Actually, one could expect better from the old continent. We have the perfect example of Stasi, East Germany political police that was so effective in gathering information... that it has rendered itself totally ineffective. Stasi maintained an extensive network of informants and in 1980's simply everyone in the DDR was under some sort of surveillance (either himself or at least his neighbor or someone in the family already was a paid Stasi informer). In 1980's Stasi knew everything about everyone exept just one thing - they didn't know what they know. When the Berlin wall fell down, many Stasi secret files were opened - to much suprise, many of them were opened for the first time. The network was just too huge to control itself anymore. The information flow jammed all the available channels. Since everyone was under surveillance, it was almost as if there was no surveillance at all. I thought this will be a meaningful lessons for all the powers that be... but it took roughtly 15 years for European politicians to repeat the same mistake. Oh well.
The only thing Nazi Germany wanted to do was build new technical devices to kill people
Antropomorphisms like this are dangerous. It's so tempting to say "Russia wants to conquer Tschetschenya" or "USA want to justify Guantanamo to the public opinion", but you should always remember there is no such person as Uncle Sam or Mother Russia. Whatever George W. Bush wants or needs, it's not necessarily what every American or even majority of Americans want or need. It's also dangerous when you talk about dictatorship, as there was more in Third Reich than just Hitler and his crazy followers. What we know about Werner von Braun is that he was interested in rocket science "as such" - his lifelong dream was a manned mission to Mars. He worked for Hitler not because he loved him, but simply because for a German rocket scientist in 1940's there weren't really any other options. When you say "That was their ethos" you should consider who do you mean by "they". Them-Nazis? Sure, you're right. Them-German scientitst? You are obviously wrong.
The debate over the value of Cedega/WINE as a solution for the nascent Linux gaming community continues..."
I think this debate is pointless. If you purchase a Windows game, you are a member of the Windows gaming community, period. It doesn't matter if you play it on native Wintel platform or on Macintosh emulating x86/Windows via Virtual PC - or Linux emulating Windows APIs. The next logical step is to quit all your Linux activity and reboot your computer to MS Windows, the same game will run even better then. The *only* way to build Linux gaming community is via native Linux ports, just as the relatively small Macintosh gaming community does. Mac users got used to waiting months or years for native ports to be released. They don't complain paying premium prices for games whose Windows ports are already in bargain bins. There will be no "Linux gaming community", not until Linux gamers accept similar solution.
Why on earth does the author suggest connecting it to a receiver box, when the whole point is to allow TV on the go? What sort of person carries a receiver unit to their hotel?
"TV on the go"? Whart sort of a hotel does not offer a TV-set?
I don't want to troll with obligatory "will it work with Linux" or "imagine a Bewulf cluster of these", I'm sincerely interested. As a long-time iMac/iBook user, I always in theory enjoyed the idea that I don't need to open the case of my machine just to get something done, but I was always frustrated that my only way to capture TV on my computer was a quite cumbersome setup involving a DV camera with video input. I was always interested in a device like this, but of course the PCI solutions were not for me, and USB 1.1 was just too slow for anything serious. Should this thingy be anyhow supported by MacOS X with USB 2.0, I'd purchase one right away. Hints, anyone?
He is probably the #1 author of signature quotes, at least he used to be in the early days of Internet. My God, if he had $1 for every "So long and thanks for all the fish" mail signature (and similar ones), the Adams Estate could now purchase the Tolkien Estate for breakfast.
What if the guy wasn't using the Internet but was editing his site and was looking at the preview? (this was not the case but what if)
What if the guy WAS using the Internet but was connected via bluetooth to a cell phone in his pocket? How can a policeman tell the difference without a wireless network sniffer? So much for presumed innocence?
a Geforce 5200fx is a 5200fx.. if they say doom will run on it then it will...
I run halo on my SP 1.8gig G5 (very first gen) perfectly fine.. uses the 5200.. it's a pretty nice card..
