At my company I've talked to the art & production departments to have their interns collaborate with mine to get very professional looking reference pieces done.
When I was the only IT guy at a student newspaper, I found that less professional, but funny (or at least funny to me) posters that I threw together got the best results. If I put a mascot on the poster - say, the Terminator endoskeleton with its head replaced by David Warner's to make Cyborg David Warner - everyone would pay attention and remember the things it explained. YMMV, depending on the office environment.
am not saying this to be mean or short-sighted but every time I see a very liberal person taklign about the wiretapping/phone records issue, they genuinely come across to me as someone who would rather see people DIE as in DEAD than have one single person's phone call monitored that shouldn't have been. Does it matter that they were talking about a recipe for fried chicken or a rendezvous at a restaurant? No.
That's funny. Every time I hear a very stereotypically "conservative" American talking about the wiretapping/phone records issue, they genuinely come across to me as someone who would rather see Americans live under constant surveillance with no actual freedom than have one single person stand a chance of being killed (or even injured) by some nebulous "terrorist" bogeyman-of-the-week.
The thing is, I can't figure out if it's blind stupidity alone, or stupidity mixed with blind hatred of the Bush administration, and by extension, the military and intelligence communities.
The thing is, I can't figure out if it's blind stupidity alone, or stupidity mixed with a blind hatred of anything they perceive as "liberal."
The issue here is not the NSA listening in on one particular person giving a recipe to a friend. It is the mentality that a surveillance society is a good thing. The NSA wiretaps are a product of that mentality, with the logical conclusion of it being totalitarianism. That is why people like me want to see programs like this smashed *now*, before they get even more out of hand.
I think Eon could be filmed. Like all of Bear's novels that I've read, it would be a big project, but not impossible. Of his stories, I especially think that one, Anvil of Stars, and Queen of Angels would all make excellent films if done properly.
A Fire Upon the Deep would be *really* tricky to pull off, although not as much as A Deepness in the Sky.
Neuromancer and The Diamond Age could both be filmed relatively easily... if they were simplified to the point of losing the things that make them really cool. I'm thinking of that very bad screenplay version of Neuromancer that was floating around online in the 90s. It had most of the same characters and a similar story arc, but it just wasn't any good. Gibson and Stephenson cram in so much detail and plot convolution that would never make it to the screen. One of the things I always remember about Stephenson's novels is that they're told in third-person, but most of it is sort of told as if the third person is the character the scene is about, presenting it through the filter of their experience. I can't imagine that happening on screen. Something like the Cap'n Crunch section of Cryptonomicon, or the part in All Tomorrow's Parties where Gibson describes the hitman just would not work at all.
I don't get PSP "hacking" - if you want to write code for a cool handheld, why not get a GP2X [gp2x.org], which is totally open, easy to develop for (using the standard GNU toolchain), runs Linux, and doesn't have a multi-national corporationa attempting to thwart you at every turn?
Of course, I could just be wildly mistaken about who currently holds the rights to the IP.
I could see it going either way. ED was an *awesome* game, but it apparently sold very poorly, so I doubt Nintendo is really going to hold tightly onto it.
It seems like kind of a moot point, though. Silicon Knights finished Blood Omen (with the help of some Crystal Dynamics staff) in 1996. Eternal Darkness didn't come out until seven years later. Too Human is *still* unreleased, and they were working on that as a PS1 title at the same time as Blood Omen. If they're going to make it a trilogy, it will probably be about 3050CE before they can get ED2 out the door.
What I'd love to see though is a bonus disc with Too Human that includes the unfinished PS1 and Gamecube versions of the game, as well as the N64 version of Eternal Darkness =).
they slip up while sawing some thooth in half and the drill-bit digs into my gums.
the dentist then proceeds to thoroughly wash the hole that he/she just drilled with ICE COLD water.
Doctors are seriously blind to patient comfort.
Um, maybe you just go to the wrong doctors? Dentists that end up sticking a drill into your gums? Do you get your dental work done at a bombed-out basement in Beirut?
