Good book about Pi
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not sure if anyone has mention this book (link : http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Pi-Petr-Beckmann/dp/0312381859/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205526089&sr=8-1 ) I found it entertaining and easy to read while at the same being informative/interesting. I feel the book gives a very good presentation of the thought process behind how different civilizations reached their approximation of Pi and a good insight into how brilliant people of different times where able to calculate Pi. I bet a lot of "ordinary" people wouldn't have a clue about how to find a good number for Pi, without hitting their "Pi"-button on a calculator:)
A good read. Very nice addition to say, your toilet library (I've got one...)
I've got a 16GB iPhone right here... And I want to beat the crap out of Steve/Apple.
At work earlier today this happened: Usually I bring along my iPod. At the office I plug it into the USB of my MacBook and just use iTunes to play music from the iPod. Well, today I brought along the iPone (with all my music on) and what happened? You can't play music from the iPhone! I can't do anything in iTunes, transfer movies/music from my office MacBook. As I was about to go home, I had to bring with me some rather large files. Usually I just use Finder and drag the files over to the iPod. Does my iPhone show up in Finder? No! Is my iPhone broken?!
It's not a small computer. It's a pretty black box, with very limited use. Yes. It has a great interface and good screen. But there the good things seem to end.
"As a computer, it can also browse the web, take notes, watch videos, listen to music, check your stocks, check the weather, take pictures, and email." What videos? Only those you get from YouTube or the ones you transfer from the one special chosen Mac? What if you want to transfer videos/music from another computer? Can it watch my chosen stocks and notify me when they hit a certain limit? Can the stock-program do this in the background? Where is MSN for iPhone? Browse the web with which browser? Opera? Firefox? Lynx? SSH? I often use SSH clients from my computers to log into and manage my servers. A computer should do this. Does the iPhone?
All the things you mention my previous phone could do too. It's a rather new Sony Ericsson. Difference was the screen and the UI on the iPone, -and- the SE's ability to transfer files with IR, BlueTooth and USB, use exchangeable SD cards for storage, ability to use mp3 files as ringtones, or just play ordinary mp3 files.
Show me the console where you aren't left to the mercy of the creator.
Take XBox Live. They have the ability to chat with friends, but only 1 on 1. Why? There is NO reason what-so-ever for this limit. In games you can talk with up to 20 other, but not in private - there we have an artificial limit of 1 on 1. US players might not think this is so bad, but living in Norway and playing with European players, this is EXTREMELY annoying. Joining a server (take CoD4) with 3-4 friends, we all have to spend a few minutes muting everyone else. Not seldom are the chat channel filled with people speaking/shouting in french, german, spansish, english, norwegian, +++. Why not just let people have as many people they like, in private chat?
Dedicated servers? Not for consoles. Consoles bring us back 10+ years in gaming. You don't even have the ability to see what ping you have in most online games. Only a "network bar" or some other clever thing which is so crappy that "perfect connection" can mean anything from 30ms to 600ms latency.
Mods? No, not for consoles. Buy a shitty expansion pack from XBox live for $9.99.
Console network down? Ah. No online play for you. (this has started to appear for pc gaming too, with centralized servers)
My Norwegian 100 kroner bill, which is in my pocket right now, have for the past few years increased 50% in value compared to the USD. The reason for this is the lack of Norwegian economy?
At level 8, my char, Lardbutt, had around 3500 gold -and- almost all the Epics/Rares you could trade. This would probably amount to 10.000+ in total gold value. I played him until I got to Ironforge, after that he NEVER left the auction house. Just bought up things I thought were cheap and put them back in with a more expensive price. Most people don't check the market price for an item and when they found a rare/epic item they didn't need, would just sell it to the highest bidder at their first attempt to sell it. The ignorance of a weapons true worth was also something to take advantage of. Like the value of Julie's Dagger and Hanzo Sword, which on paper didn't really have über stats, but were perfect weapons for some types of warrior and rogue classes. Buying them for 10-20gold was quite possible, earning a profit of 50+ gold whenever you sold them to someone who "knew" their real price.
After a while I could by everything of some specific item and control the price. I often did this with the better types of bags:)
It took me about 3 months of regular playing to get there. This was the three first months after the release. I don't think you can pull it off that easily now, because most items are no Bind of Pickup, instead of Bind on Equip as they were earlier and the economy for items more or less crashed after 5-6 months.
I stopped playing after about 3-4 months.
