It's one thing to sit and think about a beautiful system. To daydream wistfully about interfaces so well-thought that you can swap kernels and userland implementations without the world coming to an end.
It's another thing entirely to see it happen with a full featured OS like Debian! Congrats are in order for the Debian team for tackling this and (apparently) going all the way.
Sweet! Ars was just covering a story about using carbon nanotubes for artificial muscles, and now we have the neural interface controls we need too. If only ITER would hurry up and get us to the point of developing compact fusion reactors, we'd be all set to go.
DUHN-DUHN
In the Carleton university academic system, there are three groups: the faculty, who try their best to better the school's reputation, the students, who are some kind of horrible hybrid of communist and stupid, and CUSA, whose mandate is to get Carleton into the mainstream press for being stupid at least once every two years.
To be clear here - the staff (including the President) of the school don't like CUSA, the students don't like CUSA (the Marxists can't figure out that strikes might hurt the student body), and I'm pretty certain CUSA members must harbour some level of self-loathing over themselves and their bad decisions. So please, don't confound Carleton the school with CUSA the body of idiocy.
That horrifies me. The point of the graphic novel was that you could take your time, and absorb every little nuance - graffiti of lovers burned into a wall, the headlines on the newspapers, the reflections in windows.
And then you animate that? Everything that made the comic great will wash past in low-detail animation, moving too quickly to allow even the faintest bit of appreciation.
Actually, that added feature pushed me to buying one of those when they come out. I've got an XBox and a PS3 in the living room fighting over the single ethernet cable there, and a very noisy 2.4ghz spectrum. I've been thinking about getting an 802.11n router for my MBP so I can switch over to 5ghz networking, but the AEBS wasn't doing it for me. However, an AEBS with an internal 500gb drive well get me:
Some more zero-downtime networked storage (which I need)
A small gig ethernet switch to let my living room devices live in harmony
An 802.11n router to let me get off the 2.4ghz spectrum
A good place to add external drives from guests or as a later expansion
Consolidating all that stuff in the living room (which keeps the light, heat and noise out of my bedroom), in a single box, for a reasonable price seems like a win/win/win to me.
No, an RPG is driven by role-playing. You can get a group of people role-playing characters, set them in a room together, and with no story at all you can have an amazing RPG session. It's hard to do, but it's possible.
To reiterate: It's players engaged in role-playing which are crucial to an RPG. A story can help players to role-play, but on its own is worthless. A story in an RPG without role-playing is simply a book.
Once more: An RPG is driven by its characters. Their individual aspirations (as role-played) clashing or meshing towards a conclusion of some kind. Whether that conclusion is written down ahead of time in a book or not is irrelevant.
Honestly, I'm a bit confused - have you ever played an RPG? Have you never had a storyteller craft a good story before? Have you never had a play session where 'nothing' gets done, but you remember it forever? Your obsession with story makes me think you've only ever touched the video game version of an RPG, where the story is needed to drag you from random encounter to random encounter.
True, but lots of people, myself included, have large digital video libraries that we don't want to spend time and effort on transcoding. Digital video can stick around, usefully, in older formats - unlike, say, VHS, Beta or Laserdisc. This is a welcome announcement.
Have you ever actually found a reference which will back up that claim? I used to believe that statement as well, until I actually went looking for it myself. And failed to find it, or anything like it in the Geneva conventions. I think you might be taken in by the same floating bit of misinformation that I was.
I have to say that I agree with you on all points. I've started to religiously follow standards whenever I'm in full control of a page now - if it's not in a W3C recommendation, I try not to have it in my page.
Personally, I look at this as a case of "lead by example". The work I do gets limited exposure where I work, but my coworkers all know that I always strive for correct webpages (I even write them with the strict XHTML DTD). I hope it rubs off them eventually. If it rubs off on them, who else will it rub off on next?
Well that seals the deal. I thought Shadowrun was in good hands with FanPro, but apparently it needs to have a good public dragging through the mud to ensure its death. At least it won't have to suffer as many injustices as the BattleTech franchise has.
The thing is though, we're just used to having to have a PC to do our data entry. Back when we used paper for everything, you could enter data whenever and wherever you had the paper. Simply put, a PC does offer a suite of advantages over analog data entry (faster speed, easy replication, spell checking, data transfer) but it comes with a lot of problems too (large machine, weighs a lot, has to consume power somehow, very expensive, has downtime, requires maintenance, training requirements). Ideally, we should be taking what we had with paper and other basic data recording (portability, simplicity of use, availability, cost) and improving on that, rather than contenting ourselves with swapping out one set of problems for another.
