No point to going online
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The only person I know who plays the Sims is my mother. I remember mentioning Sims Online to her, and she didnt get the point. She didnt see why she needed to 'compete' against other people to see whos the best person. She kills her sims probably a half hour after bringing them to life, she just enjoys watching them run around and make toast and whatnot. She does ICQ and chats online with people who play scrabble and other mom-type stuff. She just doesnt get the point of Sims Online.
My point is, this game is popular because it's merely a good old distraction. It's completely uncompetitive and not really goal-oriented, at least to most who play it. You just screw around and watch the people do stuff. It just doesnt fit into the MMORPG genre.
Add that to the fact that it just comes off like another in the long line of Sims cash grabs (they have a whole new game/expansion pack bi-weekly it seems). After plunking down $50 on "The Sims get New Pants(tm)" people get wary. The dead horse has been beaten beyond recognition.
Plus it's just a boring game to most traditional 'gamers' in the first place.
The linked article mentions that they could concievably get another shuttle up in as quick as a week, if they skipped all of the redundant pre-flight safety checks.
I'm absolutely certain that if they had reason to believe this was necessary, they would have done so.
There are a lot of people pointing fingers and going "I told you so". The public loves to snap that type of crap up. The truth is, it's all theories.
Most of these stories will come from engineers who work for a company that lost the government contract. Like the guy in your story; "Newman, president of Laser Technologies Inc."
There are no 'standards' in space flight, and virtually everything is unknown. The Shuttle is very much an experimental craft. Stuff like this is going to happen.
Only problem is that it isnt feasible, and its just some sci-fi tecnical sounding bullshit that michael felt he needed to inject, having nothing insightful to add to the posters story.
"The foam is fragile enough to have been damaged once in a hailstorm, forcing a previous shuttle mission to be delayed while the insulation was repaired. Chunks have come off in flight before, too. They can be ice-coated, making them heavy projectiles. Columbia sustained damage in this way in 1992 and 1997, and foam struck a booster rocket of Atlantis in October."
RTFA
I live in the D.C. area, know many who work for NASA, and was actully at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD last week doing a dog and pony show of our RMS system to their security chiefs and some of the bigwigs. I've met the people involved, higher ups and lower-downs. They dont let 7 people die to 'save face' on TV.
Why dont you keep your stupid gub'ment conspiracy theories to yourself?
Big chunks of ice fall off that big gas tank every time it goes up (it's filled with liquid hydrogen, IIRC). There was no more damage to the shuttle than occurs on any given launch.
They did inspect it, and if you were paying attention to the mission BEFORE it became a tragedy-cum-media-feeding-frenzy, you would have known that they assessed that there was no issue with safety.
But you have to be able to program. The course I referred to familiarizes you with all the menu options in the IDE, and teaches shit about actually writing code that works.
I shouldnt have to explain to the 'programmers' I work with what a search tree is.
>> It's quite an insightful article, recognising that the vast majority of computer users just want a system that works and don't care about issues of open- or closed-source and don't even want to know about dependencies
This is true, but the average user also wants what everyone else is using.
If Joe User can't figure out how to do something, he wants to be able to call up one of his buddies who knows and ask him how to do it. He doesn't want to deal with "I dunno, Joe. I never used Linux. Sorry"
If his buddies have Macs, he'll be inclined to get a Mac. More often than not, his buddies have Windows, so thats what he wants too. His buddies dont have to be computer geeks, just someone whos used $APPLICATION before and can give him a hand.
Chances are good if he knows someone who runs linux, they are of the 'technical elitest' movement, and wont help. They'll stick their noses in the air and say "you should run Windows or get a Mac, Linux is too complicated for you".
There's an air among many of the 'in-the-know' computer geeks that they wont share information. Even Free with a capital F information, when it comes to linux. Whether its a feeling of power they get by knowing more about something than someone else, or whether they cant be bothered, or it's just a lack of social skills, it doesnt matter. They like to call themselves Gurus as if they have some mystical power and you should beg them to use it for your benefit.
It's not every linux user who behaves like this, but a large enough portion of them that it will continue to slow it's growth on the desktop.
If you want to help linux get accepted, help the users who need it.
Eg, a friend of mine has an old Compaq that he only uses to print invoices and work orders for his small business.
