Ok, so with the tens thousands of cameras and billions of pounds spend, and all they can do is possibly link a bunch of guys who didn't actually do anything themselves to 7/7... after the fact?
I guess the only way not to get recorded all the time by CCTV is to be a Brazilian electrician. That's the only way to be safe.
Maybe being a huge pussy, like you guys, helps somewhat. I also played it in darkness with 5.1 surround, but after the first few times when a monster spawns behind your back the "scary" level quickly drops down to almost nothing. Occasionally they'd get the atmosphere right and it's somewhat creepy, but most of the time it's just lame and annoying. And no, sudden loud noises aren't scary.
Overall though, I think as a game it was ok, and I don't regret the time I spend playing it. Actually I even came back to it to replay certain enjoyable parts. But as a DOOM game, IMO it's way off the mark. Most enemies, the pacing, the levels, and even the weapons didn't feel quite right at all. You used to be able to take down several imps with a single shotgun blast, but not anymore, you'd be lucky to kill one. Not that it matters, because most of the time there weren't enough enemies in a room to really get the party going.
That's why I think the OP put the word realistic in quotes. These games aren't really realistic in the Operation Flashpoint-realistic way, but compared to Q3 and UT99 they certainly feel so, regenerative health bullshit aside. The pace is slower, the movements are slower, and even mouselook is crippled with the simulated accuracy drop when you snap the mouse to the nearest foe's head. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, I myself really enjoyed the abovementioned Operation Flashpoint as well as pre-Vegas Rainbow6 games and SWAT 4. But what good is perfect mouse accuracy if you need to wait for a second before the crosshairs settle to an acceptable size?
Anyway, back to the topic. Of course there is a point after which spending any more on a mouse is ridiculous, and an additional 400dpi probably won't get you more frags. Still, the Razer Diamondback I got soon after its release was well worth it. Almost four years later it's still as good as new in terms of look and functionality. I think the buttons in particular fared very well, the clicks are "sharp" and the buttons don't get stuck, and there's almost no difference between the left and right buttons (the left one usually gets destroyed much faster due to more frequent use). I also find it much more comfortable than the wireless Mouseman Logitech I had before that, and pretty much any other regular mouse I could try at the shops. Unlike many other mice it's also symmetrical, so I can comfortably use my left hand if the right one is busy:).
Re:You didn't read the article
on
Second Person
·
· Score: 4, Funny
>COMPUTER
What should we do with the COMPUTER?
>use COMPUTER
You try to use the COMPUTER. It crashes and the monitor, the only source of light in the room, enters the standby mode.
Look, if you want to go 60 years backwards in terms of automotive transportations, go ahead and get yourself the abovementioned beetle to enjoy its "fine" performance and the excellent 32 mpg. Nobody's stoppping you. I myself would take one of those M5 thingies the germans seem to be offering before people such as yourself will manage to destroy all that is good in this world.
PS Even if you force everyone else to drive around in cardboard cars, you could still crash into concrete wall and no amount of "S-MAV" regulation is going to prevent your knees from failing badly at acting as a crumple zones.
If you were using a proper browser, such as Opera, you could just leave the browser window open to the side of the editor and have it automatically reload the page. No need to take your hands off the keyboard.
I'm not sure who's the one with comprehension problems;). What I'm saying is that if 90% of the drives fail within the first 6 months, the probability of significant numbers of them (depending on sample size and other stuff, which of course you don't actually reveal. See below) lasting more than a couple of years is extremely thin since, at best, they'd be following ~4-8% annualized failure rates as per the Google paper, and possibly much worse because WD drives are obviously so terrible.
Of course, this all depends on how one interpretes your story. Did 10% of your customers experience no failures, while the other 90% all lost their drives within 6 months? Or did all customers lose 90% of their drives? Or was that 10% of 10% of HDDs that survived? Really, between your two posts this is not very clear at all. Never mind though. The whole point of that part of my post was to set up the silly counter example, on which, by the way, you did not call me out. Which brings me to...
The "full of it" part was supposed to illustrate how foolish it is to use limited personal anecdotes (that's what they are, plural of anecdote != data) to make any strong statements, notice that I used my experience with ONE WD drive to counter your argument.
