Pandora's Box is far scarier than some old can of worms any day.
I've gotten two replies on this, and apparently none of you got the joke. I know he was referring to Pandora's Box, and I know what that is. I did not mean can of worms. I was referring to opening up a can of whoop-ass.
I'm reminded of an old quote that I think was from Mark Twain. "Explaining the humor in a joke is like dissecting a frog. No one is very interested, and the frog dies of it."
In one life, you're Jack Thompson, legal counsel for respectable families. You show up to court cases, file your legal briefs, and you...help Mrs. Jones protect her children.
The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the video game-hating alias "Jack the Ripper" and are guilty of threatening and insulting virtually every geek in the world. One of these lives has a future...and one of them does not.
That's the first time I've ever seen that on Slashdot.:)
Anyway, in the spirit of the poster below who mentioned some of his favorite quotes from the Princess Bride that are a little more obscure, here is my favorite.
Grandpa: It was ten days to the wedding. The King still lived, but Buttercup's nightmares were growing steadily worse. The Grandson: See didn't I tell you she'd never marry that rotten Humperdinck. Grandpa: Yes you're very smart. Shut up.
Why did slashdot feel their obligation to the asshat retard who sent back or authorized those worthless "answers" was greater than their committment to slashdot readers?
That's an interesting point to ponder. Which is the better response? Obviously Blizzards "answers" were garbage, but what is the right thing to do in this situation? I like this method, where Taco reported back their responses, but prefaced them as being worthless and indicated that Blizzard was less than helpful.
The other method that would have been really good has an element of dissatisfaction about it. It would have been really classy to not post their responses, but instead put up a summary that indicated, "Blizzard decided to give us garbage answers that are just a bunch of PR nonsense, so we're not going to support them by publishing it here." That would have been a totally cool thing to do, but of course it would bring on the chorus of, "But we want to see it anyway!"
But why, oh why, after the first 2 dozen comments point it out, does everyone continue to harp on it? Dupes happen. Don't read it. Move on.
Seriously, it's because this one is more impressive than most. They are both on the Slashdot front page at the same time. Usually dupes are at least a few days apart. Well done, gentlemen.
When you say Apple has 3% market share, WHAT market are you talking about? Operating system market or computer market? Apple currently ties them together, so it's hard to talk about them separately, but with this capability of running the OSX operating system on lower-cost computers, their markets will be able to change separately. You refer to trying to "protect what they have", but I think this ability to sell their operating system could grow that division immensely.
Of course, as we know, Apple primarily uses the OSX operating system as an attraction to buy their hardware. That is generally how they make their money, so having this not tied together would not be perceived as a good thing for them.
Do you violate the ruling or does Google for accepting your business?
According to TFA in the Register, that is still to be decided. See quote below:
According to GEICO, the court has stayed the trial for 30 days to give the parties an opportunity to settle. If the parties do not settle, the trial will continue on the question of damages
and on the issue of who is liable: Google or Google's advertisers.
*whoosh* You're safe on that one. The irony of your comment apparently flew several feet over your head, so you were not in any real danger.
It was pretty funny to see you stomp right up and stick out your little 4-year-old bottom lip in a pout and say, "copyright infringement is NOT theft."
I guess you didn't notice how he was pointing out that it's a tired line that is just overused as a pseudo-excuse for downloading music people don't have a right to--call that what you will.
Agreed it may be illegal, but at least get it right so your argument might actually have some weight.
Until you do, you are just 'yet another clueless ranter'.
Uh-huh. And until you stop parroting that stupid line, you're yet another redundant person proving his point.
Wow, this is about the most detailed and informative post I have seen on Slashdot in quite a while. That's a great description of the features and advantages of m0n0wall.
It sucks that you haven't gotten a mod point yet for this, but I hope it will come your way. Meanwhile, I'll lend this reply with my Karma Bonus to try to draw attention to it. Good luck with that business venture of the firewall servers.
I totally don't understand their comment on Tecmo Super Bowl.
It offered season mode with full stat tracking, injuries, and all of the players from the NFL, like the unstoppable Barry Sanders. In fact, Barry Saders was so fast, many tournaments actually instituted a no-Detroit rule.
