Maybe crazy people like me will make games like Lute Hero for the PC. The game engine is Neverwinter Nights 2, using assorted software to link the guitar keys to keyboard commands.
Cleaning well can make a huge difference, and using alternative CD players might help as well (some seem to read better than others). I had a friend use a mild polish and lots of rubbing to fix his scratching problem.
I always wanted to try a Dremel with a buffing attachment on some of the very scratched DVDs I get from the library, though I haven't been brave enough. If you've got an old Bon Jovi CD laying around (or something similarly useless), you could scratch it up and then see if you could repair it using various methods.
The drugs activate at least one of the chemical pathways triggered by resveratrol, a substance that also showed increased endurance in mice. Resveratrol is found in red wine though in amounts probably too low to significantly affect muscle.
This lends weight to the thought that Resveratrol triggers a bunch of pathways that increases life span and enhances health. Of course, the catch of all of these "health in a pill" solutions is that they just point the body in the right direction. Sure, your muscle population may shift to a higher metabolic state, but if you sit around, you won't burn many more calories.
I've been getting into the habit of running six miles a day and am amazed at how much energy it takes. I've been in pretty good shape, but there's nothing like burning an extra thousand calories a day to get rid of the last of that abdominal fat.
This isn't a condition of human nature, this is a conscious choice by a significant portion of the population to never grow out of adolescent self obsession.
Actually, I'd rather spend the majority of my resources on my children, which is probably a trait shaped by evolution to become part of the human condition. If you can send a mission to Mars without impacting my kids' education, future debt, or well-being, I'd completely support it.
I decided to get an R4 chip for our Nintendo DS. The kids love it, as I loaded it up with things like Colors!, which is a touch sensitive drawing program. It also nicely plays music and home videos. My kids were both mesmerized by family movies I took of them from a couple years ago.
There is a long list of homebrew software out there. And yes, you can even get your DS running Linux.
This reminds me of my favorite power loss story. The facility was doing a generator test, where we were supposed to switch over from city power to the generator. Unfortunately it didn't happen smoothly and the UPS kicked in. Sadly it turned out that so many servers had been added since the original design, the UPS was really only good for fifteen minutes or so. The final problem was that our operator didn't notice the issue quickly enough and so the next thing everyone in IT knew is that our main data center just lost power.
We spent most of the day getting our servers back up from various states of disrepair (confirming the article, power loss is superbad). It turns out that our main medical software ran on a Tandem. Though the drives and such lost power, the CPU had a backup of D-batteries and survived the power loss just fine. Needless to say, we stopped making fun of their seemingly primitive emergency backup power.
I wonder if we'll see a mix of drives in PCs for different applications, or HDs will end up having a massive SSD cache and information moves from drive to drive as appropriate.
Key read-only OS files would remain on SSD. Bigger files that are rarely used would be on the hard drive. The tricky part would be to minimize the number of times you spin up your hard drive. You could potentially leave it up to the user and have a deliberate mounting process when it's time to do backups or archiving.
Basically it's saying that if you have official content you want to post (e.g. big videos) that you can't post on house.gov, you currently can't do it. Since some content is hard to post, Pelosi is suggesting new rules that allow it to be possible, within guidelines.
It's actually more permissive than our Internet posting policies here at work. Right now, you have to work through us (the web services team), as opposted to setting up your own URL and posting whatever you want outside of the official content.
One of the things that's going on is that the value of the dollar continues to fall. For years, overseas producers were hesitant to lower the price in the US, even though they were getting less for their goods. This was because the US is such a huge market and they didn't want to lose it. Because of this, prices tend to be "sticky", so things will stay at 10 cents per item until suddenly all the manufacturers decide they have to bump up the price to the next "even" amount.
Gas and oil are such global commodities that they were the first to jump up in price. Now we're seeing other goods do the same. I think the US is getting to the point where it's no longer the rich superpower it used to be, and that places like China and the EU can dictate economic terms to a larger degree than in the past.