I think the "PC" as we know it is bound for a destiny as little more than a file server. I mean, let's look at some common uses of Joe six-pack's PC:
Playing songs and movies
Chatting with an IM, checking e-mail
Writing documents (letters, resumes)
Playing games
Let's start with the first one. Songs sound better through a full stereo set, we can all acknowledge that. Stereos right now are very good at playing audio: they aren't that great at holding the songs they play. Clunky 600 CD changers aren't really the answer. A PC can hold, index, categorize and search more songs in a smaller space than a CD changer ever could. With the advent of set-top boxes, playing and storing movies and videos is now almost practical in a non-PC device. However, a PC is still a more extensible platform for storing and retrieving video data. For display of video, a properly sized television is simply larger than my 17" monitor, and better suited for viewing from a distance. So playing your audio through your stereo and your video through your TV are both better options than just using your PC, but using your PC for storage and retrieval is the best way to look after data.
For chatting/e-mail, the PC is still the premiere platform. However, increasing numbers of people want to take their e-mail with them. Also, people may tend to both chat (IM) with a person they also call on their cell phone. Currently, synchronizing the data between your PDA, cell and computer on who can be contacted where is a pain in the butt. The PC is best suited to storing contact information, but a cell phone is better suited for phoning somebody, a Blackberry can check your e-mail anywhere and hopefully someday will be able to use IM as well (if it doesn't already?).
Although it's a long way off yet, e-paper is still being actively pursued as a better way of entering data. The modern PC, with it's QWERTY keyboard (a design meant to hinder speed, not help it) isn't the premiere choice for entering data. The e-paper with a clipboard could go more places than your PC ever could, but probably won't have the storage capacities that modern *cough*MS Office*cough* document formats require. So having a PC act to save and retrieve all the documents for your e-paper is probably the right combination of technologies.
As for game playing, we all know that both the console and PC games market aren't dying (haven't heard a peep out of Netcraft), but costs for a modern gaming PC are continuing to climb (look back at the pricing for a "budget" GeForce 2 card, now look at the price for a "budget" GeForce 6600 card). At the current rate, the "PC" that you play games on will be a completely different beast than the "PC" that is targeted towards the mass consumer market.
In the end, I'm trying to say that just about the only thing a PC does really well is store stuff. Playback and data entry are done much better by devices specialized for that task. So, in the long run, I think the PC will end up acting as a data server/hub for a variety of devices and server to keep them all in sync with one another. Just my $0.02
For the love of WINE, don't do an LFS system if you want Cedega to work at all. Between my dillying and dallying with RC kernels, nVidia drivers, supporting libraries and GCC versions, I can tell you that every time I do something, I've gotta fix something in Cedega:S
So make sure your distro is 'non-volatile' before you take the plunge with Cedega.
Some of the things discovered are valid exploits. Like the MPlayer hole where a streaming ASF file can modify hard disk contents.
Some of the things are seemingly far fetched. Like the CUPS vulnerability where forcing the disk to fill up DURING a password write operation can cause a user defined error message to be written to the password file. I mean, if a user who doesn't have access to the CUPS passwords he needs has the ability to fill the disk and set error messages for CUPS, then something is very wrong with user management (ie quotas) and permissions (doesn't have CUPS passwords, but can alter the CUPS error messages?).
I know my experience of unions has been that of a student, constantly facing the service groups I depend on (elementary school teachers, high school teachers, university professors, TAs, university support staff etc.) going on strike. So far, in my life, unions have been nothing but a disruption, stopping me from doing the things I need to do and causing undue stress (there's nothing quite like being a first year student in residence and wondering "If all the professors go on strike, what happens to that $2,700 I just plunked down on this semester's tuition?")
I agree. KDE is great (I'm running 3.3.1 right now), but there are still so many ways in which it could be improved I can hardly begin to name them all. With so many distros shipping with KDE as a desktop, the team should be focusing on their Linux development, not scrabbling around trying to making a working port to windows that few people (if any) will use.
My question is: Where the heck are the breweries for Budweiser situated? Every time I see that horrid excuse for a beverage sitting on the shelf at the Beer Store (I think the LCBO has good enough taste not to stock it), I always think to myself "Why buy Budweiser when pissing in an empty is so much cheaper?"
I'm in my second year of university at this point, but I can still remember well the follies of my high school programming attempts.