I prefer hyphenated names, myself. It would get unwieldy to write them all out after a few generations, but it would be a cool way to have your entire family tree represented in your name.
Sure it is - "Ziz-icks." It's still stupid (or possibly inspired by the insect demon lord thing in that one Elric novel), but no worse than most dot-com names.
Robocopy is approximately a hundred trillion trillion trillion times better than xcopy.
To put that in perspective, you would need to weld fourteen quadrillion VW Beetles end to end, then use the resulting Beetle Bar as a lever and an object with the displacement of eleven million Libraries of Congress as the fulcrum in order to give xcopy the same Windows command-line file copying power as Robocopy.
I've read about people getting killed by manhole covers in NYC that were electrified for the same reason. Power lines aren't pretty, but I'd rather have them aboveground where I can see them if they break.
Popular Mechanics and Popular Science have pretty pictures, but are hardly reliable news sources. If EMP weapons could be built currently, the US would be using them. If they could be built cheaply, the computer dork fanboys who have been drooling over the idea of EMP weapons for decades would be using them.
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I have heard that Idea before, and it seems to be a win win for everyone, why won't ebay chage their model?
From my perspective, I don't like that model because I know how much it will inflate the price of items on eBay. The reason I snipe is because I learned years ago that people get attached to the particular item they're bidding on, and if given the chance will end up ratcheting the price well beyond what it's actually worth because they got caught up in trying to win.
If eBay implemented a system like you describe, I think that while they would make more money from each auction, total use of the system would decline because most people aren't interested in paying high prices.
Yes, but Latin 'flavor' is pronounced like English 'flower'.
OT, but I have always had trouble believing this, even though I know it's how Latin scholars believe it was pronounced.
As evidence, I present Brennus, the Gaul invader who yelled "Vae Victis" at the Romans. I think any reasonable person will agree that "Way Wictis!" is far too ridiculous sounding, and therefore the Romans must have pronounced Vs like we do.
I hear it adds 10hp to your computer to use a $50+ mousepad as well. Too bad the reviewer forgot to paint the edges of the pad blue for maximum performance, and they also didn't provide any statistics as to accuracy with case badges applied versus without.
Beacuse if you have a 'traditional' wood desk, and just use your desk's top surface directly, you will end up wearing away the finish and putting a 'rut' into your desk.
Does your mouse have sandpaper on the bottom?
I haven't used a mousepad for many years. I also work extensively with them at home and at work. I have yet to have made a visible impact on any wood or Ikea-style composite desk.
The cost of living and the wage are only one factor of the cost of an ousourced worker.
This is a very important point.
We have a lot of people in India doing contract stuff for us where I work. The price for the contractors is relatively low, but there is a *huge* infrastructure cost required to let them do the work. There's the data connection costs that you mention, but also things like VPN gear, terminal servers, MS CALs (our enterprise agreement only covers employees, not contractors), plus all of the staff work here to ensure that everything can be done reasonably securely.
That's just the concrete costs. There are additional ones that are harder to measure. Things like the potential costs related to misuse of our data by people in a foreign country, or the costs of supporting applications that may have been written by a completely different team or outsourcing company.
I have seen some good work come from the contractors, but IMO they don't provide any savings worth the effort of sending the work to another country. It seems mostly like another big corporation Monopoly money game where they make it look like saving money by transferring the cost to another division.
There will come day where we expect our compilers to encode parallel information into the code so it will run faster on our 1024 core machines.
Um, like using thread pooling? If you mean a compiler that takes simple linear code and magically makes it run faster on a massively parallel architecture, I'd be very interested in an argument for how that's even logically possible.
Dynamic range is the critical part, IMO. Existing display standards are crap in terms of reproducing the full range of colours we can see, because no matter how well you calibrate the monitor, the colour depth itself prevents them from being displayed. IIRC, green suffers the most, but all colours are affected to some degree.
Sounds neat, but the guy in that photo looks incredibly stupid with that wing strapped to his back. He looks like he's going to a costume party dressed as an F-4 Phantom.
I think if he got his suit chromed, he'd be the spitting image of "Hawk" Masterson from the old Captain Power TV series, and be able to fight off a few Bio-Dreads.
