Listen, I love Transmeta because they had some cool ideas when they started out. And hey, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, works there as well. So their geek factor is really high and they seem like nice people as well (I visited back in 2000).
I was just let-go by my company last Friday after 10 years of service. Bills are lying around waiting to be paid and I'm trying to send out resumes and find some work before my wife and kid leave me. I love them to death and would probably "end it all" if I lost them.
So why should I spend my meager (non-existant, now) salary to support a company? They're in a business, and the business of business involves profiting.
If you can't profit, you lose the business. So Transmeta, enough with this puppy-eyed cutesy appeal to the geek masses for financial support. Many of us are unemployed as it is and risking losing our lives from insanity.
Or, build your own Intel- or AMD-based computer that's cheaper, faster, and uses less power.
Transmeta had a great goal when they started four years ago to reduce power use in their chips and allow for code-morphing, but it's now 2002 and mobile Intel and AMD chips are faster and use less power. And don't even get started on desktop CPU comparison...
Any Linux users do wireless stuff?
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
How in the name of Greyskull do I get Linux 8.2 to recognize and allow access to my 128-bit encrypted wireless (802.11.x) network? (I'm using Mandrake)
Please listen up to my noteworthy advice
on
Professional PHP4
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· Score: 3, Interesting
We recently switched from perl to PHP. Perl seems to be much better and handling file manipulations and it definitely is more a more complete language. But developing in PHP is so fast that the switch was easy.
With PHP, the default "thing" in a file is html that it just spits out. You have to do something special to make PHP code to run. So if I configured my server to handle.html with cgi-bin/php, all of my pages would still be served fine (although slower if run as a CGI.) What this means is that our layout people can design pages and we can easily put in code after the page design is done to make it look just like they want it. If they then want to move stuff around, they can (for the most part). They can even use editors like frontpage (and it won't complain about the php code if you use the code delimiters.)
Also, with PHP you can also do things like this: <? if (somthing) {? Something was selected ? } else { ? Something was not selected ? } ?>
so when I am printing out large chunks of html based on some variable, I can just use html without messy prints all over the place. Of course, you can use perl "print EOP" type statments, but I think the PHP approach is more elegant.
Also, the fact that PHP takes care of all the variable collection was a big plus for me. I just type testing.phtml?id=2&name="jeff" and sure enough, $id=2 and $name=jeff. Obviously, you can do the same thing in perl and it's not terribly difficult. But in PHP it is just that much easier and it's one more thing I don't have to worry about.
I would strongly recommend that you at least try PHP for a simple mail form or something. I think you'll fall in love with it for web stuff. And if you're doing database work too, then I think you'll really like it.
Merits of PHP compared to Perl?
on
Professional PHP4
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
I have to prepare a report at my job discussing the merits of Perl and PHP and would like some ideas for good points to put across in favor or against either one.
Personally I favor Perl as I think it can do much more but I'm not an expert by any means and I'd like to present some reasonable sounding arguments, possibly in front of people who are experts in Perl.
Any ideas?
Oh, and another question. I'm not 100% sure how Perl actually runs the Perl code. I know it gets compiled to P code, but I'm not sure at what stage this is done. Can anyone tell me how this works or give me a pointer to where I could find it?
As usual, thanks for your help Slashdotters.
Why I never cared much for LOTR
on
David Brin On LOTR
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'm a computer science nerd and fully admit it to anyone who asks, but I must say that I don't quite feel the same way about LOTR as I did about SW:ESB or SW:ROTJ.
1) They switched Darrens Look closely and you'll notice the human member of their party is played by two different actors at different points of the movie (it takes a sharp eye to notice, but one of them has red hair, one black).
2) Violence Give me one reason that story couldn't have been told without all the fighting.
3) I'll have to rent that one The rushed-through story the screenwriter threw in as the first ten minutes of Fellowship of the Ring looked a lot more interesting than the movie we were forced to watch. Why didn't somebody make a movie off that instead?
