I know! I -hate- it when FPS have a lot of shooting.
I'm guessing yet another fan of grenades, landmines, rockets, chainsaws, and crowbars.
I enjoyed an early 2000s alternate WWI FPS called "Ironstorm" that was mostly played by me using different TYPES of grenades.. poison, shock, fragment, sleep, etc. That was certainly different.
Granted, I probably wouldn't use RAID 5 because the drives aren't prone to random death like magnetic drives
You must be pretty new to SSDs. My experience with old ones is they work great, until one random day they never work again, at all, with 100% data loss. Some people experience they "merely" fail to write but can still be read. It seems pretty random.
Hard drives at least some of the time fail gradually and sometimes making horrible noises or taking a long time to spin up.
SSDs, so far in my experience, pretty much define random death, although they're overall pretty reliable.
It seems to me that if you're involved in such a project and have to ask how to do it, it's doomed.
Agreed, except that he may only need that initial kick to find terms to google.
For example, I know that to do what he wants, he needs to learn about the MFM vs RLL interfaces from the mid 80s, not because he will emulate either, but if he doesn't understand both and how they worked and relate to each other, he's has no chance. He is more or less trying to make a hard drive version of the catweasel floppy controller. If he never heard of a catweasel he would have a hard time figuring out he needs to learn about it.
Image scans from the very detailed technical manuals for DEC's minicomputer hard drives are available online. This is from the era of individual TTL chips, he's basically going to replicate / emulate / reverse engineer that hardware into his microcontroller in order to write individual 1/0, after all they had a solution that worked 40-50 years ago. If he didn't already know that, he would have a hard time figuring out he needed to know that.
Now if he already knows that stuff, and is really asking how to get MPLAB working so he can program his PIC, well yeah then he's well and truely lost.
But given those first steps/hints, I think a reasonably experienced EE/CE type could probably figure out the rest of it.
Adding to your nuclear analogy, if someone went back in time and told folks after 1920 to play with neutrons and U-235, they would get quite the head start on the rest of the world that didn't get that idea to try that until much later. They had all the prerequisites by 1920 but it took many years to get the right combination of ideas...
After he's spent a week banging bits into the 82072A, he'll either have gone insane, or will have realised he's well and truly barking up the wrong tree.
Yup barking up the wrong tree. Skip those ancient controller chips and use a DSP chip. Heck, data rates on old floppies was so low, that a plain jane microcontroller would probably work. Now by microcontroller I don't mean the lowest end PIC ever made because thats fast enough but has too little memory, or an interpreted basic stamp which probably has the memory but is way too slow, I mean a real mid-high range PIC at minimum.
Of course if you'd settle for very simple patterns of 1/0 to look at with ferrofluid or something, then probably any microcontroller would work?
he odds of it being an electrical failure of some kind are much higher. Then say a mechanical one, since the mechanical component is simple,
No the electric is much more reliable. The situation is simpler than that:
Mechanical cable fails (happened to my grandfather, and my father, in both cases, was no big deal), oh well, they're supposed to do that about once per driver-lifetime, that's just life. Replace it, drive on.
Electrical throttle fails, which happens much less often than direct lightning strikes but more often than being hit by a meteor, OMG call the media, its three ring circus time!
Very much like 50000 dead/year in random car accidents doesn't make the news, 100 dead in a yearly airplane crash is an absolute media circus.
And if you actually lived next to someone like that, your resale value would go down 10-15%.
You've got to be kidding. Everyone knows, that everyone knows that nothing is more important than boring beige paint, manicured lawns, no satellite/radio antennas, etc. Now, everyone actually could not care less about it, except maybe for the 1 in a thousand crackpot foul attitude anti-social rabble rouser, you know, the stereotypical crazy old lady who's into everyone else's business all the time. But everyone also knows, that everyone else is supposed to love it, although of course they personally hate it. Trust me, nobody really cares, even if they know its politically correct to say everyone cares.
This is the primary mental process when dealing with pro sports, fads, interior decorating styles, womens fashions, pop/top40 music, etc. Its simply unimportant to be worried about their lawn decorations, its as stupid as being worried about their skin color bringing the neighborhood down.
The other problem is, let say you don't want to live with trashy people, and you can afford not to. Trashy people, in addition to being trashy, tend to prefer scrap cars on the lawn, peeling paint, porch with ten dogs sleeping under it, you get the idea. City says, they'd like some of rich dudes money, so lets pass laws and hire cops and lawyers to get rid of the scrap cars up on blocks. Obviously the trashy people stay, its just their "decorations" that go. So, dumb rich people move in, because it doesn't look trashy. The problem is all the trashy people are still there, complete with all their criminal problems, bizarre cultural beliefs like dog fighting, unpleasant interpersonal attitudes, and all their social problems. There are vast tracts of suburbia, especially on the coasts, that are basically ghettos except they have lots of laws and cops. Trust me, you do not want to live near people like that. If the only thing keeping people from being white trash is a well enforced Home Owners Association, that does not mean they are not white trash anymore. The argument I'm making is its essentially false advertising. Moving next door to a lunatic criminal freal is bad, moving next door to a lunatic criminal freak with a nice lawn just increases the tragedy when they ruin your quality of life.
Its also an incredibly superficial and shallow way to look at humanity. Whenever the TV folks interview the neighbors of some horrible molester or killer or cheater in a suburban area, all you hear is how surprising it is since the guy had a nice lawn, and nice lawn equals nice guy, and reality is just crashing into their idiotic worldview so they are stunned.