After about 12 times reinstalling his printer for him after Win95 kept mysteriously 'losing' the drivers, he asked if maybe he should upgrade to WinXP. I convinced him that he could do the same thing for free with Linux, and helped him get it all set up. He was wary of all the free software, because there'd be no tech support line to call. I asked him "did 1-900-tech support get your printer running for you?"
He hasn't had any problems yet, but if he did, he'd call me up, I'd come over and we'd have a couple of beers and straighten it out.
(and it's quid-pro-quo, when my furnace died on me, he came over and helped me get it firing again)
Anyhow. If you want linux on peoples desktops, put it there. And don't be an elitist shithead if they need help.
IIRC, Crays are submerged in a coolant (some kind of mineral oil) which is pumped through a rad.
I also wondered about cooling the intake air, basically running water (outside the case) through a block attached to a peltier, which cools the water. Then it goes through the radiator, which is behind the intake fan. The air coming into the case is cooled a few degrees below ambient, and thus your case and CPU get a few degrees for that overclock.
I've also wondered how much humidity affects air cooling. Water holds much more heat than 'air', and such 'moist' air holds much more heat than 'dry' air. My scheme above would likely behave as a dehumidifier of sorts, so maybe it would hurt more than help?
All the same, I dont have the disposable cash to ghetto up my P4 rig with some goony experiment. Until then some quality low-noise fans, coupled with my Antec TruePower quiet PSU (with its variable fan-speed plugs) do the job.
I know I have. I think eventually we'll see some commercially available sealed systems that use some liquid (probably not water because of its corrosive properties) and convection to move it around.
Something idiot proof and self contained with no mechanical parts, save perhaps a slower turning large fan to exhaust air.
So far existing heat pipes are not much more than a novelty. The wick style ones with alcohol as a fluid (mentioned here awhile back) look promising.
The giant skivved aluminum/copper blocks with the big ass fans aren't going to cut it, not just because of noise, but practicality.
An MCP is what you get for completing any one of the courses. The MCPs whose resume's end up on my desk (and generally straight into the trashcan) have completed Visual Basic for Desktop Applications, and consider themselves 'Professional Developers'.
Now all the wagon jumping paper tigers that swamped the IT world can move to Linux.
A large part of the state of job opportunities in the tech sector are the 5000 absolutely unqualified applicants for every job.
Pointy haired bosses don't know a good coder from a hole in the ground, so they hire the janitor-cum-MCP with the $20,000 salary expectation.
There are a few places left that look for someone who can do the job, and do it well, and don't give a hoot about alphabet soup and buzzwords in the resume.. I'm fortunate enough to have found one of them.
I should probably get back to work, I've wasted too much time here today.
ClearChannel Take Note!! IDEA of the CENTURY!
on
Digital Celebrities
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· Score: 0, Troll
I recall someone trying to explain that to me in grade school once, but his head was submerged in the toilet bowl at the time, and I was busy counting his lunch money.
It's pretty funny (in a Nick Burns sort of way) that he planned to boot his PC up from a CD that had two.iso files on it.
Heck, it took me about 10 seconds to explain to my non-technical grandfather the difference between writing files to a CD and a writing a file that contains a CD image to a CD.
His bin/cue 'info' is all wrong too.. Nero doesn't need a cue file like he claims. They aren't BIN either, the files are ISO. You just go to burn disk image, choose 'show all files', pick your ISO and let it rip..
I think the fact that he tried to burn two 650 meg ISO files on the same CD shows his level of technical savvy. I didnt even bother to read on. It would be like listening to a mentally challenged 3rd grader explain Shakespeare.
Slashdot Mirror
The only person I know who plays the Sims is my mother. I remember mentioning Sims Online to her, and she didnt get the point. She didnt see why she needed to 'compete' against other people to see whos the best person. She kills her sims probably a half hour after bringing them to life, she just enjoys watching them run around and make toast and whatnot. She does ICQ and chats online with people who play scrabble and other mom-type stuff. She just doesnt get the point of Sims Online.
My point is, this game is popular because it's merely a good old distraction. It's completely uncompetitive and not really goal-oriented, at least to most who play it. You just screw around and watch the people do stuff. It just doesnt fit into the MMORPG genre.