4) Magic Mechanics Experts on the occult say in order for a wizard to floorspin a fully-grown man like Gandalf, he'd need three magical staffs, not two.
5) Racism Percentage of protagonists in Fellowship who are white: 100. Meanwhile the black antagonists and their black crow spies and their black glass seeing ball inhabit their black towers and perform black magic. Gosh, I wonder if there's some symbolism there?
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I certainly didn't have as many beefs with the Star Wars epics or even with the most recent Star Trek: Nemesis movie (the one where Data dies -- it's in most theaters now I believe).
I never got into those Magic: The Gathering cards either, so perhaps I just don't like the whole wizard genre of films and books.
OK. Who do you think would win in a straight out fight? The troll from Harry Potter or the troll from LotR. My vote goes to the LotR troll, he was fast! The Harry Potter troll was dumb and slow, but he looked bigger. And how about between Dumbledore and Gandalf?
I just have to gush about my early Christmas "gifts". Even if they are from me to me - with a little help from a few "elves".
Last night I received a call from the one and only Lars...letting me know that the dagger that I ordered from Lundegaard in Sept. was being shipped to me today! So I should be getting this really cool dagger with a kris blade (dubbed shorty) on Monday...at work! Can't wait! Woo Hoo. Just in time for Christmas.
Also, I received in the mail today my very first Invasion danglie! I want to thank William Iserman for taking care of ordering the danglies and shipping them off so quickly. He was also generous and did not take payment for them. Merry Christmas to you all. I also look forward to seeing many of you at Thursday's Slashdot Meetup (slashdot.meetup.com).
I never understood and still don't get why people get their panties all in a bunch about a few emails from businesses that they have to read through and delete or whatever.
Say it with me -- it's called advertising.
And that's not illegal in America. Our nation's founded upon principles of free-market, best-product-wins-out, advertising-reigns free beliefs. So why does a few pieces of so-called "junk" mail bother everyone so much?
Email isn't meant to be just for you to talk to your kids, co-workers, etc. It's not all about forwarding lame tired old jokes to your entire address book. It's about communication, and I say that if companies feel that communicating via email is a better form of advertising for them, then so be it.
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
If I feel sorry for anyone it's the companies whose million dollar ad campaigns get shut down by "spam-blocking" email filters, portable video recorders (like TiVo) that allow "skip commercials" functionality, and other anti-America, anti-business, anti-innovation tactics.
What if you were a CEO? How would you feel about all this bad press?
It's pretty simple actually
on
Who Owns Science?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
There's a rarely-explored connection between science and freedom AFAIK.
IANAL, but I still feel that the automatic assumption that these two things will always get better rests on the broad but not infinite shoulders of Aristotle, the Founding Fathers (regardless of where you live), and Ayn Rand-like characters.
IIRC from my studies, during the 'Dark Ages', the accumulated knowledge of centuries vanished, and these instants nearly coincided with repression of freedom (either from church or state).
PMFJI, but there is much evidence that the American era is coming to an end, and with it may come darker ages than those ever before known. (specifally, I cite the FDA, for crushing the advance of pharmacudical/medical science, as well as the departments of education, for caving to the mysics in their insistance that creationism be taught in public schools; and the gov't in general for any and all attempts to regulate, censor, or tax the Internet.)
This may sound TLTBT, but I say enjoy the freedom you have while you still have it. Our time time may be running out.
TXS.
Easiest question I've had to answer all day?
on
Who Owns Science?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Way back in the 19th century, protestant Englishman and Americans celebrated the new religion of amorality. This belief constituted a release from moral stricture for the then ruling class. Well this class rules today, and so does their moral law that they established.
Look, I don't know how to tell you this, but corporate america owns science, and has owned science for over a century. I think you should consider what this means.
You know what? I'm not putting away $15,000 a year for my son's college tuition for nothing.