I played this game a lot and still have it and an original NES system. Their comment about Barry Sanders doesn't make much sense because in that game, Barry wasn't the most dominant running back. The Raiders had Bo Jackson, who(in that game) had much better ability. He was much quicker and had better top speed than the Barry Sanders player.
Tecmo Super Bowl had this "how is the player feeling" status where on a given week every player's condition would be bad, average, good, or excellent. Bo was always better than Barry, except if Bo was in a worse "condition" than Barry. If Bo was about one level down from Barry, then they were about equivalent.
When I used to play full season schedules of this game with a couple of friends of mine, we used to have to agree to a "no San Francisco" rule. Joe Montana throwing to Jerry Rice really was unstoppable. The game abilities were so skewed on those players that you could triple and quadruple-team Jerry Rice, and he would still catch it almost every time.
I don't understand why no one knows how to use an apple. Take your left hand out of your pants and leave it on the keyboard in a natural position. Command, ctrl, and option are sitting right there under your thumb.
Well, you know, sometimes it's nice to still be able to use your computer with one hand while drinking your coffee, soda, or whatever with the other hand.
Got it? Most of us could probably have found this just as easily if it had not been posted on/., but now it is, so it's that much easier to find, which means it will be brought to MS's attention that much more quickly, which means they will have a fix for this work around that much sooner.
Ha ha! When I read that I thought, "Oh, you mean like we've been openly, publicly blasting them for all of their programming vulnerabilities and horrible security model, and the incredibly stupid practices of putting ease-of-use over stability or security? Yeah, that has resulted in them jumping right on it and issuing fixes for those things. NOT!"
> Your eyes are continually shifting focus between the front of the glass,
> and the back (where the image is).
No they're not. If your monitor is even vaguely clean then it's pretty much impossible to focus on the glass [...] If you're sitting the correct distance away (at least 16 inches) then the fact that the glass is 1cm thick is totally inconsequential. ie, if you DO focus on the glass front somehow, then the phospor layer is still almost perfectly focused anyway (after all, it's only about 2.5% further away than the bit you're focused on).
Right, I think that person may have heard an explanation about focus and eye strain headaches and didn't quite understand it. His explanation is not right. I got a pair of computer glasses to get rid of most of my eye strain headaches since I stare at a monitor for 7-8 hours a day at work. Here is the explanation from my eye doctor.
Focusing on closer distances (eye stretching taller)is a bit harder on the eye than farther distances (eye stretching flatter). The doc has a simulated computer screen that he set up and had me watch that while he watched what my eye was doing. Here is what happens. Since focusing close is difficult, the eye can't hold it and starts to relax a little and your focus drifts farther away. Your eye notices that you're a little out of focus and pulls it back in before you are consciously aware of it--wash, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. My doc said that at the rate my eye was doing this shift/correct cycle, it would probably be going through this several thousand times a day during my 8 hours of work. He said, imagine you were repeatedly moving any muscle that much; of course it would get sore.
So, the computer glasses are to change the normal distance of focus to the distance I normally sit from my monitor. Effectively, they refocus things a little so that my eyes can sit at an ideally "no effort", relaxed position to look at my monitor. That has greatly reduced my eye strain headaches.
I saw this on the Discovery channel, and it's fantastic for commerical space as you can distribute 'natural' light all over the office where windows can't be located.
Go to the website of this company and they have the video of that Discovery channel segment. It's about 5 minutes long and really does a good job summarising what it's about and showing how it works.
As to the abundance of comments about the "GPS tracking" to aim the mirror, I think that may be accurate. In the segment, he refers to it as a "GPS microprocessor" that can "calculate the exact position of the sun to within 0.1 degree." Since this is going to be a generic system that can be sold anywhere, it would be good to have GPS in the system just so the system itself can know where it is. With that information, it would then just be a little calculation in the microprocessor to track the known path of the sun from that location. Yes, this could be done without GPS if each system were hard-coded with its final installed coordinates at the factory, but that doesn't work well to produce these without knowing where they will end up.
