Yeah, no loading screens at all, ever! Oh wait, except that one before you can play, oh.. and the ones that come while loading games, and while not a loading screen as such, when entering buildings or starting missions, at times it can take up to around a minute with nothing but a black screen and the name of the place/mission in the bottom corner. And while walking around the map, or more specifically, while driving or flying about the map, sometimes the floor, walls or buildings don't actually load until after you have crashed into them, although that is somewhat more rarer than the above.
Hm.. not quite QED, assuming religion is right, hell exists or whatever - going on fact rather than opinion (we can't prove hell either exists or doesn't exist), we do however, know that photons exist, and photons have no mass. Sorry to reign in on your parrade, but I'm a slashdotter. And yeah, I'm a real blast at parties.
The McWhirter twins, IIRC. One (or maybe both) of them were obsessed with quirky facts. Then in 1950 they set up a business together to sell facts to newspapers. Roughly at the same time, the managing director of Guinness had an argument about the fastest bird in Europe but couldn't find any facts on it. Somehow, they ended up in contact with eachother and made the book we know as the Guinness Book of Records. Although they did have certain rules about what would and what wouldn't get put into the book.. no supernatural records (obvious reasons, I guess), no sex records (was to be a family book), no criminal feats (didn't want people doing illegal things to get into the book), and no records like eating the most marshmellows at once (didn't want people to die in the proccess). One died playing tennis, and one was killed by the IRA whilst offering £50,000 for information on terrorists..
Ditto. I just got it today actually, in fact it's only been installed for about 4 minutes.. and it's AOL (yeah, yeah, I don't care), I dunno if this is the same for the U.K., since I signed up a couple of weeks ago and TFA said they stopped taking bb orders earlier this year...
IIRC, for each qubit you add, the computing power doubles. So while we're not into the really powerful stuff yet, progress should be pretty rapid. I've dug up a little info from google and this seems to be a great place to learn as to how it all works. Because of superposition (read the link), "the number of computations that a quantum computer could undertake is 2^n, where n is the number of qubits used. A quantum computer comprised of 500 qubits would have a potential to do 2^500 calculations in a single step. This is an awesome number - 2^500 is infinitely more atoms than there are in the known universe (this is true parallel processing - classical computers today, even so called parallel processors, still only truly do one thing at a time: there are just two or more of them doing it)". 7 doesn't seem like much, but a few times more and you have an extremely powerful computer. As for the price, I haven't got a clue, Google it.
I agree that the huge number of patents on everything is pretty damn awful, soon there'll be nothing much left people can do without there being a high chance they're infringing on IP law. It's bound to breakdown at some point though, it's getting ridiculous, and not just the number there are. A lot of the (Microsoft) patents that get through, shouldn't - there are many they own where prior art exists. It's not just patents on technology in software either, I think there was a story on slashdot once about an Australian patenting the wheel, although I think that was mainly more to point out flaws in the way patents are appointed.
"FYI, infants do something early in life called "saying their first word"."
You must be new here. Here at slashdot we teach our young to do something early in life called "getting their first 'first post'". It earns them respect for many months onward and gives them time to culminate an emotional system, although it wont be used much, apart from to feel anger, disappointment and astonishment at the rate of articles with old or duplicated, often even multiple times, content. Oh, and not to forget jealousy and awe towards what we here call "pr0n". Then a few years down the line they learn how to type one handed and structure not only sentences with words consisting of 40 or so phonemes, but also 10 numerical digits, for example;
"7h15 c4k3 15 t45t3y m4n!!1!"
Although this habbit is soon dropped at later life when they realise how lame it looks, and how difficult it is to read. It is around this time that the child becomes aware to Microsoft's evil scummy contribution to the world and Linux/Mac gains another trusty young, propeller-headed, google-loving, virgin fanboy.
Funny, a while back here in the UK there was a program about people who used tiny cameras which sent the image of credit card pins & numbers when put into an ATM back to a mobile sitting in a nearby street and I wondered how long it would be before I saw one used where I live..
