you plan to waste your hours at your desk, you'll do it, whether or not it's good for your career.
You, as the layperson, may forget, but people in the relevant domain have a long and grudge filled memory. Humiliation in the eyes of the field will leave a black eye on your career for decades.