Just the other day I destroyed the 2GB HDD from our old family PC. Can't beat the feeling of putting the claw end of a clawhammer through those shiny platters, a great stress reliever!
Despite what the manufacturers would lead you to believe, optical mice do not work on any surface. Well, they might, if you use the word 'work' very loosely. I'm at home right now and I have my optical sitting on an A3 size leather document wallet. This is the perfect mousepad for my Intellimouse Optical. It is smooth enough to allow the mouse to move freely while at the same time providing just enough resistance to stop it slipping all over the place. Plus, the leather texture is perfect for optical mice to track - if I stare very closely at the surface it's like one huge game of Tetris, just what the sensor needs to track differences in frames. As a result while using this 'mousepad' my optical never goes haywire like it can do when using the shiny desk instead.
However, when I'm at my student house at University, I just use the computer desk surface. It's perfectly reasonable for playing Quake and CS (heh, I've got a good enough aim that transcends mere mouse surfaces:P) but it just doesn't feel the same.
Watch the film Gone In 60 Seconds, with Nicholas Cage. It actually deals with the analogy you raise here. On the one hand you have Memphis, a highly skilled car thief with a passion for cars. There are practically no cars that he can't steal, and he steals them because he just loves cars and driving them (during the timeframe of the film he is stealing them to save his kid brother).
On the other hand you have your dumb car thief. In the actual film someone pulls a gun on the big black guy (character name escapes me) who is driving with the window open. He sums it up with the words 'Anyone can pull a gun on somebody' (after he takes out the wannabe carjacker).
Stealing cars is legally and morally wrong, in both of the situations above. It's just that at least Nick Cage put in the time and effort to steal something because it meant something to him. Transfer this analogy to the computer world - script kiddies versus 'skilled hackers'.
I wouldn't want someone to break into my house, but if i had the choice between coming home to find a window smashed, glass all over the floor,graffiti on the wall and all my stuff gone compared to finding the Chubb bolt has been surgically removed from the door and a note saying 'Thanks for the Ming Vase', there'd be at least a slither of admiration for the 'skilled criminal', even though I'd want him arrested and that at the end of the day he's still a thief. People who are good at what they do, whether it's for good or for evil, will always be more respected than the crude, lazy fuckers who try and copy them. A lot of people think of Hitler as a good leader (come on, he was), even though he committed such atrocities.
Note that I'm not actually disagreeing with you, in a perfect world we'd not have to choose the lesser of two evils:)
But when you go and ask for those headlights, does the guy in the dungarees say 'Yeah, I'll just take off the ten cars that are on top of that one you want and then remove the headlights for you'? Or are the high value components already stripped as soon as the car comes in? Wouldn't it make more sense to gut a car of anything worthwhile to the junkyard owner - high value parts, rather than chuck it into a pile of other cars and sort it later? What I was trying to say was that technology has made it easier to fully dispose of cars, hence no particular need for 'disposable cars'. I wasn't trying to imply that this is an end to scrap yards as a whole.
You want your headlights. You pick em up cheap from a big pile of headlights. You win.
The companies interested in cheap raw materials buy everything else that is of no use to Joe Sixpack. They win
The scrap yard owner gets both your money and money from the company looking for cheap bulk scrap. He wins
Less junk piles up that people off the street don't want. Mother nature wins.
Technology has pretty much made ordinary cars disposable nowadays anyway. My dad's friend works for quite a large Irish company that deal with, among other things, scrap. Recently they have purchased a scrapping machine worth tens of millions of pounds. It's almost cartoonesque - the crushed car cube goes in at one end and raw materials emerge from the other. Aside from the power used, it's a cyclic process with minimal wastage. The rubber, plastic, metal can be reused for whatever purpose necessary. It has to be economically viable if these companies are willing to lay out so much green for these 'car eaters'.
The typical 'movie bad guy hideout' junk yards will be a thing of the past in a short period. Cars won't be sitting around piled up ten to the dozen or in landfills, they're going to be snapped up by entities who want the materials.
It's also a sort of part payback to mother nature for some of the other bad shit we've been doing.
What with China et al manufacturing all the washing machines and stuff, and with prices rising (from forty pounds per ton to over a hundred, if i have been informed correctly) the demand will increase dramatically. Hell, a lot of manhole covers are disappearing around the country in what seems to be an attempt to cash in on the metal madness.
As far as the 'disposable car' goes, it all seems a bit of a gimmick, as current normal cars aren't exactly on the same level as toxic waste.
Don't get me wrong I wasn't trying to flame or anything. If they managed to do all that you have said then hats off to them. Personally I still think the idea is a gimmick, but then again I have have always been the kind of person that hates hybrid technology that tries to do so much (toasters that schedule your meetings and order your DVDs, etc.)
