Heh, there was once a time where I had three mice (only 1 cursor though) - I had a normal PS2 mouse plugged in, an old COM port (I think.. never been too sure what port it was) mouse and a wireless USB mouse all plugged in at the same time, and they could all control the cursor.
Hehe, it was good for playing tricks on my parents when they were sitting at the desk with the PS2 mouse and I'm sitting a few feet behind them with the handy wireless USB mouse. *evillaugh*
Although many people are opposed to any microsoft anything, I have to say that their WMA format is very very useful at low bitrates.
I can use [a trial] of WMA Workshop to compress music files to as low as 2kbs. That's nothing special within itself, however, what is impressive (no matter how its done, IMO), is the fact that you can hear (and pretty clearly too) both the music AND words to the vast majority of songs. Which makes it perfect for sending my friends ultra-small previews (normally around 200kb in size) of full songs, so they know what they sound like - no doubt we've all told somebody to downl.. *cough* buy a song, but they hesitate because they think it will sound crap.
Note to members of the RIAA: The above statement is purely fictional. I have never and would never even consider the illegal distribution of music.
Excuse my ignorace, but surely nanotechnology would produce safer, lighter and cheaper (depending on the meaning.. I'm assuming consumer-side cost) everything?
Mod me down if you will, I know it is slightly offtopic, but I think the majority of people involved with the music business do a much much worse job than they could. They are driven (not that I can really blame them) by profit. The artists themselves write terrible songs (look at 'Frankee's song in reply to Eamon's song - how many of us could write lyrics to another song? Exactly, pretty much everyone - It's not challenging, and her lyrics are pretty damn bad too). The critics don't really care who ends up number one, or who doesn't even enter the charts, they care about money. Just like Microsoft, and look where that got them (yeah, they may be rich, but they're hated by a lot of people).
Musicians, Footballers, Actors, etc. They all make massive amounts of money for things which contribute almost nothing to the evolution and development of mankind. Now look at people like nurses, firemen, teachers, etc. We (at least here in britain) often hear about them going on stike because of low pay, yet they contribute a great deal to mankind.
The whole monetary system is really messed up. If we sorted it out, we might see some musicians and critics who work hard at their job.
Disclaimer: I love music, couldn't live without it, and I think a lot of artists do a great job, but I stand by my point. They should get paid the same, if not less than people who actually do the world good.
Does anybody else find this a bit unfair? (Yeah, I know that's M$'s gameplan, but still)
I mean, the only OS which viruses are a major threat is windows.. and now they're going to sell AV software? That just takes the piss in my opinion.
"Hey Bill, we can't possibly fight off all these viruses, surely we'll start losing customers at some point", "Hey, I know! lets sell some Antivirus software, that way we make yet more money and we can get away with releasing patches at an even slower rate, and we get away with terrible programming"...
As you can see, the problem is clearly not FF (or Mozilla, anyway). It's most probably bad code written to work on IE, which won't work on the standard-obeying browsers.
Unfortunately, IE cannot render properly coded HTML/XHTML/CSS, and therefore webmasters make buggy pages to appear correct in IE. This means the buggy pages appear buggy in FF, which is just how they should appear, causing many people to think FF cannot render and IE is therefore better.
Once (and if) IE is booted off the top spot, you will see a vast majority of webmasters changing their crappy code for something which actually works right.
IE is paticularly bad for CSS (especailly CSS3) - This confirms that, Although FF isnt on the list, check out the Mozilla column compared to IE.. see what I mean?
I would have included it on the list, however, if you try to lucid dream about sexual things, you get exicted and almost always wake up. Which is a waste of a lucid dream.:( Pretty damn unfortunate.
Recently, I've been looking into hypnotism, subliminal pursuation, inducing alpha state conciously and lucid dreams.
Although this does seem pretty cool, I have a breif idea of how it works, and just like most things, once you know how it works, it doesn't impress you as much (well, if it's not that hard in the first place).
To me, it looks like it's using hypnotism techniques to make you fall asleep (dimming the lights, making you relax, playing music (if you time the beats right you can change the brain waves into an alpha state)). Anyway, as we know, hypnotists can make people fall asleep in seconds, so making a computer which makes people fall asleep in 30 minutes, I have to admit, doesn't impress me that much. Considering the techniques are very similar
The sleeping gadget which impress me is the NovaDreamer - a device which, when you train yourself, can induce lucid dreams - It detects when your eyes are in REM sleep, and then uses flashes and sounds at the right level to wake you into a lucid state.
