My friend worked for RadioShack and he said the whole business model of RadioShack is crap and is obsolete. When before they were _the_ specialty electronics store, now they make most of their money off of overpriced batteries and cell phone plans. The savy geeks who would have gone there before to buy electronic parts, now get them cheaper from the Web, and the average consumers just go to places like Best Buy, CircuitCity and others where they have a larger selection of equipment. The last time I went to RS was 6 years ago to get some thermal paste for my heatsinks, and the idiot saleman didn't even know what it was, I had to go through the shelves and find it myself (I suspected they had it somewhere). That's the last time I bought anything from them. I am sure other "electronically inclined" geeks here probably have a similar story...
Or how about just the psychological trauma to see your grandma or parents rotting in the ditch close to your hut? Not very pleasant I suppose. "Oops, checked on paw-paw this morning -- looks like the maggots finallay got to him... bless his heart!"
So if a lion entered a restaurant say about 10,000 years ago he would find menu entries like:
"Roasted Human Family...29.95"
"Baby Humans with Cashews and Potatoes...24.50"
"Human a-la-carte - create your own dish out of fresh human body parts and side dishes... 35.99"
People who do not have a particularly good relationship with math and real science are fascinated with the "crazy" and "wonderful" action at a distance. Much like my cat is fascinated at the strange red dot that is there moving but then disappears all of the sudden, when I turn the laser point off. These kind of people will say stuff like "OMG! Wow! Look Ma! Two pieces of metal attract each other and they are not even touching!" Then of course they make the obvious step from there and say "Aha! I know, I bet I could build a perpetual motion machine, I'll be famous and solve the world's energy problems..." As they get older they don't necessarily get smarter, they just make their designs more complicated and use a lot of buzzwords, then they apply for patents, and people just like them from the patent office grant them those patents, then they create websites, attract investors and become famous.
What is most sad about the story is that it appeared on the front page of Slashdot. "News for nerds" turned into "News for idiots". This leads me to believe that if even the supposedly scientifically minded Slashdot editors and submitters are willing to believe such crap, the general public will probably be even easier convinces.
Sad, sad, sad... I blame the primary education in this country.
Electic motors that generate electricity and are perpetual motion machines have been appearing off and on since the electric motors have been invented. I remember reading about another such "electromagnetic generators" in a Romanian science journal back in the early 90s. There is also a web site some place (sorry no time to find the link) that documents all these perpetual motion ideas. It is quite a funny collection of ideas...
I always thought that Slashdot editors are somewhat literate as basic science goes -- it is Slashdot after all, not Fark.com -- but I guess I was wrong...
Because that is what the business world does. One company many years ago has trademarked a simple, easy to understand name and everyone else now has to come with crazy gibberish words that might sound interesting and "cool" but have no meaning at all.
Actually the pharmaceutical industry is doing the same thing. With hundreds of drugs coming out every year they've run out of normal, understandable words and have to turn to latin, greek, swedish and other languages for new, cool, easy to remember names. The same thing with the open sourse. There are thousands and thousands of applications, if you think of a name, or even an acronym, chances are that someone has already used it. Look at what happened to firefox/firebird/phoenix.
There should be a job out there to come up with new catchy meaningful and unique names.
The problem is that sms-speak and ebonics might not be acceptable for a thesis defense or a business proposal even 50 years from now. I suspect one would still need to know how to speak/write/understand English (or will it be Chinese...?) to function well.
It is quite interesting how I did a whole lot better in the English classes at an American university than most Americans, even though English is my third language. At first I thought they were smart but they just didn't care, but it turned out that they really didn't know to write and they didn't care.
I guess I expected everyone to do worse in science only, not in Enlish -- their own language! Oh, well, more jobs for immigrants like me, "Thanks! US primary educational system!"
But there is something to be done -- go to the competitor (NVIDIA in this case... probably not S3 yet) and buy their products. You have a vote as a consumer. As a geek and someone who will probably shell out extra money to buy the "just released" cards, that can cost around $400, your vote is weighted a lot more than someone's who only buy the $99.99 version 3 years later.