...play mental games with themselves when it comes to shuffled playlists?
Before you reach for the Offtopic mod let me explain. What I do personally is that when I'm bored of a song I say to myself "OK you have a maximum of five skips in which to 'settle down' and fully listen to the track".
So sometimes I would click the skip button and get a good song and think:
"Yeah this is good, but I have 4 skips left, there might be something within those four skips that is much better!"
What usually happens in that scenario is that the subsequent songs are even worse and you begin to panic! I'm sure there must be at least one other slashdotter who does this. Right guys? Guys?
As i sit here I have Winamp open with a playlist of 1483 songs. I have the playlist on random shuffle because
A) I like most genres of music, so shuffling gives me much more variety than listening to 20 songs from one artist, 20 from the next ad nauseum.
B) It's exciting not knowing what the next track will be! Will it be Paul Simon or Weird Al? Vanessa Mae or Mighty Mighty Bosstones? Nobody knows!
If there is a song in particular that I 'must immediately listen to' then it takes 2 seconds of scrolling and clicking and, bam, I can break the randomness for a moment. The only time I use a set playlist order is when playing Unreal Tournament multiplayer - trance/techno really sets the mood for the gameplay so I'll fire up Tiesto and let 'em spool off.
Let's not forget that shuffling of this magnitude (not shuffling itself) is a new thing to play with. A few years ago it was a pain in the arse to keep changing CDs after one or two tracks, you'd usually listen out the whole album before changing.
Ahh the joys of mixing alcohol with mobile phones. One night on the town a few years ago, I was IDed (I was about 16 at the time) at one of the O'Neill's pubs when I was out with my mates. I was the last person to try to go in and you know what happens, all of my friends get in and I don't. So there I am pissed out of my face, calling up the police and saying 'Come and raid O'Neills, there are underage drinkers in there!' while the door men are shaking their heads at me. I start to walk (stumble) home and I get picked up and escorted back to the house in a police van (hey, a free taxi!).
Waking up the next morning feeling very dehydrated, I thought that these blurred memories were little more than a dream. I then check my mobile and I see this:
4,500 entrants to the Microsoft Imagine Cup and this bullshit is the best they could come up with? The posters for this competition were plastered up all over the Computer Science and Physics buildings here on campus at Reading. I thought a trip to Brazil sounded cool but then again I'm not the best programmer in my University, let alone the whole country. Maybe I should have entered, after all, all of the hardcore programmers would steer clear of anything endorsed by Microsoft! I wonder what percentage of the entrants are on I.T. degrees and think that they are 1337 hax0rs because they can make the old 'Are you gay? [YES] [NO]' form where the No button is always unclickable!
What the hell is the point of that textbook stuff? You sign up for a course, and there are recommended text books from which the lecturers work from. Therefore these are likely to have the most relevant material for coursework/exams - you can buy them outright or hire them from the University library (or neither). those that are geeky enough to do further reading are clever enough to do so on their own.
As for the Drunk thing, they don't say exactly how it works, just that it sends details to a local taxi firm. So does it determine how drunk you are using slurred speech recognition or what? Or maybe they haven't reached that design stage yet. Maybe their code is like
Your post reminds me of a trust certificate that came up on my screen today.
"Always trust content from 'Click Yes To Enter LTD'?"
And in the blurb:
"By clicking yes you agree to have software installed on your computer that will dial up a premium rate phone line at a cost of 1.50 GBP a minute. You can disconnect by clicking on the Disconnect button or the connection will automatically disconnect after 13.33 minutes."
Oh yeah and the source of this was a popup for some flash game site that said 'When the certificate pops up click yes to be able to play our huge selection of games! It came up when I was on www.cooking.com looking for a recipe for good roast potatoes. Obviously I prevented myself from downloading this crapware, but I still won't be visiting that site again.
The world's first 'gender challenged' robot? Seriously, that is just plain freaky. I'm sure your average 80 year old woman won't want that thing shuffling around in the dark.
"Excuse me Pearl, I have to go collect my pension, could you let me open the door please dear?"
Slashdot Mirror
Just the other day I destroyed the 2GB HDD from our old family PC. Can't beat the feeling of putting the claw end of a clawhammer through those shiny platters, a great stress reliever!
...bandwidth?
Despite what the manufacturers would lead you to believe, optical mice do not work on any surface. Well, they might, if you use the word 'work' very loosely. I'm at home right now and I have my optical sitting on an A3 size leather document wallet. This is the perfect mousepad for my Intellimouse Optical. It is smooth enough to allow the mouse to move freely while at the same time providing just enough resistance to stop it slipping all over the place. Plus, the leather texture is perfect for optical mice to track - if I stare very closely at the surface it's like one huge game of Tetris, just what the sensor needs to track differences in frames. As a result while using this 'mousepad' my optical never goes haywire like it can do when using the shiny desk instead.