It might look a little clunky, but especially with some miniature turbines a la the "Birdman" video, this would be *really* cool to try out.
But you need to understand something: We are at WAR. And the enemies of our country do not give a goddamn about our liberties, or freedoms, our lives, and do not operate by any societal rules whatsoever.
It's pretty sad that you've bought into two of the most basic ways of manipulating a population that a government can use:
1 - Demonizing the enemy. There are certainly evil people in the world, but they are not the slobbering subhuman monsters you take them for. I would argue that most of them are actually very similar to any other person, they've just been fed a different line of propaganda specific to their part of the world.
2 - The "but we're at war!" line of horseshit. Yes, in a real war - a war with goals that can be met, like conquering the enemy and forcing them to surrender - the population must make *temporary* sacrifices. The "war on terror" is an Orwellian fantasy designed to allow those temporary sacrifices to become permanent subjugation of the population. It cannot be won, and that is the whole point - to continually grind away everything that makes America different than the militant theocracies that support the groups we are supposedly "at war" with.
I'd take Clark over Bush any day. At least he was being controlled by the Shadows. With Bush, I think he really thinks he's doing the right thing.
My take on that part of the B5 arc was that Clarke and his government weren't so much controlled by the Shadows as they were willingly working with them because they thought they were doing the right thing.
E.g. Clarke and "the ascension of the common man." The diplomat who justified the non-aggression pact with the Centauri because "we will know peace in our time."
I've always figured that that part of the story was JMS taking a break from re-telling Lord of the Rings in space to work in a re-telling of the lead-in to WWII in space. But watching it now is almost painful because when it was originally aired I never thought I'd really hear people welcoming totalitarianism in the name of "security" and "safety."
Slashdot Mirror
At my company I've talked to the art & production departments to have their interns collaborate with mine to get very professional looking reference pieces done.
When I was the only IT guy at a student newspaper, I found that less professional, but funny (or at least funny to me) posters that I threw together got the best results. If I put a mascot on the poster - say, the Terminator endoskeleton with its head replaced by David Warner's to make Cyborg David Warner - everyone would pay attention and remember the things it explained. YMMV, depending on the office environment.
Steven W: How is the RTS gentlemen!!
am not saying this to be mean or short-sighted but every time I see a very liberal person taklign about the wiretapping/phone records issue, they genuinely come across to me as someone who would rather see people DIE as in DEAD than have one single person's phone call monitored that shouldn't have been. Does it matter that they were talking about a recipe for fried chicken or a rendezvous at a restaurant? No.
That's funny. Every time I hear a very stereotypically "conservative" American talking about the wiretapping/phone records issue, they genuinely come across to me as someone who would rather see Americans live under constant surveillance with no actual freedom than have one single person stand a chance of being killed (or even injured) by some nebulous "terrorist" bogeyman-of-the-week.
The thing is, I can't figure out if it's blind stupidity alone, or stupidity mixed with blind hatred of the Bush administration, and by extension, the military and intelligence communities.
The thing is, I can't figure out if it's blind stupidity alone, or stupidity mixed with a blind hatred of anything they perceive as "liberal."
The issue here is not the NSA listening in on one particular person giving a recipe to a friend. It is the mentality that a surveillance society is a good thing. The NSA wiretaps are a product of that mentality, with the logical conclusion of it being totalitarianism. That is why people like me want to see programs like this smashed *now*, before they get even more out of hand.
I think Eon could be filmed. Like all of Bear's novels that I've read, it would be a big project, but not impossible. Of his stories, I especially think that one, Anvil of Stars, and Queen of Angels would all make excellent films if done properly.
A Fire Upon the Deep would be *really* tricky to pull off, although not as much as A Deepness in the Sky.