Add that to the fact that it just comes off like another in the long line of Sims cash grabs (they have a whole new game/expansion pack bi-weekly it seems). After plunking down $50 on "The Sims get New Pants(tm)" people get wary. The dead horse has been beaten beyond recognition.
Plus it's just a boring game to most traditional 'gamers' in the first place.
It's more environmentally sound to produce paper than microchips. And paper books dont consume the ~150watts my PC and CRT do.
The paper industry by and large farms the trees they use, and ever larger portions are recycled. It really is time to update the Greenpeace pamphlets.
The linked article mentions that they could concievably get another shuttle up in as quick as a week, if they skipped all of the redundant pre-flight safety checks.
I'm absolutely certain that if they had reason to believe this was necessary, they would have done so.
There are a lot of people pointing fingers and going "I told you so". The public loves to snap that type of crap up. The truth is, it's all theories.
Most of these stories will come from engineers who work for a company that lost the government contract. Like the guy in your story; "Newman, president of Laser Technologies Inc."
There are no 'standards' in space flight, and virtually everything is unknown. The Shuttle is very much an experimental craft. Stuff like this is going to happen.
Only problem is that it isnt feasible, and its just some sci-fi tecnical sounding bullshit that michael felt he needed to inject, having nothing insightful to add to the posters story.
>> Chunks fell off while shuttle was traveling at approxiamately 2x the speed of sound.
And so were the external tanks. Parent is correct.
"The foam is fragile enough to have been damaged once in a hailstorm, forcing a previous shuttle mission to be delayed while the insulation was repaired. Chunks have come off in flight before, too. They can be ice-coated, making them heavy projectiles. Columbia sustained damage in this way in 1992 and 1997, and foam struck a booster rocket of Atlantis in October."
RTFA
I live in the D.C. area, know many who work for NASA, and was actully at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD last week doing a dog and pony show of our RMS system to their security chiefs and some of the bigwigs. I've met the people involved, higher ups and lower-downs. They dont let 7 people die to 'save face' on TV.
Why dont you keep your stupid gub'ment conspiracy theories to yourself?
Big chunks of ice fall off that big gas tank every time it goes up (it's filled with liquid hydrogen, IIRC). There was no more damage to the shuttle than occurs on any given launch.
They did inspect it, and if you were paying attention to the mission BEFORE it became a tragedy-cum-media-feeding-frenzy, you would have known that they assessed that there was no issue with safety.
Any.
But you have to be able to program. The course I referred to familiarizes you with all the menu options in the IDE, and teaches shit about actually writing code that works.
I shouldnt have to explain to the 'programmers' I work with what a search tree is.
>> It's quite an insightful article, recognising that the vast majority of computer users just want a system that works and don't care about issues of open- or closed-source and don't even want to know about dependencies
This is true, but the average user also wants what everyone else is using.
If Joe User can't figure out how to do something, he wants to be able to call up one of his buddies who knows and ask him how to do it. He doesn't want to deal with "I dunno, Joe. I never used Linux. Sorry"
If his buddies have Macs, he'll be inclined to get a Mac. More often than not, his buddies have Windows, so thats what he wants too. His buddies dont have to be computer geeks, just someone whos used $APPLICATION before and can give him a hand.
Chances are good if he knows someone who runs linux, they are of the 'technical elitest' movement, and wont help. They'll stick their noses in the air and say "you should run Windows or get a Mac, Linux is too complicated for you".
There's an air among many of the 'in-the-know' computer geeks that they wont share information. Even Free with a capital F information, when it comes to linux. Whether its a feeling of power they get by knowing more about something than someone else, or whether they cant be bothered, or it's just a lack of social skills, it doesnt matter. They like to call themselves Gurus as if they have some mystical power and you should beg them to use it for your benefit.
It's not every linux user who behaves like this, but a large enough portion of them that it will continue to slow it's growth on the desktop.
If you want to help linux get accepted, help the users who need it.
Eg, a friend of mine has an old Compaq that he only uses to print invoices and work orders for his small business.
After about 12 times reinstalling his printer for him after Win95 kept mysteriously 'losing' the drivers, he asked if maybe he should upgrade to WinXP. I convinced him that he could do the same thing for free with Linux, and helped him get it all set up. He was wary of all the free software, because there'd be no tech support line to call. I asked him "did 1-900-tech support get your printer running for you?"