So that's how the system is failing the eco-rangers in the article. They sound like nice folks, maybe a more granola hippy than myself, but basically OK folks. The error detection code in the city laws is making a mistake by classifying them as trash and trying to toss them out of the city, so the "good" people can move in, with good solely defined as they maintain their lawn.
The worst part is the credit/housing bubble is finally popping, thank god, and prices are getting back to normal, which means staggering house price drops. The reason prices are dropping is they were too far above 3x income and 100x monthly rent, because credit was too easy to try to keep out of a 9/11 recession, kind of kicking the can down the road. Its hard to blame someone for the economy returning to normal. Its easy to blame an individual non-conformist. So, the eco-rangers in the article are going to get all the credit for crashing the local home prices, even though they actually had no effect at all. When prices were going up they'd have likewise gotten away with it, "see I installed my ugly garden and your house value went up 25% from 2004-2005, so shut up, relax, and enjoy my ugly garden"
Whenever I do, cold-callers bug me at 11pm for security systems, credit cards, and worse; if I leave for more than 5 days my mailbox gets so full of junk mail they stop delivering until I go downtown for it.
Are you certain that's from domain registration? Nothing of the sort has ever happened to me, and I have not hidden my domain info.
I got one or two "renewal notices" from DROA over the course of a decade, not much else.
You can be certain by selective falsification and then watch the incoming physical spam. Slightly inaccurate spelling, etc.
What would you need to change your mind that a concensous has been reached.
The study seems superficially to have proven a tautology, violent people like violent games. Brilliant.
Government / corporate / social policy is being defined assuming that if you graph violent games and violent people over time, games lead, showing a correlation that violent games seem to be a leading indicator of violent people.
Except I don't think that effect would show up in a graph. I very strongly suspect the correlation would simply be that people with a propensity to like violence, happen to like violent games. Makes sense to me. Dudes whom like blond women happen to like blond women pr0n. No surprise whatsoever. The biggest problem is the violence level in games is strongly increasing, yet violent crime levels are strongly decreasing, so its mighty hard to pull a leading indication out of a graph like that. Maybe violence will skyrocket in 50 years with senior citizens caning each other, but I think not.
Even if there is a correlation, who cares, unless theres a causation. Without both, you just have astrology, technical analysis stock trading, or creation science, at best. With both you are doing scientific stuff.
The folks who are doin it wrong are completely screwing up the (possibly meaningless) correlation and whipping out their "jump to conclusions mat" and making up an imaginary causation, or trying to claim causation is irrelevant to scientific thought, or similar stupidity. Then taking that ridiculous collection of ideas, and trying to do social engineering, usually based on some imaginary religious idea that I probably don't believe in anyway, or just as a pure power grab.
So, gimme a several studies that show a very strong time-correlation where gaming is a leading indicator of violence, and then some scientific studies that show a very strong causation argument, complete with falsifiable hypothesis, etc. That'll do, at least for me.
I'll bet that, within a year or two, the people who actually have to run the grid set up a "field control center" with about twenty people with PCs, cork boards on the walls, 2-way radios for talking to field crews, a conference/map table, and some printers. The real work will be done there. A few people will sit in the big room and answer questions for management.
At a previous employer, for a Very Important Photoshoot for marketing, they hired college age models to staff our center in the pictures, apparently because the real personnel were far too unphotogenic. I believe the age of all the models added together still didn't reach the age of some of our old timers.
Kind of like how anytime you see a call center in marketing material, its always staffed by stereotypical beauty pageant white women, where in reality most (not all) call centers have been moved to prisons and 3rd world countries. I've often wondered what the prisoners and 3rd worlders think when they see those advertisements (other than the obvious, americans are idiots, etc)
Sorry, but stereotyping and other forms of generalization don't work very well when you are dealing with the long tail, on either side of the peak.
The article is about a whopping single digit difference. Not exactly the long tail in the 160s range or the 40s range.
"Participants who said they were atheists had an average IQ of 103 in adolescence, while adults who said they were religious averaged 97, the study found."
Now if they tested for gullibility instead of intelligence, I'm sure the correlation would be far stronger.
Add in new switches and dials for controlling mirrors, lights, locks, etc. Despite the application of human factors analysis, the average Joe is not going to find the purpose of each and every button and dial intuitive and natural.
Whats "intuitive and natural" for turning on the lights? A match to a candle?
The graphics arts / liberal arts crowd, which has near total control of human factors groups, thinks little icons that resemble squashed insects is the epitome of intuitive. You want the lights on, find the swatted fly and twist it.
I'd like to see something designed by someone whom is literate, with like, words and stuff.
Or for the visual learners folks, a blueprint (see the diagram of the car? Touch the headlights on the diagram to turn on the headlights)
The Office 2007 ribbon might be a fair example. People who memorized countless shortcut keys and menus for Office '97 through 2003 suddenly have to reacquaint themselves with the shortcut bar for n00bs, with no simply way to revert to the old setup.
Switch to openoffice, unless they also move to that stupid design.
"We can't switch to openoffice, everyone would have to completely relearn how to use it" "We have to do that anyway for the new office. Except openoffice is free" "Oh, OK then"
I'm not sure how ABS would make pumping less effective
The ABS can pump the brakes with at least a 90% on duty cycle. If you pump the brakes "by foot" with or without ABS I don't think you'll exceed 50% duty cycle.