When the next card comes with features X,Y,Z, you will probably wonder how many of those features might be missing or are crippled, based on previous experience. If you are not the only one, ATI will lose a lot of market share right off the bat. Nothing speaks louder to a company than the bottom line -- unfortunately money _is_ everything for a company at the end of the day, so they either get their act together or die and you as a consumer have a lot to do about that.
How exactly would the law itself discover anything? Wouldn't that have to be a hypothesis first that would have to be tested experimentally before it becomes a law?
I had the same problem. I think it is a K3b issue. K3b silently decided to change the file names that were too long, the space was turned into underscore, the name itself was truncted and an enumeraion was added at the end. I had about 80.rar files that had to be named in a certain way for the archive to de-compress and K3b/cdrdao screwed it up without any warning or anything. Call me crazy, but if my application is going to change the users files in such a why, I would feel the need to let the user know beforehand. Apparently it is related to which ISO level you chose and such. The problem is that there are too many options I need to go through just to burn a CD. I hated the simple ("click to burn") menu of Nautilus on GNOME but now would use only that until I can take enough time to learn about ISO, UDF, DAO, TAO, UltraBuffers and other stuff like that.
As many have said, I think simpler is better. Ideally I would like to have a switch to switch to expert mode if I need to, but for now I'll just stick with GNOME. Adding more visual bling (WOW transparent rotated 3d windows with alpha channels and SVG and stuff and stuff) to KDE is not going to make it more appealing to me personally.
Re:That's all well and good...
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I would have to agree with you. I have been using a variety of desktops and WMs, starting from FVWM, then XFCE, Blackbox, KDE, and now GNOME. KDE was great at first as it was prettier with more eye bling and such but all that got old and thouse annoying seemingly small bugs eventually got to me and I just ended up using GNOME.
Don't get me wrong I don't hate KDE, and I don't personally care what is more open or that one has a more restrictive license or whatnot, all I care is to get my job done. One of the biggest problems that prevented me to get the job done, was believe or not, too many options. I tried once to change some window behavior and it took me such a long time to find the right submenu in the Kontrol and try to sift through help files that I eventually gave up. That happened other times with KDE itself and/or other KDE application. According to UI best practices, the configuration options should be kept at minimum. There is a trade-off between configuration power and usability.
Actually if you ask me, I think that the best/more functional/easier to learn interface is that of Mac OS X. Apple has invested more into the usability research than any other company and it payed off. I think it is mainly because of it, that it managed to sell underpowered and overpriced machines (when compared MFlop for MFlop and $ for $) for quite a long time now. On the Linux desktop side, I think GNOME is closer conceptually (not visually perhaps) to OS X than KDE is, and that I why I choose GNOME.
I have always wondered why can't everyone being sued by MPAA/RIAA just install a bunch of trajons on their machine and then claim that someone was using their computer to dowload music or wanted to frame them. Because it isn't that difficult to remotely control a computer. And unless the RIAA/MPAA has a video recording of the user searching the P2P at their keyboard, then clicking the "download" button and stuff like that it could have been anyone out there. Or is it a liability type thing -- "your computer was used, so it doesn't matter who used it, you pay either way" ?
I think you are on to something. I wish I can enlighten my sorry white trash neighbours about this. Thye sit on the porch all day, smoke pot, drink, collect their welfare check that we all pay for and run a methlab. As far as evolution goes:
As far as charismatic goes he is not that much further along than Hitler. Or rather, Hitler was fairly charismatic for his time. You have to keep in mind that you are looking back at Hitler after all he has done, and you grew up to associate his mustache and his haircut with "evil" and "monster" but for his contemporaries he was rather charming -- someone would need to be to rise to power that quickly, even in Germany...
It is too bad for the cats, I agree. But isn't it still worth to take the precaution? I am sorry but if there is a very small chance that my cat would have diarrhea from chewing some stuff outside or somehow decides to not poop in the litter box but on the carpet, or decides to sit its fuzzy but not perfectly clean butt on the table where we eat, I think it is worth it to give it away. I love cats but I also don't anything to happen to my child, sorry.