What can an organization do, centrally, to lift the burden of encryption from the users? Are there any transparent schemes for email encryption which could be installed for the organization as a whole? I work for a large healthcare organization and we use a product called Tumbleweed. It's not especially magical. If an outgoing e-mail is marked as encrypted (or keywords appear in the e-mail), the recipient gets a link to a secure web portal where they can log in and get that e-mail. It works fairly well, satisfying HIPPA requirements that otherwise prevented us from sending confidential e-mails to outside physician groups.
It's been my experience that the key to breaking into the gaming industry is to break into the gaming industry. That sounds silly, but more and more we have folks like the Counterstrike and Portal developers making games and subsequently getting hired by a development studio. Writers likely have a similar route, building up a portfolio and demonstrating the ability to write dialog, item descriptions, and other game-specific text.
I made a number of modules for Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2, and I had several job offers from Bioware and others along the way. Recently, the folks at Obsidian asked for a high quality version of the video for Lute Hero, which they plan on showing in Paris as part of a discussion on user generated content.
Nothing says "hire me" like passion and experience. In the gaming industry, that typically means creating mods and your own games at the beginning.
In the end, I opted for my stable and well-paying job in the healthcare industry. Making games is a great hobby, but the reality of the gaming industry is that it's still fairly immature and not as well paying as others. I also enjoy the fact that I can make games the way I want, even if they may be non-traditional of vaguely "inappropriate".
I do too, actually. His editorial comments are interesting, touching on statistics, politics, and the quirks of our electoral college. He's also a tech guy, and had to fend off some pretty serious DOS attacks during the last election cycle. I suppose you could argue that his commentary tends to lean left (after being anonymous for awhile, Votemaster came out as a democrat). In my mind, though, he seems fairly centrist and explains his methodology so that when the map shifts one way or another, you can see the details as to why. Works for me.
. . . the number of P2P clients that use peer blocking jumped 40%.
I suspect that the people measuring P2P downloading are the same people being paid to find downloaders. It's in their best interest to show that they're making a difference and should continue to be paid.
I know the folks who maintain our work's various policies and get brought in when discussing the computer-related ones. Typically policies are in place so that when a person's behavior (in person or online) get out of hand, they can point to a policy and say "you need to change or you'll be let go".
One specific to blogging appeared, with the usual wording about appropriate use of our company's name and so on (I think they wanted public affairs involved any time the name was mentioned in a blog). I came up with a list of obvious problems it raised, there was an outbreak of common sense, and all blogging language was removed.
Personally I feel that policies shouldn't be specific to online behavior if at all possible. Instead it's best to remain neutral to the form of communication and shape policies around it. For example, if we have a policy against hate speech, I wouldn't want to see employees writing hate speech on their blogs while they're at work (we let employees get online during breaks as long as it doesn't interfere with their work). What they do with their own time at home, of course, should generally be their own business.
Oh, I'm pretty sure the operators were duly chastised. Like any disaster, there were several opportunities to notice the issue and correct it, but sadly they didn't happen. There were other failures, such as when the diesel generator didn't supply power to the data center. The operators also sit in an area outside the data center, and I suspect the beeping UPS didn't get heard through the big glass windows.
Our data center had a catastrophic failure last year when the generator test failed and the operators didn't notice they had no power until the UPS died 15 minutes later. Absolutely everything lost power, and we spent the day recovering systems from various messy states. The exception was our Tandem, used for our clinical system, which was kept alive by a series of D batteries powering the CPU. We used to make fun of those D battieries, but never again.
In any case, our data center is part of a larger facility and while it's easy to report on overall power use for the facility, it's mixed in with so much else that it's hard to get a good estimate for power use by the data center alone. As we found out the hard way, the UPS wasn't adequate for downtimes longer than 15 minutes. We've since made a big push to improve the UPS and reduce the number of physical servers in the data center (switching to virtual whenever possible).
I work for a health care organization. We ship our backups off-site just like these guys. When it comes to encrypting hard drives, what you say makes sense. When it comes to backup tapes, it's not going to happen. The main reason is that encryption is slow. If I have to restore 500 GB of data and decrypt it, suddenly you're telling physicians that they can't get to the patient information they need to treat the patient even later than before. If someone loses the encryption keys, the information patients need to stay alive is simply gone forever.
