Anyone remembers the good old days when you actually had to be a genius to code a demo like Second Reality? I ask because today any imbecilic script kiddie with ADD and AS can write a demo using high level languages like C and libraries like SDL but in those days one had to know what byte do you need to send on which I/O port and which bit to check to know whether the electron beam in your CRT does a vertical retrace to smoothly copy your buffers to address 0x0A000. Well my point is that in those years nearly every winner of Assembly was from Finland. It was the time we also heard that some guy from Finland started playing with the GNU system by adding a new kernel and calling it Freax. Remember? It was later renamed by Ari Lemmke as "Linux." It begs the question: what is it about Finland that there are 800 times more hackers per capita than in the US and 40 times more than in India, Tokyo and Europe combined? Better education? More access to hardware? Smarter population? More nerdy environment? Less entertainment? We should really find out because every country should take an example from our sisters and brothers from Finland. Kudos to them!
Yes, in certain situations it is very wrong. Have you read the article? Let me quote the relevant part:
"Before Repliee Q1, Professor Ishiguro developed Repliee R1 which had the appearance of a five-year-old Japanese girl. Its head could move in nine directions and it could gesture with its arm. Four high-sensitivity tactile sensors were placed under the skin of its left arm that made the android react differently to differing pressures."
And that, babe, is not exactly what women are looking for from men. Not in this evolutionary sequence, anyway.
You just don't get it, do you? From the evolutionary point of view women want men. And by men I mean masculine males, hot studs, bad boys. In this "evolutionary sequence" women want alpha males for lovers and nice guys for providers.
Don't fool yourself if you think that any intelligent woman seriously considers an overly confident, almost arogant bad boy a good husband material. Is James Bond a good long-term relationship material?
No. But neither is a super hot woman. A supermodel probably won't be a good wife, she may not be able to cook, but she is still sexy and a lot of men can't help but feel attracted to her. You have to realize that for women certain traits of character and personality are more important than looks and when a man poseses them then we can't help but feel sexually attracted to him on the most basic level.
Ever wondered why women fall in love in jerks and then cry and complain about them in front of their nice-guys just-friends who are great but they still prefer to have sex with the jerks? You have to make a decision in your life whether you want to be a nice guy whom everyone likes as a friend or an alpha male whom women love as a lover, men hate for that but still respect. Take it as a good advice.
And yes, Kim Polese is hot. But do you seriously think that she melts with sexual attraction when a "nice guy" kisses up to her? Do you think that when a man says "What is your favourite restaurant? What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? Can I buy you a dinner? Do you like those 20 roses I bought on this first date? You are so beautiful! Do you like me? I'll do everything for you to like me! I'll change! I am so needy and insecure!" then she thinks "Dear God, he's so sexy!"? Again, I doubt it.
But these are all things that are counterintuitive to most of men until they take some time to learn and understand the process of sexual attraction and how it works for women.
Bad news: most of men never get it. Good news: it can be learned.
Sadly, for those of us who constantly change the operating systems on our "hobby" computer, we'll probably get marked that we've pirated their operating systems [emphasis added]
And this is surprising?
"As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. [...] One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. [...] Most directly, the thing you do is theft." (William Henry Gates III -- February 3, 1976 -- An Open Letter to Hobbyists)
Please let me be the first woman to explain few key issues here (or perhaps the first woman to even talk to some of those jokers). Gangsters and other bad boys are sexy. Nerds and other wussies are not. Period. It is not about violence vs. science. It is all about characters and a geeky nerd is the very antithesis of manhood and sexual attractiveness. As every woman will tell you, we hate "nice guys" (read: wussies) and we love bad boys (read: alpha males) not without a reason. If you can't understand those reasons then I can only feel sorry for you every time when I hear another pathetic idea of showing to the whole world how not sexy you are. And this is just sad. Really sad. Do you still wonder why there are so few women (and almost no hot women) in the IT industry? The Nerdcore Rap is your answer.
"The Economist has a column looking at the valuations of some of the Internet's darlings, with a particular emphasis on Google."
This is not another bubble but the companies that were not dumb enough to die during the last one. Did Google founders buy yachts with investors money, hire idiots for $350/hr and then wonder why on Earth did they fail? NO. So please don't tell me about another bubble.
"The Amiga 1000 was originally conceived a few years earlier by a small California company called Amiga, Inc. and was financed by a group of Florida doctors looking to invest in a killer game machine."
It sickens me when I hear that people only want to invest money in killer games. 1980s, 1990, 2000s, it's all the same violence, only the "FPSs" are of higher quality. I believe that children are not inherently evil and they will love any game that they are forced to play. Wo why not invest in nice and healthy games like Super Mario? Wouldn't you love Super Mario fully exploiting your hardware? I know I certainly would. And that is exactly the problem with Amiga. With all the colors unknown in the era they could have been the #1 platform on the kids marked and they wasted it trying to sell violence. And what do we have today? Terrorism. Do we have any good games? No. What is the bottom line? Exactly.