Neuromancer and The Diamond Age could both be filmed relatively easily... if they were simplified to the point of losing the things that make them really cool. I'm thinking of that very bad screenplay version of Neuromancer that was floating around online in the 90s. It had most of the same characters and a similar story arc, but it just wasn't any good. Gibson and Stephenson cram in so much detail and plot convolution that would never make it to the screen. One of the things I always remember about Stephenson's novels is that they're told in third-person, but most of it is sort of told as if the third person is the character the scene is about, presenting it through the filter of their experience. I can't imagine that happening on screen. Something like the Cap'n Crunch section of Cryptonomicon, or the part in All Tomorrow's Parties where Gibson describes the hitman just would not work at all.
he has a good range, I think. Ever seen Dark City?
Or Flatliners, or The Lost Boys. I haven't read any Dragonlance books since I was a kid, but I think this could turn out pretty well.
I don't get PSP "hacking" - if you want to write code for a cool handheld, why not get a GP2X [gp2x.org], which is totally open, easy to develop for (using the standard GNU toolchain), runs Linux, and doesn't have a multi-national corporationa attempting to thwart you at every turn?
Because the audience for PSP homebrew is wider?
Of course, I could just be wildly mistaken about who currently holds the rights to the IP.
I could see it going either way. ED was an *awesome* game, but it apparently sold very poorly, so I doubt Nintendo is really going to hold tightly onto it.
It seems like kind of a moot point, though. Silicon Knights finished Blood Omen (with the help of some Crystal Dynamics staff) in 1996. Eternal Darkness didn't come out until seven years later. Too Human is *still* unreleased, and they were working on that as a PS1 title at the same time as Blood Omen. If they're going to make it a trilogy, it will probably be about 3050CE before they can get ED2 out the door.
What I'd love to see though is a bonus disc with Too Human that includes the unfinished PS1 and Gamecube versions of the game, as well as the N64 version of Eternal Darkness =).
they slip up while sawing some thooth in half and the drill-bit digs into my gums.
the dentist then proceeds to thoroughly wash the hole that he/she just drilled with ICE COLD water.
Doctors are seriously blind to patient comfort.
Um, maybe you just go to the wrong doctors? Dentists that end up sticking a drill into your gums? Do you get your dental work done at a bombed-out basement in Beirut?
I prefer hyphenated names, myself. It would get unwieldy to write them all out after a few generations, but it would be a cool way to have your entire family tree represented in your name.
Zzyzzyxx wasn't even pronounceable
Sure it is - "Ziz-icks." It's still stupid (or possibly inspired by the insect demon lord thing in that one Elric novel), but no worse than most dot-com names.
Robocopy is approximately a hundred trillion trillion trillion times better than xcopy.
To put that in perspective, you would need to weld fourteen quadrillion VW Beetles end to end, then use the resulting Beetle Bar as a lever and an object with the displacement of eleven million Libraries of Congress as the fulcrum in order to give xcopy the same Windows command-line file copying power as Robocopy.
I've read about people getting killed by manhole covers in NYC that were electrified for the same reason. Power lines aren't pretty, but I'd rather have them aboveground where I can see them if they break.
ISTR a Popular Mechanics article a few years back
Popular Mechanics and Popular Science have pretty pictures, but are hardly reliable news sources. If EMP weapons could be built currently, the US would be using them. If they could be built cheaply, the computer dork fanboys who have been drooling over the idea of EMP weapons for decades would be using them.
I have heard that Idea before, and it seems to be a win win for everyone, why won't ebay chage their model?
From my perspective, I don't like that model because I know how much it will inflate the price of items on eBay. The reason I snipe is because I learned years ago that people get attached to the particular item they're bidding on, and if given the chance will end up ratcheting the price well beyond what it's actually worth because they got caught up in trying to win.
If eBay implemented a system like you describe, I think that while they would make more money from each auction, total use of the system would decline because most people aren't interested in paying high prices.
Yes, but Latin 'flavor' is pronounced like English 'flower'.
OT, but I have always had trouble believing this, even though I know it's how Latin scholars believe it was pronounced.
As evidence, I present Brennus, the Gaul invader who yelled "Vae Victis" at the Romans. I think any reasonable person will agree that "Way Wictis!" is far too ridiculous sounding, and therefore the Romans must have pronounced Vs like we do.