I think it's important to safeguard information. At the same time, I see these sort of cases sensationalized and lawyers demand decisions that are incredibly stupid. We don't save e-mail past a year any more because of legal issues. This means that I can't solve issues or know what was going on unless I take cumbersome actions to save data off somewhere (made deliberately difficult). What you're suggesting is that lawyers should run even more of our business.
This event probably ended up establishing the concept of "races", meaning small groups of geographically isolated humans ended up having a lot of genetically distinct features. As their populations grew, they seemed very foreign to each other and only in modern times those barriers to gene flow seem to be falling.
I look forward to the day when people stop saying "I'm X race" and instead say "I carry the genetic markers for A, B, and C." Well, perhaps it's unlikely, but an ex-biologist can dream, can't he?
At this point, it seems like just about everyone's SSN is out there in the public domain in one form or another. What pains me is that SSN is still used like a password for many institutions. Banks will ask for SSN, birthdate, and mother's maiden name. Unfortunately all of those things can be found out with a bit of digging.
The more these breaches happen, the more apparent it is that we need a better "proof of identity" mechanism. I'm not advocating for the government to pass out universal ID cards to everyone. I think I'd rather see something along the lines of SSL certificates, where business can issue identification to people and later use that number and passphrase to do business with them. Perhaps a handful of business certificates become the "gold standard" and and are accepted by other businesses as a valid identifier.
Well, it's extremely difficult to perform dietary experiments on humans. People tend not to like being told what to eat. Still, a few weeks ago the results of the DASH diet came in, with yet more evidence that eating a mostly plant-based diet is best for you.
True, everyone's going to die. What seems to happen, though, is that people's diet can influence the quality of life and length of life. I don't think it's a straw man argument to hold up statistics that compare health issues and diet.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe crazy people like me will make games like Lute Hero for the PC. The game engine is Neverwinter Nights 2, using assorted software to link the guitar keys to keyboard commands.
Cleaning well can make a huge difference, and using alternative CD players might help as well (some seem to read better than others). I had a friend use a mild polish and lots of rubbing to fix his scratching problem.
I always wanted to try a Dremel with a buffing attachment on some of the very scratched DVDs I get from the library, though I haven't been brave enough. If you've got an old Bon Jovi CD laying around (or something similarly useless), you could scratch it up and then see if you could repair it using various methods.
The drugs activate at least one of the chemical pathways triggered by resveratrol, a substance that also showed increased endurance in mice. Resveratrol is found in red wine though in amounts probably too low to significantly affect muscle.
This lends weight to the thought that Resveratrol triggers a bunch of pathways that increases life span and enhances health. Of course, the catch of all of these "health in a pill" solutions is that they just point the body in the right direction. Sure, your muscle population may shift to a higher metabolic state, but if you sit around, you won't burn many more calories.
I've been getting into the habit of running six miles a day and am amazed at how much energy it takes. I've been in pretty good shape, but there's nothing like burning an extra thousand calories a day to get rid of the last of that abdominal fat.
This isn't a condition of human nature, this is a conscious choice by a significant portion of the population to never grow out of adolescent self obsession.
Actually, I'd rather spend the majority of my resources on my children, which is probably a trait shaped by evolution to become part of the human condition. If you can send a mission to Mars without impacting my kids' education, future debt, or well-being, I'd completely support it.
I decided to get an R4 chip for our Nintendo DS. The kids love it, as I loaded it up with things like Colors!, which is a touch sensitive drawing program. It also nicely plays music and home videos. My kids were both mesmerized by family movies I took of them from a couple years ago.
There is a long list of homebrew software out there. And yes, you can even get your DS running Linux.
This reminds me of my favorite power loss story. The facility was doing a generator test, where we were supposed to switch over from city power to the generator. Unfortunately it didn't happen smoothly and the UPS kicked in. Sadly it turned out that so many servers had been added since the original design, the UPS was really only good for fifteen minutes or so. The final problem was that our operator didn't notice the issue quickly enough and so the next thing everyone in IT knew is that our main data center just lost power.