For those who don't know what lucid dreams are; they are dreams in which you know you are dreaming, and can therefore control your dream in any way you want - fly, breathe underwater, whatever. There are reports people can predict the future in lucid dreams too, which I really don't know if thats BS or not, we've all had deja vu's, and apparently they are previous dreams we've had. Lucid dreaming deviced would be more impressive to me, but hey.
I spent some time learning assembly, simply because I wanted to. I found out how EXTREMELY fast it can be (If you've ever used REGEX - the engine is written in assembly - you'll know how much faster it is compared to string functions, in any language). However, I think the only times assembly is really needed is (in a few cases, C++ will do the job almost as well):
Cracking - Obvious reasons, you'll need to know how to program in ASM to know whats going on in programs, and therefore how to 'crack' them.
Kernel/Other core file development - Again, pretty obvious. Apart from the fact you can't really write kernels in VB and whatnot, you will want these files to be as fast as possible.
Graphic-Intensive games - Again, you want the game to run as fast as possible, you'll maybe get 60 fps if written in ASM, compared to about 10fps if written in VB.
Virus writing - polymorphic viruses, for example, if you want the program to actually change its contents when a virus scanner checks it, writing it in VB or something will quite a bit more than challenging.
There are probably other cases too. I think it IS important to know how computers work - as in the CPU, registers, etc. But in most cases, it's simply not needed.
If you want to optimize, you can learn how to optimize code in your own language. For example, 2 * 2 * 2 will be about extremely faster than 2^3. StrComp() type functions are faster than If (UCase(string1) = UCase(string2)), etc.
There are literally hundreds of companies here in the UK that have moved their call centers to India, and I can remember seeing numerous stories on./ about Indians being good at programming, outsourcing people and whatnot, I also remember a lotta ma mates having a virus which made a hidden file on my desktop with text about 'The great Indians' heh.
They're moving up in the world, and at pretty fast too. It's because they will work for a heck of a lot cheaper than the people in the UK, yet to the Indians, it's still more than an average wage. So both parties are happy.. Well, except all the redundant people over here.
I'm not a regular user of Linux so I really can't comment on the speeds compared to Windows.
However, I do know that as hardware costs drop and technology advances, programmers get lazy. Instead of 'bumming' programs down to maybe 30% the original size and speeding them up by the same amount, they figure the computer can handle all the bloat and so write bad code. So what we actually end up with is a computer maybe 4x as fast as last year, with software thats maybe 3x slower than last year.
I'm not that old really, so I don't really know what computers where like about a decade ago, however, looking at things like early versions of windows compared to XP and longhorn, there is far far far much more bloat and un-needed graphics, which must slow down the whole OS considerably.
I keep complaining to my parents I need a new PC (can't really afford my own), anyway, they argue that it's not that old and that it was perfectly fast when we bought it, and that's true.. programs used to open sharpish, but software has become extremely bloated since then (aswell as my comp getting filled up with various things) and now it can take up to 5 minutes to load certain apps (and I'm not exaggerating either).
Before I start, THIS IS NOT TROLL, NOR FLAMEBAIT. I'm just answering the question.
Its getting such negative responses because firstly, its not AI, secondly its not "pretty" art, basically; it sucks more than a horny prostitute.
Seriously, how difficult do you think it is to make that? They use a PHP library to show random shapes in flash.. I don't know the flash libraries myself, but I know it will be extremely easy - going on the GD, MySQL, PSpell and various other libaries PHP offers (btw, I could write this using static images in about 20minutes flat, probably less). They don't use any advanced techniques to actually show the art, its just random colours with random shapes in random places. Thats why its not impressive in the least.
Slashdot Mirror
"index of /admin" site:.gov
Pwned!
heh.. that seems like a pretty useful website..
Although a@a.com whoops none@none.com's ass
Nowhere near as bad as Crack!!
Heh, there was once a time where I had three mice (only 1 cursor though) - I had a normal PS2 mouse plugged in, an old COM port (I think.. never been too sure what port it was) mouse and a wireless USB mouse all plugged in at the same time, and they could all control the cursor.
Hehe, it was good for playing tricks on my parents when they were sitting at the desk with the PS2 mouse and I'm sitting a few feet behind them with the handy wireless USB mouse.