Then last week, while walking through town at college I saw a swarm of police around an ATM machine with one of them holding those little camera strip things they put on ATM machines to look nicely inconspicuous while recording stuff.. Yeah they can be easily abused and it happens a lot, costs millions, but so can everything in the wrong hands, n they're cool
To prove 0.9 recurring = 1, we will multiply 0.9 recurring by 10, and take 0.9 recurring away, in effect multiplying it by 9 (for displaying purposes take.9r to mean.9 recurring):
1) 0.9r * 10 = 9.9r
2) 0.9r * 1 = 0.9r
3) 9.9r - 0.9r = 9.0
Ok, so we multipled 0.9r by 10 to get 9.9r.
Then we multipled 0.9r by 1 to get 0.9r.
Then we took one occurance away from the other 10, which would leave us with 9 times 0.9r.
Since we took away 0.9r from 9.9r, the whole set of recurring numbers cancell eachother out, and we are left with the answer 9.0, so if we divide that answer by 9, we will get the answer to what 1 * 0.9r is, which turns out to be 1... so there you have it, 0.9r = 1.
If you haven't seen this before and are feeling conned, try it out with other numbers, it's the same rule.
As much as I want there to be a semantic web at some point, hopefully sooner than later, I can't see it being developed to the point of mass usefullness anytime soon.
There are many, many problems which stopped me from trying to develop my own things for the semantic web.
First of all, sorry for my ignorance if many of these problems have a solution, I haven't followed the development of the semantic web for a while now.. Let's think about this.. let's say there's some user, Ben Smith, who enters his perfectly valid information about himself into the a database about people. Due to the massive amount of people named Ben Smith, when someone tries to get information about Ben Smith (assuming there's no data protection stuff and people are free to access info on him), it would yield results of people from Canada, England, various states in the US, as well as several other locations, all of which are correct.. yet not much use to us. Considering that correct information will be pretty useless a lot of the time without being very very pedantic in the query (which we probably won't be able to do, since we are searching for info about it in the first place), just imagine the problems that would arrise if somebody somehow enters false information into the semweb. Would *all* information have to be verified? That could and would take far, far, far too long and would put a serious stump on expansion. What about how to collect the information? Would programs be made to scan the web for information? If so, these programs would have to be extremely clever.. anybody who has tried to make AI programs will know that making sense from english is difficult at the best of times, let alone when people use misleasing (even if not intentional) grammar or spelling. If not, again, it would take a heck of a long time to get lots of useful information into the semantic web.. How would it all be updated, think about how many new news stories appear on the web every day, how can it all be added without verification or AI-type programs? The list of problems that spring to mind are plentiful...
That said, I also hope for the good, just don't be expecting much anytime soon.
I've never had that problem, but then I haven't used hotmail recently, and when I used to, I signed up to lots of stuff so I wouldn't be able to tell anyway. However, AOL is absolutely fucking terrible for this, ALL of my screennames (and therefore email addresses) have never been used, at all. I never use them since I have two websites of my own, gmail, and throw-away-emails/hotmail for anything I think will spam me.. anyway, ALL of these AOL emails (of which 2 are almost completely unguessable) frequently get all kinds of spam..
Yours, The anonymous coward to doesn't want to admit to using AOL.
There was something on UK news today which I found as bad as this; If criminals (the news item mentioned murderers, although I think it may have applied to all court cases) plead guilty they can have a severly reduced sentence, since it will save substancial amounts of money on court cases...
And I though justice had nothing to do with money.. Boy how I was wrong.
A movie you say? What a great idea! Why didn't he think of that anytime in the past 30 odd years?
What? Oh.. Apparently he did and it's coming out June 3rd 2005, starring Martin Freeman, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Anna Chancellor and Bill Nighy, and there's already a trailer for it, available here!
Documentation on ~ was only 2 clicks away from the homepage (the "more >>" link, then "web search features" at the side of the next page).