We spent most of the day getting our servers back up from various states of disrepair (confirming the article, power loss is superbad). It turns out that our main medical software ran on a Tandem. Though the drives and such lost power, the CPU had a backup of D-batteries and survived the power loss just fine. Needless to say, we stopped making fun of their seemingly primitive emergency backup power.
I get a little tired with the "hit by a bus" example. My coworkers use it all the time as an excuse to make me document everything to the Nth degree.
Maybe they could suggest "crushed in an orgy" or "broke lightspeed and turned to photons". Getting hit by a bus is such a boring way to go.
I wonder if we'll see a mix of drives in PCs for different applications, or HDs will end up having a massive SSD cache and information moves from drive to drive as appropriate.
Key read-only OS files would remain on SSD. Bigger files that are rarely used would be on the hard drive. The tricky part would be to minimize the number of times you spin up your hard drive. You could potentially leave it up to the user and have a deliberate mounting process when it's time to do backups or archiving.
Basically it's saying that if you have official content you want to post (e.g. big videos) that you can't post on house.gov, you currently can't do it. Since some content is hard to post, Pelosi is suggesting new rules that allow it to be possible, within guidelines.
It's actually more permissive than our Internet posting policies here at work. Right now, you have to work through us (the web services team), as opposted to setting up your own URL and posting whatever you want outside of the official content.
One of the things that's going on is that the value of the dollar continues to fall. For years, overseas producers were hesitant to lower the price in the US, even though they were getting less for their goods. This was because the US is such a huge market and they didn't want to lose it. Because of this, prices tend to be "sticky", so things will stay at 10 cents per item until suddenly all the manufacturers decide they have to bump up the price to the next "even" amount.
Gas and oil are such global commodities that they were the first to jump up in price. Now we're seeing other goods do the same. I think the US is getting to the point where it's no longer the rich superpower it used to be, and that places like China and the EU can dictate economic terms to a larger degree than in the past.
It's been my experience that the key to breaking into the gaming industry is to break into the gaming industry. That sounds silly, but more and more we have folks like the Counterstrike and Portal developers making games and subsequently getting hired by a development studio. Writers likely have a similar route, building up a portfolio and demonstrating the ability to write dialog, item descriptions, and other game-specific text.
I made a number of modules for Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2, and I had several job offers from Bioware and others along the way. Recently, the folks at Obsidian asked for a high quality version of the video for Lute Hero, which they plan on showing in Paris as part of a discussion on user generated content.
Nothing says "hire me" like passion and experience. In the gaming industry, that typically means creating mods and your own games at the beginning.
In the end, I opted for my stable and well-paying job in the healthcare industry. Making games is a great hobby, but the reality of the gaming industry is that it's still fairly immature and not as well paying as others. I also enjoy the fact that I can make games the way I want, even if they may be non-traditional of vaguely "inappropriate".
People have also had some good successes hooking up other Wii devices to their PC.
I personally bought a bluetooth adapter specifically for trying out these sort of things.
I do too, actually. His editorial comments are interesting, touching on statistics, politics, and the quirks of our electoral college. He's also a tech guy, and had to fend off some pretty serious DOS attacks during the last election cycle. I suppose you could argue that his commentary tends to lean left (after being anonymous for awhile, Votemaster came out as a democrat). In my mind, though, he seems fairly centrist and explains his methodology so that when the map shifts one way or another, you can see the details as to why. Works for me.
. . . the number of P2P clients that use peer blocking jumped 40%.
I suspect that the people measuring P2P downloading are the same people being paid to find downloaders. It's in their best interest to show that they're making a difference and should continue to be paid.
Dang. It's starting to show that I've left science and gone into computers.
If only they'd expressed it in powers of two (e.g. 2^16).
- 1.5 T is what's used in MRIs (people have died when metallic objects fly around in these fields)
- 16 T will levitate a frog
- 45 T is the strongest magetic field continuously produced in a laboratory.