*evillaugh*
Although many people are opposed to any microsoft anything, I have to say that their WMA format is very very useful at low bitrates.
I can use [a trial] of WMA Workshop to compress music files to as low as 2kbs. That's nothing special within itself, however, what is impressive (no matter how its done, IMO), is the fact that you can hear (and pretty clearly too) both the music AND words to the vast majority of songs. Which makes it perfect for sending my friends ultra-small previews (normally around 200kb in size) of full songs, so they know what they sound like - no doubt we've all told somebody to downl.. *cough* buy a song, but they hesitate because they think it will sound crap.
Note to members of the RIAA: The above statement is purely fictional. I have never and would never even consider the illegal distribution of music.
Excuse my ignorace, but surely nanotechnology would produce safer, lighter and cheaper (depending on the meaning.. I'm assuming consumer-side cost) everything?
Profit
Non-lethal my ass, I almost died from just looking at the thing, my ribs still ache now.
I'd hate to see what this thing can do when actually used...
Mod me down if you will, I know it is slightly offtopic, but I think the majority of people involved with the music business do a much much worse job than they could.
They are driven (not that I can really blame them) by profit.
The artists themselves write terrible songs (look at 'Frankee's song in reply to Eamon's song - how many of us could write lyrics to another song? Exactly, pretty much everyone - It's not challenging, and her lyrics are pretty damn bad too). The critics don't really care who ends up number one, or who doesn't even enter the charts, they care about money. Just like Microsoft, and look where that got them (yeah, they may be rich, but they're hated by a lot of people).
Musicians, Footballers, Actors, etc. They all make massive amounts of money for things which contribute almost nothing to the evolution and development of mankind. Now look at people like nurses, firemen, teachers, etc. We (at least here in britain) often hear about them going on stike because of low pay, yet they contribute a great deal to mankind.
The whole monetary system is really messed up.
If we sorted it out, we might see some musicians and critics who work hard at their job.
Disclaimer: I love music, couldn't live without it, and I think a lot of artists do a great job, but I stand by my point. They should get paid the same, if not less than people who actually do the world good.
Their gluttony has grown at the same rate their OS requirements have.
Does anybody else find this a bit unfair? (Yeah, I know that's M$'s gameplan, but still)
I mean, the only OS which viruses are a major threat is windows.. and now they're going to sell AV software? That just takes the piss in my opinion.
"Hey Bill, we can't possibly fight off all these viruses, surely we'll start losing customers at some point", "Hey, I know! lets sell some Antivirus software, that way we make yet more money and we can get away with releasing patches at an even slower rate, and we get away with terrible programming"...
Ok, I would maybe accept the odd one or two dupes, but not if the same story has appeared only a few hours earlier.
2's company, 3's a crowd, and 4 is for the fat cats who wipe their ass with 50 dollar bills.
I should have probably posted a link to this in my other post, but anyway:
Browser Javascript Compatability, Browser DOM Compatability, Browser CSS Compatability.
As you can see, the problem is clearly not FF (or Mozilla, anyway). It's most probably bad code written to work on IE, which won't work on the standard-obeying browsers.
No, it IS light years ahead of IE.
Unfortunately, IE cannot render properly coded HTML/XHTML/CSS, and therefore webmasters make buggy pages to appear correct in IE.
This means the buggy pages appear buggy in FF, which is just how they should appear, causing many people to think FF cannot render and IE is therefore better.
Once (and if) IE is booted off the top spot, you will see a vast majority of webmasters changing their crappy code for something which actually works right.
IE is paticularly bad for CSS (especailly CSS3) - This confirms that, Although FF isnt on the list, check out the Mozilla column compared to IE.. see what I mean?
"I don't want to be an smartass..."
;)
Don't worry, you failed being a smartass within the first six words
I would have included it on the list, however, if you try to lucid dream about sexual things, you get exicted and almost always wake up. Which is a waste of a lucid dream. :( Pretty damn unfortunate.
Recently, I've been looking into hypnotism, subliminal pursuation, inducing alpha state conciously and lucid dreams.
Although this does seem pretty cool, I have a breif idea of how it works, and just like most things, once you know how it works, it doesn't impress you as much (well, if it's not that hard in the first place).
