It seems to me that one of the reasons MS has always been able to create inconvienient packages from groups of software, and then sell at very high prices, is that they OWN most of the market. In other words, they're so big that you and I can't possibly expect to demand a concession.
Of course, now that countries are starting to realize that they're big enough to push back, we have more of a Goliath vs Goliath thing going on, and maybe MS will start to be more flexible in the way it offers its software. Maybe they'll start to consider adding a language pack when they stand to lose sales to an entire nation.
It'd be nice to be able, for instance, to buy Word and Excel without PowerPoint, Access, or FrontPage. (It'd be even nicer if Frontpage and everyone who contributed to it's creation were cast into Hell, but that's another story!)
She didn't visit her dead father in space. She was visitied by an alien that used her father's image to keep her calm and rational. What bugs me about people missing this point is that it is explicitly explained right in that very scene!
First, I believe "Global Dimming" refers to less visible light reaching the planet's surface, independent of any variation in the Sun's output. This is thought to be due to an increase in airborne particulates. I'd have to check, but I think average solar output has been relatively constant over the last 50 years. If solar output dropped 15.9% in 50 years, (as your 3%/decade number suggests), we'd all be popsicles by now.
Second, I'm pretty sure that the Earth is too massive for reemission of solar radiation to generate enough thrust to cause a 1 second per year change in our orbit.
Third, if the suggested causes involve changes in the Earth's core, the article is probably referring to changes in the length of the day (the Earth's period of rotation), and not the length of the year. I can think of no way, short of ejection of significant mass at escape velocity, that the Earth's core could affect the planet's orbit in any way.
Gawd, yes. It pisses me off no end that I have to wait 30-60 seconds after loading a DVD just to get to the main menu - which is usually also locked so I have to watch a stupid video sequence before I can finally select 'Play'.
Is it so unreasonable to want to load a DVD and watch the damn movie? Seriously, if there was a DVD player out there that advertised on the box "No function lockouts", I'd pay an extra $50 just for that.
Actually, I hated that stupid show. Admittedly, I was many years older than its target audience, but I can't imagine a kid with a bad enough case of ADD that he needed the same *tiny* snippet of information repeated every couple of seconds for the duration of a 20 minute show just to get it in his head.
When I was young, I watched proper science shows on PBS, and learned more for it. Of course, at the time I thought my dad was a twit for making me watch those shows, but it was hardly torture!
Until I read "bobs2pacsvegaswirled"'s post, I was only thinking of the GPS and basic cell phone access - but hacking the unit so you could dial in from your cell phone, press '7' and open the locks would be nifty. Even better would be pressing '9' to disable the car if it's stolen.
Really, at that point where you could do that, you're paying Onstar to be a surrogate cell phone, right? Suddenly, their annual fee looks ridiculous.
Of course, you could also do things (not for the tinfoil hat crowd) like have a home PC autodial the system every hour for a GPS update and alert you if the car isn't where it should be, update a secure web site so you can track your kid from the office, etc, etc, etc... maybe even hide a webcam in the dash and send a.jpg of the driver!
Yeah, there ought to be a standard in the industry - develop, sell, wait 5 years, check if the title is ready for the bargain bin and if so, release to the public domain.
George Bush frightens me, if for no other reason than that his administration ignores and deliberately surpresses information gleaned by scientific method if it contradicts his fundamentalist Christian beliefs; I suspect he's got more than a little of the "book burner" gene in him.
Having said that, I think in the long run history will judge him as the right guy for the times - sometimes the times just suck, that's all.
Actually, I read that post not as flamebait, but as a humourously sarcastic detailing of what you'd likely hear when speaking on the subject to an alarmingly high percentage of the population.
There are, however, certain justifications for claiming that asian and african countries in general tend to have attitudes that lead to the easier spread of disease.
I never said they don't. There are a couple of known issues with Explorer that cause it to take over the processor cycles, for instance.
In this particular case, I happen to be qualified to correctly diagnose the particular process causing the problem; honestly, selecting the 'processes' tab in the task manager and sorting by CPU usage ain't that difficult. It's the Sun JVM. I have not yet looked into WHY.
To hell with scaling THIS robot up... I want to use this tech scaled up to build a mech. Really, how cool would it be to drive a freakin' MECH to work?
