Unfortunately, neither of these companies tell me how many lumens they produce. I use higher wattage compact fluorescents (25-42 watts) that produce 1100-2000 lumens anywhere I read. The 36-LED light would probably be bright enough for normal use, but the rest would be relegated to accent lighting, which I don't waste energy on (that's what all the blinkenlights and the LCD monitors are for), or for the bathroom and bedrooms. And I found a new CFL for the bathroom...
It reads like an opinion piece passed off as fact.
He's an interface designer. It's his job to point out weaknesses in flawed GUIs and so forth. Yes, it's opinion. And one based on some experience in the subject of human-computer interface design.
Sure, the specific things he describes may be there, but whether they're good, bad is a matter of what a user's accustomed to.
Indeed. You can become "accustomed to" a lot of stupid, or even bad things. Wouldn't it be better to correct flaws before it's too late?
If someone were to "fix" every single item on that list, people will still complain, because you've eliminated their "GUI givens," the things that are a "given" when considering interacting with their GUI.
Hopefully, they've worked out the assorted design issues (huge controllers, superlarge system that doesn't really fit anywhere, horribly buggy games including KoToR, power adaptors which start house fires, incessasnt cooling issues, DVD support, projector support).
Fear not, Microsoft has been listening to the debate about the size of their controller. That's why each and every Xbox360 system comes with a 3-month supply of Jose Canseco Brand (tm) Steroidal Hand Cream and illustrated exercise chart. Within 6-12 weeks, that enormous controller will comfortably fit your mutated, gigantic, powerful hands.
Microsoft doesn't like buggy games any more than you, the consumer, do. That's why backward compatibility with old Xbox titles may be limited, or completely eliminated, depending on which rumor you believe. Rest assured that when purchasing new copies of the same game you had for Xbox, they will be certified to not have the same annoying bugs that the old version had.
My hope is that the scientist(s) responsible for this accident, are at least, fined for this incident. I hope if there is gross incompetence, that they not work as a scientist in a medical facility ever again.
Doctors kill over 100,000 patients a year through negligence or incompetence. Health professionals (including doctors) kill around 250,000 people a year through negligence, incompetence, or malice. They aren't held accountable. Why should we hold a scientist more accountable?
I think it's great how preoccupied so many people are about these completely obscure hypothetical apocalypse events. If life has been ticking for hundreds of millions of years without a hitch you can be damn sure that the least of our worries are going to be random gamma radiation. How about the fact that we've lost almost 50% of all types of tropical, mediterranean and temperate forests as well as 30% of deserts over the past 100 years. Stop staring at the sky waiting for asteroids and mythical dragons to swoop down and annihilate the human race, the SUV in your driveway is a much more likely candidate people...
Okay, if the human race destroys itself before the next Gamma ray burst hits the planet, I owe you a Coke.
Even tho many of its early users hate steam, its an interesting way of pushing out software. Saves the gamemakers money, and the gamers legs.
So, rather than being raped at EBGames for the $55, I got raped by Steam for the $55. And I got the added bonus of downloading it over a few days. You'd think with all the time they save through this new distribution channel, they'd spend time on an expansion pack to actually finish the game. Sour grapes, I know.
If I didn't have to connect to Steam ever again after activating the damn game, I wouldn't mind. Why do they have to force you to periodically connect to Steam? Yes, even running offline-- your token expires. It annoys me, and hasn't stopped pirates.
And what happens in 5 years when Steam is gone and you want to play your vintage HL2 + favorite mod? Hmmm? Or maybe Steam will still be around, but they no longer support HL2 since moving to a subscription model, tough luck. Still, you can shell out $80 for the new, improved HL4 with a 3 month trial.
Well, I'm not a rocket scientist, so I can't say whether an Orion drive or ion drive is better for any particular mission. No, I'm not too fond of the idea of nuclear (explosion) propulsion. I assumed that anyone executing the idea would take into account using the drive only at a "safe" distance from Earth.