Also, a "ton" is not a suitable quantifier for the sample or population size, unless you're ordering your hard drives by weight. In that case, I'm not surprised that 90% of them fail immediately:D. For the sake of argument though, with a metric "tonne" this works out to about 1666 units at 600 grams per 2-platter hard drive (which is what the WD800 are). This is quite reasonable actually, but still about two orders of magnitude lower than google's.
I was able to find some graphs with HDD failures broken down by manufacturers. The difference between Seagate and WD is a whopping 0.48 percentage points. This might or might not be statistically significant, as no additional information is available. In any case, it's far from impressive. Here's the graph in question. It's based on RMAs from a PC equipment stores, and the whole thing is available here. It's in Russian, but the text doesn't say anything which isn't on the graphs.
I'm not taking this personally at all, and I have no stake in WD whatsoever, only in truth. This probably sounds way too cheesy, but that's what it is. Between the laptops, which mostly came with Hitachi drives, and a bunch of Seagate and Samsung drives in desktops, WD drives probably don't even make up the majority of all HDDs, and that's the only connection I have to WD. Do you work for Seagate, by the way? So far, I'm the only one who tried to use actual numbers and cited any sources (even if you don't like them), so the ball's in your court.
-----------
From another reply: > I'd also like to quote that, as of right now the *only* message below the post you replied to that has been positively moderated is mine. Obviously I'm not alone in my experiences...
Well to be honest, now I'm really impressed. With the power of slashdot moderation statistics potentially on my side, I could finish my thesis in just a few hours! Anybody knows what's the proper MLA citation format for a slashdot moderation?
Wow, a 90% failure rate within 6 month surely doesn't leave any drives functioning after more than a couple of years. Well my WD800JB is still just fine after more than five years of almost continuous usage, so obviously you're full of it, right?
> I realize there are people (like you) that seem to have had very good luck with WD's drives.
Yeah, and there are also people like you with their unsupported anecdotes, and then there are large scale studies, like that done by google, which say that while some models are more reliable than others (DeathStar, etc), overall the "results shown in the rest of the paper are not affected significantly by the population mix." PDF source
First of all, I'm completely aware that not everybody uses 120V, since I live on a continent where 230V is used pretty much universally. Also, many (if not all) laptop PSUs accept 100-240V for input, and thus usually require at most a plug adaptor. Finally, Americans are not the only ones who use ebay, so laptops with appropriate power supplies and plugs should be available. The laptops themselves accept DC of course.
So, except for a somewhat wider range of accepted voltages, there doesn't seem to be any significant OLPC benefit, from this point of view at least:P.
All of that doesn't matter, really. OLPC's ability to deliver the laptops at twice the target price, the availability of EEE, you anecdotes of failed HP laptops, and pretty much everything else. What does matter, though, is whether or not the laptop does anything useful for the kids. The keyboard failures alone do not make it useless, of course, but it's still a problem. Remember, the keyboards were supposed to be designed to withstand some abuse, which is why they suck to type on. If the keyboards have to be serviced or replaced every week, not only does it raise support costs in terms of parts and labor, but also kids' time with the laptops.
I'm not claiming the OLPC is a failure (or success, for that matter). If the goal was get cheap laptops to the kids in poor countries, then yeah, it's somewhat of a success. But then, if that was the only goal, we could just send them some laptops bought off ebay.
Now, I'm no Unix guru, but I think this is a good point. Using the FreeBSD handbook I was able to go from zero POSIX experience to a comfortable use of the system, while taking care of the installation & setup process by myself. You just need to come up with some excercises and let the students figure them out using the #1 UNIX Principle: RTFM.
Well, maybe you should've thought about it for a few extra second before buying the card. The 7900 is indeed one generation older (the 7<8 part), but it's higher up in Nvidia's model range (900>600). Knowing this, I think it's unreasonable to expect the newer, but much cheaper card to be significantly/any (depending on exact configuratio) faster than the older one.
> You CAN distribute code under the BSD liscence, just you can only distribute to other registered developers.
Oh, ok. I think I've just solved the prostitution problem for the US using the same approach: you can pay women for sex, but only if the woman in question is your wife. Ta-da!