I played Doom 3 on my friend's PC, with Radeon 9800 (the base model, not XT/PRO). The game was getting hiccups even with "medium" detail setting. Makes me rather pessimistic about playability on GF 5200 - at best, it will require lowest detail settings.
A GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. You can get better video in a PowerBook. I guess that settles it: no Doom 3 for OS X.
I don't think so - the top-of-the line powerbooks (15" and 17") should have enough horsepower for Doom 3 as well as the whole Powermac G5 family. Besides, the iMac family will certainly get another upgrade round before Doom 3 for Mac gets into beta phase. Half year would be a really optimistic estimate...
I think in the next future Apple will improve its often underlooked yet very interesting piece of hardware - the Airport Express base station. Since we have now iTunes music streaming to your home stereo system, video streaming to your home cinema system sounds like the next logical step. I'd rather expect this "engineer" to work in this field. I don't believe in video iPod as it would be simply not feasible. You can walk the street and listen to the music, you can't walk the street and watch a movie (especially not on a 3-inch screen). At least not unless Apple introduces some nano-implants allowing the movie to be streamed wirelessly directly to your retina...
I must admit I'm getting more and more of the deja vu feeling, reading Microsoft's statements on Longhorn. I've seen it before, when Apple representatives struggled to explain the delay with shipping their ultimately sophisticated version of MacOS, codenamed Copland. They understood all too well that the classic MacOS is a bloated unstable construction based on a single-user single-machine Macintosh System, that was not designed with networking and multitasking in mind. They managed somehow to hack this system to have a sort-of poor man's multitasking and also some rudimentary networking capabilities, but they knew it's not gonna last in the Internet Age. They needed a new system and they needed it ASAP. Yet after millions of bucks and years of coding, Copland turned out to be just nothing but very expensive vaporware, and Apple's last chance to survive was to purchase NeXT, with their Unix experience, and thus MacOS X was born.
There are many similarities with Windows and Longhorn - Microsoft also tried for a very long time to hack and upgrade their old OS, also designed for single user with no networking. And yet they were strangled by their own limitations they needed to keep for sake of backwards compatibility. Can they solve it on their own or will they just, say, buy Sun for their OS experience?
Re:playing the lottery is not stupid
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If the excitement of playing the lottery is worth more than 10 cents, then playing the lottery is a good deal. Suppose that the excitement is worth 20 cents to you. Well, 90 cents plus 20 cents is 110 cents, on a ticket that only cost you 100 cents!
The point is that in order to be able to get excited playing lottery, you have to be bad at math. Let's suppose I offer you a heads or tails game with fair 50-50 probability split for both options. If you win, I pay you $1 (one US dollar), if I win, you pay me $100 (a hundred US dollars). You won't get excited by this game - at least not in a pleasant way. You'll rather say "what kind of a crooked game is this?". The point is that all the lotteries and casino games are as much crooked as this game, but they try to hide it in complex score counting systems. This scheme works good enough for weak minds, but I for one couldn't feel any "excitement" playing a fundamentally crooked game. I can be excited playing poker with a trusted friend, when I know it's just luck and betting strategies for both of us, but there's no point of playing if I know that he has a hidden ace under the table. That's lottery for a math-savvy person.
In Google's Zeitgeist statistic there was a 5% figure that represented what the OS statistic as "other". I thought that this was bizarre because the Linux and Mac statistics even combined were less than the "other" which encapsulated them all.
There's a large network traffic generated not by human surfers but by various bots, scanning the Web for whatever purpose. The bots often identify themselves in a strange way - a comprehensive list of their user-agents can be found here and I always thought that this is actually the majority of the mysterious "other". They are not human users of desktop OS'es, but bots running automated google searches. What do you think?
I have a question for slashdot... can I use your polls for scientific research? Will my request result in slashdot removing their polls section? What kind of a crazy assed reaction is this?
