True, I would have asked different questions. However, if you read my profile, you'll see that I'm a salesman, not an engineer. I wish I could write a decoder in 6 lines...
"JV: Well, I can't believe there's not any -- there must be a reason for... Let me find out about that. You bring up an interesting question -- I don't know the answer to that... Well, you're telling me a lot of things I don't know
That's a ton of computer hardware to use on factoring... I wonder why they didn't just use a distributed system (like seti@home) to do this... at least it's free.
It looks to me like a combination of the work being done by Sony and other Japanese manufacturers will give us walking machines that have the same type and degree of mobility as a human eventually. Also, the work being done in a university in Europe (Sorry, I can't seem to find the link anywhere yet, will go and reply to this when I have found it) seems to indicate that we may eventually have a computer program capable of holding a perfectly believable conversation with a human.
Do you think that the combination of these technologies will lead to walking, talking robots?
Macs are great for stuff like this, sometimes I wish they had had the marketing smarts to get the market share PCs have now. They have alot going for them...
Ah well, "Macs for productivity, Linux for stability, Windows for solitaire"
I kinda like all the stories I have read here about/.ing the spammers and signing them up for junk snail-mail and the like. (and if anyone can find me the link to the old story, I'd appreciate it)
"It's not just an annoying bug, it makes the tool unusable for collaboration in heterogenous environments (i.e., unless you can mandate consistent use of OO.o, you shouldn't allow it to be used, and really, there's no way to mandate its use with MSO being the de facto standard.)"
The reason OO.o can't do this is that Microsoft makes all their.doc documents really hard to create. It is not for lack of trying though...
The bigger the inside, the smaller the outside. I've already lost 2 hard drives this way... When will they stop?? Is it too much to ask for something at least one cubic foot?
Until someone writes better power management features into Linux, short battery life is a fact. I don't understand OS software coding well enough to comment intelligently on how to make Linux more efficient, but I do know that there are various hardware fixes you can make. You can get 3rd party batteries that have longer life than the original, or you could get heavier batteries that last longer. Until Linux is more efficient, increasing power (and weight) of your laptop is the only solution I can think of.
True, but the more people "training" these ghosts, the larger the concerted effort would have to be to mess it up. Eventually, all systems like this learn enough to discount erroneous data because after a set amount of time, the creators of the program would test them and evaluate them on their progress. If they have made negative progress, the habits they acquired would be discarded.
The beauty about systems like this is that it would take a large number of people deliberately "gaming" the system the same way to screw it up. The ghosts evolve and any deviations along the way are just that. Who knows, maybe your hacking the ghosts would actually add something to the final result.
There is a whole market of companies who buy and sell excess bubble gear. Usually, the only way you can get anything from a big blow-out like this or a large corporate upgrade's leftovers is by promising to either "de-manufacture" the hard drives or format them 6 times each. One of my clients is going to be selling 6000 old computers for a large cell phone manufacturer and he had to contract this massive ultra-format of their hard drives out to another company just so he could sell the non-storage parts on Powersource...
Companies are very aware of data left over, but someone told me that there is always a way to get the data back, no matter what happened to the drive (excluding melting I suppose...)
I live in Montreal, Canada. There are more telemarketing operations here than anywhere else in the world. Some of my friends work for these places. I've even had to do the paid training for a few of them while I was in school... They don't now, and never will respect this no call registry law.
Most of these firms are scams that operate by not giving out any real information about the company. They have a "toll free customer service line" that rings and rings, and they instruct their reps to hang up on anyone who asks questions and sounds smart enough to do something. If anything, this do not call registry makes their lives easier. When they're on the phone with someone who will threaten them with the do not call registry, they know they should not bother finishing their script and just hang up on them so they can go to the next call. They mainly target old people and very young people who haven't had enough experience to avoid scams. These targets are the ones who do not know that this call they're taking is going to end up in a huge headache.
I love this place. Our drinking age is lower, our technology is cheaper, our women are cuter...
Seriously though, I have done allot of thinking about the difference between Americans and Canadians lately and I believe that the best way of explaining it is by looking at American idol and comparing it to CBC's Monday Report. Americans like to laugh at themselves and Canadians like to laugh at their politicians.
Scientists come and go, and they're the reason that so many of the above posts are making fun of this whole theory. Real evidence disputing the dark matter theory can only exist because we don't have any real evidence supporting it. All we can do is observe facts and choose what theory we use to interpret the data. We see the universe expand, we assume that something must be doing it. Hopefully we'll discover some more evidence that will refine our string theory or Higgs's boson field theory. If we don't, we will discover something else and have to figure out a new theory.
