Most gags that have critical timing are difficult to relate in text. The best thing to do is usually to simply abandon the original pretext and recreate a new joke. That aside, I told the story because it was actually true, not because I was trying to be funny.
A bunch of us were at a friend's house, and the remote control for the TV wasn't working. I opened it up and noticed that the batteries had been put in backwards. I took great pleasure in saying, out loud;
"I just have to REVERSE THE POLARITY!"
At which point two of us were overcome with hysterical convulsions of laughter for at least a half hour. Everyone else just kind of stared at us, wondering what the hell was so funny.
>6 infrastructure to recycle batteries hydro's capacity to generate and distribute all the electricity required for X households to recharge their car batteries all night
I work at a large utility in a large city. We own the grid. Trust me when I say that, by and large, if people are going to be recharging their cars in off peak hours it WONT BE A PROBLEM. Half the customer service shit we deal with is trying to get more customers to use off peak power, and shift the load away from peak times during the day.
There's plenty of capacity after hours. Take my word for it.
..which is a big showstopper for end users. I want to be able to plug the same carts into the top of my portable N64/SNES as I do in my big grey box below the TV - just like that guy did with the Atari 2600s on the site I mentioned above. Sure, that'll stretch the size of the machine, but any sort ROM-copying needs to be easy and seemless, so that any shmuck could use it on the go. I'd hate the hassle of having to shift ROM images around every time I wanted to play a different set of games.
Imagine a portable PSOne that could fit into a discman carry case, with your 20 favourite games in the side pockets. I know I'd rather carry that on the bus with me every morning. And I can go and buy second hand discs/carts/whatever and just plug them straight into my portable.
There was an adaptor out a while ago that let you play any Sega Master System game on the ill-fated Game Gear. I could never figure out why that didn't take off, it increased your potential library ten-fold. The only drawback was having to carry bigger carts around, but they were no bigger than an audio tape. Hmmm, I'm just getting pictures of a portable C64 with a tape drive.....
Every time I pull apart an old system (which I do fairly regularly), I'm amazed at how, by today's standards, simple these things are. I know www.classicgaming.com/vcsp/ is run buy a guy with a penchant for doing incredible things with portable Atari 2600's (he did a PS1 as well), but what about more mainstream systems? Surely it would be fairly cheap to wrap a GBA case around a SNES, and you've got an instant 1000's of games to choose from. Hell, I was pretty tempted to have a go at an N64 not too long ago.
Assuming we had schematics, circuit layouts, etc and didn't have to pull apart old systems for parts, it would be trivial to fit all the silicon you would need in one chip. Then its a matter of minimalising the analogue components, which is basically all your I/O (screen / AV out, controls). If I had the full schematics and access to a fab I could do it myself....
Some big company with lots of money should license this idea from me. I want my Mario All-Stars on a handheld!
In a way, yes. Affirmative action is illegal in many areas simply because it is the opposite of Equal Opportunity Employment. EEO mandates choosing the best person for the job, regardless of disability, background, ethnicity, blood type, etc... whereas affirmative action mandates hiring (or using) people/resources ONLY from a particular area, in order to promote the use those minorities. AA is most widely publicised for its role in integrating the african american population into the european workforce is the US, after equal rights were granted but no white employers wanted to take the first step. It's sad that it's necessary, but sometimes people need to be given a gentle push in the right direction. I suppose it's human nature to be afraid of something different.
"Now if you don't mind, I'm going to go and break all the Windows in Bob Carrs office."
Most sections of a collaborative project involve only a few people - my honours thesis was only two (myself and my supervisor) and my Masters thesis will be only three (myself, plus two cosupers). Even if you add in a few consultants, that's still easily less than half a dozen people. I agree that collaboration tools are important, but most large projects are broken down into smaller, bite-size chunks before roles are allocated. Managing large quantities of input is only necessary when bringing it all together, and even then you are only dealing with each of the team leaders.
Collab tools are important, they allow us to easily work around other issues, such as location and time zone differences, that face-to-face meetings are not appropriate for. But meeting in person is always more constructive then shifting.docs back and forth over email, particularly when only a few people are involved.
These are all valid advantages, but I had assumed, by the way the poster spoke, that they were writing low level code. If the code were abstract enough then it could, to a large extent, be debugged on any architecture (In fact, it would be a testament to the quality of the code).
There is little high level work today that cannot be developed concurrently on multiple architectures, given the right development environment.