If you prefers 4:3 monitors then that's just fine. I do too, actually. Between a 1680x1050 and a 1600x1200 monitor, I'd choose the 4:3 one if for no other reason than having more pixels, but only if cost wasn't a concern. Considering how much more affordable reasonably good 22" monitors are, I'm more than willing to sacrifice the 150 pixels.
I addressed several points in my post, but I think quite clearly stated in the first sentence you quoted what a proper replacement (as opposed to an upgrade) for a 4:3 20" was. These 1600x1200 20" monitors are still available from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Samsung and a whole bunch of other OEMs/manufacturers. Seriously, just use google or something.
Pretending no more 20" monitors exist, I can understand how the 24" could be the only acceptable alternative. But again, the whole point of the numbers exercise was to show how unreasonable it is to claim that the prices have not gone down or that there is price gouging going on. Car analogy time: OH NOES, BMW might discontinue the 5-series at some point in the future so obviously I can't get one now... and yet the 7-series is more expensive. Those assholes!
Yep, and one of the 21" Eizo monitors is $1 850. I know that. I also filtered the results to only show 4:3 monitors, because this is what you were looking for. Both Eizo and LaCie also make widescreen models, not to mention NEC, in which they make up almost half of their model range.
What exactly is it about monitors that makes smart people into retards, or at least "geometry-challenged"?
To replace your 4:3 20" monitor you'd need a... 4:3 20" monitor. Do you realize that the 24" widescreen monitors are basically (but not exactly, due to different pixel sizes) 20" ones with some extra width? Not only are they not smaller, or even the same, they're a good deal larger in every way possible. Perhaps some numbers will make this perfectly clear:
So, with the 22" you lose 150px and 8mm of height, but gain 80px and 7cm of width. But that's not what you want, so with the 24" you gain 320px and 11cm of width, as well as 2cm of height, for a total of 384 000 extra pixels and 430 cm^2 of area. These are roughly 20 to 30% increases for the same amount of much, much more useless dollars. Doesn't sound like gouging to me.
And really, what's so hard about finding good non-widescreen monitors? Just because your workplace isn't buying any doesn't mean they don't exist. Here, this took me less than a minute: NEC, Eizo, LaCie
This is pretty much exactly what I've been looking for my parent's dog. Being a beagle, sometimes she'd just drop whatever toy she was playing with and run off after a scent. The area might be perfectly safe for her, but she can still be gone for over an hour at a time.
Real-time tracking would be even more fun, but these devices tend to be too bulky and/or expensive, like the Garmin Astro or the thing from the article. The GPS logger, as you suggested, is the next step down and I think it could still be very interesting. I too found a couple of such devices, but they too seem to be rather poorly matched for the task, either due to their size, infrequent logging intervals, no waterproofing, etc. If anyone knows of something useful, I'd gladly have a look at any suggestions.
Contrary to one of the other posters, I've found the GPS accuracy to be pretty good in the area, as my Garmin unit usually reports ~3m accuracy. Sure, the dog/cat could crawl under a rock or something, but most of the time I'd imagine the accuracy would be good enough.
Exactly. I used to tell my parents that playing Carmageddon will help me improve my driving skills once I'm old enough to drive. I think it tought me a lot of neat tricks like dealing with the police, other drivers and pedestrians, not to mention the need to carefuly consider the cons and pros of each car model before making the final decision.
Not in a liberal society. "I don't like that" just doesn't (or at least shouldn't) fly.
And seriously, comparing murder to someone talking on the phone is completely retarded. Do you really not see the difference between depriving someone of their life or property and being slightly annoyed by a nonviolent behavior?
Slashdot Mirror
> but you don't see any articles on here about the successes.
:P
That's because there aren't any
Ok, so with the tens thousands of cameras and billions of pounds spend, and all they can do is possibly link a bunch of guys who didn't actually do anything themselves to 7/7... after the fact?
I guess the only way not to get recorded all the time by CCTV is to be a Brazilian electrician. That's the only way to be safe.
