ME:
"Hey, check out this Linux distro I just got. It looks (and works) just like XP - right down to the..."
A friend:
"What? What's wrong?"
"bluescreen"
1. It doesn't have a handlebar moustache to twirl 2. It doesn't shoot its own henchmen to prove how evil it is 3. It may be incorporated, but it isn't corporeal enough to die of impalement, the default method of bad guy death since the heyday of 70's action films.
OK, so how long will it take to spool that data from a hard drive onto that 1 TB disc?
And how long will it take to write it? My understanding is that a full DVD takes over an hour to burn, and this is a disc with over 300 times the capacity. That's a loooong burn...
Larry, you have truly demonstrated fine wit, intelligence and the full human potential of slashdot posters.
I hope for an equally awe-inspiring encore in the near future.
The more tax revenue governments take in, the more they spend.
I doubt that this would do anything more than raise the overall levels of expenditure in that country.
There are many reasons people may run out of fuel in a SoloTrek:
1. A newbie Solotrek user is so excited, that they really don't monitor the fuel gauge too closely.
2. Defective or inaccurately calibrated fuel gauge.
3. Procrastination about refilling the gas.
4. Too inebriated/intoxicated to monitor fuel, or to care.
I heard someone call up Car Talk, an NPR show in which you pay $50 to ask "click and clack" tech questions about automotive issues. A somewhat distressed woman complained about her hubby who kept a jerrycan full of gas in the trunk because he kept procrastinating in going to a fuel station, to the point of running out
and getting stuck.
In addition to the list of issues with a personal flight device, I should have included catastrophic mechanical failure. Although one would hope that in most cases, the blades would sort of "autorotate" enough to bring the Solotrekker down for a controlled crash.
Actually, I wish Star Trek *would* end.
It's being endlessly diluted with each canon-defying series that Paramounts spits out of their drek factory.
I can't blame them entirely - when you create something as great as the original series (or Next Generation) or Star Wars, you're faced with a difficult choice - quite while you're ahead, but deprive fans of the chance to further explore that "universe" or keep on making new material based on the original lore, with the likely result of dilution and loss of quality.
The future of personal flight?
on
The End of Solotrek
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't see how personal flight vehicles for the masses could ever come to fruition.
It's been a struggle to reduce highway fatalities due to people losing control over a vehicle capable of moving over an essentially planar surface.
Now, how about the problems associated with the ability to travel in the third dimension. Running out of fuel while in midair - you splat down hard, instead of coasting to stop. Collisions with trees, buildings, fogbanks, aircraft, including fellow SoloTrekkers, etc.
Imagine the possibilities opening up for ordinary criminals and terrorists.
If the ultimate goal is the rapid conveyance of people intra and inter city, we need to:
1. Use massive tax incentives to encourage working from home. Jet Blue, for instance, largely does away with call centers by having its reservation agents receive the calls at home.
2. Construct efficient new light rail systems.
3. Encourage a new generation of small ultraefficient jet aircraft to ferry small loads of passengers on the less popular routes.
There has been an upsurge in fractional jet ownership programs, with ensuing competition driving down prices.
Big airlines and big planes are showing their age. It's time for new thinking in the post-jet age.
Brad Fiedel and Adam Greenberg, and many others came back to work on T2, over five years after the release of the first Terminator film.
Certainly, T2 benefitted from that.
I agree that no one sits around hoping
to rejoin a team they were once part of.
However, there are more workers than
work in Hollywood, and no one turns it down,
unless they are already engaged.
It's the producers' job to marshall talent.
It's up to them to ask composers, FX artists
and cinematographers to return for a sequel.
Said technicians can (and usually do) say,
"yes I'll do it" when given the chance.
In the case of T3, it looks like the producers
intentionally discarded elements that made
the first two films great.
I think sequels suffer when the producers try
too hard to bring new blood onboard.
Some of the effects in Alien 3 are horrible (Amalgamated Dynamics and Boss Film vs. LA Effects and Stan Winston)
compared to the first two films, despite a decade
plus of advancements in FX technology.
I find it ironic that as much as folks complain about MS' monopolistic practices, look at how much more difficult it is to piece together your own Mac. Even those who have purchased a factory-built Mac are faced with a narrower selection of hardware choices.
Apple wouldn't have had to create a "switch" campaign if they hadn't reversed their decision to license out their OS. (As I recall, Power Computing at one point sold more Mac-OS running computers than Apple did!).
Their market share keeps declining, even as the quality and innovation of their products is on the upswing. How strange.
It's eerily similar to watching socialist command economies flounder and fall, while free-market ones thrive and give consumers more choices at better prices.
I'll leave it up to those reading this to map the metaphor.
