That's not just bad marketing, it's a marketing showstopper. Remember Ball-buster-man's comment "You might want to squirt me pictures of your kids"? Sorry, anyone who puts squirt and kids in the same sentence should be locked up, IMHO.
Seriously, it sounds like Ball-head-man was desperately trying to come up with a catchy name for that wifi thing the device does so badly. He's the most executron-looking dweeb I've ever seen; he typifies the image of the whole company to the yoot who buy such gadgets.
So please Mr. Ballmer, don't squirt on me, K? Thanks...
I have to say it and agree with whoever else has pointed this out: Give a village $100 and they'll eat for a year. Give them a $100 laptop and children will have a chance to further their education and eat for a lifetime. *Doh!!*
Thanks: redundant or not, I had to get that off pasty-white, bony, geek-boy chest;-)
This calls to mind an interview with Gates on Letterman, in the mid-late 90s after Gates finally acknowledged that just maybe the Internet was going to be the future. He was extolling the wonderful things the 'Net could do for us: provide news, sports coverage, weather and music streaming. Letterman shot back that he could do that now: "It's called a radio." It brought peels of laughter from the audience and threw Gates completely off his game. Brilliant.
You're bringing back memories. I remember those had a particular problem with seizing up and indeed, WD40 was the fix.
But I did at one time have a 5-MB drive working with my turbo-xt clone machine which had it's lid removed and platters exposed. Worked great for quite a while actually.
> Have you been walking outside your house for the last 100 thousand years?
No, but I, and a lot of other people, have been walking outside for the past thirty years, and they have noticed trends. I have loads of anecdotes myself, one of which is walking in a park in London (UK, for you Venusians out there) in February with the temperature in the mid-70's. Add that to loads of friends and acquaintances reporting that winters are shorter or just plain weird (remember, global warming doesn't always mean higher temps, but also bizarre weather patterns), and other reports from reliable news sources and such and it all adds up to *something*. If you have a good alternate explanation, then please tell the class.
> Total BS! > Then STFU.
Please don't speak to me, or anyone else this way. It's extremely rude, and no-one should use such language when speaking with another; if you have a rebuttal to a comment, do make it, but make it with facts and let the facts speak for themselves.
1. Open door 2. Walk outside 3. Note that the weather is very much unseasonable for this time of year 4. Doh!
Folks, it's obvious that things are not as they should be, and that summer-like weather is consuming more and more of the year. Forget science - do your own experiment, as outlined above.
And combined with the post above about noticing that email addresses given to US government departments causing spam influxes, it shows that the main enemy might be right under our noses. Certainly system admins are making good money selling email lists, so more has to be done to prevent email addresses being let out into the wild as possible.
However, that doesn't prevent the spammers who play a guessing game for email addresses, but it's a start.
I think one thing that hinders discovery and prosecution is that a lot of the pumpndumpers are Russian and other Asian mafia types, in countries where there is little recourse for stopping them.
Interestingly, in the article there is mention that spamming is less profitable, indicating that now spammers can count on only 1 in 100,000 victims responding and getting scammed whereas they could count on 1 in 1,000 a few years ago. So it seems that education and overall awareness of spam as being something to ignore is taking hold, which bodes well for the future.
However, there should be much more effort towards tracking down spammers originating in North America and Europe, as doing so will have a significant impact on the amount of spam being produced.
I think the creators of Half Life probably still think Gopher is current tech. Did they just resurrect the code for the original virtual world stuff of yore and rebrand it? The web is about innovation - the graphics in Half Life are more crude than 100,000 year old cave paintings.
Also consider the difference between the US and other countries with despotic regimes. In many other countries you have a large pool of soldiers willing to blindly follow and enforce orders given by the dictator, because of poor education and basically very low moral standards, along with the fact that he country probably has very little precedent set for a strong democracy anyway.
In the case if the US, there is a relatively good educational system, and the vast majority of soldiers would be very much aware that they are causing damage to the country's democratic ideals by acting like gestapo. I believe there would be a sudden rise in conscientious objection if martial law were declared.
You've chosen to simply "despise Democrats," dismissing them out of hand, and have indicated that you would normally simply vote Republican - essentially along party lines without thought to the merits of the individual politicians.
The fact is that you waited until the very politicians you voted for started dismantling the very principles of the United States Constitution to suddenly start raising objections. If you'd not voted so blindly in previous elections, you wouldn't be in this mess, basically. But it appears to be a bit late now.