:P) but it just doesn't feel the same.
However, when I'm at my student house at University, I just use the computer desk surface. It's perfectly reasonable for playing Quake and CS (heh, I've got a good enough aim that transcends mere mouse surfaces
I'd also give mine up for love.
Maybe also for a secret.
Hell, I'd also do it for God.
Although not neccesarily in that order.
Watch the film Gone In 60 Seconds, with Nicholas Cage. It actually deals with the analogy you raise here. On the one hand you have Memphis, a highly skilled car thief with a passion for cars. There are practically no cars that he can't steal, and he steals them because he just loves cars and driving them (during the timeframe of the film he is stealing them to save his kid brother).
:)
On the other hand you have your dumb car thief. In the actual film someone pulls a gun on the big black guy (character name escapes me) who is driving with the window open. He sums it up with the words 'Anyone can pull a gun on somebody' (after he takes out the wannabe carjacker).
Stealing cars is legally and morally wrong, in both of the situations above. It's just that at least Nick Cage put in the time and effort to steal something because it meant something to him. Transfer this analogy to the computer world - script kiddies versus 'skilled hackers'.
I wouldn't want someone to break into my house, but if i had the choice between coming home to find a window smashed, glass all over the floor,graffiti on the wall and all my stuff gone compared to finding the Chubb bolt has been surgically removed from the door and a note saying 'Thanks for the Ming Vase', there'd be at least a slither of admiration for the 'skilled criminal', even though I'd want him arrested and that at the end of the day he's still a thief. People who are good at what they do, whether it's for good or for evil, will always be more respected than the crude, lazy fuckers who try and copy them. A lot of people think of Hitler as a good leader (come on, he was), even though he committed such atrocities.
Note that I'm not actually disagreeing with you, in a perfect world we'd not have to choose the lesser of two evils
But when you go and ask for those headlights, does the guy in the dungarees say 'Yeah, I'll just take off the ten cars that are on top of that one you want and then remove the headlights for you'? Or are the high value components already stripped as soon as the car comes in? Wouldn't it make more sense to gut a car of anything worthwhile to the junkyard owner - high value parts, rather than chuck it into a pile of other cars and sort it later? What I was trying to say was that technology has made it easier to fully dispose of cars, hence no particular need for 'disposable cars'. I wasn't trying to imply that this is an end to scrap yards as a whole.
You want your headlights. You pick em up cheap from a big pile of headlights. You win.
The companies interested in cheap raw materials buy everything else that is of no use to Joe Sixpack. They win
The scrap yard owner gets both your money and money from the company looking for cheap bulk scrap. He wins
Less junk piles up that people off the street don't want. Mother nature wins.
Of course, to stop users exploiting their new bionic power, they'd need to hardcode some directives into this brain chip.
Bonus points for those that can spot the link between this post and the parent.
Technology has pretty much made ordinary cars disposable nowadays anyway. My dad's friend works for quite a large Irish company that deal with, among other things, scrap. Recently they have purchased a scrapping machine worth tens of millions of pounds. It's almost cartoonesque - the crushed car cube goes in at one end and raw materials emerge from the other. Aside from the power used, it's a cyclic process with minimal wastage. The rubber, plastic, metal can be reused for whatever purpose necessary. It has to be economically viable if these companies are willing to lay out so much green for these 'car eaters'.
The typical 'movie bad guy hideout' junk yards will be a thing of the past in a short period. Cars won't be sitting around piled up ten to the dozen or in landfills, they're going to be snapped up by entities who want the materials.
It's also a sort of part payback to mother nature for some of the other bad shit we've been doing.
What with China et al manufacturing all the washing machines and stuff, and with prices rising (from forty pounds per ton to over a hundred, if i have been informed correctly) the demand will increase dramatically. Hell, a lot of manhole covers are disappearing around the country in what seems to be an attempt to cash in on the metal madness.
As far as the 'disposable car' goes, it all seems a bit of a gimmick, as current normal cars aren't exactly on the same level as toxic waste.
... Slashdotters stop working the threat of more spam into every posted topic?
Not long, I hope
Judging by the state of public urinals, I'd say this is a common problem.
Don't get me wrong I wasn't trying to flame or anything. If they managed to do all that you have said then hats off to them. Personally I still think the idea is a gimmick, but then again I have have always been the kind of person that hates hybrid technology that tries to do so much (toasters that schedule your meetings and order your DVDs, etc.)
You paid for all those songs, right?
'Yes'
...play mental games with themselves when it comes to shuffled playlists?
Before you reach for the Offtopic mod let me explain. What I do personally is that when I'm bored of a song I say to myself "OK you have a maximum of five skips in which to 'settle down' and fully listen to the track".
