Excluding my licensed usage of the patented/. late night maths for not realising that a large number isn't really that big I still would like an answer to my second question of PHBs taking this much data home. Seriously we have several gig DBs at work with thousands of customer records yet I've never seen one good reason for it to leave the main storage site and with banking details which I would consider more sensitive why would a company even open itself up to this sort of thing...
This probably shows how much of a geek I am compared to you but 11 million records...So say a name, an address, several series of numbers and general info...That is a hell of a lot of plain text. When did laptop hard drives get that big and what are bank PHBs doing with those DBs at home anyway?
Financial resources are in no way limited. Economics 101...Some one has to always be in a position to need some thing from some one else for our systems to work. Basically all of them rely on this concept. Why not at least make those we tread on daily (with or without our knowledge) have slightly more meaningful lives and give them one of the best resources around - knowledge.
As far as I'm concerned this is just Microsoft kicking a good project because of the injection of Linux it will bring to the developing world. And don't lie to yourself; if we really wanted to give help to these people we would do more than a token effort - and maybe this is one of those ways.
Windows users are continuing to test the waters of Linux and to be honest I think this is the best way to convert them...Show new users that over a period of time Linux is a manageable learning curve and has some clear advantages. Every one I know that uses Linux full time after being a long time Windows user did it this way including myself and it takes about one to three years. This process is being helped a long now that Linux isn't playing second fiddle to Windows and is now focusing on catching up to OSX and finding its own identity instead of just being a straight (boring and useless) Windows clone. And with compiz/xorg working on everyday hardware without issue and Vista's upgrade costs at least force a bunch of new to Linux Windows users start testing the waters. If this is kept up the rate of users defecting to Linux and Mac will hopefully turn into a land slide in the next five to ten years and then we will truly see the year of the Linux Desktop.
Note I do hope users go to both Linux and Mac in roughly equal groups as I'd like to see us avoid another monopoly situation like this Microsoft hell we've had to live through.
You never know... By the time the game industry is dx10 mainstream WINE may support it well. WINEs implimentation of dx7/8 is going well and dx9 is getting better all the time. A recent post in the WINEhq newsletter also suggested that adding support for dx10 once 7/8/9 were working nicely would be a doable affair. So in the end you may be able to play more of your Windows games than you can under Windows;)...Just like the current state of programs (yes you can run more Windows programs under Linux than under Windows if you include win 3.11 to xp sp2!).
I'm a bit worried to be honest. Windows people seem to be ready for this rogering from Microsoft and they all have the out look of "oh but the DRM will be cracked within a month and we'll be free to continue doing what we do"...The real question is will it really be cracked (activation never was, well) and secondly do we want it cracked. It looks like a rather good model to me and most of the people who deal with advanced systems like that wouldn't touch Windows anyway - and we can be sure it is out of the realm of script kiddies. I don't see Windows users going back to XP once they've switched to Vista; they've been chopping at the bit to drop the dead weight that is XP (in their eyes) because of the pressure applied by the Linux and Mac camps who even with the Vista release are still infront. So there are two outcomes...Windows users find DRM to much and side grade to Linux or Mac or more likely they will bend over and continue to take it like they did with activation.
I agree with you on allowing females to not play if they don't want too. We hold four large and profitable lans a year (and have done for the last six years now) and in that time we have held strong a fundamental rule of no girlfriends. The girls that come to our lans are serious gamers like us not trophies and they are given no special treatment - if they can't frag with the best they get ridiculed just like every one else. Strangely enough, at least from our point of view, this has had an interesting effect of holding our female numbers at around 25% of our regulars as they, from what we can gather, feel that they are equal with every one and can earn the same respect.
So from what I can gather if we really want more girls in gaming we need to stop pandering to them and just hold as much of a non biased line as we can. For those that are interested about half of those 25% are rather good looking; and no you can't have their numbers!
Well I for one haven't been under a rock nor had I noticed a Zune was coming out...Guess I was lucky to avoid the marketing volley and stay sane. Either way don't be to harsh on Sony as without them I wouldn't have a brand new replacement battery for my Powerbook. As far as I'm concerned Apple replaced my battery mid cycle leading to a laptop that I can rely on for longer than I expected for no cost to myself and little hassle. Kuddos to them and they can expect my money again in just under two years for a new mac laptop.:)
Well...It did. I often go on trips carrying only enough clothes for two days and nothing else except for my laptop. When I get some where I like I find an open access point and jump onto the local IRC channel for that area and shout out for a roof. If you are prepared to accept as little as a roof (backpacks are good pillows, and your towel - which you always carry - is a good blanket) you can be pleasantly surprised; most people are more than willing to lend you some form of bedding and many will offer you food - usually the quality that they are eating (which can get a bit hairy!) but on the whole good.
