I would like to know why computers fail to get the point that I don't have a floppy drive connected. Even if I disable the controller in BIOS, the A: drive always shows up in windows, and Linux still seems to insist that/dev/floppy exists. If you every click on A: in My Computer, the computer tends to freeze up for a couple seconds trying to figure out where the missing piece of hardware is.
Speaking of overheating laptops, I had a roommate in university who could only play certain games on his laptop if he left the CD drive open. Otherwise the computer would lock up. As far as we could figure, opening the CD drive would allow just a little extra air to flow, and keep it cool enough so it didn't lock up. Thank god for NoCD crackz.
Isn't it always in the taxpayers best interest to make things cheaper down the road. I hate these politicians who come in and say they are going to lower taxes without having any plan on how to do so, and without doing thorough review of the budget. Often the only way to cut the taxes is by cutting services, and the citizens suffer. I seriously wish our politicians would invest in some technologies that would make things cheaper in the long run, instead of trying to make themselves look good by taking the cheapest route for their term in office.
Not sure how it works...
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Not sure how it works, but I've saved 2 or 3 hard drives that reported tons of bad sectors with cat/dev/urandom >/dev/hdb and then cat/dev/zero >/dev/hdb and repeating that a couple times. Seems to alleviate all the problems. The drives wouldn't format, and all the data would get corrupted, but after doing that trick, they haven't had a problem (with the longest running drive being 2 years after the fix and still going).
Yes, although the new top of the line chips from intel seem to be outperforming AMD, the older cheaper processors from AMD seem to be much faster than Intel. I see Dell being able to offer a lot better low end machines by using AMD. I have a 3200+ at home, and it's blazing fast. I don't think i'll need it any faster for at least another 3 years.
I found the targeting ability in Wind Waker made it way to easy to kill even the boss characters. The fact that you could easily strafe around a kill them without being hit most of the time made it a little too easy. It only got hard when there was more than 3 knights attacking you, which wasn't very many points in the game, and you could often lure they away from the group one at a time, and easily do away with them. I found that the enemies had above average AI (as far as most games go), which made them a little harder, however, the entire game was still too easy.
Well, I do web development, and I find it quite interesting. However, each project usually consists of and extra 20% time spent tweaking it to make it look right. I'm not really sure if it's wasted time. Most of the time I use style sheets and other good programming practices, so that using a darker shade of blue doesn't require all that much work. There are plenty of boring web development jobs using.Net where you drag a bunch of controls on a page, do a minimal amount of programming, and that's it. However, if you're really interested in web development, and are good at programming, there's lots of other complicated stuff that you can do, and it can be very interesting.
The problem with encrypting removable media is a little bit shakey. I'm assuming you want the to encrypt it so they can bring the information home with them. If they aren't bringing it home, you're probably better leaving the data on the computer/network to keep it more secure. However, once they bring it home, and type in the decryption key, any spyware on their home computer is free to read the data just as the user would be free to read the data. Smart spyware would probably actively look for encrypted partitions (although I don't know of any that does), because it's more likely that there is confidential and important information there. Encrypting the media will give you lots of protection if the data happens to go lost, but won't protect you once the user plugs it into a foriegn computer and types the password. You also need the software on every computer, so if you're bringing a presentation on an encrypted drive to a client's office, they need to have the software to read it. Also, remants of the files can be left on the computer in the swap partition, which can be read later if the swap partition isn't encrypted, which is the case with most windows, as well as Linux setups (althought it's quite easy to encrypt your Linux swap partition)
On a side note, I don't think you have to worry too much about the users encrypting their hard drive if you use truecrypt, because as far as i'm aware, you have to unmount and format the volume in order to encrypt it. I don't think that regular users have that privilege, and I'm not even sure if it's possible with admin privileges, if they only have 1 partition. You can't unmount C: when you only have C:. Same reason why Format C: will not work at the command prompt.
It really depends on what you are patenting. The quick sort algorith is still useful today, even though it was developed in 1960. Had it been patented, the patent would have already expired, and we'd still find it quite useful. Also, the amount of time is the cost in developing a software algorithm. Some algorithms take 30 seconds to produce, others take years of research. It all comes down to what is worthy of a patent. Something that you could have come up with in 30 seconds should not be patentable. However, why not an algorithm that took you a year to develop? Why not be able to patent an algorithm that does something in one tenth the time. You shouldn't be able to patent sorting in general, but if you found a way to sort in log(n) time, I would certainly think that was worth a patent.