Terrible meetings seem more common in large companies. I work in a largish company, but since most of my meetings are in a small division of a largish company I can see this tendency in effect. The rare times I have gone to a cross platform meeting involving people from the IT dept, the sales dept, and management, all of the disastrous characteristics of corporate meetings rear their brutal heads. I learn nothing, PowerPoint is used and abused to no end, and the company spends allot of money having me there. More often than not though, the meetings with my team (sales only) are very useful. They are short, informational, and involve no PowerPoint at all. Pens and boards. We meet once a week with a solid agenda and never deviate or spend more time than we have to.
About donations to Iraq, would they generate a tax break the same way a charity would? Alot of companies and schools will donate their old gear to charities but often it's because of the tax credit.
"Week off work"? "Liberal use" of "Xylo"? Pain killers? "Anti-depressants"?! Dude, the combined damage your plan would cause is worse than a life of caffeine!
To the original poster: I decided to quit caffeine a few years ago (I would drink more than five cups of coffee a day) so I just stopped. I had a headache for 3 days and had trouble jump starting myself in the mornings, but after the three days I was back to normal. Easy as pie.
The reason, most of the time, that people find exotic methods for kicking habits is that they don't think they have the willpower to wait out the withdrawal. If you really want to quit, just stick to it.
I haven't been following this story so pardon me if the answer to this is somewhere on slashdot, but why are "the infamous memos" referred to in the original story infamous? I looked through a few of them but I couldn't find anything really glaring... is it the fact that their client emails are available to random people like me?
The problem with this "non-pathogenic" virus is that it doesn't naturally cure cancer. We had to modify it to do so. The reality of evolution is that life forms (especially simple, fast replicating ones like viruses and bacteria) tend to mutate often. What happens when we're mass producing this virus with millions of people being treated and a new strain surfaces that doesn't stop at cancerous cells?
"For those musicians who are original and are making what I like to call "real music", it would be nice to have a little extra money to get their music out to the public"
As you stated, the music industry is set up so that the musicians who "sell out" and make sexy over-produced bland music for the masses are the ones who get the sliver of the earnings from record sales. People who make the "real music" don't get anything from the industry.
I would support struggling artists by using a pay for play site or going to their concerts, but I will never stop downloading the music for free off the internet before I decide if I want to pay for the real thing.
Slashdot Mirror
True, I would have asked different questions. However, if you read my profile, you'll see that I'm a salesman, not an engineer. I wish I could write a decoder in 6 lines...
Oh, I disagree. This is at least as funny:
"JV: Well, I can't believe there's not any -- there must be a reason for... Let me find out about that. You bring up an interesting question -- I don't know the answer to that... Well, you're telling me a lot of things I don't know
That's a ton of computer hardware to use on factoring... I wonder why they didn't just use a distributed system (like seti@home) to do this... at least it's free.
It looks to me like a combination of the work being done by Sony and other Japanese manufacturers will give us walking machines that have the same type and degree of mobility as a human eventually. Also, the work being done in a university in Europe (Sorry, I can't seem to find the link anywhere yet, will go and reply to this when I have found it) seems to indicate that we may eventually have a computer program capable of holding a perfectly believable conversation with a human.
Do you think that the combination of these technologies will lead to walking, talking robots?
Macs are great for stuff like this, sometimes I wish they had had the marketing smarts to get the market share PCs have now. They have alot going for them...
Ah well, "Macs for productivity, Linux for stability, Windows for solitaire"
I kinda like all the stories I have read here about /.ing the spammers and signing them up for junk snail-mail and the like. (and if anyone can find me the link to the old story, I'd appreciate it)
I'm wearing blue stripes to work tomorrow!!!
I love IBM...
"It's not just an annoying bug, it makes the tool unusable for collaboration in heterogenous environments (i.e., unless you can mandate consistent use of OO.o, you shouldn't allow it to be used, and really, there's no way to mandate its use with MSO being the de facto standard.)" The reason OO.o can't do this is that Microsoft makes all their .doc documents really hard to create. It is not for lack of trying though...
He's right, this money is better spent elsewhere. Bush just wants to create a legacy.
The bigger the inside, the smaller the outside. I've already lost 2 hard drives this way... When will they stop?? Is it too much to ask for something at least one cubic foot?
I love the pure nerd power contained in /.! It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside ;)
How many places do you know of that can DDoS something offensive solely by linking to it? You know we all clicked on those links...
Can you provide me with a link to that site? I would love to see it... if you don't want to post it online, please send it to montrealpb@yahoo.ca.
Until someone writes better power management features into Linux, short battery life is a fact. I don't understand OS software coding well enough to comment intelligently on how to make Linux more efficient, but I do know that there are various hardware fixes you can make. You can get 3rd party batteries that have longer life than the original, or you could get heavier batteries that last longer. Until Linux is more efficient, increasing power (and weight) of your laptop is the only solution I can think of.