Except on snow, that's where ABS will kill you. If you lock non-ABS brakes on snow, it turns the car into a snowplow and you stop extremely quickly, almost as fast as deep loose gravel. Like feel your eyeballs pull outward fast. If you lock ABS brakes on snow, you just merrily glide along on top of the snow, barely slowing down at all, until you plow into someone. If theres ice, neither really works. Given my climate, thats why I specifically shopped for a non-ABS car. I don't know if non-ABS cars are still available, kind of like trying to buy a manual transmission car, or one without air conditioning.
The authors note that all SOC and NOC's have a common feature in that the people operating them are often remote from the processes that they are monitoring and controlling, and the operations function on a 24/7 basis. The many demands of remote and continuous operation place special considerations on the design of the SOC and NOC. The output of the book is that it can be used to effectively to design these operating centers.
You need a big fridge, and a microwave.
Another common feature is at least of all NOCs I've seen is marketing wants the most stylish looking facility they can get, which is often/always completely at odds with the goals of an effective facility.
Common noc mistakes:
1) Everyone crammed in like sardines so "we can work together". Except that no one noticed that we don't work together. All it makes is a lot of noise and interference. No space to open a stack of manuals, closely related to no space for usable computer monitors (as opposed to the ones used only for show). Even worse, designers seem addicted to adding "static noise" masking generator, crappy elevator music, and/or a PA system for other departments blaring away. Thru careful work, its possible to include features to make it look like its ideal for cooperation, yet make actual cooperation impossible due to noise level etc.
2) Extraordinarily expensive big screen TVs / monitors / projectors on all the forward facing walls, that no one actually uses. Too small, too low res, no actual business purpose. This is a killer two ways, first of all its a huge capital expense that could have paid the salary for extra techs for years, which would have a measurable positive effect. The other way its a killer is you'll actually take people off productive work to "fix" the big screens so marketing is happy. Would anyone in the NOC have a problem doing their job if all the projector bulbs burned out? No, but marketing would freak out.
3) Second class citizen status. "Real" employees can have family pictures in their work area. The dogs of the "noc", not so much. This attitude flows thru the organization in many other ways, producing discontent. Promotion out of the noc becomes a goal, not to "advance" but just to get the hell out.
4) Constant over the shoulder monitoring. No matter if its marketing, or management, there seems an utterly desperate desire to perch over the NOC workers shoulders, either physically or virtually. A great employer-employee attitude if you are 17 years old and working at taco bell. Not a great attitude in a professional noc environment. There seems something inherent in all NOC management that makes them distrust their employees, that you generally don't see in most other departments. Kind of like having the ability to treat them as serfs inevitably makes it a requirement to treat them like serfs.
5) You know those 1970's "sunken livingrooms"? alive and well in the nocs of the world. How about the 1960s original star trek theatre in the round concept with a bridge in the middle? alive and well in the nocs of the world. Remember the set of "wargames" from 1983? Why can't a noc be designed that doesn't look like a throwback or parody? At least try something different, like a medieval dungeon or something?
For example, I was thinking about creating icons or logos to identify specific errors.
Choice 1) I assume you have a company directory with pictures of personnel. Use them. "I got a Patty Sue error...". I have, in fact, done this. It is best to use well known personnel (the receptionist, the director, etc)
Choice 2) I assume, being a slashdotter, you have a vast collection of Pr0n. Use them. "I got a Goatse error...". I threatened to do this, but never actually did it.
Choice 3) Combine #1 and #2. This is by far the funniest if you make pictures that "us slashdotters" would recognize but the general public would be completely unaware of. "Well, I got an error message, it has those two women from accounting, and a cup..." "So, the error message has a bunch of lemons at a birthday party" "After it stopped working, I see a goat on the left side and the Mediterranean Sea on the right side"
Much more boring, yet almost as illegal, is to violate copyright laws and include cartoons. Oh, you say you got a dilbert error? A family circus error, that'll take awhile to fix.
Your computer and HDDs will still keep working, assuming you can get power for them.
Plus or minus power surges on connected, powered up equipment.
More accurately, everything on the shelves at your local computer store will be OK. Stuff thats plugged into a power outlet (ATX supplies never turn completely off), or has a long cable attached (ethernet?) maybe not so good.
Katrina was just another boring hurricane, like all the others that hit the southern US every year, with the following exceptions:
1) It hit one of the most corrupt cities in the entire country, with the possible exception of Chicago and NYC, so none of the disaster "preparations" worked because the upper class criminals siphoned off all the funds.
2) Everyone left the coastal cities except the lower class criminals and the folks so dumb that they lived underneath sea level but "couldn't" leave.
So what does that have to do with a solar flare? It would affect entire hemispheres not just one corrupt city. Nowhere to evac to anyway.
It would probably resemble the great NYC power outage more so than any weather phenomena.
Regardless of its effects on your health, EM radiation can heat up deep under your skin. I wouldn't buy that apartment, as I'd then be anticipating continuous uncomfortable heat.
The continuous uncomfortable heat comes from being on the top floor in the summer and having to air condition the asphalt roof. Your electric bill will resemble a McMansion rather than an apartment. I have experience with that scenario. The second to the top floor is actually the best location.
The FCC has an ultra wordy explanation of cell transmitter power
Based on r^2 scaling laws, assuming you don't literally wrap your body around the antennas to keep warm while you sleep, I don't think you'll get more than a tiny fraction of a watt, much less than a cellphone in a pocket, probably.
I can't add anything to the RF debate, but be aware that being next to any major bit of infrastructure can be a real pain in the ass.