However, how is this different than say, designing a game console (the hardware aspect). Every time you make a design decision, you have to worry about whether or not that idea has been pateneted. You want to put a rumble feature in your conotroller, sorry, that's patented. The entire process of a controller isn't being patented, but rather some small little feature of the controller. Just look at any physical item you own. There's often > 10 patents on any 1 simple devices. In software you still wouldn't be a able to patent obvious things, such as a loop that adds an array of numbers, but stuff that's truly inventive may be something that is patentable. If you can solve the problem of cutting out all the crap, and really only patent truly inventive ideas, the software patent idea doesn't seem all that bad. However, I'm against software patents, because it seems as though the patent office has done a really bad job of weeding out the non-obvious stuff, or anything else that isn't really patent worthy.
Here's the question though. Why shouldn't someone be able to patent quicksort? I'm not really for software patents myself, as a lot of them fail the obviousness test. However, I don't think that quicksort is really that obvious, that It's actually a very useful invention. However it is just a mathematical formula when you get down to it, and we all know that formulas aren't patentable. I don't really agree with software patents, but in a lot of ways, they aren't really that much different than patents in any other field. If you cut out all the crap, you'd probably have a pretty good bunch of patents. I've yet to find a good logical paper that contrasts the pros and cons of software patents, and presents a good reason on why or not they should exist. Most of the stuff I read is severely one sided, or just yells of "No software patents" without any explanation or logic to back them up.
Seriously though. He's complaining about the cost of google adwords, and he's leaving out the cheapest form of advertising available, Slashvertisement. I think that a lot of people think Google Adwords are way more important than they are. I may have in my 10 years on the internet clicked on 20 ads. And 99.9% of the time I don't even read them. I imagine that most people are the same. He'd get much better value for his time/money if he just linked to his program in his sig, and posted a bunch of stuff on slashdot.
However, researchers for academic institutions don't usually make peanuts either. They may make less than the would if they worked in private sector, but they still get paid pretty decently. Also, they get quite a few perks beyond doing what they are interested in. The also get a lot of holidays and get to go on sabbatical every once in a while. They can also get some pretty interesting research grants. I know a psych prof at my alma mater who got a grant to sail around the world so he could study the mindset of a middle aged man who is sailing around the world.
Let's take another situation then. You are in the desert. There are no cacti or other plant life in sight. You know that you are a couple days trek to civilization. You have already been a couple days without food, and you know that you will not have the energy to continue on if you do not eat something. You see a lizard walk by. Do you eat it? If you don't eat it, you will surely die. If you do eat it, you will be able to make it to civilization, and live the rest of your life. I'll give you a hint on the answer, the lizard would eat you if he could.
Which brings my biggest problem with veganism/vegetarianism. Other animals eats animals all the time. Why is it wrong for people (who are just really smart animals) to eat other animals. It's not like it's even because we are so superior that it's cruel that we would kill them because it's just too easy. It's also easy for a whale to eat a fish, but they still do.
The university book store is a business just like any other. Their only interest is in making money. Most of the time it isn't run by the school, or the student union, but rather by some company who has been given an exclusive contract to sell books on campus. Where I went to school the student union had opened their own book store, because students were tired of high priced books, and no competition. However, the books were usually only 1 or 2 dollars cheaper, and they didn't carry all the books. This may be something you want to have your student union pushing to inform the students.
How about, when people upload files, don't store them in a folder accessible to the outside world, which means they can't be run. It makes more sense to store them somewhere else, so that even if they upload a.php file, they can't call it. Also, when sending the files back downstream, ensure that it isn't in a way that will execute anything on the client side.
$99 isn't that much for most college students. Seeing what most of them spend on beer, I think that most students who were really interested in actually designing a game would be able to afford it. It's the same cost as a single text book. When I was in college, there were many people who probably couldn't afford that, but there was also a lot of people who could have. I don't know which college you attended, but students of plenty of free time, and $99 a year doesn't break the bank for most of them. Maybe it's different over here in Canada, but I've seen many students spend way more than $99 on stuff that was way more worthless than an XBox 360 Dev Kit.