I made a joke about this above, but some "process" patents are legitimate, such as technical processes. Do you know how hard it is to figure out how to get strained silicon to grow on a sapphire substrate in usable quantities, but still able to carry a current? Some of these processes involved a great deal of hard work and ingenuity, and that should be respected.
After all, there's no such thing as "One-Click Silicon."
Seriousy, I have had some long chats to my (lawyer) brother about this. Has anybody heard of any real, legitimate, honest-to-goodness, business process patents that have been granted and licensed?
Obviously, being an engineer, I believe that technical processes should also be public domain...
The inherent problem I see with allowing violent videogames is not that it might promote violence as a legitimate course of action in the minds of the players, (we have CNN for that, luckily..) but that it gives people the necessary skills to be able to actually carry it out. Living in australia, I can rack up a few quick, easy hours practice with a pistol at the local video arcade, without anyone noticing anything awry, unlike at a gun club.
There is a deeper problem that must be addressed, that is why are kids deciding to shoot their classmates. But we also need to ask ourselves whether we are not giving kids the opportunity to hone their skills, making them much more adept at shooting.
The skills that one develops playing a "virtual" shooting game are very similar the the skills that one develops practicing at a range, this is one reason that the military uses such simulations instead of only ever practicing with real equipment.
We have to ask ourselves: Who do we really want to develop those skills?
I'm not at all promoting the idea of removing violent games, just don't use them as a medium to teach our kids how to shoot each other.
And NO, I don't count aiming with a mouse as the same thing. Sheesh.
What I've always liked about Apple's notebooks is their ability to make the right compromises between size, weight, cost, speed, expandability, etc. I'm not saying they're perfect, but I agree with you that they're usually a lot better thought out than most of the wintel notebooks out there. You're better off asking yourself what your priorities are in a portable machine, and then picking a box that was built with the same priorities as you. As you said, the VAIO line is well designed, but often lacks features and speed. Do you need that extra speed? If you're looking for a devel machine then maybe you should just bite the bullet and buy a chunkier box.
Another poster suggested testing your apps in VPC on the Mac, but I think a virtual machine is the last place you want to be debugging test code. Any chance you could move to high level development? That way the test platform wouldn't really matter, just use your OO language of choice.
I understand all the arguments coming through syaing that there is no way we could enforce a law like this, that all the spammers would just post through a server in Nigeria, or something like that. All that does is leave people frustrated, like there is no solution to this epidemic.
We are the technical community, we should be making our voice heard when nontechnical people - with the best of intentions - try and understand an inherently technical problem.
My preferred solution has been around in theory for quite some time, using computation time as the "cost" to send an email. For those who are not familiar with the concept, it goes something like this:
I want to send an email to my friend Bob. My mail client connects to Bob's mail server and says "Hey, I want to leave a mail for Bob, okay?" The server then says to the client "Sure, but you have to solve this computationally intensive problem first." My mail client then says "No probs, hand it over. It'll only take a few seconds anyway." Here's the key. My mail client must now spend a few seconds solving this problem if it want's to send the mail. This isn't a problem if I'm only sending one, or ten, or even a few dozen emails, but spammers sell their services in the millions of units.
Ten million emails x a few seconds per mail = far too long to bother about. Yes, they could buy incredibly expensive hardware that could solve these problems quicker, but then the whole concept of spam as cheap advertising becoming a moot point.
Bill Gates gave a good summary in that interview a few days ago on USA Today, although he did not invent them, as he would have you believe. And no, I am not an MS lackey, as somebody suggested last week. here's the url:
As a side note, people often argue that mail servers should be locked down anyway, etc. But this doesn't solve the problem that email itself is inherently insecure. Given how much effort has gone into developing TCP/IP into what it is today, I'm surprised that the email spec has survived this far, virtually unaltered. These security problems are going to keep rearing their ugly heads until we fix them all, but that is all part of the wonderful evolution of software...
Calm down there, tiger. Not everyone is part of the conspiracy, put your tin foil helmet away.
Although it's early and I just got to work, I'm going to actually respond to this one. The distinction between how Palladium and this so-called "sandbox" would work is the difference between the two following statements:
"I want to run apps on my system that have been signed as trusted."
And:
"I want to run apps on my system that I have signed as trusted."
The Javs VM currently works this way, and (barring holes in the VM itself) it has proven to be a reasonable solution.
Follow the previous thread for a far more elegant solution to this issue, using MAC.
