Never saw that problem, actually. Automatic Flash plugin installation system has worked flawlessly on all the systems I've tried for the past year or so, which is a pretty diverse mix of AMD and Intel systems and Linux distributions. There may be something messed up on your system.
Choose your rants better. USB-RS232 is the accepted solution in the field, and is not that much of a hardship. With a hardware RS232 port, you still need to carry a serial cable, right? The USB converter cables are no easier to lose or damage than the plain RS232 cables, and aren't any bulkier. The end result with both options is that you carry a 6 foot cable, you plug one end into a device, you plug the other end into the laptop. I've been in the field with hundreds of automation engineers, and not one of them ever had a serious complaint about not having a serial port on their laptop. It's a simple problem with an obvious solution, and everyone but you has dealt with it and moved on.
"Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc."
We don't have to think about it, buddy...we live it.
"Blocking customers" is a useless exercise that only gives the appearance of doing anything. It's easy for spammers to get new accounts, or activate more zombie PCs.
Reminds me of an experiment I did a while ago. On a whim, I stuck an old USB Bluetooth dongle into a 400MHz Linux box I had set up as a random-task server in the apartment closet. It was recognized and running immediately (wait, what?) so I played around with some of the HCI commands. Long story short, we soon had a tracking system tied to our cell phones. Whenever either of us approached the apartment, the server would log the event on a web page, play a few tones and announce "so-and-so has entered the perimeter" to the apartment. Similar if either of us left. The web page had a status indicator showing whether we were IN or OUT. This was handy in a few ways; you could tell if your roommate was already home from work and give them a call to see if a parcel was delivered, etc.
I also played around with gathering some information and playing it via Festival on arrival, "welcome back so-and-so, you were away for 10 hours and 23 minutes. You have 143 new emails, 132 marked as spam." Could be expanded a lot with other functions; music presets, wake my computers, etc. Anyway, the system fell into disuse after the computer was moved and the cat ate the speaker wire. But it was pretty interesting to see how easy it was to use Bluetooth as a presence detector, with a few lines of shell script. The phones didn't even need to be set in Discoverable mode, once the mac addresses were gathered.
This kind of thing is a piece of cake for the various secretive agencies to do to you on a global level, and they don't even need Bluetooth...every cell phone is a little tracking device. Too bad that power is several orders of magnitude more difficult for the public to obtain, as it is a centralized service much like the government itself. Sure, you can track your kids' phones if you pay Sprint some extra cash...but the head of the NSA can see where everyone with your last name had lunch today, while you can't log in and make sure he didn't skip work and go to the golf course instead. This is just a small example of the ways we're gradually being tagged and tracked, and it's a good think to have people aware and thinking of it. The power may be in the right hands for the most part, but it can be misused so easily.
I see that one of the tags for this story is "noob". And it occurs to me; we need a disparaging name for someone who is just no longer in the loop. noob doesn't do it because that implies that the person is just new to the game but may get there with time. Dvorak often seems like someone who was there but isn't with it anymore.
I use standby mode pretty often, but my home computer boots to an idle, ready desktop in about 18 to 22 seconds. I don't see how people are getting three minute boot times with a properly configured computer purchased within the last three years. I guess that's the problem...most people buy a Dell and never do anything about the huge pile of junkware that runs at boot time. The software loadout is shipped already broken. If someone is actually still using a P3-500 as a desktop, they really should upgrade...the wasted time in 2-3 second increments over the course of a day really adds up. That goes for people who use Linux too, if you're running a GUI any more complex than Ion.
I guess you could set up a version of Firefox that runs with no OS. Then you can do email, web browsing, maybe even IMs with it. Basically your operating system would BE Firefox, and everything you do would be on Google (email, documents, photos, etc). However, I don't see much advantage to this unless you provide a machine that only runs Firefox...once you try to make Firefox work with a billion different hardware configurations, or set up some kind of virtualization environment, you're right back to the complexity and overhead of a normal OS.
Now I'm thoroughly confused. You don't want citizens being brought up on the charges she was brought up on, for doing what she did? Sounds like she SHOULD be your poster child.
The only reason you don't like her is because she lost. And you are somehow blaming her for that.
She's not guilty of anything, this is a civil case. And as far as legality goes, they only proved she "made available" which has already been found to be inadequate evidence in prior cases (a fact the RIAA lawyers knew and were legally required to provide and did not...now there's a felony).
No...the prosecution only had to show that she made them available, not that anyone had ACTUALLY downloaded those songs, thereby causing her to ACTUALLY infringe copyright.
