Heh heh, that country is so overpopulated and in such economic crisis that kids are literally dying to get into university for a chance to better themselves!!!
OMFGROFOLOLOL HILARIOUS
HAHA..
Ok, ok.. I got another good one..
There's a huge AIDS epidemic in Africa, right.. SO like, these poor rural folks dont understand how it's spread, and when they get it, they can't afford any sort of treatment so they just die..
Can I run Visual Studio.NET and a full install of SQL Server 2005 on it with relatively large (20 gig or so) databases?
If not, it's absolutely useless to me, as shiney as it is, and regardless of how many games you play on it.
Why is everything a chance to evangelize or an opportunity for a sales pitch?
WHY DONT YOU MAC CLOWNS EVER SHUT THE FUCK UP? I've never seen a mac in use by anyone but trendy mcpopcollars and wannabe computer guys. Face facts, it doesnt run the software that I (or the majority of the world) need on a day to day basis.
It's really easy to "just work" when it has such limited usefulness, and it's easy to "not need drivers" when it's hardware specs are cast in stone on high Mt Jobs.
Fortunately for me, it's also just easy to install the drivers and software I need on a PC.
Somebody who doesnt carry their computer around all the time, but maybe a few times a year needs to take some real computer power with him on the road.. Like me.. A laptop is too weak for what I try to do on it, and a traditional tower desktop is too unweildly.
Or you have the folks who want a simple, slick shiney package for the home/office, without giving up functionality.
I like the concept. One plug to AC power, one to the 'net (if no wireless available), built-in UPS, and a small footprint.
Try upgrading the graphics card in a laptop computer, or installing a TV card... Ugh!
Plugging stuff into USB ports is too hard for you?
If you bought the laptop for gaming (about the only reason you'd ever need to update the graphics card), then you get what you deserve. But there are plenty of decent USB 2.0 TV adapters out there, and we demo our multi-screen app on laptops with addon USB video adapters.
I'd love to be able to carry, or cheaply ship a real computer to sites when I have to travel, or even set it up back at the hotel rooms so I can squash bugs, compile, and do database stuff on a *real* computer.
It really sucks trying to do some sort of data manipulation involving millions of records, tens of gigabytes at a time, on a pentium M laptop with 512 megs of ram and one of its rinky-dink little hard drives. And many times the space is so tight on the clients server, I really have no choice during an upgrade to migrate the whole thing to the laptop (or usb drive) and watch the poor thing suffer overnight.
I've been trying to talk the boss into letting me put together a high-specced shuttle cube PC that I could ship out with a 15' LCD for just such an occasion. Once I had them overnight my office desktop to me, because it was apparent that my laptop just couldnt cut it.
So, like plenty of technologies, just because it's not useful to YOU doesn't mean it isnt useful to anyone.
Usually the last paragraph is a pseudo-review, always glowing, and probably paraphrased (if not outright lifted) from the back cover.
"'Advanced Perl Techniques' is a fabulas book with a kind of a donkey on the front of it, one of those desert kind of donkeys or something. It is copyright 2002 and published by the good folks at SAMS publishing. It has 650 pages with some pictures.
In conclusion, I think everybody should read this book."
What I mean is, everybody who's ever going to buy a PS2 has already has one. The 360 and PS3 aren't in my eyes a "new generation", I see a new generation as being capable of a whole new range of functionality. The NES could clearly do things that the Atari 2600 couldnt. The SNES could do things the NES couldnt. The PSX could do things the NES couldnt. The PS2/XBox can do things the PSX/Saturn gen couldnt. These are all different generations.
I can't think of anything the XBox 360 can do that the XBox couldn't, it does the exact same thing, just at a higher resolution.
VHS to DVD is a better example. There's a clear technological leap from analog to digital, as well as a leap in quality. DVD to HD-DVD, just more of the same..
I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode with tagline for the Gamestation 256... "It's slightly faster... TO THE EXTREME!!!!"
