Nope, still not of any use...
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Hey look, this battery dies twice as fast, but if it's dead, you can recharge it on USB!" "Uh, yeah, couldn't I just have used a regular battery that wouldn't be dead yet?"
You can have:
- an expensive, dead, 1300 mAh USB battery that you need to recharge on your laptop (good luck on your laptop battery not going dead first!)
- a cheap, half-full 2500 mAh regular rechargable battery that you don't need to recharge at all.
Newsflash: Can't predict the future based on one criteria.
Hell, the article doesn't even say that there isn't a correlation between good reviews and good games, just that it's not a reliable predictor of sales. Well duh. Maybe things like number of consoles in the market for that game, or marketing, or whether its a sequal, or the price, or whether it's released in May or during the holiday season, might all play a role.
We expect that the same game with good reviews will perform better than that same game with poor reviews. The article confirms that expectation, while trying to sound like it's conclusion is surprising. It's not.
Some people will buy a Pokemon game no matter how bad the review is. This is obvious. Doing a study that confirms it doesn't change that it's obvious and your study is just an excuse to fill some pages under the guise of 'news'.
Can you imagine what one billion dollars would achieve if spent for FOSS?
Not much. A billion dollars SOUNDS like a lot, but it really isn't. 1 billion dollars would get you 100 million dollars to work with a year if invested well. 100 million dollars a year is enough to pay maybe 1,000 people a year. That may be enough for a handful of large-scale projects, but it's not world-changing.
Actually it doesn't matter that the chicks are not in *your* classes. You just have to know where to look to find concentrations of those in psych and sociology and exercise science. The real action happens after hours anyway.
When I finished high school, I was very good and fairly well experienced with computers, and I was very good with chemistry, one of the best in the state. I could do very, very well on Chemistry exams. I wasnt etirely sure what I wanted to do, so when I enrolled as a Computer Engineering major, I also took the advanced chemistry, even though it didn't really serve any purpose for my CompE degree and really only Cem and PreMed majors took it. And the first two semesters of the class that were theory, problem sets and exams I did very well at, usually having the best exam score out of the entire lecture of a couple hundred kids.
2nd semester, though, you also take a one-hour lab class where it ain't problem sets anymore - you're in the lab doing real chemistry, in the library getting real information. I hated it, my results sucked, and I got a C. That class removed any doubt as to what I wanted to do and I'm now a engineer. I will never have to boil water again.
Point of the matter is, in many majors, the real world isn't like the classes or the exams at all. Exams prove you can apply the theory, but they don't prove you can do the job. The real solution is you have to have both kinds of classes - classes that give students the opportunity to do practical things on their own time, and classes that examine whether the students know what they're talking about under controlled conditions. It won't matter if kids cheat the practical classes as they'll fail the exam classes.
I'm still glad I took the chemistry classes though, there are a lot more girls in Chem than in CompE, they bathe more, and I had all the answers. Too bad I didn't figure out how to talk to girls until 3 years later.
What if GoDaddy only charged $5 per year for domains? Or $2? At what point is the domain so cheap that the cost of ANY litigation is not factored in?
It's quite reasonable that for $8.95/month, GoDaddy can't afford your 'insurance', and if you want to participate in 'domain name lawsuit insurance', you'll have to go with a provider who provides it, and charges $14.95/yr, or more.
The feature you are talking about is vital to the proper operation of a real database. The "transactional reasons" you refer too are the difference between a "real" database and a toy like "mysql" (which is neither yours nor very good SQL) Imagine two operations concurrently operating on a database, one in the process of modifying the data, the other simply reading it. The first process starts a transaction and makes a lot of changes, then commits the changes. The second query just wants to execute a quick query. The second query gets its data and is done. When the first operation finishes, its changes become available. No one had to wait for anything. In MySQL, the second query would have to wait. As we see in so many MySQL web sites, as the waiters pile up, sooner or later you run out of MySQL connections and start to get error messages. IMHO, one of the reasons why the web is broken is that it is so easy to create content that no one takes the time to learn the basic computer science involved. When things break or perform poorly, they blame everyone but themselves. There is REAL science in computers, if if you ignore it, you'll never do anything worth while.
