I bet when the Martian invasion comes and Slashdot reports it, instead of panicking like the people after the Orson Welles broadcast, Slashdotters will be like:
"Someone tell the editors it's not April fools anymore" (+3, Funny) "It's a dupe! Doesn't Taco read his own site?" (+2 Insightful) "I paid subscription rates for *this*?!" (+1 Insightful) "DUPE!!!" (-1, redundant) "I, for one, welcome our new Martian overlords" (+3, Funny) "Slashdot has gone really downhill lately, don't they check their sources?!" (+1 insightful)
and while they chatter away, the Martians will take over the world and kill everyone.
Right, while I have never done an "rm -Rf/", I have hosed my/lib directory when I thought I was just deleting some game's stupid lib directory.
I didn't know just how important/lib was until I did that and found a lot of basic CLI utils didn't work anymore.
The thing is, unless you have your shell prompt display the full path you're in or do a "pwd" before every delete, UNIX's dir naming traditions make it easy to mistake top-level dirs for some subdirectories. For example, a lot of programs will have their own 'bin' or 'lib' directories, some of the top-level dirs are repeated in/usr, so on.
What I've seen of hackers (both white and black hat) doesn't lead me to think they would do well in a military envornment. Does anyone know if there has been much problems with keeping the unit discipline?
I'm not just talking about the physical fitness stuff, I mean that most hackers seem to want to "screw with the system" a little. Maybe it comes from the same urge to reverse-engineer stuff, but the hackers I've seen tend to dislike bueracracy and "keeping your head down" to not stick out, which are things the military seems to have a lot of.
There are a couple of ex-mil. guys in my LUG, but they're the 'resposible sysadmin/programmer', with maybe a touch of BOFH syndrome.
I wonder if the military is recruiting hackers directly, or training their own people to be hackers?
As the general in charge of the "Five Grand Crapper Initiative" here at the Dept. of Defense, I take offense with your assertion that we waste taxpayer money or that our decisions are based on congressional vote buying.
I assure you, our decision to fund research into WMD-reisitant albino elephants, calfs made EMP-proof by gold plating, and pig meat for distribution to patriotic voters had nothing to do with the esteemed congresswhores^H^H^H^H^H^Hmen from those states.
Why, I am writing this to you right now on a paper computer built for over ten million dollars, thin and flexible as real paper, but with a full computer interface! A marvel of engineering! I am also on one of the prototype $5,000 crappers, and I must say it is the most comfortable dump I have ever taken. It's the next best thing to shitting on taxpayers.
Uh oh, it looks like I'm out of paper. I guess I will have to wipe my ass with Slashdot posts.
pseudomorphic - Similar to, but not having a shape heterojunction - Has one junction bipolar - Crazy transistor - A thingie that switches circuits gigahertz - One billion cycles per second
So, a crazy shapeless circuit-switcher with only one junction spun around 600 billion times in one second.
Uhhh... or just import it from somewhere else, like they do in Japan? They have about half the U.S. population in an area the size of California, so they import lots of food, especially from the U.S.
And given China and India's land area, I suspect they can support most of their people themselves even if they have a third of the world population.
Ooh, I can imagine some intrepid Indiana Jones type going up to the altar of the bottle of tang, and very quickly and carefully replacing it with a bottle of Evian.
Then he hears an ominous rumbling, and looks up to see a very rotund 800 pound NASA engineer who has been living on nothing but Cheetos and tang rolling towards him, yelling "My Taaang! Bring back my Taaaaaanngg!".
A chase scene between shelves of old NASA junk ensues.
... but I didn't shoot no deputy. Oh no, oh I shot the sheriff, but I didn't post anonymously Ooh, ooh, ooh Yeah
All around in my BBS They're tryin' to track me down, yeah They say they want to bring me in guilty For the killing of a deputy, for the life of a deputy But I say, oh, now, now...
This reminds me of what my high school's compuer lab did.
The room had a very high ceiling where all the heat would rise to, and when it got too hot we could activate large fans set high on the outside wall that would push air *out* of the room, instead of in. This pushed the hot air out, and new cooler air would come in from the rest of the building. There were metal shutters that would close when the fan was not in use, to keep outside air and humidity from coming in.
All in all, it was pretty effective, though a bit loud. Of course, this was a lab of PCs and Macs, not a datacenter.
Dook dook dook... If you're not aware that some types of speech such as libel are not protected by the constitution, you must not have passed civics class. Political speech is, of course, but this ordinance does not seem to infringe on it.