They might consider ProVigil
on
Got Sleep?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Here is a story on ProVigil, a new drug Cephalon is testing.
http://www.you.com.au/news/1377.htm
Its primary usage is to treat problems arising from a lack of sleep, or drowsiness, provided they arise from a clinical problem and/or the treatment prescribed for it. However, it can also potentially be used to maintain an alert state for a long time, without the jitteriness of caffeine, or drowsiness of plain ol' sleep deprivation.
I wrote to them a while back, asking to try some, citing the desire to have a "really productive day."
They wrote back promptly, essentially saying that such a usage would essentially be misusage of their product.
I wasn't too thrilled about this film knowing that James Cameron wouldn't be involved in any way.
Kind of ironic that in the trailer, they play the classic Terminator riffs composed by Brad Fiedel, considering that they replaced him with an entirely different composer who's not even using Fiedel's cues from the first two films!
This reminds me a bit of the transition from Alien and Aliens to Alien3. It looks like in both cases, the producers have thrown out the charm, technical crew and composers from the first two and just put anybody in there.
As I recall, Alien3 had a spectacular opening weekend, then poor word of mouth killed it in subsequent weeks, because people expected something worthy of the two predecessors, and didn't get it.
T3 could very well end up in the same situation.
Sentient beings evolved from human-created "mecha" go digging into the icefields
for traces of human civilization.
They can resurrect humans from a few wisps of recovered DNA, but they can't read the friggin' drives Cliff used for archiving ages ago...
Stanislaw Lem (Of Solaris fame) wrote an excellent book called Invincible over twenty years ago that dealt with a renegade swarm of tiny, evolving creatures in a much more interesting manner. It's worth seeking out and reading.
Prey, by contrast, was simplistically written and predictably plotted. Glad I saved $25 by reading it in a series of bookstores.
I fear that nano- is going to be one of the most overhyped prefixes this decade, just like cyber- was in the late 80's/early 90's and i- and e- were in the late 90's.
Hmmm... IBM partnering with someone to create an ISP? Hope it doesn't go the way of Prodigy. I worked there for a couple of years, and in that short time saw a lot of management insanity.
I wish them the best of luck...
Slashdot Mirror
Bill 'em, bag 'em, book 'em.
"fucking dumbass???" You can't do anything more mature than an ad hominem troll attack?
Andreas Petzoldt's flying backpack.
Nope. It was just a cheap shot. I use Windows XP as my main OS, and haven't found the time to learn Linux.
ME: "Hey, check out this Linux distro I just got. It looks (and works) just like XP - right down to the..." A friend: "What? What's wrong?" "bluescreen"
I thought X10 gear was only for spying on pretty young women in tight clothes.
I guess those popups were misleading me...
1. It doesn't have a handlebar moustache to twirl
2. It doesn't shoot its own henchmen to prove how evil it is
3. It may be incorporated, but it isn't corporeal enough to die of impalement, the default method of bad guy death since the heyday of 70's action films.
OK, so how long will it take to spool that data from a hard drive onto that 1 TB disc? And how long will it take to write it? My understanding is that a full DVD takes over an hour to burn, and this is a disc with over 300 times the capacity. That's a loooong burn...
The result that came back was interesting - instead of a rating in MHZ and the serial number, I saw, "Help, I'm trapped in a Chinese CPU Factory"
Another benefit to these potato flakes is that they wouldn't be as harmful as the plastic ones if accidentally inhaled or ingested.
Larry, you have truly demonstrated fine wit, intelligence and the full human potential of slashdot posters. I hope for an equally awe-inspiring encore in the near future.
Unlike women, Zip Zaps are: 1. Easy to pick up 2. Low cost 3. Low commitment 4. Low maintenance 5. Have a short recharge interval
The more tax revenue governments take in, the more they spend.
I doubt that this would do anything more than raise the overall levels of expenditure in that country.
There are many reasons people may run out of fuel in a SoloTrek: 1. A newbie Solotrek user is so excited, that they really don't monitor the fuel gauge too closely. 2. Defective or inaccurately calibrated fuel gauge. 3. Procrastination about refilling the gas. 4. Too inebriated/intoxicated to monitor fuel, or to care. I heard someone call up Car Talk, an NPR show in which you pay $50 to ask "click and clack" tech questions about automotive issues. A somewhat distressed woman complained about her hubby who kept a jerrycan full of gas in the trunk because he kept procrastinating in going to a fuel station, to the point of running out and getting stuck. In addition to the list of issues with a personal flight device, I should have included catastrophic mechanical failure. Although one would hope that in most cases, the blades would sort of "autorotate" enough to bring the Solotrekker down for a controlled crash.
Actually, I wish Star Trek *would* end.
It's being endlessly diluted with each canon-defying series that Paramounts spits out of their drek factory.
I can't blame them entirely - when you create something as great as the original series (or Next Generation) or Star Wars, you're faced with a difficult choice - quite while you're ahead, but deprive fans of the chance to further explore that "universe" or keep on making new material based on the original lore, with the likely result of dilution and loss of quality.
