If random.org is not random enough, either they're doing something quite horribly wrong or (far more likely) players don't actually understand what random means.
I'd bet money on "players don't actually understand what random means". This device is interesting, though. Broken down:
PROBLEM: His users complained because they don't trust a computer to say "I rolled a die, and it came up 6."
SOLUTION: Build a device that rolls real dice, and hook it to a computer. Then the computer says "I rolled a die, and it came up 6."
Let's face it - if the video camera was a dummy and the PC was just still getting results one of the old ways, would anyone notice? Either way the ultimate result is a computer saying "Yeah, it's a five. Now it's a four. Now a five. etc."
Natural progression from people using "dice" as the singular, I suppose.
Worse than that, where I used to live, the local vernacular maimed the word "lynx". "Lynx" was used as the plural form, and that's okay, but "link" ("lynk"?) was used as the singular. Drove me NUTS, and no amount of explaining that not every word that ends in an S sound is a plural helped. Still does when speaking to relatives and the topic of what wild animals were recently seen comes up. It's a topic I try to avoid.
1) Package deal PC + monitor + printer + scanner + etc. Defrag and scandisk were crashing the system, often BSODing. (Windows ME, no commments please.) I called tech support, and the guy told me to download and install a new printer driver. I thought he was nuts, but tried it. Worked a treat. Ah, the early days of USB printing.
2) During my time doing HP Deskjet printer support, I saw a genius move. HP had reorganized internally, and rather than each department doing its own media design for the printers it built, one consolidated unit did all the ink cartridges. It presumably cut costs, but also cut decent design. The first or second call I fielded on one of the new printers built under this grouping involved the print carriage crawling into its hidey-hole and refusing to come out.
And that's when I found out something fascinating. The media group hadn't designed the cartridges to be different shapes, like the older ones were. (The older ones were different in every way possible - color was bigger than black and various protrusions meant they each only fit one way without the assistance of a hammer.) Now the color and black carts were damnear identical, and they slid into each other's spots just fine. So they built a complex carriage with spring-loaded sliding doors keyed to the tiny differences between the carts as a workaround to try prevent people from loading color and black in the wrong spots.
For a workaround, it worked okay. Except.... They'd been so busy designing for the possibility of someone putting the carts in the wrong spot that they'd never even considered all the other ways the ink carts could be installed incorrectly. The cartridges were also symmetrical - they could be installed into the right spots BACKWARDS. Contacts don't meet contacts but the workaround spring-doors shut just fine, which I gather was the only metric the printer used to determine if a cart was installed. So printer tries to talk to cart, cart refuses to talk back, printer goes "WTF?" and goes into a coma until you turn it on, unplug it WHILE ON, move the carriage manually (can't be done without the unplug-while-on step - it locks into place on a proper power-off) and fix the carts.
The whole premise of this article is essentially flawed...
The whole premise of the article is an amusing jab at creationists and should be taken as seriously as you would their creation science. Did we read the same article?
Apparently so, but as the last line states:
Note: This story was originally published with the title, "An Immodest Proposal".
Like the Swift work it is named after, I imagine this article is doomed to be misinterpreted.
Operating systems aren't immortal beings, and by rights, there can't be (there shouldn't be) only one.
What? This directly contradicts the widely-known fact that Linux is The Highlander of operating systems.
Oh, great, so now I got this image in my head of Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds fighting with swords on top of a building while Queen plays in the background. And until I shake the Queen discography playback, I won't be able to shake the image. I need to work today and now I've got a swordfight going on in my head! CURSE YOU, INTERNET!
I appreciate the value of metaphor, but causing a direct comparison between Linux and a cult and Linux users and cultists prowling for suckers really isn't helping the case.
Who else just thought "Wait, didn't the C64 have this?"
But the C64 had one benefit over this: You could actually automate things with little scripts.
You could also had some choice in OS. I know GEOS was never popular, but if you wanted the Windows-Icon-Mouse-Pointer interface, it was there, just like Windows 3.1 could be loaded on top of DOS.