The funny part of all of this is, that many games being released for XBox and the 360 look worse on the 360, since all the texturing was done with a lower resolution in mind. King Kong and Tony Hawk Wasteland come to mind.. Run Quake 1 at crazy high resolutions and see what I mean... It looks much more natural, entirely better, at the lower resolutions it was designed for.
As for the Wii, Nintendo could easily market that funny looking controller for the gamecube, and put the broadband adapter back into production.. Though of all the new systems, this will be the one I'll probably buy this year, I'm believe in Miyamoto's Nintendo, they are after all the only video game hardware company left - actually trying to design systems that play games and not going the "jack of all trades, master of none" route that the must-dominate mindset that Sony and Microsoft have dictates.
PS3 will be as good a Blu Ray player as the PS2 was a DVD player, which is to say, half-assed at best.
Unless it's from Sony and specifically a BluRay showcase disc, I'd imagine the HD-DVD and BluRay releases will be exactly the same data - after all, why encode and remaster the thing twice?
The masses though can't get over the Beta vs VHS thing.. So the non-techies out there can't grasp that this time around the only difference is the discs themselves, and the markets being split for no reason better than competition for the sake of it.
I think HDDVD vs Blu Ray is a battle that everybody will ultimately lose.
I know severeal folks with fancy new HDTV plasmas, and most don't get why they should pay a few extra bucks for component video cables, when s-video or composite looks just as good to them... Frankly, unless you're a videophile, they're right.
If I'm just passively watching or playing a game, I can't see the difference between progressive scan and interlaced..
Maybe I'm just getting to old -- but most people are as old or older. I don't see the point.
I feel the same way about XBox 360, PS3 and Wii.. They aren't a "new generation", the whole thing seems to be the industry trying to force us to upgrade to something we don't want or need. The last generation was "good enough", and once the market got saturated, they conductor of the gravy train yelled "end of the line" and they freaked out..
Ever go looking for some porn on a torrent site, and get nothing but pages and pages of different versions/cams/releases of that crap movie and its sequels?
Somewhat surprisingly, it's '50 First Dates' that ranked highest of the three in video quality
Not surprising, there's no action to speak of, not a lot of motion, etc.. Less movement means less to encode, which means less work to decode.
The Matrix was always the DVD stress-tester of choice, specifically the kung fu scene, because you would really notice the quality of the decoder during the more intense scenes, where every pixel on screen is changing with every frame.
So my question is, is this an issue with the encoding of the discs or an inherent design problem with the discs themselves, perhaps too low a bitrate, or just a cheap shit decoder in the playback device? My money is on the latter.
They did the buttered toast thing on Mythbusters. From a height, they determined that when you butter the toast you cup it somewhat, so it tends to land butter side up - falling like a leaf.
Sheesh... Some people didn't like the iPod when it lauched.. Some people don't like Palm's Treo.. Some people don't like the XBox, or the PSP, or the Gameboy.. Some people liked New Coke..
Can anybody name a product launch without "mixed" feedback?
The article has slim to no details as to what the problems were, and I suspect this is only on slashdot because of the dig at microsoft.
Users submit articles, they sit back and click "submit" about twelve times a day, and watch fansubbed Sailor Moon episodes that they painstakenly re-encoded into.ogm files.
Back in the day, it didn't matter so much. Now it's getting ridiculous, with retarded newbie typo's like "teh" making the front page.
I forgot about slashdot for about a year, came back just the other day. It seems the user base (based on posting on articles) is about half of what it was a year ago, and hell, a year ago it was only a shadow of it's former self. It seems that only the most self-righteous of the OSS flamers are left. Technically adept users seem to be slim to none, as I'm seeing hardly any intelligent comments being left on any of the recent technical articles.
To borrow a South Park qoute, non-gnome related, this site is literally dissapearing up it's own asshole.