We all know math is just a nerd conspiracy to keep middle aged baby boomers and young spoiled teenagers scared of physics and keep them from building their own colliders, H-bombs and of course flux capacitors.
I don't know about the rest of the Slashdot crowd, but I'll tend to side with Einstein here say "probably not"
Talking about time and how you can move through time doesn't make sense because time is part of spacetime and it is one entity. (Yes, that is exactly why it is spelled together as one word.) So one cannot travel in time if he is not traveling in space and vice-versa. I know, it is simple to say that but perhaps hard to understand, and that why there are people like this guy on the internet saying that "Einstein misunderstood hiw own theory."
Interesting. What if he lands in Iran or Pakistan due to some failure. Will he be able to bribe his way out to freedom? And will the US commandos go in to save his arse?
Rock solid on Ubuntu all version of drivers : from GeForce to FX5700. NVIDIA was actually chosen consistently for upgrades because it had stable linux accelerated drivers.
So the answer is "the government". The applicant pool sets the particular number of minority individuals (5, 10, 100 etc.) , but the rate (the 10 %) is set by the government, that is what I was wondering about. Thanks for clarifying.
Slashdot Mirror
My friend worked for RadioShack and he said the whole business model of RadioShack is crap and is obsolete. When before they were _the_ specialty electronics store, now they make most of their money off of overpriced batteries and cell phone plans. The savy geeks who would have gone there before to buy electronic parts, now get them cheaper from the Web, and the average consumers just go to places like Best Buy, CircuitCity and others where they have a larger selection of equipment. The last time I went to RS was 6 years ago to get some thermal paste for my heatsinks, and the idiot saleman didn't even know what it was, I had to go through the shelves and find it myself (I suspected they had it somewhere). That's the last time I bought anything from them. I am sure other "electronically inclined" geeks here probably have a similar story...
Or how about just the psychological trauma to see your grandma or parents rotting in the ditch close to your hut? Not very pleasant I suppose. "Oops, checked on paw-paw this morning -- looks like the maggots finallay got to him... bless his heart!"
So if a lion entered a restaurant say about 10,000 years ago he would find menu entries like: ... 35.99"
"Roasted Human Family...29.95"
"Baby Humans with Cashews and Potatoes...24.50"
"Human a-la-carte - create your own dish out of fresh human body parts and side dishes
What is most sad about the story is that it appeared on the front page of Slashdot. "News for nerds" turned into "News for idiots". This leads me to believe that if even the supposedly scientifically minded Slashdot editors and submitters are willing to believe such crap, the general public will probably be even easier convinces.
Sad, sad, sad... I blame the primary education in this country.
I always thought that Slashdot editors are somewhat literate as basic science goes -- it is Slashdot after all, not Fark.com -- but I guess I was wrong...
Actually the pharmaceutical industry is doing the same thing. With hundreds of drugs coming out every year they've run out of normal, understandable words and have to turn to latin, greek, swedish and other languages for new, cool, easy to remember names. The same thing with the open sourse. There are thousands and thousands of applications, if you think of a name, or even an acronym, chances are that someone has already used it. Look at what happened to firefox/firebird/phoenix.
There should be a job out there to come up with new catchy meaningful and unique names.
It was an average 4 year American university. So you could probably say it was representative of a typical American university.
It is quite interesting how I did a whole lot better in the English classes at an American university than most Americans, even though English is my third language. At first I thought they were smart but they just didn't care, but it turned out that they really didn't know to write and they didn't care.
I guess I expected everyone to do worse in science only, not in Enlish -- their own language! Oh, well, more jobs for immigrants like me, "Thanks! US primary educational system!"
When the next card comes with features X,Y,Z, you will probably wonder how many of those features might be missing or are crippled, based on previous experience. If you are not the only one, ATI will lose a lot of market share right off the bat. Nothing speaks louder to a company than the bottom line -- unfortunately money _is_ everything for a company at the end of the day, so they either get their act together or die and you as a consumer have a lot to do about that.