And yet none of that explains why it is necessary for the original record to persist indefinitely. When the change is committed, delete the echo of the record. There's no reason to maintain copies of records in the DB that are never going to be used again. Otherwise, you have to purge them all at once, and queries don't get executed while you're doing that, and start to get error messages.
Sortof like when you buy a steak at the grocery store, you're contributing to the economics of killing a cow. Not that particular cow - it's already dead. But you just paid for some grain for the next cow.
What if you don't buy steak, but instead buy all of the cows?
Let's say you are trying to do good. But everytime you try to do good, some scumsucking lobbyists, who are very good at being scumsucking lobbyists, get in your way. How do you overcome that? Kill them? Can't do that, it's evil.
But, you could hire them and pay to send them on permanent vacation. Then the next time you try to do good, and Evil tries to hire scumsucking lobbyists, they can't, because they're in Tahiti. On Google-paid permanent vacation.
Your 'reason' applies to any new technology. The world did fine with horses and carraiges too. But cars are better. Should we not use cars because we could already get from point A to point B on horses?
Paper voting is not perfect. Electronic voting could be better than paper voting. The existence of bad electronic voting does not change this, and the existence of a system that's used now doesn't mean it's better than anything else that is possible either.
How many candidates per piece of paper? How big should each candidate's name be written? In what ORDER should the names of the candidates be written? When are the ballots printed?
2. Mark an X in a big box CLEARLY beside the candidate you want.
What does, and does not, count as an X? If I just have a small dash, should that count? What if I have a small dash in two boxes, or an X in one box and a dash in another box, or X's in all but one box?
3. Put it in the ballot box.
What if I put two ballots in the box?
Electronic voting lets you do a lot of parts of voting better. They key to any electronic system is redundancy - you don't have fewer than 2 of any critical component, and you have a non-electrical backup.
For electronic voting, that means you have enough provisional ballots to do the entire election if needed. It means you have a physical (paper or other non-alterable type) record. There's nothing wrong with electronic voting, except that the people who are implementing it appear to be morons.
The article does focus on the machines not working because the cards you need to run them were not brought to the location. That's definitely user error - you wouldn't say paper balloting was broken if you forgot to bring the ballots.
But, towards the end of the article, there is this:
Louise Bradley said she arrived at her polling station after the electronic cards had been delivered, but her card did not work properly. When she got to the section of the ballot listing candidates for the Democratic central committee, it was already filled out. Bradley said she had to remove the computer's choices and insert her own.
Now *THAT* is a problem with electronic voting, and a severe one.
It blames the california blackouts on a natural gas shortage. Given that it can't get basic facts right, I question any other conclusion in the article.
People's willingess to take risks online is about the same as their willingness to take risks elsewhere. It's just that risks online tend to be small.
Th risk of pissing off someone you 'met' 30 seconds ago is much lower than pissing off someone you work with every day. On the same token, there are plenty of people who have very bad behavior when interacting in 'the real world' with people they don't expect to see again - just hang around the customer service dept. of any retail establishment for a bit.
One of these days, advertisers are going to have to realize that there are more americans interested in 'offensive' things than there are interested in 'wholesomeness', and accept that if they want to reach the largest market possible that it's ok if their ad runs next to a list of results for 'asian schoolgirls'.
Oh the vanity! People really do that??? If I want you to see my video I'll put it on my own site and mention it somewhere, maybe even slashdot and it it's interesting word will get around, if it's not, my ego won't be crushed. I will be pissed if those weasels at thinkgeek steal it for another merchandising product.
If you have video content that you want internet users to see, like a commercial, the front page of YouTube is a very, very good place to put it. Why? Because the people looking at the front page of YouTube are, by definition, people who both CAN and WANT TO look at videos on the internet.