Many geeks will happily accept your nerdy company as repayment or, as I've more often found, they don't want to see you at all and they want you to stay out of their way. Either way as long as you are smart and polite it turns out well and remember to repay the favor to the next person needing the floor for the night.
Of course as I said above this did exist 10 years ago, further back as well. I know BBS used to be used to do the shout outs I was talking about before. Anyway I've been doing it for around six years now and I've had about ten geeks crash on my floor (I offer a fold out bed now;) so yeah - don't be shy to try...And remember to always have a backup plan - I suggest becoming Catholic, the seats aren't comfy but the churches don't usually get cold.:P
Haha yeah...How about this for frighteningly low; in early 2008 my city runs out of water. There are no backup plans and no prospects in the pipe line at the moment, due to a rather stupid population voting on our water future based on popularity (the good looking one was the dumb one) not on science, so all 100,000 residence and twice that in the near by regions will be out of water. I hear the huge storms that hit Brisbane over the last three days are only adding a weeks worth of water to their supplies too - they'll be out of water in four years - just over 1.5 million people in the city alone. The whole Australian east coast will be out of water by 2015.
So as you can imagine most Australians are eagerly awaiting news of these projects and basically anything that will solve our water problem before, as is often quoted, the shit really hits the fan.
Oh god my karma is going to burn for this; though I am from Australia and we believe it is no ones right to take another's life including those who kill others. We have not had the, barbaric, death sentence for over 30 years and far longer in other states.
So while this sentence was predictable and probably required from a political point of view I object on moral grounds. Instead he should be thrown in jail and never let out.
I plead cultural ignorance!;) In Australia 24 hour time is some thing every person knows of and can convert to and from...Few people use it often though it is 'about' and required learning.
Hmm ish. You are really replacing one hard problem with one easier problem. For example people currently say 5 pm EST with the rude assumption that who ever is reading it a) knows whos Eastern Standard Time that is talking about and b) its GMT conversion amount. Where as if you moved to global 24 hour time you kill both of those problems and have one new problem of a) I have to learn which times mean what in my area (eg for Australia sun up would now be 2000 hours instead of 0600) with the huge advantage that you can easily move times around and make missing international meetings impossible...You may need to know when their sun up is to have an objective view on their day (from sun up to sun down) though that isn't a requirement for every zone you see a time for, only those you need to directly interact with unlike the current system. In reality it is just different to the system you use now; adapting to it would be rather easy and there are some clear advantages.
Erm since when does the military own 24 hour time? They use it to make sure people aren't idiots and mistake timings though the system of time itself comes from Europe and really has nothing to do with any army much like the mills system.
HD is still a long way off in Australia as people simply aren't that interested. I can see that most people will start to switch when their current TVs die because of the 'may as well' pov and that the majority of those left will switch by the time the next set they bought dies because HD will be the norm and cheaper. Though in reality normal TV has lots of annoying ads and people don't really tend to watch it all the time, mostly just for tuning out, while DVDs look find on them. So when they see a SD TV for $300 and a HD TV for $1500 the choice is normally very simple. So maybe Nintendo is just assuming that most of the world isn't like the more well off areas of America?
I tend to have my main desktop in front of me and a laptop to my side so I can easily work on both. On my Linux desktop I have four virt terminals which each have dedicated tasks (1; web, active chat, current work 2; chat user lists and reference lists (phone numbers, address books) 3; email 4; possibly illegal torrent operations and anything of that nature) and I try to keep as much tabbed as possible. Then to my left on my Mac laptop I tend to just have the one desktop filled with everything (F11 under expose` is awesome) including more chat, mostly work, and basically a clone of the applications on my Linux box (this allows me to pickup my mac and go roaming while continuing what I'm doing in real time). Both boxes have extra tasks that each one carries out and the other can't do.
In total I have around 80 windows open at any one time over the two computers; plus tabs in ffox, im, and xchat.:)...Some times the ease of multitasking under Unix can be a curse.