Then I had probably a 100 complains posted against me, because people was 100% sure that I cheated and every time I logged on I got 15+ tells from people talking trash about how I cheated them/the system/the auction house/etc. Almost wish I kept on playing a little longer. =P
Your points sounds reasonable from a user perspective... But doesn't this seem a bit like what we already have at the software level? Microsoft have dynamic license-models as an option -Pay for how many clients who connects, say, to windows terminal server.
What's the difference between the spying at the hardware level and software level? And I bet it was more expensive to develop software with dynamic license-model than without. Why can't hardware manufactures do the same?
My Dell 30" LCD screens are 2560x1600 pixels (each), which is almost 1.5 million more pixels than this screen. Even my MacBook Pro can drive simple games in that resolution and using any new graphic card in two or three way SLI will let you run state of the art graphics in those resolutions.
What has an inaccessible service to do with a free game? Nothing at all really.
This is close to being a fraud. Not being able to play CoD4 -AT ALL- during the holidays is just ridicules from a gamers perspective. When else do I have time to play? Not during ordinary weekdays because then I'm busy with work/family, and my weekends are not really free for that much playing either. Had I continued to use a computer to play games I wouldn't be faced with this problem at all -that some central system is not robust enough to provide paying customers with the service they are paying for. This is the symptoms of pure greediness. They could easily ha upgraded XBox Live to provide flawless service for their games (if not, how will they ever be able to support the current number of users?), but they choose not to. And when they see that people actually get mad for not being able to play with the hardware and subscriptions they have paid a lot for, they start to offer some shitty game as compensation. No what the fuck? I've got the game I want to play. I don't want another game. But for over two weeks now, it's been impossible to play the game online. And it's STILL NOT FIXED! This should bring some pain to Microsoft and MS shouldn't be allowed to decide for themselves on how to reimburse their customers.
Since you don't pay for FireFox, there is really no reason not to upgrade. With MS you have to pay for EVERY new version which is released. In my world that is kind of a huge difference. And if you are just talking about IE, well, you really shouldn't be using old versions anyway...:)
"... while the band has a large fanbase..." That just the same type of measuring that RIAA uses. They go about saying that the "Potenial customers = World population", which is just wrong. You brother's fanbase is the amount of people who actually do buy his records or do to go to his concerts, and NOT the number of people who say they pirated the songs. I get the feeling your brother doesn't really have such a large fanbase.
You make it sound like that without pirating your brother would actually sell a lot of albums and have a lot of people attending his concerts? How do you figure?
U2 has a large fanbase because A LOT of people attende their concerts and a lot of people buy their albums... The fact that a lot of people pirate their music, probably on a scale a million times larger than what your brother is experiencing, is not really anything people use to measure their fanbase.
So you are saying that your sites don't have vistor logging? Or just that you don't use Apache log files?:)
We started using apache log files but with increased traffic we ran into the same problems you mentioned. To solve this we set up a dedicated server for logging using phpOpenTracker (http://www.phpopentracker.de/). You would really need to have some very large sites before you would start having trouble with that solution. Lately we have been setting up our users with Google Analytics and moving them away from Open Tracker too. This is possible because we run a lot of smaller sites, instead of few large ones.
Actually, why don't you get started on the upgrading and working with forms in Drupal. I would love to see some input on those.
We've been using Drupal for over a year now. Both small and medium sized projects. It's just a really really good framework. Possible -the- best right now.
Since you didn't bother to actually show any examples of what "sucks so much" I won't bother to make any arguments for why "it rocks":)
I don't understand this... Call center? Arrogant operator? Local guy?
I run a small company. Not even close to 100 computers. We have our "own" key account manager at Dell. This person has always been from Scandinavia (we are based in Norway). If we have a problem we call our key account manager who then takes care of business. We usually buy silver/gold support (the one which is maximum 4 hour assitance, 24/7). I've never talked to an arrogant person at Dell customer service. Then one time I really needed some help, my HD on my laptop totally crashed after a flight, I called service and a person came, within 4 hours, and replaced that harddrive. He also brought with him a recovery CD. Dell has been our primary source for computer equipment since 2001. Server, desktop pcs, laptops, monitors (Dell 30" LCD is just wonderful) and now also TVs (I love the Dell 37" LCD TV). When our support contracts for old equipment run out, we usually give it away and buy new equipment. My mom is still using an old Dell laptop I've had since 2002. Just got a two new Dell servers. And they are a breeze to upgrade. Only a week ago I had to open one to insert more memory, an extra HD and an extra Intel dual Gbit ethernet card. Built like a tank, but with easy access to any vital part.
