So why is this news? The Microsoft engineers came up with a reasonably obvious method of ranking people, got a trademark on a stupid name, and now this standard rating method is getting free advertising space on Slashdot, and the methedology behind it is sound enough that nobody calls them on it.
They didn't do anything. They're just measuring the skill of a player as a standard deviation up or down from where they are for matching players.
The point is the quality doesn't match, but the results can be equivalent anyways.
Are you looking to get a degree from somewhere reputable that's not really worth anything other than the value of the degree? Then it sounds like there are distant learning programs that give you the exact same degree as a real, second tier CS school. However, the education is going to be terrible. Seems like a good way to shortcut the educational process if you've already developed the knowledge you need via work experience.
It is if you try and put a numerical value on infinity. But the universe is splitting into an infinite number of copies, which is just as simple a number as 0,1, and 1,000,000 and fulfills Occam's razor because it makes a lot of the math, really, really, simple.
What if Microsoft's plan is to give every single Xbox 360.v1 owner a coupon for a free HD-DVD drive by mail? It could make sense, economically, if the difference in cost between the HD-DVD changes enough over the course of two years. Two years from this Christmas, then, Microsoft launches the Xbox 360.v2 with the HD-DVD drive and all Xbox 360.v1 owners are told that they can send in a copy of the bottom of their Xbox to receive their free HD-DVD drive upgrade. It could save a lot of money I think, and not cause the Osborne effect or the Sega CD effect.
I don't understand people that complain that the buying and selling of virtual goods ruins online goods for those that don't want to spend extra money on their character.
It doesn't ruin the game for the others. It just makes it profitable for them in the long run, with all sorts of suckers running around throughing real life dough at them.
And how bout this? The HD-DVD player upgrade is also a standalone HD-DVD player. Microsoft allies with the HD-DVD players and truly tries to crush Blu-Ray via saturation of HD-DVD and the market share of its own Xbox.
What if Microsoft's plan is to give every single Xbox 360.v1 owner a coupon for a free HD-DVD drive by mail?
It could make sense, economically, if the difference in cost between the HD-DVD changes enough over the course of two years. Two years from this Christmas, then, Microsoft launches the Xbox 360.v2 with the HD-DVD drive and all Xbox 360.v1 owners are told that they can send in a copy of the bottom of their Xbox to receive their free HD-DVD drive upgrade.
It could save a lot of money I think, and not cause the Osborne effect or the Sega CD effect.
My favorite Asimov novel is The End of Eternity. The premise is that time travel exists, and a group of people outside of the normal fabric of time tries to slowly improve the existence of mankind by making tiny, tiny changes at key points in the timeline.
As explained in the book, a person would never know that a change had taken place. As per the book, it's possible that I might not have even existed last week, but maybe a Change willed me into existence, then I was created and have all the memories of my life like I actually lived it, even though I didn't. It raises some great issues about time travel, and for the true Asimov fans, he accidentally (on purpose?) and subtly ties the entire Foundation/Robots/Empire series together before he began explicitly doing so in the 80's. This book is a true prequel to those.
I use it with firefox. You click a pdf link. Foxit opens. It displays the PDF. It doesn't mess up your system. It runs quickly. It feels much more like reading a PDF on OS X or Linux, which is nice.
Mike May, blind from age 3 to age 46, had a stem cell implant and was suddenly able to see. He kept a detailed online journal about his experiences. He still doesn't see perfectly, but it's mostly because it is very slow to teach the mind to understand the input its suddenly given.
On another note, I'm an extremely cynical person. This guy's journal is the only truly inspiration thing I've read in my entire life. His description of the intimacy of looking into a stranger's eyes for the first time gave me chills.
It seems like a waste of a computer's potential to display random strings of text for a user. With modern development in language education, shouldn't computers be able to do something special? Something to take advantage of what they do well, rather than displaying black on white text.
I go back and forth on whether a precedent like this is a good thing. For one, yeah, I download things in a hypothetical manner on various peer to peer services. It certainly would be nice to be fully exonerated. It would also force the RIAA and MPAA to rexamine there business models and I think myself and most/.'ers would like the libertarian-anarchist paradise of self distribution and fair prices.
Still, it seems like an exceptionally harsh judgement against the MPAA and RIAA to say that anyone who wants any of their wares can aquire them for free. But, I guess issuing a huge judgement such as this in the USA would be the only way to move us away from record company monopoly and towards fair internet distribution paradise.
I just finished a length research paper. It was extremely satisfying when I clicked on a link in Google and was told "Welcome University of Pittsburgh. Your organization maintains access to this journal" and I was given full access to the paper immediately. Contrast this with "This paper is not available online. Print this sheet and take it to the library." Certainly, there is no monetary reason why all papers could not be available to someone on a University IP address or capapble of VPN'ing into a university account. The universities pay their fees without complaining, and it's not like there is an issue of those without access trying to steal the journals -- the only ones who would want access anyways are those on university IP's.