So what world are you living in? Have you spoken to a physicist or a chemist lately and even dared to suggest that biology is a 'real' science... There is very little respect for one of the main strands let alone the classical sciences from what I see every day.
I'm interested in these results Larry suggested. My friends and I for the last year have been working on a skill, one that we wondered if it was possible while bored in a lecture one day, where as usual you filter all noise that is irrelevant (the venues in our cases include lecture theaters and filled refectories) and touch type on an assignment or other wise engaging task with the added difficulty of holding a detailed conversation on another topic with some one else. In the beginning it was rather impossible though surprisingly enough it is rather doable as we have found with only a little practice and then a lot of usage to get the words per minute ratio up.
Laptops allow you to be anywhere and we know we can filter noise and information a lot better than is currently done (and with less effort than at least I expected) plus the human brain is perfect for multitasking. I wonder if this sort of thing is indeed the future of at least geekdom, maybe of office space in general?
I'm guessing Digg is down as the last few news stories seem to have Diggs level of comments...
The problems I see with using cameras to take the picture is you'd have to have some form of size reference to do the mapping and have some points that align the sample to be compared. Lighting and visual mistake could also cause problems. On top of that dealing with damage (short or long term) to the eye would be a huge problem...Imagine a scratch to your eye or if you had a blood shot eye. So in reality passwords are needed for this situation anyway which makes doing some thing like this, at least home brew, a waste of time in the near future until the tech gets better.
The simple solution is to rely on pass phrases for the short term and do some thing about your paranoia.:)
I got modded +5 insightful above though I find the simple act that your post got modded insightful instead of funny an insight into how scary the world is today outside of the fake fear of terrorists and other horrible axis. I wonder if anything will save us?:|
Agreed. I also have a few troubles with the arguement here... "We are going to retain data in America to catch terrorists in other countries like Iran and Iraq!"...Does any one else smell 'omg teh terrorists r coming lol all j00r privacy r belong to us?'
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Excluding my licensed usage of the patented /. late night maths for not realising that a large number isn't really that big I still would like an answer to my second question of PHBs taking this much data home. Seriously we have several gig DBs at work with thousands of customer records yet I've never seen one good reason for it to leave the main storage site and with banking details which I would consider more sensitive why would a company even open itself up to this sort of thing...
This probably shows how much of a geek I am compared to you but 11 million records...So say a name, an address, several series of numbers and general info...That is a hell of a lot of plain text. When did laptop hard drives get that big and what are bank PHBs doing with those DBs at home anyway?
Financial resources are in no way limited. Economics 101...Some one has to always be in a position to need some thing from some one else for our systems to work. Basically all of them rely on this concept. Why not at least make those we tread on daily (with or without our knowledge) have slightly more meaningful lives and give them one of the best resources around - knowledge.
As far as I'm concerned this is just Microsoft kicking a good project because of the injection of Linux it will bring to the developing world. And don't lie to yourself; if we really wanted to give help to these people we would do more than a token effort - and maybe this is one of those ways.
Windows users are continuing to test the waters of Linux and to be honest I think this is the best way to convert them...Show new users that over a period of time Linux is a manageable learning curve and has some clear advantages. Every one I know that uses Linux full time after being a long time Windows user did it this way including myself and it takes about one to three years. This process is being helped a long now that Linux isn't playing second fiddle to Windows and is now focusing on catching up to OSX and finding its own identity instead of just being a straight (boring and useless) Windows clone. And with compiz/xorg working on everyday hardware without issue and Vista's upgrade costs at least force a bunch of new to Linux Windows users start testing the waters. If this is kept up the rate of users defecting to Linux and Mac will hopefully turn into a land slide in the next five to ten years and then we will truly see the year of the Linux Desktop.
Note I do hope users go to both Linux and Mac in roughly equal groups as I'd like to see us avoid another monopoly situation like this Microsoft hell we've had to live through.
You never know... By the time the game industry is dx10 mainstream WINE may support it well. WINEs implimentation of dx7/8 is going well and dx9 is getting better all the time. A recent post in the WINEhq newsletter also suggested that adding support for dx10 once 7/8/9 were working nicely would be a doable affair. So in the end you may be able to play more of your Windows games than you can under Windows ;) ...Just like the current state of programs (yes you can run more Windows programs under Linux than under Windows if you include win 3.11 to xp sp2!).