He will go to either Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in EE or CS. Then he'll graduate and hopefully get a job with a Fortune 500 company as an IT specialist/consultant.
I don't want this constant contracting-out of IT jobs and project to India. Why is Microsoft over there courting the Indians? Because there's talent, and they're hungry, and oh, they work for $5.00 a day.
So please, if any of you are in significant positions in technology companies in the northeast or out in California, I urge you to keep jobs at home. Just look here at the Slashdot crowd -- most of us are unemployed, or currently in college. The job market is tough right now and only getting tougher.
I will not let my kid go to medical or law school, so he must be an engineer. But I sure as hell hope there is still a tech industry in America by the time he graduates in 2014.
My 35" TV is probably eight years old and ready to be replaced. Is now a good time to buy a new TV, or are there worthwhile developments in the pipeline (Bluetooth?) that make it worth waiting 12 months?
I remember when I was back in high school in the late 1980s (mixed black & white), there were of course always groups of kids small and large who would talk about playing the old 8-bit Nintendo sysetm during study hall, lunch, and after school. Sure, a few of them were black, but most of the kids in any given group were white.
I was watching TV today, and they were showing a packed school auditorium in a black neighborhood. As the camera panned the auditorium, I noticed that literally every single student was black. No whites whatsoever. And that got me to thinking: I wonder if groups of these kids in this school get together and play Nintendo Gamecube, X-Box, Playstation, etc. or any other console game system? Or, are they just culturally not interested in such things?
Is it the price? Is it a cultural thing (white people prefer games, blacks prefer sports)? Is it a DNA thing?
If you can shed any kind of insight into this, I'd appreciate it.
But they often make mistakes. I mean, I hope things are better with their Gamecube model that's out now.
Back in the N64 days, though, it was often:
1. Take an old SFC/NES title
2. Add "64" to it
3. Take away the plot
4. Make all the gameplay elements shit
5. Give it crappy polygonal gfx
6. Make some silly ads for it
7. Delay it
8. Delay it again
9. Delay it again
10. Delay it again
11. Either repeat from step 8 or release it
Kind of harsh, but kind of true as well. This is why they lost so much ground to the Playstation and X-Box consoles. N64 just didn't cut it, and the kids weren't interested.
Why are we wasting precious bandwidth?
on
HotBot Returns
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· Score: 2, Troll
I realize that I post a lot here, so I've refrained a bit recently.
But I just wanted to say that someone needs to point out the following:
Every competitor to Google adds to the amount of spidering traffic on the Internet
In fact, it's perfectly valid to go one step further: competing with Google constitutes a terroristic denial of service attack (DOS) on the Internet.
I have a lot of friends. One of them is Inoshiro, who started Kuro5hin.org, a Web site that many of you may be familiar with. I've seen his access logs for that site, and 18% of all hits to K5 are from Google's "GoogleBot 2.1" spider.
I'll let you do the math -> every search engine adds 20% load to the Internet.
Do you want to lose 1 out of 5 packets all because of some lame, was-famous-yesteryear search engine called HotBot? What a waste!
It's not about religion Nor is it a matter of ethics. It's not about love, caring, thoughtfulness, kindness, compassion, vision, hope, intellect, wisdom, or sharing.
It's about feeding my kids.
And I'm sorry, and I'm sure I'll get flamed for this for going against typical Slashdot Zealout creedo, but the license that someone uses for their drawings or computer code or music tracks doesn't mean jack in the long run.
So I'll continue to get paid for the hard work I do and I'll continue to raise my kids the way they should be, and give them whatever they need when they need it.
You know what? I've spent years... years... working on highly-customized and amazingly intelligent (in an A.I. sense) software that runs on multiple platforms and computer architectures. And it's not just me with these skills, it's many of you folks, my fellow Slashdotters, who command an amazingly broad skillset of computer abilities.