As for the features of google, there's no way I'll be able to list them all here, but they can all be found by looking through the links in help pages and whatnot... Well, here's my attempt anyway: search within the url, search within the title, search within the page, search for similar terms, search for exact terms, search within ragnes of numbers, search within dates, search within certain sites or tlds, search for certain filetypes, search for images, webpages, products. Theres specially made pages which search for U.S government stuff, mac stuff, bsd stuff, microsoft stuff and linux stuff, search for things in universities, theres google news, the calculator, spell checker, language translator, file translator, google answers, alerts, groups, gmail, blogger, toolbar, apis, theres that local search thing, maps, google directory, photo organiser, upcoming google browser, etc. etc. etc.
What, you mean like ~detect~? Seems to have a wildcard function to me.. aswell as literally hundreds of advanced functions that almost no other search engines posses..
While I would have agreed with you several months back about Outlook having better features and whatnot, Outlook, for no apparent reason (good ol' MS software), started having a mysterious problem with passwords which meant I couldn't access any of my emails on any of my accounts. Having used Thunderbird in it's early releases, I wasn't too keen about swapping back to it, but I had no other choice (well, apart from webmail, but then I can't tell whenever I recieve emails, which is always a pain). After swapping back, I had realised that Thunderbird had improved greatly and I'm very glad that Outlook b0rked up, otherwise I'd probably still be using it now.
Thunderbird probably does have a lot of features that Outlook doesn't have (or at least didn't appear to have), but I'm perfectly happy with the features Thunderbird does have and I don't require anything extra from it. It's interface looks much better than Outlooks boring GUI and it's junk mail filter is also extremely accurate, IMO - having marked around 98% of my junk emails as junk emails, with only 1 or 2 false positives in the whole time I've used it.
Anyway, you mustn't forget that features shouldn't be the only reason to swap over.. Outlook does have severe security issues that need to be addressed (anyone have a link to that bug where people aren't supposed to start emails with a certain word, because it makes Outlook think the rest of the email is actually a file? HAH!). Yeah, Thunderbird might have security issues too, but I seel much safer with TB than OL.
Heh. Obviously a joke, but anyway, to see it, you'll either have to buy the 1982 film (or is it a DVD of the TV Series?), or wait till June 2005, for the new film to be released (starring John Malkovich, Bill Nighy and Martin Freeman).
By the way, the BBC are also running another HHGTTG competition, which I submitted a story about, but alas, it got rejected. You have to write a new entry for Earth in exactly 264 words (262 more than "Mostly Harmless". UK residents only again, though luck America (and anywhere else for that matter).
Exactly. Makes me wonder what the price of a phone that just calls people (well, plus an addressbook and SMS) would actually cost now-a-days.. I'm guessing a hell of a lot cheaper than what phones do cost (yea, yea, hardware prices are dropping and all, but still..). This really sucks for people who aren't rich - they should offer customizable packages like most PC vendors do, that way people can get the phone they want (i.e. something that doesn't look like a brick) without all the costly extras that they're likely to never use. Although having said all that, I did tend to make extensive use of my camera when I got my phone, although I never originally planned on doing so. Most of the other features were pretty redundant though.
Although the results from your (friend's) site do have a majority of Mozilla users, the hits aren't a staggering amount.. so it's more likely that the people who visit it share similar intrests and probably know eachother.. hence the browser stats may be a little unrepresentative.
The stat's for my own site are around the same as the summary percentages..
For this month (Up to current date):
IE: 76.6%
Mozilla: 16.2%
(Screenshot)
Since July this year (site launch):
IE: 80.8%
Mozilla: 14%
href="http://www.iceboarders.com/stats2.png">Scree nshot)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, no loading screens at all, ever!
:-p
Oh wait, except that one before you can play, oh.. and the ones that come while loading games, and while not a loading screen as such, when entering buildings or starting missions, at times it can take up to around a minute with nothing but a black screen and the name of the place/mission in the bottom corner. And while walking around the map, or more specifically, while driving or flying about the map, sometimes the floor, walls or buildings don't actually load until after you have crashed into them, although that is somewhat more rarer than the above.