True, but the more people "training" these ghosts, the larger the concerted effort would have to be to mess it up. Eventually, all systems like this learn enough to discount erroneous data because after a set amount of time, the creators of the program would test them and evaluate them on their progress. If they have made negative progress, the habits they acquired would be discarded.
The beauty about systems like this is that it would take a large number of people deliberately "gaming" the system the same way to screw it up. The ghosts evolve and any deviations along the way are just that. Who knows, maybe your hacking the ghosts would actually add something to the final result.
There is a whole market of companies who buy and sell excess bubble gear. Usually, the only way you can get anything from a big blow-out like this or a large corporate upgrade's leftovers is by promising to either "de-manufacture" the hard drives or format them 6 times each. One of my clients is going to be selling 6000 old computers for a large cell phone manufacturer and he had to contract this massive ultra-format of their hard drives out to another company just so he could sell the non-storage parts on Powersource...
Companies are very aware of data left over, but someone told me that there is always a way to get the data back, no matter what happened to the drive (excluding melting I suppose...)
I live in Montreal, Canada. There are more telemarketing operations here than anywhere else in the world. Some of my friends work for these places. I've even had to do the paid training for a few of them while I was in school... They don't now, and never will respect this no call registry law.
Most of these firms are scams that operate by not giving out any real information about the company. They have a "toll free customer service line" that rings and rings, and they instruct their reps to hang up on anyone who asks questions and sounds smart enough to do something. If anything, this do not call registry makes their lives easier. When they're on the phone with someone who will threaten them with the do not call registry, they know they should not bother finishing their script and just hang up on them so they can go to the next call. They mainly target old people and very young people who haven't had enough experience to avoid scams. These targets are the ones who do not know that this call they're taking is going to end up in a huge headache.
I love this place. Our drinking age is lower, our technology is cheaper, our women are cuter...
Seriously though, I have done allot of thinking about the difference between Americans and Canadians lately and I believe that the best way of explaining it is by looking at American idol and comparing it to CBC's Monday Report. Americans like to laugh at themselves and Canadians like to laugh at their politicians.
Scientists come and go, and they're the reason that so many of the above posts are making fun of this whole theory. Real evidence disputing the dark matter theory can only exist because we don't have any real evidence supporting it. All we can do is observe facts and choose what theory we use to interpret the data. We see the universe expand, we assume that something must be doing it. Hopefully we'll discover some more evidence that will refine our string theory or Higgs's boson field theory. If we don't, we will discover something else and have to figure out a new theory.
Terrible meetings seem more common in large companies. I work in a largish company, but since most of my meetings are in a small division of a largish company I can see this tendency in effect. The rare times I have gone to a cross platform meeting involving people from the IT dept, the sales dept, and management, all of the disastrous characteristics of corporate meetings rear their brutal heads. I learn nothing, PowerPoint is used and abused to no end, and the company spends allot of money having me there. More often than not though, the meetings with my team (sales only) are very useful. They are short, informational, and involve no PowerPoint at all. Pens and boards. We meet once a week with a solid agenda and never deviate or spend more time than we have to.
About donations to Iraq, would they generate a tax break the same way a charity would? Alot of companies and schools will donate their old gear to charities but often it's because of the tax credit.
"Week off work"? "Liberal use" of "Xylo"? Pain killers? "Anti-depressants"?! Dude, the combined damage your plan would cause is worse than a life of caffeine!
To the original poster: I decided to quit caffeine a few years ago (I would drink more than five cups of coffee a day) so I just stopped. I had a headache for 3 days and had trouble jump starting myself in the mornings, but after the three days I was back to normal. Easy as pie.
The reason, most of the time, that people find exotic methods for kicking habits is that they don't think they have the willpower to wait out the withdrawal. If you really want to quit, just stick to it.
I haven't been following this story so pardon me if the answer to this is somewhere on slashdot, but why are "the infamous memos" referred to in the original story infamous? I looked through a few of them but I couldn't find anything really glaring... is it the fact that their client emails are available to random people like me?
The problem with this "non-pathogenic" virus is that it doesn't naturally cure cancer. We had to modify it to do so. The reality of evolution is that life forms (especially simple, fast replicating ones like viruses and bacteria) tend to mutate often. What happens when we're mass producing this virus with millions of people being treated and a new strain surfaces that doesn't stop at cancerous cells?
I would support struggling artists by using a pay for play site or going to their concerts, but I will never stop downloading the music for free off the internet before I decide if I want to pay for the real thing.