"I am looking for technology that can allow my company to track the position of a fork lift as it moves around a warehouse. This would allow us to factor out one problem situation - where the lift was when the driver dropped off the product. Based on the width of our warehouse locations, we need a resolution of about +-1ft. Standard GPS can't get that accurate or work well indoors. The fork lifts already have a VT220 terminal running 802.11b, so adding another device would not be difficult. I am currently looking at a product that can triangulate via the RSSI of the 802.11b network, but I am concerned the changes in the product mix and density of the corrugated boxes will change the RSSI and introduce a mis-positioning of the locations. I would prefer that the device transmit a position either serially or via our 802.11b network. Our warehouses are fairly large (300,000+ sqft) and have a large of amount of corrugated boxes. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!"
If you just look at the highlighted words you first get the requirement "track position forklift warehouse" So he wants to know where the forklifts are in a warehouse. Okay. But WHY?
Second set of words is "where driver dropped product. Ah. I was wondering. Who gives a toss where the forklift is? Oh I worked in enough warehouses to know they are sometimes a pain to find if people don't return them or use them as a portable chair to take their break outside BUT it would be cheaper just to buy another one then set up a tracking system.
So we just got a case of a user making it not very clear what he wants. All of the answers so far have focused on trying to keep track of the forklift. Some intresting solutions and some stupid ones (measuring wheel spin on a forklift forgets that these things slip OFTEN).
However none of you have so far questioned why he wants to do this NOR wondered if this was indeed the real requirement.
More likely he wants to keep tracks of the goods. In practice goods are often misplaced in warehouses. If something is in the wrong rack it can be a pain to find it. Or worse you only notice it when the wrong thing is sent to the customer because items were mixed up.
IF this is the real problem, tracking goods, then all the given solutions are at best incomplete and at worst totally and utterly wrong to a degree that explains why so many it projects are overtime and overbudget.
But surely knowing the location of the forklift whill help tracking goods? Nope. Why? Because there is no way to track were an item was dropped by the forklift. Why not? What if the forklift operator drops of his pallet for a moment to shift another pallet out of his way? What if he takes the contents of a pallet off to put them on another pallet?
Basically this has to do with warehouse procedures that aren't followed or don't match the real situation. Ideally every storage place in a warehouse should have a unique identifier. Each storage place is catogorized as to what it can contain. Every item coming in FITS inside the storage place (not 1 item requiring two spaces OR 2 items going into the same space). At receiving the computer assigns an empty storage space. The forklift operator then takes the item to the required location and stores it. Ideally you want some kind of system to verify this BUT in real live all you need is good employees and good managers who allow each other to do their jobs.
If this system is followed then no goods will go missing. Problem is that this often doesn't happen. Neither does it seem to happen in the posters warehouse. If the forklift operators kept track off where they dropped items off OR dropped them off at the pre-assigned location then things wouldn't go missing.
Sadly he seems to go for a tech solution. Nice but it won't work unless he shifts his attention from the forklifts to the items. They are the ones missing in action.
For the most obvious failure and the sure sign that this p
Is that nature will always be one step ahead with the latest model fool "NOW WITH EXTRA STUPIDITY" for your enjoyment.
This list is nice and all and while laughable to those with a clue it could work for an idiot. Except for two tiny little errors he makes.
The first is that his foolproof solution contains words. Multiple words some of them longer then one syllable. It even runs of the bottom of the page. Lets face it the average spyware attractor can barely read a newspaper headline without a rest.
Second is that his solution is no magic bullet. Those who attract spyware want a shiny sparkly button to click. Not think or have to remember things.
This list is ONLY of use to completly new computer users. Those who already been infected have already proven that they lack the mental skills to survive online. Only way to fix them is take away their internet OR just realize that techs worldwide are feeding their families by fixing those spyware infested computers.
As long as I can remember consumer organisations have warned against pyramid schemes. That hasn't gone away and people can loose real money with them. There will always be stupid people. Don't hate spyware. See it as a sign so that you know the person you are dealing with is slightly denser then your cat. Now if only we could convince stupid people they can get a something free by wearing a sign.
Come on. What do think is more important. Emergency response in under 5 minutes OR a virus free computer. Doctors been saving lives for decades with simple mechinical tools. Computers like in so many other sectors are just niceties.
If the IT in the emergency section was really good enough it wouldn't be a 24/7/365 job anyway. The IT would just work, just like say bridge engineer isn't a 24/7/365 job. Why is IT engineering the only engineering where we don't prosecute for design failures?
Not that IT is useless to the people we really need. Communication equipment is pretty handy BUT these things have only become less reliable as they added more chips.
Nad, this guy has an inflated sense of the importance of IT. If you really want to see just how important IT is look at the kinda computer power involved in space vehicles. Not very much is it. Solid old school engineering and slide rulers put a man on the moon. Chemistry and sharp knifes saves lives (in the hands of a doctor). Computers? Handy for keeping the accounts to calculate the costs.
I haven't played the mech game but have played nexus.
No review starts good when the reviewer gets a basic fact totally wrong. The cutscenes in Nexus are skippable. Even the talking during games to "advance" the story can be clicked away ending the speech and making it all happen a bit faster. So basically either the reviewer was to dumb to figure out how to skip cutscenes and break off conversations OR he is lying and never played the game. Don't believe me? Download the demo.
Now it must be said that the background story is incredibly dumb. Basically you just don't give a shit. It is all to generic. A bad captain Kirk as the captain, a sexy japanese computer, a spunky rebellious cloaky type girl, an obnoxious incompetent superiour, weak silly aliens. Jada jada jada. It is so mediocre and un-original it is unbelievable.