Boy, it'd be cool to let loose with an autocannon and a brace of SRMs when some idiot cuts you off...
OK, I'm done with my geeky fantasy for the moment. Thanks for reading.:)
I've switched to Firebird, finally. I got sick of finding that my HOSTS file, favourites, and start page were being rewritten by malicious web pages.
On the other hand, Firebird doesn't use the MS JVM, it uses the Sun JVM, which occasionally decideds to use 99% of my system resources. It behaved the same way when I tried to use it for IE as well.
On the other, other hand (what, three hands???) I love tabbed browsing, though I haven't yet adjusted - I keep dragging the cursor towards the taskbar looking to switch processes before redirecting to the tabs.
On the fourth hand (this is getting weird) I now see the effects of all the tiny errors in my hand-coded HTML that IE was running - and a proper browser is refusing to display. I actually like that, since forcing compliant coding on me makes my work accessible to more browsers than just IE... of course since they're just vanity pages for me and the wife, it was never critical which is why the errors were never checked for before.
In terms of elements, I don't think I'd bother playing with oxygen or CO2 levels as they are altered by life - and I think it would be beyond our current modelling skills to change the initial chemical balances and model how life WOULD have developed, given that our ability to model the existing atmosphere pretty much sucks.
Changing the star type, planet core rotation and composition, etc would be interesting though.
I'd love to see a series of sims run on a modified Earth model - each sim run with only 1 parameter changed, and then examined to see what would happen to life as we know it, here on Earth.
For instance, play with the Earth's mass, water content, distance from the Sun, or mass of its satellite. It would be interesting to have an educated guess as to how much each of these values could differ from reality before Earth wouldn't be Earth anymore, and how things would change as we approached those limits.
No, I wouldn't play a political sim. I can't believe anyone would want to play a political sim, even political theorists and hopefuls. Those who are experts in campaign management know they are practicing an art, not a science, and that any sim would be far too simplistic a model to make it 'fun' for the people who are into such things.
On the other hand, people play dating sims even though most of the same problems apply... and in neither case does the digital reward for success match the real life version.
Besides, women aren't stupid or ignorant - they can always insist that the 'other man' wear a condom. Just because you're the father of the child doesn't mean you're the only one having sex with the mother!
When my wife and I have kids, we're planning to get the children and ourselves DNA fingerprinted and put the images together in a picture frame for comparison.
Of course, I have no idea how accessible such services are, how expensive, or even what the process is called... still I think it'll look neat on the wall.
If you work from home, and host a web site that might become the target of a fanatic's ire, it's really nice not to have your full name, telephone number, and address available to anyone with an Internet connection. Would you really like to limit 'safe' domain registration to companies large enough to have an office, receptionist, and security?
If a registrar needs to find you (because of, say, a warrant) they can track you down by your credit card information.
I went to IKEA and bought a cheap-o entertainment cabinet. Nice black finish, smoke glass door on the front, and cheaper than I could have bought the parts for to build my own.
I never installed the castors, and as that puts the bottom right on the floor it easily handles the weight of my large UPS. The only problem is no rails, but I've put everything on shelves... it's only for home, after all.
I'm slowly putting myself out of business as my clients upgrade from NT/W9x networks to W2K/XP networks. I used to spend a couple of days each week repairing W9x workstations, or NT servers showing signs of instability.
With W2K/XP, there are still support issues, but with a well planned and tested initial rollout the support calls pretty much dry up within a week of user training being completed. Don't forget that with XP (unlike 9x), once you get a good configuration you can lock it down so the users can't screw it up. My company is having difficulty landing new clients quickly enough to take up the slack - I suspect because every other company supporting Windows is doing the same thing.
I agree that the roads should be filled with 1 or 2 seat vehicles... but they're not. They're filled with SUVs, tractor trailors, and mid-sized sedans for the most part. I drive a smaller car myself, but not an econ-size because those things crumple like tinfoil when they meet the previously mentioned vehicles I share the road with. My problem with most motorcyclists is that they take advantage of their size and mobility to avoid traffic problems... WITHOUT taking me into account. I should be able to change lanes without worrying about a bike scooting up the middle, doing a three lane slide, or cutting me off.