And OS or no, there was a great deal of flexibility. Need a new program? Buy (or get your friend who uses this strange program called Fast Hack'em to make free copies) a program and, just like every other disk you own, pop it in the drive and type LOAD "*",8,1 and hit RETURN. Honestly, if a person never wanted to use the built-in BASIC 2.0, that was the only command they needed to learn, and it was written on the label of every storebought disk in existence. Hell, if they were too stupid for that, use a "datasette" tape drive. Hit Shift-RUN/STOP, press play on tape. Three button pushes and BASIC is gone (or at least hidden).
No matter what features a BIOS-based OS has, if the idea is to move away from hard drives then your hands are tied as far as new programs go. You only get what the manufacturer provides, a level of vendor lock-in to make Microsoft look like right permissive folk. Yeah, browser-based stuff will still work, but that kills freeware and stuff written by small companies right there. Google's programs will work. Microsoft Office Ultimate Cloud and Rainbow Computing Edition will work. And... yeah, that's it. The beauty of software is that 10 copies cost almost the same to make as 10,000. If everything is browser-based, forget it. 10,000 is suddenly 1000 times harder than 10 because those 10,000 might all use the software - and your servers - at once. I've seen a web app tested by 50 get 1000 people unleashed on it without being scaled correctly. Went live at 9:30, stumbled at 10:30, died at 11:30 because that's when each new time zone's office opened and dumped a new load of office workers on it. Not pretty. Now imagine half the not-made-by-the-big-boys apps you use doing just that.
How is this any different from the SplashTop (or ExpressGate) interface used by companies like ASUS?
Especially since in my experience as front desk geek at a computer store, people who know what it is turn ExpressGate off on a fairly regular basis.
Part of my job is assembling just-bought mobo+CPU+RAM combos to show the customer that all three play nice together (and to catch any compatibility screwups before they leave the store, like an AMD CPU and Intel board).
If the customer asks what ExpressGate is (or what the "Whaa! ExpressGate not installed!" error is on models that need it installed from within Windows before it will work - yeah, I don't get the logic there either), the conversation ALWAYS goes like this:
1) I explain what ExpressGate is.
2) The customer asks what it does that Windows doesn't.
3) I explain that it starts faster.
4) They say they turn their PC on in the morning, walk away for a bit, and come back when it's started. Then they ask if you can install Game X or Application Y on it.
5) I explain that no, you can't play Unreal Tournament 3 or use MS Office from within ExpressGate.
6) They ask me to turn it off.
Sure, a lot of people leave it on. But since they're the ones who don't mention it at all, I don't know if they're thinking they need it or, more likely, they're just thinking "Oooh, words and pictures go by, not important, I gotta wait for Windows."
Apparently, there was talk of making Thief 4 take place present day (under the impression that they had done enough with the steampunk fantasy genre). There was even some concept art done (sorry for no link) of a catburgler/hoodiewearing Garrett.
Alternately, he could be replaced with a gentleman thief wearing a trilby.
Leto II, you old bastard! How's that whole "pearls of awareness" thing working out for you?
... aaand...
Methuselah! Is that you? Fancy meeting you here on slashdot! Only this morning I was thinking I wonder what old Methu is up to these days? Remember that time we threw that Roman in the tepidarium? Good times, so what's new?
Is it wrong of me to think that, while both of these posts are amusing, they're downright hilarious when stuck next to each other?
Deputy health minister Yakov Litzman, a member of United Torah Judaism, said earlier this week that the name "swine flu" should not be used as it contains the name of the unkosher animal. Litzman suggested that authorities call the virus sweeping the globe "Mexican flu."
I learned that if there was ever a terrorist attack on New York it would cause various invasive and overreaching laws to be passed in the name of security, and that the destroyed edifice wouldn't be repaired or rebuilt, leaving a void in the skyline for decades.
Once in a rare while, something like a historical documentary sneaks through onto the H channel, but that is at least as rare as seeing science fiction on the scifi channel.
Ah, I remember the old days, when the likes of Sci-Fi Buzz was on. When a reference to meeting Poul Anderson and Frederik Pohl ended in an incredibly bad pun about being "po(u|h)larized" and they could expect most of the audience to get it. Where you could make a weekly "editorial" segment simply by sticking a camera in front of Harlan Ellison and letting him be himself for five minutes. Where the least science-fictiony thing was coverage of a (Western) animation convention which still had the sheer awesomeness of seeing the likes of Don Messick and June Foray being interviewed and voicing their more memorable characters. (Seriously. Papa Smurf meets Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Most memorable 10 seconds of TV ever.)