Basically, in high school my nerd friends and I had a lot of one thing: ambition. We could dream up the coolest projects ever. We could sit down and discuss details and implementations for the coolest video games ever made. We could daydream for hours about how system x could work with system y. When it came right down to it though, we ended up nothing - not even any code.
What high school coders lack the most is experience - they'll have no idea what is too much or too little to bite off as a project, they'll have no idea how much time it will take or how much effort, they'll have no idea how to manage working as a group.
So what would probably be most valued is mentorship. Find the kids who know what they are doing with programming, and then give them realistic challenges based on their own ideas (want to build an IRC client using Ruby? cool! Start by doing _this_ and just this, and once you get that working we'll try seeing what other stuff we can do with your client) Any experience you can give students for managing large, challenging projects will go a long way to helping them in the future and will let them see some of their big-shot dreams come true in high school (I can still remember how proud I was of the first "encryption" program I wrote in PERL that worked)
Yeah, but the thing is that even if people aren't targetting FireFox now, when they do, there won't be ugly things like ActiveX and security zones that will let people root your boxen. Firefox was built as a web browser, something that goes out onto the big bad nasty Internet and pulls down only god-knows-what sort of data. IE was built as this tightly integrated emeddable omnipotent part of the OS... which then goes and pulls down god-knows-what sort of data and runs with it. So FireFox really is more secure than IE - when it gets targetted, the exploits won't be as bad as those we've seen on IE, and because the project is open source, I'd expect the attention to security to increase as the userbase climbs (attention to security is pretty good right now I think, but IANAD)
That we introduce a forced limit on how good your steering/braking system can be relative to the maximum output of your vehicle. Say you're only allowed to have enough downforce applied etc. to maintain reasonable control at half your engine's top output. That way, the mediocre drivers would drive more cautiously, whereas the truely amazing drivers could push their cars to a very very dangerous point and win the race.... or crash in a spectacular fashion. Which makes us (the spectators) that much more happy.
Slashdot Mirror
It's one thing to sit and think about a beautiful system. To daydream wistfully about interfaces so well-thought that you can swap kernels and userland implementations without the world coming to an end. It's another thing entirely to see it happen with a full featured OS like Debian! Congrats are in order for the Debian team for tackling this and (apparently) going all the way.
Sweet! Ars was just covering a story about using carbon nanotubes for artificial muscles, and now we have the neural interface controls we need too. If only ITER would hurry up and get us to the point of developing compact fusion reactors, we'd be all set to go.
DUHN-DUHN In the Carleton university academic system, there are three groups: the faculty, who try their best to better the school's reputation, the students, who are some kind of horrible hybrid of communist and stupid, and CUSA, whose mandate is to get Carleton into the mainstream press for being stupid at least once every two years. To be clear here - the staff (including the President) of the school don't like CUSA, the students don't like CUSA (the Marxists can't figure out that strikes might hurt the student body), and I'm pretty certain CUSA members must harbour some level of self-loathing over themselves and their bad decisions. So please, don't confound Carleton the school with CUSA the body of idiocy.
That horrifies me. The point of the graphic novel was that you could take your time, and absorb every little nuance - graffiti of lovers burned into a wall, the headlines on the newspapers, the reflections in windows. And then you animate that? Everything that made the comic great will wash past in low-detail animation, moving too quickly to allow even the faintest bit of appreciation.
Actually, that added feature pushed me to buying one of those when they come out. I've got an XBox and a PS3 in the living room fighting over the single ethernet cable there, and a very noisy 2.4ghz spectrum. I've been thinking about getting an 802.11n router for my MBP so I can switch over to 5ghz networking, but the AEBS wasn't doing it for me. However, an AEBS with an internal 500gb drive well get me: Some more zero-downtime networked storage (which I need) A small gig ethernet switch to let my living room devices live in harmony An 802.11n router to let me get off the 2.4ghz spectrum A good place to add external drives from guests or as a later expansion Consolidating all that stuff in the living room (which keeps the light, heat and noise out of my bedroom), in a single box, for a reasonable price seems like a win/win/win to me.
Read the 3drealms website. It was an unfunded effort by a few employees to make something for the company Christmas party. Lighten up, Francis!