I would never put my trust in a local computer guy. The small computer stores usually don't last more than a few years. Also, most often, their service deals are actually more expensive than say Dell.
No, I don't work at Dell. I just like the way the do their business.
Well. I would do whatever it takes to get the chat function in Xbox Live to work with more than two persons. The official word is that they have limited the chat to two persons because fear of overused bandwidth (they need at least 64kbps for games). That is what I hate with MS/closed source. People who know what is best for you. If a mod chip would let me use some other chat program or remove this immensly stupid artificial restriction I would buy it in a second.
As for the old Xbox. With a mod chip it became one of the greatest pieces of hardware I've ever bought. Without a mod chip it was just an ok game console. I guess the same goes for X360.
It's still doesn't change the fact that using an analog controller is vastly inferior to using a mouse/keyboard combination. It really is! And no! It didn't take long to get used to the mouse/keyboard combination in Wolfenstein 3D. It felt quite good from the start.
Took my browser 5 seconds from clicking on the Slashdot logo, until the page started reloading. Well, I'm off then. I'll surf away to the other Slashdot... Oh, wait! I wanted to see the front of Slashdot again, so I actually waited for as long as it took. Bummer!
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 1
"Eventually, as it always happens, there will be bug releases and new drivers for Windows Vista. Upgrading to them is as easily as doing "Windows Update." Linux (and BSD) distros will never be this easily patched due to the very nature of being open source."
-1 Ignorant Seriously!
We've got a Windows server her, which is quite the hassle to keep up to date (windows + several programs) There are also two servers here running VMWare with 4 virtual machines with Ubuntu 6.10 Server, which is a breeze to keep up to date.
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Not sure if anyone has mention this book (link : http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Pi-Petr-Beckmann/dp/0312381859/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205526089&sr=8-1 ) :)
I found it entertaining and easy to read while at the same being informative/interesting. I feel the book gives a very good presentation of the thought process behind how different civilizations reached their approximation of Pi and a good insight into how brilliant people of different times where able to calculate Pi. I bet a lot of "ordinary" people wouldn't have a clue about how to find a good number for Pi, without hitting their "Pi"-button on a calculator
A good read. Very nice addition to say, your toilet library (I've got one...)
I've got a 16GB iPhone right here... And I want to beat the crap out of Steve/Apple.
At work earlier today this happened:
Usually I bring along my iPod. At the office I plug it into the USB of my MacBook and just use iTunes to play music from the iPod. Well, today I brought along the iPone (with all my music on) and what happened? You can't play music from the iPhone! I can't do anything in iTunes, transfer movies/music from my office MacBook.
As I was about to go home, I had to bring with me some rather large files. Usually I just use Finder and drag the files over to the iPod. Does my iPhone show up in Finder? No!
Is my iPhone broken?!
It's not a small computer. It's a pretty black box, with very limited use. Yes. It has a great interface and good screen. But there the good things seem to end.
"As a computer, it can also browse the web, take notes, watch videos, listen to music, check your stocks, check the weather, take pictures, and email."
What videos? Only those you get from YouTube or the ones you transfer from the one special chosen Mac?
What if you want to transfer videos/music from another computer?
Can it watch my chosen stocks and notify me when they hit a certain limit? Can the stock-program do this in the background?
Where is MSN for iPhone?
Browse the web with which browser? Opera? Firefox? Lynx?
SSH? I often use SSH clients from my computers to log into and manage my servers. A computer should do this. Does the iPhone?
All the things you mention my previous phone could do too.
It's a rather new Sony Ericsson. Difference was the screen and the UI on the iPone, -and- the SE's ability to transfer files with IR, BlueTooth and USB, use exchangeable SD cards for storage, ability to use mp3 files as ringtones, or just play ordinary mp3 files.
Just to add something...
Show me the console where you aren't left to the mercy of the creator.
Take XBox Live.
They have the ability to chat with friends, but only 1 on 1. Why? There is NO reason what-so-ever for this limit. In games you can talk with up to 20 other, but not in private - there we have an artificial limit of 1 on 1.
US players might not think this is so bad, but living in Norway and playing with European players, this is EXTREMELY annoying. Joining a server (take CoD4) with 3-4 friends, we all have to spend a few minutes muting everyone else. Not seldom are the chat channel filled with people speaking/shouting in french, german, spansish, english, norwegian, +++.
Why not just let people have as many people they like, in private chat?
Dedicated servers?