My suggestion: at the most local level, make sure that you only vote for politicians who you've thoroughly researched, completely ignoring such artificial boundaries as party names. And if the guy/gal you voted for turns out to be dishonest, make your voice known in the next election - or run for office yourself.
I joined the other day to see what the fuss is all about. And I'm now totally baffled as to what the fuss is all about. I was looking at graphics that hadn't advanced since the hoo-ha about virtual worlds back in the late 90's. Crude and extremely difficult to navigate in a world about as attractive and welcoming as a... well as a graphically rendered world circa 1998. Nasty.
And the thought of interacting with even more poorly rendered avatars which only represent real humans' own invented alter egos is even less attractive a thought. Utterly lame, as the kids would say.
So rendering weather in such a horrible environment seems rather pointless. So now we'll see a bunch of people with bugs bunny heads and angel wings wandering randomly about the place spouting random thoughts whilst walking right through various bits of random stuff strewn about the place... while it pours with rain. Well that sounds like a lot of fun
Well, I certainly haven't reached the limit of music I've bought on good ol' vinyl. Trust me, discovering new musical gems in the record collections of the elderly and middle-aged having house sales and at thrift shops is vastly more satisfying than waking up from your nap where you fell asleep at the desk during a 48-hour Warcraft marathon, moved two muscles to click the mouse on the download button for the latest shite music offering from the major media houses then falling back asleep again.
And the sound quality is vastly better as well of course.
As to your last part, I'm tired of that damned argument. These kids willingly joined the army, yes to pay for college, but they were told repeatedly and voluntarily swore an oath (no fucking fine print) that when the U.S. goes to war, they will probably have to ship off and if that is the case, there is nothing they can do about it. I feel little sympathy for these kids, I mean it sucks over there but you did sign up with the military, what did you expect? Why didn't you go for the National Guard, hmm? Your chances of being deployed over seas to hostile combat zone are dramatically reduced in that organization.
It should also be part of every soldier's education the lessons learned from previous wars in which the intransigence of the ultimate commanders on each side, in which their pride came before regard for the lives of the footsoldiers, which kept the virtual genocidal conflicts of WWI, Vietnam etc boiling away. The thinking of our leaders is no more rational than it ever was because... we're human (actually we're animals, and all our behaviour is animalistic. The aforementioned intransigence of the upper leadership is a testament to that).
However they should be taught this before they sign up, although that would utterly destroy recruiting numbers.
This is right up there with such urban legends as "Microsoft products crash all the time".
Really. I've spoken to many hard-core developers. I invariably have asked what they think of Linux and their reply is invariably: "I use what gets the job done. Microsoft works and has the tools. But I don't care what the platform is, I just need to get my coding finished and working stably."
I know I have a choice, and I choose Windows XP. I do so because it runs the applications which I need to do my job, and it *doesn't* crash. I have a school full of Windows machines, and they *don't* crash. And believe you me, if they crashed I'd never hear the end of it as it's my responsibility to keep them crash-free.
Funny you should mention it, but I hear that Sony makes a point of archiving it's music on analog formats as they still don't consider digital a "stable medium."
I only really listen to music on records, and I know for a fact that this format, while being vastly superior sound-wise, will also live into the forseeable future, *without* DRM. One advantage: When you look at the groove (records only have *one* groove per side) you see the wave form and any life form can deduce that they are probably looking at a wave form. A shiny silver disk with pits in it would take a lot more effort to figure out.
is it really a good idea to teach potentially hostile aliens about how we work (and by extension how to kill us)?
By now, they've no doubt concluded that all they have to do is wait another couple hundred years for us do the deed ourselves, thereby saving the aliens a bundle on the cost of deploying military assets.
Equally important is the password complexity. Windows Server 2003 prompts for a password at installation and insists on a certain level of complexity, although you have the option of entering password of lower complexity, which is guaranteeing that a lazy or overworked admin will enter 'password' and tell himself he'll get back and enter a more complex one when he has time. And inevitably never does.
But an ATM or similar machine should enforce a password complexity level, and even provide a password generator with appropriate precautions and dialogs warning that if that password is lost then it will be *hell* to reset it.
Myth: Vinyl sound is all scratches, hiss and rumble. Truth: Only if you abuse your vinyl as I (and most of those of my generation) did when I was a youth. A properly cleaned and taken care of record (not hard to do!) is a very clean sounding medium. Also, the very small amount of noise (and the inevetiable occasional tick and pop) are reminders that there's a world out there beyond the audio system.