Maybe being a huge pussy, like you guys, helps somewhat. I also played it in darkness with 5.1 surround, but after the first few times when a monster spawns behind your back the "scary" level quickly drops down to almost nothing. Occasionally they'd get the atmosphere right and it's somewhat creepy, but most of the time it's just lame and annoying. And no, sudden loud noises aren't scary.
Overall though, I think as a game it was ok, and I don't regret the time I spend playing it. Actually I even came back to it to replay certain enjoyable parts. But as a DOOM game, IMO it's way off the mark. Most enemies, the pacing, the levels, and even the weapons didn't feel quite right at all. You used to be able to take down several imps with a single shotgun blast, but not anymore, you'd be lucky to kill one. Not that it matters, because most of the time there weren't enough enemies in a room to really get the party going.
That's why I think the OP put the word realistic in quotes. These games aren't really realistic in the Operation Flashpoint-realistic way, but compared to Q3 and UT99 they certainly feel so, regenerative health bullshit aside. The pace is slower, the movements are slower, and even mouselook is crippled with the simulated accuracy drop when you snap the mouse to the nearest foe's head. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, I myself really enjoyed the abovementioned Operation Flashpoint as well as pre-Vegas Rainbow6 games and SWAT 4. But what good is perfect mouse accuracy if you need to wait for a second before the crosshairs settle to an acceptable size?
:).
Anyway, back to the topic. Of course there is a point after which spending any more on a mouse is ridiculous, and an additional 400dpi probably won't get you more frags. Still, the Razer Diamondback I got soon after its release was well worth it. Almost four years later it's still as good as new in terms of look and functionality. I think the buttons in particular fared very well, the clicks are "sharp" and the buttons don't get stuck, and there's almost no difference between the left and right buttons (the left one usually gets destroyed much faster due to more frequent use). I also find it much more comfortable than the wireless Mouseman Logitech I had before that, and pretty much any other regular mouse I could try at the shops. Unlike many other mice it's also symmetrical, so I can comfortably use my left hand if the right one is busy
>COMPUTER
What should we do with the COMPUTER?
>use COMPUTER
You try to use the COMPUTER. It crashes and the monitor, the only source of light in the room, enters the standby mode.
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Oh, cock.
If you're getting caught by the speed traps, you aren't going fast enough.
Look, if you want to go 60 years backwards in terms of automotive transportations, go ahead and get yourself the abovementioned beetle to enjoy its "fine" performance and the excellent 32 mpg. Nobody's stoppping you. I myself would take one of those M5 thingies the germans seem to be offering before people such as yourself will manage to destroy all that is good in this world.
PS
Even if you force everyone else to drive around in cardboard cars, you could still crash into concrete wall and no amount of "S-MAV" regulation is going to prevent your knees from failing badly at acting as a crumple zones.
If you were using a proper browser, such as Opera, you could just leave the browser window open to the side of the editor and have it automatically reload the page. No need to take your hands off the keyboard.
They're just aware of all the CIA backdoors.
\me adjusts tinfoil hat
The Napster memory remains, eh?
> No because my reason for using Open Office isn't just because I'm a tight wad.
What then, you're really into S&M?
I'm not sure who's the one with comprehension problems ;). What I'm saying is that if 90% of the drives fail within the first 6 months, the probability of significant numbers of them (depending on sample size and other stuff, which of course you don't actually reveal. See below) lasting more than a couple of years is extremely thin since, at best, they'd be following ~4-8% annualized failure rates as per the Google paper, and possibly much worse because WD drives are obviously so terrible.
:D. For the sake of argument though, with a metric "tonne" this works out to about 1666 units at 600 grams per 2-platter hard drive (which is what the WD800 are). This is quite reasonable actually, but still about two orders of magnitude lower than google's.
Of course, this all depends on how one interpretes your story. Did 10% of your customers experience no failures, while the other 90% all lost their drives within 6 months? Or did all customers lose 90% of their drives? Or was that 10% of 10% of HDDs that survived? Really, between your two posts this is not very clear at all. Never mind though. The whole point of that part of my post was to set up the silly counter example, on which, by the way, you did not call me out. Which brings me to...