Drive around Toronto for a while, and tell me what you see - lots of overly agressive, bad drivers in (or on) all kinds of vehicles. The ones on bikes are harder to see, harder to avoid, and easier to render into a fine paste. Barring a massive change in attitudes and ability in all drivers in my area, I'd rather just not see bikes on congested routes.
Shortly after my nephew was old enough to speak I tried to teach him the names of the original Star Trek crew.
Ten years later it is obvious thhat it didn't take; three bullies tried to beat the crap out of him last year... he beat the crap out of them instead, all at once. He's had two girlfriends... at the same time. He doesn't know who Spock is.
I think I've failed to create the next generation of nerd/geek/whatever in my family.:(
I understand the lure of riding a motorcycle. I also understand why they're referred to as 'donorcycles'. Car drivers aren't 'literally' trying to kill motorcyclists, but many motorcyclists behave as if they're trying to commit suicide.
I work in a fairly urban area, and I can't recall the last time I saw a motorcycle in traffic that WASN'T driven by someone who thought the rules of the road only applied to cars. Seriously - weaving through traffic without leaving enough space for cars to react, racing between lanes of stopped cars, speeding well beyond anything I've seen a car do... and if a car driver hits one of those asses, they get to remember what someone else's guts look like for the rest of their lives. Bikes should be kept to touring on the country backroads, and 'rice rockets' should be illegal except on a track.
An entire useless third of the population...
on
Sub-Zero Squirrels
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Perhaps we could build some kind of 'ark', load it up with this bunch of bloody loonies, and arrange to have it crash somewhere very remote so we don't have to deal with them anymore.
As long as everyone keeps their telephones clean, we'll be OK.
How in the hell did the parent post get a score of +5, Insightful? Is Slashdot somehow scripting moderator point distribution to skew to complete idiots?
I've SEEN what happens when a project is done without a project manager... and you end up with the programmers being just as pissed off as the client. No project manager = no enforced schedule + no well defined scope + no detailed development guides + no moderator of disputes. A good project manager knows the limits of their team and the technology they work with, and will protect the team against unreasonable demands. They take twice as much crap from the level of management above the team as the team takes from them.
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It seems to me that one of the reasons MS has always been able to create inconvienient packages from groups of software, and then sell at very high prices, is that they OWN most of the market. In other words, they're so big that you and I can't possibly expect to demand a concession.
Of course, now that countries are starting to realize that they're big enough to push back, we have more of a Goliath vs Goliath thing going on, and maybe MS will start to be more flexible in the way it offers its software. Maybe they'll start to consider adding a language pack when they stand to lose sales to an entire nation.
It'd be nice to be able, for instance, to buy Word and Excel without PowerPoint, Access, or FrontPage. (It'd be even nicer if Frontpage and everyone who contributed to it's creation were cast into Hell, but that's another story!)
She didn't visit her dead father in space. She was visitied by an alien that used her father's image to keep her calm and rational. What bugs me about people missing this point is that it is explicitly explained right in that very scene!
First, I believe "Global Dimming" refers to less visible light reaching the planet's surface, independent of any variation in the Sun's output. This is thought to be due to an increase in airborne particulates. I'd have to check, but I think average solar output has been relatively constant over the last 50 years. If solar output dropped 15.9% in 50 years, (as your 3%/decade number suggests), we'd all be popsicles by now.
Second, I'm pretty sure that the Earth is too massive for reemission of solar radiation to generate enough thrust to cause a 1 second per year change in our orbit.
Third, if the suggested causes involve changes in the Earth's core, the article is probably referring to changes in the length of the day (the Earth's period of rotation), and not the length of the year. I can think of no way, short of ejection of significant mass at escape velocity, that the Earth's core could affect the planet's orbit in any way.
Gawd, yes. It pisses me off no end that I have to wait 30-60 seconds after loading a DVD just to get to the main menu - which is usually also locked so I have to watch a stupid video sequence before I can finally select 'Play'.
Is it so unreasonable to want to load a DVD and watch the damn movie? Seriously, if there was a DVD player out there that advertised on the box "No function lockouts", I'd pay an extra $50 just for that.
Actually, I hated that stupid show. Admittedly, I was many years older than its target audience, but I can't imagine a kid with a bad enough case of ADD that he needed the same *tiny* snippet of information repeated every couple of seconds for the duration of a 20 minute show just to get it in his head.