This gets my vote. I hadn't thought of that. This is one of the best things about an open source system with access to open source software repositories. That will really impress them that they can get almost any type of software they want in less than a minute for free.
Good idea about the drawing on the whiteboard and having people offer suggestions. Perhaps I can refine the idea a little.
Lets say you show them the two methods of development as cars that are being offered. You can make this demo a bit more fun with some model cars or Matchbox cars. I would suggest the proprietary model first. Show them a car, and explain that this is the only model of car that is offered by the One Big Company right now. You can start asking around, "What do you need in a vehicle?" Throw out suggestions if necessary like, "Do you need a bigger vehicle to carry your kids? Do you need something with an outside bed to haul dirt or rocks? How about some of you who are looking for a commuter car to get good gas mileage so you're not spending $80 a week to fill up your vehicle?" Now show them a very different vehicle, and explain that it is the new model from the One Big Company. Ask if it effectively addresses everyone's needs. (obviously not) Be sure to mention that the One Big Company immediately stops making the first car because they want everyone to buy their new one.
Now show (by pulling out a bunch of your small cars) how there are other companies who are making sports cars, commuter cars, luxury cars, minivans, scooters, motorcycles, semi trucks, SUVs, Mini Coopers, limousines, and modified hot rods. Tell them how any of these cars can be had for cheaper than the extremely limited selection from the One Big Company.
The steel pipe heat pump is really cool. I like that idea.
The thing you mentioned about photovoltaic cells to cut your electric bill by $5-$15/month may never pay for itself, depending on where you live though. Crunch the numbers for your local area first. I was just looking into that in Idaho, where I live. PV cells are still extremely expensive. They are selling at a cost of about $8/Watt. To completely run a home about 1500 square feet like yours would need around a 3-4KW system. That is $24K-$32K. Where I live in Idaho, it is a blessing that we have so much hydroelectric power that our rate is about 6 cents per KWhour. What that means for the PV aspect is that it will basically never pay for itself, and Idaho doesn't give any kind of incentives or anything for building PV installations. The power company is required to buy any excess you generate, but at 6 cents per KWhour, it wouldn't really get you anywhere fast.
So driving at 40 mph on a track takes wind resistance out of it?? Were they in a vacumn? Driving at 45 MPH gives you 45 MPH or wind resistance, wind from the enviornment is not an important factor here, just the acutal speed the car was traveling
Maybe I was unclear in leaving the detail out of it, but as someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread, air resistance goes up exponentially with speed. At lower speeds like 45mph, other factors like engine power, tire rolling resistance, etc. are the dominating factors, and air resistance is extremely minor. At very high speeds, air resistance comes to be the dominant factor of a vehicle's resistance to movement. In fact, if you read a lot of car reviews, they will specify on the top speed whether it is limited by engine governor, engine capability, or wind resistance.
My comments about being in a sheltered environment are relevent because any "natural wind" in the environment except for a tailwind will also contribute to drag. So for real-world highway conditions at about 70mph out in the open, the wind drag will be more severe than their tests account for.
Yeah, R134 is definitely less effective than R12. I remember on some older cars that still used R12, they could develop frost on the A/C vents because of how cold they blew.
dude, your headlights use more power than the air conditioner in a modern car.
Turn off your headlights and your foglights (driving with them on makes people look like a dorks anyways) and you will have more than enough power restored for the AC.
Where is the moderation for "Wrong"? Lets say that in one case, you were to drive with basically none of the electrical features in your car running. Then turn on your headlights, dome light, reading lights, windshield wipers, fuzz buster, and the radio on really loud. Wow, I'll bet your car feels really sluggish now, huh? It doesn't? Oh yeah, that's because those things don't take much power, and that power comes from an alternator which is always running and generating at least as much power as is needed to run all of the electrical accesories in your car. In a smallish car, when you turn on the A/C, you'll feel that sudden drag like somebody latched a tow chain onto the back.
Using your AC taps mechanical power from the engine. This requires you to use more gas to maintain the same speed. Opening your windows adds some wind resistance, but doesn't add the same amount of loss as engaging the AC compressor. (you should watch mythbusters sometime, its a great show!)