No, an RPG is driven by role-playing. You can get a group of people role-playing characters, set them in a room together, and with no story at all you can have an amazing RPG session. It's hard to do, but it's possible. To reiterate: It's players engaged in role-playing which are crucial to an RPG. A story can help players to role-play, but on its own is worthless. A story in an RPG without role-playing is simply a book. Once more: An RPG is driven by its characters. Their individual aspirations (as role-played) clashing or meshing towards a conclusion of some kind. Whether that conclusion is written down ahead of time in a book or not is irrelevant. Honestly, I'm a bit confused - have you ever played an RPG? Have you never had a storyteller craft a good story before? Have you never had a play session where 'nothing' gets done, but you remember it forever? Your obsession with story makes me think you've only ever touched the video game version of an RPG, where the story is needed to drag you from random encounter to random encounter.
True, but lots of people, myself included, have large digital video libraries that we don't want to spend time and effort on transcoding. Digital video can stick around, usefully, in older formats - unlike, say, VHS, Beta or Laserdisc. This is a welcome announcement.
Have you ever actually found a reference which will back up that claim? I used to believe that statement as well, until I actually went looking for it myself. And failed to find it, or anything like it in the Geneva conventions. I think you might be taken in by the same floating bit of misinformation that I was.
I have to say that I agree with you on all points. I've started to religiously follow standards whenever I'm in full control of a page now - if it's not in a W3C recommendation, I try not to have it in my page. Personally, I look at this as a case of "lead by example". The work I do gets limited exposure where I work, but my coworkers all know that I always strive for correct webpages (I even write them with the strict XHTML DTD). I hope it rubs off them eventually. If it rubs off on them, who else will it rub off on next?
Well that seals the deal. I thought Shadowrun was in good hands with FanPro, but apparently it needs to have a good public dragging through the mud to ensure its death. At least it won't have to suffer as many injustices as the BattleTech franchise has.
Ye gods man, don't spoil it for the rest of us! "Ignorance is bliss" must remain a critical part of the poutine eating process.
Oh my god! You said piqued Not peaked, or piked, or any other dumb thing that editors let slip by in mainstream publications, but piqued! I love you
The thing is though, we're just used to having to have a PC to do our data entry. Back when we used paper for everything, you could enter data whenever and wherever you had the paper. Simply put, a PC does offer a suite of advantages over analog data entry (faster speed, easy replication, spell checking, data transfer) but it comes with a lot of problems too (large machine, weighs a lot, has to consume power somehow, very expensive, has downtime, requires maintenance, training requirements). Ideally, we should be taking what we had with paper and other basic data recording (portability, simplicity of use, availability, cost) and improving on that, rather than contenting ourselves with swapping out one set of problems for another.
I think the "PC" as we know it is bound for a destiny as little more than a file server. I mean, let's look at some common uses of Joe six-pack's PC:
Playing songs and movies
Chatting with an IM, checking e-mail
Writing documents (letters, resumes)
Playing games
Let's start with the first one. Songs sound better through a full stereo set, we can all acknowledge that. Stereos right now are very good at playing audio: they aren't that great at holding the songs they play. Clunky 600 CD changers aren't really the answer. A PC can hold, index, categorize and search more songs in a smaller space than a CD changer ever could. With the advent of set-top boxes, playing and storing movies and videos is now almost practical in a non-PC device. However, a PC is still a more extensible platform for storing and retrieving video data. For display of video, a properly sized television is simply larger than my 17" monitor, and better suited for viewing from a distance. So playing your audio through your stereo and your video through your TV are both better options than just using your PC, but using your PC for storage and retrieval is the best way to look after data.
For chatting/e-mail, the PC is still the premiere platform. However, increasing numbers of people want to take their e-mail with them. Also, people may tend to both chat (IM) with a person they also call on their cell phone. Currently, synchronizing the data between your PDA, cell and computer on who can be contacted where is a pain in the butt. The PC is best suited to storing contact information, but a cell phone is better suited for phoning somebody, a Blackberry can check your e-mail anywhere and hopefully someday will be able to use IM as well (if it doesn't already?).
Although it's a long way off yet, e-paper is still being actively pursued as a better way of entering data. The modern PC, with it's QWERTY keyboard (a design meant to hinder speed, not help it) isn't the premiere choice for entering data. The e-paper with a clipboard could go more places than your PC ever could, but probably won't have the storage capacities that modern *cough*MS Office*cough* document formats require. So having a PC act to save and retrieve all the documents for your e-paper is probably the right combination of technologies.
As for game playing, we all know that both the console and PC games market aren't dying (haven't heard a peep out of Netcraft), but costs for a modern gaming PC are continuing to climb (look back at the pricing for a "budget" GeForce 2 card, now look at the price for a "budget" GeForce 6600 card). At the current rate, the "PC" that you play games on will be a completely different beast than the "PC" that is targeted towards the mass consumer market.