The "full of it" part was supposed to illustrate how foolish it is to use limited personal anecdotes (that's what they are, plural of anecdote != data) to make any strong statements, notice that I used my experience with ONE WD drive to counter your argument.
Also, a "ton" is not a suitable quantifier for the sample or population size, unless you're ordering your hard drives by weight. In that case, I'm not surprised that 90% of them fail immediately
I was able to find some graphs with HDD failures broken down by manufacturers. The difference between Seagate and WD is a whopping 0.48 percentage points. This might or might not be statistically significant, as no additional information is available. In any case, it's far from impressive. Here's the graph in question. It's based on RMAs from a PC equipment stores, and the whole thing is available here. It's in Russian, but the text doesn't say anything which isn't on the graphs.
I'm not taking this personally at all, and I have no stake in WD whatsoever, only in truth. This probably sounds way too cheesy, but that's what it is. Between the laptops, which mostly came with Hitachi drives, and a bunch of Seagate and Samsung drives in desktops, WD drives probably don't even make up the majority of all HDDs, and that's the only connection I have to WD. Do you work for Seagate, by the way? So far, I'm the only one who tried to use actual numbers and cited any sources (even if you don't like them), so the ball's in your court.
-----------
From another reply:
> I'd also like to quote that, as of right now the *only* message below the post you replied to that has been positively moderated is mine. Obviously I'm not alone in my experiences...
Well to be honest, now I'm really impressed. With the power of slashdot moderation statistics potentially on my side, I could finish my thesis in just a few hours! Anybody knows what's the proper MLA citation format for a slashdot moderation?
Wow, a 90% failure rate within 6 month surely doesn't leave any drives functioning after more than a couple of years. Well my WD800JB is still just fine after more than five years of almost continuous usage, so obviously you're full of it, right?
> I realize there are people (like you) that seem to have had very good luck with WD's drives.
Yeah, and there are also people like you with their unsupported anecdotes, and then there are large scale studies, like that done by google, which say that while some models are more reliable than others (DeathStar, etc), overall the "results shown in the rest of the paper are not affected significantly by the population mix." PDF source
Well, if you want to go there...
:P.
First of all, I'm completely aware that not everybody uses 120V, since I live on a continent where 230V is used pretty much universally. Also, many (if not all) laptop PSUs accept 100-240V for input, and thus usually require at most a plug adaptor. Finally, Americans are not the only ones who use ebay, so laptops with appropriate power supplies and plugs should be available. The laptops themselves accept DC of course.
So, except for a somewhat wider range of accepted voltages, there doesn't seem to be any significant OLPC benefit, from this point of view at least
All of that doesn't matter, really. OLPC's ability to deliver the laptops at twice the target price, the availability of EEE, you anecdotes of failed HP laptops, and pretty much everything else. What does matter, though, is whether or not the laptop does anything useful for the kids. The keyboard failures alone do not make it useless, of course, but it's still a problem. Remember, the keyboards were supposed to be designed to withstand some abuse, which is why they suck to type on. If the keyboards have to be serviced or replaced every week, not only does it raise support costs in terms of parts and labor, but also kids' time with the laptops.
I'm not claiming the OLPC is a failure (or success, for that matter). If the goal was get cheap laptops to the kids in poor countries, then yeah, it's somewhat of a success. But then, if that was the only goal, we could just send them some laptops bought off ebay.
Now, I'm no Unix guru, but I think this is a good point.
Using the FreeBSD handbook I was able to go from zero POSIX experience to a comfortable use of the system, while taking care of the installation & setup process by myself. You just need to come up with some excercises and let the students figure them out using the #1 UNIX Principle: RTFM.
Well, maybe you should've thought about it for a few extra second before buying the card. The 7900 is indeed one generation older (the 7<8 part), but it's higher up in Nvidia's model range (900>600). Knowing this, I think it's unreasonable to expect the newer, but much cheaper card to be significantly/any (depending on exact configuratio) faster than the older one.
And not to be a complete dick, here's a handy chart for comparing graphics cards across several games.
Well then, I choose PEN MISSILE!!!!
> You CAN distribute code under the BSD liscence, just you can only distribute to other registered developers.
