You can't fly in space - you need some sort of fluid (traditionally a gas) to interact with the flight surfaces and provide lift. You can't float there either as there's nothing to displace.
hmm well I'm fairly sure "flying" has a lot to do with aerodynamics, the passge of air over a shaped surface that creates a pressure differential that "sucks" the craft upwards. tardis - shaped like a brick.
Mind you - I guess we do say things like "the rock flew through the window" so maybe, possibly:P
It won't go in my Nokia car kit. I've stuck with a relaible but boring 6310i because it does. I was hoping that when Nokia got around to maiing a modern device (Like the Sony Erricsson one) that it would be plug compatible and fit in the cradle.
Photo caption from the BBC article "the tardis was the Doctor's flying machine" How to demonstrate the lack of even basic knowledge of the subject they are reporting on in one phrase... Things like this always make me wonder whether the other stories, that are about things I have no prior knowledge of, are just as inaccurate..
Agreed - there is a lot of work involved in categorizing the books - but that doesn't change the system. In fact, it's largely so damm hard because the system is so restrictive. Trying to describe a book from a series of predefined categories is not natural - why not just write an abstract describing the book, and then you could search on the words in the abstract? To uniquely identify the book, you just need a unique number - like the ISBN. This number does not have to say anything about the content of the book. The DDC tries to do both with just some numbers and the mother of all lookup tables. It was designed to be searched by humans. Information technology has moved on - there are far more suitable ways to represent this inside a computer.
I agree though - that designing the model is only part of it - someone still has to type all that sh*t in, and make those decisions - DDC just doesn't help them much though does it?
The main thing though - is that it's a standard, which means that unfortunately, some central body has to maintain the damm thing - and they can't do it for free, and no: $500pa is not a lot. But one of the downsides to centralised standards is that they are blooming difficult to shift later no matter how antiquated they get. VHS for eg.
Well if it is the categories they are claiming as IP I take your point. The "system" isn't worth tuppence though.
er - do you work at the same place as me? (and no I'm not saying:P)
Seriously though - you just described my situation. This whole "one size fits all" centralisation thing is bizzarre. The worst thing I find, is that no one seems to be embarrased at the quotes times/costs for doing things under the new centralised system. I mean - I can see where they were aiming for: more buying clout, economies of scale, re-use of development effort, re-use of spare tech, common standards across the company, assurance of best practice being applied, compliance with legislation etc but sadly, the sheer admin overhead means that these savings, even if they are realised, are wiped out by the excessive time and cost incurred to bring a new system to production. Lots of small nimble efficient teams with total repsonsibilty for their own domains is the way to go. This is not idle conjecture on my part - that's how it used to be, and it damm well worked.
These days, I spend more time submitting procedures for review, attending meetings on compliance (and I'm talking compliance with stuff we made up ourselves here for the most part - not govenmental legislation), and producing project documentation by the truckload. Something is wrong, when the project documents, and approval/procurement process took longer than the development and testing for a new system.
It's almost as if those with vision who formulated this way of working told some slightly deaf people who didn't really speak the language who went off and imposed a gotesque twisted version of the original vision.
It just takes too long. A good example is hardware standards. We can only buy kit from the "approved" list. When I say "we" I mean the centralised procurement team - we not allowed to actually buy anything. By the time something new makes it onto the approved list - having undergone extensive testing, its no longer available! The replacemnt isn't on the list, so where exactly do we get the kit from? A car boot? I mean come on - we can safely assume I think that HP/Dell/IBM et al do a fair bit of testing before releasing a new server: why are we duplicating this effort? Anyway - that's just one of my many soapboxes, but you get the idea. It's just too slow. The industry I work in demands very fast turnaround on new systems, new features for existing systems and security fixes and so on. We all realise that standards and centralised management are there to mitigate risk to the business, but right now, with the spiralling costs, and timelines 100 times longer than before they *are* the biggest risk to business.
We used to get a new Internet web site to market in 3 months. It would probably run on a couple of servers with no backup system. Occasionally shit would break, and people leapt into action until it was working again. Then - watch out here's comes the world of standards, centralised management etc etc. Now we have an online warm standby, diverse Internet routing and an operations manual thats bigger than the bible (so that in theory, any old joe in the data centre can pick this up and fix the system). Trouble is, our web site's now hosted in a different country to the customers, if it breaks, the same thing happens as before, only now, we can't touch the system and have to get it fixed by talking someone through the diagnosis on the phone. This cost about 20 times what it used to cost to run per year (about a 1million now) and the service is worse! Now if we were to add up the losses incurred by the previous setup, sure there was some downtime - longest was about 5 hours when I had to rebuild both firewalls - which is another (very tedious) story - it would come out to no more than 30K. So - do the math - it's all about risk management, but the "one size fits all" centralised IT setup means we literally throw money away. This is why software costs so much - it's still a drop in the ocean compared to the running costs of such a bureaucratic setup.
I couldn't agree more - I mean come on guys - you can't copyright/patent counting. I don't claim to be an expert on the DD indexing "system" but I just read the "introduction" pdf and it seems to me to be a simple hierachical identifier, a lot like er.. IP addressing... And in what way is it "decimal" anyway? because it has "."'s between the numbers?!? Give it up guys. Here's Scooters semi-colon numbering system: you define a whole bunch of top level categories, and then some sub categories, and then some sub-sub-categories, and when you get bored of adding tiers, number the books. Write them down as a;b;c;d;....n. Great - now if any of you tea leafs start numbering things like that - I'll see you in court!:P
I mean in this day and age surely some sort of tree structure would be better (and be easier to manipulate by machines). Each book has n number of attributes where n is bigger than 0. You can go on adding nodes of type attribute until the book is described uniqely. Or dammit - just index them by the ISBN and chuck in a whole bunch of keywords to search by..