I hear it adds 10hp to your computer to use a $50+ mousepad as well. Too bad the reviewer forgot to paint the edges of the pad blue for maximum performance, and they also didn't provide any statistics as to accuracy with case badges applied versus without.
Beacuse if you have a 'traditional' wood desk, and just use your desk's top surface directly, you will end up wearing away the finish and putting a 'rut' into your desk.
Does your mouse have sandpaper on the bottom?
I haven't used a mousepad for many years. I also work extensively with them at home and at work. I have yet to have made a visible impact on any wood or Ikea-style composite desk.
The cost of living and the wage are only one factor of the cost of an ousourced worker.
This is a very important point.
We have a lot of people in India doing contract stuff for us where I work. The price for the contractors is relatively low, but there is a *huge* infrastructure cost required to let them do the work. There's the data connection costs that you mention, but also things like VPN gear, terminal servers, MS CALs (our enterprise agreement only covers employees, not contractors), plus all of the staff work here to ensure that everything can be done reasonably securely.
That's just the concrete costs. There are additional ones that are harder to measure. Things like the potential costs related to misuse of our data by people in a foreign country, or the costs of supporting applications that may have been written by a completely different team or outsourcing company.
I have seen some good work come from the contractors, but IMO they don't provide any savings worth the effort of sending the work to another country. It seems mostly like another big corporation Monopoly money game where they make it look like saving money by transferring the cost to another division.
Best use of the Slashdot tagging system evar.
There will come day where we expect our compilers to encode parallel information into the code so it will run faster on our 1024 core machines.
Um, like using thread pooling? If you mean a compiler that takes simple linear code and magically makes it run faster on a massively parallel architecture, I'd be very interested in an argument for how that's even logically possible.
and increase the dynamic range.
Dynamic range is the critical part, IMO. Existing display standards are crap in terms of reproducing the full range of colours we can see, because no matter how well you calibrate the monitor, the colour depth itself prevents them from being displayed. IIRC, green suffers the most, but all colours are affected to some degree.
Sounds neat, but the guy in that photo looks incredibly stupid with that wing strapped to his back. He looks like he's going to a costume party dressed as an F-4 Phantom.
I think if he got his suit chromed, he'd be the spitting image of "Hawk" Masterson from the old Captain Power TV series, and be able to fight off a few Bio-Dreads.
It might look a little clunky, but especially with some miniature turbines a la the "Birdman" video, this would be *really* cool to try out.
But you need to understand something: We are at WAR. And the enemies of our country do not give a goddamn about our liberties, or freedoms, our lives, and do not operate by any societal rules whatsoever.
It's pretty sad that you've bought into two of the most basic ways of manipulating a population that a government can use:
1 - Demonizing the enemy. There are certainly evil people in the world, but they are not the slobbering subhuman monsters you take them for. I would argue that most of them are actually very similar to any other person, they've just been fed a different line of propaganda specific to their part of the world.
2 - The "but we're at war!" line of horseshit. Yes, in a real war - a war with goals that can be met, like conquering the enemy and forcing them to surrender - the population must make *temporary* sacrifices. The "war on terror" is an Orwellian fantasy designed to allow those temporary sacrifices to become permanent subjugation of the population. It cannot be won, and that is the whole point - to continually grind away everything that makes America different than the militant theocracies that support the groups we are supposedly "at war" with.
I keep hearing that line from Star Wars, Episode 1 --- "...I will MAKE it legal!"
That, and "I *am* the Senate!"
I'd take Clark over Bush any day. At least he was being controlled by the Shadows. With Bush, I think he really thinks he's doing the right thing.
My take on that part of the B5 arc was that Clarke and his government weren't so much controlled by the Shadows as they were willingly working with them because they thought they were doing the right thing.
E.g. Clarke and "the ascension of the common man." The diplomat who justified the non-aggression pact with the Centauri because "we will know peace in our time."
I've always figured that that part of the story was JMS taking a break from re-telling Lord of the Rings in space to work in a re-telling of the lead-in to WWII in space. But watching it now is almost painful because when it was originally aired I never thought I'd really hear people welcoming totalitarianism in the name of "security" and "safety."