They can create bogus pages to feed to the Majestic bot like in the BMW vs. Google case.
Moderators are on crack again. I guess I should metamoderate more often to keep those suckers in line ;-)
E=mc^2
P.S. The dark matter is actually spaghetti, planets and stars are just meatballs...
How exactly would the law itself discover anything? Wouldn't that have to be a hypothesis first that would have to be tested experimentally before it becomes a law?
As many have said, I think simpler is better. Ideally I would like to have a switch to switch to expert mode if I need to, but for now I'll just stick with GNOME. Adding more visual bling (WOW transparent rotated 3d windows with alpha channels and SVG and stuff and stuff) to KDE is not going to make it more appealing to me personally.
Don't get me wrong I don't hate KDE, and I don't personally care what is more open or that one has a more restrictive license or whatnot, all I care is to get my job done. One of the biggest problems that prevented me to get the job done, was believe or not, too many options. I tried once to change some window behavior and it took me such a long time to find the right submenu in the Kontrol and try to sift through help files that I eventually gave up. That happened other times with KDE itself and/or other KDE application. According to UI best practices, the configuration options should be kept at minimum. There is a trade-off between configuration power and usability.
Actually if you ask me, I think that the best/more functional/easier to learn interface is that of Mac OS X. Apple has invested more into the usability research than any other company and it payed off. I think it is mainly because of it, that it managed to sell underpowered and overpriced machines (when compared MFlop for MFlop and $ for $) for quite a long time now. On the Linux desktop side, I think GNOME is closer conceptually (not visually perhaps) to OS X than KDE is, and that I why I choose GNOME.
I have always wondered why can't everyone being sued by MPAA/RIAA just install a bunch of trajons on their machine and then claim that someone was using their computer to dowload music or wanted to frame them. Because it isn't that difficult to remotely control a computer. And unless the RIAA/MPAA has a video recording of the user searching the P2P at their keyboard, then clicking the "download" button and stuff like that it could have been anyone out there. Or is it a liability type thing -- "your computer was used, so it doesn't matter who used it, you pay either way" ?
T.gondii - 1
H.Sapiens - 0
As far as charismatic goes he is not that much further along than Hitler. Or rather, Hitler was fairly charismatic for his time. You have to keep in mind that you are looking back at Hitler after all he has done, and you grew up to associate his mustache and his haircut with "evil" and "monster" but for his contemporaries he was rather charming -- someone would need to be to rise to power that quickly, even in Germany...
It is too bad for the cats, I agree. But isn't it still worth to take the precaution? I am sorry but if there is a very small chance that my cat would have diarrhea from chewing some stuff outside or somehow decides to not poop in the litter box but on the carpet, or decides to sit its fuzzy but not perfectly clean butt on the table where we eat, I think it is worth it to give it away. I love cats but I also don't anything to happen to my child, sorry.
We all know math is just a nerd conspiracy to keep middle aged baby boomers and young spoiled teenagers scared of physics and keep them from building their own colliders, H-bombs and of course flux capacitors.
I don't know about the rest of the Slashdot crowd, but I'll tend to side with Einstein here say "probably not"
Talking about time and how you can move through time doesn't make sense because time is part of spacetime and it is one entity. (Yes, that is exactly why it is spelled together as one word.) So one cannot travel in time if he is not traveling in space and vice-versa. I know, it is simple to say that but perhaps hard to understand, and that why there are people like this guy on the internet saying that "Einstein misunderstood hiw own theory."
Interesting. What if he lands in Iran or Pakistan due to some failure. Will he be able to bribe his way out to freedom? And will the US commandos go in to save his arse?
Rock solid on Ubuntu all version of drivers : from GeForce to FX5700. NVIDIA was actually chosen consistently for upgrades because it had stable linux accelerated drivers.
So the answer is "the government". The applicant pool sets the particular number of minority individuals (5, 10, 100 etc.) , but the rate (the 10 %) is set by the government, that is what I was wondering about. Thanks for clarifying.