The missions briefings before the missions proper are indeed baffling. They seem more story devices then informing you of mission objectives. Wich can be troublesome as you then need to choice your weapon configuration. Would be nice if you learned you need to pack a squad of marines BEFORE you start the mission. Once inside the mission things however are pretty clear. So this is a negative point but lets face it, proper mission briefing has been missing in action in games for so long I am no longer bothered by it.
The combat. This is actually takes a while to get intresting as like every game they make the tutorial part of the game meaning the first few missions are wasted on teaching you the basics. I hate it as I can read and understand a manual and want my game to be challenging from the start but sadly most of the human race needs its hand hold.
Combat is simple enough. You got three kind of weapons, anti-shield, anti-hull and anti-system. You can't hit a hull when shields are up and anti-system damage is reduced with shields up. Simplest setup is to balance between shield busters and hull busters. Going anti-device is an option for the more tactical minded as knocking out say the anti-fighter defences gives you fighters/bombers free play and they can knock devices out even faster. Who cares about their hull and engines when they can't hit you? Knock out their anti-shield weapnons and as long as you don't power down yours their anti-hull weapons are useless.
Combat is okay but once you sussed it out it can be a bit simple. Even in big battles there is really only one strategy. Concentrate all your fire on the ship doing to most damage and then work your way down to the last vessel. It soon evolves into your ships circling one enemy vessel while blasting it to bits and you occasionally saving one of your vessel if it is taking to much damage. Basically it is nice until you figured it out.
Now the reviewer complains about ships not following order. This means that either he is dumb or simply didn't understand the interface. You can set your ships to various modes of behaviour and one of them they basically follow their own logic wich isn't bad but can be confusing if you are not expecting it. For instance if you have them on agressive then they will happily go after the ship you told them to but on the way they will fire at any ship that gets in their way. If you target a ship with shields up it will continue to fire its hull busters at a ship with down shields. If you want total control it is there. You just got to set the right mode. Another point of for this reviewer.
He then goes on to complain that it can take up to a full minute to take out a weapon system (with your anti-system weapons) and no less then three minutes to take out a ship completly. Read this part of his review carefully and then ask yourselve what on earth was this guy thinking when he picked up a strategy game? This is a strategy game of battleships. What does he want? Knock out your enemies weapons in 2-3 seconds? In the larger battles a minute to destroy a main armanent is nothing. This is not a scroll down shooter where you got hundreds of enemies. A dozen is a lot. Co
Is he just trying to grab some power? He says something about rules but not wich rules. So all this basically is the eternal re-distrobution of power that goes on at all layers off goverment and the UN is no exception.
Respecting countries laws. Hmmm how do you want to do this on the net? Some religious countries are opposed to porn. Okay but the only way to respect that would be to either remove all porn wich would not be respectfull of goverments that are pro-porn. (Where are they and how do I become a citizen?). The only other way would be stop ALL porn from reaching those countries. Impossible.
Further more if a country really wants to control the net then it is simple. Control the communication channels and put filters in place that block anything that is not approved. North Korea is pretty a much a black spot on the globe with the world having no clue what is going on inside and presumably this is true in reverse.
So either he wants to limit the content of the internet to something every country with a vote can agree with, and they will take my porn over my cold dead body, OR change the technology to make filtering easier.
Either way this guy is from china. Not a refugee, an ex-minister of the regime that gave us Tianenmen-square. The US of course has done pretty much the same thing but the US has one big advantage as controller of the internet. It is hopelessly incompetent and all the intrested parties are having far to much fun fighting each other instead of actually doing something. The US is evil but is a kind of bumbling evil that always destroys itself before it even gets out of the door. Even purely internal censorship measures get shot down by its own system. The chance of the US succesfully censoring the Internet is as likely as the US winning a landwar against a small asian country.
If it is a choice between two evils I take US control of ICANN over countries like china having a veto on the UN anyday. For that matter the US having a veto.
The internet has flourished under its current inept management and general anarchie. This idiot claims it hasn't flourished. Spam he mentions as a problem. Well considering an awfull lot of spam comes from chinese computers let him tell his own goverment to fix that first.
There just are to many of them. Now this is not a problem except when there are to many for to long. Compare it with drinking. If you binge drink once every decenium then it will be bad for your system but nothing terrible will happen. Neither will anything happen if you take a glass of table wine every day. But 10 glasses each day will kill you.
Same with ads. I come from the netherlands and am so old that I remember when tv only had ads between programs and not even that on sundays and other christian holidays. Of course we only had 1 dutch channel, yes I am really really old, but german tv had only the occasional ad block in the afternoon (although it was bloody long) and belgian tv has maybe 1 ad per day. BBC of course has none.
But now we got commercial tv and the ads are in the program and last for far to long. It is so bad that with my memory I forget wich program I was watching. Meaning I zap to another channel and don't return OR as is happening more and more just don't watch tv but watch bittorrent instead.
I didn't mind the ads in the olden days. 1-2 minutes between programs. That was acceptable. But 5+ minutes every 15 minutes is to much.
Why should the tv channels care? Well because I went from watching a couple of ads to watching 0 ads.
Same really with the net. It took me quit a while to start with adblockers because the occasional ad I could live with. But they kept forcing more and more ads onto me until I reached breaking point and installed an adblocker. Now I don't see any ads. Including the one for this page. Though shit that slashdot loses income, my breaking point has been reached. Now even 1 ad getting to the adblocker has me instantly adding the url to the block list. To many ads means that I now don't want to see a single one.
This move by tivo seems the ultimate arrogance and ignorance by the ad pushers. The entire idea behind tivo is to skip ads and yet you are aiming your ads at these people? THEY DON'T WANT YOUR ADS. The only thing this can possibly achieve is that either people move away from tivo OR put an embargo on your product.