Alright, I'll make it simple enough for you to understand. This ordinance does not infringe on the constitution, because it does not stop free speech nor imposes prior restraint on it.
The ordinance basically requires political ads to have the "paid for by (whoever)" tag, and requires campaigns to file their expenses with the ethics commision. This does not prevent speech of any kind, it merely requires you to make more speech to inform the voters.
Yeah, SC2 is one of the most enjoyable space operas on the computer still, even though it's an old 2D action/strategy game. I keep wishing they would port it to the Game Boy Advance.
It had some of the most original aliens, and a really nice interweaving of the plots in a non-linear fashon. I just wish modern space games had such rich backround - the 'epic plot' of Halo pales in comparison to the races of SC2.
On a different note, though, the most original concept I've seen for a space game was in a game called 'Inca' from Sierra On-Line way back in 1992. Basically, it featured Incas as a spacefaring race conquered by Conquistadors with lasers and space galleons. Its ship designs were influenced by Inca and Spanish motifs, it looks rater different from the typical SF ships. I can't say much about the game play since i've never played it, but it looked like the game was like the Rebel Assault games from Lucas Arts.
To be fair, they were probably from a poor background in Mexico, so they wouldn't have gotten the same oppurtunities they got in their American school. I don't know what kind of college system or financial aid they have in Mexico, but the ones who can afford college there are probably not the ones sneaking across the border.
I'm not saying the America is a paradise for immigrants, but a lot of countries have more restrictive education systems than the US. I know a woman from Japan who came to college in the states because it was easier to get into school here than to get back into college in Japan after she dropped out for a while.
I am going to a community college majoring in IT with a Unix/Linux concentration. I am finding that I wish I'd gone into another major, like graphic arts or English or something.
I basically did it because I figured since I'm a computer geek, I may as well get a degree in it. However, I've found that the IT program at my school sucks. 40% of the students have left the IT program in the last year. Most of the credits will not transfer to another school, so if I go to a CS program I might have to start from scratch. And I do want to study CS more than IT.
In retrospect, I am thinking I should have used the comm. college to broaden my horizons a bit before concentrating on getting a BS in my chosen field.
I don't mean any disrespect to them, but I suspect that the other departments are not as inferior to their 4-year school counterparts as the IT/CS departments at a CC. Perhaps majoring in something like math at a CC will help you in your quest for a BS. It would be more likely to transfer credits, anyways.
Does anyone know where I could get a gender breakdown on game sales by gender, especially for Japanese companies?
It seemed to me that gamer culture was a bit more girl-friendly in Japan than in the States - I would guess Nintendo is probobly the company with the highest female player ratio, but does anyone know for sure?
While it had little to do with the actual political causes of the war, it had an effect on how the war was percieved and fought. Not that artists were running the war, mind you, but the generals and leaders had their view of war still stuck in the romantic and heroic myth of war.
They didn't seem to grasp the power of modern technology over men and willpower, and thought that a determined and spirited attack would be able to overcome modern defenses.
The public was also swayed by this notion into supporting the war as well. Looking at this page, it seems the British public thought of the war as a glorious adventure at first, and they did not have to resort to conscription until 1916.
Ja, ve Äusträlians spêäk die English fünéy, büt vat määde deine tink ve spøôke it dat bääd? Do nut confüse üs vit den Æüstrian fréiks, das ist Verbøten.
That is, however, not true. You don't need something to push against, you just need to exert a force in one direction, and there will be a a force in the opposite direction.
Because of this misconception, it was originally thought that rockets wouldn't work in space, because the exhaust they put out wouldn't be able to push against the atmosphere. But hey, they do!
Uggg.... No. And you call yourself a Trekkie God?!
You say you need to exsert force in one direction. Remember, however, that F = m*a ; Without the 'm', there is no F. You need something to push against.
As for why rockets work in space, you need to look at what the rocket is actually pushing. The rocket is actually pushing against the exhast gasses in the engine and sending it flying back at enormous speed. Once the gas and rocket push apart after giving acceleration to each other, it doesn't matter if either one pushes against anything or not. The force is imparted from the pushing apart of the rocket and fuel/exhast, not the rocket pushing against atmosphere or launch pad via exhaust.
People didn't think about this in the early days of rocketry because they didn't think a little gas coming out of the end of a spout could be enough to make a huge rocket go by itself. But think about it, most of the volume (and probobly the mass) of a rocket like the Saturn Vs are in the form of fuel and oxidizer. All that stuff ends up being shot backwards at tremendous speed, so you get a tremendous amount of force just from pushing fuel out the back. The amount of force on the rocket would be F = (mass of fuel + oxidizer) * (acceleration of exhaust gasses).