I woke up this morning, had some coffee, and browsed through my favorite URLs. After reading Matt Drudge's editorials, I came to Slashdot only to find out that lazy human scientists have decided to enslave an entire species of animal (the common sewer rat) in order to allow for robotic rats that they can manipulate for senseless "exploration" purposes.
NASA can build robots and send them many, many, many,..., many lightyears away to distance planets. They can then remotely control them and obtain rock samples, pH test data, and brightness/contrast/luminosity metrics. They can use them to search as well, locating various pools of high-resource lime and calcium areas. Why can't we do this in this instance? A $20 Lego robot kit could almost get the job done if you just throw in a camera that can sense photons. But no, let's just electrocute rats' brains with RF signals because it's "cool".
The worst part is that these scientists, who I really doubt have any religious beliefs whatsoever (if they did, they wouldn't be supporting animal cruelty/slavery), have decided to use rats as search mechanisms. It's not fair, it's not right, and I urge you all to write to these research labs and state your disgust at their antics.
Listen up, this is the last time I'll say this
on
Decentralization
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Geeks make new stuff primarily because it's fun, because it's useful, and because they can. Suits make new stuff primarily because they hope to earn a profit.
You know what? That's a load of crap, and you know it. I don't even care that you tried to cover your blatant generalization up in the next sentence of the write-up. If someone tells a racist joke, are they not a racist regardless of if they were "just joking"?
I'm sick of these "it's either this way, or that way" people. The computing field is full of a ton of smart people who have more than one ability. I can code with the best of 'em but still am confident that, if necessary and so desired, I could run a group of a dozen or two programmers, system administrators, etc.
The reason I get so upset sometimes is that people pigeonhole themselves into a specific career (major in computer engineering OR major in management OR major in English, etc.) before thinking "Hey, ya know, maybe I'm gifted enough to do both coding and project management and testing, and hey, maybe even a few interviews."
I love to see other fellow men and women reach their highest potential, but that can't happen when you segregate folks into one specific area.
It was covered here and entitled "Rat Mind Control".
I will evaluate this from a lover's perspective
on
Google vs. Evil
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· Score: -1, Troll
Porn takes away all the pleasure of making love, so I think Google probably should censor pornography as well. It has just as bad an effect on one's life as tobacco and firearms do.
My wife is a pornography addict, always buying a new DVD when we travel and she sees a new shop of adult toys. We don't really make love anymore, it's just sex. There's no tenderness and everything is over so fast that I feel used.
Pornography makes "quick finishes" even worse by focusing on the sensuality of certain body parts. Women who've been on a steady diet of porn often want to get right to the body part they fantasize most about, which leaves me wondering "What the fuck happened to foreplay?"
While there can be other physical or psychological causes of premature ejaculation, masturbation is a major cause of "learned" premature ejaculation. Pornography is designed to stimulate masturbatory fantasies. Because masturbation is usually a hurry-up job, a woman learns to bring herself to ejaculation very quickly. This is another reason why pornography is bad.
Shortened foreplay? Premature ejaculation? Are these the tools of a great lover?
I plan on writing a letter to Sergey Brin at Google and encouraging him to stop linking to demeaning, relationship-ruining pornography.
"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."
With all due respect to Google, Eric Schmidt, and Sergay Brin, that statement almost sounds evil in and of itself.
I don't mean to flame folks here, but what if another company decided that their entire philosophy revolved around what their own CEO thought about things? What if this CEO was raised poorly, and without religion, and generally was a mean, racially prejucided man?
Google is an industry leader in the realm of Web search. They are moving into new technology areas as well, such as image searches, Usenet searches, product searches, directory searches, Web page caching, etc. What happens if Brin one day is the victim of a hate crime by a white person? Will he start blocking Google from indexing predominantly white Web sites such as J. Crew, Kuro5hin, or the New York Islanders home page?
It sounds good at first, but upon deeper exploration you'll see that it's: a.) Childish b.) Poorly thought-out c.) Discriminatory d.) A disservice to Internet users
I, for one, will no longer visit Google because I simply can't trust them anymore. I urge others to as well. AllTheWeb is nearly catching up to Google anyway, and is at least as good if not better.