Myth: Vinyl has limited dynamic range compared to the CD. Truth: An all-analog LP has much greater *apparent* dynamic range than a CD. This is a feature of Analog versus digital, not CD versus LP. Proof? Just listen.
Myth: Digital music means absolute control over what we can listen to. And there's so much stuff out there on the P2P and legit download services. Truth: What you'll find once you adopt the LP as a format is that your muscal horizons will expand massively. When I only bought CDs I found that I only acquired those albums of my favourite music and little else. After I started in with LPs again I'm finding some amazing stuff that I never heard of - rare punk, gorgeously recorded classical, very rare jazz that will *never* see proper CD release, etc, etc.
One other observation: An all-analog LP in good nick is much easier to listen to than a digital version. I can turn up Beck's Blow by Blow to insane levels before my ears complain, but a similar digital version hurts my head at even moderate levels.
I urge all here to go down to their local hifi shop and see if they'll give you a demo of a good vinyl playback system. You will be floored.
For all the distortion of that format, some great timbral accuracy remains. Those and the better electrically recorded 78's had some amazing sound, believe it or not (as in Ripley's).
Not to mention, about ten years ago a company release a special 78 pressing of modern analog recorded music as experiment, and apparently it was a knockout.
This does point to the dangers of relying on computerised processes to take control of critical system functions which could potentially put human wellbeing at risk. Computers, particularly digital ones, tend to have absolute modes of failure: they may not fail often, but when they do, it's often a doozy.
With human design failures in more purely mechanical devices. fixes are more obvious and failure points can sometimes even be detected and corrected by the end user, whereas computerised systems often don't show signs of problems until it hits that misplaced bit of code and [insert Earth-shattering kaboom here].
On a Segway, such a system poses relatively small risk of injury, but with cars and other large modes of transport increasingly relying on computer processing for their critical functions, a need for extremely rigorous testing presents itself. I would suggest that the relevant government regulatory agencies step in and set standards for the roadworthiness of these systems, as human wellbeing is affected.
Just my random thoughts brought about by this article.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not just bad marketing, it's a marketing showstopper. Remember Ball-buster-man's comment "You might want to squirt me pictures of your kids"? Sorry, anyone who puts squirt and kids in the same sentence should be locked up, IMHO.
Seriously, it sounds like Ball-head-man was desperately trying to come up with a catchy name for that wifi thing the device does so badly. He's the most executron-looking dweeb I've ever seen; he typifies the image of the whole company to the yoot who buy such gadgets.
So please Mr. Ballmer, don't squirt on me, K? Thanks...
I have to say it and agree with whoever else has pointed this out: Give a village $100 and they'll eat for a year. Give them a $100 laptop and children will have a chance to further their education and eat for a lifetime. *Doh!!*
;-)
Thanks: redundant or not, I had to get that off pasty-white, bony, geek-boy chest
This calls to mind an interview with Gates on Letterman, in the mid-late 90s after Gates finally acknowledged that just maybe the Internet was going to be the future. He was extolling the wonderful things the 'Net could do for us: provide news, sports coverage, weather and music streaming. Letterman shot back that he could do that now: "It's called a radio." It brought peels of laughter from the audience and threw Gates completely off his game. Brilliant.
Which could explain why the bearings would inevitably seize up again after a while. Very interesting...
You're bringing back memories. I remember those had a particular problem with seizing up and indeed, WD40 was the fix.
But I did at one time have a 5-MB drive working with my turbo-xt clone machine which had it's lid removed and platters exposed. Worked great for quite a while actually.
Cheers
> Have you been walking outside your house for the last 100 thousand years?
No, but I, and a lot of other people, have been walking outside for the past thirty years, and they have noticed trends. I have loads of anecdotes myself, one of which is walking in a park in London (UK, for you Venusians out there) in February with the temperature in the mid-70's. Add that to loads of friends and acquaintances reporting that winters are shorter or just plain weird (remember, global warming doesn't always mean higher temps, but also bizarre weather patterns), and other reports from reliable news sources and such and it all adds up to *something*. If you have a good alternate explanation, then please tell the class.
> Total BS!
> Then STFU.
Please don't speak to me, or anyone else this way. It's extremely rude, and no-one should use such language when speaking with another; if you have a rebuttal to a comment, do make it, but make it with facts and let the facts speak for themselves.