But apart from that.. yeah, none at all.
Yeah, he also has the biggest penis and supply of V1@GR4 in the world
Hm.. not quite QED, assuming religion is right, hell exists or whatever - going on fact rather than opinion (we can't prove hell either exists or doesn't exist), we do however, know that photons exist, and photons have no mass. Sorry to reign in on your parrade, but I'm a slashdotter.
And yeah, I'm a real blast at parties.
Highly Off-Topic, but yes..
The McWhirter twins, IIRC. One (or maybe both) of them were obsessed with quirky facts. Then in 1950 they set up a business together to sell facts to newspapers. Roughly at the same time, the managing director of Guinness had an argument about the fastest bird in Europe but couldn't find any facts on it. Somehow, they ended up in contact with eachother and made the book we know as the Guinness Book of Records. Although they did have certain rules about what would and what wouldn't get put into the book.. no supernatural records (obvious reasons, I guess), no sex records (was to be a family book), no criminal feats (didn't want people doing illegal things to get into the book), and no records like eating the most marshmellows at once (didn't want people to die in the proccess). One died playing tennis, and one was killed by the IRA whilst offering £50,000 for information on terrorists..
Ditto. I just got it today actually, in fact it's only been installed for about 4 minutes.. and it's AOL (yeah, yeah, I don't care), I dunno if this is the same for the U.K., since I signed up a couple of weeks ago and TFA said they stopped taking bb orders earlier this year...
IIRC, for each qubit you add, the computing power doubles. So while we're not into the really powerful stuff yet, progress should be pretty rapid. I've dug up a little info from google and this seems to be a great place to learn as to how it all works. Because of superposition (read the link), "the number of computations that a quantum computer could undertake is 2^n, where n is the number of qubits used. A quantum computer comprised of 500 qubits would have a potential to do 2^500 calculations in a single step. This is an awesome number - 2^500 is infinitely more atoms than there are in the known universe (this is true parallel processing - classical computers today, even so called parallel processors, still only truly do one thing at a time: there are just two or more of them doing it)". 7 doesn't seem like much, but a few times more and you have an extremely powerful computer. As for the price, I haven't got a clue, Google it.
I agree that the huge number of patents on everything is pretty damn awful, soon there'll be nothing much left people can do without there being a high chance they're infringing on IP law. It's bound to breakdown at some point though, it's getting ridiculous, and not just the number there are. A lot of the (Microsoft) patents that get through, shouldn't - there are many they own where prior art exists. It's not just patents on technology in software either, I think there was a story on slashdot once about an Australian patenting the wheel, although I think that was mainly more to point out flaws in the way patents are appointed.
"FYI, infants do something early in life called "saying their first word"."
You must be new here. Here at slashdot we teach our young to do something early in life called "getting their first 'first post'". It earns them respect for many months onward and gives them time to culminate an emotional system, although it wont be used much, apart from to feel anger, disappointment and astonishment at the rate of articles with old or duplicated, often even multiple times, content. Oh, and not to forget jealousy and awe towards what we here call "pr0n". Then a few years down the line they learn how to type one handed and structure not only sentences with words consisting of 40 or so phonemes, but also 10 numerical digits, for example;
"7h15 c4k3 15 t45t3y m4n!!1!"
Although this habbit is soon dropped at later life when they realise how lame it looks, and how difficult it is to read. It is around this time that the child becomes aware to Microsoft's evil scummy contribution to the world and Linux/Mac gains another trusty young, propeller-headed, google-loving, virgin fanboy.
I think I can solve this tedious problem;
Step 1: Flatten [others] into a 1mm-thick sheet.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Profit!
Funny, a while back here in the UK there was a program about people who used tiny cameras which sent the image of credit card pins & numbers when put into an ATM back to a mobile sitting in a nearby street and I wondered how long it would be before I saw one used where I live..
