Software publishers hate it though ; if you're playing old classics on your emulated hardware, you're not spending time and money playing their new shiny games.
There was a time when Amiga and ST magazines in the UK would cover mount disks with copies of older games as a value-add for the paper. This was eventually stopped by the European Leisure Software Publishers Association who formed a compact not to license these games for cover mounting because they feared it was affecting their sales - why buy a game for £20 when you could get that, plus a good read, for £2 ?
Nintendo have wisely yoked this resource by offering it "legit" on the virtual console.
So there's lots of black and thus fewer polygons in space... who the hell cares if you're not utilising the hardware! The point of the games is to utilise the wetware - particularly the enjoyment centres...
I wasn't entirely referring to the tax dollars donated as aid. I was mostly referring to the tax dollars spent by Western governments with Israeli security companies, which no doubt get poured into R&D.
Things like
The Mexico-Canada US border "fence" systems
DHS border operations training
Rentacops for the affluent areas of New Orleans after Katrina
The firewalls in "89% of fortune 500 companies"
Call-monitoring for the NYPD
CCTV recording in the London tube, Dulles airport, Capital Hill, Montreal Metro
I wonder how many of my tax dollars are being used
Many. The Israeli security industry benefits enormously from Western spending ; they are respected and renowned as the people with the most experience of dealing with terrorism.
Someone with thicker tinfoil on their hat might suspect that this was a prototype project, pushed through by rich Israeli security industry lobbyists keen to prove their ability for the contracts for Western nations. Someone with double-layered tinfoil might even believe that they already have a contract and this is just the testing phase...
If the source is open, you have multiple samples of $randomInternetDude to choose from. And it's not really random either. More like $internetDudeWithUnhealthyInterestInGameEngineProgramming, who I would expect to know a thing or two.
And you can always learn enough to verify it for yourself, if you have the source.
The train analogy is reasonable (ignoring the fact that a train has limited capacity ; digital duplication has no such restriction)
With a privately run train company, if everyone freerides, there is no incentive to run the service. The train operator will take technical measures to guard their revenue (indeed, train guards are now called "revenue protection officers" on my trains). If this is made technically impossible (each technical measure of revenue protection is circumvented), the train operator has no incentive to continue to run the service, in a totally free market (where the only reason to run a train service is the presence of people willing to pay for carriage).
Since public transport isn't a luxury (most industrialized societies rely on mass transport to function), at the point this happens you could hope for the trains to be nationalized.
Music isn't a necessity in the same way that trains are, but perhaps it should also be nationalized ; you can see shades of this in the taxes on CD media earmarked for the music cartels. Make all the music available on a single service, in any popular format (FLAC, MP3, AAC, OGG), no DRM, etc. Introduce a single flat-fee license to download from this service (like the UK TV license allows UK residents to watch free-to-air channels). Allocate portions of this fee to artists based on their download popularity.
It might not bring in the same revenues as the existing music industry, it might not be open to the same profiteering, but if you can't make a profit in the "traditional" way, it provides music to the people where it would otherwise be difficult.
The only rowing machine I really like is the Concept II line ; this is the machine that all the competition rowers use. It has a serial port option and Windows software to log races and even race online. Not cheap though. But it's the only machine that felt right after being in my school team. That and the other machines are too short for my stroke length, and I'd knock against the stops.
Speak for yourself ; I used to get out of bed at 0600 on a Sunday in February and wade waist deep into the sea with my team and row.
Of course, when you got out, you regretted taking a warm shower, because you regained the sensation in your feet, and discovered that they hurt like hell from the cold.
A quarter-pounder is still a quarter-pounder in the UK. As Vincent Vega would say "we got the metric system", but it was only because it was imposed under protest by an EU directive.
Most UK residents over the age of 30 still think in Imperial measurements (we did invent them, after all).
Although don't talk to us about your gallons and pints. Anyone from the UK ordering a pint in an American bar is in for a nasty shock (unless they serve Imperial measures).
The main reason that people don't use branching more is because it has been very painful to merge the branches together again. The current generation of DVCS tools were all designed to mitigate this as much as possible.
I suspect much of your fear is from these painful merge experiences.
With plugins that can two-way-synch between the DVCS tool and Subversion available for several of the DVCS tools, there's no real barrier to trying them out, using them for branching, and discovering how much less painful merging is now.
As you can tell, from their use of the word "plumbing" for the actual code, and "porcelain" for the user interface..
I hate to make you think about moving again, but why not try Bazaar? It allows both the natural branching you like and the pedestrian centralized version management that your designers are used to - at the same time!