I watched that episode of Mythbusters about the A/C vs. open windows debate, and their conclusion was that it was pretty close to even. Their test results could barely find a difference, but their testing methods were so horrible(as in not real life) that I found any conclusion they would come to worthless. The biggest aspect that screwed up their results was that the identical vehicles they were using were both huge SUVs with V-8 engines. Of course an A/C compressor isn't going to be much of a load(proportionally) on that powerful of an engine.
I have always had small 4-cylinder cars, and in them, when you turn on the A/C, it feels like the car just hit a construction barrel. It's pulling a much larger percentage of power from the engine than on those big SUVs. That large percentage of power would translate significantly to lost fuel efficiency.
The other aspect about the Mythbusters test that was messed up was that they were running them around a closed-in, banked racetrack. The handling limitations of the SUVs on that track forced them to keep their speed down to about 45mph. Those two factors--the low speed and the sheltered from the wind environment pretty much take the wind resistance factor out of the equation.
So, myth: The Mythbusters show proved something about the A/C vs. windows debate? BUSTED!
That does remind me that there was a similar situation with Double Dragon. The arcade version had very different mechanics to the NES version(s). There were some very different moves in the arcade Double Dragon, and cooperative gameplay, which was not available on the NES until DD2.
This one may bring back some memories--on the arcade version, if you hit Jump and Punch at the same time, your guy would do this elbow jab behind him that was way powerful and about the only way to take out some of the stonger enemies. Wow, now I really want to play that again.
I finally beat Bionic Commando using a NES emulator. Without that, I don't think I would have been able to. The 'save state' feature was what saved my butt. That "one chance" shot at the helicopter was something where I had to restore and try again a few times.
I do think the grappling feature opened up a whole new paradigm in game play. Swinging was a new and exciting skill to learn. There were several places where, with some good swinging skills, you could get over or around some dangerous areas without having to fight through them directly. It gave a nice sense of creative achivement in finding an alternate solution. There were also some times where you might be about to fall and could save yourself with a well-timed last minute grab onto something.
After getting very close to being 0wned(the person did log into one of my credit card accounts and changed the password, but we got in and reset it before they did anything), my wife and I decided we needed to go to some real password security. We started using a password manager program. So now, our passwords are like 15 or 20+ characters and full of symbols, numbers and junk. We store the password file on a USB flash drive at home(and backed up on a CD in a safe), so it is not kept on that computer. And since the passwords are put in with Copy and Paste, there is no keylogger weakness.
There are lots of password manager programs for any operating system, so try a few until you find one you like. A good feature to have is a password generator built into it. We use Whisper32, and it has a good simple interface. For generating, you tell it the conditions like number of characters and what types of numbers or symbols are allowed and then hit the "Generate" button. If you like what it comes up with, just save it as the password for that account.
It also has a notes field where you can enter stuff like phone numbers or payment addresses for each account.
Slashdot Mirror
I've gotten two replies on this, and apparently none of you got the joke. I know he was referring to Pandora's Box, and I know what that is. I did not mean can of worms. I was referring to opening up a can of whoop-ass.
I'm reminded of an old quote that I think was from Mark Twain. "Explaining the humor in a joke is like dissecting a frog. No one is very interested, and the frog dies of it."
In one life, you're Jack Thompson, legal counsel for respectable families. You show up to court cases, file your legal briefs, and you...help Mrs. Jones protect her children.
The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the video game-hating alias "Jack the Ripper" and are guilty of threatening and insulting virtually every geek in the world. One of these lives has a future...and one of them does not.
I think you misspelled can.
That's the first time I've ever seen that on Slashdot. :)
Anyway, in the spirit of the poster below who mentioned some of his favorite quotes from the Princess Bride that are a little more obscure, here is my favorite.
Grandpa: It was ten days to the wedding. The King still lived, but Buttercup's nightmares were growing steadily worse.
The Grandson: See didn't I tell you she'd never marry that rotten Humperdinck.
Grandpa: Yes you're very smart. Shut up.
The other method that would have been really good has an element of dissatisfaction about it. It would have been really classy to not post their responses, but instead put up a summary that indicated, "Blizzard decided to give us garbage answers that are just a bunch of PR nonsense, so we're not going to support them by publishing it here." That would have been a totally cool thing to do, but of course it would bring on the chorus of, "But we want to see it anyway!"