The only difficulty I see, aside from a catastrophic accident, is that pesky Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Let's allow for "peaceful" use of nuclear explosions in space? Great. China, USA, and any other country that could afford it would soon have "peaceful" Orion drive space probes ready to go. Perhaps they can be deployed near your enemy's military and civilian communications/spy satellites. Is the EMP from the drive system strong enough to fry their electronics? What's next? An orbital wea^H^H^Hspace station where they could bring them up piece by piece for later deployment? Ahh, the possibilites are endless.
On the other hand, maybe we'll all make friends when we find the aliens (and the aliens find us tasty).
It'd be great if NASA (or someone higher up on the food chain) had the cojones to put an orion drive on a probe.
You mean like Deep Space 1 [nasa.gov]? It sounds like you have a good proposal for a mission. Personally, I think particle and fields science is pretty dull.
No, no, NO! He meains Orion Drive, not Ion Drive. The Orion Drive was thought up in the 50s, when other great ideas, like the Flying Crowbar were being developed. Compare detonating nuclear bomblets as a propulsive force (Orion Drive) with accelerating a harmless, inert gas through an electric field (Ion Drive). Which would you prefer malfunctioning catastrophically?
No IP addresses of the machines, the virus must be detected by their virus scanner (and be harmless!), and the machines don't open email attachments. Gee, I don't run Outlook or open attachments on my Windows machine, using the same terms, I must be invulnerable.
That's not to say I think Apple is as vulnerable as Windows, just that this "contest" is rigged.
The "degaussing slot." Located above the built-in floppy drive (or was it below?), this space provides an inviting location to store your floppies when you're on the move. What they didn't tell you is that any floppy left in that space when the unit gets turned on has a better than average probability of being wiped by the degaussing circuit of the monitor.
If you need the extra performance by moving the swap, moving it to a separate partition will just slow everything down because the head has to move further on the platter to get there. If it's interspersed among your data, the chances it needs to hunt for the right track is that much reduced because it's already pretty close to being there already.
What you really want to do is have that physical partition in the middle of the drive, reducing the distance that the RW head travels from data areas to swap, thus reducing latency. Yes, a separate hard drive is better.
Also, I'd love to find a pointer to building an inexpensive (not cheap, there's a difference), reliable machine... much more interesting to me anyway.
www.newegg.com
Asus mainboard, stick o' Corsair RAM, cheapest Athlon XP (Barton core) left, Antec Sonata case, cheap FX5500 graphics card, check weekend ads for 80-250 GB hard drive deal, mouse and keyboard. You should sneak in under $500. Add another $300 for the 19" LCD.
So you can back up everything on one CD - fantastic! So, why do you ever need more than 2 backup CDRWs then? One for current backup, one for the last one. If everything you need to back up fit son one CD, you don't need to keep a stockpile of old backups around.
First, I don't keep every single document or project that I've ever worked on in my life on the computer. At some point, I dump "Project X" off the hard drive and the last CD containing that project is marked as such. I don't trust CDRWs to last more than a few dozen rewrites, as I've had a few suffer data integrity losses. I'll stick with the phthalocyanine CD-Rs and use the gold for terminal projects and digital photography work. At some point I destroy CDR backups without any important terminal project on it. Usually around spring cleaning.
Assuming you are an averagely busy person who has time to watch 2-3 movies a week, if you have a 400 SVCD collection of movies, even assuming that you watched only those movies for an entire year, the odds of you watching any given one of those movies is less than 0.5%. Assuming you do other things than watch crappy old movies (like watch crappy new ones), your eyes will probbaly never even look at 75% of that colleciton for your whole life.
I believe that certain things should be saved for posterity. If that means that I have to have 5, 6,..., 20? CD books full of movies, then so be it. Don't come crying to me when you want to see Tom Baker as the Doctor, or your favorite My Favorite Martian episode.
Go through them, pick out your true favorites, toss the rest. You will thank yourself later when your GF stops calling your place a hellhole and starts spending time there.
Contrary to popular belief, being a packrat does not imply that you live in a house with stacks of newspaper up to the ceiling. And the wife doesn't know about the GF, so *shhh*.
Drivers? Get on the web, download the latest versions of everything, put them all on one CD. I guarantee that there is nothing else on those driver disks that's worth keeping.
Great, unless you can't find it on the web when you need it. Or you need a newer version since you upgraded some software, or you need an older version than the one you did burn, or you can't install just the driver without having the super-duper-install-drivers and-tons-of-crap-you-don't-need CD.