Old viruses provided you with an education ; you suffered the consequences of being lax about backups and developed a healthy attitude to safe hex. Many of the early ones weren't even very destructive - they just told you that you'd been infected, and reproduced. If they got onto a disk with a custom boot sector, like a game, they'd destroy it, but most legitimate game disks had the write-enable tab missing. The worst that could happen is that you'd lose work, or have to replace some software.
These days, viruses can lose you money, screw with your credit rating, lose you your job, or even get you banged up on kiddy-porn charges if you are unlucky.
That's not pwnage though, that's a normal feature of the OS being abused.
My advice to anyone on this matter is to never connect any desktop OS directly to the internet. Always put it behind a firewall with an OS specifically designed to be a firewall.
Windows in particular has too many things enabled out of the box though. I think some of the network-listening services are required for normal operation, even if the box is a standalone workstation.
I used to wear a full three piece suit, including a fob watch on a chain.
I think it's just important you don't look like a typical generic office worker. Nothing says "technical genius" better than sticking out like a sore thumb in a crowd of MBAs.....
My Vista eats around 15GB of disk space, much of it in cache folders for compatible binaries : the World Wide Wisdom assures me it would be foolhardy to delete these.
Initially I stuck it on a 60GB partition, assuming that this would be a handsome spread of sectors for it to wallow on, providing headroom for defragmentation and plenty of room for applications. It's now getting a little crowded in there. Software developers are not going to be install Vista on one of these babies and get any sensible amount of use out of it, particularly if they develop tools used with any large data sets, or any large codebases with big histories managed by one of the new DVCS tools, which like a lot of disc space to sit in.
128GB sounds about right to me ; it's enough to be functional, but with precious little room for frivolity. I suppose I can put my frivolity on external drives.
Not if the goal is video streaming. Bittorrent is all about maximising the use of the upload bandwidth of the peers to distribute chunks of the file. The chunks distributed are spread throughout the file ; once the seed has served a chunk, there is little point it serving it again because one or more peers can now seed it ; instead, it concentrates on uploading unseeded chunks until the full file is available from peers in the swarm. At this point, the seed is no longer required (as long as no peers go offline).
What this does not achieve is real-time streaming at every peer. People like to watch sporting events while they are happening, for the sense of community. They can ignore an encoding/transmission delay of a few seconds, but waiting several hours (maybe listening to the cheers of the people next door) would not exactly be conducive to an exciting sport event.
Hell, my wife insists on watching movies at their time of broadcast, because they are "better live"... even though they are coming through the HTPC and thus are exactly the same bitstream on disk whether you watch them now, later, or next year.....
Heat pumps can move far more heat than the energy they consume doing it. So much so, that people are now using them to warm their homes, as well as cool them.
AC is expensive because people design houses and offices with giant windows which both let the sunshine in and keep the heat from getting out. And then build them in Texas.
Not a solution to defeat ISPs attempts to control, what's going through networks they constructed with large sums of both public and private money they mortgaged against providing a service to their customers, not fighting against them.
Painkillers are not addictive when being taken to stave off pain. It's the same with porn.
When I was in my teens and early 20s and single, I used porn for gratification a lot. Whenever I was in a relationship I never felt the need ; I was getting plenty of much superior gratification from my girlfriend.
My wife overworks herself obsessively for her job and church, without investing anything in her own self-maintenance, and as a consequence is physically depleted and uninterested in physical intimacy ; our sex life has gone from intermittent, to occasional, to non-existent, which I find very difficult, because it meant a lot to me. My alternatives are masturbation or extra-marital sex (abstinence is not an option ; I've tried that, it just makes me hyper-distracted and virtually useless at work); the former is far easier, being both endless in supply and less risky. Porn is a useful aide to masturbation ; it makes the process faster, which makes it both more convenient, which is good when you have a wife and child and cannot take a whole afternoon off to wank, but sadly, less satisfying (the longer it takes, the better).
If my wife wasn't drop-dead tired all the time and had a more normal sexual appetite, I probably wouldn't use it.
Wanting sexual gratification is normal ; one of our primary inbuilt drives is the imperative to breed. I would say that those you perceive as having a porn addiction are merely those who cannot get a mate, or those who have a mate who doesn't... mate. It's probably more healthy than the way the animal kingdom deals with it (mostly fights to see who gets the girl).
Slashdot Mirror
"As a reviewer, my reputation is valueable, but so is my ability to view screenings.
Therefore, I shall not be publishing a review of Clone Wars. You may draw your own conclusion from this."
Software publishers hate it though ; if you're playing old classics on your emulated hardware, you're not spending time and money playing their new shiny games.