If ad pushers want to get people to watch their ads they should realize that they need to reduce the amount of ads we see. Companies wanting to advertise. 1 ad in a movie is watched. your 1 ad between 5 minutes of other ads is not watched. TV companies. 1 ad per movie might just fetch you a far higher price AND get more viewers then the other channels.
Then again we are talking about the tv industry. Brains are not exactly their strong point. Currently young males are no longer watching tv so much as before. Strangely this happened at the exact same time as reality tv became a staple diet of every channel. TV bosses reaction. MORE REALITY TV.
From that same logic it is not hard to see how the reaction people zapping away from ads is to show more ads or how you buy ad time on a device designed to skip ads. Maybe Heineken should sponsor AA meetings.
NONE of them were at the academy together. Spock already served on the enterprise under captain Pike before Kirk took over. This was set in the pilot of the original series. While you of course don't graduate as captain and it is possible that Spock and Kirk went to the academy together only to split up and meet again on the enterprise this is simply not how the original series tells it. Hell Kirk even wants to get rid of spock for being to cold blooded.
Spock is also much older and McCoy is somewhere in between them. Chekov goes to the academy to follow in his heroes footsteps.
So timewise they could not meet up as trainees and to do so would upset the fans to much wich has been shown with enterprise is not a good thing.
So could it work?
Well yeah. But make a drastic twist in how the story is told. Don't make the "hero" the crew but make the "hero" the academy. So do not have a central cast but rather a central supporting cast of teachers or old students coming back for training around wich fresh new characters have their story in each episode.
This allows you to kill characters central to the story and never really know how it is going to end.
Also the fear of teen drama doesn't have to happen. Teens do not go to the academy. They are a few years older and young adults instead. Wesley was a freak and admitted early. Don't repeat that mistake and you won't have snotty anoying kids.
It could work but paramount would most likely ruin it.
Correct AND incorrect
on
Girls Got Game
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What they mean with this is for instance the skill to see what a flat piece of paper folded along certian lines would look like. Or what the missing/obscured part of an object looks like or what would be the floorprint of a 3D object. Common one is also to pick the correct rear/top image for a given object.
However what this have to do with gaming? If you make this a 100% skill where men got it perfect and women don't have it at all then all it would mean is that women could not edit the skins for 3D objects that is so popular in modding. That after all requires you to "see" where the pixels on the flat skin are going to end up on the 3D model.
It has no relation with 3d gaming since no study has shown that women are less adapt at moving around in a 3D world (kinda like the one outside your eyes). No parking jokes please.
Also more women play now then in the days of 2D gaming.
So the difference is very real but it just doesn't relate to gaming. If you don't believe me take such a teste and then play a FPS game and try to find such a test in it. Only 3D tetris would be slightly harder for women. Running around Brothers in Arms would not.
I think you have never seen the size of and number of The Sims user made content or quake maps. Let alone complete mods wich basically give you a new game. It just doesn't fit.
First the most important. Set your budget. You know how much money you got. Count it and don't let anyone tell you to spend more then you want to. If the player you want costs more SAVE up for it. Do never buy with store credit. It ain't worth it.
HD vs flash vs CD vs Minidisc vs Someweird cd like formats.
HD's have the most storage but consume a lot of elec and are more vulnerable. They do not skip. MS most be of its rocker. It is CD's that skip.
Flash is robuust and storage is increasing but still tiny compared to HD's. Also cost less elec to run so longer battery life.
CD's were a cheap way to get loads of storage before flash sizes increased without the costs of HD. Now all but useless. Big, vulnareble to skipping and limited to something like 640mb.
Minidisc. Smaller then CD's but still limited compared to HD. A market segment on its own. I had one before the HD player and it was sweet but the HD is sweeter.
Weird formats. Don't bother.
Basic conclusion? Determine your size needs. This is based on A. How long do you listen it in one go. B. What is your tolerance for repeats. C. How often do you chance your songs. If you use it 4 hours per day, can't stand to hear the same song more then once in a week and never replace your songlist you are going to need more space then someone who likes to listen to the same album over and over again. HD's also can be damaged more easily by extreme rough use. Not by carrying them with you in your pocket while running but if you throw your stuff around the hd might not survive. For most people there will be no problems.
Goodies. Ehm yeah right. Goodies are for sucking in the gullible. It is like those stickers "now tastes better" or "free toy inside". You are buying a music player. Concentrate on that. A carrying harness is nice and all but you will most likely put the thing in your pocket. Other stuff like stopwatch is clearly MS being of its rocker. Anyway your mobile phone probably has one and you can always just use something called a watch.
So don't be tempted by "extras". Extras are easy. Making a damned good solid mp3 player is not.
Display. Obvious dig at the iPod shuffle. Also MS not understanding a thing. If you have created your ideal music collection and just want to listen to it on shuffle mode then why do you need a display? Determine your own needs. If you never use the playlist in xmms/winamp to select a song why would you suddenly want to do so on the move? If you do then get a good display AND a mp3 player with a browse system that doesn't drive you up the wall.
Radio. Let a professional make your play list. Oh yeah. Big brother knows best and for your extra convenience they will have lots of MS commercials to make sure you make the right decisions. God how can a single company be so out of touch. RADIO SUCKS wich is why we have music players in the first place. It costs next to nothing to add fm capabilty HOWEVER this also means radios are cheap. You can get one for a few bucks or even as a free toy. If you want a radio. Get one. Don't waste money on an mp3 player. Further more if you use your player inside or worse in a train expect incredibly bad reception. It also adds clutter to your player. Again determine your own needs. If you sometimes want to listen to the radio then fine look for it in your player. Just realize this one simple fact. Portable radio's are cheaper, last longer and been around far longer then personal music players. So why do so few people seem to use portable radios on the move? Why do radio's in cars come with personal music players (cassetes)?
