The scene: A road that was winding its way along a treacherous landscape (think Wile E. Coyote's home turf).
A generic couple were standing by the side of road, which was basically a piece of flat pavement cut into the side of a mountain. They were watching a garage inventor/scientist type explain his latest invention, a motorized luggage carrier. Sort of a motorcycle sidecar or luggage unit for people who didn't want to change the visual impact of their motorbike. It was an independent unit, had its own motor and fuel, and required only a slight modification to the motorcycle in the form of a radio transmitter. After that, it basically mimicked the motions of the "master" motorcycle.
Garage inventor gets on his bike, fires it up, and drives off. Sure enough, the other device (which I recall looking a lot like a large cooler on wheels) fired up by itself and followed. A few minutes later, the garage inventor loops back and drives by. Getting cocky, he waves at the couple. Unfortunately, he hits a rock and with only one hand on the handlebars, can't recover. He loses control, and drives off the side of the cliff. An unpleasant "crunch" is heard below.
Moments later, the motorized luggage holder comes along and dutifully throws itself off the cliff as well. A second "crunch" is heard.
The couple look down at the carnage and then leave.
I'm not allowed to where I work. Too much chance of something going wrong and then us getting blamed. My standard line for years has been "No virus scanner or spyware scanner is perfect."
The tests demonstrate that av products don't perform well. It is right on. 80% of my day is spent cleaning malware.
We wound up having to make the labor charge on our virus cleaning more expensive just to reduce the number of people getting it done. Takes up far too much in the way of resources to do it right, especially when we've got tons of hardware related diagnostics to do on other machines.
As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness that I found pleasurable... until I realized that it wasn't a nectarine at all, but a human head.
You are probably one of those guys that thinks that if you can get 36 women working together on making a baby, it will be ready in 1 week.
It'd certainly be fun trying, though.;)
Not all problems can scale out to many cpus (or wombs, for that matter). Threading overhead, network latency/bandwidth, mutual exclusion (or the overhead on atomic data types) all conspire to defeat attempts to scale.
It's not my skill set, but I remember years ago seeing a fascinating show on how blindly adding more resources can make something SLOWER. To translate the case study (involving editing individual segments for a news show on limited editing equipment) into geek speak, they demonstrated that unless you do things right, you might wind up with cores 2-8 zipping through their parts just to wait for core 1, which has unceremoniously had all the long tasks scheduled to run on it because the scheduling algorithm was only made with a dual- or quad-core system in mind and gets stupid when handed more, resulting in it scheduling things wrong.
Really, I got the feeling from that show that trying to make multiple interrelated units work together on a single task without bottlenecks or downtime is a logistical nightmare no matter if it's people in a company, robots in a factory, or cores in a computer.
So let me get this straight: Scientists gave up on building a better mouse trap, for which the world have beaten a path to their doors, and instead they went the indirect route of building a better rat to chew a path through the world's doors?
A mousetrap has to be manufactured, never improves once built, needs maintenance and placement. Rats have none of these weaknesses; self-repairing, self-replicating, self-feeding, and adaptable.
So apparently the scientists have not only decided to welcome their new rodent overlords, they've decided to create them!
Presumably, there is a selective advantage to improved learning and memory. Presumably, there is some kind of downside that balances that selective advantage.
The downside is that now the Rats crave human brains...
Hey, I TOLD Ilsensine that the cranium rats were enough, but it said "Hey! Who's the god-brain here?!" Something about not enough surface dweller brains being eaten to offset how much they were breeding. Afraid they were going to start digging downward in some crazy subterranean condo fad.
And then I said "Okay, but outsourcing the work to humans doesn't seem like a good idea." and it said with the recession it had to cut some corners, and the human cattle work cheap.
Really, I've been against it the whole way, but it's hard to argue with, like, a level six zillion psionicist. Become a thrall, see the world, they said. A gyp, if you ask me. All I've seen are the insides of damp, dark rooms. And the insides of brains, less dark but more damp.
Me too, but if there are any younger folks on the list perhaps N.I.M.H or even "the Brain" would strike the same nerve.
NIMH was the first thing I thought of (the Bluth movie, not the original book or the... eugh... sequel). But I take slight issue with the "younger folks". I know "younger" is relative, but I'm 30 and I didn't see it when it came out, being only three(ish) at the time.
But people who think of Pinky & the Brain? THEY'RE just kids!:)
Next you'll be telling me that 8 out of 10 people who have unprotected sex with HIV-positive, syphilitic, sore-encrusted prostitutes will contract some sort of venereal disease.
Not if they use a Mac, they can't get viruses.
You don't get viruses, but no matter how much they round the edges, sex with a Mac STILL hurts.