There was a time when Amiga and ST magazines in the UK would cover mount disks with copies of older games as a value-add for the paper. This was eventually stopped by the European Leisure Software Publishers Association who formed a compact not to license these games for cover mounting because they feared it was affecting their sales - why buy a game for £20 when you could get that, plus a good read, for £2 ?
Nintendo have wisely yoked this resource by offering it "legit" on the virtual console.
So there's lots of black and thus fewer polygons in space... who the hell cares if you're not utilising the hardware! The point of the games is to utilise the wetware - particularly the enjoyment centres...
I wasn't entirely referring to the tax dollars donated as aid. I was mostly referring to the tax dollars spent by Western governments with Israeli security companies, which no doubt get poured into R&D.
Things like
All the above spend money with Israeli firms.
I wonder how many of my tax dollars are being used
Many. The Israeli security industry benefits enormously from Western spending ; they are respected and renowned as the people with the most experience of dealing with terrorism.
Someone with thicker tinfoil on their hat might suspect that this was a prototype project, pushed through by rich Israeli security industry lobbyists keen to prove their ability for the contracts for Western nations. Someone with double-layered tinfoil might even believe that they already have a contract and this is just the testing phase...
He should back all the left-of-field fusion research projects instead.
If any of them produces a viable over-unity reactor, it would be the greatest contribution to world prosperity and hence peace and security. Ever.
Yes, they may be long shots. But you could pay their funding out of the Gates Foundation petty cash and not miss it.
$randomInternetDude
If the source is open, you have multiple samples of $randomInternetDude to choose from. And it's not really random either. More like $internetDudeWithUnhealthyInterestInGameEngineProgramming, who I would expect to know a thing or two.
And you can always learn enough to verify it for yourself, if you have the source.
Better than trusting $corporatePrMan, anyway.
The train analogy is reasonable (ignoring the fact that a train has limited capacity ; digital duplication has no such restriction)
With a privately run train company, if everyone freerides, there is no incentive to run the service. The train operator will take technical measures to guard their revenue (indeed, train guards are now called "revenue protection officers" on my trains). If this is made technically impossible (each technical measure of revenue protection is circumvented), the train operator has no incentive to continue to run the service, in a totally free market (where the only reason to run a train service is the presence of people willing to pay for carriage).
Since public transport isn't a luxury (most industrialized societies rely on mass transport to function), at the point this happens you could hope for the trains to be nationalized.
Music isn't a necessity in the same way that trains are, but perhaps it should also be nationalized ; you can see shades of this in the taxes on CD media earmarked for the music cartels. Make all the music available on a single service, in any popular format (FLAC, MP3, AAC, OGG), no DRM, etc. Introduce a single flat-fee license to download from this service (like the UK TV license allows UK residents to watch free-to-air channels). Allocate portions of this fee to artists based on their download popularity.
It might not bring in the same revenues as the existing music industry, it might not be open to the same profiteering, but if you can't make a profit in the "traditional" way, it provides music to the people where it would otherwise be difficult.
The only rowing machine I really like is the Concept II line ; this is the machine that all the competition rowers use. It has a serial port option and Windows software to log races and even race online. Not cheap though. But it's the only machine that felt right after being in my school team. That and the other machines are too short for my stroke length, and I'd knock against the stops.
can't do it in the winter
Speak for yourself ; I used to get out of bed at 0600 on a Sunday in February and wade waist deep into the sea with my team and row.
Of course, when you got out, you regretted taking a warm shower, because you regained the sensation in your feet, and discovered that they hurt like hell from the cold.
A quarter-pounder is still a quarter-pounder in the UK. As Vincent Vega would say "we got the metric system", but it was only because it was imposed under protest by an EU directive.
Most UK residents over the age of 30 still think in Imperial measurements (we did invent them, after all).
Although don't talk to us about your gallons and pints. Anyone from the UK ordering a pint in an American bar is in for a nasty shock (unless they serve Imperial measures).
The main reason that people don't use branching more is because it has been very painful to merge the branches together again. The current generation of DVCS tools were all designed to mitigate this as much as possible.
I suspect much of your fear is from these painful merge experiences.
With plugins that can two-way-synch between the DVCS tool and Subversion available for several of the DVCS tools, there's no real barrier to trying them out, using them for branching, and discovering how much less painful merging is now.
As you can tell, from their use of the word "plumbing" for the actual code, and "porcelain" for the user interface..
I hate to make you think about moving again, but why not try Bazaar? It allows both the natural branching you like and the pedestrian centralized version management that your designers are used to - at the same time!
Depends on your definition of "worse".
Old viruses provided you with an education ; you suffered the consequences of being lax about backups and developed a healthy attitude to safe hex. Many of the early ones weren't even very destructive - they just told you that you'd been infected, and reproduced. If they got onto a disk with a custom boot sector, like a game, they'd destroy it, but most legitimate game disks had the write-enable tab missing. The worst that could happen is that you'd lose work, or have to replace some software.