I would like a science fiction channel, and I would like a history channel, but they are not available.
Nope, welcome to Bizarro world, where TLC is not The Learning Channel, where A&E isn't Arts & Entertainment, where AMC isn't American Movie Classics, where TNN wasn't The Nashville Network, and where Sci-Fi is SyFy. I suppose the HyStry Channel is next....
As I'd done the maths I realized how sleezy it was (it was fairly obvious that those towards the bottom stood to lose every penny, whilst the guy at the top was looking at £50,000 per month) and in declined. Probably I wouldn't these days.. I'm older, wiser and have less of a conscience.
When 'wisdom' get modified to include "Willing to risk jail time for scamming people"?
"Dear [companyname], I have a buyer who wishes to put horse porn up on [companyname].con, and is willing to pay $50,000 for the domain. However, because I like you guys so much, I'll give you first crack at it, for the same price."
CC to 100 major companies and even a small success rate will earn back your investment. Or, go for 1000 minor-but-still-decent-sized companies with a $5,000 price tag. Or 10,000 small-sized companies that can't afford lawyers but can afford $500....
Slashdot Mirror
If random.org is not random enough, either they're doing something quite horribly wrong or (far more likely) players don't actually understand what random means.
I'd bet money on "players don't actually understand what random means". This device is interesting, though. Broken down:
PROBLEM: His users complained because they don't trust a computer to say "I rolled a die, and it came up 6."
SOLUTION: Build a device that rolls real dice, and hook it to a computer. Then the computer says "I rolled a die, and it came up 6."
Let's face it - if the video camera was a dummy and the PC was just still getting results one of the old ways, would anyone notice? Either way the ultimate result is a computer saying "Yeah, it's a five. Now it's a four. Now a five. etc."
"Dices"? Really?
Natural progression from people using "dice" as the singular, I suppose.
Worse than that, where I used to live, the local vernacular maimed the word "lynx". "Lynx" was used as the plural form, and that's okay, but "link" ("lynk"?) was used as the singular. Drove me NUTS, and no amount of explaining that not every word that ends in an S sound is a plural helped. Still does when speaking to relatives and the topic of what wild animals were recently seen comes up. It's a topic I try to avoid.
The two dumbest bugs I ever saw:
1) Package deal PC + monitor + printer + scanner + etc. Defrag and scandisk were crashing the system, often BSODing. (Windows ME, no commments please.) I called tech support, and the guy told me to download and install a new printer driver. I thought he was nuts, but tried it. Worked a treat. Ah, the early days of USB printing.
2) During my time doing HP Deskjet printer support, I saw a genius move. HP had reorganized internally, and rather than each department doing its own media design for the printers it built, one consolidated unit did all the ink cartridges. It presumably cut costs, but also cut decent design. The first or second call I fielded on one of the new printers built under this grouping involved the print carriage crawling into its hidey-hole and refusing to come out.
And that's when I found out something fascinating. The media group hadn't designed the cartridges to be different shapes, like the older ones were. (The older ones were different in every way possible - color was bigger than black and various protrusions meant they each only fit one way without the assistance of a hammer.) Now the color and black carts were damnear identical, and they slid into each other's spots just fine. So they built a complex carriage with spring-loaded sliding doors keyed to the tiny differences between the carts as a workaround to try prevent people from loading color and black in the wrong spots.
For a workaround, it worked okay. Except.... They'd been so busy designing for the possibility of someone putting the carts in the wrong spot that they'd never even considered all the other ways the ink carts could be installed incorrectly. The cartridges were also symmetrical - they could be installed into the right spots BACKWARDS. Contacts don't meet contacts but the workaround spring-doors shut just fine, which I gather was the only metric the printer used to determine if a cart was installed. So printer tries to talk to cart, cart refuses to talk back, printer goes "WTF?" and goes into a coma until you turn it on, unplug it WHILE ON, move the carriage manually (can't be done without the unplug-while-on step - it locks into place on a proper power-off) and fix the carts.
So we might have been inadvertently killing alien life? Like in Ender's Game, only we're killing them.
Put more simply: Like Ender's Game, only we're the Buggers.
Sounds 'bout right.
The whole premise of this article is essentially flawed...