Pick the right size. I know bill gates never really said that 640k should be enough for anyone but this page is so out of date. If you are buying less then 512mb these days you are getting screwed. Prices have dropped and even 1gb flash players are pretty affordable. 128mb or less is something you should get for free.
As for the whole wma nonsense. My hearing is pretty bad but on the whole
In fact most consoles can't even add content. The entire idea of "expansions" being released is something that can really only be done on a pc. Same with patches and hacking. Where would gamecube or PS2 store extra content?
PC expansion typically sell for about half of the full price game so 20 bucks for an x-box expansion is pretty low considering the high prices for console game vs pc games (might be different for you but over here top console games are easily 10-20 euro's above the price of the same game for the pc).
As for user content. Consoles never had this so they don't know any better. The theorie is that console owner in turn get games that just work from launch and do not have to be patched first.
Just because halo is available on pc and x-box does not suddenly mean the x-box stops following console rules.
So this is not the end of free content. PC owners of halo can still make maps and distribute them if they want to take the time and effort. As long as PC gaming does not die out (considering that THE console company sony has several big MMO PC only games I think we don't have to worry to much) then user created content will continue to be available. Just not to console owners.
Imagine if you can manage to keep a million+ people pay you 10 bucks each and every month. Yes MMO games are big and expensive to develop AND they have recurring cost in hardware/net/support but WOW. That is some serious cash blizzard has coming in. 1.5 million boxes plus a couple of months subscription.
Will it last? Who knows. Sad fact is that lineage 1-2 has so far been the only one who could measure its audience in the millions. None of the big western ones have passed a million before. I know only 1 person who plays it and he already seems to be getting bored with it. Also the promised but delayed content seems an all to well known mantra from other hyped but ultimately disappointing games.
A lot of people who never wanted to touch an MMO game before are playing WoW but is this going to last? Every month the bill will be coming in and when most players are already at the top level what else are they going to do?
Can someone answer me this? Is it possible to play without having a credit card? Sony has global collect for us europeans wich works very well but all other MMO games I looked at seem convinced the entire world has credit cards.
I think the poster wants something like the windows registry. Fair enough. Windows registy is were all programs store their settings and seems to work. Except wait. No it doesn't. Windows registry is so easy that to store a 1 you really got to write x000001 or something. Yeah that is noob friendly. Also many programs especially games use both the registry AND.ini or.cfg files. Some games even use multiple AND put them sometimes in the game install dir and sometimes under the Home dir of the user. Documents or something.
Oh lets admit it, windows registry is an even greater mess. At least/etc support bloody goddamn fucking comments. Something MS apparently thought nobody would ever need.
But what about all those different file formats. Mmmm well yes true enough. They are really not all that different though. Most of them have 1 pure text file seperated into sections for easier reading and each entry is something like "setting = value" contruction. The better config files have lots of comments to indicate possible values and what they mean. Very easy for humans to use. I generally find editing a config file to be a breeze.
The problem is between updates. I get the idea that the poster is using a gentoo and gentoo has a thing for updates. Gentoo updates a lot and for some reason config files change a lot. Not a problem with config files you never touch youreselve just accept the updated one but with things like/etc/fstab samba or apache configs it becomes more complex.
For a long time gentoo insisted on constantly changing/etc/fstab despite the fact that the format never changed, no new options were ever added and all the settings are purely individual. Thank god they changed this but they still insist on giving me a new config file for each time samba or apache gets installed. Now some of the changes are security related and important but an awfull lot seem to be pure preference by whoever this time did the config file. Finding out the differences ain't easy. Often they are purely syntax differences anyway. Diff is a nice tool but can't understand human reasons for why lines might be in a different order.
So merging new configs and your existing config is indeed a mess. A better way to do this would indeed be usefull.
This however HAS ABSOLUTLY NOTHING TO DO WITH/ETC. The exact same problem occurs on windows with its registry. You see the simple problem is this. Say I got a config entry that says, foo=bar. Now during an bugfix it becomes clear that for 99% of users this should be foo=bar2 instead. How do you change this? Just overwrite what is there? No because for mee foo=bar might be what I need and I don't want an upgrade to change my settings. Ignore? But then I am never alerted to the fact I am using outdated settings. Alert me? Well nobody seems to do that.
Ideally during an upgrade the installer would go through the existing settings and analyze them for correctness and alert the user to changes.
It is not a gentoo specific problem either. If you install apache by hand it just leaves the old config untouched. Windows throws a dice during boot to see what it does with your settings. Games just overwrite if they feel like it.
Don't mistake messy dir structure with lousy upgrading of configuration settings.
If you can't see the difference between the two you have done to much html editing. The first is human readable, the second is not. Yeah yeah I know it is "readable" but come on.
If you want to change/etc you are going to have to convince vi or even ed users like me. xml ain't gonna do it. We use vi because emacs takes to many keypresses to start. We are not going to type the variable name twice. No way. Try again.
/etc is a mess wich could first be slightly cleaned by moving every config file into a subdir with the same name as the app. This would at least reduce the number of entries and avoid problems with designers naming essential config files something else then app.cfg. Yes I am talking to you mplayer.
Lets just say that it was a two horse race, Opera vs IE and Opera won 1st and 2nd and 3rd place. IE was towed to the pet food factory.
Opera works well and is a proper browser. IE at the time (about 2 years ago) was horribly limited in the mobile version, no css at all for instance. Opera on the other hand could handle regular websites as well or as bad as the full version on your pc.
Mouse gestures didn't exist but the ones I used were the big slightly laptop form nokia's vs pda MS phones. The widescreen of the nokia helped reading newssites wich is what I was supposed to be building for these phones.
Maybe IE has now improved but two years ago there was no competition.