When I was young, I watched proper science shows on PBS, and learned more for it. Of course, at the time I thought my dad was a twit for making me watch those shows, but it was hardly torture!
Until I read "bobs2pacsvegaswirled"'s post, I was only thinking of the GPS and basic cell phone access - but hacking the unit so you could dial in from your cell phone, press '7' and open the locks would be nifty. Even better would be pressing '9' to disable the car if it's stolen.
Really, at that point where you could do that, you're paying Onstar to be a surrogate cell phone, right? Suddenly, their annual fee looks ridiculous.
Of course, you could also do things (not for the tinfoil hat crowd) like have a home PC autodial the system every hour for a GPS update and alert you if the car isn't where it should be, update a secure web site so you can track your kid from the office, etc, etc, etc... maybe even hide a webcam in the dash and send a .jpg of the driver!
Yeah, there ought to be a standard in the industry - develop, sell, wait 5 years, check if the title is ready for the bargain bin and if so, release to the public domain.
It's nothing but good for the developer.
George Bush frightens me, if for no other reason than that his administration ignores and deliberately surpresses information gleaned by scientific method if it contradicts his fundamentalist Christian beliefs; I suspect he's got more than a little of the "book burner" gene in him.
Having said that, I think in the long run history will judge him as the right guy for the times - sometimes the times just suck, that's all.
Actually, I read that post not as flamebait, but as a humourously sarcastic detailing of what you'd likely hear when speaking on the subject to an alarmingly high percentage of the population.
There are, however, certain justifications for claiming that asian and african countries in general tend to have attitudes that lead to the easier spread of disease.
I never said they don't. There are a couple of known issues with Explorer that cause it to take over the processor cycles, for instance.
In this particular case, I happen to be qualified to correctly diagnose the particular process causing the problem; honestly, selecting the 'processes' tab in the task manager and sorting by CPU usage ain't that difficult. It's the Sun JVM. I have not yet looked into WHY.
To hell with scaling THIS robot up... I want to use this tech scaled up to build a mech. Really, how cool would it be to drive a freakin' MECH to work?
Boy, it'd be cool to let loose with an autocannon and a brace of SRMs when some idiot cuts you off...
OK, I'm done with my geeky fantasy for the moment. Thanks for reading. :)
I've switched to Firebird, finally. I got sick of finding that my HOSTS file, favourites, and start page were being rewritten by malicious web pages.
On the other hand, Firebird doesn't use the MS JVM, it uses the Sun JVM, which occasionally decideds to use 99% of my system resources. It behaved the same way when I tried to use it for IE as well.
On the other, other hand (what, three hands???) I love tabbed browsing, though I haven't yet adjusted - I keep dragging the cursor towards the taskbar looking to switch processes before redirecting to the tabs.
On the fourth hand (this is getting weird) I now see the effects of all the tiny errors in my hand-coded HTML that IE was running - and a proper browser is refusing to display. I actually like that, since forcing compliant coding on me makes my work accessible to more browsers than just IE... of course since they're just vanity pages for me and the wife, it was never critical which is why the errors were never checked for before.
I'm out of hands, now.
In terms of elements, I don't think I'd bother playing with oxygen or CO2 levels as they are altered by life - and I think it would be beyond our current modelling skills to change the initial chemical balances and model how life WOULD have developed, given that our ability to model the existing atmosphere pretty much sucks.
Changing the star type, planet core rotation and composition, etc would be interesting though.
I'd love to see a series of sims run on a modified Earth model - each sim run with only 1 parameter changed, and then examined to see what would happen to life as we know it, here on Earth.
For instance, play with the Earth's mass, water content, distance from the Sun, or mass of its satellite. It would be interesting to have an educated guess as to how much each of these values could differ from reality before Earth wouldn't be Earth anymore, and how things would change as we approached those limits.
No, I wouldn't play a political sim. I can't believe anyone would want to play a political sim, even political theorists and hopefuls. Those who are experts in campaign management know they are practicing an art, not a science, and that any sim would be far too simplistic a model to make it 'fun' for the people who are into such things.
On the other hand, people play dating sims even though most of the same problems apply... and in neither case does the digital reward for success match the real life version.