The whole premise of the article is an amusing jab at creationists and should be taken as seriously as you would their creation science. Did we read the same article?
Apparently so, but as the last line states:
Note: This story was originally published with the title, "An Immodest Proposal".
Like the Swift work it is named after, I imagine this article is doomed to be misinterpreted.
The author of the story obviously can't use Google. I found people talking about their mastiff/chihuaua mix dogs, among plenty of others.
Did any of them explode? I want to get in on the ground floor of the Chihuahua grenade business.
What? This directly contradicts the widely-known fact that Linux is The Highlander of operating systems.
Oh, great, so now I got this image in my head of Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds fighting with swords on top of a building while Queen plays in the background. And until I shake the Queen discography playback, I won't be able to shake the image. I need to work today and now I've got a swordfight going on in my head! CURSE YOU, INTERNET!
(Stamps 'SP' on own forehead and runs away.)
Who else just thought "Wait, didn't the C64 have this?" But the C64 had one benefit over this: You could actually automate things with little scripts.
You could also had some choice in OS. I know GEOS was never popular, but if you wanted the Windows-Icon-Mouse-Pointer interface, it was there, just like Windows 3.1 could be loaded on top of DOS.
And OS or no, there was a great deal of flexibility. Need a new program? Buy (or get your friend who uses this strange program called Fast Hack'em to make free copies) a program and, just like every other disk you own, pop it in the drive and type LOAD "*",8,1 and hit RETURN. Honestly, if a person never wanted to use the built-in BASIC 2.0, that was the only command they needed to learn, and it was written on the label of every storebought disk in existence. Hell, if they were too stupid for that, use a "datasette" tape drive. Hit Shift-RUN/STOP, press play on tape. Three button pushes and BASIC is gone (or at least hidden).
No matter what features a BIOS-based OS has, if the idea is to move away from hard drives then your hands are tied as far as new programs go. You only get what the manufacturer provides, a level of vendor lock-in to make Microsoft look like right permissive folk. Yeah, browser-based stuff will still work, but that kills freeware and stuff written by small companies right there. Google's programs will work. Microsoft Office Ultimate Cloud and Rainbow Computing Edition will work. And... yeah, that's it. The beauty of software is that 10 copies cost almost the same to make as 10,000. If everything is browser-based, forget it. 10,000 is suddenly 1000 times harder than 10 because those 10,000 might all use the software - and your servers - at once. I've seen a web app tested by 50 get 1000 people unleashed on it without being scaled correctly. Went live at 9:30, stumbled at 10:30, died at 11:30 because that's when each new time zone's office opened and dumped a new load of office workers on it. Not pretty. Now imagine half the not-made-by-the-big-boys apps you use doing just that.
How is this any different from the SplashTop (or ExpressGate) interface used by companies like ASUS?
Especially since in my experience as front desk geek at a computer store, people who know what it is turn ExpressGate off on a fairly regular basis.
Part of my job is assembling just-bought mobo+CPU+RAM combos to show the customer that all three play nice together (and to catch any compatibility screwups before they leave the store, like an AMD CPU and Intel board).
If the customer asks what ExpressGate is (or what the "Whaa! ExpressGate not installed!" error is on models that need it installed from within Windows before it will work - yeah, I don't get the logic there either), the conversation ALWAYS goes like this:
1) I explain what ExpressGate is.
2) The customer asks what it does that Windows doesn't.
3) I explain that it starts faster.
4) They say they turn their PC on in the morning, walk away for a bit, and come back when it's started. Then they ask if you can install Game X or Application Y on it.
5) I explain that no, you can't play Unreal Tournament 3 or use MS Office from within ExpressGate.
6) They ask me to turn it off.
Sure, a lot of people leave it on. But since they're the ones who don't mention it at all, I don't know if they're thinking they need it or, more likely, they're just thinking "Oooh, words and pictures go by, not important, I gotta wait for Windows."
eww, a .rar!
Yeah, first it's .rars, then next thing you know you're up to your neck in depleted uranium beholders.
Maybe people will stop looking at me funny when I carry a compass everywhere.
People used to do the same to me. When someone does, I stab them with the pointy end and draw a circle on their face.
Now they don't look at me funny.
Mabye Suasn's a ILzy dylsexic eplipetic.