These days, viruses can lose you money, screw with your credit rating, lose you your job, or even get you banged up on kiddy-porn charges if you are unlucky.
That's not pwnage though, that's a normal feature of the OS being abused.
My advice to anyone on this matter is to never connect any desktop OS directly to the internet. Always put it behind a firewall with an OS specifically designed to be a firewall.
Windows in particular has too many things enabled out of the box though. I think some of the network-listening services are required for normal operation, even if the box is a standalone workstation.
I used to wear a full three piece suit, including a fob watch on a chain.
I think it's just important you don't look like a typical generic office worker. Nothing says "technical genius" better than sticking out like a sore thumb in a crowd of MBAs.....
My Vista eats around 15GB of disk space, much of it in cache folders for compatible binaries : the World Wide Wisdom assures me it would be foolhardy to delete these.
Initially I stuck it on a 60GB partition, assuming that this would be a handsome spread of sectors for it to wallow on, providing headroom for defragmentation and plenty of room for applications. It's now getting a little crowded in there. Software developers are not going to be install Vista on one of these babies and get any sensible amount of use out of it, particularly if they develop tools used with any large data sets, or any large codebases with big histories managed by one of the new DVCS tools, which like a lot of disc space to sit in.
128GB sounds about right to me ; it's enough to be functional, but with precious little room for frivolity. I suppose I can put my frivolity on external drives.
couldn't they just use bittorrent?
Not if the goal is video streaming. Bittorrent is all about maximising the use of the upload bandwidth of the peers to distribute chunks of the file. The chunks distributed are spread throughout the file ; once the seed has served a chunk, there is little point it serving it again because one or more peers can now seed it ; instead, it concentrates on uploading unseeded chunks until the full file is available from peers in the swarm. At this point, the seed is no longer required (as long as no peers go offline).
What this does not achieve is real-time streaming at every peer. People like to watch sporting events while they are happening, for the sense of community. They can ignore an encoding/transmission delay of a few seconds, but waiting several hours (maybe listening to the cheers of the people next door) would not exactly be conducive to an exciting sport event.
Hell, my wife insists on watching movies at their time of broadcast, because they are "better live"... even though they are coming through the HTPC and thus are exactly the same bitstream on disk whether you watch them now, later, or next year.....
Quick surf answered my questions ;
It has a 1.3Mpixel camera at the back, and a 0.3MPixel one at the front. Presumably it's so you can take photos, while you videoconference.....
I liked my idea better.
Is there something one (camera) just can't pull off?
Stereoscopic 3D photographs (or even video, if the capture rates is fast enough).
I don't know what the camera placement is on this particular model though.
It makes complete sense.
Heat pumps can move far more heat than the energy they consume doing it. So much so, that people are now using them to warm their homes, as well as cool them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump
AC is expensive because people design houses and offices with giant windows which both let the sunshine in and keep the heat from getting out. And then build them in Texas.
Not a solution to defeat ISPs attempts to control, what's going through networks they constructed with large sums of both public and private money they mortgaged against providing a service to their customers, not fighting against them.
Yup, sure do.
I'd say it was caused by a rift in the intimacy.
Painkillers are not addictive when being taken to stave off pain. It's the same with porn.
When I was in my teens and early 20s and single, I used porn for gratification a lot. Whenever I was in a relationship I never felt the need ; I was getting plenty of much superior gratification from my girlfriend.
My wife overworks herself obsessively for her job and church, without investing anything in her own self-maintenance, and as a consequence is physically depleted and uninterested in physical intimacy ; our sex life has gone from intermittent, to occasional, to non-existent, which I find very difficult, because it meant a lot to me. My alternatives are masturbation or extra-marital sex (abstinence is not an option ; I've tried that, it just makes me hyper-distracted and virtually useless at work); the former is far easier, being both endless in supply and less risky. Porn is a useful aide to masturbation ; it makes the process faster, which makes it both more convenient, which is good when you have a wife and child and cannot take a whole afternoon off to wank, but sadly, less satisfying (the longer it takes, the better).
If my wife wasn't drop-dead tired all the time and had a more normal sexual appetite, I probably wouldn't use it.
Wanting sexual gratification is normal ; one of our primary inbuilt drives is the imperative to breed. I would say that those you perceive as having a porn addiction are merely those who cannot get a mate, or those who have a mate who doesn't ... mate. It's probably more healthy than the way the animal kingdom deals with it (mostly fights to see who gets the girl).
It's a quote from Back to the Future, George McFly screwing up his chatup lines in the diner.