It is nokia, they run symbian. Opera runs on practically everything. Shoot Xiph in the head and shoot the ones who moderated him in the stomach, they should suffer.
and stormtroopers had light sabers too. Now luke a girl, leia a girl. Han sure is a lucky boy:P or make him a girl too and go for the ultimate in movie history, 3 way lesbian love interest. Lucas would own every male on the planet.
Yahoo is not what it once used to be but it is still a pretty big internet company. Basically it means that in a public statement a company has said that Firefox is big enough to warrant special attention. For a long time IE was the only browser for most companies. If you used anything else then that was just your problem if they even admitted that you could use another browser.
Baby steps. Each company out there that realizes that windows/ie only doesn't make business sense makes the world a better place for freedom of choice.
Lots of people used to complain about banking problems with non-ie browsers. Yet I use the dutch Postbank as my bank and it works perfectly fine with opera on linux and firefox as well. It is slow progress but there is progress.
I can foresee a time when every serious website will simply run on every browser out there. For someone old enough to remember "this site best viewed with" messages or even links to microsoft.com that is a nice vision.
The hurd is vaporware that puts even Duke Nukem Forever to shame and BSD is dead you fanboys insist on whipping its rotting carcass.
Face it, despite apache and firefox/mozilla, linux IS THE face for open source. Richard M Stallman did a great thing with the gnu and it was used long before linus torvald started his work but it is Linux that gave it its growning glory.
So just swallow your pride, bow down to the penguin and get at the back of the parade. If your nice you may carry a small Hurd or BSD sign.
Just like Bill Gates true genious was in business not software Linus true genious is not in coding but in somehow making his project likable enough to get into the mainstream, something BSD has totally and utterly failed for how many decades now?
As others have already commented this has little to do with security.
Most linux systems are used as desktops, if you use them as a server you don't use the defaults. Now a user being able to crash his own system is nothing new. It ain't nice but as long as it is the user doing it then no problem. Now if this fork could be used to make apache explode and bring down the system THAT would be a boo boo.
Ideally yes the system should not do things that bring it coming crashing down but this is close to blaming a car for allowing me to plow into a wall. Not sure if I want a car/computer telling me what I can and cannot do.
As to how to set the limits on the number of forks. Maybe I got this completly wrong but could it be that this depends entirely on your hardware? Perhaps the latest IBM mainframe can handle a few more then an ancient 386? How the hell is the distro supposed to know what I got?
Security is other people doing stuff on my computer that I don't want and or know about. Me screwing stuff up is my business.
BSD is very solid, this is known. It is also known that BSD has been along long before linux and but has been sucking it exhaust fumes ever since it arrived. For every story about how much more secure BSD is there are a dozen stories about linux actually making a mark on the world. So good. Your BSD survived a forkbomb. But why exactly was the author running a linux desktop then if BSD is so much better?
Another non-story on/. Is the internet going to the way of tv?
Slashdot Mirror
If you just look at the highlighted words you first get the requirement "track position forklift warehouse" So he wants to know where the forklifts are in a warehouse. Okay. But WHY?
Second set of words is "where driver dropped product. Ah. I was wondering. Who gives a toss where the forklift is? Oh I worked in enough warehouses to know they are sometimes a pain to find if people don't return them or use them as a portable chair to take their break outside BUT it would be cheaper just to buy another one then set up a tracking system.
So we just got a case of a user making it not very clear what he wants. All of the answers so far have focused on trying to keep track of the forklift. Some intresting solutions and some stupid ones (measuring wheel spin on a forklift forgets that these things slip OFTEN).
However none of you have so far questioned why he wants to do this NOR wondered if this was indeed the real requirement.
More likely he wants to keep tracks of the goods. In practice goods are often misplaced in warehouses. If something is in the wrong rack it can be a pain to find it. Or worse you only notice it when the wrong thing is sent to the customer because items were mixed up.
IF this is the real problem, tracking goods, then all the given solutions are at best incomplete and at worst totally and utterly wrong to a degree that explains why so many it projects are overtime and overbudget.
But surely knowing the location of the forklift whill help tracking goods? Nope. Why? Because there is no way to track were an item was dropped by the forklift. Why not? What if the forklift operator drops of his pallet for a moment to shift another pallet out of his way? What if he takes the contents of a pallet off to put them on another pallet?
Basically this has to do with warehouse procedures that aren't followed or don't match the real situation. Ideally every storage place in a warehouse should have a unique identifier. Each storage place is catogorized as to what it can contain. Every item coming in FITS inside the storage place (not 1 item requiring two spaces OR 2 items going into the same space). At receiving the computer assigns an empty storage space. The forklift operator then takes the item to the required location and stores it. Ideally you want some kind of system to verify this BUT in real live all you need is good employees and good managers who allow each other to do their jobs.
If this system is followed then no goods will go missing. Problem is that this often doesn't happen. Neither does it seem to happen in the posters warehouse. If the forklift operators kept track off where they dropped items off OR dropped them off at the pre-assigned location then things wouldn't go missing.
Sadly he seems to go for a tech solution. Nice but it won't work unless he shifts his attention from the forklifts to the items. They are the ones missing in action.
For the most obvious failure and the sure sign that this p
This list is nice and all and while laughable to those with a clue it could work for an idiot. Except for two tiny little errors he makes.
The first is that his foolproof solution contains words. Multiple words some of them longer then one syllable. It even runs of the bottom of the page. Lets face it the average spyware attractor can barely read a newspaper headline without a rest.
Second is that his solution is no magic bullet. Those who attract spyware want a shiny sparkly button to click. Not think or have to remember things.
This list is ONLY of use to completly new computer users. Those who already been infected have already proven that they lack the mental skills to survive online. Only way to fix them is take away their internet OR just realize that techs worldwide are feeding their families by fixing those spyware infested computers.