Apparently, there was talk of making Thief 4 take place present day (under the impression that they had done enough with the steampunk fantasy genre). There was even some concept art done (sorry for no link) of a catburgler/hoodiewearing Garrett.
Alternately, he could be replaced with a gentleman thief wearing a trilby.
An FBI wounding study found that even with their heart destroyed, a suitably determined individual can preform voluntary actions for 10-15 seconds.
I know I'm gonna regret asking this, but how do you test something like that?
I wish they find some proof for the FSM.
All we need to do is send a drawing of the FSM back in time. Tell you what, we'll split the labor.
(Doodle doodle.)
Okay, I drew the FSM. You get the time machine and we'll be all ready to go!
Leto II, you old bastard! How's that whole "pearls of awareness" thing working out for you?
... aaand...
Methuselah! Is that you? Fancy meeting you here on slashdot! Only this morning I was thinking I wonder what old Methu is up to these days? Remember that time we threw that Roman in the tepidarium? Good times, so what's new?
Is it wrong of me to think that, while both of these posts are amusing, they're downright hilarious when stuck next to each other?
I hear all the devs have been snapped up by EDS.
Wow. Just when I think DNF is the epitome of development hell, someone comes and reminds me that even Hell has a bad part of town.
one should eventually just product out the door.
Even if they accidentally the whole product?
Deputy health minister Yakov Litzman, a member of United Torah Judaism, said earlier this week that the name "swine flu" should not be used as it contains the name of the unkosher animal. Litzman suggested that authorities call the virus sweeping the globe "Mexican flu."
So it's okay for Jews to eat Mexicans...?
Do you remember Bird Flu, Spanish Flu, and Ebola?
I do, but I doubt most people do. In the mind of Joe Sixpack, it probably goes:
Spanish Flu? Is that what you get from taking too much Spanish Fly?
Ebola? Oh, there was something on that years ago, I don't remember what.
SARS? The Asian disease, right? That was the stuff that Japanese terrorist released in the subway, right?
Bird flu? I remember that! Killed some people in some country with a funny name.
Swine flu? OH MY GOD WE'RE GONNA DIE!
Haven't you people learned nothing from Deus Ex!?
I learned that if there was ever a terrorist attack on New York it would cause various invasive and overreaching laws to be passed in the name of security, and that the destroyed edifice wouldn't be repaired or rebuilt, leaving a void in the skyline for decades.
Once in a rare while, something like a historical documentary sneaks through onto the H channel, but that is at least as rare as seeing science fiction on the scifi channel.
Ah, I remember the old days, when the likes of Sci-Fi Buzz was on. When a reference to meeting Poul Anderson and Frederik Pohl ended in an incredibly bad pun about being "po(u|h)larized" and they could expect most of the audience to get it. Where you could make a weekly "editorial" segment simply by sticking a camera in front of Harlan Ellison and letting him be himself for five minutes. Where the least science-fictiony thing was coverage of a (Western) animation convention which still had the sheer awesomeness of seeing the likes of Don Messick and June Foray being interviewed and voicing their more memorable characters. (Seriously. Papa Smurf meets Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Most memorable 10 seconds of TV ever.)
I would like a science fiction channel, and I would like a history channel, but they are not available.
Nope, welcome to Bizarro world, where TLC is not The Learning Channel, where A&E isn't Arts & Entertainment, where AMC isn't American Movie Classics, where TNN wasn't The Nashville Network, and where Sci-Fi is SyFy. I suppose the HyStry Channel is next....
As I'd done the maths I realized how sleezy it was (it was fairly obvious that those towards the bottom stood to lose every penny, whilst the guy at the top was looking at £50,000 per month) and in declined. Probably I wouldn't these days.. I'm older, wiser and have less of a conscience.
When 'wisdom' get modified to include "Willing to risk jail time for scamming people"?
"Dear [companyname], I have a buyer who wishes to put horse porn up on [companyname].con, and is willing to pay $50,000 for the domain. However, because I like you guys so much, I'll give you first crack at it, for the same price."
CC to 100 major companies and even a small success rate will earn back your investment. Or, go for 1000 minor-but-still-decent-sized companies with a $5,000 price tag. Or 10,000 small-sized companies that can't afford lawyers but can afford $500....