And before you ask, I'm here because it's fun to watch and be labelled a troll for not toeing the line and bowing down before the great Rickie Stallman.
Homer taught all the Indians about paid vacations and golden parachutes and casual fridays and health plans, just a couple of weeks ago.
Actually, that episode was good social commentary... It's basically what's happening. The Indian labour force is developing the sense of entitlement so near and dear to our hearts.
It's been good for business elsewhere, it'll be good for business for them.
I don't see this as any more shocking than Apple or IBM embracing open source, and MSFT's technologies have been increasingly more accessable to developers.
Stoop to childish namecalling and whining, but it's not your decision, it's theirs.
MSFT's stock has been slumping hard lately, it might be a good time to pick some up.
Nah, Toronto is very multicultural, but take a road trip into Quebec, the Maritimes or the Prairies and marvel at all the different cultures you see (hint, that was sarcasm.).
You could argue, however, that Toronto is, for all intents and purposes, Canada, and I'd have a hard time debating that.
The nay-sayers here aren't engineers, they're beurocrats.
They may have once been engineers, in a former life, but once you get that cushy government paycheck, your job becomes "not being held accountable for stuff".
It's no accident that "the lead engineer and top safety official are against launching".
BTW, it may seem I've contradicted myself, but "lead engineer" doesn't imply any actual engineering any more than "software project lead" implies that the guy could cobble together a four-line vb script.
They aren't against the launch, they just voiced some concerns, so when it blows up, and people come to them with questions, they can say "see! see! somebody elses fault".
Like everything else that goes wrong in America, if there's an accident, it will all somehow be Bush's fault. After all, the guy didn't even prevent Hurricane Katrina from hitting New Orleans, the rat bastard! (Not only that, he hasn't even announced a comprehensive plan to prevent hurricanes from hitting the coast again!)
Government folks (non-contracted) abhor responsibility and accountability. I've worked a few federal contacts lately - actually one was supposed to be at the KSC, last week, but they cancelled it due to the launch because apparently when they scheduled it a month ago they didn't know they had a shuttle, but I digress..
Nobody who works for the government will do anything, sign anything, and it's completely frustrating being an outside joe like myself who has a job to do. Although, I learned how to work the system... Everytime some dinkus stands in my way, for instance: I had to have an escort at one federal site, my escort chose to show up for work at 11:30, and look at his watch around 2 PM and say "lets call it a day", I say fine and ask them to sign a stop-work order... Asking them to put their name on something, in ink, why, why, why, thats accountability!! It works every time (the guy I mentioned had to work 8 hour days for the first week in his life, "work" of course meant sitting there googling the intarweb while I did work)
What was my point? Oh yeah, if it's govt employees doing the whining, they're safe to ignore.
Glad to know there's someone with a set of balls at NASA.
If we wait for everything to be 100% iron-clad safe, we'll never leave this rock.
There's always going to be a nay-sayer somewhere up the chain. Beurocrats get so uptight about their jobs that that they'd never greenlight anything, for fear of being accountable for something (feds are 100% allergic to accountability, anyone who's ever worked a government contract will know this).
Slashdot Mirror
But it's just as funny..
Some inner city kid got shot trying to rob a liquor store to raise money for his sisters tuition..
Hilarious! No prior criminal record, and then shot right in the fucking head!
Get it? Now not only does she not go to school, but her brother is dead.
wah wah wah wahahahahahahah
OMG it's funny, laugh.
Heh heh, that country is so overpopulated and in such economic crisis that kids are literally dying to get into university for a chance to better themselves!!!
OMFGROFOLOLOL HILARIOUS
HAHA..
Ok, ok.. I got another good one..
There's a huge AIDS epidemic in Africa, right.. SO like, these poor rural folks dont understand how it's spread, and when they get it, they can't afford any sort of treatment so they just die..
HAHAHAHHAH omg my sides are splitting
Is this as lame as that EFF flash cartoon you guys had yesterday?