As long as I can remember consumer organisations have warned against pyramid schemes. That hasn't gone away and people can loose real money with them. There will always be stupid people. Don't hate spyware. See it as a sign so that you know the person you are dealing with is slightly denser then your cat. Now if only we could convince stupid people they can get a something free by wearing a sign.
If the IT in the emergency section was really good enough it wouldn't be a 24/7/365 job anyway. The IT would just work, just like say bridge engineer isn't a 24/7/365 job. Why is IT engineering the only engineering where we don't prosecute for design failures?
Not that IT is useless to the people we really need. Communication equipment is pretty handy BUT these things have only become less reliable as they added more chips.
Nad, this guy has an inflated sense of the importance of IT. If you really want to see just how important IT is look at the kinda computer power involved in space vehicles. Not very much is it. Solid old school engineering and slide rulers put a man on the moon. Chemistry and sharp knifes saves lives (in the hands of a doctor). Computers? Handy for keeping the accounts to calculate the costs.
No review starts good when the reviewer gets a basic fact totally wrong. The cutscenes in Nexus are skippable. Even the talking during games to "advance" the story can be clicked away ending the speech and making it all happen a bit faster. So basically either the reviewer was to dumb to figure out how to skip cutscenes and break off conversations OR he is lying and never played the game. Don't believe me? Download the demo.
Now it must be said that the background story is incredibly dumb. Basically you just don't give a shit. It is all to generic. A bad captain Kirk as the captain, a sexy japanese computer, a spunky rebellious cloaky type girl, an obnoxious incompetent superiour, weak silly aliens. Jada jada jada. It is so mediocre and un-original it is unbelievable.
The missions briefings before the missions proper are indeed baffling. They seem more story devices then informing you of mission objectives. Wich can be troublesome as you then need to choice your weapon configuration. Would be nice if you learned you need to pack a squad of marines BEFORE you start the mission. Once inside the mission things however are pretty clear. So this is a negative point but lets face it, proper mission briefing has been missing in action in games for so long I am no longer bothered by it.
The combat. This is actually takes a while to get intresting as like every game they make the tutorial part of the game meaning the first few missions are wasted on teaching you the basics. I hate it as I can read and understand a manual and want my game to be challenging from the start but sadly most of the human race needs its hand hold.
Combat is simple enough. You got three kind of weapons, anti-shield, anti-hull and anti-system. You can't hit a hull when shields are up and anti-system damage is reduced with shields up. Simplest setup is to balance between shield busters and hull busters. Going anti-device is an option for the more tactical minded as knocking out say the anti-fighter defences gives you fighters/bombers free play and they can knock devices out even faster. Who cares about their hull and engines when they can't hit you? Knock out their anti-shield weapnons and as long as you don't power down yours their anti-hull weapons are useless.
Combat is okay but once you sussed it out it can be a bit simple. Even in big battles there is really only one strategy. Concentrate all your fire on the ship doing to most damage and then work your way down to the last vessel. It soon evolves into your ships circling one enemy vessel while blasting it to bits and you occasionally saving one of your vessel if it is taking to much damage. Basically it is nice until you figured it out.
Now the reviewer complains about ships not following order. This means that either he is dumb or simply didn't understand the interface. You can set your ships to various modes of behaviour and one of them they basically follow their own logic wich isn't bad but can be confusing if you are not expecting it. For instance if you have them on agressive then they will happily go after the ship you told them to but on the way they will fire at any ship that gets in their way. If you target a ship with shields up it will continue to fire its hull busters at a ship with down shields. If you want total control it is there. You just got to set the right mode. Another point of for this reviewer.
He then goes on to complain that it can take up to a full minute to take out a weapon system (with your anti-system weapons) and no less then three minutes to take out a ship completly. Read this part of his review carefully and then ask yourselve what on earth was this guy thinking when he picked up a strategy game? This is a strategy game of battleships. What does he want? Knock out your enemies weapons in 2-3 seconds? In the larger battles a minute to destroy a main armanent is nothing. This is not a scroll down shooter where you got hundreds of enemies. A dozen is a lot. Co
Respecting countries laws. Hmmm how do you want to do this on the net? Some religious countries are opposed to porn. Okay but the only way to respect that would be to either remove all porn wich would not be respectfull of goverments that are pro-porn. (Where are they and how do I become a citizen?). The only other way would be stop ALL porn from reaching those countries. Impossible.
Further more if a country really wants to control the net then it is simple. Control the communication channels and put filters in place that block anything that is not approved. North Korea is pretty a much a black spot on the globe with the world having no clue what is going on inside and presumably this is true in reverse.
So either he wants to limit the content of the internet to something every country with a vote can agree with, and they will take my porn over my cold dead body, OR change the technology to make filtering easier.
Either way this guy is from china. Not a refugee, an ex-minister of the regime that gave us Tianenmen-square. The US of course has done pretty much the same thing but the US has one big advantage as controller of the internet. It is hopelessly incompetent and all the intrested parties are having far to much fun fighting each other instead of actually doing something. The US is evil but is a kind of bumbling evil that always destroys itself before it even gets out of the door. Even purely internal censorship measures get shot down by its own system. The chance of the US succesfully censoring the Internet is as likely as the US winning a landwar against a small asian country.
If it is a choice between two evils I take US control of ICANN over countries like china having a veto on the UN anyday. For that matter the US having a veto.
The internet has flourished under its current inept management and general anarchie. This idiot claims it hasn't flourished. Spam he mentions as a problem. Well considering an awfull lot of spam comes from chinese computers let him tell his own goverment to fix that first.
Guess we just have to wait for them to clone the original cast.