He's already decided to live near a major piece of infrastructure, that being his building's roof. I lived in a top floor apartment (real apartment, not a condo) in the past, so I know how it is. Lets just say the guy on the top floor reports more roof leaks to management than the guy on the first floor. If the roof leaks all the way to the first floor, you've got real problems. It seems disturbing to have contractors occasionally stomping around on the roof, but its actually less annoying than having residents stomping above your ceiling all the time. Also, even in cities, animals live on roofs. Loud animals that chirp at sunrise and creepily scratch at the roof at all hours, and they build ugly nests out of trash and crap all over your windows.
Another interesting point is about two decades ago I turned down an entry level job of visiting cell sites and running periodic sweeps on the antennas with a spectrum analyzer and TDR the feedlines, along with visual inspection of the antennas and equipment. You'll have a regular "scheduled" visitor, not just repairs and upgrades. I imagine it would be about as annoying as having a water meter reader visit, no big deal, just be prepared for it.
But I had read somewhere that people that live near power lines out in the country seem to develop extremely rare forms of cancer at a higher percentage than people living in the city.
Since the 1930s TVA Rural electrification program, its been getting pretty difficult to find someone living in the country far away from powerlines. So, difficult, that the data seems merely anecdotal, like, the unibomber, and uh... yup, the unibomber. We have to make the wild assumption that their statistics are worth anything. And assume they didn't just pull the whole thing out of some orifice as stereotypical anti-capitalism ranting.
Now, consider the telephone pole in front of my house. Its got a tag on it 59-"some 5 digit number". I have some professional work related knowledge of that simple date code, and that means that pole was sunk in the ground in 1959, its about half a century old. No surprise given that my house was built within a year of that date. Its frankly in pretty good shape, and at work, they claim they're on a case by case 75 year replacement schedule. Around 2034 some power company employee will consider replacing my "telephone" pole, but if its still in good shape, it stays up with occasional inspection. There is a cost benefit ratio where replacing a pole at 2am in the winter during a service outage is around 20 times more expensive and much more dangerous than regular scheduled maintenance replacement on a nice sunny spring afternoon.
Anyway, in the old days, heck, even now, they use incredibly toxic substances to prevent rot. If you think a harmless raw tree branch could still be in load bearing service after a century of burial, you must live in a weird climate. However, those substances eventually leach into the ground, where the kids play, where the garden grows, etc. My parents always told us never to touch the telephone poles, not so much for electrocution danger or dog pee reasons but because they were sticky with creosote and god only knows what else.
So I started thinking "HD Failing" (it is an original PS3 after all). Figured I'd have it format the drive then reinstall and repatch my games. Nearly a 5 hour time estimate. Take a nap, wake up, see this.... "oh god damnit."
AKA the "it just works" console gaming experience? Or are you running a PS3 emulator on a windows PC? I haven't had/heard that kind of agony in gaming since trying to get Wing Commander working by editing config.sys lines back in 1991-ish.
I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious, since your experience is supposed to be unpossible on a console.
People like me, who got rid of their PS2 when they picked up a PS3, are not going to be happy in the slightest if it turns out we need to start hitting Ebay for PS2s.
PS2s are still available retail for $99, as far as I know. Compared to the cost of replacing all the worlds old PS3s, throwing in a PS2 as a consolation prize is no big expense, plus it depletes the warehouses, probably a convenient way to discontinue the PS2. That's what a reputable company would do. Oh, wait, this is Sony, home of the root kit. No, I guess you're just out of luck.
Nobody's responded in an hour, yet a bunch of questions is modded +4 insightful?
If this is a game, or strictly entertainment, why do they need to be registered with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission?
They wanna trade real money futures contracts. Technically they want to write futures contracts, and it just happens they are trading them on their own private exchange. Then again I am not a futures contract lawyer, just a futures contract trader, and minutia of the legal document don't interest me as much as the market price vs my opinion of its value.
If this is a real trading forum, what exactly do you own? May I expect a distribution from Angelina Jolie's next big blockbuster, because as a shareholder, I expect her first and only priority is to maintain and enhance shareholder value.
Futures work a totally different way than you describe. You mention Ms Jolie, perhaps because you like her movies. Personally, I am not a fan. In fact, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. I'm willing to sell you a redeemable ticket has written on it "vlm 69642 will pay the owner of this ticket $1 if Ms. Jolie's next movie is an absolute stinker". I'm willing to sell you this ticket, which might turn out to be worth $1, or maybe a worthless piece of paper, for, say, 25 cents. Deal? Deal. Migraneman 632303 you are now a futures trader. Had real money actually changed hands, I'd be a felon in "a pound me in the ethernet port prison" as per office space, and perhaps you too, since I'm not registered to write futures contracts, but whatever, its just an example.
At first glance, in addition to futures, HSX seems to do some really bizarre analog of bonds and stock options. The CFTC is probably going to freak about that. What they call "stocks" seem to be something like stock options. I don't really know, I'm not a hsx user.
I didn't think it was legal to own a person.
Then you're going to have real issues wrapping your head around the meaning of futures contracts based on SP500 index close prices...
If you trade a contract on the quality of Ms. Jolie's future artistic productions, you don't own her, or her artistic production. I suspect that if you did own her, you'd find something more fun to do with your time than post to slashdot; then again with a name like Migraneman 632203, perhaps Ms Jolie would be hearing "not tonight honey I have a headache"...
Slashdot Mirror
I know! I -hate- it when FPS have a lot of shooting.
I'm guessing yet another fan of grenades, landmines, rockets, chainsaws, and crowbars.
I enjoyed an early 2000s alternate WWI FPS called "Ironstorm" that was mostly played by me using different TYPES of grenades.. poison, shock, fragment, sleep, etc. That was certainly different.