"Losing data once due to hard drive failure may be all that is required to convince anyone that RAID is right for them, but why wait until that happens."
Why? That's actually quite simple. Losing consciousness once due to a brick falling on the head may be all that is required to convince anyone that a helmet is right for them, but we don't see people wearing helmets, do we? Do people wear bulletproof vests? No? Why not? After all the benefits of a bulletproof vest over an ordinary vest far outweigh the extra consideration required during installation! Please, people, could we stop being such naive children thinking that our beloved industry is somehow special, that ones and zeroes have more value than humen lives? Could we please stop being so pathetic once in our lives? RAID may be a nice idea for "nerds that matter" but it is not for grandma. Period.
"That means that in order for the players to get all the features they enjoy in a game, they would have to play more than one MMORPG, if not many MMORPGs. I do not know about you, but I struggle with playing one at a time."
Struggle no more, my friend. I have a game with all the features: economics, politics, sex, violence, war, crime, education, entertainment, sports, art, great music, every job imaginable, every object, thousands of players in every part of the map... You name it! It's called a life. You should try it sometimes. If, on the other hand, you prefer to spend all days alone in front of a cathode ray tube in your mother's basement, then must be prepared for at least some limitations. I know, hard to believe.
All of these software updates are driving me nuts. Under Debian it's fine, just "apt-get upgrade" and things happen fairly seamlessly. But on my windows box, updating requires downloading a new installer for each program, in some cases uninstalling the new version, and then running each new installer. These window installers all require multiple steps, and so it's just a big hassle to stay current.
Don't worry. I'm sure that eventually Windows will be ready for the desktop one day.
"More interestingly, the system will have a button which will allow the user to verify that they are indeed at the bank's website and not at some scammer's fake site."
Brilliant idea. I'm sure that said scammer's fake sites will look exactly the same, except they will lack that button.
...and yet because of scandals like this one or that involving Randal Schwartz (see: State of Oregon vs. Randal Schwartz, Washington County Circuit Court C94-0322CR) to name just a few, I have a hard time convincing the management that we should rewrite all of our Java backends in Perl and I'm sure I'm not alone who faces such ridiculous obstacles on a daily basis. I know with no doubt that both Randal and Chip are completely innocent. But they are also very naîve and shortsighted. I don't think we need such scandals in the Perl community. It is harmful for Perl, it is harmful for CPAN and it is harmful for us, the Free Software movement. So please, let us all help Chip with legal actions and do everything we possibly can to save the reputation of the core Perl hackers, even if that means excluding certain irresponsible individuals from the circle of trust. We owe that to Larry.
The Universal Media Disc (UMD) is an optical disc medium developed by Sony for use on the PlayStation Portable. It can hold 1.8 gigabytes of data, which can include games, movies, or music.
Unlike the Minidisc, another proprietary Sony-developed format, blank media will not be commercially available, in order to avoid piracy. However, there has been recent discussion about the UMD movie and music formats being opened by Sony, although it is not clear if this will result in the development of UMD "burners" (through CD or DVD burners). Sony has said that it intends to keep the game-formatted UMD specifications to itself, in order to avoid competition (and presumably to profit from licensing fees).
It has recently been found out that if the disc is removed from its casing and shaved down to fit into the mini DVD slot in a DVD drive that it will register on your computer. However, no files are shown if the game disc has been written on.
* Dimensions: Approx. 65 mm (W) x 64 mm (D) x 4.2 mm (H) * Diameter: 60 mm * Maximum Capacity: 1.80GB (Single-sided, dual layer) * Laser wavelength: 660 nm (Red laser) * Encryption: AES 128-bit
Great news for Micro$oft, terrible news for The People. Hardly surprising if you ask me. I wonder what about the EU marker, for it seems that only Europeans have any balls these days. Hopefully they will ban this "integration" scam. Of course the US customers are boned like always.
Slashdot Mirror
Most 4kb and 64kb intros released today are made almost completely in C.
YES. Keywords: most, today. Wasn't that the point of the original poster?