It's otherwise hard to get video content to internet users. Many don't have the bandwidth or the software to play the video in the first place, others you risk angering by essentially taking over their sound system to display your ad.
People going to YouTube are already predisposed to WANT to watch videos. That's what they are there to do.
So, I'll go ahead and solve YouTube's problem for them: Like Google, have a 'paid placement' section alongside the rest of the videos. Let people pay to have their videos where people can see them. You might even let people pay to have videos display with ceretain keywords. Maybe I search for 'Dew' and along with the rest of the results, I get the latest Mt. Dew commercials. Just like I find the ads returned with search results on google HELPFUL when I'm using Google to search for a commercial service, I might find video ad results helpful when searching YouTube for videos.
Don't piss off your users by MAKING them watch, or by having the videos run automatically - leave it to the advertisers to generate YouTube commercials that are ENTERTAINING. Then let YouTube do what it does best - spread the word about entertaining videos.
There's also a bonus here - there's no reason that the person who charges the advertisers NEEDS to be YouTube directly. If I can buy placement for my video, I might get an advertiser to pay me to create a video, integrate their ad into my video, and then pay YouTube to make sure my video gets seen. You could create a whole new advertising medium where video producers effectively 'buy airtime' on YouTube through paid placement and then pay for that by selling commercials or product placement within their videos to other advertisers.
YouTube would then become essentially the TVGuide of internet video content: Everybody with an internet video gets a listing, but people who want to pay get the full-page ads.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hey look, this battery dies twice as fast, but if it's dead, you can recharge it on USB!"
"Uh, yeah, couldn't I just have used a regular battery that wouldn't be dead yet?"
You can have:
- an expensive, dead, 1300 mAh USB battery that you need to recharge on your laptop (good luck on your laptop battery not going dead first!)
- a cheap, half-full 2500 mAh regular rechargable battery that you don't need to recharge at all.
If you had spent $6 on a real battery, with double the capacity of your 'nifty' USB battery, it wouldn't need to be recharged in the first place.
Newsflash: Can't predict the future based on one criteria.
Hell, the article doesn't even say that there isn't a correlation between good reviews and good games, just that it's not a reliable predictor of sales. Well duh. Maybe things like number of consoles in the market for that game, or marketing, or whether its a sequal, or the price, or whether it's released in May or during the holiday season, might all play a role.
We expect that the same game with good reviews will perform better than that same game with poor reviews. The article confirms that expectation, while trying to sound like it's conclusion is surprising. It's not.
Some people will buy a Pokemon game no matter how bad the review is. This is obvious. Doing a study that confirms it doesn't change that it's obvious and your study is just an excuse to fill some pages under the guise of 'news'.
Can you imagine what one billion dollars would achieve if spent for FOSS?
Not much. A billion dollars SOUNDS like a lot, but it really isn't. 1 billion dollars would get you 100 million dollars to work with a year if invested well. 100 million dollars a year is enough to pay maybe 1,000 people a year. That may be enough for a handful of large-scale projects, but it's not world-changing.
Actually it doesn't matter that the chicks are not in *your* classes. You just have to know where to look to find concentrations of those in psych and sociology and exercise science. The real action happens after hours anyway.
You missed the point entirely.
When I finished high school, I was very good and fairly well experienced with computers, and I was very good with chemistry, one of the best in the state. I could do very, very well on Chemistry exams. I wasnt etirely sure what I wanted to do, so when I enrolled as a Computer Engineering major, I also took the advanced chemistry, even though it didn't really serve any purpose for my CompE degree and really only Cem and PreMed majors took it. And the first two semesters of the class that were theory, problem sets and exams I did very well at, usually having the best exam score out of the entire lecture of a couple hundred kids.
2nd semester, though, you also take a one-hour lab class where it ain't problem sets anymore - you're in the lab doing real chemistry, in the library getting real information. I hated it, my results sucked, and I got a C. That class removed any doubt as to what I wanted to do and I'm now a engineer. I will never have to boil water again.