And Speed Racer (no relation to the guy who drove the Mach 5) for the C64 followed. It had several different ways of keeping score, including Horns and Halos. You got a Halo for every pedestrian you passed without harming, and a Horn for every pedestrian turned into a red splat on the street (with an appropriate approximation of a wet "splat" sound). As I recall, possible victims include a businessman, a child, a dog, and an old woman with a walker.
However, this seems like an interesting setup for the game, and it does show that the game may be trying to... you know, influence people. The closer a game gets to stirring up emotions, even if it is fear or horror, the closer we're getting to seeing games as art.
No, I'm afraid it won't. We've already had games that are beautiful, or moving, or funny, or thought-provoking. Yet we have no 'art'.
A person who sees a decades-old medium as incapable of generating art is generally just against the medium. Games aren't art, because they're just murder simulators. Rock music isn't art, because it corrupts kids. Non-Catholic paintings, statues, and writings aren't art, they just lead the mind to heresy and sin. And so on, and so forth....
My suspicion is that he is actually a long-term deep penetration Conservative mole whose job is to make labour unelectable.
That would require an epic amount of Conservative cleverness that - to my limited ignorant North American knowledge - they've not often demonstrated.
Also, even if he is the most evil and clever Conservative in the world, then why does the Labour party keep letting him do it? His core motives are irrelevant - his VISIBLE motives would, in a better world, see him so far out of a position of trust that shopkeepers would follow him through their stores to make sure he didn't nick something.
First off, I think the guy writing the article is exaggerating. I routinely visit rec.arts.tv on groups.google.com and there's maybe one spam message per two pages (100 messages). Not a big deal.
Using the busiest nonbinary group in a feed (r.a.tv gets what, about 500-1500 messages every day?) is misleading. As a counterexample, alt.tv.(almost any show not currently on the air) is/are almost 100% spam.
Once there's a lot of noise and a weak signal, the group dies. I've seen smaller groups live fine with only one new thread a month... IF it's not spam, since most of us have things rigged to bring new posts or threads to our attention. But once spammers update their group lists, then one thread a month plus two spams (thus two spam threads) means most of the time a person is disappointed. That's when they start looking elsewhere.
I'm not condoning this, just pointing out the obvious.
Thanks for stressing you're anti-rape. With slashdotters, you can't be sure. So many of us spend so much time on the longboats, our long beards matted from all the clotted blood of our enemies. It's easy to forget that when you come home and hang up the horned helmet for a nice relaxing night of using the Core 2 Quad you got as danegeld, that 'no means no'.
... if the Teslas and the Quadro have their fans on the bottom (relative the case), and each card is pretty much wedged right up against its lower neighbor or the case bottom, then where are the cards supposed to get cool air from?
(More pictures, including the obligatory model to hang off the computer like it was a sugar daddy.)
Four dimensional? So they've not only figured out how to make silicon substrates grow vertically and interconnect, but it can communicate with an extra-dimensional extant of itself?
It's a funny thing - when the marketers add stupid Internet acronyms and a $500+ price tag to a video card, extradimensionality just falls out for free.
And now you know the story of EVGA's GTX 295 CO-OP FTW.
“Both said they lost track of time,” the report stated. It also said that the pilots had heard voices over their cockpit radios but ignored them.
So either:
1) they're used to ignoring air traffic control and "winging it",
2) they hear tiny voices telling them to do things all the time,
3) that was the most amazing, most engrossing scheduling application on the face of the Earth.
If 1) or 2), then it's good they not fly planes. If 3), we give the program's UI designer a raise.
I expect they will be terminated soon enough, but don't you think it's fair to complete the investigation before we go around swinging the axe?
We're Slashdot. I thought our job was to go around swinging axes as soon and with as little evidence as possible. Evidence: First posts, lack of RTFA, lack of RTFSummary, and occasional lack of RTFHeadline.
Slashdot Mirror
A generic couple were standing by the side of road, which was basically a piece of flat pavement cut into the side of a mountain. They were watching a garage inventor/scientist type explain his latest invention, a motorized luggage carrier. Sort of a motorcycle sidecar or luggage unit for people who didn't want to change the visual impact of their motorbike. It was an independent unit, had its own motor and fuel, and required only a slight modification to the motorcycle in the form of a radio transmitter. After that, it basically mimicked the motions of the "master" motorcycle.
Garage inventor gets on his bike, fires it up, and drives off. Sure enough, the other device (which I recall looking a lot like a large cooler on wheels) fired up by itself and followed. A few minutes later, the garage inventor loops back and drives by. Getting cocky, he waves at the couple. Unfortunately, he hits a rock and with only one hand on the handlebars, can't recover. He loses control, and drives off the side of the cliff. An unpleasant "crunch" is heard below.
Moments later, the motorized luggage holder comes along and dutifully throws itself off the cliff as well. A second "crunch" is heard.