Games/Movies? Trust me, you do not need too keep every single one you ever purchased. I know it's tempting to keep them "just in case", but that case will never come. Sell them used or give them away. If it's in your closet now it can't be that worth keeping.
What? And jettison my 400 SVCD collection of my former VHS collection of crappy sci-fi movies?!? Why, just yesterday I watched episode 3 of Space:1999 ("Black Sun"), and I liked it!
Backups? Who are you kidding? I can't think of many scenarios where an individuals vital data would take up more than a handful of CDs or one DVD. There is some stuff that just isn't worth the hassle of backing up like that. If you've got a bunch of ripped music or something just mirror it onto an external hard disk.
I can back up everything important on one CD. It's much easier to do a full backup once a week than to do an incremental backup since I don't have any backup software to figure out which of the 8,000 files changed. Some of us work from home and might just need to grab some file from a month ago.
I say this as a reformed packrat.
You've lost your edge. What happens when you need that PDP-11 you just threw away? That 300 Baud acoustic modem? Moebius for the Amiga? That Video Toaster you swore you'd use to make a short film? A spare A1000 for parts? Need to make a Mac SE fishtank, but threw away the half dozen (still working) Macs? I've got all those and more, just waiting for the moment they're desperately needed!
I say this as a true packrat: Keep packing and ratting until it's not safe to open the door to your storage area. Then go rent another one.
If the person is incarcerated, I don't see it as a violation of their rights. The real issue here is the "therapy".
The use of a lie detector to verify the veracity of a subject's responses has been proven, time and again, to produce false positives and false negatives in abundance. Also, there are simple tricks that can be used to "game" a lie detector. The administrator of the test can "game" the lie detector as well.
Let's put this in a different perspective. I were an Iowan (Iowite?), I'd be worried about a supposedly "cured" sex offender coming to live in my neighborhood. It's one thing to have the sex offender believe in the Tooth Fairy (Lie Detector), but it's insane for a sex offender's treatment/release to be based on what that Tooth Fairy says about the sex offender.
When reached for comment about a new fan-created film, Mr. D. Vader, a spokesperson for LucasFilms released the following statement: "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed, the ability to host a file is no match for the power of the Slashdot force."
No, no, NO! You're misunderestimating EA's position entirely. What they're saying is that EA did NOT force its employees to work 20-40 hours of overtime per week. The perception that they would be fired or passed over for bonuses and raises if they didn't work long hours is wholly incorrect. They voluntarily worked those hours! The only thing EA can be faulted for is having excellent employees who were willing to put their dedication before their own families and mental health.
This looks a lot like the Colani mouse that I had back in '95. It was comfortable to use, but I've gotten pretty used to my Kensington Expert Mouse Trackball.
The OP implies that there's some degree that's better than interesting and relevant job experience. I've hired people. Do you know how much attention we pay to what degrees they have?
Do *you* know how HR writes the ads for your company and screens out perfectly capable candidates because they haven't hit the buzzword bingo? Unless you have connections, that "paper" is your only way past HR drones.
The update button showed up for me today. I clicked it and it ran me through the download and install of 1.0.1. The automatic update was intentionally delayed because of server capacity issues; apparently they've got them sorted out now.
I wonder how much delaying the update helped their capacity issues. I simply downloaded the whole Firefox 1.0.1 archive after hearing about the vulnerability. So did everyone else I know that also runs Firefox. Just uninstall/reinstall and everything else (bookmarks, cookies, extensions) is still there.
That's right ladies, it's never too early to start thinking about an education in a career field that is bloated with unemployed and underemployed highly skilled workers under attack by commoditization of the workforce and outsourcing to cheaper workers in other countries. You too, could be a statistic (until you run out of unemployment compensation).
I'm all for girls (and boys) learning math and science, but if you want a job in IT, go to ITT or Devry after college. Of course, this advice may not apply in Canada...
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, neither of these companies tell me how many lumens they produce. I use higher wattage compact fluorescents (25-42 watts) that produce 1100-2000 lumens anywhere I read. The 36-LED light would probably be bright enough for normal use, but the rest would be relegated to accent lighting, which I don't waste energy on (that's what all the blinkenlights and the LCD monitors are for), or for the bathroom and bedrooms. And I found a new CFL for the bathroom...