How about: "Geek sets record by breaking the law and endangering innocent men, women, and children in selfish quest to do something pointless"
Seriously, this doesn't push any boundaries of technology or vehicle science. It tests two things: being able to stay awake, and being able to break laws and get away with it. Here they are tearing across the country in a car filled with distracting devices, sleep deprivation, fatigue, driving at unsafe speeds near vehicles filled with normal people trying to get to work or school.
I'm not really sure you can call Portal an FPS because of the "shooter" part...after all, in the game you never hold a weapon expressly intended to destroy anything or hurt anyone. Not even a generic wrecking tool like a crowbar. The portal generator is a gun only in the sense that it projects energy to a distant surface...it's not a weapon. Not even as much of a weapon as the Gravity Gun in HL2, which got a lot of attention at the time as a puzzle solving device rather than a traditional weapon. The joy of Portal was the way in which it guided you to do the "wrong" thing...gradually distrust the computer, start to notice the signs of something amiss, and improvise to use this mostly innocuous device to destroy obstacles. It was possible to continue believing the announcer...on the first reports of the gameplay on forums, you could find players saying that they "beat" Portal and the ending was pointless: they had trustingly ridden the platform into the incinerator. The game rewarded suspicion and curiosity, yet allowed the player to be an obedient lab rat if that was their predilection.
I don't really have a good term for the game, though on the basis of similar discussions we might call it a "first-person-puzzle-suspense-tragicomedy."
It's smooth as glass on my 8800. I didn't really like the feel of it at first, but it's a lot tighter if you turn off mouse smoothing. The graphics are busier and more dystopian than UT2004, so you'll sometimes need a sharp eye to pick out a target. Hoverboards are genius, as is being able to grapple a Manta and get a tow. Everyone's salivating over the descriptions of the Necris vehicles, and the Darkwalker in the Heatray DM map certainly delivers. It's a thing of fright and beauty to watch that tripod clumping through the buildings, occasionally slithering a leg up to grasp the side of a pillar or building for extra support.
Lots of things to fix...the server list is inexcusably broken, the Hellbender doesn't steer correctly, the auto trajectory on the flak cannon secondary was a bad idea and needs to go. Also you appear 2 feet taller than other players because the camera height is wrong. It's amazing they let such amateur mistakes get out into the public eye, while still investing so much time into the rest of the game.
I know someone is going to get on their high horse and say that spam is annoying but not a cause for murder.
Maybe I should feel the same way.
However, I'm only slightly surprised to find that my conscience doesn't have any problem at all allowing me to feel happy at the news of this man's death.
Actually, he's not too far off...if you've ever been to a distribution center (I've been to 30 or 40), it at least appears that most of the workers are white, or hispanic if anywhere near the Southwest. Not terribly surprising when you look at the placement of the DCs...usually a couple miles outside a small town, which is on a major highway anywhere from 50 to 200 miles from the nearest major city.
Agreed. As a former employee of a company that provides Wal-Mart with its warehouse automation systems, the investment to switch to RFID is just too huge. Except for the really big items, the product comes off the inbound trailers and is broken down and very efficiently assigned internal barcode labels. This happens right at the mouth of the automated sorting system. From then on it barely touches a human hand until it's loaded on an outbound trailer. The sorting systems accurately read the barcodes and shunt the cartons to the desired conveyors. RFID is kind of a problem because it's difficult to read exactly one box and detect its position within a couple inches, the way barcode can. The automation begins to break down with the pick and put areas, where they're manually breaking open boxes and sorting by individual item, but RFID can't even help there unless you want to RFID every last toothbrush and soap dispenser.
The real useful application for RFID is for Wal-Mart to have an even easier way to detect if a vendor has shorted them a box or two on a truck. Once again, the vendors get to foot most of the bill for something that is designed to allow Wal-Mart to keep a tighter leash on them.
Well, it does run much faster performing similar activities, and is a much smoother desktop experience. If I only needed to leave the computer on and in one place at all times, it would be ideal for my purposes. Hoping that Gutsy Gibbon will have the right mix to finally wean myself off Bill Gates' tit.
I'd actually welcome the opportunity to get some XP recovery disks for the laptop I purchased last month. It's my first experience with Windows Vista. Over the past month, I have seen that Vista has changed everything that was good about XP, and left all the bad parts untouched. Everything from network browsing to hibernation support has been subtly altered for maximum annoyance. Maybe Vista is a ruse to bump up sales of XP, because I've certainly been considering a self funded downgrade. And yes, Linux runs on it like a dream, but I'm still having trouble with the video and suspend to RAM functions.
Slashdot Mirror
Never saw that problem, actually. Automatic Flash plugin installation system has worked flawlessly on all the systems I've tried for the past year or so, which is a pretty diverse mix of AMD and Intel systems and Linux distributions. There may be something messed up on your system.
A normal RS232 port will be a different number each time you plug it into a different port, too.