Point of the matter is, in many majors, the real world isn't like the classes or the exams at all. Exams prove you can apply the theory, but they don't prove you can do the job. The real solution is you have to have both kinds of classes - classes that give students the opportunity to do practical things on their own time, and classes that examine whether the students know what they're talking about under controlled conditions. It won't matter if kids cheat the practical classes as they'll fail the exam classes.
I'm still glad I took the chemistry classes though, there are a lot more girls in Chem than in CompE, they bathe more, and I had all the answers. Too bad I didn't figure out how to talk to girls until 3 years later.
What if GoDaddy only charged $5 per year for domains? Or $2? At what point is the domain so cheap that the cost of ANY litigation is not factored in?
It's quite reasonable that for $8.95/month, GoDaddy can't afford your 'insurance', and if you want to participate in 'domain name lawsuit insurance', you'll have to go with a provider who provides it, and charges $14.95/yr, or more.
The feature you are talking about is vital to the proper operation of a real database. The "transactional reasons" you refer too are the difference between a "real" database and a toy like "mysql" (which is neither yours nor very good SQL) Imagine two operations concurrently operating on a database, one in the process of modifying the data, the other simply reading it. The first process starts a transaction and makes a lot of changes, then commits the changes. The second query just wants to execute a quick query. The second query gets its data and is done. When the first operation finishes, its changes become available. No one had to wait for anything. In MySQL, the second query would have to wait. As we see in so many MySQL web sites, as the waiters pile up, sooner or later you run out of MySQL connections and start to get error messages. IMHO, one of the reasons why the web is broken is that it is so easy to create content that no one takes the time to learn the basic computer science involved. When things break or perform poorly, they blame everyone but themselves. There is REAL science in computers, if if you ignore it, you'll never do anything worth while.
And yet none of that explains why it is necessary for the original record to persist indefinitely. When the change is committed, delete the echo of the record. There's no reason to maintain copies of records in the DB that are never going to be used again. Otherwise, you have to purge them all at once, and queries don't get executed while you're doing that, and start to get error messages.
Put a string into an int field? Let me guess what you meant... etc.
Not a big fan of Perl, are you?
search 'label:Bob label:Wedgie'
There you go.
and the last two governors who lost elections went to prison (or will, in the case of Ryan).
Ryan didn't lose an election - he won, all the way up until he (plagued with scandal) didn't run again.
Sortof like when you buy a steak at the grocery store, you're contributing to the economics of killing a cow. Not that particular cow - it's already dead. But you just paid for some grain for the next cow.
What if you don't buy steak, but instead buy all of the cows?
What if Google is paying for not-lobbying?
Let's say you are trying to do good. But everytime you try to do good, some scumsucking lobbyists, who are very good at being scumsucking lobbyists, get in your way. How do you overcome that? Kill them? Can't do that, it's evil.
But, you could hire them and pay to send them on permanent vacation. Then the next time you try to do good, and Evil tries to hire scumsucking lobbyists, they can't, because they're in Tahiti. On Google-paid permanent vacation.
Your 'reason' applies to any new technology. The world did fine with horses and carraiges too. But cars are better. Should we not use cars because we could already get from point A to point B on horses?
Paper voting is not perfect. Electronic voting could be better than paper voting. The existence of bad electronic voting does not change this, and the existence of a system that's used now doesn't mean it's better than anything else that is possible either.
Social networking is about networking and being social, getting to know people and networking with them. It's right in the name.
Wait - it's not about having the largest friend list? And I was so close to beating Tom!
Didn't slashdot patent that?
1. Take a piece of paper.
How many candidates per piece of paper? How big should each candidate's name be written? In what ORDER should the names of the candidates be written? When are the ballots printed?
2. Mark an X in a big box CLEARLY beside the candidate you want.
What does, and does not, count as an X? If I just have a small dash, should that count? What if I have a small dash in two boxes, or an X in one box and a dash in another box, or X's in all but one box?