Couldn't you incorporate and just pay yourself once a year to avoid the penalties?
It reads like an opinion piece passed off as fact.
He's an interface designer. It's his job to point out weaknesses in flawed GUIs and so forth. Yes, it's opinion. And one based on some experience in the subject of human-computer interface design.
Sure, the specific things he describes may be there, but whether they're good, bad is a matter of what a user's accustomed to.
Indeed. You can become "accustomed to" a lot of stupid, or even bad things. Wouldn't it be better to correct flaws before it's too late?
If someone were to "fix" every single item on that list, people will still complain, because you've eliminated their "GUI givens," the things that are a "given" when considering interacting with their GUI.
It's already too late, I guess.
Hopefully, they've worked out the assorted design issues (huge controllers, superlarge system that doesn't really fit anywhere, horribly buggy games including KoToR, power adaptors which start house fires, incessasnt cooling issues, DVD support, projector support).
Fear not, Microsoft has been listening to the debate about the size of their controller. That's why each and every Xbox360 system comes with a 3-month supply of Jose Canseco Brand (tm) Steroidal Hand Cream and illustrated exercise chart. Within 6-12 weeks, that enormous controller will comfortably fit your mutated, gigantic, powerful hands.
Microsoft doesn't like buggy games any more than you, the consumer, do. That's why backward compatibility with old Xbox titles may be limited, or completely eliminated, depending on which rumor you believe. Rest assured that when purchasing new copies of the same game you had for Xbox, they will be certified to not have the same annoying bugs that the old version had.
My hope is that the scientist(s) responsible for this accident, are at least, fined for this incident. I hope if there is gross incompetence, that they not work as a scientist in a medical facility ever again.
Doctors kill over 100,000 patients a year through negligence or incompetence. Health professionals (including doctors) kill around 250,000 people a year through negligence, incompetence, or malice. They aren't held accountable. Why should we hold a scientist more accountable?
itself gets damaged during lift-off? Wouldn't it be safer/cheaper to use the Soyuz docked with the space station and send up a replacement?
I think it's great how preoccupied so many people are about these completely obscure hypothetical apocalypse events. If life has been ticking for hundreds of millions of years without a hitch you can be damn sure that the least of our worries are going to be random gamma radiation. How about the fact that we've lost almost 50% of all types of tropical, mediterranean and temperate forests as well as 30% of deserts over the past 100 years. Stop staring at the sky waiting for asteroids and mythical dragons to swoop down and annihilate the human race, the SUV in your driveway is a much more likely candidate people...
Okay, if the human race destroys itself before the next Gamma ray burst hits the planet, I owe you a Coke.
Even tho many of its early users hate steam, its an interesting way of pushing out software. Saves the gamemakers money, and the gamers legs.
So, rather than being raped at EBGames for the $55, I got raped by Steam for the $55. And I got the added bonus of downloading it over a few days. You'd think with all the time they save through this new distribution channel, they'd spend time on an expansion pack to actually finish the game. Sour grapes, I know.
If I didn't have to connect to Steam ever again after activating the damn game, I wouldn't mind. Why do they have to force you to periodically connect to Steam? Yes, even running offline-- your token expires. It annoys me, and hasn't stopped pirates.
And what happens in 5 years when Steam is gone and you want to play your vintage HL2 + favorite mod? Hmmm? Or maybe Steam will still be around, but they no longer support HL2 since moving to a subscription model, tough luck. Still, you can shell out $80 for the new, improved HL4 with a 3 month trial.
How do people deal with MAPS and other RBL services who will not cooperate or be reasonable?
Lawsuits, generally.
Well, I'm not a rocket scientist, so I can't say whether an Orion drive or ion drive is better for any particular mission. No, I'm not too fond of the idea of nuclear (explosion) propulsion. I assumed that anyone executing the idea would take into account using the drive only at a "safe" distance from Earth.