Anyone remembers the good old days when you actually had to be a genius to code a demo like Second Reality? I ask because today any imbecilic script kiddie with ADD and AS can write a demo using high level languages like C and libraries like SDL but in those days one had to know what byte do you need to send on which I/O port and which bit to check to know whether the electron beam in your CRT does a vertical retrace to smoothly copy your buffers to address 0x0A000. Well my point is that in those years nearly every winner of Assembly was from Finland. It was the time we also heard that some guy from Finland started playing with the GNU system by adding a new kernel and calling it Freax. Remember? It was later renamed by Ari Lemmke as "Linux." It begs the question: what is it about Finland that there are 800 times more hackers per capita than in the US and 40 times more than in India, Tokyo and Europe combined? Better education? More access to hardware? Smarter population? More nerdy environment? Less entertainment? We should really find out because every country should take an example from our sisters and brothers from Finland. Kudos to them!
Truly hilarious. Where are the mod points when I need them? MOD PARENT UP!
Is it wrong to think a female robot is hot?
Yes, in certain situations it is very wrong. Have you read the article? Let me quote the relevant part:
"Before Repliee Q1, Professor Ishiguro developed Repliee R1 which had the appearance of a five-year-old Japanese girl. Its head could move in nine directions and it could gesture with its arm. Four high-sensitivity tactile sensors were placed under the skin of its left arm that made the android react differently to differing pressures."
I don't even want to comment that.
A new data model?
Couldn't we please focus on implementing the old data model correctly first?
And that, babe, is not exactly what women are looking for from men. Not in this evolutionary sequence, anyway.
You just don't get it, do you? From the evolutionary point of view women want men. And by men I mean masculine males, hot studs, bad boys. In this "evolutionary sequence" women want alpha males for lovers and nice guys for providers.
Don't fool yourself if you think that any intelligent woman seriously considers an overly confident, almost arogant bad boy a good husband material. Is James Bond a good long-term relationship material?
No. But neither is a super hot woman. A supermodel probably won't be a good wife, she may not be able to cook, but she is still sexy and a lot of men can't help but feel attracted to her. You have to realize that for women certain traits of character and personality are more important than looks and when a man poseses them then we can't help but feel sexually attracted to him on the most basic level.
Ever wondered why women fall in love in jerks and then cry and complain about them in front of their nice-guys just-friends who are great but they still prefer to have sex with the jerks? You have to make a decision in your life whether you want to be a nice guy whom everyone likes as a friend or an alpha male whom women love as a lover, men hate for that but still respect. Take it as a good advice.
And yes, Kim Polese is hot. But do you seriously think that she melts with sexual attraction when a "nice guy" kisses up to her? Do you think that when a man says "What is your favourite restaurant? What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? Can I buy you a dinner? Do you like those 20 roses I bought on this first date? You are so beautiful! Do you like me? I'll do everything for you to like me! I'll change! I am so needy and insecure!" then she thinks "Dear God, he's so sexy!"? Again, I doubt it.
But these are all things that are counterintuitive to most of men until they take some time to learn and understand the process of sexual attraction and how it works for women.
Bad news: most of men never get it. Good news: it can be learned.
Sadly, for those of us who constantly change the operating systems on our "hobby" computer, we'll probably get marked that we've pirated their operating systems [emphasis added]
And this is surprising?
"As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. [...] One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. [...] Most directly, the thing you do is theft." (William Henry Gates III -- February 3, 1976 -- An Open Letter to Hobbyists)
Here's an exercise:
A. bad boys
B. nice guys
Which is sexy: A or B?
Which makes more sense as hip-hop stars: A or B?
I hope it helps.
Please let me be the first woman to explain few key issues here (or perhaps the first woman to even talk to some of those jokers). Gangsters and other bad boys are sexy. Nerds and other wussies are not. Period. It is not about violence vs. science. It is all about characters and a geeky nerd is the very antithesis of manhood and sexual attractiveness. As every woman will tell you, we hate "nice guys" (read: wussies) and we love bad boys (read: alpha males) not without a reason. If you can't understand those reasons then I can only feel sorry for you every time when I hear another pathetic idea of showing to the whole world how not sexy you are. And this is just sad. Really sad. Do you still wonder why there are so few women (and almost no hot women) in the IT industry? The Nerdcore Rap is your answer.
"The Economist has a column looking at the valuations of some of the Internet's darlings, with a particular emphasis on Google."
This is not another bubble but the companies that were not dumb enough to die during the last one. Did Google founders buy yachts with investors money, hire idiots for $350/hr and then wonder why on Earth did they fail? NO. So please don't tell me about another bubble.
"The Amiga 1000 was originally conceived a few years earlier by a small California company called Amiga, Inc. and was financed by a group of Florida doctors looking to invest in a killer game machine."
It sickens me when I hear that people only want to invest money in killer games. 1980s, 1990, 2000s, it's all the same violence, only the "FPSs" are of higher quality. I believe that children are not inherently evil and they will love any game that they are forced to play. Wo why not invest in nice and healthy games like Super Mario? Wouldn't you love Super Mario fully exploiting your hardware? I know I certainly would. And that is exactly the problem with Amiga. With all the colors unknown in the era they could have been the #1 platform on the kids marked and they wasted it trying to sell violence. And what do we have today? Terrorism. Do we have any good games? No. What is the bottom line? Exactly.