Slashdot Mirror
Listen, I love Transmeta because they had some cool ideas when they started out. And hey, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, works there as well. So their geek factor is really high and they seem like nice people as well (I visited back in 2000).
I was just let-go by my company last Friday after 10 years of service. Bills are lying around waiting to be paid and I'm trying to send out resumes and find some work before my wife and kid leave me. I love them to death and would probably "end it all" if I lost them.
So why should I spend my meager (non-existant, now) salary to support a company? They're in a business, and the business of business involves profiting.
If you can't profit, you lose the business. So Transmeta, enough with this puppy-eyed cutesy appeal to the geek masses for financial support. Many of us are unemployed as it is and risking losing our lives from insanity.
Or, build your own Intel- or AMD-based computer that's cheaper, faster, and uses less power.
Transmeta had a great goal when they started four years ago to reduce power use in their chips and allow for code-morphing, but it's now 2002 and mobile Intel and AMD chips are faster and use less power. And don't even get started on desktop CPU comparison...
How in the name of Greyskull do I get Linux 8.2 to recognize and allow access to my 128-bit encrypted wireless (802.11.x) network? (I'm using Mandrake)
Alcohol and tobacco kill people.
Pornography does not.
We recently switched from perl to PHP. Perl seems to be much better and handling file manipulations and it definitely is more a more complete language. But developing in PHP is so fast that the switch was easy.
.html with cgi-bin/php, all of my pages would still be served fine (although slower if run as a CGI.) What this means is that our layout people can design pages and we can easily put in code after the page design is done to make it look just like they want it. If they then want to move stuff around, they can (for the most part). They can even use editors like frontpage (and it won't complain about the php code if you use the code delimiters.)
With PHP, the default "thing" in a file is html that it just spits out. You have to do something special to make PHP code to run. So if I configured my server to handle
Also, with PHP you can also do things like this:
<? if (somthing) {?
Something was selected
? } else { ?
Something was not selected
? } ?>
so when I am printing out large chunks of html based on some variable, I can just use html without messy prints all over the place. Of course, you can use perl "print EOP" type statments, but I think the PHP approach is more elegant.
Also, the fact that PHP takes care of all the variable collection was a big plus for me. I just type testing.phtml?id=2&name="jeff" and sure enough, $id=2 and $name=jeff. Obviously, you can do the same thing in perl and it's not terribly difficult. But in PHP it is just that much easier and it's one more thing I don't have to worry about.
I would strongly recommend that you at least try PHP for a simple mail form or something. I think you'll fall in love with it for web stuff. And if you're doing database work too, then I think you'll really like it.
I have to prepare a report at my job discussing the merits of Perl and PHP and would like some ideas for good points to put across in favor or against either one.
Personally I favor Perl as I think it can do much more but I'm not an expert by any means and I'd like to present some reasonable sounding arguments, possibly in front of people who are experts in Perl.
Any ideas?
Oh, and another question. I'm not 100% sure how Perl actually runs the Perl code. I know it gets compiled to P code, but I'm not sure at what stage this is done. Can anyone tell me how this works or give me a pointer to where I could find it?
As usual, thanks for your help Slashdotters.
I'm a computer science nerd and fully admit it to anyone who asks, but I must say that I don't quite feel the same way about LOTR as I did about SW:ESB or SW:ROTJ.
1) They switched Darrens
Look closely and you'll notice the human member of their party is played by two different actors at different points of the movie (it takes a sharp eye to notice, but one of them has red hair, one black).
2) Violence
Give me one reason that story couldn't have been told without all the fighting.
3) I'll have to rent that one
The rushed-through story the screenwriter threw in as the first ten minutes of Fellowship of the Ring looked a lot more interesting than the movie we were forced to watch. Why didn't somebody make a movie off that instead?