Granted, I probably wouldn't use RAID 5 because the drives aren't prone to random death like magnetic drives
You must be pretty new to SSDs. My experience with old ones is they work great, until one random day they never work again, at all, with 100% data loss. Some people experience they "merely" fail to write but can still be read. It seems pretty random.
Hard drives at least some of the time fail gradually and sometimes making horrible noises or taking a long time to spin up.
SSDs, so far in my experience, pretty much define random death, although they're overall pretty reliable.
It seems to me that if you're involved in such a project and have to ask how to do it, it's doomed.
Agreed, except that he may only need that initial kick to find terms to google.
For example, I know that to do what he wants, he needs to learn about the MFM vs RLL interfaces from the mid 80s, not because he will emulate either, but if he doesn't understand both and how they worked and relate to each other, he's has no chance. He is more or less trying to make a hard drive version of the catweasel floppy controller. If he never heard of a catweasel he would have a hard time figuring out he needs to learn about it.
Image scans from the very detailed technical manuals for DEC's minicomputer hard drives are available online. This is from the era of individual TTL chips, he's basically going to replicate / emulate / reverse engineer that hardware into his microcontroller in order to write individual 1/0, after all they had a solution that worked 40-50 years ago. If he didn't already know that, he would have a hard time figuring out he needed to know that.
Now if he already knows that stuff, and is really asking how to get MPLAB working so he can program his PIC, well yeah then he's well and truely lost.
But given those first steps/hints, I think a reasonably experienced EE/CE type could probably figure out the rest of it.
Adding to your nuclear analogy, if someone went back in time and told folks after 1920 to play with neutrons and U-235, they would get quite the head start on the rest of the world that didn't get that idea to try that until much later. They had all the prerequisites by 1920 but it took many years to get the right combination of ideas...
After he's spent a week banging bits into the 82072A, he'll either have gone insane, or will have realised he's well and truly barking up the wrong tree.
Yup barking up the wrong tree. Skip those ancient controller chips and use a DSP chip. Heck, data rates on old floppies was so low, that a plain jane microcontroller would probably work. Now by microcontroller I don't mean the lowest end PIC ever made because thats fast enough but has too little memory, or an interpreted basic stamp which probably has the memory but is way too slow, I mean a real mid-high range PIC at minimum.
Of course if you'd settle for very simple patterns of 1/0 to look at with ferrofluid or something, then probably any microcontroller would work?
he odds of it being an electrical failure of some kind are much higher. Then say a mechanical one, since the mechanical component is simple,
No the electric is much more reliable. The situation is simpler than that:
Mechanical cable fails (happened to my grandfather, and my father, in both cases, was no big deal), oh well, they're supposed to do that about once per driver-lifetime, that's just life. Replace it, drive on.
Electrical throttle fails, which happens much less often than direct lightning strikes but more often than being hit by a meteor, OMG call the media, its three ring circus time!
Very much like 50000 dead/year in random car accidents doesn't make the news, 100 dead in a yearly airplane crash is an absolute media circus.
And if you actually lived next to someone like that, your resale value would go down 10-15%.
You've got to be kidding. Everyone knows, that everyone knows that nothing is more important than boring beige paint, manicured lawns, no satellite/radio antennas, etc. Now, everyone actually could not care less about it, except maybe for the 1 in a thousand crackpot foul attitude anti-social rabble rouser, you know, the stereotypical crazy old lady who's into everyone else's business all the time. But everyone also knows, that everyone else is supposed to love it, although of course they personally hate it. Trust me, nobody really cares, even if they know its politically correct to say everyone cares.
This is the primary mental process when dealing with pro sports, fads, interior decorating styles, womens fashions, pop/top40 music, etc. Its simply unimportant to be worried about their lawn decorations, its as stupid as being worried about their skin color bringing the neighborhood down.
The other problem is, let say you don't want to live with trashy people, and you can afford not to. Trashy people, in addition to being trashy, tend to prefer scrap cars on the lawn, peeling paint, porch with ten dogs sleeping under it, you get the idea. City says, they'd like some of rich dudes money, so lets pass laws and hire cops and lawyers to get rid of the scrap cars up on blocks. Obviously the trashy people stay, its just their "decorations" that go. So, dumb rich people move in, because it doesn't look trashy. The problem is all the trashy people are still there, complete with all their criminal problems, bizarre cultural beliefs like dog fighting, unpleasant interpersonal attitudes, and all their social problems. There are vast tracts of suburbia, especially on the coasts, that are basically ghettos except they have lots of laws and cops. Trust me, you do not want to live near people like that. If the only thing keeping people from being white trash is a well enforced Home Owners Association, that does not mean they are not white trash anymore. The argument I'm making is its essentially false advertising. Moving next door to a lunatic criminal freal is bad, moving next door to a lunatic criminal freak with a nice lawn just increases the tragedy when they ruin your quality of life.
Its also an incredibly superficial and shallow way to look at humanity. Whenever the TV folks interview the neighbors of some horrible molester or killer or cheater in a suburban area, all you hear is how surprising it is since the guy had a nice lawn, and nice lawn equals nice guy, and reality is just crashing into their idiotic worldview so they are stunned.
So that's how the system is failing the eco-rangers in the article. They sound like nice folks, maybe a more granola hippy than myself, but basically OK folks. The error detection code in the city laws is making a mistake by classifying them as trash and trying to toss them out of the city, so the "good" people can move in, with good solely defined as they maintain their lawn.