Of course she knows this!
Besides, women aren't stupid or ignorant - they can always insist that the 'other man' wear a condom. Just because you're the father of the child doesn't mean you're the only one having sex with the mother!
When my wife and I have kids, we're planning to get the children and ourselves DNA fingerprinted and put the images together in a picture frame for comparison.
Of course, I have no idea how accessible such services are, how expensive, or even what the process is called... still I think it'll look neat on the wall.
If you work from home, and host a web site that might become the target of a fanatic's ire, it's really nice not to have your full name, telephone number, and address available to anyone with an Internet connection. Would you really like to limit 'safe' domain registration to companies large enough to have an office, receptionist, and security?
If a registrar needs to find you (because of, say, a warrant) they can track you down by your credit card information.
I went to IKEA and bought a cheap-o entertainment cabinet. Nice black finish, smoke glass door on the front, and cheaper than I could have bought the parts for to build my own.
I never installed the castors, and as that puts the bottom right on the floor it easily handles the weight of my large UPS. The only problem is no rails, but I've put everything on shelves... it's only for home, after all.
I'm slowly putting myself out of business as my clients upgrade from NT/W9x networks to W2K/XP networks. I used to spend a couple of days each week repairing W9x workstations, or NT servers showing signs of instability.
With W2K/XP, there are still support issues, but with a well planned and tested initial rollout the support calls pretty much dry up within a week of user training being completed. Don't forget that with XP (unlike 9x), once you get a good configuration you can lock it down so the users can't screw it up. My company is having difficulty landing new clients quickly enough to take up the slack - I suspect because every other company supporting Windows is doing the same thing.
I agree that the roads should be filled with 1 or 2 seat vehicles... but they're not. They're filled with SUVs, tractor trailors, and mid-sized sedans for the most part. I drive a smaller car myself, but not an econ-size because those things crumple like tinfoil when they meet the previously mentioned vehicles I share the road with. My problem with most motorcyclists is that they take advantage of their size and mobility to avoid traffic problems... WITHOUT taking me into account. I should be able to change lanes without worrying about a bike scooting up the middle, doing a three lane slide, or cutting me off.
Drive around Toronto for a while, and tell me what you see - lots of overly agressive, bad drivers in (or on) all kinds of vehicles. The ones on bikes are harder to see, harder to avoid, and easier to render into a fine paste. Barring a massive change in attitudes and ability in all drivers in my area, I'd rather just not see bikes on congested routes.
Shortly after my nephew was old enough to speak I tried to teach him the names of the original Star Trek crew.
Ten years later it is obvious thhat it didn't take; three bullies tried to beat the crap out of him last year... he beat the crap out of them instead, all at once. He's had two girlfriends... at the same time. He doesn't know who Spock is.
I think I've failed to create the next generation of nerd/geek/whatever in my family. :(
I understand the lure of riding a motorcycle. I also understand why they're referred to as 'donorcycles'. Car drivers aren't 'literally' trying to kill motorcyclists, but many motorcyclists behave as if they're trying to commit suicide.
I work in a fairly urban area, and I can't recall the last time I saw a motorcycle in traffic that WASN'T driven by someone who thought the rules of the road only applied to cars. Seriously - weaving through traffic without leaving enough space for cars to react, racing between lanes of stopped cars, speeding well beyond anything I've seen a car do... and if a car driver hits one of those asses, they get to remember what someone else's guts look like for the rest of their lives. Bikes should be kept to touring on the country backroads, and 'rice rockets' should be illegal except on a track.
Perhaps we could build some kind of 'ark', load it up with this bunch of bloody loonies, and arrange to have it crash somewhere very remote so we don't have to deal with them anymore.
As long as everyone keeps their telephones clean, we'll be OK.
How in the hell did the parent post get a score of +5, Insightful? Is Slashdot somehow scripting moderator point distribution to skew to complete idiots?
I've SEEN what happens when a project is done without a project manager... and you end up with the programmers being just as pissed off as the client. No project manager = no enforced schedule + no well defined scope + no detailed development guides + no moderator of disputes. A good project manager knows the limits of their team and the technology they work with, and will protect the team against unreasonable demands. They take twice as much crap from the level of management above the team as the team takes from them.