I'm a bit worried to be honest. Windows people seem to be ready for this rogering from Microsoft and they all have the out look of "oh but the DRM will be cracked within a month and we'll be free to continue doing what we do"...The real question is will it really be cracked (activation never was, well) and secondly do we want it cracked. It looks like a rather good model to me and most of the people who deal with advanced systems like that wouldn't touch Windows anyway - and we can be sure it is out of the realm of script kiddies. I don't see Windows users going back to XP once they've switched to Vista; they've been chopping at the bit to drop the dead weight that is XP (in their eyes) because of the pressure applied by the Linux and Mac camps who even with the Vista release are still infront. So there are two outcomes...Windows users find DRM to much and side grade to Linux or Mac or more likely they will bend over and continue to take it like they did with activation.
I agree with you on allowing females to not play if they don't want too. We hold four large and profitable lans a year (and have done for the last six years now) and in that time we have held strong a fundamental rule of no girlfriends. The girls that come to our lans are serious gamers like us not trophies and they are given no special treatment - if they can't frag with the best they get ridiculed just like every one else. Strangely enough, at least from our point of view, this has had an interesting effect of holding our female numbers at around 25% of our regulars as they, from what we can gather, feel that they are equal with every one and can earn the same respect.
So from what I can gather if we really want more girls in gaming we need to stop pandering to them and just hold as much of a non biased line as we can. For those that are interested about half of those 25% are rather good looking; and no you can't have their numbers!
Well I for one haven't been under a rock nor had I noticed a Zune was coming out...Guess I was lucky to avoid the marketing volley and stay sane. Either way don't be to harsh on Sony as without them I wouldn't have a brand new replacement battery for my Powerbook. As far as I'm concerned Apple replaced my battery mid cycle leading to a laptop that I can rely on for longer than I expected for no cost to myself and little hassle. Kuddos to them and they can expect my money again in just under two years for a new mac laptop. :)
Well...It did. I often go on trips carrying only enough clothes for two days and nothing else except for my laptop. When I get some where I like I find an open access point and jump onto the local IRC channel for that area and shout out for a roof. If you are prepared to accept as little as a roof (backpacks are good pillows, and your towel - which you always carry - is a good blanket) you can be pleasantly surprised; most people are more than willing to lend you some form of bedding and many will offer you food - usually the quality that they are eating (which can get a bit hairy!) but on the whole good.
;) so yeah - don't be shy to try...And remember to always have a backup plan - I suggest becoming Catholic, the seats aren't comfy but the churches don't usually get cold. :P
Many geeks will happily accept your nerdy company as repayment or, as I've more often found, they don't want to see you at all and they want you to stay out of their way. Either way as long as you are smart and polite it turns out well and remember to repay the favor to the next person needing the floor for the night.
Of course as I said above this did exist 10 years ago, further back as well. I know BBS used to be used to do the shout outs I was talking about before. Anyway I've been doing it for around six years now and I've had about ten geeks crash on my floor (I offer a fold out bed now
Haha yeah...How about this for frighteningly low; in early 2008 my city runs out of water. There are no backup plans and no prospects in the pipe line at the moment, due to a rather stupid population voting on our water future based on popularity (the good looking one was the dumb one) not on science, so all 100,000 residence and twice that in the near by regions will be out of water. I hear the huge storms that hit Brisbane over the last three days are only adding a weeks worth of water to their supplies too - they'll be out of water in four years - just over 1.5 million people in the city alone. The whole Australian east coast will be out of water by 2015.
So as you can imagine most Australians are eagerly awaiting news of these projects and basically anything that will solve our water problem before, as is often quoted, the shit really hits the fan.
Oh god my karma is going to burn for this; though I am from Australia and we believe it is no ones right to take another's life including those who kill others. We have not had the, barbaric, death sentence for over 30 years and far longer in other states.
So while this sentence was predictable and probably required from a political point of view I object on moral grounds. Instead he should be thrown in jail and never let out.
My 2 cents.
I plead cultural ignorance! ;) In Australia 24 hour time is some thing every person knows of and can convert to and from...Few people use it often though it is 'about' and required learning.
Depends on how you define beat; we beat chickenpox by making sure every child had it so it was rare that it mutated into the worse form later in life.
Mmm nothing ghastly. I'd say that if they beat it back then we'd own it these days as our immune systems are rather advanced in comparison.