I got my first crack at programming by editing gorilla.bas and nibbles.bas. This was great fun, giving yourself 30 lives in nibbles, or giving yourself only 1 in order to make it harder. You could also make the explosions really big in gorillas. After that I picked up some programming books from the library, which had code listings you could type in. I distinctly remember oregon trail. I'm not sure if I ever got it working correctly, but it was great fun trying to get it work. I also learned a lot about the memory system of DOS, as well as how to configure it so that you could run games that required very close to how much memory you actually had. You're right. I don't think I would have ever been as into computers as I was had it not been for games. I would have never spent hours tweaking my config.sys and autoexec.bat just to do a spreadsheet.
Well, the good news, is that the Nintendo Wii Dev Kit will cost somewhere around $1700. That's not too bad a price, considering the PS3 kit is rumoured to cost between $30,000 and $50,000. I'm not sure how much the full dev kit on the XBox 360 goes for. I think this could open up a lot of possiblities for the Wii. You get the full dev kit for under $2000. Not some rinky dink homebrew version, the whole thing. At this price, there could be WiiNux before we know it. And it would probably sell if it offered good multimedia functionality to the Wii, such as playing downloaded movies, and Linux games. Although I don't think Nintendo would let that fly, as people would just install an emulator, and play the Old NES games for free instead of paying for them.
I am quite aware that there are many good concerts in the $5 to $20 range. Actually, my own philosophy is never to pay over $25 for a concert ticket. Sometimes I'll go as high as $30 if it's a band I really want to see. I saw a lot of the current big name bands before they were big, and often for around $10. I live in Ottawa, so a lot of the up and coming Canadian bands play cheap shows here. I always chuckle a little when they come back 5 years later playing at the local NHL arena, and charge $80 a ticket. I wouldn't pay that much to see anyone, I don't know why anyone else does either. I don't know who these people think they are, but that's quite a lot for what usually ends up being a less than 2 hour show.
I used to have an old Radio Shack Electronic Chess Board and it used to beat me pretty easily. I've never really considered myself a good chess player, but there's probably some pretty old computers that can beat most people. I remember setting that thing to the highest level. It would take about 2 minutes to make each move.
That's easy, all you have to do is run your program on a computer that users 32-bit bytes. That way you can fit more bits in your bytes, and automatically beat the record by 4 times.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to know why computers fail to get the point that I don't have a floppy drive connected. Even if I disable the controller in BIOS, the A: drive always shows up in windows, and Linux still seems to insist that /dev/floppy exists. If you every click on A: in My Computer, the computer tends to freeze up for a couple seconds trying to figure out where the missing piece of hardware is.
Speaking of overheating laptops, I had a roommate in university who could only play certain games on his laptop if he left the CD drive open. Otherwise the computer would lock up. As far as we could figure, opening the CD drive would allow just a little extra air to flow, and keep it cool enough so it didn't lock up. Thank god for NoCD crackz.
Isn't it always in the taxpayers best interest to make things cheaper down the road. I hate these politicians who come in and say they are going to lower taxes without having any plan on how to do so, and without doing thorough review of the budget. Often the only way to cut the taxes is by cutting services, and the citizens suffer. I seriously wish our politicians would invest in some technologies that would make things cheaper in the long run, instead of trying to make themselves look good by taking the cheapest route for their term in office.
Not sure how it works, but I've saved 2 or 3 hard drives that reported tons of bad sectors with cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hdb and then cat /dev/zero > /dev/hdb and repeating that a couple times. Seems to alleviate all the problems. The drives wouldn't format, and all the data would get corrupted, but after doing that trick, they haven't had a problem (with the longest running drive being 2 years after the fix and still going).
Yes, although the new top of the line chips from intel seem to be outperforming AMD, the older cheaper processors from AMD seem to be much faster than Intel. I see Dell being able to offer a lot better low end machines by using AMD. I have a 3200+ at home, and it's blazing fast. I don't think i'll need it any faster for at least another 3 years.
Maybe they could get Billy Corgan to do some commercials. Oh wait, his band was called Zwan. Well, close enough.
I found the targeting ability in Wind Waker made it way to easy to kill even the boss characters. The fact that you could easily strafe around a kill them without being hit most of the time made it a little too easy. It only got hard when there was more than 3 knights attacking you, which wasn't very many points in the game, and you could often lure they away from the group one at a time, and easily do away with them. I found that the enemies had above average AI (as far as most games go), which made them a little harder, however, the entire game was still too easy.