When you say Apple has 3% market share, WHAT market are you talking about? Operating system market or computer market? Apple currently ties them together, so it's hard to talk about them separately, but with this capability of running the OSX operating system on lower-cost computers, their markets will be able to change separately. You refer to trying to "protect what they have", but I think this ability to sell their operating system could grow that division immensely.
Of course, as we know, Apple primarily uses the OSX operating system as an attraction to buy their hardware. That is generally how they make their money, so having this not tied together would not be perceived as a good thing for them.
It was pretty funny to see you stomp right up and stick out your little 4-year-old bottom lip in a pout and say, "copyright infringement is NOT theft."
I guess you didn't notice how he was pointing out that it's a tired line that is just overused as a pseudo-excuse for downloading music people don't have a right to--call that what you will.
Uh-huh. And until you stop parroting that stupid line, you're yet another redundant person proving his point.
Wow, this is about the most detailed and informative post I have seen on Slashdot in quite a while. That's a great description of the features and advantages of m0n0wall.
It sucks that you haven't gotten a mod point yet for this, but I hope it will come your way. Meanwhile, I'll lend this reply with my Karma Bonus to try to draw attention to it. Good luck with that business venture of the firewall servers.
Tecmo Super Bowl had this "how is the player feeling" status where on a given week every player's condition would be bad, average, good, or excellent. Bo was always better than Barry, except if Bo was in a worse "condition" than Barry. If Bo was about one level down from Barry, then they were about equivalent.
When I used to play full season schedules of this game with a couple of friends of mine, we used to have to agree to a "no San Francisco" rule. Joe Montana throwing to Jerry Rice really was unstoppable. The game abilities were so skewed on those players that you could triple and quadruple-team Jerry Rice, and he would still catch it almost every time.
Focusing on closer distances (eye stretching taller)is a bit harder on the eye than farther distances (eye stretching flatter). The doc has a simulated computer screen that he set up and had me watch that while he watched what my eye was doing. Here is what happens. Since focusing close is difficult, the eye can't hold it and starts to relax a little and your focus drifts farther away. Your eye notices that you're a little out of focus and pulls it back in before you are consciously aware of it--wash, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. My doc said that at the rate my eye was doing this shift/correct cycle, it would probably be going through this several thousand times a day during my 8 hours of work. He said, imagine you were repeatedly moving any muscle that much; of course it would get sore.
So, the computer glasses are to change the normal distance of focus to the distance I normally sit from my monitor. Effectively, they refocus things a little so that my eyes can sit at an ideally "no effort", relaxed position to look at my monitor. That has greatly reduced my eye strain headaches.
As to the abundance of comments about the "GPS tracking" to aim the mirror, I think that may be accurate. In the segment, he refers to it as a "GPS microprocessor" that can "calculate the exact position of the sun to within 0.1 degree." Since this is going to be a generic system that can be sold anywhere, it would be good to have GPS in the system just so the system itself can know where it is. With that information, it would then just be a little calculation in the microprocessor to track the known path of the sun from that location. Yes, this could be done without GPS if each system were hard-coded with its final installed coordinates at the factory, but that doesn't work well to produce these without knowing where they will end up.
This gets my vote. I hadn't thought of that. This is one of the best things about an open source system with access to open source software repositories. That will really impress them that they can get almost any type of software they want in less than a minute for free.
Good idea about the drawing on the whiteboard and having people offer suggestions. Perhaps I can refine the idea a little.
Lets say you show them the two methods of development as cars that are being offered. You can make this demo a bit more fun with some model cars or Matchbox cars. I would suggest the proprietary model first. Show them a car, and explain that this is the only model of car that is offered by the One Big Company right now. You can start asking around, "What do you need in a vehicle?" Throw out suggestions if necessary like, "Do you need a bigger vehicle to carry your kids? Do you need something with an outside bed to haul dirt or rocks? How about some of you who are looking for a commuter car to get good gas mileage so you're not spending $80 a week to fill up your vehicle?" Now show them a very different vehicle, and explain that it is the new model from the One Big Company. Ask if it effectively addresses everyone's needs. (obviously not) Be sure to mention that the One Big Company immediately stops making the first car because they want everyone to buy their new one.