Yes, this would be a more appropriate behaviour for windows to use (and I admire the "Run As.." option for any executable as of win2k), however even a nonpriviledged user in windows is not completely locked down by default, and it takes a great deal of fiddling to get it that way. Creating a "nobody" account that can do NOTHING on the system (access shared resources, send mail, etc.) is beyond the time and expertise of most end users.
I just realised, isn't this what mandatory access controls (MAC) is supposed to solve? From what i recall, a process app does not necessarily inherit the security level of its parent or the user that runs it, rather this is a variable that may be specified at run-time.
For example, the sysadmin may run (and own) a process the only has read permission to the filesystem. Or no access to it at all, it's up to the user instantiating the process.
This would only protect other users from the effects of an executable. I'm not sure about you, but I consider my home directory to be far more valuable then the rest of the installation, which I could easily recreate within an hour.
A good VM would allow you to interact in a useful way with the application, without allowing it unauthorised access to your data.
A quick (though cumbersome) workaround would be to have another account on the machine within which any untrusted apps may be tested first. Though awkward, it does prove the concept.
This is an important point. Why should running an executable be dangerous at all? is it really that difficult to set up a sandbox (a la the JVM) for users to run untrusted executables in? There may be some more hassle involved, but it could be implemented fairly transparently.
I'll vouch for this solution. I had a palm m105 for the last 18 months of my degree, and (apart from organising my hitherto disorganised life) Avantgo saved me from falling asleep in many a 45 min lecture.
Seriously, if you're never going to be spending more than an hour away from a PC then just cache enough content on your device to keep you happy for that long. Avantgo has a pretty good selection of its own channels, as well as allowing you to cache sites of your choosing. If something really piques your interest then you can look it up when you get back to your desk, after all you're not really going to do any serious development on a PalmOS machine, are you?:)
Back in my day we used a coat hanger. If you had the time you would bend it into the shape of your favourite country. Certainly made the car easier to find, although I never did learn to recognise Finland....
Slashdot Mirror
Most gags that have critical timing are difficult to relate in text. The best thing to do is usually to simply abandon the original pretext and recreate a new joke. That aside, I told the story because it was actually true, not because I was trying to be funny.
A bunch of us were at a friend's house, and the remote control for the TV wasn't working. I opened it up and noticed that the batteries had been put in backwards. I took great pleasure in saying, out loud;
"I just have to REVERSE THE POLARITY!"
At which point two of us were overcome with hysterical convulsions of laughter for at least a half hour. Everyone else just kind of stared at us, wondering what the hell was so funny.
I guess they weren't Trek fans..
>6 infrastructure to recycle batteries hydro's capacity to generate and distribute all the electricity required for X households to recharge their car batteries all night
I work at a large utility in a large city. We own the grid. Trust me when I say that, by and large, if people are going to be recharging their cars in off peak hours it WONT BE A PROBLEM. Half the customer service shit we deal with is trying to get more customers to use off peak power, and shift the load away from peak times during the day.
There's plenty of capacity after hours. Take my word for it.
..which is a big showstopper for end users. I want to be able to plug the same carts into the top of my portable N64/SNES as I do in my big grey box below the TV - just like that guy did with the Atari 2600s on the site I mentioned above. Sure, that'll stretch the size of the machine, but any sort ROM-copying needs to be easy and seemless, so that any shmuck could use it on the go. I'd hate the hassle of having to shift ROM images around every time I wanted to play a different set of games.
Imagine a portable PSOne that could fit into a discman carry case, with your 20 favourite games in the side pockets. I know I'd rather carry that on the bus with me every morning. And I can go and buy second hand discs/carts/whatever and just plug them straight into my portable.
There was an adaptor out a while ago that let you play any Sega Master System game on the ill-fated Game Gear. I could never figure out why that didn't take off, it increased your potential library ten-fold. The only drawback was having to carry bigger carts around, but they were no bigger than an audio tape. Hmmm, I'm just getting pictures of a portable C64 with a tape drive.....
Every time I pull apart an old system (which I do fairly regularly), I'm amazed at how, by today's standards, simple these things are. I know www.classicgaming.com/vcsp/ is run buy a guy with a penchant for doing incredible things with portable Atari 2600's (he did a PS1 as well), but what about more mainstream systems? Surely it would be fairly cheap to wrap a GBA case around a SNES, and you've got an instant 1000's of games to choose from. Hell, I was pretty tempted to have a go at an N64 not too long ago.
Assuming we had schematics, circuit layouts, etc and didn't have to pull apart old systems for parts, it would be trivial to fit all the silicon you would need in one chip. Then its a matter of minimalising the analogue components, which is basically all your I/O (screen / AV out, controls). If I had the full schematics and access to a fab I could do it myself....