The worst part is the credit/housing bubble is finally popping, thank god, and prices are getting back to normal, which means staggering house price drops. The reason prices are dropping is they were too far above 3x income and 100x monthly rent, because credit was too easy to try to keep out of a 9/11 recession, kind of kicking the can down the road. Its hard to blame someone for the economy returning to normal. Its easy to blame an individual non-conformist. So, the eco-rangers in the article are going to get all the credit for crashing the local home prices, even though they actually had no effect at all. When prices were going up they'd have likewise gotten away with it, "see I installed my ugly garden and your house value went up 25% from 2004-2005, so shut up, relax, and enjoy my ugly garden"
That's pretty funny. What Federal taxes do we pay on online transactions? What cut of the ISP bill does the government get?
Income tax.
Whenever I do, cold-callers bug me at 11pm for security systems, credit cards, and worse; if I leave for more than 5 days my mailbox gets so full of junk mail they stop delivering until I go downtown for it.
Are you certain that's from domain registration? Nothing of the sort has ever happened to me, and I have not hidden my domain info.
I got one or two "renewal notices" from DROA over the course of a decade, not much else.
You can be certain by selective falsification and then watch the incoming physical spam. Slightly inaccurate spelling, etc.
Is SONY going to make my PS3 explode?
No, that's July 4th not April Fools Day.
The conventional wisdom is that open source is risky.
Does anyone believe that anymore, other than journalists quoting other journalists and PR people?
I did some google searching, trying to find when that old FUD campaign started. It seems to not show up much until 1998.
The 12 year old advertising/FUD campaign is getting kind of tired.
What would you need to change your mind that a concensous has been reached.
The study seems superficially to have proven a tautology, violent people like violent games. Brilliant.
Government / corporate / social policy is being defined assuming that if you graph violent games and violent people over time, games lead, showing a correlation that violent games seem to be a leading indicator of violent people.
Except I don't think that effect would show up in a graph. I very strongly suspect the correlation would simply be that people with a propensity to like violence, happen to like violent games. Makes sense to me. Dudes whom like blond women happen to like blond women pr0n. No surprise whatsoever. The biggest problem is the violence level in games is strongly increasing, yet violent crime levels are strongly decreasing, so its mighty hard to pull a leading indication out of a graph like that. Maybe violence will skyrocket in 50 years with senior citizens caning each other, but I think not.
Even if there is a correlation, who cares, unless theres a causation. Without both, you just have astrology, technical analysis stock trading, or creation science, at best. With both you are doing scientific stuff.
The folks who are doin it wrong are completely screwing up the (possibly meaningless) correlation and whipping out their "jump to conclusions mat" and making up an imaginary causation, or trying to claim causation is irrelevant to scientific thought, or similar stupidity. Then taking that ridiculous collection of ideas, and trying to do social engineering, usually based on some imaginary religious idea that I probably don't believe in anyway, or just as a pure power grab.
So, gimme a several studies that show a very strong time-correlation where gaming is a leading indicator of violence, and then some scientific studies that show a very strong causation argument, complete with falsifiable hypothesis, etc. That'll do, at least for me.
I'll bet that, within a year or two, the people who actually have to run the grid set up a "field control center" with about twenty people with PCs, cork boards on the walls, 2-way radios for talking to field crews, a conference/map table, and some printers. The real work will be done there. A few people will sit in the big room and answer questions for management.
At a previous employer, for a Very Important Photoshoot for marketing, they hired college age models to staff our center in the pictures, apparently because the real personnel were far too unphotogenic. I believe the age of all the models added together still didn't reach the age of some of our old timers.
Kind of like how anytime you see a call center in marketing material, its always staffed by stereotypical beauty pageant white women, where in reality most (not all) call centers have been moved to prisons and 3rd world countries. I've often wondered what the prisoners and 3rd worlders think when they see those advertisements (other than the obvious, americans are idiots, etc)
Sorry, but stereotyping and other forms of generalization don't work very well when you are dealing with the long tail, on either side of the peak.
The article is about a whopping single digit difference. Not exactly the long tail in the 160s range or the 40s range.
"Participants who said they were atheists had an average IQ of 103 in adolescence, while adults who said they were religious averaged 97, the study found."
Now if they tested for gullibility instead of intelligence, I'm sure the correlation would be far stronger.
Add in new switches and dials for controlling mirrors, lights, locks, etc. Despite the application of human factors analysis, the average Joe is not going to find the purpose of each and every button and dial intuitive and natural.
Whats "intuitive and natural" for turning on the lights? A match to a candle?
The graphics arts / liberal arts crowd, which has near total control of human factors groups, thinks little icons that resemble squashed insects is the epitome of intuitive. You want the lights on, find the swatted fly and twist it.
I'd like to see something designed by someone whom is literate, with like, words and stuff.
Or for the visual learners folks, a blueprint (see the diagram of the car? Touch the headlights on the diagram to turn on the headlights)
The Office 2007 ribbon might be a fair example. People who memorized countless shortcut keys and menus for Office '97 through 2003 suddenly have to reacquaint themselves with the shortcut bar for n00bs, with no simply way to revert to the old setup.
Switch to openoffice, unless they also move to that stupid design.
"We can't switch to openoffice, everyone would have to completely relearn how to use it"
"We have to do that anyway for the new office. Except openoffice is free"
"Oh, OK then"
I'm not sure how ABS would make pumping less effective
The ABS can pump the brakes with at least a 90% on duty cycle. If you pump the brakes "by foot" with or without ABS I don't think you'll exceed 50% duty cycle.