Three 3.0 Ghz PPC cores. Wow. And I'm sure it'll be at a standard console launch price point, about $300. That's a whole lot of power.
Of course, people said the same thing when the Xbox first launched. 733 megahertz for $300 seemed like a great deal then. But, that was back when becoming obselete used to be a concern when buying computers. Remember when Moore's Law was being upheld? I bought a Pentium IV 2.4C about 2 years ago for $180 dollars. Today, $180 dollars buys you a PIV 3.0. An incremental leap forward at best.
If the Xenon really has 3 PowerPC 3.0 GHz processors, that thing is gonna be one hell of a bargain at $300 dollars. Five years from now, a Xenon is still going to be relatively impressive, unlike today's Xbox, unless we manage to invent some radically new technology that lets us get back on track with Moore's Law.
That's exactly what my thought process is. I'm paying a nominal sum for illegal things that are much BETTER than the free illegal things -- to me, even on my meager income, 1 penny per megabyte (even 2 pennies) is worth it. As a wannabe audiophile, or at least a person that appreciates the difference between a well encoded MP3 and Kazaa's crap, it's very worth it to me. Any more than 2 cents a megabyte, maybe $.03, and at that point it's worth it to pay $5 or $6 dollars for a used CD on eBay.
If I'm risking a fine anyways, I'd rather have higher quality files for an amount of money that is meaningless to me. Besides, it's always been a fantasy of mine to be sued by someone like the RIAA and take it all the way up the courts instead of just settling. Hopefully, the EFF would give pro-bono attorneys to a paying member willing to stand up for his rights.
I, hypothetically speaking, downloaded from AllofMP3. I didn't really care that it's illegal. The important thing to me and many others is that the music was high quality and at a much more reasonable rate than iTunes. It was a reasonable enough rate that paying for AllofMP3 was a better value for me than wasting my time sorting through Kazaa.
AllofMP3 gave me good quality OGGs or LAME MP3s with fast downloads, and was probably closer to being legal than Kazaa.
Also, what if some manufactures that were marketing to the techie/overclocker/modder market made it unreasonably easy to alter the hardware? Something like soldering two easy points together on the circuit board.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an SNES platformer action RPG about evolution. And it's a lot of fun.
So why is this news? The Microsoft engineers came up with a reasonably obvious method of ranking people, got a trademark on a stupid name, and now this standard rating method is getting free advertising space on Slashdot, and the methedology behind it is sound enough that nobody calls them on it. They didn't do anything. They're just measuring the skill of a player as a standard deviation up or down from where they are for matching players.
The point is the quality doesn't match, but the results can be equivalent anyways.
Are you looking to get a degree from somewhere reputable that's not really worth anything other than the value of the degree? Then it sounds like there are distant learning programs that give you the exact same degree as a real, second tier CS school. However, the education is going to be terrible. Seems like a good way to shortcut the educational process if you've already developed the knowledge you need via work experience.
My favorite math riddle?
The Condom Problem
It is if you try and put a numerical value on infinity. But the universe is splitting into an infinite number of copies, which is just as simple a number as 0,1, and 1,000,000 and fulfills Occam's razor because it makes a lot of the math, really, really, simple.
What if Microsoft's plan is to give every single Xbox 360.v1 owner a coupon for a free HD-DVD drive by mail? It could make sense, economically, if the difference in cost between the HD-DVD changes enough over the course of two years. Two years from this Christmas, then, Microsoft launches the Xbox 360.v2 with the HD-DVD drive and all Xbox 360.v1 owners are told that they can send in a copy of the bottom of their Xbox to receive their free HD-DVD drive upgrade. It could save a lot of money I think, and not cause the Osborne effect or the Sega CD effect.
I don't understand people that complain that the buying and selling of virtual goods ruins online goods for those that don't want to spend extra money on their character. It doesn't ruin the game for the others. It just makes it profitable for them in the long run, with all sorts of suckers running around throughing real life dough at them.
And how bout this? The HD-DVD player upgrade is also a standalone HD-DVD player. Microsoft allies with the HD-DVD players and truly tries to crush Blu-Ray via saturation of HD-DVD and the market share of its own Xbox.
What if Microsoft's plan is to give every single Xbox 360.v1 owner a coupon for a free HD-DVD drive by mail? It could make sense, economically, if the difference in cost between the HD-DVD changes enough over the course of two years. Two years from this Christmas, then, Microsoft launches the Xbox 360.v2 with the HD-DVD drive and all Xbox 360.v1 owners are told that they can send in a copy of the bottom of their Xbox to receive their free HD-DVD drive upgrade. It could save a lot of money I think, and not cause the Osborne effect or the Sega CD effect.
One of the reasons the PS2 did so well in its initial launch in Japan was because it was comparable in price to stand-alone DVD players.
It'll probably be the same with the PS3.
My favorite Asimov novel is The End of Eternity. The premise is that time travel exists, and a group of people outside of the normal fabric of time tries to slowly improve the existence of mankind by making tiny, tiny changes at key points in the timeline.