It's actually typical for a public company. Just imagine that someone sues Google because he was indeed using Google Zeitgeist for some scientific research, unaware that it was just for fun. It doesn't matter that this claim is ridiculous. Its very existence will most likely create negative market reaction. Even if the shares drop for just 1%, if you are among the company's top rank, it will generate enormous loss for you. If you have, say, 100.000.000 dollars in company stock, you have just lost 1 megabuck just because of this crazy accusation. So public companies act rather paranoid in situations like this. That's the reason why media in the US were too chicken to say "tobacco is addictive". Just the very thought of being sued by big tobacco companies made every CEO of every media corporation to wet his pants with fear. Expect more "crazy assed" reactions from Google as they continue to "go public".
Er.. So how do you open the pic of that cute girl to a new tab while browsing one-handed?
Personally, I don't think that tabs fit well to the one-button paradigm... and I don't use them. Expose makes them just redundant. "Pr0n aside", there are websites with javascript purposedly blocking out the right mouse button, to make it more difficult to save the image of the cute girl to your local collection of, ummmm, images. On a Mac it's simple - just drag'n'drop the image onto the icon of your "~/Pictures/pr0n" folder, and their silly javascript can just kiss the round backside of your iMac.
let me stick my pirated version of War and Piece in my Hello world application.
Well, if your Hello world application was written in the style of
Master Programmer from the old joke... you can easily fit the whole collected works by Fedor Dostoevsky.
Big Brother In Your Front Seat (...) "Would you give up your privacy in your car to save a few bucks on your auto insurance?
Give up privacy of my back seat? Never. No way. Okay, okay, certainly not for just few bucks, but serious offers will be considered. Oh, you said "front seat"? No problem then.
Is this really such a slow news day that a trivial change to a popular game made it onto/.?
Oh no. It's anything but trivial. From the very first level onwards the player dreams of having this solution - many traps are designed on the premise that you don't see your enemy/enemies and have to shoot where you think they might be or escape in panic to some light place. Ability to have a gun AND a flashlight (in stock game, it's either this or that) in your hands makes it a completely different game.
I do think it's a bit silly though, all this technology used to colonise mars and the best solution they can come up with is a old style flashlight (what about infra red nightvision ?). Of course it is you basic weapon, you can club people with it.
Apollo 13 wouldn't return home without duct tape solutions. In space exploration it can - and it does! - happen that all the modern technology becomes useless due to some sad coincidence and suddenly duct tape or old-fashioned flashlight is your only hope. After all, in Doom 3 we don't have a perfectly functioning Mars colony, t's a place where lots of sh* has hit lots of fans. Let's assume for sake of the story that passive nightvision is unavailable because opening the portal to hell has created strong residual infrared emission, blinding the marine's nightvision googles.
Anyone know of a large island that is well connected to the Internet?
Niue might not be large (check the stats on CIA site), but it's beautiful and THE WHOLE AREA is covered by freely accessible Wi-Fi network. Plus - they have cool Net domain ".nu". Just think - GNU colony could have the website g.nu!
She is absolutely frightened of flying, and somewhat of a computer nerd, I can't wait to talk to her, and tell her the scary news.
One of my worst flights ever was on a business trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. I was accompanied by a genuine RAF pilot, who flies the tanker Boeings for NATO warplanes. There was a rainstorm and strong wind over the whole UK and my friend was busy explaining me that Boeings are very vulnerable to strong winds and wind is the scariest threat for Boeing pilots and so on. It wasn't a nice thing to say on board, especially when the pilot announced a delay in approaching due to strong wind.