I don't see how personal flight vehicles for the masses could ever come to fruition. It's been a struggle to reduce highway fatalities due to people losing control over a vehicle capable of moving over an essentially planar surface. Now, how about the problems associated with the ability to travel in the third dimension. Running out of fuel while in midair - you splat down hard, instead of coasting to stop. Collisions with trees, buildings, fogbanks, aircraft, including fellow SoloTrekkers, etc. Imagine the possibilities opening up for ordinary criminals and terrorists. If the ultimate goal is the rapid conveyance of people intra and inter city, we need to: 1. Use massive tax incentives to encourage working from home. Jet Blue, for instance, largely does away with call centers by having its reservation agents receive the calls at home. 2. Construct efficient new light rail systems. 3. Encourage a new generation of small ultraefficient jet aircraft to ferry small loads of passengers on the less popular routes. There has been an upsurge in fractional jet ownership programs, with ensuing competition driving down prices. Big airlines and big planes are showing their age. It's time for new thinking in the post-jet age.
Quoted (cut and pasted directly):
"Despite I listen to music only quietly, I have repeatedly tinitus"
Hmmm... Perhaps the author has lost more than his audial acuity?
Or is it merely "lossy compression/decompression?"
Brad Fiedel and Adam Greenberg, and many others came back to work on T2, over five years after the release of the first Terminator film. Certainly, T2 benefitted from that. I agree that no one sits around hoping to rejoin a team they were once part of. However, there are more workers than work in Hollywood, and no one turns it down, unless they are already engaged. It's the producers' job to marshall talent. It's up to them to ask composers, FX artists and cinematographers to return for a sequel. Said technicians can (and usually do) say, "yes I'll do it" when given the chance. In the case of T3, it looks like the producers intentionally discarded elements that made the first two films great. I think sequels suffer when the producers try too hard to bring new blood onboard. Some of the effects in Alien 3 are horrible (Amalgamated Dynamics and Boss Film vs. LA Effects and Stan Winston) compared to the first two films, despite a decade plus of advancements in FX technology.
I find it ironic that as much as folks complain about MS' monopolistic practices, look at how much more difficult it is to piece together your own Mac. Even those who have purchased a factory-built Mac are faced with a narrower selection of hardware choices.
Apple wouldn't have had to create a "switch" campaign if they hadn't reversed their decision to license out their OS. (As I recall, Power Computing at one point sold more Mac-OS running computers than Apple did!).
Their market share keeps declining, even as the quality and innovation of their products is on the upswing. How strange.
It's eerily similar to watching socialist command economies flounder and fall, while free-market ones thrive and give consumers more choices at better prices.
I'll leave it up to those reading this to map the metaphor.
Here is a story on ProVigil, a new drug Cephalon is testing.
http://www.you.com.au/news/1377.htm
Its primary usage is to treat problems arising from a lack of sleep, or drowsiness, provided they arise from a clinical problem and/or the treatment prescribed for it. However, it can also potentially be used to maintain an alert state for a long time, without the jitteriness of caffeine, or drowsiness of plain ol' sleep deprivation.
I wrote to them a while back, asking to try
some, citing the desire to have a "really
productive day."
They wrote back promptly, essentially saying
that such a usage would essentially be
misusage of their product.
I wasn't too thrilled about this film knowing that James Cameron wouldn't be involved in any way.
Kind of ironic that in the trailer, they play the classic Terminator riffs composed by Brad Fiedel, considering that they replaced him with an entirely different composer who's not even using Fiedel's cues from the first two films!
This reminds me a bit of the transition from Alien and Aliens to Alien3. It looks like in both cases, the producers have thrown out the charm, technical crew and composers from the first two and just put anybody in there.
As I recall, Alien3 had a spectacular opening weekend, then poor word of mouth killed it in subsequent weeks, because people expected something worthy of the two predecessors, and didn't get it.
T3 could very well end up in the same situation.
Maybe the meteor shower will bring an earlier end to DirecTV Internet...
Sentient beings evolved from human-created "mecha" go digging into the icefields for traces of human civilization. They can resurrect humans from a few wisps of recovered DNA, but they can't read the friggin' drives Cliff used for archiving ages ago...
Stanislaw Lem (Of Solaris fame) wrote an excellent book called Invincible over twenty years ago that dealt with a renegade swarm of tiny, evolving creatures in a much more interesting manner. It's worth seeking out and reading. Prey, by contrast, was simplistically written and predictably plotted. Glad I saved $25 by reading it in a series of bookstores. I fear that nano- is going to be one of the most overhyped prefixes this decade, just like cyber- was in the late 80's/early 90's and i- and e- were in the late 90's.
Hmmm... IBM partnering with someone to create an ISP? Hope it doesn't go the way of Prodigy. I worked there for a couple of years, and in that short time saw a lot of management insanity.
I wish them the best of luck...