Cheers,
Dennis
1. Open door
2. Walk outside
3. Note that the weather is very much unseasonable for this time of year
4. Doh!
Folks, it's obvious that things are not as they should be, and that summer-like weather is consuming more and more of the year. Forget science - do your own experiment, as outlined above.
And combined with the post above about noticing that email addresses given to US government departments causing spam influxes, it shows that the main enemy might be right under our noses. Certainly system admins are making good money selling email lists, so more has to be done to prevent email addresses being let out into the wild as possible.
However, that doesn't prevent the spammers who play a guessing game for email addresses, but it's a start.
Cheers
I think one thing that hinders discovery and prosecution is that a lot of the pumpndumpers are Russian and other Asian mafia types, in countries where there is little recourse for stopping them.
Interestingly, in the article there is mention that spamming is less profitable, indicating that now spammers can count on only 1 in 100,000 victims responding and getting scammed whereas they could count on 1 in 1,000 a few years ago. So it seems that education and overall awareness of spam as being something to ignore is taking hold, which bodes well for the future.
However, there should be much more effort towards tracking down spammers originating in North America and Europe, as doing so will have a significant impact on the amount of spam being produced.
Cheers
Yeah. I blame it on being dog tired when posting that. It was a hard week for me last week.
:-)
So yeah, Second Life sucks, Half Life doesn't. Thanks for pointing that out
I think the creators of Half Life probably still think Gopher is current tech. Did they just resurrect the code for the original virtual world stuff of yore and rebrand it? The web is about innovation - the graphics in Half Life are more crude than 100,000 year old cave paintings.
Sheesh
As long as they keep giving us such primitive and poorly designed online experiences as Half Life.
Also consider the difference between the US and other countries with despotic regimes. In many other countries you have a large pool of soldiers willing to blindly follow and enforce orders given by the dictator, because of poor education and basically very low moral standards, along with the fact that he country probably has very little precedent set for a strong democracy anyway.
In the case if the US, there is a relatively good educational system, and the vast majority of soldiers would be very much aware that they are causing damage to the country's democratic ideals by acting like gestapo. I believe there would be a sudden rise in conscientious objection if martial law were declared.
You've chosen to simply "despise Democrats," dismissing them out of hand, and have indicated that you would normally simply vote Republican - essentially along party lines without thought to the merits of the individual politicians.
The fact is that you waited until the very politicians you voted for started dismantling the very principles of the United States Constitution to suddenly start raising objections. If you'd not voted so blindly in previous elections, you wouldn't be in this mess, basically. But it appears to be a bit late now.
My suggestion: at the most local level, make sure that you only vote for politicians who you've thoroughly researched, completely ignoring such artificial boundaries as party names. And if the guy/gal you voted for turns out to be dishonest, make your voice known in the next election - or run for office yourself.
It's simple really.
I joined the other day to see what the fuss is all about. And I'm now totally baffled as to what the fuss is all about. I was looking at graphics that hadn't advanced since the hoo-ha about virtual worlds back in the late 90's. Crude and extremely difficult to navigate in a world about as attractive and welcoming as a... well as a graphically rendered world circa 1998. Nasty.
And the thought of interacting with even more poorly rendered avatars which only represent real humans' own invented alter egos is even less attractive a thought. Utterly lame, as the kids would say.
So rendering weather in such a horrible environment seems rather pointless. So now we'll see a bunch of people with bugs bunny heads and angel wings wandering randomly about the place spouting random thoughts whilst walking right through various bits of random stuff strewn about the place... while it pours with rain. Well that sounds like a lot of fun
Well, I certainly haven't reached the limit of music I've bought on good ol' vinyl. Trust me, discovering new musical gems in the record collections of the elderly and middle-aged having house sales and at thrift shops is vastly more satisfying than waking up from your nap where you fell asleep at the desk during a 48-hour Warcraft marathon, moved two muscles to click the mouse on the download button for the latest shite music offering from the major media houses then falling back asleep again.
And the sound quality is vastly better as well of course.
It should also be part of every soldier's education the lessons learned from previous wars in which the intransigence of the ultimate commanders on each side, in which their pride came before regard for the lives of the footsoldiers, which kept the virtual genocidal conflicts of WWI, Vietnam etc boiling away. The thinking of our leaders is no more rational than it ever was because... we're human (actually we're animals, and all our behaviour is animalistic. The aforementioned intransigence of the upper leadership is a testament to that).