Hmm ish. You are really replacing one hard problem with one easier problem. For example people currently say 5 pm EST with the rude assumption that who ever is reading it a) knows whos Eastern Standard Time that is talking about and b) its GMT conversion amount. Where as if you moved to global 24 hour time you kill both of those problems and have one new problem of a) I have to learn which times mean what in my area (eg for Australia sun up would now be 2000 hours instead of 0600) with the huge advantage that you can easily move times around and make missing international meetings impossible...You may need to know when their sun up is to have an objective view on their day (from sun up to sun down) though that isn't a requirement for every zone you see a time for, only those you need to directly interact with unlike the current system. In reality it is just different to the system you use now; adapting to it would be rather easy and there are some clear advantages.
Erm since when does the military own 24 hour time? They use it to make sure people aren't idiots and mistake timings though the system of time itself comes from Europe and really has nothing to do with any army much like the mills system.
HD is still a long way off in Australia as people simply aren't that interested. I can see that most people will start to switch when their current TVs die because of the 'may as well' pov and that the majority of those left will switch by the time the next set they bought dies because HD will be the norm and cheaper. Though in reality normal TV has lots of annoying ads and people don't really tend to watch it all the time, mostly just for tuning out, while DVDs look find on them. So when they see a SD TV for $300 and a HD TV for $1500 the choice is normally very simple. So maybe Nintendo is just assuming that most of the world isn't like the more well off areas of America?
Agreed; what do people think this place is, Digg?
I tend to have my main desktop in front of me and a laptop to my side so I can easily work on both. On my Linux desktop I have four virt terminals which each have dedicated tasks (1; web, active chat, current work 2; chat user lists and reference lists (phone numbers, address books) 3; email 4; possibly illegal torrent operations and anything of that nature) and I try to keep as much tabbed as possible. Then to my left on my Mac laptop I tend to just have the one desktop filled with everything (F11 under expose` is awesome) including more chat, mostly work, and basically a clone of the applications on my Linux box (this allows me to pickup my mac and go roaming while continuing what I'm doing in real time). Both boxes have extra tasks that each one carries out and the other can't do.
:) ...Some times the ease of multitasking under Unix can be a curse.
In total I have around 80 windows open at any one time over the two computers; plus tabs in ffox, im, and xchat.
Bah I know! First my Corp taxes me and then the government does too! When will it end? :(
*Releax it is a joke!*
So what world are you living in? Have you spoken to a physicist or a chemist lately and even dared to suggest that biology is a 'real' science... There is very little respect for one of the main strands let alone the classical sciences from what I see every day.
I'm interested in these results Larry suggested. My friends and I for the last year have been working on a skill, one that we wondered if it was possible while bored in a lecture one day, where as usual you filter all noise that is irrelevant (the venues in our cases include lecture theaters and filled refectories) and touch type on an assignment or other wise engaging task with the added difficulty of holding a detailed conversation on another topic with some one else. In the beginning it was rather impossible though surprisingly enough it is rather doable as we have found with only a little practice and then a lot of usage to get the words per minute ratio up.
Laptops allow you to be anywhere and we know we can filter noise and information a lot better than is currently done (and with less effort than at least I expected) plus the human brain is perfect for multitasking. I wonder if this sort of thing is indeed the future of at least geekdom, maybe of office space in general?
I'm guessing Digg is down as the last few news stories seem to have Diggs level of comments...
:)
The problems I see with using cameras to take the picture is you'd have to have some form of size reference to do the mapping and have some points that align the sample to be compared. Lighting and visual mistake could also cause problems. On top of that dealing with damage (short or long term) to the eye would be a huge problem...Imagine a scratch to your eye or if you had a blood shot eye. So in reality passwords are needed for this situation anyway which makes doing some thing like this, at least home brew, a waste of time in the near future until the tech gets better.
The simple solution is to rely on pass phrases for the short term and do some thing about your paranoia.
I got modded +5 insightful above though I find the simple act that your post got modded insightful instead of funny an insight into how scary the world is today outside of the fake fear of terrorists and other horrible axis. I wonder if anything will save us? :|
Agreed. I also have a few troubles with the arguement here... "We are going to retain data in America to catch terrorists in other countries like Iran and Iraq!" ...Does any one else smell 'omg teh terrorists r coming lol all j00r privacy r belong to us?'