Choose your rants better. USB-RS232 is the accepted solution in the field, and is not that much of a hardship. With a hardware RS232 port, you still need to carry a serial cable, right? The USB converter cables are no easier to lose or damage than the plain RS232 cables, and aren't any bulkier. The end result with both options is that you carry a 6 foot cable, you plug one end into a device, you plug the other end into the laptop. I've been in the field with hundreds of automation engineers, and not one of them ever had a serious complaint about not having a serial port on their laptop. It's a simple problem with an obvious solution, and everyone but you has dealt with it and moved on.
"Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc."
We don't have to think about it, buddy...we live it.
"Blocking customers" is a useless exercise that only gives the appearance of doing anything. It's easy for spammers to get new accounts, or activate more zombie PCs.
Reminds me of an experiment I did a while ago. On a whim, I stuck an old USB Bluetooth dongle into a 400MHz Linux box I had set up as a random-task server in the apartment closet. It was recognized and running immediately (wait, what?) so I played around with some of the HCI commands. Long story short, we soon had a tracking system tied to our cell phones. Whenever either of us approached the apartment, the server would log the event on a web page, play a few tones and announce "so-and-so has entered the perimeter" to the apartment. Similar if either of us left. The web page had a status indicator showing whether we were IN or OUT. This was handy in a few ways; you could tell if your roommate was already home from work and give them a call to see if a parcel was delivered, etc.
I also played around with gathering some information and playing it via Festival on arrival, "welcome back so-and-so, you were away for 10 hours and 23 minutes. You have 143 new emails, 132 marked as spam." Could be expanded a lot with other functions; music presets, wake my computers, etc. Anyway, the system fell into disuse after the computer was moved and the cat ate the speaker wire. But it was pretty interesting to see how easy it was to use Bluetooth as a presence detector, with a few lines of shell script. The phones didn't even need to be set in Discoverable mode, once the mac addresses were gathered.
This kind of thing is a piece of cake for the various secretive agencies to do to you on a global level, and they don't even need Bluetooth...every cell phone is a little tracking device. Too bad that power is several orders of magnitude more difficult for the public to obtain, as it is a centralized service much like the government itself. Sure, you can track your kids' phones if you pay Sprint some extra cash...but the head of the NSA can see where everyone with your last name had lunch today, while you can't log in and make sure he didn't skip work and go to the golf course instead. This is just a small example of the ways we're gradually being tagged and tracked, and it's a good think to have people aware and thinking of it. The power may be in the right hands for the most part, but it can be misused so easily.
I see that one of the tags for this story is "noob". And it occurs to me; we need a disparaging name for someone who is just no longer in the loop. noob doesn't do it because that implies that the person is just new to the game but may get there with time. Dvorak often seems like someone who was there but isn't with it anymore.
Has-been?
I use standby mode pretty often, but my home computer boots to an idle, ready desktop in about 18 to 22 seconds. I don't see how people are getting three minute boot times with a properly configured computer purchased within the last three years. I guess that's the problem...most people buy a Dell and never do anything about the huge pile of junkware that runs at boot time. The software loadout is shipped already broken. If someone is actually still using a P3-500 as a desktop, they really should upgrade...the wasted time in 2-3 second increments over the course of a day really adds up. That goes for people who use Linux too, if you're running a GUI any more complex than Ion.
I guess you could set up a version of Firefox that runs with no OS. Then you can do email, web browsing, maybe even IMs with it. Basically your operating system would BE Firefox, and everything you do would be on Google (email, documents, photos, etc). However, I don't see much advantage to this unless you provide a machine that only runs Firefox...once you try to make Firefox work with a billion different hardware configurations, or set up some kind of virtualization environment, you're right back to the complexity and overhead of a normal OS.
Now I'm thoroughly confused. You don't want citizens being brought up on the charges she was brought up on, for doing what she did? Sounds like she SHOULD be your poster child.
The only reason you don't like her is because she lost. And you are somehow blaming her for that.
Did she jump on the bandwagon, or are you a rat trying to leave a sinking ship?
She's not guilty of anything, this is a civil case. And as far as legality goes, they only proved she "made available" which has already been found to be inadequate evidence in prior cases (a fact the RIAA lawyers knew and were legally required to provide and did not...now there's a felony).
No...the prosecution only had to show that she made them available, not that anyone had ACTUALLY downloaded those songs, thereby causing her to ACTUALLY infringe copyright.
If you write it to one of the DVD Audio formats instead of Red Book, you don't even get the down-sampling.
Glad you mentioned this. Always been a fan of DVDA...it's fun for everyone!
I've always wanted the powers of hiding under the fridge, living without my head, and grossing out chicks.
Well, one out of three ain't bad.