Except on snow, that's where ABS will kill you. If you lock non-ABS brakes on snow, it turns the car into a snowplow and you stop extremely quickly, almost as fast as deep loose gravel. Like feel your eyeballs pull outward fast. If you lock ABS brakes on snow, you just merrily glide along on top of the snow, barely slowing down at all, until you plow into someone. If theres ice, neither really works. Given my climate, thats why I specifically shopped for a non-ABS car. I don't know if non-ABS cars are still available, kind of like trying to buy a manual transmission car, or one without air conditioning.
The authors note that all SOC and NOC's have a common feature in that the people operating them are often remote from the processes that they are monitoring and controlling, and the operations function on a 24/7 basis. The many demands of remote and continuous operation place special considerations on the design of the SOC and NOC. The output of the book is that it can be used to effectively to design these operating centers.
You need a big fridge, and a microwave.
Another common feature is at least of all NOCs I've seen is marketing wants the most stylish looking facility they can get, which is often/always completely at odds with the goals of an effective facility.
Common noc mistakes:
1) Everyone crammed in like sardines so "we can work together". Except that no one noticed that we don't work together. All it makes is a lot of noise and interference. No space to open a stack of manuals, closely related to no space for usable computer monitors (as opposed to the ones used only for show). Even worse, designers seem addicted to adding "static noise" masking generator, crappy elevator music, and/or a PA system for other departments blaring away. Thru careful work, its possible to include features to make it look like its ideal for cooperation, yet make actual cooperation impossible due to noise level etc.
2) Extraordinarily expensive big screen TVs / monitors / projectors on all the forward facing walls, that no one actually uses. Too small, too low res, no actual business purpose. This is a killer two ways, first of all its a huge capital expense that could have paid the salary for extra techs for years, which would have a measurable positive effect. The other way its a killer is you'll actually take people off productive work to "fix" the big screens so marketing is happy. Would anyone in the NOC have a problem doing their job if all the projector bulbs burned out? No, but marketing would freak out.
3) Second class citizen status. "Real" employees can have family pictures in their work area. The dogs of the "noc", not so much. This attitude flows thru the organization in many other ways, producing discontent. Promotion out of the noc becomes a goal, not to "advance" but just to get the hell out.
4) Constant over the shoulder monitoring. No matter if its marketing, or management, there seems an utterly desperate desire to perch over the NOC workers shoulders, either physically or virtually. A great employer-employee attitude if you are 17 years old and working at taco bell. Not a great attitude in a professional noc environment. There seems something inherent in all NOC management that makes them distrust their employees, that you generally don't see in most other departments. Kind of like having the ability to treat them as serfs inevitably makes it a requirement to treat them like serfs.
5) You know those 1970's "sunken livingrooms"? alive and well in the nocs of the world. How about the 1960s original star trek theatre in the round concept with a bridge in the middle? alive and well in the nocs of the world. Remember the set of "wargames" from 1983? Why can't a noc be designed that doesn't look like a throwback or parody? At least try something different, like a medieval dungeon or something?
For example, I was thinking about creating icons or logos to identify specific errors.
Choice 1) I assume you have a company directory with pictures of personnel. Use them. "I got a Patty Sue error...". I have, in fact, done this. It is best to use well known personnel (the receptionist, the director, etc)
Choice 2) I assume, being a slashdotter, you have a vast collection of Pr0n. Use them. "I got a Goatse error...". I threatened to do this, but never actually did it.
Choice 3) Combine #1 and #2. This is by far the funniest if you make pictures that "us slashdotters" would recognize but the general public would be completely unaware of. "Well, I got an error message, it has those two women from accounting, and a cup..." "So, the error message has a bunch of lemons at a birthday party" "After it stopped working, I see a goat on the left side and the Mediterranean Sea on the right side"
Much more boring, yet almost as illegal, is to violate copyright laws and include cartoons. Oh, you say you got a dilbert error? A family circus error, that'll take awhile to fix.
Your computer and HDDs will still keep working, assuming you can get power for them.
Plus or minus power surges on connected, powered up equipment.
More accurately, everything on the shelves at your local computer store will be OK. Stuff thats plugged into a power outlet (ATX supplies never turn completely off), or has a long cable attached (ethernet?) maybe not so good.
What does a solar flare have to do with Katrina?
Katrina was just another boring hurricane, like all the others that hit the southern US every year, with the following exceptions:
1) It hit one of the most corrupt cities in the entire country, with the possible exception of Chicago and NYC, so none of the disaster "preparations" worked because the upper class criminals siphoned off all the funds.
2) Everyone left the coastal cities except the lower class criminals and the folks so dumb that they lived underneath sea level but "couldn't" leave.
So what does that have to do with a solar flare? It would affect entire hemispheres not just one corrupt city. Nowhere to evac to anyway.
It would probably resemble the great NYC power outage more so than any weather phenomena.
Regardless of its effects on your health, EM radiation can heat up deep under your skin. I wouldn't buy that apartment, as I'd then be anticipating continuous uncomfortable heat.
The continuous uncomfortable heat comes from being on the top floor in the summer and having to air condition the asphalt roof. Your electric bill will resemble a McMansion rather than an apartment. I have experience with that scenario. The second to the top floor is actually the best location.
The FCC has an ultra wordy explanation of cell transmitter power
http://www.fcc.gov/oet/rfsafety/cellpcs.html
The wikipedia cuts to the chase and calls it about 100 watts total for an urban site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_site
Based on r^2 scaling laws, assuming you don't literally wrap your body around the antennas to keep warm while you sleep, I don't think you'll get more than a tiny fraction of a watt, much less than a cellphone in a pocket, probably.