Can I run Visual Studio .NET and a full install of SQL Server 2005 on it with relatively large (20 gig or so) databases?
If not, it's absolutely useless to me, as shiney as it is, and regardless of how many games you play on it.
Why is everything a chance to evangelize or an opportunity for a sales pitch?
WHY DONT YOU MAC CLOWNS EVER SHUT THE FUCK UP? I've never seen a mac in use by anyone but trendy mcpopcollars and wannabe computer guys. Face facts, it doesnt run the software that I (or the majority of the world) need on a day to day basis.
It's really easy to "just work" when it has such limited usefulness, and it's easy to "not need drivers" when it's hardware specs are cast in stone on high Mt Jobs.
Fortunately for me, it's also just easy to install the drivers and software I need on a PC.
Somebody who doesnt carry their computer around all the time, but maybe a few times a year needs to take some real computer power with him on the road.. Like me.. A laptop is too weak for what I try to do on it, and a traditional tower desktop is too unweildly.
Or you have the folks who want a simple, slick shiney package for the home/office, without giving up functionality.
I like the concept. One plug to AC power, one to the 'net (if no wireless available), built-in UPS, and a small footprint.
Try upgrading the graphics card in a laptop computer, or installing a TV card... Ugh!
Plugging stuff into USB ports is too hard for you?
If you bought the laptop for gaming (about the only reason you'd ever need to update the graphics card), then you get what you deserve. But there are plenty of decent USB 2.0 TV adapters out there, and we demo our multi-screen app on laptops with addon USB video adapters.
You're a wimp!
I'd love to be able to carry, or cheaply ship a real computer to sites when I have to travel, or even set it up back at the hotel rooms so I can squash bugs, compile, and do database stuff on a *real* computer.
It really sucks trying to do some sort of data manipulation involving millions of records, tens of gigabytes at a time, on a pentium M laptop with 512 megs of ram and one of its rinky-dink little hard drives. And many times the space is so tight on the clients server, I really have no choice during an upgrade to migrate the whole thing to the laptop (or usb drive) and watch the poor thing suffer overnight.
I've been trying to talk the boss into letting me put together a high-specced shuttle cube PC that I could ship out with a 15' LCD for just such an occasion. Once I had them overnight my office desktop to me, because it was apparent that my laptop just couldnt cut it.
So, like plenty of technologies, just because it's not useful to YOU doesn't mean it isnt useful to anyone.
Usually the last paragraph is a pseudo-review, always glowing, and probably paraphrased (if not outright lifted) from the back cover.
"'Advanced Perl Techniques' is a fabulas book with a kind of a donkey on the front of it, one of those desert kind of donkeys or something. It is copyright 2002 and published by the good folks at SAMS publishing. It has 650 pages with some pictures.
In conclusion, I think everybody should read this book."
What I mean is, everybody who's ever going to buy a PS2 has already has one. The 360 and PS3 aren't in my eyes a "new generation", I see a new generation as being capable of a whole new range of functionality. The NES could clearly do things that the Atari 2600 couldnt. The SNES could do things the NES couldnt. The PSX could do things the NES couldnt. The PS2/XBox can do things the PSX/Saturn gen couldnt. These are all different generations.
I can't think of anything the XBox 360 can do that the XBox couldn't, it does the exact same thing, just at a higher resolution.
VHS to DVD is a better example. There's a clear technological leap from analog to digital, as well as a leap in quality. DVD to HD-DVD, just more of the same..
I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode with tagline for the Gamestation 256... "It's slightly faster... TO THE EXTREME!!!!"
The funny part of all of this is, that many games being released for XBox and the 360 look worse on the 360, since all the texturing was done with a lower resolution in mind. King Kong and Tony Hawk Wasteland come to mind.. Run Quake 1 at crazy high resolutions and see what I mean... It looks much more natural, entirely better, at the lower resolutions it was designed for.