4) Magic Mechanics
Experts on the occult say in order for a wizard to floorspin a fully-grown man like Gandalf, he'd need three magical staffs, not two.
5) Racism
Percentage of protagonists in Fellowship who are white: 100. Meanwhile the black antagonists and their black crow spies and their black glass seeing ball inhabit their black towers and perform black magic. Gosh, I wonder if there's some symbolism there?
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I certainly didn't have as many beefs with the Star Wars epics or even with the most recent Star Trek: Nemesis movie (the one where Data dies -- it's in most theaters now I believe).
I never got into those Magic: The Gathering cards either, so perhaps I just don't like the whole wizard genre of films and books.
OK. Who do you think would win in a straight out fight? The troll from Harry Potter or the troll from LotR. My vote goes to the LotR troll, he was fast! The Harry Potter troll was dumb and slow, but he looked bigger. And how about between Dumbledore and Gandalf?
I just have to gush about my early Christmas "gifts". Even if they are from me to me - with a little help from a few "elves".
Last night I received a call from the one and only Lars...letting me know that the dagger that I ordered from Lundegaard in Sept. was being shipped to me today! So I should be getting this really cool dagger with a kris blade (dubbed shorty) on Monday...at work! Can't wait! Woo Hoo. Just in time for Christmas.
Also, I received in the mail today my very first Invasion danglie! I want to thank William Iserman for taking care of ordering the danglies and shipping them off so quickly. He was also generous and did not take payment for them.
Merry Christmas to you all. I also look forward to seeing many of you at Thursday's Slashdot Meetup (slashdot.meetup.com).
I never understood and still don't get why people get their panties all in a bunch about a few emails from businesses that they have to read through and delete or whatever.
.
Say it with me -- it's called advertising
And that's not illegal in America. Our nation's founded upon principles of free-market, best-product-wins-out, advertising-reigns free beliefs. So why does a few pieces of so-called "junk" mail bother everyone so much?
Email isn't meant to be just for you to talk to your kids, co-workers, etc. It's not all about forwarding lame tired old jokes to your entire address book. It's about communication, and I say that if companies feel that communicating via email is a better form of advertising for them, then so be it.
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
If I feel sorry for anyone it's the companies whose million dollar ad campaigns get shut down by "spam-blocking" email filters, portable video recorders (like TiVo) that allow "skip commercials" functionality, and other anti-America, anti-business, anti-innovation tactics.
What if you were a CEO? How would you feel about all this bad press?
There's a rarely-explored connection between science and freedom AFAIK.
IANAL, but I still feel that the automatic assumption that these two things will always get better rests on the broad but not infinite shoulders of Aristotle, the Founding Fathers (regardless of where you live), and Ayn Rand-like characters.
IIRC from my studies, during the 'Dark Ages', the accumulated knowledge of centuries vanished, and these instants nearly coincided with repression of freedom (either from church or state).
PMFJI, but there is much evidence that the American era is coming to an end, and with it may come darker ages than those ever before known. (specifally, I cite the FDA, for crushing the advance of pharmacudical/medical science, as well as the departments of education, for caving to the mysics in their insistance that creationism be taught in public schools; and the gov't in general for any and all attempts to regulate, censor, or tax the Internet.)
This may sound TLTBT, but I say enjoy the freedom you have while you still have it. Our time time may be running out.
TXS.
Way back in the 19th century, protestant Englishman and Americans celebrated the new religion of amorality. This belief constituted a release from moral stricture for the then ruling class. Well this class rules today, and so does their moral law that they established.
Look, I don't know how to tell you this, but corporate america owns science, and has owned science for over a century. I think you should
consider what this means.
You know what? I'm not putting away $15,000 a year for my son's college tuition for nothing.
He will go to either Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in EE or CS. Then he'll graduate and hopefully get a job with a Fortune 500 company as an IT specialist/consultant.