The only difficulty I see, aside from a catastrophic accident, is that pesky Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Let's allow for "peaceful" use of nuclear explosions in space? Great. China, USA, and any other country that could afford it would soon have "peaceful" Orion drive space probes ready to go. Perhaps they can be deployed near your enemy's military and civilian communications/spy satellites. Is the EMP from the drive system strong enough to fry their electronics? What's next? An orbital wea^H^H^Hspace station where they could bring them up piece by piece for later deployment? Ahh, the possibilites are endless.
On the other hand, maybe we'll all make friends when we find the aliens (and the aliens find us tasty).
It'd be great if NASA (or someone higher up on the food chain) had the cojones to put an orion drive on a probe.
You mean like Deep Space 1 [nasa.gov]? It sounds like you have a good proposal for a mission. Personally, I think particle and fields science is pretty dull.
No, no, NO! He meains Orion Drive, not Ion Drive. The Orion Drive was thought up in the 50s, when other great ideas, like the Flying Crowbar were being developed. Compare detonating nuclear bomblets as a propulsive force (Orion Drive) with accelerating a harmless, inert gas through an electric field (Ion Drive). Which would you prefer malfunctioning catastrophically?
No IP addresses of the machines, the virus must be detected by their virus scanner (and be harmless!), and the machines don't open email attachments. Gee, I don't run Outlook or open attachments on my Windows machine, using the same terms, I must be invulnerable.
That's not to say I think Apple is as vulnerable as Windows, just that this "contest" is rigged.
Very likely, though I thought the problem only occurred when first turning on the unit. Leading me to believe there was a degaussing circuit.
The "degaussing slot." Located above the built-in floppy drive (or was it below?), this space provides an inviting location to store your floppies when you're on the move. What they didn't tell you is that any floppy left in that space when the unit gets turned on has a better than average probability of being wiped by the degaussing circuit of the monitor.
If you need the extra performance by moving the swap, moving it to a separate partition will just slow everything down because the head has to move further on the platter to get there. If it's interspersed among your data, the chances it needs to hunt for the right track is that much reduced because it's already pretty close to being there already.
What you really want to do is have that physical partition in the middle of the drive, reducing the distance that the RW head travels from data areas to swap, thus reducing latency. Yes, a separate hard drive is better.
Also, I'd love to find a pointer to building an inexpensive (not cheap, there's a difference), reliable machine... much more interesting to me anyway.
www.newegg.com
Asus mainboard, stick o' Corsair RAM, cheapest Athlon XP (Barton core) left, Antec Sonata case, cheap FX5500 graphics card, check weekend ads for 80-250 GB hard drive deal, mouse and keyboard. You should sneak in under $500. Add another $300 for the 19" LCD.
So you can back up everything on one CD - fantastic! So, why do you ever need more than 2 backup CDRWs then? One for current backup, one for the last one. If everything you need to back up fit son one CD, you don't need to keep a stockpile of old backups around.
First, I don't keep every single document or project that I've ever worked on in my life on the computer. At some point, I dump "Project X" off the hard drive and the last CD containing that project is marked as such. I don't trust CDRWs to last more than a few dozen rewrites, as I've had a few suffer data integrity losses. I'll stick with the phthalocyanine CD-Rs and use the gold for terminal projects and digital photography work. At some point I destroy CDR backups without any important terminal project on it. Usually around spring cleaning.
Assuming you are an averagely busy person who has time to watch 2-3 movies a week, if you have a 400 SVCD collection of movies, even assuming that you watched only those movies for an entire year, the odds of you watching any given one of those movies is less than 0.5%. Assuming you do other things than watch crappy old movies (like watch crappy new ones), your eyes will probbaly never even look at 75% of that colleciton for your whole life.
I believe that certain things should be saved for posterity. If that means that I have to have 5, 6,..., 20? CD books full of movies, then so be it. Don't come crying to me when you want to see Tom Baker as the Doctor, or your favorite My Favorite Martian episode.
Go through them, pick out your true favorites, toss the rest. You will thank yourself later when your GF stops calling your place a hellhole and starts spending time there.
Contrary to popular belief, being a packrat does not imply that you live in a house with stacks of newspaper up to the ceiling. And the wife doesn't know about the GF, so *shhh*.