Then last week, while walking through town at college I saw a swarm of police around an ATM machine with one of them holding those little camera strip things they put on ATM machines to look nicely inconspicuous while recording stuff.. Yeah they can be easily abused and it happens a lot, costs millions, but so can everything in the wrong hands, n they're cool
For those who dont get...
.9r to mean .9 recurring):
To prove 0.9 recurring = 1, we will multiply 0.9 recurring by 10, and take 0.9 recurring away, in effect multiplying it by 9 (for displaying purposes take
1) 0.9r * 10 = 9.9r
2) 0.9r * 1 = 0.9r
3) 9.9r - 0.9r = 9.0
Ok, so we multipled 0.9r by 10 to get 9.9r.
Then we multipled 0.9r by 1 to get 0.9r.
Then we took one occurance away from the other 10, which would leave us with 9 times 0.9r.
Since we took away 0.9r from 9.9r, the whole set of recurring numbers cancell eachother out, and we are left with the answer 9.0, so if we divide that answer by 9, we will get the answer to what 1 * 0.9r is, which turns out to be 1... so there you have it, 0.9r = 1.
If you haven't seen this before and are feeling conned, try it out with other numbers, it's the same rule.
As much as I want there to be a semantic web at some point, hopefully sooner than later, I can't see it being developed to the point of mass usefullness anytime soon.
There are many, many problems which stopped me from trying to develop my own things for the semantic web.
First of all, sorry for my ignorance if many of these problems have a solution, I haven't followed the development of the semantic web for a while now..
Let's think about this.. let's say there's some user, Ben Smith, who enters his perfectly valid information about himself into the a database about people. Due to the massive amount of people named Ben Smith, when someone tries to get information about Ben Smith (assuming there's no data protection stuff and people are free to access info on him), it would yield results of people from Canada, England, various states in the US, as well as several other locations, all of which are correct.. yet not much use to us.
Considering that correct information will be pretty useless a lot of the time without being very very pedantic in the query (which we probably won't be able to do, since we are searching for info about it in the first place), just imagine the problems that would arrise if somebody somehow enters false information into the semweb. Would *all* information have to be verified? That could and would take far, far, far too long and would put a serious stump on expansion.
What about how to collect the information? Would programs be made to scan the web for information? If so, these programs would have to be extremely clever.. anybody who has tried to make AI programs will know that making sense from english is difficult at the best of times, let alone when people use misleasing (even if not intentional) grammar or spelling. If not, again, it would take a heck of a long time to get lots of useful information into the semantic web..
How would it all be updated, think about how many new news stories appear on the web every day, how can it all be added without verification or AI-type programs? The list of problems that spring to mind are plentiful...
That said, I also hope for the good, just don't be expecting much anytime soon.
Oh well.. so much for the anonyminity, forgot to hit the 'post anonymously' button. Fuck it... I use AOL, flame me.
I've never had that problem, but then I haven't used hotmail recently, and when I used to, I signed up to lots of stuff so I wouldn't be able to tell anyway.
However, AOL is absolutely fucking terrible for this, ALL of my screennames (and therefore email addresses) have never been used, at all. I never use them since I have two websites of my own, gmail, and throw-away-emails/hotmail for anything I think will spam me.. anyway, ALL of these AOL emails (of which 2 are almost completely unguessable) frequently get all kinds of spam..
Yours, The anonymous coward to doesn't want to admit to using AOL.
There was something on UK news today which I found as bad as this; If criminals (the news item mentioned murderers, although I think it may have applied to all court cases) plead guilty they can have a severly reduced sentence, since it will save substancial amounts of money on court cases...
And I though justice had nothing to do with money.. Boy how I was wrong.
A movie you say? What a great idea! Why didn't he think of that anytime in the past 30 odd years?
What? Oh.. Apparently he did and it's coming out June 3rd 2005, starring Martin Freeman, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Anna Chancellor and Bill Nighy, and there's already a trailer for it, available here!
Documentation on ~ was only 2 clicks away from the homepage (the "more >>" link, then "web search features" at the side of the next page).
As for the features of google, there's no way I'll be able to list them all here, but they can all be found by looking through the links in help pages and whatnot...