The couple look down at the carnage and then leave.
Stop recommending products.
I'm not allowed to where I work. Too much chance of something going wrong and then us getting blamed. My standard line for years has been "No virus scanner or spyware scanner is perfect."
The tests demonstrate that av products don't perform well. It is right on. 80% of my day is spent cleaning malware.
We wound up having to make the labor charge on our virus cleaning more expensive just to reduce the number of people getting it done. Takes up far too much in the way of resources to do it right, especially when we've got tons of hardware related diagnostics to do on other machines.
As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness that I found pleasurable... until I realized that it wasn't a nectarine at all, but a human head.
Human head? ID code marked right on the surface?
Oh my God, you ate Agent 47!
You are probably one of those guys that thinks that if you can get 36 women working together on making a baby, it will be ready in 1 week.
It'd certainly be fun trying, though.;)
Not all problems can scale out to many cpus (or wombs, for that matter). Threading overhead, network latency/bandwidth, mutual exclusion (or the overhead on atomic data types) all conspire to defeat attempts to scale.
It's not my skill set, but I remember years ago seeing a fascinating show on how blindly adding more resources can make something SLOWER. To translate the case study (involving editing individual segments for a news show on limited editing equipment) into geek speak, they demonstrated that unless you do things right, you might wind up with cores 2-8 zipping through their parts just to wait for core 1, which has unceremoniously had all the long tasks scheduled to run on it because the scheduling algorithm was only made with a dual- or quad-core system in mind and gets stupid when handed more, resulting in it scheduling things wrong.
Really, I got the feeling from that show that trying to make multiple interrelated units work together on a single task without bottlenecks or downtime is a logistical nightmare no matter if it's people in a company, robots in a factory, or cores in a computer.
So let me get this straight: Scientists gave up on building a better mouse trap, for which the world have beaten a path to their doors, and instead they went the indirect route of building a better rat to chew a path through the world's doors?
A mousetrap has to be manufactured, never improves once built, needs maintenance and placement. Rats have none of these weaknesses; self-repairing, self-replicating, self-feeding, and adaptable.
So apparently the scientists have not only decided to welcome their new rodent overlords, they've decided to create them!
Presumably, there is a selective advantage to improved learning and memory. Presumably, there is some kind of downside that balances that selective advantage.
The downside is that now the Rats crave human brains...
Hey, I TOLD Ilsensine that the cranium rats were enough, but it said "Hey! Who's the god-brain here?!" Something about not enough surface dweller brains being eaten to offset how much they were breeding. Afraid they were going to start digging downward in some crazy subterranean condo fad.
And then I said "Okay, but outsourcing the work to humans doesn't seem like a good idea." and it said with the recession it had to cut some corners, and the human cattle work cheap.
Really, I've been against it the whole way, but it's hard to argue with, like, a level six zillion psionicist. Become a thrall, see the world, they said. A gyp, if you ask me. All I've seen are the insides of damp, dark rooms. And the insides of brains, less dark but more damp.
They'll be busy playing D&D?
They won't be hard to find. Track down theft of any sourcebooks relating to Ravenloft, particularly ones containing info on Richemulot.
(Since that's insanely obscure - the domain of Richemulot has a lot of rats, in all shapes and sizes. The darklord is a wererat, in fact.)
Me too, but if there are any younger folks on the list perhaps N.I.M.H or even "the Brain" would strike the same nerve.
NIMH was the first thing I thought of (the Bluth movie, not the original book or the... eugh... sequel). But I take slight issue with the "younger folks". I know "younger" is relative, but I'm 30 and I didn't see it when it came out, being only three(ish) at the time.
But people who think of Pinky & the Brain? THEY'RE just kids!:)
Next you'll be telling me that 8 out of 10 people who have unprotected sex with HIV-positive, syphilitic, sore-encrusted prostitutes will contract some sort of venereal disease.
Not if they use a Mac, they can't get viruses.
You don't get viruses, but no matter how much they round the edges, sex with a Mac STILL hurts.
What a fantastic way to ensure a free press: have them paid by the very institution they're supposed to be the watchdogs for.
I find that hard to believe. Where are Jon and Kate Gosselin going to get the money?
Turn in your Nerd Card because you fail. That's John Hodgeman, better known as the PC in the Mac ads.
Here, I'll get the rest of the thread out of the way:
"I thought that was the guy on Mystery Science Theater 3000."
"That's Joel Hodgson."
"No, he was on Miami Vice."
"That's Don Johnson!"
"He hosted Hollywood Squares!"
"Tom Bergeron!"
"Brother of Menelaus!"
"Damn it, that's AGAMEMNON!"
(Yes, I stole the last few items from Frisky Dingo.)
and this is different from running rampant in grand theft auto killing innocent citizens .... how ... ?