So sometimes I would click the skip button and get a good song and think:
"Yeah this is good, but I have 4 skips left, there might be something within those four skips that is much better!"
What usually happens in that scenario is that the subsequent songs are even worse and you begin to panic! I'm sure there must be at least one other slashdotter who does this. Right guys? Guys?
As i sit here I have Winamp open with a playlist of 1483 songs. I have the playlist on random shuffle because
A) I like most genres of music, so shuffling gives me much more variety than listening to 20 songs from one artist, 20 from the next ad nauseum.
B) It's exciting not knowing what the next track will be! Will it be Paul Simon or Weird Al? Vanessa Mae or Mighty Mighty Bosstones? Nobody knows!
If there is a song in particular that I 'must immediately listen to' then it takes 2 seconds of scrolling and clicking and, bam, I can break the randomness for a moment.
The only time I use a set playlist order is when playing Unreal Tournament multiplayer - trance/techno really sets the mood for the gameplay so I'll fire up Tiesto and let 'em spool off.
Let's not forget that shuffling of this magnitude (not shuffling itself) is a new thing to play with. A few years ago it was a pain in the arse to keep changing CDs after one or two tracks, you'd usually listen out the whole album before changing.
Ahh the joys of mixing alcohol with mobile phones. One night on the town a few years ago, I was IDed (I was about 16 at the time) at one of the O'Neill's pubs when I was out with my mates. I was the last person to try to go in and you know what happens, all of my friends get in and I don't. So there I am pissed out of my face, calling up the police and saying 'Come and raid O'Neills, there are underage drinkers in there!' while the door men are shaking their heads at me. I start to walk (stumble) home and I get picked up and escorted back to the house in a police van (hey, a free taxi!).
Waking up the next morning feeling very dehydrated, I thought that these blurred memories were little more than a dream. I then check my mobile and I see this:
Last dialled: 999
Whoops, sorry for wasting your time officer.
4,500 entrants to the Microsoft Imagine Cup and this bullshit is the best they could come up with? The posters for this competition were plastered up all over the Computer Science and Physics buildings here on campus at Reading. I thought a trip to Brazil sounded cool but then again I'm not the best programmer in my University, let alone the whole country. Maybe I should have entered, after all, all of the hardcore programmers would steer clear of anything endorsed by Microsoft! I wonder what percentage of the entrants are on I.T. degrees and think that they are 1337 hax0rs because they can make the old 'Are you gay? [YES] [NO]' form where the No button is always unclickable!
What the hell is the point of that textbook stuff? You sign up for a course, and there are recommended text books from which the lecturers work from. Therefore these are likely to have the most relevant material for coursework/exams - you can buy them outright or hire them from the University library (or neither). those that are geeky enough to do further reading are clever enough to do so on their own.
As for the Drunk thing, they don't say exactly how it works, just that it sends details to a local taxi firm. So does it determine how drunk you are using slurred speech recognition or what? Or maybe they haven't reached that design stage yet. Maybe their code is like
if student = drunk then callcab(studentdetails).
At the moment the program is only a prototype
You mean a data flow diagram?
Both the outer sleeves on my Futurama season 1 and 2 box sets have fallen apart, and I can be quite anal about handling DVDs with care.
Doesn't matter if
Dammit, my Geforce isn't displaying the text properly, I can't make out the end of your sentence!
Hollywood actor Ben Affleck has been witnessed cashing a multi million dollar paycheck around the time of the chip's release. Film at 11.
Your post reminds me of a trust certificate that came up on my screen today.
"Always trust content from 'Click Yes To Enter LTD'?"
And in the blurb:
"By clicking yes you agree to have software installed on your computer that will dial up a premium rate phone line at a cost of 1.50 GBP a minute. You can disconnect by clicking on the Disconnect button or the connection will automatically disconnect after 13.33 minutes."
Oh yeah and the source of this was a popup for some flash game site that said 'When the certificate pops up click yes to be able to play our huge selection of games! It came up when I was on www.cooking.com looking for a recipe for good roast potatoes. Obviously I prevented myself from downloading this crapware, but I still won't be visiting that site again.
If it was economically viable to send garbage to the moon, why not go the extra step and send it into the sun?
I love the smell of incinerated Whiskas cans in the morning.
Or a Furby without the fur. A By, if you will.
I pay this person almost $80,000 a year for this....
- John
Travolta? Cusak? Ashcroft?
The world's first 'gender challenged' robot? Seriously, that is just plain freaky. I'm sure your average 80 year old woman won't want that thing shuffling around in the dark.
"Excuse me Pearl, I have to go collect my pension, could you let me open the door please dear?"
"I'm sorry Gwyneth, I'm afraid I can't do that"
Ask Hitomi Kitahara