Well, here's my attempt anyway: search within the url, search within the title, search within the page, search for similar terms, search for exact terms, search within ragnes of numbers, search within dates, search within certain sites or tlds, search for certain filetypes, search for images, webpages, products. Theres specially made pages which search for U.S government stuff, mac stuff, bsd stuff, microsoft stuff and linux stuff, search for things in universities, theres google news, the calculator, spell checker, language translator, file translator, google answers, alerts, groups, gmail, blogger, toolbar, apis, theres that local search thing, maps, google directory, photo organiser, upcoming google browser, etc. etc. etc.
Hhmm.. actually it seems you only actually need to use the ~ symbol before words, not after. My bad.
What, you mean like ~detect~? Seems to have a wildcard function to me.. aswell as literally hundreds of advanced functions that almost no other search engines posses..
Ah, here's the link to that bug.
And in true MS style, the solution is... not to use that word at the start of email messages.
While I would have agreed with you several months back about Outlook having better features and whatnot, Outlook, for no apparent reason (good ol' MS software), started having a mysterious problem with passwords which meant I couldn't access any of my emails on any of my accounts. Having used Thunderbird in it's early releases, I wasn't too keen about swapping back to it, but I had no other choice (well, apart from webmail, but then I can't tell whenever I recieve emails, which is always a pain).
After swapping back, I had realised that Thunderbird had improved greatly and I'm very glad that Outlook b0rked up, otherwise I'd probably still be using it now.
Thunderbird probably does have a lot of features that Outlook doesn't have (or at least didn't appear to have), but I'm perfectly happy with the features Thunderbird does have and I don't require anything extra from it. It's interface looks much better than Outlooks boring GUI and it's junk mail filter is also extremely accurate, IMO - having marked around 98% of my junk emails as junk emails, with only 1 or 2 false positives in the whole time I've used it.
Anyway, you mustn't forget that features shouldn't be the only reason to swap over.. Outlook does have severe security issues that need to be addressed (anyone have a link to that bug where people aren't supposed to start emails with a certain word, because it makes Outlook think the rest of the email is actually a file? HAH!). Yeah, Thunderbird might have security issues too, but I seel much safer with TB than OL.
My 2c.
Heh. Obviously a joke, but anyway, to see it, you'll either have to buy the 1982 film (or is it a DVD of the TV Series?), or wait till June 2005, for the new film to be released (starring John Malkovich, Bill Nighy and Martin Freeman).
By the way, the BBC are also running another HHGTTG competition, which I submitted a story about, but alas, it got rejected. You have to write a new entry for Earth in exactly 264 words (262 more than "Mostly Harmless". UK residents only again, though luck America (and anywhere else for that matter).
Tha printer isn't actually 3D, it only has 2 axis and the chocolate is only one layer thick.
Although there are plenty of actual 3D printers.
w00t, my first post using DVORAK.
Exactly. Makes me wonder what the price of a phone that just calls people (well, plus an addressbook and SMS) would actually cost now-a-days.. I'm guessing a hell of a lot cheaper than what phones do cost (yea, yea, hardware prices are dropping and all, but still..). This really sucks for people who aren't rich - they should offer customizable packages like most PC vendors do, that way people can get the phone they want (i.e. something that doesn't look like a brick) without all the costly extras that they're likely to never use.
Although having said all that, I did tend to make extensive use of my camera when I got my phone, although I never originally planned on doing so. Most of the other features were pretty redundant though.
Although the results from your (friend's) site do have a majority of Mozilla users, the hits aren't a staggering amount.. so it's more likely that the people who visit it share similar intrests and probably know eachother.. hence the browser stats may be a little unrepresentative.
e nshot)
The stat's for my own site are around the same as the summary percentages..
For this month (Up to current date):
IE: 76.6%
Mozilla: 16.2%
(Screenshot)
Since July this year (site launch):
IE: 80.8%
Mozilla: 14%
href="http://www.iceboarders.com/stats2.png">Scre