However they should be taught this before they sign up, although that would utterly destroy recruiting numbers.
This is right up there with such urban legends as "Microsoft products crash all the time".
Really. I've spoken to many hard-core developers. I invariably have asked what they think of Linux and their reply is invariably: "I use what gets the job done. Microsoft works and has the tools. But I don't care what the platform is, I just need to get my coding finished and working stably."
I know I have a choice, and I choose Windows XP. I do so because it runs the applications which I need to do my job, and it *doesn't* crash. I have a school full of Windows machines, and they *don't* crash. And believe you me, if they crashed I'd never hear the end of it as it's my responsibility to keep them crash-free.
Oy.
Funny you should mention it, but I hear that Sony makes a point of archiving it's music on analog formats as they still don't consider digital a "stable medium."
I only really listen to music on records, and I know for a fact that this format, while being vastly superior sound-wise, will also live into the forseeable future, *without* DRM. One advantage: When you look at the groove (records only have *one* groove per side) you see the wave form and any life form can deduce that they are probably looking at a wave form. A shiny silver disk with pits in it would take a lot more effort to figure out.
Cheers
By now, they've no doubt concluded that all they have to do is wait another couple hundred years for us do the deed ourselves, thereby saving the aliens a bundle on the cost of deploying military assets.
Cheers
Equally important is the password complexity. Windows Server 2003 prompts for a password at installation and insists on a certain level of complexity, although you have the option of entering password of lower complexity, which is guaranteeing that a lazy or overworked admin will enter 'password' and tell himself he'll get back and enter a more complex one when he has time. And inevitably never does.
But an ATM or similar machine should enforce a password complexity level, and even provide a password generator with appropriate precautions and dialogs warning that if that password is lost then it will be *hell* to reset it.
Simple stuff.
Myth: Vinyl sound is all scratches, hiss and rumble.
Truth: Only if you abuse your vinyl as I (and most of those of my generation) did when I was a youth. A properly cleaned and taken care of record (not hard to do!) is a very clean sounding medium. Also, the very small amount of noise (and the inevetiable occasional tick and pop) are reminders that there's a world out there beyond the audio system.
Myth: Vinyl has limited dynamic range compared to the CD.
Truth: An all-analog LP has much greater *apparent* dynamic range than a CD. This is a feature of Analog versus digital, not CD versus LP. Proof? Just listen.
Myth: Digital music means absolute control over what we can listen to. And there's so much stuff out there on the P2P and legit download services.
Truth: What you'll find once you adopt the LP as a format is that your muscal horizons will expand massively. When I only bought CDs I found that I only acquired those albums of my favourite music and little else. After I started in with LPs again I'm finding some amazing stuff that I never heard of - rare punk, gorgeously recorded classical, very rare jazz that will *never* see proper CD release, etc, etc.
One other observation: An all-analog LP in good nick is much easier to listen to than a digital version. I can turn up Beck's Blow by Blow to insane levels before my ears complain, but a similar digital version hurts my head at even moderate levels.
I urge all here to go down to their local hifi shop and see if they'll give you a demo of a good vinyl playback system. You will be floored.
Cheers
For all the distortion of that format, some great timbral accuracy remains. Those and the better electrically recorded 78's had some amazing sound, believe it or not (as in Ripley's).
Not to mention, about ten years ago a company release a special 78 pressing of modern analog recorded music as experiment, and apparently it was a knockout.
Cheers
We will instead see 'hack-in' votes. So we'll someday see a socially-inept, spotty 14 year old elected as the leader of the once-free world.
Seriously, as long as the voting machines are computerised, there will be ways to hack them, and they will be hacked.
This does point to the dangers of relying on computerised processes to take control of critical system functions which could potentially put human wellbeing at risk. Computers, particularly digital ones, tend to have absolute modes of failure: they may not fail often, but when they do, it's often a doozy.
With human design failures in more purely mechanical devices. fixes are more obvious and failure points can sometimes even be detected and corrected by the end user, whereas computerised systems often don't show signs of problems until it hits that misplaced bit of code and [insert Earth-shattering kaboom here].
On a Segway, such a system poses relatively small risk of injury, but with cars and other large modes of transport increasingly relying on computer processing for their critical functions, a need for extremely rigorous testing presents itself. I would suggest that the relevant government regulatory agencies step in and set standards for the roadworthiness of these systems, as human wellbeing is affected.
Just my random thoughts brought about by this article.