On return flight I discovered that this time we'll be flying on an Airbus. I told the (supposedly) good news to my friend, hoping that this time he will spare me his horror stories. Unfortunately, his reply was:
- Do you know why the pilots call it "Scarebus"?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, one could expect better from the old continent. We have the perfect example of Stasi, East Germany political police that was so effective in gathering information... that it has rendered itself totally ineffective. Stasi maintained an extensive network of informants and in 1980's simply everyone in the DDR was under some sort of surveillance (either himself or at least his neighbor or someone in the family already was a paid Stasi informer). In 1980's Stasi knew everything about everyone exept just one thing - they didn't know what they know. When the Berlin wall fell down, many Stasi secret files were opened - to much suprise, many of them were opened for the first time. The network was just too huge to control itself anymore. The information flow jammed all the available channels. Since everyone was under surveillance, it was almost as if there was no surveillance at all. I thought this will be a meaningful lessons for all the powers that be... but it took roughtly 15 years for European politicians to repeat the same mistake. Oh well.
I hope London didn't take offense to be bombed 60 years ago.
After the fire-bombing of Dresden, it's fair to say they're even.
The only thing Nazi Germany wanted to do was build new technical devices to kill people
Antropomorphisms like this are dangerous. It's so tempting to say "Russia wants to conquer Tschetschenya" or "USA want to justify Guantanamo to the public opinion", but you should always remember there is no such person as Uncle Sam or Mother Russia. Whatever George W. Bush wants or needs, it's not necessarily what every American or even majority of Americans want or need. It's also dangerous when you talk about dictatorship, as there was more in Third Reich than just Hitler and his crazy followers. What we know about Werner von Braun is that he was interested in rocket science "as such" - his lifelong dream was a manned mission to Mars. He worked for Hitler not because he loved him, but simply because for a German rocket scientist in 1940's there weren't really any other options. When you say "That was their ethos" you should consider who do you mean by "they". Them-Nazis? Sure, you're right. Them-German scientitst? You are obviously wrong.
The debate over the value of Cedega/WINE as a solution for the nascent Linux gaming community continues..."
I think this debate is pointless. If you purchase a Windows game, you are a member of the Windows gaming community, period. It doesn't matter if you play it on native Wintel platform or on Macintosh emulating x86/Windows via Virtual PC - or Linux emulating Windows APIs. The next logical step is to quit all your Linux activity and reboot your computer to MS Windows, the same game will run even better then. The *only* way to build Linux gaming community is via native Linux ports, just as the relatively small Macintosh gaming community does. Mac users got used to waiting months or years for native ports to be released. They don't complain paying premium prices for games whose Windows ports are already in bargain bins. There will be no "Linux gaming community", not until Linux gamers accept similar solution.
Why on earth does the author suggest connecting it to a receiver box, when the whole point is to allow TV on the go? What sort of person carries a receiver unit to their hotel?
"TV on the go"? Whart sort of a hotel does not offer a TV-set?
I don't want to troll with obligatory "will it work with Linux" or "imagine a Bewulf cluster of these", I'm sincerely interested. As a long-time iMac/iBook user, I always in theory enjoyed the idea that I don't need to open the case of my machine just to get something done, but I was always frustrated that my only way to capture TV on my computer was a quite cumbersome setup involving a DV camera with video input. I was always interested in a device like this, but of course the PCI solutions were not for me, and USB 1.1 was just too slow for anything serious. Should this thingy be anyhow supported by MacOS X with USB 2.0, I'd purchase one right away. Hints, anyone?
when the only way you can legally download music for the iPod is through iTunes?
My iPod is filled with legally ripped AAC's from my very own CD collection.
He is probably the #1 author of signature quotes, at least he used to be in the early days of Internet. My God, if he had $1 for every "So long and thanks for all the fish" mail signature (and similar ones), the Adams Estate could now purchase the Tolkien Estate for breakfast.
What if the guy wasn't using the Internet but was editing his site and was looking at the preview? (this was not the case but what if)
What if the guy WAS using the Internet but was connected via bluetooth to a cell phone in his pocket? How can a policeman tell the difference without a wireless network sniffer? So much for presumed innocence?
a Geforce 5200fx is a 5200fx.. if they say doom will run on it then it will... I run halo on my SP 1.8gig G5 (very first gen) perfectly fine.. uses the 5200.. it's a pretty nice card..