Same with ads. I come from the netherlands and am so old that I remember when tv only had ads between programs and not even that on sundays and other christian holidays. Of course we only had 1 dutch channel, yes I am really really old, but german tv had only the occasional ad block in the afternoon (although it was bloody long) and belgian tv has maybe 1 ad per day. BBC of course has none.
But now we got commercial tv and the ads are in the program and last for far to long. It is so bad that with my memory I forget wich program I was watching. Meaning I zap to another channel and don't return OR as is happening more and more just don't watch tv but watch bittorrent instead.
I didn't mind the ads in the olden days. 1-2 minutes between programs. That was acceptable. But 5+ minutes every 15 minutes is to much.
Why should the tv channels care? Well because I went from watching a couple of ads to watching 0 ads.
Same really with the net. It took me quit a while to start with adblockers because the occasional ad I could live with. But they kept forcing more and more ads onto me until I reached breaking point and installed an adblocker. Now I don't see any ads. Including the one for this page. Though shit that slashdot loses income, my breaking point has been reached. Now even 1 ad getting to the adblocker has me instantly adding the url to the block list. To many ads means that I now don't want to see a single one.
This move by tivo seems the ultimate arrogance and ignorance by the ad pushers. The entire idea behind tivo is to skip ads and yet you are aiming your ads at these people? THEY DON'T WANT YOUR ADS. The only thing this can possibly achieve is that either people move away from tivo OR put an embargo on your product.
If ad pushers want to get people to watch their ads they should realize that they need to reduce the amount of ads we see. Companies wanting to advertise. 1 ad in a movie is watched. your 1 ad between 5 minutes of other ads is not watched. TV companies. 1 ad per movie might just fetch you a far higher price AND get more viewers then the other channels.
Then again we are talking about the tv industry. Brains are not exactly their strong point. Currently young males are no longer watching tv so much as before. Strangely this happened at the exact same time as reality tv became a staple diet of every channel. TV bosses reaction. MORE REALITY TV.
From that same logic it is not hard to see how the reaction people zapping away from ads is to show more ads or how you buy ad time on a device designed to skip ads. Maybe Heineken should sponsor AA meetings.
Piano Wire: Hitman.
Strangulation: Dark Forces 2. SWG. KOTOR.
Drowning: Silent Hunter.
Starvation: Ultima?
Food poisoning: Hitman.
So games are to blame for all the wrongs in the world.
Spock is also much older and McCoy is somewhere in between them. Chekov goes to the academy to follow in his heroes footsteps.
So timewise they could not meet up as trainees and to do so would upset the fans to much wich has been shown with enterprise is not a good thing.
So could it work?
Well yeah. But make a drastic twist in how the story is told. Don't make the "hero" the crew but make the "hero" the academy. So do not have a central cast but rather a central supporting cast of teachers or old students coming back for training around wich fresh new characters have their story in each episode.
This allows you to kill characters central to the story and never really know how it is going to end.
Also the fear of teen drama doesn't have to happen. Teens do not go to the academy. They are a few years older and young adults instead. Wesley was a freak and admitted early. Don't repeat that mistake and you won't have snotty anoying kids.
It could work but paramount would most likely ruin it.
However what this have to do with gaming? If you make this a 100% skill where men got it perfect and women don't have it at all then all it would mean is that women could not edit the skins for 3D objects that is so popular in modding. That after all requires you to "see" where the pixels on the flat skin are going to end up on the 3D model.
It has no relation with 3d gaming since no study has shown that women are less adapt at moving around in a 3D world (kinda like the one outside your eyes). No parking jokes please.
Also more women play now then in the days of 2D gaming.
So the difference is very real but it just doesn't relate to gaming. If you don't believe me take such a teste and then play a FPS game and try to find such a test in it. Only 3D tetris would be slightly harder for women. Running around Brothers in Arms would not.
I think you have never seen the size of and number of The Sims user made content or quake maps. Let alone complete mods wich basically give you a new game. It just doesn't fit.
Basic conclusion? Determine your size needs. This is based on A. How long do you listen it in one go. B. What is your tolerance for repeats. C. How often do you chance your songs. If you use it 4 hours per day, can't stand to hear the same song more then once in a week and never replace your songlist you are going to need more space then someone who likes to listen to the same album over and over again. HD's also can be damaged more easily by extreme rough use. Not by carrying them with you in your pocket while running but if you throw your stuff around the hd might not survive. For most people there will be no problems.
So don't be tempted by "extras". Extras are easy. Making a damned good solid mp3 player is not.
As for the whole wma nonsense. My hearing is pretty bad but on the whole
PC expansion typically sell for about half of the full price game so 20 bucks for an x-box expansion is pretty low considering the high prices for console game vs pc games (might be different for you but over here top console games are easily 10-20 euro's above the price of the same game for the pc).
As for user content. Consoles never had this so they don't know any better. The theorie is that console owner in turn get games that just work from launch and do not have to be patched first.
Just because halo is available on pc and x-box does not suddenly mean the x-box stops following console rules.
So this is not the end of free content. PC owners of halo can still make maps and distribute them if they want to take the time and effort. As long as PC gaming does not die out (considering that THE console company sony has several big MMO PC only games I think we don't have to worry to much) then user created content will continue to be available. Just not to console owners.
Subject says it all really. Never listen to the advice of people 6 feet under.
Will it last? Who knows. Sad fact is that lineage 1-2 has so far been the only one who could measure its audience in the millions. None of the big western ones have passed a million before. I know only 1 person who plays it and he already seems to be getting bored with it. Also the promised but delayed content seems an all to well known mantra from other hyped but ultimately disappointing games.
A lot of people who never wanted to touch an MMO game before are playing WoW but is this going to last? Every month the bill will be coming in and when most players are already at the top level what else are they going to do?
Can someone answer me this? Is it possible to play without having a credit card? Sony has global collect for us europeans wich works very well but all other MMO games I looked at seem convinced the entire world has credit cards.