Well, I do web development, and I find it quite interesting. However, each project usually consists of and extra 20% time spent tweaking it to make it look right. I'm not really sure if it's wasted time. Most of the time I use style sheets and other good programming practices, so that using a darker shade of blue doesn't require all that much work. There are plenty of boring web development jobs using .Net where you drag a bunch of controls on a page, do a minimal amount of programming, and that's it. However, if you're really interested in web development, and are good at programming, there's lots of other complicated stuff that you can do, and it can be very interesting.
The problem with encrypting removable media is a little bit shakey. I'm assuming you want the to encrypt it so they can bring the information home with them. If they aren't bringing it home, you're probably better leaving the data on the computer/network to keep it more secure. However, once they bring it home, and type in the decryption key, any spyware on their home computer is free to read the data just as the user would be free to read the data. Smart spyware would probably actively look for encrypted partitions (although I don't know of any that does), because it's more likely that there is confidential and important information there. Encrypting the media will give you lots of protection if the data happens to go lost, but won't protect you once the user plugs it into a foriegn computer and types the password. You also need the software on every computer, so if you're bringing a presentation on an encrypted drive to a client's office, they need to have the software to read it. Also, remants of the files can be left on the computer in the swap partition, which can be read later if the swap partition isn't encrypted, which is the case with most windows, as well as Linux setups (althought it's quite easy to encrypt your Linux swap partition)
On a side note, I don't think you have to worry too much about the users encrypting their hard drive if you use truecrypt, because as far as i'm aware, you have to unmount and format the volume in order to encrypt it. I don't think that regular users have that privilege, and I'm not even sure if it's possible with admin privileges, if they only have 1 partition. You can't unmount C: when you only have C:. Same reason why Format C: will not work at the command prompt.
It really depends on what you are patenting. The quick sort algorith is still useful today, even though it was developed in 1960. Had it been patented, the patent would have already expired, and we'd still find it quite useful. Also, the amount of time is the cost in developing a software algorithm. Some algorithms take 30 seconds to produce, others take years of research. It all comes down to what is worthy of a patent. Something that you could have come up with in 30 seconds should not be patentable. However, why not an algorithm that took you a year to develop? Why not be able to patent an algorithm that does something in one tenth the time. You shouldn't be able to patent sorting in general, but if you found a way to sort in log(n) time, I would certainly think that was worth a patent.
However, how is this different than say, designing a game console (the hardware aspect). Every time you make a design decision, you have to worry about whether or not that idea has been pateneted. You want to put a rumble feature in your conotroller, sorry, that's patented. The entire process of a controller isn't being patented, but rather some small little feature of the controller. Just look at any physical item you own. There's often > 10 patents on any 1 simple devices. In software you still wouldn't be a able to patent obvious things, such as a loop that adds an array of numbers, but stuff that's truly inventive may be something that is patentable. If you can solve the problem of cutting out all the crap, and really only patent truly inventive ideas, the software patent idea doesn't seem all that bad. However, I'm against software patents, because it seems as though the patent office has done a really bad job of weeding out the non-obvious stuff, or anything else that isn't really patent worthy.
Here's the question though. Why shouldn't someone be able to patent quicksort? I'm not really for software patents myself, as a lot of them fail the obviousness test. However, I don't think that quicksort is really that obvious, that It's actually a very useful invention. However it is just a mathematical formula when you get down to it, and we all know that formulas aren't patentable. I don't really agree with software patents, but in a lot of ways, they aren't really that much different than patents in any other field. If you cut out all the crap, you'd probably have a pretty good bunch of patents. I've yet to find a good logical paper that contrasts the pros and cons of software patents, and presents a good reason on why or not they should exist. Most of the stuff I read is severely one sided, or just yells of "No software patents" without any explanation or logic to back them up.
Seriously though. He's complaining about the cost of google adwords, and he's leaving out the cheapest form of advertising available, Slashvertisement. I think that a lot of people think Google Adwords are way more important than they are. I may have in my 10 years on the internet clicked on 20 ads. And 99.9% of the time I don't even read them. I imagine that most people are the same. He'd get much better value for his time/money if he just linked to his program in his sig, and posted a bunch of stuff on slashdot.
That site is such a google rip off that it's not even funny.
However, researchers for academic institutions don't usually make peanuts either. They may make less than the would if they worked in private sector, but they still get paid pretty decently. Also, they get quite a few perks beyond doing what they are interested in. The also get a lot of holidays and get to go on sabbatical every once in a while. They can also get some pretty interesting research grants. I know a psych prof at my alma mater who got a grant to sail around the world so he could study the mindset of a middle aged man who is sailing around the world.