Now show (by pulling out a bunch of your small cars) how there are other companies who are making sports cars, commuter cars, luxury cars, minivans, scooters, motorcycles, semi trucks, SUVs, Mini Coopers, limousines, and modified hot rods. Tell them how any of these cars can be had for cheaper than the extremely limited selection from the One Big Company.
The steel pipe heat pump is really cool. I like that idea.
The thing you mentioned about photovoltaic cells to cut your electric bill by $5-$15/month may never pay for itself, depending on where you live though. Crunch the numbers for your local area first. I was just looking into that in Idaho, where I live. PV cells are still extremely expensive. They are selling at a cost of about $8/Watt. To completely run a home about 1500 square feet like yours would need around a 3-4KW system. That is $24K-$32K. Where I live in Idaho, it is a blessing that we have so much hydroelectric power that our rate is about 6 cents per KWhour. What that means for the PV aspect is that it will basically never pay for itself, and Idaho doesn't give any kind of incentives or anything for building PV installations. The power company is required to buy any excess you generate, but at 6 cents per KWhour, it wouldn't really get you anywhere fast.
My comments about being in a sheltered environment are relevent because any "natural wind" in the environment except for a tailwind will also contribute to drag. So for real-world highway conditions at about 70mph out in the open, the wind drag will be more severe than their tests account for.
Yeah, R134 is definitely less effective than R12. I remember on some older cars that still used R12, they could develop frost on the A/C vents because of how cold they blew.
I have always had small 4-cylinder cars, and in them, when you turn on the A/C, it feels like the car just hit a construction barrel. It's pulling a much larger percentage of power from the engine than on those big SUVs. That large percentage of power would translate significantly to lost fuel efficiency.
The other aspect about the Mythbusters test that was messed up was that they were running them around a closed-in, banked racetrack. The handling limitations of the SUVs on that track forced them to keep their speed down to about 45mph. Those two factors--the low speed and the sheltered from the wind environment pretty much take the wind resistance factor out of the equation.
So, myth: The Mythbusters show proved something about the A/C vs. windows debate? BUSTED!
That does remind me that there was a similar situation with Double Dragon. The arcade version had very different mechanics to the NES version(s). There were some very different moves in the arcade Double Dragon, and cooperative gameplay, which was not available on the NES until DD2.
This one may bring back some memories--on the arcade version, if you hit Jump and Punch at the same time, your guy would do this elbow jab behind him that was way powerful and about the only way to take out some of the stonger enemies. Wow, now I really want to play that again.
I finally beat Bionic Commando using a NES emulator. Without that, I don't think I would have been able to. The 'save state' feature was what saved my butt. That "one chance" shot at the helicopter was something where I had to restore and try again a few times.
I do think the grappling feature opened up a whole new paradigm in game play. Swinging was a new and exciting skill to learn. There were several places where, with some good swinging skills, you could get over or around some dangerous areas without having to fight through them directly. It gave a nice sense of creative achivement in finding an alternate solution. There were also some times where you might be about to fall and could save yourself with a well-timed last minute grab onto something.
After getting very close to being 0wned(the person did log into one of my credit card accounts and changed the password, but we got in and reset it before they did anything), my wife and I decided we needed to go to some real password security. We started using a password manager program. So now, our passwords are like 15 or 20+ characters and full of symbols, numbers and junk. We store the password file on a USB flash drive at home(and backed up on a CD in a safe), so it is not kept on that computer. And since the passwords are put in with Copy and Paste, there is no keylogger weakness.
There are lots of password manager programs for any operating system, so try a few until you find one you like. A good feature to have is a password generator built into it. We use Whisper32, and it has a good simple interface. For generating, you tell it the conditions like number of characters and what types of numbers or symbols are allowed and then hit the "Generate" button. If you like what it comes up with, just save it as the password for that account.
It also has a notes field where you can enter stuff like phone numbers or payment addresses for each account.