I know a guy who's been replying for years. And unlike this moronic idea, he's damn Funny.
"Losing data once due to hard drive failure may be all that is required to convince anyone that RAID is right for them, but why wait until that happens."
Why? That's actually quite simple. Losing consciousness once due to a brick falling on the head may be all that is required to convince anyone that a helmet is right for them, but we don't see people wearing helmets, do we? Do people wear bulletproof vests? No? Why not? After all the benefits of a bulletproof vest over an ordinary vest far outweigh the extra consideration required during installation! Please, people, could we stop being such naive children thinking that our beloved industry is somehow special, that ones and zeroes have more value than humen lives? Could we please stop being so pathetic once in our lives? RAID may be a nice idea for "nerds that matter" but it is not for grandma. Period.
"The bill is seen as an endorsement of President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, including returning man to the Moon and eventually Mars."
Returning man to the Moon is nothing but returning man to Mars is what I really look forward. You are a true visionary, Mr. President.
Solid State.
"That means that in order for the players to get all the features they enjoy in a game, they would have to play more than one MMORPG, if not many MMORPGs. I do not know about you, but I struggle with playing one at a time."
Struggle no more, my friend. I have a game with all the features: economics, politics, sex, violence, war, crime, education, entertainment, sports, art, great music, every job imaginable, every object, thousands of players in every part of the map... You name it! It's called a life. You should try it sometimes. If, on the other hand, you prefer to spend all days alone in front of a cathode ray tube in your mother's basement, then must be prepared for at least some limitations. I know, hard to believe.
All of these software updates are driving me nuts. Under Debian it's fine, just "apt-get upgrade" and things happen fairly seamlessly. But on my windows box, updating requires downloading a new installer for each program, in some cases uninstalling the new version, and then running each new installer. These window installers all require multiple steps, and so it's just a big hassle to stay current.
Don't worry. I'm sure that eventually Windows will be ready for the desktop one day.
"More interestingly, the system will have a button which will allow the user to verify that they are indeed at the bank's website and not at some scammer's fake site."
Brilliant idea. I'm sure that said scammer's fake sites will look exactly the same, except they will lack that button.
How ... pointless!
...and yet because of scandals like this one or that involving Randal Schwartz (see: State of Oregon vs. Randal Schwartz, Washington County Circuit Court C94-0322CR) to name just a few, I have a hard time convincing the management that we should rewrite all of our Java backends in Perl and I'm sure I'm not alone who faces such ridiculous obstacles on a daily basis. I know with no doubt that both Randal and Chip are completely innocent. But they are also very naîve and shortsighted. I don't think we need such scandals in the Perl community. It is harmful for Perl, it is harmful for CPAN and it is harmful for us, the Free Software movement. So please, let us all help Chip with legal actions and do everything we possibly can to save the reputation of the core Perl hackers, even if that means excluding certain irresponsible individuals from the circle of trust. We owe that to Larry.
In other news, the telephone company didn't inform criminals that their line is wiretapped. Film at 11.
The Universal Media Disc (UMD) is an optical disc medium developed by Sony for use on the PlayStation Portable. It can hold 1.8 gigabytes of data, which can include games, movies, or music.
Unlike the Minidisc, another proprietary Sony-developed format, blank media will not be commercially available, in order to avoid piracy. However, there has been recent discussion about the UMD movie and music formats being opened by Sony, although it is not clear if this will result in the development of UMD "burners" (through CD or DVD burners). Sony has said that it intends to keep the game-formatted UMD specifications to itself, in order to avoid competition (and presumably to profit from licensing fees).
It has recently been found out that if the disc is removed from its casing and shaved down to fit into the mini DVD slot in a DVD drive that it will register on your computer. However, no files are shown if the game disc has been written on.
* Dimensions: Approx. 65 mm (W) x 64 mm (D) x 4.2 mm (H)
* Diameter: 60 mm
* Maximum Capacity: 1.80GB (Single-sided, dual layer)
* Laser wavelength: 660 nm (Red laser)
* Encryption: AES 128-bit
Picture 1
Picture 2.
More info.
Editors: please add this links to the story. Thank you.
Great news for Micro$oft, terrible news for The People. Hardly surprising if you ask me. I wonder what about the EU marker, for it seems that only Europeans have any balls these days. Hopefully they will ban this "integration" scam. Of course the US customers are boned like always.
Programming Linux on Cell ... in a cubicle ... using chroot jail, no less. Is that the future of IT jobs?
The answer is: No.
Sad but true.