I played Doom 3 on my friend's PC, with Radeon 9800 (the base model, not XT/PRO). The game was getting hiccups even with "medium" detail setting. Makes me rather pessimistic about playability on GF 5200 - at best, it will require lowest detail settings.
A GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. You can get better video in a PowerBook. I guess that settles it: no Doom 3 for OS X.
I don't think so - the top-of-the line powerbooks (15" and 17") should have enough horsepower for Doom 3 as well as the whole Powermac G5 family. Besides, the iMac family will certainly get another upgrade round before Doom 3 for Mac gets into beta phase. Half year would be a really optimistic estimate...
Maybe not sellable, but that's a different issue.
:-).
I'd say it's a quite important issue for a commercial enterprise
I think in the next future Apple will improve its often underlooked yet very interesting piece of hardware - the Airport Express base station. Since we have now iTunes music streaming to your home stereo system, video streaming to your home cinema system sounds like the next logical step. I'd rather expect this "engineer" to work in this field. I don't believe in video iPod as it would be simply not feasible. You can walk the street and listen to the music, you can't walk the street and watch a movie (especially not on a 3-inch screen). At least not unless Apple introduces some nano-implants allowing the movie to be streamed wirelessly directly to your retina...
I must admit I'm getting more and more of the deja vu feeling, reading Microsoft's statements on Longhorn. I've seen it before, when Apple representatives struggled to explain the delay with shipping their ultimately sophisticated version of MacOS, codenamed Copland. They understood all too well that the classic MacOS is a bloated unstable construction based on a single-user single-machine Macintosh System, that was not designed with networking and multitasking in mind. They managed somehow to hack this system to have a sort-of poor man's multitasking and also some rudimentary networking capabilities, but they knew it's not gonna last in the Internet Age. They needed a new system and they needed it ASAP. Yet after millions of bucks and years of coding, Copland turned out to be just nothing but very expensive vaporware, and Apple's last chance to survive was to purchase NeXT, with their Unix experience, and thus MacOS X was born.
There are many similarities with Windows and Longhorn - Microsoft also tried for a very long time to hack and upgrade their old OS, also designed for single user with no networking. And yet they were strangled by their own limitations they needed to keep for sake of backwards compatibility. Can they solve it on their own or will they just, say, buy Sun for their OS experience?
If the excitement of playing the lottery is worth more than 10 cents, then playing the lottery is a good deal. Suppose that the excitement is worth 20 cents to you. Well, 90 cents plus 20 cents is 110 cents, on a ticket that only cost you 100 cents!
The point is that in order to be able to get excited playing lottery, you have to be bad at math. Let's suppose I offer you a heads or tails game with fair 50-50 probability split for both options. If you win, I pay you $1 (one US dollar), if I win, you pay me $100 (a hundred US dollars). You won't get excited by this game - at least not in a pleasant way. You'll rather say "what kind of a crooked game is this?". The point is that all the lotteries and casino games are as much crooked as this game, but they try to hide it in complex score counting systems. This scheme works good enough for weak minds, but I for one couldn't feel any "excitement" playing a fundamentally crooked game. I can be excited playing poker with a trusted friend, when I know it's just luck and betting strategies for both of us, but there's no point of playing if I know that he has a hidden ace under the table. That's lottery for a math-savvy person.
In Google's Zeitgeist statistic there was a 5% figure that represented what the OS statistic as "other". I thought that this was bizarre because the Linux and Mac statistics even combined were less than the "other" which encapsulated them all.
There's a large network traffic generated not by human surfers but by various bots, scanning the Web for whatever purpose. The bots often identify themselves in a strange way - a comprehensive list of their user-agents can be found here and I always thought that this is actually the majority of the mysterious "other". They are not human users of desktop OS'es, but bots running automated google searches. What do you think?
I have a question for slashdot... can I use your polls for scientific research? Will my request result in slashdot removing their polls section? What kind of a crazy assed reaction is this?