Not for consoles. Consoles bring us back 10+ years in gaming. You don't even have the ability to see what ping you have in most online games. Only a "network bar" or some other clever thing which is so crappy that "perfect connection" can mean anything from 30ms to 600ms latency.
Mods?
No, not for consoles. Buy a shitty expansion pack from XBox live for $9.99.
Console network down?
Ah. No online play for you.
(this has started to appear for pc gaming too, with centralized servers)
Have no economy?
What does that mean?
My Norwegian 100 kroner bill, which is in my pocket right now, have for the past few years increased 50% in value compared to the USD. The reason for this is the lack of Norwegian economy?
or one installation of Crysis ( http://www.ea.com/crysis/ ) running at decent frame rate on Windows Vista =/
That is such a strange comment.
How can you "blow away" something which is free and does exactly what I want it to do?
It just not even imaginable...
At level 8, my char, Lardbutt, had around 3500 gold -and- almost all the Epics/Rares you could trade. This would probably amount to 10.000+ in total gold value.
:)
I played him until I got to Ironforge, after that he NEVER left the auction house. Just bought up things I thought were cheap and put them back in with a more expensive price. Most people don't check the market price for an item and when they found a rare/epic item they didn't need, would just sell it to the highest bidder at their first attempt to sell it. The ignorance of a weapons true worth was also something to take advantage of. Like the value of Julie's Dagger and Hanzo Sword, which on paper didn't really have über stats, but were perfect weapons for some types of warrior and rogue classes. Buying them for 10-20gold was quite possible, earning a profit of 50+ gold whenever you sold them to someone who "knew" their real price.
After a while I could by everything of some specific item and control the price. I often did this with the better types of bags
It took me about 3 months of regular playing to get there. This was the three first months after the release. I don't think you can pull it off that easily now, because most items are no Bind of Pickup, instead of Bind on Equip as they were earlier and the economy for items more or less crashed after 5-6 months.
I stopped playing after about 3-4 months.
Then I had probably a 100 complains posted against me, because people was 100% sure that I cheated and every time I logged on I got 15+ tells from people talking trash about how I cheated them/the system/the auction house/etc. Almost wish I kept on playing a little longer. =P
I can't even in my wildest dreams believe you compared the most ugly and noise machine to ever enter my house to Apple TV/iTunes movie rental.
Your points sounds reasonable from a user perspective...
But doesn't this seem a bit like what we already have at the software level?
Microsoft have dynamic license-models as an option
-Pay for how many clients who connects, say, to windows terminal server.
What's the difference between the spying at the hardware level and software level?
And I bet it was more expensive to develop software with dynamic license-model than without. Why can't hardware manufactures do the same?
Uh?
My Dell 30" LCD screens are 2560x1600 pixels (each), which is almost 1.5 million more pixels than this screen. Even my MacBook Pro can drive simple games in that resolution and using any new graphic card in two or three way SLI will let you run state of the art graphics in those resolutions.
Extreme example (3-way SLI): http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_3waysli.html
Parent should be modded up!
No it is not.
What has an inaccessible service to do with a free game? Nothing at all really.
This is close to being a fraud. Not being able to play CoD4 -AT ALL- during the holidays is just ridicules from a gamers perspective.
When else do I have time to play? Not during ordinary weekdays because then I'm busy with work/family, and my weekends are not really free for that much playing either.
Had I continued to use a computer to play games I wouldn't be faced with this problem at all -that some central system is not robust enough to provide paying customers with the service they are paying for. This is the symptoms of pure greediness. They could easily ha upgraded XBox Live to provide flawless service for their games (if not, how will they ever be able to support the current number of users?), but they choose not to. And when they see that people actually get mad for not being able to play with the hardware and subscriptions they have paid a lot for, they start to offer some shitty game as compensation. No what the fuck?
I've got the game I want to play. I don't want another game. But for over two weeks now, it's been impossible to play the game online. And it's STILL NOT FIXED!
This should bring some pain to Microsoft and MS shouldn't be allowed to decide for themselves on how to reimburse their customers.
I don't agree.
:)
Since you don't pay for FireFox, there is really no reason not to upgrade.
With MS you have to pay for EVERY new version which is released. In my world that is kind of a huge difference. And if you are just talking about IE, well, you really shouldn't be using old versions anyway...
How can you claime that iPhone is not a contender?
I would have considered 810 had it -not- been for the iPhone. Same for 4-5 other people at work.
"... while the band has a large fanbase ..."
That just the same type of measuring that RIAA uses. They go about saying that the "Potenial customers = World population", which is just wrong.