As for the Wii, Nintendo could easily market that funny looking controller for the gamecube, and put the broadband adapter back into production.. Though of all the new systems, this will be the one I'll probably buy this year, I'm believe in Miyamoto's Nintendo, they are after all the only video game hardware company left - actually trying to design systems that play games and not going the "jack of all trades, master of none" route that the must-dominate mindset that Sony and Microsoft have dictates.
PS3 will be as good a Blu Ray player as the PS2 was a DVD player, which is to say, half-assed at best.
Unless it's from Sony and specifically a BluRay showcase disc, I'd imagine the HD-DVD and BluRay releases will be exactly the same data - after all, why encode and remaster the thing twice?
The masses though can't get over the Beta vs VHS thing.. So the non-techies out there can't grasp that this time around the only difference is the discs themselves, and the markets being split for no reason better than competition for the sake of it.
I think HDDVD vs Blu Ray is a battle that everybody will ultimately lose.
I know severeal folks with fancy new HDTV plasmas, and most don't get why they should pay a few extra bucks for component video cables, when s-video or composite looks just as good to them... Frankly, unless you're a videophile, they're right.
If I'm just passively watching or playing a game, I can't see the difference between progressive scan and interlaced..
Maybe I'm just getting to old -- but most people are as old or older. I don't see the point.
I feel the same way about XBox 360, PS3 and Wii.. They aren't a "new generation", the whole thing seems to be the industry trying to force us to upgrade to something we don't want or need. The last generation was "good enough", and once the market got saturated, they conductor of the gravy train yelled "end of the line" and they freaked out..
What were we talking about anyways?
Ever go looking for some porn on a torrent site, and get nothing but pages and pages of different versions/cams/releases of that crap movie and its sequels?
Somewhat surprisingly, it's '50 First Dates' that ranked highest of the three in video quality
Not surprising, there's no action to speak of, not a lot of motion, etc.. Less movement means less to encode, which means less work to decode.
The Matrix was always the DVD stress-tester of choice, specifically the kung fu scene, because you would really notice the quality of the decoder during the more intense scenes, where every pixel on screen is changing with every frame.
So my question is, is this an issue with the encoding of the discs or an inherent design problem with the discs themselves, perhaps too low a bitrate, or just a cheap shit decoder in the playback device? My money is on the latter.
They did the buttered toast thing on Mythbusters. From a height, they determined that when you butter the toast you cup it somewhat, so it tends to land butter side up - falling like a leaf.
Sheesh... Some people didn't like the iPod when it lauched.. Some people don't like Palm's Treo.. Some people don't like the XBox, or the PSP, or the Gameboy.. Some people liked New Coke..
Can anybody name a product launch without "mixed" feedback?
The article has slim to no details as to what the problems were, and I suspect this is only on slashdot because of the dig at microsoft.
Does anybody have any real info on the device?
The editors don't actually "edit" and never have.
.ogm files.
Users submit articles, they sit back and click "submit" about twelve times a day, and watch fansubbed Sailor Moon episodes that they painstakenly re-encoded into
Back in the day, it didn't matter so much. Now it's getting ridiculous, with retarded newbie typo's like "teh" making the front page.
I forgot about slashdot for about a year, came back just the other day. It seems the user base (based on posting on articles) is about half of what it was a year ago, and hell, a year ago it was only a shadow of it's former self. It seems that only the most self-righteous of the OSS flamers are left. Technically adept users seem to be slim to none, as I'm seeing hardly any intelligent comments being left on any of the recent technical articles.
To borrow a South Park qoute, non-gnome related, this site is literally dissapearing up it's own asshole.
And before you ask, I'm here because it's fun to watch and be labelled a troll for not toeing the line and bowing down before the great Rickie Stallman.
It'll take a long time for the business community at large to "get it".
They'll simply shift the labour mills to asia, then africa, then maybe antartica (those penguins will work cheap )..