To me, it looks like it's using hypnotism techniques to make you fall asleep (dimming the lights, making you relax, playing music (if you time the beats right you can change the brain waves into an alpha state)). Anyway, as we know, hypnotists can make people fall asleep in seconds, so making a computer which makes people fall asleep in 30 minutes, I have to admit, doesn't impress me that much. Considering the techniques are very similar
The sleeping gadget which impress me is the NovaDreamer - a device which, when you train yourself, can induce lucid dreams - It detects when your eyes are in REM sleep, and then uses flashes and sounds at the right level to wake you into a lucid state.
For those who don't know what lucid dreams are; they are dreams in which you know you are dreaming, and can therefore control your dream in any way you want - fly, breathe underwater, whatever. There are reports people can predict the future in lucid dreams too, which I really don't know if thats BS or not, we've all had deja vu's, and apparently they are previous dreams we've had. Lucid dreaming deviced would be more impressive to me, but hey.
Anyway, there's my opinion.
Heh, 24 is a bit generous, they'll be out of business in less than an hour after been /.ed
However, I think the only times assembly is really needed is (in a few cases, C++ will do the job almost as well):
- Cracking - Obvious reasons, you'll need to know how to program in ASM to know whats going on in programs, and therefore how to 'crack' them.
- Kernel/Other core file development - Again, pretty obvious. Apart from the fact you can't really write kernels in VB and whatnot, you will want these files to be as fast as possible.
- Graphic-Intensive games - Again, you want the game to run as fast as possible, you'll maybe get 60 fps if written in ASM, compared to about 10fps if written in VB.
- Virus writing - polymorphic viruses, for example, if you want the program to actually change its contents when a virus scanner checks it, writing it in VB or something will quite a bit more than challenging.
There are probably other cases too.I think it IS important to know how computers work - as in the CPU, registers, etc. But in most cases, it's simply not needed.
If you want to optimize, you can learn how to optimize code in your own language. For example, 2 * 2 * 2 will be about extremely faster than 2^3. StrComp() type functions are faster than If (UCase(string1) = UCase(string2)), etc.
There are literally hundreds of companies here in the UK that have moved their call centers to India, and I can remember seeing numerous stories on ./ about Indians being good at programming, outsourcing people and whatnot, I also remember a lotta ma mates having a virus which made a hidden file on my desktop with text about 'The great Indians' heh.
They're moving up in the world, and at pretty fast too. It's because they will work for a heck of a lot cheaper than the people in the UK, yet to the Indians, it's still more than an average wage. So both parties are happy.. Well, except all the redundant people over here.
I'm not a regular user of Linux so I really can't comment on the speeds compared to Windows.
However, I do know that as hardware costs drop and technology advances, programmers get lazy. Instead of 'bumming' programs down to maybe 30% the original size and speeding them up by the same amount, they figure the computer can handle all the bloat and so write bad code. So what we actually end up with is a computer maybe 4x as fast as last year, with software thats maybe 3x slower than last year.
I'm not that old really, so I don't really know what computers where like about a decade ago, however, looking at things like early versions of windows compared to XP and longhorn, there is far far far much more bloat and un-needed graphics, which must slow down the whole OS considerably.
I keep complaining to my parents I need a new PC (can't really afford my own), anyway, they argue that it's not that old and that it was perfectly fast when we bought it, and that's true.. programs used to open sharpish, but software has become extremely bloated since then (aswell as my comp getting filled up with various things) and now it can take up to 5 minutes to load certain apps (and I'm not exaggerating either).
This is Microsoft. Here's how it works:
You have to buy them dinner, and take them to a movie, then they screw you.
For something more along the lines of a nice fast, stress-free relationship, try Linux.
Before I start, THIS IS NOT TROLL, NOR FLAMEBAIT. I'm just answering the question.
Its getting such negative responses because firstly, its not AI, secondly its not "pretty" art, basically; it sucks more than a horny prostitute.
Seriously, how difficult do you think it is to make that? They use a PHP library to show random shapes in flash.. I don't know the flash libraries myself, but I know it will be extremely easy - going on the GD, MySQL, PSpell and various other libaries PHP offers (btw, I could write this using static images in about 20minutes flat, probably less). They don't use any advanced techniques to actually show the art, its just random colours with random shapes in random places.
Thats why its not impressive in the least.
Oh.. I always thought it stood for Monopolising Scammers
. Maybe I just got confused because they're also Moronic Shitheads.