Oh lets admit it, windows registry is an even greater mess. At least /etc support bloody goddamn fucking comments. Something MS apparently thought nobody would ever need.
But what about all those different file formats. Mmmm well yes true enough. They are really not all that different though. Most of them have 1 pure text file seperated into sections for easier reading and each entry is something like "setting = value" contruction. The better config files have lots of comments to indicate possible values and what they mean. Very easy for humans to use. I generally find editing a config file to be a breeze.
The problem is between updates. I get the idea that the poster is using a gentoo and gentoo has a thing for updates. Gentoo updates a lot and for some reason config files change a lot. Not a problem with config files you never touch youreselve just accept the updated one but with things like /etc/fstab samba or apache configs it becomes more complex.
For a long time gentoo insisted on constantly changing /etc/fstab despite the fact that the format never changed, no new options were ever added and all the settings are purely individual. Thank god they changed this but they still insist on giving me a new config file for each time samba or apache gets installed. Now some of the changes are security related and important but an awfull lot seem to be pure preference by whoever this time did the config file. Finding out the differences ain't easy. Often they are purely syntax differences anyway. Diff is a nice tool but can't understand human reasons for why lines might be in a different order.
So merging new configs and your existing config is indeed a mess. A better way to do this would indeed be usefull.
This however HAS ABSOLUTLY NOTHING TO DO WITH /ETC. The exact same problem occurs on windows with its registry. You see the simple problem is this. Say I got a config entry that says, foo=bar. Now during an bugfix it becomes clear that for 99% of users this should be foo=bar2 instead. How do you change this? Just overwrite what is there? No because for mee foo=bar might be what I need and I don't want an upgrade to change my settings. Ignore? But then I am never alerted to the fact I am using outdated settings. Alert me? Well nobody seems to do that.
Ideally during an upgrade the installer would go through the existing settings and analyze them for correctness and alert the user to changes.
It is not a gentoo specific problem either. If you install apache by hand it just leaves the old config untouched. Windows throws a dice during boot to see what it does with your settings. Games just overwrite if they feel like it.
Don't mistake messy dir structure with lousy upgrading of configuration settings.
If you want to change /etc you are going to have to convince vi or even ed users like me. xml ain't gonna do it. We use vi because emacs takes to many keypresses to start. We are not going to type the variable name twice. No way. Try again.
/etc is a mess wich could first be slightly cleaned by moving every config file into a subdir with the same name as the app. This would at least reduce the number of entries and avoid problems with designers naming essential config files something else then app.cfg. Yes I am talking to you mplayer.
Opera works well and is a proper browser. IE at the time (about 2 years ago) was horribly limited in the mobile version, no css at all for instance. Opera on the other hand could handle regular websites as well or as bad as the full version on your pc.
Mouse gestures didn't exist but the ones I used were the big slightly laptop form nokia's vs pda MS phones. The widescreen of the nokia helped reading newssites wich is what I was supposed to be building for these phones.
Maybe IE has now improved but two years ago there was no competition.
It is nokia, they run symbian. Opera runs on practically everything. Shoot Xiph in the head and shoot the ones who moderated him in the stomach, they should suffer.
and stormtroopers had light sabers too. Now luke a girl, leia a girl. Han sure is a lucky boy :P or make him a girl too and go for the ultimate in movie history, 3 way lesbian love interest. Lucas would own every male on the planet.
Baby steps. Each company out there that realizes that windows/ie only doesn't make business sense makes the world a better place for freedom of choice.
Lots of people used to complain about banking problems with non-ie browsers. Yet I use the dutch Postbank as my bank and it works perfectly fine with opera on linux and firefox as well. It is slow progress but there is progress.
I can foresee a time when every serious website will simply run on every browser out there. For someone old enough to remember "this site best viewed with" messages or even links to microsoft.com that is a nice vision.
Just browse games.slashdot.org with opera. THE HORROR! A good browser but yikes what a horrible color rendering.
Face it, despite apache and firefox/mozilla, linux IS THE face for open source. Richard M Stallman did a great thing with the gnu and it was used long before linus torvald started his work but it is Linux that gave it its growning glory.
So just swallow your pride, bow down to the penguin and get at the back of the parade. If your nice you may carry a small Hurd or BSD sign.
Just like Bill Gates true genious was in business not software Linus true genious is not in coding but in somehow making his project likable enough to get into the mainstream, something BSD has totally and utterly failed for how many decades now?
Most linux systems are used as desktops, if you use them as a server you don't use the defaults. Now a user being able to crash his own system is nothing new. It ain't nice but as long as it is the user doing it then no problem. Now if this fork could be used to make apache explode and bring down the system THAT would be a boo boo.
Ideally yes the system should not do things that bring it coming crashing down but this is close to blaming a car for allowing me to plow into a wall. Not sure if I want a car/computer telling me what I can and cannot do.
As to how to set the limits on the number of forks. Maybe I got this completly wrong but could it be that this depends entirely on your hardware? Perhaps the latest IBM mainframe can handle a few more then an ancient 386? How the hell is the distro supposed to know what I got?
Security is other people doing stuff on my computer that I don't want and or know about. Me screwing stuff up is my business.
BSD is very solid, this is known. It is also known that BSD has been along long before linux and but has been sucking it exhaust fumes ever since it arrived. For every story about how much more secure BSD is there are a dozen stories about linux actually making a mark on the world. So good. Your BSD survived a forkbomb. But why exactly was the author running a linux desktop then if BSD is so much better?
Another non-story on /. Is the internet going to the way of tv?
This is true for most real world objects. Only software is radically different.
You can also hack your own fridge all you want without dmca style rules coming into play.
So his anology works for a skilled craftsman anyway.