I don't want this constant contracting-out of IT jobs and project to India. Why is Microsoft over there courting the Indians? Because there's talent, and they're hungry, and oh, they work for $5.00 a day.
So please, if any of you are in significant positions in technology companies in the northeast or out in California, I urge you to keep jobs at home. Just look here at the Slashdot crowd -- most of us are unemployed, or currently in college. The job market is tough right now and only getting tougher.
I will not let my kid go to medical or law school, so he must be an engineer. But I sure as hell hope there is still a tech industry in America by the time he graduates in 2014.
My 35" TV is probably eight years old and ready to be replaced. Is now a good time to buy a new TV, or are there worthwhile developments in the pipeline (Bluetooth?) that make it worth waiting 12 months?
I remember when I was back in high school in the late 1980s (mixed black & white), there were of course always groups of kids small and large who would talk about playing the old 8-bit Nintendo sysetm during study hall, lunch, and after school. Sure, a few of them were black, but most of the
kids in any given group were white.
I was watching TV today, and they were showing a packed school auditorium in a black neighborhood. As the camera panned the auditorium, I noticed that literally every single student was black. No whites whatsoever. And that got me to thinking: I wonder if groups of these kids in this school get together and play Nintendo Gamecube, X-Box, Playstation, etc. or any other console game system? Or, are they just culturally not interested in such things?
Is it the price? Is it a cultural thing (white people prefer games, blacks prefer sports)? Is it a DNA thing?
If you can shed any kind of insight into this, I'd appreciate it.
But they often make mistakes. I mean, I hope things are better with their Gamecube model that's out now.
Back in the N64 days, though, it was often:
1. Take an old SFC/NES title
2. Add "64" to it
3. Take away the plot
4. Make all the gameplay elements shit
5. Give it crappy polygonal gfx
6. Make some silly ads for it
7. Delay it
8. Delay it again
9. Delay it again
10. Delay it again
11. Either repeat from step 8 or release it
Kind of harsh, but kind of true as well. This is why they lost so much ground to the Playstation and X-Box consoles. N64 just didn't cut it, and the kids weren't interested.
I realize that I post a lot here, so I've refrained a bit recently.
But I just wanted to say that someone needs to point out the following:
Every competitor to Google adds to the amount of spidering traffic on the Internet
In fact, it's perfectly valid to go one step further: competing with Google constitutes a terroristic denial of service attack (DOS) on the Internet.
I have a lot of friends. One of them is Inoshiro, who started Kuro5hin.org, a Web site that many of you may be familiar with. I've seen his access logs for that site, and 18% of all hits to K5 are from Google's "GoogleBot 2.1" spider.
I'll let you do the math -> every search engine adds 20% load to the Internet.
Do you want to lose 1 out of 5 packets all because of some lame, was-famous-yesteryear search engine called HotBot? What a waste!
It's not about religion
Nor is it a matter of ethics.
It's not about love, caring, thoughtfulness, kindness, compassion, vision, hope, intellect, wisdom, or sharing.
It's about feeding my kids.
And I'm sorry, and I'm sure I'll get flamed for this for going against typical Slashdot Zealout creedo, but the license that someone uses for their drawings or computer code or music tracks doesn't mean jack in the long run.
So I'll continue to get paid for the hard work I do and I'll continue to raise my kids the way they should be, and give them whatever they need when they need it.
I'm a father for Christ's sake, not the Pope.
Why are humans so God-awful lazy?
... years ... working on highly-customized and amazingly intelligent (in an A.I. sense) software that runs on multiple platforms and computer architectures. And it's not just me with these skills, it's many of you folks, my fellow Slashdotters, who command an amazingly broad skillset of computer abilities.
..., many lightyears away to distance planets. They can then remotely control them and obtain rock samples, pH test data, and brightness/contrast/luminosity metrics. They can use them to search as well, locating various pools of high-resource lime and calcium areas. Why can't we do this in this instance? A $20 Lego robot kit could almost get the job done if you just throw in a camera that can sense photons. But no, let's just electrocute rats' brains with RF signals because it's "cool".