In the end, I'm trying to say that just about the only thing a PC does really well is store stuff. Playback and data entry are done much better by devices specialized for that task. So, in the long run, I think the PC will end up acting as a data server/hub for a variety of devices and server to keep them all in sync with one another. Just my $0.02
For the love of WINE, don't do an LFS system if you want Cedega to work at all. Between my dillying and dallying with RC kernels, nVidia drivers, supporting libraries and GCC versions, I can tell you that every time I do something, I've gotta fix something in Cedega :S
So make sure your distro is 'non-volatile' before you take the plunge with Cedega.
Some of the things discovered are valid exploits. Like the MPlayer hole where a streaming ASF file can modify hard disk contents. Some of the things are seemingly far fetched. Like the CUPS vulnerability where forcing the disk to fill up DURING a password write operation can cause a user defined error message to be written to the password file. I mean, if a user who doesn't have access to the CUPS passwords he needs has the ability to fill the disk and set error messages for CUPS, then something is very wrong with user management (ie quotas) and permissions (doesn't have CUPS passwords, but can alter the CUPS error messages?).
I know my experience of unions has been that of a student, constantly facing the service groups I depend on (elementary school teachers, high school teachers, university professors, TAs, university support staff etc.) going on strike. So far, in my life, unions have been nothing but a disruption, stopping me from doing the things I need to do and causing undue stress (there's nothing quite like being a first year student in residence and wondering "If all the professors go on strike, what happens to that $2,700 I just plunked down on this semester's tuition?")
I agree. KDE is great (I'm running 3.3.1 right now), but there are still so many ways in which it could be improved I can hardly begin to name them all. With so many distros shipping with KDE as a desktop, the team should be focusing on their Linux development, not scrabbling around trying to making a working port to windows that few people (if any) will use.
Yeah, but do you really want to run around in a Mackey? I'd wait until you can get your hands on a Black Knight at the very least.
My question is: Where the heck are the breweries for Budweiser situated? Every time I see that horrid excuse for a beverage sitting on the shelf at the Beer Store (I think the LCBO has good enough taste not to stock it), I always think to myself "Why buy Budweiser when pissing in an empty is so much cheaper?"
I'm in my second year of university at this point, but I can still remember well the follies of my high school programming attempts.
Basically, in high school my nerd friends and I had a lot of one thing: ambition. We could dream up the coolest projects ever. We could sit down and discuss details and implementations for the coolest video games ever made. We could daydream for hours about how system x could work with system y. When it came right down to it though, we ended up nothing - not even any code.
What high school coders lack the most is experience - they'll have no idea what is too much or too little to bite off as a project, they'll have no idea how much time it will take or how much effort, they'll have no idea how to manage working as a group.
So what would probably be most valued is mentorship. Find the kids who know what they are doing with programming, and then give them realistic challenges based on their own ideas (want to build an IRC client using Ruby? cool! Start by doing _this_ and just this, and once you get that working we'll try seeing what other stuff we can do with your client) Any experience you can give students for managing large, challenging projects will go a long way to helping them in the future and will let them see some of their big-shot dreams come true in high school (I can still remember how proud I was of the first "encryption" program I wrote in PERL that worked)
Yeah, but the thing is that even if people aren't targetting FireFox now, when they do, there won't be ugly things like ActiveX and security zones that will let people root your boxen. Firefox was built as a web browser, something that goes out onto the big bad nasty Internet and pulls down only god-knows-what sort of data. IE was built as this tightly integrated emeddable omnipotent part of the OS ... which then goes and pulls down god-knows-what sort of data and runs with it. So FireFox really is more secure than IE - when it gets targetted, the exploits won't be as bad as those we've seen on IE, and because the project is open source, I'd expect the attention to security to increase as the userbase climbs (attention to security is pretty good right now I think, but IANAD)
That we introduce a forced limit on how good your steering/braking system can be relative to the maximum output of your vehicle. Say you're only allowed to have enough downforce applied etc. to maintain reasonable control at half your engine's top output. That way, the mediocre drivers would drive more cautiously, whereas the truely amazing drivers could push their cars to a very very dangerous point and win the race .... or crash in a spectacular fashion. Which makes us (the spectators) that much more happy.
2. Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000:
Another dumbass tiny computer running a dumber ass OS. Who cares? Why is this cool? TruEnvy Factor: One complimentary BSOD.
BSOD? The Zaurus series are running Linux, not Windows CE *hugs his SL-5500*