- 10,000 T is instantly lethal to organic life
Basically we're fine levitating frogs, but probably won't be able to use it as part of an instant-death ray.I know the folks who maintain our work's various policies and get brought in when discussing the computer-related ones. Typically policies are in place so that when a person's behavior (in person or online) get out of hand, they can point to a policy and say "you need to change or you'll be let go".
One specific to blogging appeared, with the usual wording about appropriate use of our company's name and so on (I think they wanted public affairs involved any time the name was mentioned in a blog). I came up with a list of obvious problems it raised, there was an outbreak of common sense, and all blogging language was removed.
Personally I feel that policies shouldn't be specific to online behavior if at all possible. Instead it's best to remain neutral to the form of communication and shape policies around it. For example, if we have a policy against hate speech, I wouldn't want to see employees writing hate speech on their blogs while they're at work (we let employees get online during breaks as long as it doesn't interfere with their work). What they do with their own time at home, of course, should generally be their own business.
Oh, I'm pretty sure the operators were duly chastised. Like any disaster, there were several opportunities to notice the issue and correct it, but sadly they didn't happen. There were other failures, such as when the diesel generator didn't supply power to the data center. The operators also sit in an area outside the data center, and I suspect the beeping UPS didn't get heard through the big glass windows.
Our data center had a catastrophic failure last year when the generator test failed and the operators didn't notice they had no power until the UPS died 15 minutes later. Absolutely everything lost power, and we spent the day recovering systems from various messy states. The exception was our Tandem, used for our clinical system, which was kept alive by a series of D batteries powering the CPU. We used to make fun of those D battieries, but never again.
In any case, our data center is part of a larger facility and while it's easy to report on overall power use for the facility, it's mixed in with so much else that it's hard to get a good estimate for power use by the data center alone. As we found out the hard way, the UPS wasn't adequate for downtimes longer than 15 minutes. We've since made a big push to improve the UPS and reduce the number of physical servers in the data center (switching to virtual whenever possible).
It's not that we're breeding like rabbits, it's that we're not dropping like flies.
I work for a health care organization. We ship our backups off-site just like these guys. When it comes to encrypting hard drives, what you say makes sense. When it comes to backup tapes, it's not going to happen. The main reason is that encryption is slow. If I have to restore 500 GB of data and decrypt it, suddenly you're telling physicians that they can't get to the patient information they need to treat the patient even later than before. If someone loses the encryption keys, the information patients need to stay alive is simply gone forever.
I think it's important to safeguard information. At the same time, I see these sort of cases sensationalized and lawyers demand decisions that are incredibly stupid. We don't save e-mail past a year any more because of legal issues. This means that I can't solve issues or know what was going on unless I take cumbersome actions to save data off somewhere (made deliberately difficult). What you're suggesting is that lawyers should run even more of our business.
This event probably ended up establishing the concept of "races", meaning small groups of geographically isolated humans ended up having a lot of genetically distinct features. As their populations grew, they seemed very foreign to each other and only in modern times those barriers to gene flow seem to be falling.
I look forward to the day when people stop saying "I'm X race" and instead say "I carry the genetic markers for A, B, and C." Well, perhaps it's unlikely, but an ex-biologist can dream, can't he?
At this point, it seems like just about everyone's SSN is out there in the public domain in one form or another. What pains me is that SSN is still used like a password for many institutions. Banks will ask for SSN, birthdate, and mother's maiden name. Unfortunately all of those things can be found out with a bit of digging.
The more these breaches happen, the more apparent it is that we need a better "proof of identity" mechanism. I'm not advocating for the government to pass out universal ID cards to everyone. I think I'd rather see something along the lines of SSL certificates, where business can issue identification to people and later use that number and passphrase to do business with them. Perhaps a handful of business certificates become the "gold standard" and and are accepted by other businesses as a valid identifier.
Well, it's extremely difficult to perform dietary experiments on humans. People tend not to like being told what to eat. Still, a few weeks ago the results of the DASH diet came in, with yet more evidence that eating a mostly plant-based diet is best for you.
True, everyone's going to die. What seems to happen, though, is that people's diet can influence the quality of life and length of life. I don't think it's a straw man argument to hold up statistics that compare health issues and diet.