I can't add anything to the RF debate, but be aware that being next to any major bit of infrastructure can be a real pain in the ass.
He's already decided to live near a major piece of infrastructure, that being his building's roof. I lived in a top floor apartment (real apartment, not a condo) in the past, so I know how it is. Lets just say the guy on the top floor reports more roof leaks to management than the guy on the first floor. If the roof leaks all the way to the first floor, you've got real problems. It seems disturbing to have contractors occasionally stomping around on the roof, but its actually less annoying than having residents stomping above your ceiling all the time. Also, even in cities, animals live on roofs. Loud animals that chirp at sunrise and creepily scratch at the roof at all hours, and they build ugly nests out of trash and crap all over your windows.
Another interesting point is about two decades ago I turned down an entry level job of visiting cell sites and running periodic sweeps on the antennas with a spectrum analyzer and TDR the feedlines, along with visual inspection of the antennas and equipment. You'll have a regular "scheduled" visitor, not just repairs and upgrades. I imagine it would be about as annoying as having a water meter reader visit, no big deal, just be prepared for it.
But I had read somewhere that people that live near power lines out in the country seem to develop extremely rare forms of cancer at a higher percentage than people living in the city.
Since the 1930s TVA Rural electrification program, its been getting pretty difficult to find someone living in the country far away from powerlines. So, difficult, that the data seems merely anecdotal, like, the unibomber, and uh ... yup, the unibomber. We have to make the wild assumption that their statistics are worth anything. And assume they didn't just pull the whole thing out of some orifice as stereotypical anti-capitalism ranting.
Now, consider the telephone pole in front of my house. Its got a tag on it 59-"some 5 digit number". I have some professional work related knowledge of that simple date code, and that means that pole was sunk in the ground in 1959, its about half a century old. No surprise given that my house was built within a year of that date. Its frankly in pretty good shape, and at work, they claim they're on a case by case 75 year replacement schedule. Around 2034 some power company employee will consider replacing my "telephone" pole, but if its still in good shape, it stays up with occasional inspection. There is a cost benefit ratio where replacing a pole at 2am in the winter during a service outage is around 20 times more expensive and much more dangerous than regular scheduled maintenance replacement on a nice sunny spring afternoon.
Anyway, in the old days, heck, even now, they use incredibly toxic substances to prevent rot. If you think a harmless raw tree branch could still be in load bearing service after a century of burial, you must live in a weird climate. However, those substances eventually leach into the ground, where the kids play, where the garden grows, etc. My parents always told us never to touch the telephone poles, not so much for electrocution danger or dog pee reasons but because they were sticky with creosote and god only knows what else.
So I started thinking "HD Failing" (it is an original PS3 after all). Figured I'd have it format the drive then reinstall and repatch my games. Nearly a 5 hour time estimate. Take a nap, wake up, see this.... "oh god damnit."
AKA the "it just works" console gaming experience? Or are you running a PS3 emulator on a windows PC? I haven't had/heard that kind of agony in gaming since trying to get Wing Commander working by editing config.sys lines back in 1991-ish.
I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious, since your experience is supposed to be unpossible on a console.
People like me, who got rid of their PS2 when they picked up a PS3, are not going to be happy in the slightest if it turns out we need to start hitting Ebay for PS2s.
PS2s are still available retail for $99, as far as I know. Compared to the cost of replacing all the worlds old PS3s, throwing in a PS2 as a consolation prize is no big expense, plus it depletes the warehouses, probably a convenient way to discontinue the PS2. That's what a reputable company would do. Oh, wait, this is Sony, home of the root kit. No, I guess you're just out of luck.
Nobody's responded in an hour, yet a bunch of questions is modded +4 insightful?
If this is a game, or strictly entertainment, why do they need to be registered with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission?
They wanna trade real money futures contracts. Technically they want to write futures contracts, and it just happens they are trading them on their own private exchange. Then again I am not a futures contract lawyer, just a futures contract trader, and minutia of the legal document don't interest me as much as the market price vs my opinion of its value.
If this is a real trading forum, what exactly do you own? May I expect a distribution from Angelina Jolie's next big blockbuster, because as a shareholder, I expect her first and only priority is to maintain and enhance shareholder value.
Futures work a totally different way than you describe. You mention Ms Jolie, perhaps because you like her movies. Personally, I am not a fan. In fact, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. I'm willing to sell you a redeemable ticket has written on it "vlm 69642 will pay the owner of this ticket $1 if Ms. Jolie's next movie is an absolute stinker". I'm willing to sell you this ticket, which might turn out to be worth $1, or maybe a worthless piece of paper, for, say, 25 cents. Deal? Deal. Migraneman 632303 you are now a futures trader. Had real money actually changed hands, I'd be a felon in "a pound me in the ethernet port prison" as per office space, and perhaps you too, since I'm not registered to write futures contracts, but whatever, its just an example.
At first glance, in addition to futures, HSX seems to do some really bizarre analog of bonds and stock options. The CFTC is probably going to freak about that. What they call "stocks" seem to be something like stock options. I don't really know, I'm not a hsx user.
I didn't think it was legal to own a person.
Then you're going to have real issues wrapping your head around the meaning of futures contracts based on SP500 index close prices...
If you trade a contract on the quality of Ms. Jolie's future artistic productions, you don't own her, or her artistic production. I suspect that if you did own her, you'd find something more fun to do with your time than post to slashdot; then again with a name like Migraneman 632203, perhaps Ms Jolie would be hearing "not tonight honey I have a headache"...