I don't know about the rest of the parent poster's comment, but given how wrong he got simple Newtonian physics, I don't think I would trust the rest of his comment, either.
I found it odd that there aren't any pics of the machine on those sites, so I looked around... Here are some pics of the prototype at top, and the finished version at bottom. It looks like it's going to be in classic "IBM black", like the 2001 monolith : )
Anyone know what kind of facilities blue gene will be housed at? The one for the earth simulator looks like something out of a movie, IBM better be able to compete on the 'cool factor'. : )
And does anyone else get the warm and fuzzy feelings from looking at these pics, even though there's nothing you could possibly use that much power for? Ahhh, power...
This reminds me of one time when someone vandalized our high school - they tried to spraypaint the words "Rogue Ale" with the 'A' done anarchy logo style all over a courtyard, like dozens of places. Rogue Ale is an actual brand of beer, btw. Unfortunately, they misspelled it as "Rouge Ale" (perhaps because they had been enjoying said beverage before going on their spree), and made themselves look like complete idiots in the process.
One teacher held up a dictionary and said, "If you know who did this, tell me who so I can get them a dictionary."
Doesn't the constitution say interstate commerce is the federal gov't's responsibility? Thus, wouldn't Utah be overstepping its bounds in blocking porn outside of Utah?
As for free speech, actually, the reason it doesn't infring on 1st amendment rights is that the list is opt-in.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet when the Martian invasion comes and Slashdot reports it, instead of panicking like the people after the Orson Welles broadcast, Slashdotters will be like:
"Someone tell the editors it's not April fools anymore" (+3, Funny)
"It's a dupe! Doesn't Taco read his own site?" (+2 Insightful)
"I paid subscription rates for *this*?!" (+1 Insightful)
"DUPE!!!" (-1, redundant)
"I, for one, welcome our new Martian overlords" (+3, Funny)
"Slashdot has gone really downhill lately, don't they check their sources?!" (+1 insightful)
and while they chatter away, the Martians will take over the world and kill everyone.
Or something.
Right, while I have never done an "rm -Rf /", I have hosed my /lib directory when I thought I was just deleting some game's stupid lib directory.
/lib was until I did that and found a lot of basic CLI utils didn't work anymore.
/usr, so on.
I didn't know just how important
The thing is, unless you have your shell prompt display the full path you're in or do a "pwd" before every delete, UNIX's dir naming traditions make it easy to mistake top-level dirs for some subdirectories. For example, a lot of programs will have their own 'bin' or 'lib' directories, some of the top-level dirs are repeated in
What I've seen of hackers (both white and black hat) doesn't lead me to think they would do well in a military envornment. Does anyone know if there has been much problems with keeping the unit discipline?
I'm not just talking about the physical fitness stuff, I mean that most hackers seem to want to "screw with the system" a little. Maybe it comes from the same urge to reverse-engineer stuff, but the hackers I've seen tend to dislike bueracracy and "keeping your head down" to not stick out, which are things the military seems to have a lot of.
There are a couple of ex-mil. guys in my LUG, but they're the 'resposible sysadmin/programmer', with maybe a touch of BOFH syndrome.
I wonder if the military is recruiting hackers directly, or training their own people to be hackers?
I'm curious, was this in Oregon, or do people outside the beaver state use it as well?
I did just that in a Eugene school, and we also had Odell Lake and Carmen Sandiego...
Ah, those were the days...
The interesting thing is that Trent has been a geeky guy for a while - he made "Pretty Hate Machine" using a Mac and a MIDI keyboard, IIRC.
He's also made the soundtrack for Quake because he liked Doom so much, and is close friends with John Carmack.
While not as geeky as some of the electronica musicians out there, he's still got geek cred.
Dear Mr. Seminal,
As the general in charge of the "Five Grand Crapper Initiative" here at the Dept. of Defense, I take offense with your assertion that we waste taxpayer money or that our decisions are based on congressional vote buying.
I assure you, our decision to fund research into WMD-reisitant albino elephants, calfs made EMP-proof by gold plating, and pig meat for distribution to patriotic voters had nothing to do with the esteemed congresswhores^H^H^H^H^H^Hmen from those states.
Why, I am writing this to you right now on a paper computer built for over ten million dollars, thin and flexible as real paper, but with a full computer interface! A marvel of engineering! I am also on one of the prototype $5,000 crappers, and I must say it is the most comfortable dump I have ever taken. It's the next best thing to shitting on taxpayers.