How about: "Geek sets record by breaking the law and endangering innocent men, women, and children in selfish quest to do something pointless"
Seriously, this doesn't push any boundaries of technology or vehicle science. It tests two things: being able to stay awake, and being able to break laws and get away with it. Here they are tearing across the country in a car filled with distracting devices, sleep deprivation, fatigue, driving at unsafe speeds near vehicles filled with normal people trying to get to work or school.
I'm not really sure you can call Portal an FPS because of the "shooter" part...after all, in the game you never hold a weapon expressly intended to destroy anything or hurt anyone. Not even a generic wrecking tool like a crowbar. The portal generator is a gun only in the sense that it projects energy to a distant surface...it's not a weapon. Not even as much of a weapon as the Gravity Gun in HL2, which got a lot of attention at the time as a puzzle solving device rather than a traditional weapon. The joy of Portal was the way in which it guided you to do the "wrong" thing...gradually distrust the computer, start to notice the signs of something amiss, and improvise to use this mostly innocuous device to destroy obstacles. It was possible to continue believing the announcer...on the first reports of the gameplay on forums, you could find players saying that they "beat" Portal and the ending was pointless: they had trustingly ridden the platform into the incinerator. The game rewarded suspicion and curiosity, yet allowed the player to be an obedient lab rat if that was their predilection.
I don't really have a good term for the game, though on the basis of similar discussions we might call it a "first-person-puzzle-suspense-tragicomedy."
It's smooth as glass on my 8800. I didn't really like the feel of it at first, but it's a lot tighter if you turn off mouse smoothing. The graphics are busier and more dystopian than UT2004, so you'll sometimes need a sharp eye to pick out a target. Hoverboards are genius, as is being able to grapple a Manta and get a tow. Everyone's salivating over the descriptions of the Necris vehicles, and the Darkwalker in the Heatray DM map certainly delivers. It's a thing of fright and beauty to watch that tripod clumping through the buildings, occasionally slithering a leg up to grasp the side of a pillar or building for extra support.
Lots of things to fix...the server list is inexcusably broken, the Hellbender doesn't steer correctly, the auto trajectory on the flak cannon secondary was a bad idea and needs to go. Also you appear 2 feet taller than other players because the camera height is wrong. It's amazing they let such amateur mistakes get out into the public eye, while still investing so much time into the rest of the game.
You, for President, if you're in the U.S.A.
I know someone is going to get on their high horse and say that spam is annoying but not a cause for murder.
Maybe I should feel the same way.
However, I'm only slightly surprised to find that my conscience doesn't have any problem at all allowing me to feel happy at the news of this man's death.
The article says no. And at that point, I ceased to take the article seriously.
Actually, he's not too far off...if you've ever been to a distribution center (I've been to 30 or 40), it at least appears that most of the workers are white, or hispanic if anywhere near the Southwest. Not terribly surprising when you look at the placement of the DCs...usually a couple miles outside a small town, which is on a major highway anywhere from 50 to 200 miles from the nearest major city.
Agreed. As a former employee of a company that provides Wal-Mart with its warehouse automation systems, the investment to switch to RFID is just too huge. Except for the really big items, the product comes off the inbound trailers and is broken down and very efficiently assigned internal barcode labels. This happens right at the mouth of the automated sorting system. From then on it barely touches a human hand until it's loaded on an outbound trailer. The sorting systems accurately read the barcodes and shunt the cartons to the desired conveyors. RFID is kind of a problem because it's difficult to read exactly one box and detect its position within a couple inches, the way barcode can. The automation begins to break down with the pick and put areas, where they're manually breaking open boxes and sorting by individual item, but RFID can't even help there unless you want to RFID every last toothbrush and soap dispenser.
The real useful application for RFID is for Wal-Mart to have an even easier way to detect if a vendor has shorted them a box or two on a truck. Once again, the vendors get to foot most of the bill for something that is designed to allow Wal-Mart to keep a tighter leash on them.
Well, it does run much faster performing similar activities, and is a much smoother desktop experience. If I only needed to leave the computer on and in one place at all times, it would be ideal for my purposes. Hoping that Gutsy Gibbon will have the right mix to finally wean myself off Bill Gates' tit.
I'd actually welcome the opportunity to get some XP recovery disks for the laptop I purchased last month. It's my first experience with Windows Vista. Over the past month, I have seen that Vista has changed everything that was good about XP, and left all the bad parts untouched. Everything from network browsing to hibernation support has been subtly altered for maximum annoyance. Maybe Vista is a ruse to bump up sales of XP, because I've certainly been considering a self funded downgrade. And yes, Linux runs on it like a dream, but I'm still having trouble with the video and suspend to RAM functions.
That's pretty much the way Google has done it since day one.