Maybe because in GTA its evil evil criminals, because those who protest were too concerned about hidden sex games to complain about GTA.
But that's sex! Can't have kids thinking sex is fun, they might want to try it!
Death Race got there first.
And Speed Racer (no relation to the guy who drove the Mach 5) for the C64 followed. It had several different ways of keeping score, including Horns and Halos. You got a Halo for every pedestrian you passed without harming, and a Horn for every pedestrian turned into a red splat on the street (with an appropriate approximation of a wet "splat" sound). As I recall, possible victims include a businessman, a child, a dog, and an old woman with a walker.
But it wasn't popular, so no one cared.
hmm... I'm pretty sure I've killed 5 or 6 times more civilians than that in just the first 2 hours of playing Prototype.
And if video of Prototype had been leaked or 'leaked', we'd have had this conversation months ago.
However, this seems like an interesting setup for the game, and it does show that the game may be trying to... you know, influence people. The closer a game gets to stirring up emotions, even if it is fear or horror, the closer we're getting to seeing games as art.
No, I'm afraid it won't. We've already had games that are beautiful, or moving, or funny, or thought-provoking. Yet we have no 'art'.
A person who sees a decades-old medium as incapable of generating art is generally just against the medium. Games aren't art, because they're just murder simulators. Rock music isn't art, because it corrupts kids. Non-Catholic paintings, statues, and writings aren't art, they just lead the mind to heresy and sin. And so on, and so forth....
My SheevaPlug arrives via Fedex in about 30 minutes :).
how much did it cost you? been looking at getting one myself.
Well, if he doesn't answer in the next 17 minutes, we know we're not gonna hear anything for a few days....
My suspicion is that he is actually a long-term deep penetration Conservative mole whose job is to make labour unelectable.
That would require an epic amount of Conservative cleverness that - to my limited ignorant North American knowledge - they've not often demonstrated.
Also, even if he is the most evil and clever Conservative in the world, then why does the Labour party keep letting him do it? His core motives are irrelevant - his VISIBLE motives would, in a better world, see him so far out of a position of trust that shopkeepers would follow him through their stores to make sure he didn't nick something.
So?
First off, I think the guy writing the article is exaggerating. I routinely visit rec.arts.tv on groups.google.com and there's maybe one spam message per two pages (100 messages). Not a big deal.
Using the busiest nonbinary group in a feed (r.a.tv gets what, about 500-1500 messages every day?) is misleading. As a counterexample, alt.tv.(almost any show not currently on the air) is/are almost 100% spam.
Once there's a lot of noise and a weak signal, the group dies. I've seen smaller groups live fine with only one new thread a month... IF it's not spam, since most of us have things rigged to bring new posts or threads to our attention. But once spammers update their group lists, then one thread a month plus two spams (thus two spam threads) means most of the time a person is disappointed. That's when they start looking elsewhere.
I'm not condoning this, just pointing out the obvious.
Thanks for stressing you're anti-rape. With slashdotters, you can't be sure. So many of us spend so much time on the longboats, our long beards matted from all the clotted blood of our enemies. It's easy to forget that when you come home and hang up the horned helmet for a nice relaxing night of using the Core 2 Quad you got as danegeld, that 'no means no'.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
(More pictures, including the obligatory model to hang off the computer like it was a sugar daddy.)
2 or 3 kittens would be sufficient, so you've got enough to share.
1100W? Can I eat my vacuum cleaner instead? Yummy.
Eat an innocent vacuum cleaner? You MONSTER!
Mod parent up confused.
Four dimensional? So they've not only figured out how to make silicon substrates grow vertically and interconnect, but it can communicate with an extra-dimensional extant of itself?
It's a funny thing - when the marketers add stupid Internet acronyms and a $500+ price tag to a video card, extradimensionality just falls out for free.
And now you know the story of EVGA's GTX 295 CO-OP FTW.
However since they were on their laptops if someone had sent them an IM, Twitter, or email they would have probably been alright.
@twoguysinaplane Check your headset.
@twoguysinaplane Seriously, WTF?
@twoguysinaplane Don't make us come up there!
“Both said they lost track of time,” the report stated. It also said that the pilots had heard voices over their cockpit radios but ignored them.
So either:
1) they're used to ignoring air traffic control and "winging it",
2) they hear tiny voices telling them to do things all the time,
3) that was the most amazing, most engrossing scheduling application on the face of the Earth.
If 1) or 2), then it's good they not fly planes. If 3), we give the program's UI designer a raise.
I expect they will be terminated soon enough, but don't you think it's fair to complete the investigation before we go around swinging the axe?
We're Slashdot. I thought our job was to go around swinging axes as soon and with as little evidence as possible. Evidence: First posts, lack of RTFA, lack of RTFSummary, and occasional lack of RTFHeadline.