It's actually typical for a public company. Just imagine that someone sues Google because he was indeed using Google Zeitgeist for some scientific research, unaware that it was just for fun. It doesn't matter that this claim is ridiculous. Its very existence will most likely create negative market reaction. Even if the shares drop for just 1%, if you are among the company's top rank, it will generate enormous loss for you. If you have, say, 100.000.000 dollars in company stock, you have just lost 1 megabuck just because of this crazy accusation. So public companies act rather paranoid in situations like this. That's the reason why media in the US were too chicken to say "tobacco is addictive". Just the very thought of being sued by big tobacco companies made every CEO of every media corporation to wet his pants with fear. Expect more "crazy assed" reactions from Google as they continue to "go public".
Er.. So how do you open the pic of that cute girl to a new tab while browsing one-handed?
Personally, I don't think that tabs fit well to the one-button paradigm... and I don't use them. Expose makes them just redundant. "Pr0n aside", there are websites with javascript purposedly blocking out the right mouse button, to make it more difficult to save the image of the cute girl to your local collection of, ummmm, images. On a Mac it's simple - just drag'n'drop the image onto the icon of your "~/Pictures/pr0n" folder, and their silly javascript can just kiss the round backside of your iMac.
let me stick my pirated version of War and Piece in my Hello world application.
Well, if your Hello world application was written in the style of Master Programmer from the old joke... you can easily fit the whole collected works by Fedor Dostoevsky.
...there is no DMCA here :D Of course, once the EUCD is passed into law (sooner or later), it may be a problem.
Norway is not in EU.
Big Brother In Your Front Seat (...) "Would you give up your privacy in your car to save a few bucks on your auto insurance?
Give up privacy of my back seat? Never. No way. Okay, okay, certainly not for just few bucks, but serious offers will be considered. Oh, you said "front seat"? No problem then.
Is this really such a slow news day that a trivial change to a popular game made it onto /.?
Oh no. It's anything but trivial. From the very first level onwards the player dreams of having this solution - many traps are designed on the premise that you don't see your enemy/enemies and have to shoot where you think they might be or escape in panic to some light place. Ability to have a gun AND a flashlight (in stock game, it's either this or that) in your hands makes it a completely different game.
I do think it's a bit silly though, all this technology used to colonise mars and the best solution they can come up with is a old style flashlight (what about infra red nightvision ?). Of course it is you basic weapon, you can club people with it.
Apollo 13 wouldn't return home without duct tape solutions. In space exploration it can - and it does! - happen that all the modern technology becomes useless due to some sad coincidence and suddenly duct tape or old-fashioned flashlight is your only hope. After all, in Doom 3 we don't have a perfectly functioning Mars colony, t's a place where lots of sh* has hit lots of fans. Let's assume for sake of the story that passive nightvision is unavailable because opening the portal to hell has created strong residual infrared emission, blinding the marine's nightvision googles.
Anyone know of a large island that is well connected to the Internet?
Niue might not be large (check the stats on CIA site), but it's beautiful and THE WHOLE AREA is covered by freely accessible Wi-Fi network. Plus - they have cool Net domain ".nu". Just think - GNU colony could have the website g.nu!
She is absolutely frightened of flying, and somewhat of a computer nerd, I can't wait to talk to her, and tell her the scary news.
One of my worst flights ever was on a business trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. I was accompanied by a genuine RAF pilot, who flies the tanker Boeings for NATO warplanes. There was a rainstorm and strong wind over the whole UK and my friend was busy explaining me that Boeings are very vulnerable to strong winds and wind is the scariest threat for Boeing pilots and so on. It wasn't a nice thing to say on board, especially when the pilot announced a delay in approaching due to strong wind.
On return flight I discovered that this time we'll be flying on an Airbus. I told the (supposedly) good news to my friend, hoping that this time he will spare me his horror stories. Unfortunately, his reply was:
- Do you know why the pilots call it "Scarebus"?