Let's take another situation then. You are in the desert. There are no cacti or other plant life in sight. You know that you are a couple days trek to civilization. You have already been a couple days without food, and you know that you will not have the energy to continue on if you do not eat something. You see a lizard walk by. Do you eat it? If you don't eat it, you will surely die. If you do eat it, you will be able to make it to civilization, and live the rest of your life. I'll give you a hint on the answer, the lizard would eat you if he could.
Which brings my biggest problem with veganism/vegetarianism. Other animals eats animals all the time. Why is it wrong for people (who are just really smart animals) to eat other animals. It's not like it's even because we are so superior that it's cruel that we would kill them because it's just too easy. It's also easy for a whale to eat a fish, but they still do.
The university book store is a business just like any other. Their only interest is in making money. Most of the time it isn't run by the school, or the student union, but rather by some company who has been given an exclusive contract to sell books on campus. Where I went to school the student union had opened their own book store, because students were tired of high priced books, and no competition. However, the books were usually only 1 or 2 dollars cheaper, and they didn't carry all the books. This may be something you want to have your student union pushing to inform the students.
The Wii doens't need a price drop, as it will be priced well below the XBox 360 and the PS3.
How about, when people upload files, don't store them in a folder accessible to the outside world, which means they can't be run. It makes more sense to store them somewhere else, so that even if they upload a .php file, they can't call it. Also, when sending the files back downstream, ensure that it isn't in a way that will execute anything on the client side.
$99 isn't that much for most college students. Seeing what most of them spend on beer, I think that most students who were really interested in actually designing a game would be able to afford it. It's the same cost as a single text book. When I was in college, there were many people who probably couldn't afford that, but there was also a lot of people who could have. I don't know which college you attended, but students of plenty of free time, and $99 a year doesn't break the bank for most of them. Maybe it's different over here in Canada, but I've seen many students spend way more than $99 on stuff that was way more worthless than an XBox 360 Dev Kit.
I got my first crack at programming by editing gorilla.bas and nibbles.bas. This was great fun, giving yourself 30 lives in nibbles, or giving yourself only 1 in order to make it harder. You could also make the explosions really big in gorillas. After that I picked up some programming books from the library, which had code listings you could type in. I distinctly remember oregon trail. I'm not sure if I ever got it working correctly, but it was great fun trying to get it work. I also learned a lot about the memory system of DOS, as well as how to configure it so that you could run games that required very close to how much memory you actually had. You're right. I don't think I would have ever been as into computers as I was had it not been for games. I would have never spent hours tweaking my config.sys and autoexec.bat just to do a spreadsheet.
Well, the good news, is that the Nintendo Wii Dev Kit will cost somewhere around $1700. That's not too bad a price, considering the PS3 kit is rumoured to cost between $30,000 and $50,000. I'm not sure how much the full dev kit on the XBox 360 goes for. I think this could open up a lot of possiblities for the Wii. You get the full dev kit for under $2000. Not some rinky dink homebrew version, the whole thing. At this price, there could be WiiNux before we know it. And it would probably sell if it offered good multimedia functionality to the Wii, such as playing downloaded movies, and Linux games. Although I don't think Nintendo would let that fly, as people would just install an emulator, and play the Old NES games for free instead of paying for them.
I am quite aware that there are many good concerts in the $5 to $20 range. Actually, my own philosophy is never to pay over $25 for a concert ticket. Sometimes I'll go as high as $30 if it's a band I really want to see. I saw a lot of the current big name bands before they were big, and often for around $10. I live in Ottawa, so a lot of the up and coming Canadian bands play cheap shows here. I always chuckle a little when they come back 5 years later playing at the local NHL arena, and charge $80 a ticket. I wouldn't pay that much to see anyone, I don't know why anyone else does either. I don't know who these people think they are, but that's quite a lot for what usually ends up being a less than 2 hour show.
I used to have an old Radio Shack Electronic Chess Board and it used to beat me pretty easily. I've never really considered myself a good chess player, but there's probably some pretty old computers that can beat most people. I remember setting that thing to the highest level. It would take about 2 minutes to make each move.
That's easy, all you have to do is run your program on a computer that users 32-bit bytes. That way you can fit more bits in your bytes, and automatically beat the record by 4 times.