He hasn't had any problems yet, but if he did, he'd call me up, I'd come over and we'd have a couple of beers and straighten it out.
(and it's quid-pro-quo, when my furnace died on me, he came over and helped me get it firing again)
Anyhow. If you want linux on peoples desktops, put it there. And don't be an elitist shithead if they need help.
IIRC, Crays are submerged in a coolant (some kind of mineral oil) which is pumped through a rad.
I also wondered about cooling the intake air, basically running water (outside the case) through a block attached to a peltier, which cools the water. Then it goes through the radiator, which is behind the intake fan. The air coming into the case is cooled a few degrees below ambient, and thus your case and CPU get a few degrees for that overclock.
I've also wondered how much humidity affects air cooling. Water holds much more heat than 'air', and such 'moist' air holds much more heat than 'dry' air. My scheme above would likely behave as a dehumidifier of sorts, so maybe it would hurt more than help?
All the same, I dont have the disposable cash to ghetto up my P4 rig with some goony experiment. Until then some quality low-noise fans, coupled with my Antec TruePower quiet PSU (with its variable fan-speed plugs) do the job.
I know I have. I think eventually we'll see some commercially available sealed systems that use some liquid (probably not water because of its corrosive properties) and convection to move it around.
Something idiot proof and self contained with no mechanical parts, save perhaps a slower turning large fan to exhaust air.
So far existing heat pipes are not much more than a novelty. The wick style ones with alcohol as a fluid (mentioned here awhile back) look promising.
The giant skivved aluminum/copper blocks with the big ass fans aren't going to cut it, not just because of noise, but practicality.
When you say Uncle Steve, you mean Ballmer right, and not Jobs..
I only ask because Apple's proprietary software and hardware fiefdom is sacrosanct around here, FYI.
Furthermore, I was being a smartass.
/.'er.
Peoples choices in web browser aren't nearly as important to me as they are to the average
Overnight fixes tell me they were poorly tested and have a high probability of doing more harm than good.
Seems like that list would be shorter.
An MCP is what you get for completing any one of the courses. The MCPs whose resume's end up on my desk (and generally straight into the trashcan) have completed Visual Basic for Desktop Applications, and consider themselves 'Professional Developers'.
Now all the wagon jumping paper tigers that swamped the IT world can move to Linux.
A large part of the state of job opportunities in the tech sector are the 5000 absolutely unqualified applicants for every job.
Pointy haired bosses don't know a good coder from a hole in the ground, so they hire the janitor-cum-MCP with the $20,000 salary expectation.
There are a few places left that look for someone who can do the job, and do it well, and don't give a hoot about alphabet soup and buzzwords in the resume.. I'm fortunate enough to have found one of them.
I should probably get back to work, I've wasted too much time here today.
D. J. Stephen Hawking.
>>Is it still cheaper to pay real people to do it all?
Let's see..
CGI rendered porn model - millions in development, artwork and rendering time, plus expensive render farms to do the computations.
Drug addict in her late teens - $20 worth of crack and a Sony Handycam.
Yes, it's cheaper.
Thank you.
I recall someone trying to explain that to me in grade school once, but his head was submerged in the toilet bowl at the time, and I was busy counting his lunch money.
I know Max Headroom, but who's Carson Daly and whats the simaluacarom?
Isn't he the guy from MTV that does the show about Boy Bands?
It's Free.
Not Free as in Beer, nor Free as in Speech.
But Free as in 'not worth Jack-Shit'
It's pretty funny (in a Nick Burns sort of way) that he planned to boot his PC up from a CD that had two .iso files on it.
Heck, it took me about 10 seconds to explain to my non-technical grandfather the difference between writing files to a CD and a writing a file that contains a CD image to a CD.
His bin/cue 'info' is all wrong too.. Nero doesn't need a cue file like he claims. They aren't BIN either, the files are ISO. You just go to burn disk image, choose 'show all files', pick your ISO and let it rip..
I think the fact that he tried to burn two 650 meg ISO files on the same CD shows his level of technical savvy. I didnt even bother to read on. It would be like listening to a mentally challenged 3rd grader explain Shakespeare.