Uh oh, it looks like I'm out of paper. I guess I will have to wipe my ass with Slashdot posts.
- Gen. Pork
pseudomorphic - Similar to, but not having a shape
heterojunction - Has one junction
bipolar - Crazy
transistor - A thingie that switches circuits
gigahertz - One billion cycles per second
So, a crazy shapeless circuit-switcher with only one junction spun around 600 billion times in one second.
There. Understand?
Uhhh... or just import it from somewhere else, like they do in Japan? They have about half the U.S. population in an area the size of California, so they import lots of food, especially from the U.S.
And given China and India's land area, I suspect they can support most of their people themselves even if they have a third of the world population.
Ooh, I can imagine some intrepid Indiana Jones type going up to the altar of the bottle of tang, and very quickly and carefully replacing it with a bottle of Evian.
Then he hears an ominous rumbling, and looks up to see a very rotund 800 pound NASA engineer who has been living on nothing but Cheetos and tang rolling towards him, yelling "My Taaang! Bring back my Taaaaaanngg!".
A chase scene between shelves of old NASA junk ensues.
... but I didn't shoot no deputy.
Oh no, oh
I shot the sheriff, but I didn't post anonymously
Ooh, ooh, ooh Yeah
All around in my BBS
They're tryin' to track me down, yeah
They say they want to bring me in guilty
For the killing of a deputy, for the life of a deputy
But I say, oh, now, now...
- Bob Marley
Oh no, the FBI will be after Slashdot now!
This reminds me of what my high school's compuer lab did.
The room had a very high ceiling where all the heat would rise to, and when it got too hot we could activate large fans set high on the outside wall that would push air *out* of the room, instead of in. This pushed the hot air out, and new cooler air would come in from the rest of the building. There were metal shutters that would close when the fan was not in use, to keep outside air and humidity from coming in.
All in all, it was pretty effective, though a bit loud. Of course, this was a lab of PCs and Macs, not a datacenter.
Dook dook dook... If you're not aware that some types of speech such as libel are not protected by the constitution, you must not have passed civics class. Political speech is, of course, but this ordinance does not seem to infringe on it.
Alright, I'll make it simple enough for you to understand. This ordinance does not infringe on the constitution, because it does not stop free speech nor imposes prior restraint on it.
The ordinance basically requires political ads to have the "paid for by (whoever)" tag, and requires campaigns to file their expenses with the ethics commision. This does not prevent speech of any kind, it merely requires you to make more speech to inform the voters.
Yeah, SC2 is one of the most enjoyable space operas on the computer still, even though it's an old 2D action/strategy game. I keep wishing they would port it to the Game Boy Advance.
It had some of the most original aliens, and a really nice interweaving of the plots in a non-linear fashon. I just wish modern space games had such rich backround - the 'epic plot' of Halo pales in comparison to the races of SC2.
On a different note, though, the most original concept I've seen for a space game was in a game called 'Inca' from Sierra On-Line way back in 1992. Basically, it featured Incas as a spacefaring race conquered by Conquistadors with lasers and space galleons. Its ship designs were influenced by Inca and Spanish motifs, it looks rater different from the typical SF ships. I can't say much about the game play since i've never played it, but it looked like the game was like the Rebel Assault games from Lucas Arts.
link with screenshots, review of Inca 2
To be fair, they were probably from a poor background in Mexico, so they wouldn't have gotten the same oppurtunities they got in their American school. I don't know what kind of college system or financial aid they have in Mexico, but the ones who can afford college there are probably not the ones sneaking across the border.
I'm not saying the America is a paradise for immigrants, but a lot of countries have more restrictive education systems than the US. I know a woman from Japan who came to college in the states because it was easier to get into school here than to get back into college in Japan after she dropped out for a while.
I am going to a community college majoring in IT with a Unix/Linux concentration. I am finding that I wish I'd gone into another major, like graphic arts or English or something.
I basically did it because I figured since I'm a computer geek, I may as well get a degree in it. However, I've found that the IT program at my school sucks. 40% of the students have left the IT program in the last year. Most of the credits will not transfer to another school, so if I go to a CS program I might have to start from scratch. And I do want to study CS more than IT.
In retrospect, I am thinking I should have used the comm. college to broaden my horizons a bit before concentrating on getting a BS in my chosen field.