Oh, ok. I think I've just solved the prostitution problem for the US using the same approach: you can pay women for sex, but only if the woman in question is your wife. Ta-da!
If you prefers 4:3 monitors then that's just fine. I do too, actually. Between a 1680x1050 and a 1600x1200 monitor, I'd choose the 4:3 one if for no other reason than having more pixels, but only if cost wasn't a concern. Considering how much more affordable reasonably good 22" monitors are, I'm more than willing to sacrifice the 150 pixels.
I addressed several points in my post, but I think quite clearly stated in the first sentence you quoted what a proper replacement (as opposed to an upgrade) for a 4:3 20" was. These 1600x1200 20" monitors are still available from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Samsung and a whole bunch of other OEMs/manufacturers. Seriously, just use google or something.
Pretending no more 20" monitors exist, I can understand how the 24" could be the only acceptable alternative. But again, the whole point of the numbers exercise was to show how unreasonable it is to claim that the prices have not gone down or that there is price gouging going on. Car analogy time: OH NOES, BMW might discontinue the 5-series at some point in the future so obviously I can't get one now... and yet the 7-series is more expensive. Those assholes!
Yep, and one of the 21" Eizo monitors is $1 850. I know that. I also filtered the results to only show 4:3 monitors, because this is what you were looking for. Both Eizo and LaCie also make widescreen models, not to mention NEC, in which they make up almost half of their model range.
What exactly is it about monitors that makes smart people into retards, or at least "geometry-challenged"?
To replace your 4:3 20" monitor you'd need a... 4:3 20" monitor. Do you realize that the 24" widescreen monitors are basically (but not exactly, due to different pixel sizes) 20" ones with some extra width? Not only are they not smaller, or even the same, they're a good deal larger in every way possible. Perhaps some numbers will make this perfectly clear:
20" 1600x1200 -- Pixels: 1 920 000; Width: 40.6cm; Height: 30.5cm
22" 1680x1050 -- Pixels: 1 764 000; Width: 47.4cm; Height: 29.6cm
24" 1920x1200 -- Pixels: 2 304 000; Width: 51.7cm; Height: 32.3cm
So, with the 22" you lose 150px and 8mm of height, but gain 80px and 7cm of width. But that's not what you want, so with the 24" you gain 320px and 11cm of width, as well as 2cm of height, for a total of 384 000 extra pixels and 430 cm^2 of area. These are roughly 20 to 30% increases for the same amount of much, much more useless dollars. Doesn't sound like gouging to me.
And really, what's so hard about finding good non-widescreen monitors? Just because your workplace isn't buying any doesn't mean they don't exist. Here, this took me less than a minute:
NEC, Eizo, LaCie
Well, the missing fingers probably don't help, either.
This is pretty much exactly what I've been looking for my parent's dog. Being a beagle, sometimes she'd just drop whatever toy she was playing with and run off after a scent. The area might be perfectly safe for her, but she can still be gone for over an hour at a time.
Real-time tracking would be even more fun, but these devices tend to be too bulky and/or expensive, like the Garmin Astro or the thing from the article. The GPS logger, as you suggested, is the next step down and I think it could still be very interesting. I too found a couple of such devices, but they too seem to be rather poorly matched for the task, either due to their size, infrequent logging intervals, no waterproofing, etc. If anyone knows of something useful, I'd gladly have a look at any suggestions.
Contrary to one of the other posters, I've found the GPS accuracy to be pretty good in the area, as my Garmin unit usually reports ~3m accuracy. Sure, the dog/cat could crawl under a rock or something, but most of the time I'd imagine the accuracy would be good enough.
> There are more types of games than just FPS
Exactly. I used to tell my parents that playing Carmageddon will help me improve my driving skills once I'm old enough to drive. I think it tought me a lot of neat tricks like dealing with the police, other drivers and pedestrians, not to mention the need to carefuly consider the cons and pros of each car model before making the final decision.
> Uh, yeah?
Not in a liberal society. "I don't like that" just doesn't (or at least shouldn't) fly.
And seriously, comparing murder to someone talking on the phone is completely retarded. Do you really not see the difference between depriving someone of their life or property and being slightly annoyed by a nonviolent behavior?