As explained in the book, a person would never know that a change had taken place. As per the book, it's possible that I might not have even existed last week, but maybe a Change willed me into existence, then I was created and have all the memories of my life like I actually lived it, even though I didn't. It raises some great issues about time travel, and for the true Asimov fans, he accidentally (on purpose?) and subtly ties the entire Foundation/Robots/Empire series together before he began explicitly doing so in the 80's. This book is a true prequel to those.
Whoa -- does anyone sell hacked AIM accounts? I would pay good money for the AIM name "Kevin" or my full name or initials or anything.
with gratuitous panty shots
A PDF reader for Windows that doesn't suck.
I use it with firefox. You click a pdf link. Foxit opens. It displays the PDF. It doesn't mess up your system. It runs quickly. It feels much more like reading a PDF on OS X or Linux, which is nice.
Mike May, blind from age 3 to age 46, had a stem cell implant and was suddenly able to see. He kept a detailed online journal about his experiences. He still doesn't see perfectly, but it's mostly because it is very slow to teach the mind to understand the input its suddenly given.
On another note, I'm an extremely cynical person. This guy's journal is the only truly inspiration thing I've read in my entire life. His description of the intimacy of looking into a stranger's eyes for the first time gave me chills.
It seems like a waste of a computer's potential to display random strings of text for a user. With modern development in language education, shouldn't computers be able to do something special? Something to take advantage of what they do well, rather than displaying black on white text.
I go back and forth on whether a precedent like this is a good thing. For one, yeah, I download things in a hypothetical manner on various peer to peer services. It certainly would be nice to be fully exonerated. It would also force the RIAA and MPAA to rexamine there business models and I think myself and most /.'ers would like the libertarian-anarchist paradise of self distribution and fair prices.
Still, it seems like an exceptionally harsh judgement against the MPAA and RIAA to say that anyone who wants any of their wares can aquire them for free. But, I guess issuing a huge judgement such as this in the USA would be the only way to move us away from record company monopoly and towards fair internet distribution paradise.
I just finished a length research paper. It was extremely satisfying when I clicked on a link in Google and was told "Welcome University of Pittsburgh. Your organization maintains access to this journal" and I was given full access to the paper immediately. Contrast this with "This paper is not available online. Print this sheet and take it to the library." Certainly, there is no monetary reason why all papers could not be available to someone on a University IP address or capapble of VPN'ing into a university account. The universities pay their fees without complaining, and it's not like there is an issue of those without access trying to steal the journals -- the only ones who would want access anyways are those on university IP's.
Three 3.0 Ghz PPC cores. Wow. And I'm sure it'll be at a standard console launch price point, about $300. That's a whole lot of power. Of course, people said the same thing when the Xbox first launched. 733 megahertz for $300 seemed like a great deal then. But, that was back when becoming obselete used to be a concern when buying computers. Remember when Moore's Law was being upheld? I bought a Pentium IV 2.4C about 2 years ago for $180 dollars. Today, $180 dollars buys you a PIV 3.0. An incremental leap forward at best. If the Xenon really has 3 PowerPC 3.0 GHz processors, that thing is gonna be one hell of a bargain at $300 dollars. Five years from now, a Xenon is still going to be relatively impressive, unlike today's Xbox, unless we manage to invent some radically new technology that lets us get back on track with Moore's Law.
Believe it or not, a 14 story Tetris was made.
That's exactly what my thought process is. I'm paying a nominal sum for illegal things that are much BETTER than the free illegal things -- to me, even on my meager income, 1 penny per megabyte (even 2 pennies) is worth it. As a wannabe audiophile, or at least a person that appreciates the difference between a well encoded MP3 and Kazaa's crap, it's very worth it to me. Any more than 2 cents a megabyte, maybe $.03, and at that point it's worth it to pay $5 or $6 dollars for a used CD on eBay. If I'm risking a fine anyways, I'd rather have higher quality files for an amount of money that is meaningless to me. Besides, it's always been a fantasy of mine to be sued by someone like the RIAA and take it all the way up the courts instead of just settling. Hopefully, the EFF would give pro-bono attorneys to a paying member willing to stand up for his rights.
I, hypothetically speaking, downloaded from AllofMP3. I didn't really care that it's illegal. The important thing to me and many others is that the music was high quality and at a much more reasonable rate than iTunes. It was a reasonable enough rate that paying for AllofMP3 was a better value for me than wasting my time sorting through Kazaa. AllofMP3 gave me good quality OGGs or LAME MP3s with fast downloads, and was probably closer to being legal than Kazaa.
Also, what if some manufactures that were marketing to the techie/overclocker/modder market made it unreasonably easy to alter the hardware? Something like soldering two easy points together on the circuit board.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
~Dylan Thomas
There really is a WoW Christian Guild, named God's Peons. They are a chapter of the Tribe of Judah.
The best part of the ToJ webpage is the FAQ about why Mormon's can't join the Tribe.