3. Put it in the ballot box.
What if I put two ballots in the box?
Electronic voting lets you do a lot of parts of voting better. They key to any electronic system is redundancy - you don't have fewer than 2 of any critical component, and you have a non-electrical backup.
For electronic voting, that means you have enough provisional ballots to do the entire election if needed. It means you have a physical (paper or other non-alterable type) record. There's nothing wrong with electronic voting, except that the people who are implementing it appear to be morons.
The article does focus on the machines not working because the cards you need to run them were not brought to the location. That's definitely user error - you wouldn't say paper balloting was broken if you forgot to bring the ballots.
But, towards the end of the article, there is this:
Louise Bradley said she arrived at her polling station after the electronic cards had been delivered, but her card did not work properly. When she got to the section of the ballot listing candidates for the Democratic central committee, it was already filled out. Bradley said she had to remove the computer's choices and insert her own.
Now *THAT* is a problem with electronic voting, and a severe one.
It blames the california blackouts on a natural gas shortage. Given that it can't get basic facts right, I question any other conclusion in the article.
People's willingess to take risks online is about the same as their willingness to take risks elsewhere. It's just that risks online tend to be small.
Th risk of pissing off someone you 'met' 30 seconds ago is much lower than pissing off someone you work with every day. On the same token, there are plenty of people who have very bad behavior when interacting in 'the real world' with people they don't expect to see again - just hang around the customer service dept. of any retail establishment for a bit.
30 year olds act like 15 year olds
Sounds just like the real world to me.
Household Bank. And after they absolutely dicked me over on one of them 'buy now pay later' plans, I refuse to use any card backed by that bank.
When your content is DVD-quality, S-Video cable is plenty sufficient for carrying the signal.
One of these days, advertisers are going to have to realize that there are more americans interested in 'offensive' things than there are interested in 'wholesomeness', and accept that if they want to reach the largest market possible that it's ok if their ad runs next to a list of results for 'asian schoolgirls'.
Oh the vanity! People really do that??? If I want you to see my video I'll put it on my own site and mention it somewhere, maybe even slashdot and it it's interesting word will get around, if it's not, my ego won't be crushed. I will be pissed if those weasels at thinkgeek steal it for another merchandising product.
If you have video content that you want internet users to see, like a commercial, the front page of YouTube is a very, very good place to put it. Why? Because the people looking at the front page of YouTube are, by definition, people who both CAN and WANT TO look at videos on the internet.
It's otherwise hard to get video content to internet users. Many don't have the bandwidth or the software to play the video in the first place, others you risk angering by essentially taking over their sound system to display your ad.
People going to YouTube are already predisposed to WANT to watch videos. That's what they are there to do.
So, I'll go ahead and solve YouTube's problem for them: Like Google, have a 'paid placement' section alongside the rest of the videos. Let people pay to have their videos where people can see them. You might even let people pay to have videos display with ceretain keywords. Maybe I search for 'Dew' and along with the rest of the results, I get the latest Mt. Dew commercials. Just like I find the ads returned with search results on google HELPFUL when I'm using Google to search for a commercial service, I might find video ad results helpful when searching YouTube for videos.
Don't piss off your users by MAKING them watch, or by having the videos run automatically - leave it to the advertisers to generate YouTube commercials that are ENTERTAINING. Then let YouTube do what it does best - spread the word about entertaining videos.
There's also a bonus here - there's no reason that the person who charges the advertisers NEEDS to be YouTube directly. If I can buy placement for my video, I might get an advertiser to pay me to create a video, integrate their ad into my video, and then pay YouTube to make sure my video gets seen. You could create a whole new advertising medium where video producers effectively 'buy airtime' on YouTube through paid placement and then pay for that by selling commercials or product placement within their videos to other advertisers.
YouTube would then become essentially the TVGuide of internet video content: Everybody with an internet video gets a listing, but people who want to pay get the full-page ads.