You brother's fanbase is the amount of people who actually do buy his records or do to go to his concerts, and NOT the number of people who say they pirated the songs. I get the feeling your brother doesn't really have such a large fanbase.
You make it sound like that without pirating your brother would actually sell a lot of albums and have a lot of people attending his concerts? How do you figure?
U2 has a large fanbase because A LOT of people attende their concerts and a lot of people buy their albums...
The fact that a lot of people pirate their music, probably on a scale a million times larger than what your brother is experiencing, is not really anything people use to measure their fanbase.
So you are saying that your sites don't have vistor logging? Or just that you don't use Apache log files? :)
We started using apache log files but with increased traffic we ran into the same problems you mentioned.
To solve this we set up a dedicated server for logging using phpOpenTracker (http://www.phpopentracker.de/).
You would really need to have some very large sites before you would start having trouble with that solution.
Lately we have been setting up our users with Google Analytics and moving them away from Open Tracker too. This is possible because we run a lot of smaller sites, instead of few large ones.
Should have been this one:
http://www.hvorfor.no/bilder/arti/Battleship.jpg
Actually, why don't you get started on the upgrading and working with forms in Drupal. I would love to see some input on those.
:)
We've been using Drupal for over a year now. Both small and medium sized projects. It's just a really really good framework. Possible -the- best right now.
Since you didn't bother to actually show any examples of what "sucks so much" I won't bother to make any arguments for why "it rocks"
Been using SoftScan for 4 months now (http://www.softscan.no/) for several of our domains.
:)
Nothing gets through.
Sure we pay a small fee, but hey... We don't spend any time sorting through loads of spam or virus e-mail at our company now
I don't understand this...
Call center? Arrogant operator? Local guy?
I run a small company. Not even close to 100 computers. We have our "own" key account manager at Dell. This person has always been from Scandinavia (we are based in Norway). If we have a problem we call our key account manager who then takes care of business. We usually buy silver/gold support (the one which is maximum 4 hour assitance, 24/7).
I've never talked to an arrogant person at Dell customer service. Then one time I really needed some help, my HD on my laptop totally crashed after a flight, I called service and a person came, within 4 hours, and replaced that harddrive. He also brought with him a recovery CD.
Dell has been our primary source for computer equipment since 2001. Server, desktop pcs, laptops, monitors (Dell 30" LCD is just wonderful) and now also TVs (I love the Dell 37" LCD TV).
When our support contracts for old equipment run out, we usually give it away and buy new equipment. My mom is still using an old Dell laptop I've had since 2002.
Just got a two new Dell servers. And they are a breeze to upgrade. Only a week ago I had to open one to insert more memory, an extra HD and an extra Intel dual Gbit ethernet card. Built like a tank, but with easy access to any vital part.
I would never put my trust in a local computer guy. The small computer stores usually don't last more than a few years. Also, most often, their service deals are actually more expensive than say Dell.
No, I don't work at Dell.
I just like the way the do their business.
Benefits...
Well.
I would do whatever it takes to get the chat function in Xbox Live to work with more than two persons. The official word is that they have limited the chat to two persons because fear of overused bandwidth (they need at least 64kbps for games). That is what I hate with MS/closed source. People who know what is best for you.
If a mod chip would let me use some other chat program or remove this immensly stupid artificial restriction I would buy it in a second.
As for the old Xbox.
With a mod chip it became one of the greatest pieces of hardware I've ever bought. Without a mod chip it was just an ok game console. I guess the same goes for X360.
It's still doesn't change the fact that using an analog controller is vastly inferior to using a mouse/keyboard combination. It really is!
And no! It didn't take long to get used to the mouse/keyboard combination in Wolfenstein 3D. It felt quite good from the start.
I Think,
therefore I Tank...
*sigh*
Took my browser 5 seconds from clicking on the Slashdot logo, until the page started reloading.
Well, I'm off then. I'll surf away to the other Slashdot...
Oh, wait! I wanted to see the front of Slashdot again, so I actually waited for as long as it took.
Bummer!
"Eventually, as it always happens, there will be bug releases and new drivers for Windows Vista. Upgrading to them is as easily as doing "Windows Update." Linux (and BSD) distros will never be this easily patched due to the very nature of being open source."
-1 Ignorant
Seriously!
We've got a Windows server her, which is quite the hassle to keep up to date (windows + several programs)
There are also two servers here running VMWare with 4 virtual machines with Ubuntu 6.10 Server, which is a breeze to keep up to date.