You know what? I've spent years
I woke up this morning, had some coffee, and browsed through my favorite URLs. After reading Matt Drudge's editorials, I came to Slashdot only to find out that lazy human scientists have decided to enslave an entire species of animal (the common sewer rat) in order to allow for robotic rats that they can manipulate for senseless "exploration" purposes.
NASA can build robots and send them many, many, many,
The worst part is that these scientists, who I really doubt have any religious beliefs whatsoever (if they did, they wouldn't be supporting animal cruelty/slavery), have decided to use rats as search mechanisms. It's not fair, it's not right, and I urge you all to write to these research labs and state your disgust at their antics.
Yay! Now we can play Lemmings for real!
Geeks make new stuff primarily because it's fun, because it's useful, and because they can. Suits make new stuff primarily because they hope to earn a profit.
You know what? That's a load of crap, and you know it. I don't even care that you tried to cover your blatant generalization up in the next sentence of the write-up. If someone tells a racist joke, are they not a racist regardless of if they were "just joking"?
I'm sick of these "it's either this way, or that way" people. The computing field is full of a ton of smart people who have more than one ability. I can code with the best of 'em but still am confident that, if necessary and so desired, I could run a group of a dozen or two programmers, system administrators, etc.
The reason I get so upset sometimes is that people pigeonhole themselves into a specific career (major in computer engineering OR major in management OR major in English, etc.) before thinking "Hey, ya know, maybe I'm gifted enough to do both coding and project management and testing, and hey, maybe even a few interviews."
I love to see other fellow men and women reach their highest potential, but that can't happen when you segregate folks into one specific area.
It was covered here and entitled "Rat Mind Control".
Porn takes away all the pleasure of making love, so I think Google probably should censor pornography as well. It has just as bad an effect on one's life as tobacco and firearms do.
My wife is a pornography addict, always buying a new DVD when we travel and she sees a new shop of adult toys. We don't really make love anymore, it's just sex. There's no tenderness and everything is over so fast that I feel used.
Pornography makes "quick finishes" even worse by focusing on the sensuality of certain body parts. Women who've been on a steady diet of porn often want to get right to the body part they fantasize most about, which leaves me wondering "What the fuck happened to foreplay?"
While there can be other physical or psychological causes of premature ejaculation, masturbation is a major cause of "learned" premature ejaculation. Pornography is designed to stimulate masturbatory fantasies. Because masturbation is usually a hurry-up job, a woman learns to bring herself to ejaculation very quickly. This is another reason why pornography is bad.
Shortened foreplay? Premature ejaculation? Are these the tools of a great lover?
I plan on writing a letter to Sergey Brin at Google and encouraging him to stop linking to demeaning, relationship-ruining pornography.
"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."
With all due respect to Google, Eric Schmidt, and Sergay Brin, that statement almost sounds evil in and of itself.
I don't mean to flame folks here, but what if another company decided that their entire philosophy revolved around what their own CEO thought about things? What if this CEO was raised poorly, and without religion, and generally was a mean, racially prejucided man?
Google is an industry leader in the realm of Web search. They are moving into new technology areas as well, such as image searches, Usenet searches, product searches, directory searches, Web page caching, etc. What happens if Brin one day is the victim of a hate crime by a white person? Will he start blocking Google from indexing predominantly white Web sites such as J. Crew, Kuro5hin, or the New York Islanders home page?
It sounds good at first, but upon deeper exploration you'll see that it's:
a.) Childish
b.) Poorly thought-out
c.) Discriminatory
d.) A disservice to Internet users
I, for one, will no longer visit Google because I simply can't trust them anymore. I urge others to as well. AllTheWeb is nearly catching up to Google anyway, and is at least as good if not better.
Alcohol and cigarettes kill people.
Pornography does not.