I don't mean any disrespect to them, but I suspect that the other departments are not as inferior to their 4-year school counterparts as the IT/CS departments at a CC. Perhaps majoring in something like math at a CC will help you in your quest for a BS. It would be more likely to transfer credits, anyways.
But does it have a stopwatch?!?!
Does anyone know where I could get a gender breakdown on game sales by gender, especially for Japanese companies?
It seemed to me that gamer culture was a bit more girl-friendly in Japan than in the States - I would guess Nintendo is probobly the company with the highest female player ratio, but does anyone know for sure?
While it had little to do with the actual political causes of the war, it had an effect on how the war was percieved and fought. Not that artists were running the war, mind you, but the generals and leaders had their view of war still stuck in the romantic and heroic myth of war.
They didn't seem to grasp the power of modern technology over men and willpower, and thought that a determined and spirited attack would be able to overcome modern defenses.
The public was also swayed by this notion into supporting the war as well. Looking at this page, it seems the British public thought of the war as a glorious adventure at first, and they did not have to resort to conscription until 1916.
Telekom Austria? Buntes Fernsehen?
Ja, ve Äusträlians spêäk die English fünéy, büt vat määde deine tink ve spøôke it dat bääd? Do nut confüse üs vit den Æüstrian fréiks, das ist Verbøten.
Krêikey.
That is, however, not true. You don't need something to push against, you just need to exert a force in one direction, and there will be a a force in the opposite direction.
Because of this misconception, it was originally thought that rockets wouldn't work in space, because the exhaust they put out wouldn't be able to push against the atmosphere. But hey, they do!
Uggg.... No. And you call yourself a Trekkie God?!
You say you need to exsert force in one direction. Remember, however, that F = m*a ; Without the 'm', there is no F. You need something to push against.
As for why rockets work in space, you need to look at what the rocket is actually pushing. The rocket is actually pushing against the exhast gasses in the engine and sending it flying back at enormous speed. Once the gas and rocket push apart after giving acceleration to each other, it doesn't matter if either one pushes against anything or not. The force is imparted from the pushing apart of the rocket and fuel/exhast, not the rocket pushing against atmosphere or launch pad via exhaust.
People didn't think about this in the early days of rocketry because they didn't think a little gas coming out of the end of a spout could be enough to make a huge rocket go by itself. But think about it, most of the volume (and probobly the mass) of a rocket like the Saturn Vs are in the form of fuel and oxidizer. All that stuff ends up being shot backwards at tremendous speed, so you get a tremendous amount of force just from pushing fuel out the back. The amount of force on the rocket would be F = (mass of fuel + oxidizer) * (acceleration of exhaust gasses).
I don't know about the rest of the parent poster's comment, but given how wrong he got simple Newtonian physics, I don't think I would trust the rest of his comment, either.
I found it odd that there aren't any pics of the machine on those sites, so I looked around... Here are some pics of the prototype at top, and the finished version at bottom. It looks like it's going to be in classic "IBM black", like the 2001 monolith : )
Some more pics of the prototype.
For comparison, the Earth simulator and big mac.
Anyone know what kind of facilities blue gene will be housed at? The one for the earth simulator looks like something out of a movie, IBM better be able to compete on the 'cool factor'. : )
And does anyone else get the warm and fuzzy feelings from looking at these pics, even though there's nothing you could possibly use that much power for? Ahhh, power...
This reminds me of one time when someone vandalized our high school - they tried to spraypaint the words "Rogue Ale" with the 'A' done anarchy logo style all over a courtyard, like dozens of places. Rogue Ale is an actual brand of beer, btw. Unfortunately, they misspelled it as "Rouge Ale" (perhaps because they had been enjoying said beverage before going on their spree), and made themselves look like complete idiots in the process.
One teacher held up a dictionary and said, "If you know who did this, tell me who so I can get them a dictionary."
No one fessed up to that one, AFAIK. : )
Doesn't the constitution say interstate commerce is the federal gov't's responsibility? Thus, wouldn't Utah be overstepping its bounds in blocking porn outside of Utah?
As for free speech, actually, the reason it doesn't infring on 1st amendment rights is that the list is opt-in.
Bah, it should be cycles, not bandwidth.
just do what I do:
mind$ drive --fast --avoidcollision
mind$ radio -v 9 --npr
mind$ nice +15 radio
So is this true on all Unix-like systems? I just checked the OS X box i'm using at school, it is currently 1111084982 as I type this.
And do we get to sacrifice a virgin when the time comes? Or would sacrificing a non-virgin make more sense in this crowd? : )