Some big company with lots of money should license this idea from me. I want my Mario All-Stars on a handheld!
In a way, yes. Affirmative action is illegal in many areas simply because it is the opposite of Equal Opportunity Employment. EEO mandates choosing the best person for the job, regardless of disability, background, ethnicity, blood type, etc... whereas affirmative action mandates hiring (or using) people/resources ONLY from a particular area, in order to promote the use those minorities. AA is most widely publicised for its role in integrating the african american population into the european workforce is the US, after equal rights were granted but no white employers wanted to take the first step. It's sad that it's necessary, but sometimes people need to be given a gentle push in the right direction. I suppose it's human nature to be afraid of something different.
"Now if you don't mind, I'm going to go and break all the Windows in Bob Carrs office."
"But how will you clean up the glass?"
"Glass?"
Most sections of a collaborative project involve only a few people - my honours thesis was only two (myself and my supervisor) and my Masters thesis will be only three (myself, plus two cosupers). Even if you add in a few consultants, that's still easily less than half a dozen people. I agree that collaboration tools are important, but most large projects are broken down into smaller, bite-size chunks before roles are allocated. Managing large quantities of input is only necessary when bringing it all together, and even then you are only dealing with each of the team leaders.
.docs back and forth over email, particularly when only a few people are involved.
Collab tools are important, they allow us to easily work around other issues, such as location and time zone differences, that face-to-face meetings are not appropriate for. But meeting in person is always more constructive then shifting
Heh. Couldn't resist.
"The stability of the Linupy Operating System rivals the Palm Operating System."
Come on, anyone who has used a Palm device (I live off one) for more than basic date/contacts knows that stability isn't their strong point.
These are all valid advantages, but I had assumed, by the way the poster spoke, that they were writing low level code. If the code were abstract enough then it could, to a large extent, be debugged on any architecture (In fact, it would be a testament to the quality of the code).
There is little high level work today that cannot be developed concurrently on multiple architectures, given the right development environment.
I made a joke about this above, but some "process" patents are legitimate, such as technical processes. Do you know how hard it is to figure out how to get strained silicon to grow on a sapphire substrate in usable quantities, but still able to carry a current? Some of these processes involved a great deal of hard work and ingenuity, and that should be respected.
After all, there's no such thing as "One-Click Silicon."
Seriousy, I have had some long chats to my (lawyer) brother about this. Has anybody heard of any real, legitimate, honest-to-goodness, business process patents that have been granted and licensed?
Obviously, being an engineer, I believe that technical processes should also be public domain...
The inherent problem I see with allowing violent videogames is not that it might promote violence as a legitimate course of action in the minds of the players, (we have CNN for that, luckily..) but that it gives people the necessary skills to be able to actually carry it out. Living in australia, I can rack up a few quick, easy hours practice with a pistol at the local video arcade, without anyone noticing anything awry, unlike at a gun club.
There is a deeper problem that must be addressed, that is why are kids deciding to shoot their classmates. But we also need to ask ourselves whether we are not giving kids the opportunity to hone their skills, making them much more adept at shooting.
The skills that one develops playing a "virtual" shooting game are very similar the the skills that one develops practicing at a range, this is one reason that the military uses such simulations instead of only ever practicing with real equipment.
We have to ask ourselves: Who do we really want to develop those skills?
I'm not at all promoting the idea of removing violent games, just don't use them as a medium to teach our kids how to shoot each other.
And NO, I don't count aiming with a mouse as the same thing. Sheesh.
What I've always liked about Apple's notebooks is their ability to make the right compromises between size, weight, cost, speed, expandability, etc. I'm not saying they're perfect, but I agree with you that they're usually a lot better thought out than most of the wintel notebooks out there. You're better off asking yourself what your priorities are in a portable machine, and then picking a box that was built with the same priorities as you. As you said, the VAIO line is well designed, but often lacks features and speed. Do you need that extra speed? If you're looking for a devel machine then maybe you should just bite the bullet and buy a chunkier box.
Another poster suggested testing your apps in VPC on the Mac, but I think a virtual machine is the last place you want to be debugging test code. Any chance you could move to high level development? That way the test platform wouldn't really matter, just use your OO language of choice.
Yes, a microwave would work, although it would not make it particularly convenient to "de-tag" a newly bought item.