Eventually, Americas economy will start to tank, and once it gets rough enough, *then* the jobs will come back.
Homer taught all the Indians about paid vacations and golden parachutes and casual fridays and health plans, just a couple of weeks ago.
Actually, that episode was good social commentary... It's basically what's happening. The Indian labour force is developing the sense of entitlement so near and dear to our hearts.
It's been good for business elsewhere, it'll be good for business for them.
I don't see this as any more shocking than Apple or IBM embracing open source, and MSFT's technologies have been increasingly more accessable to developers.
Stoop to childish namecalling and whining, but it's not your decision, it's theirs.
MSFT's stock has been slumping hard lately, it might be a good time to pick some up.
And you're the one who defines who isn't?
we really need to start working on a next generation system right now
We are, and quoth that article: "The winning concept will be chosen in 2008, and the manned vehicle flown in 2014."
But, in the meantime, the Shuttle is all we got, and we should use it, rather than waiting until 2014 to go back up into space.
What if Lewis and Clark waited for the railroad to be built before heading West because canoes and horses were too risky?
Canada is a very multicultural country
Nah, Toronto is very multicultural, but take a road trip into Quebec, the Maritimes or the Prairies and marvel at all the different cultures you see (hint, that was sarcasm.).
You could argue, however, that Toronto is, for all intents and purposes, Canada, and I'd have a hard time debating that.
Disclaimer, I'm from the GTA..
The nay-sayers here aren't engineers, they're beurocrats.
They may have once been engineers, in a former life, but once you get that cushy government paycheck, your job becomes "not being held accountable for stuff".
It's no accident that "the lead engineer and top safety official are against launching".
BTW, it may seem I've contradicted myself, but "lead engineer" doesn't imply any actual engineering any more than "software project lead" implies that the guy could cobble together a four-line vb script.
They aren't against the launch, they just voiced some concerns, so when it blows up, and people come to them with questions, they can say "see! see! somebody elses fault".
Like everything else that goes wrong in America, if there's an accident, it will all somehow be Bush's fault. After all, the guy didn't even prevent Hurricane Katrina from hitting New Orleans, the rat bastard! (Not only that, he hasn't even announced a comprehensive plan to prevent hurricanes from hitting the coast again!)
The thing that brought the shuttle down really cant be fixed.
It may not strike a chunk of foam, but hey, it might smack a big old bird on the way up, ro get nicked by a meteorite or some space-junk.
They are going up this time with a contingency plan to possibly repair such damage after it happened, but it's always going to be dangerous.
Government folks (non-contracted) abhor responsibility and accountability. I've worked a few federal contacts lately - actually one was supposed to be at the KSC, last week, but they cancelled it due to the launch because apparently when they scheduled it a month ago they didn't know they had a shuttle, but I digress..
Nobody who works for the government will do anything, sign anything, and it's completely frustrating being an outside joe like myself who has a job to do. Although, I learned how to work the system... Everytime some dinkus stands in my way, for instance: I had to have an escort at one federal site, my escort chose to show up for work at 11:30, and look at his watch around 2 PM and say "lets call it a day", I say fine and ask them to sign a stop-work order... Asking them to put their name on something, in ink, why, why, why, thats accountability!! It works every time (the guy I mentioned had to work 8 hour days for the first week in his life, "work" of course meant sitting there googling the intarweb while I did work)
What was my point? Oh yeah, if it's govt employees doing the whining, they're safe to ignore.
Glad to know there's someone with a set of balls at NASA.
If we wait for everything to be 100% iron-clad safe, we'll never leave this rock.
There's always going to be a nay-sayer somewhere up the chain. Beurocrats get so uptight about their jobs that that they'd never greenlight anything, for fear of being accountable for something (feds are 100% allergic to accountability, anyone who's ever worked a government contract will know this).
Godspeed and have some fun up there.