Drivers? Get on the web, download the latest versions of everything, put them all on one CD. I guarantee that there is nothing else on those driver disks that's worth keeping.
Great, unless you can't find it on the web when you need it. Or you need a newer version since you upgraded some software, or you need an older version than the one you did burn, or you can't install just the driver without having the super-duper-install-drivers and-tons-of-crap-you-don't-need CD.
Games/Movies? Trust me, you do not need too keep every single one you ever purchased. I know it's tempting to keep them "just in case", but that case will never come. Sell them used or give them away. If it's in your closet now it can't be that worth keeping.
What? And jettison my 400 SVCD collection of my former VHS collection of crappy sci-fi movies?!? Why, just yesterday I watched episode 3 of Space:1999 ("Black Sun"), and I liked it!
Backups? Who are you kidding? I can't think of many scenarios where an individuals vital data would take up more than a handful of CDs or one DVD. There is some stuff that just isn't worth the hassle of backing up like that. If you've got a bunch of ripped music or something just mirror it onto an external hard disk.
I can back up everything important on one CD. It's much easier to do a full backup once a week than to do an incremental backup since I don't have any backup software to figure out which of the 8,000 files changed. Some of us work from home and might just need to grab some file from a month ago.
I say this as a reformed packrat.
You've lost your edge. What happens when you need that PDP-11 you just threw away? That 300 Baud acoustic modem? Moebius for the Amiga? That Video Toaster you swore you'd use to make a short film? A spare A1000 for parts? Need to make a Mac SE fishtank, but threw away the half dozen (still working) Macs? I've got all those and more, just waiting for the moment they're desperately needed!
I say this as a true packrat: Keep packing and ratting until it's not safe to open the door to your storage area. Then go rent another one.
If the person is incarcerated, I don't see it as a violation of their rights. The real issue here is the "therapy".
The use of a lie detector to verify the veracity of a subject's responses has been proven, time and again, to produce false positives and false negatives in abundance. Also, there are simple tricks that can be used to "game" a lie detector. The administrator of the test can "game" the lie detector as well.
Let's put this in a different perspective. I were an Iowan (Iowite?), I'd be worried about a supposedly "cured" sex offender coming to live in my neighborhood. It's one thing to have the sex offender believe in the Tooth Fairy (Lie Detector), but it's insane for a sex offender's treatment/release to be based on what that Tooth Fairy says about the sex offender.
When reached for comment about a new fan-created film, Mr. D. Vader, a spokesperson for LucasFilms released the following statement: "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed, the ability to host a file is no match for the power of the Slashdot force."
No, no, NO! You're misunderestimating EA's position entirely. What they're saying is that EA did NOT force its employees to work 20-40 hours of overtime per week. The perception that they would be fired or passed over for bonuses and raises if they didn't work long hours is wholly incorrect. They voluntarily worked those hours! The only thing EA can be faulted for is having excellent employees who were willing to put their dedication before their own families and mental health.
This looks a lot like the Colani mouse that I had back in '95. It was comfortable to use, but I've gotten pretty used to my Kensington Expert Mouse Trackball.
The OP implies that there's some degree that's better than interesting and relevant job experience. I've hired people. Do you know how much attention we pay to what degrees they have?
Do *you* know how HR writes the ads for your company and screens out perfectly capable candidates because they haven't hit the buzzword bingo? Unless you have connections, that "paper" is your only way past HR drones.
The update button showed up for me today. I clicked it and it ran me through the download and install of 1.0.1. The automatic update was intentionally delayed because of server capacity issues; apparently they've got them sorted out now.
I wonder how much delaying the update helped their capacity issues. I simply downloaded the whole Firefox 1.0.1 archive after hearing about the vulnerability. So did everyone else I know that also runs Firefox. Just uninstall/reinstall and everything else (bookmarks, cookies, extensions) is still there.
That's right ladies, it's never too early to start thinking about an education in a career field that is bloated with unemployed and underemployed highly skilled workers under attack by commoditization of the workforce and outsourcing to cheaper workers in other countries. You too, could be a statistic (until you run out of unemployment compensation).
I'm all for girls (and boys) learning math and science, but if you want a job in IT, go to ITT or Devry after college. Of course, this advice may not apply in Canada...