"Sir, would you mind stepping into this large metal box for a moment. You may feel a warm, tingling sensation in every water molecule in your body."
I understand all the arguments coming through syaing that there is no way we could enforce a law like this, that all the spammers would just post through a server in Nigeria, or something like that. All that does is leave people frustrated, like there is no solution to this epidemic.
s -spamhow_x.htm
We are the technical community, we should be making our voice heard when nontechnical people - with the best of intentions - try and understand an inherently technical problem.
My preferred solution has been around in theory for quite some time, using computation time as the "cost" to send an email. For those who are not familiar with the concept, it goes something like this:
I want to send an email to my friend Bob. My mail client connects to Bob's mail server and says "Hey, I want to leave a mail for Bob, okay?" The server then says to the client "Sure, but you have to solve this computationally intensive problem first." My mail client then says "No probs, hand it over. It'll only take a few seconds anyway." Here's the key. My mail client must now spend a few seconds solving this problem if it want's to send the mail. This isn't a problem if I'm only sending one, or ten, or even a few dozen emails, but spammers sell their services in the millions of units.
Ten million emails x a few seconds per mail = far too long to bother about. Yes, they could buy incredibly expensive hardware that could solve these problems quicker, but then the whole concept of spam as cheap advertising becoming a moot point.
Bill Gates gave a good summary in that interview a few days ago on USA Today, although he did not invent them, as he would have you believe. And no, I am not an MS lackey, as somebody suggested last week. here's the url:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-29-gate
As a side note, people often argue that mail servers should be locked down anyway, etc. But this doesn't solve the problem that email itself is inherently insecure. Given how much effort has gone into developing TCP/IP into what it is today, I'm surprised that the email spec has survived this far, virtually unaltered. These security problems are going to keep rearing their ugly heads until we fix them all, but that is all part of the wonderful evolution of software...
Calm down there, tiger. Not everyone is part of the conspiracy, put your tin foil helmet away.
Although it's early and I just got to work, I'm going to actually respond to this one. The distinction between how Palladium and this so-called "sandbox" would work is the difference between the two following statements:
"I want to run apps on my system that have been signed as trusted."
And:
"I want to run apps on my system that I have signed as trusted."
The Javs VM currently works this way, and (barring holes in the VM itself) it has proven to be a reasonable solution.
Follow the previous thread for a far more elegant solution to this issue, using MAC.
Yes, this would be a more appropriate behaviour for windows to use (and I admire the "Run As.." option for any executable as of win2k), however even a nonpriviledged user in windows is not completely locked down by default, and it takes a great deal of fiddling to get it that way. Creating a "nobody" account that can do NOTHING on the system (access shared resources, send mail, etc.) is beyond the time and expertise of most end users.
I just realised, isn't this what mandatory access controls (MAC) is supposed to solve? From what i recall, a process app does not necessarily inherit the security level of its parent or the user that runs it, rather this is a variable that may be specified at run-time.
For example, the sysadmin may run (and own) a process the only has read permission to the filesystem. Or no access to it at all, it's up to the user instantiating the process.
Am I wrong here?
This would only protect other users from the effects of an executable. I'm not sure about you, but I consider my home directory to be far more valuable then the rest of the installation, which I could easily recreate within an hour.
A good VM would allow you to interact in a useful way with the application, without allowing it unauthorised access to your data.
A quick (though cumbersome) workaround would be to have another account on the machine within which any untrusted apps may be tested first. Though awkward, it does prove the concept.
This is an important point. Why should running an executable be dangerous at all? is it really that difficult to set up a sandbox (a la the JVM) for users to run untrusted executables in? There may be some more hassle involved, but it could be implemented fairly transparently.
As much as these so-called "consumer safety" tests try, they'll never stop me blowing up my own appliances.
It's just too darn fun.
I'll vouch for this solution. I had a palm m105 for the last 18 months of my degree, and (apart from organising my hitherto disorganised life) Avantgo saved me from falling asleep in many a 45 min lecture.
:)
Seriously, if you're never going to be spending more than an hour away from a PC then just cache enough content on your device to keep you happy for that long. Avantgo has a pretty good selection of its own channels, as well as allowing you to cache sites of your choosing. If something really piques your interest then you can look it up when you get back to your desk, after all you're not really going to do any serious development on a PalmOS machine, are you?
Yes, that should have been "Pringles can.." Serves me right for using a werty....
Back in my day we used a coat hanger. If you had the time you would bend it into the shape of your favourite country. Certainly made the car easier to find, although I never did learn to recognise Finland....