In other news, the estate of one Pythagoras is suing everyone for making the square of the hypotenuse on their triangles equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides - the thieving swines! Pop-Idol on BBC2 next, after the weather.
Geez, as a Quake player I always regarded Half Speed as being a bit slow - but now it's powered by Steam?! Blimey: Quiet Life Camperstrike 2 - here we come... Ready, set, hide!!
And it depends on the cloud's altitude - perhaps a more interesting question might "how much does a cloud mass?" which in turn is er.. fairly simple, depending as it does on it's average desnity and it's volume... in fact is anyone bothered about this? At all? I mean they weigh what they weigh - and it's different for each cloud..
Lots of people watch football. I'm not one of them - as I'm probably with you in "I'd rather play than watch" but examine the reasons why millions do watch football: it's to see players with bags more skill than they have playing a game they know, really well. This applies equally well to games like Quake/RTCW etc. I'm sure you realise that it isn't really about "[clicking] really fast for endless hours in front of a screen" I've played Q2 4v4 in 'amateur' leagues in it's heyday and I found seeing better teams, and better players than me play the game is actually watchable and quite entertaining.
The amount of skill and level of commitment necessary to play with the big boys in these games is immense. We had, for example a pretty handy Q2 team, but we knew we would never be on a par with the best teams becuase non of us had the time necessary to perfect the map strategies, communication drills and other choreography necessary to take control of a game and win at that level. We had a plan for each map, and we practised once a week for a few hours (usually just the map that we were due to play next in the league). We'd play friendly games on that map gainst teams we knew, to try out the strategy, and practice any set pieces we'd come up with. This activity, however, was nothing compared to the amount of practice a top level team would need to be putting in: hours of practice every day, until every trick jump was 100%, every set piece was timed down to the last millisecond and so on. It's bloomin time consuming! (Not to mention the cost - you can't play competitively at in these competitions with a pile of junk for a PC. These days this isn't such a problem for Q3 based games as pretty much any new PC can run it OK but it used to be a bit of a hardware race.
I think some games lend themselves to the spectatot thing more than others. QuakeIII for example - has no "plot" as such - the game is the game and exists for it's own sake - this sort of thing makes good spectator material. RTCW on the other hand, is more like a war movie. UT2K3 goes all out to appear to be a "sport" complete with excitable commentator!
To get back to the plot though:-/ yes - I for one quite like watching the demos of really good players, and hell, if rendering technology continues to advance as it has, soon movie producers wanting a CGI action film, can just tart up a demo of RTCW IV and add some voices:))
They couldn't shoot the coke can becuase of the force field, but they were were able to walk up to the ship and place the can there. Surely all we're arguing about then, is the speed of the object ? All they needed was some slower missiles to penetrate the field. (Not that they would have done much damage to a thing with that much mass anyway..).
And then we have the famous triangulation scene where Goldblum pin-points his ex-wife's position by triangualtion - but doesn't move. Thats a pretty odd looking triangle.
An why oh why would a species that's mastered interstellar travel, planet busting weapons etc etc need some clapped out old earth comms satellites to synchronise their attacks? Imagine the alian commander berating his underlings "you forgot the f**king clocks again didn't you? Well you'd better come up with a cunning plan to time our attacks or it'll be no new Mac for you come xmas!". And why was it important to synchronise them anyway? It wasn't as if the people in LA seeing Moscow go up would then go "oh right *that's* what they're up to - we know exactly what to do to stop them now..."
Makes you cringe. Don't even start on "Jumpin' Jack Flash"....
and in another 16 years or so (if a light bulb last 6 months and the flourescents cost around 32 times the price of incandescents (25p for a 100W versus about 8 quid for am equivalent flourescent) here you may have recouped your investment in these flourescent bulbs (ok you save a few pounds on the leccy each year too with your ligting potion being about a quarter of what it was). You'll have to endure the strange dingy light they emit for that time too. Don't know exactly what the difference is in the spectrum they emit, but I find those flourescent bulbs have the ability to transform any room into a dingy hole at the flick of a switch.
My kitchen is lit by some very wasteful and expensive 50watt halogen lights for a total of 7 lights = 350watts. These things are so inefficient, they need a heat shield to prevent them inducing combustion in the ceiling. But: I like the light they produce.
I will admit though - at least you won't have to change them every few months: that is a pain.
Well indeed - Alex Bell invents the telephone, only to realise no bugger else has bothered. John Logie Baird invents the TV, and there's nothing on for 36 years..
LOL - I concur - the vac is highly effective at removing flies (airborne or stationery). I occasionally zap some Raid up the pipe too just in case the little buggers start breeding in the dust bag:)
Exactly - why do we still describe user processes (to users) in terms of hardware components? Hard drive? The average Joe doesn't care how his documents are kept inside the machine - it could be a disk, tape, drum, solid state, or fairy dust. To them, the "computer" is, as it is represented on the screen - the little yellow folder thingies that you can drag about to different places in different windows. It's about time we stopped calling the damm things "computers" anyway - it falls woefully short as a descriptive for Today's multimedia "information terminals" or "workstations". Computer - something that "computes" stuff. Now how many average users actually use the machines to crunch numbers? Not many. I'll bet most of em are used as Internet access terminals and email devices.
Right - I have to go feed the little demons that write all ma shit down on tiny bits of paper inside my PC.
SCO needs to just go away to be honest. Is anyone really interested in the ramblings of a dying and long irrelevant company? Even if they did by some miracle get a court to back them over this, they will have left a bad taste in many peoples mouths - will anyone ever buy anything from them ever again? Certainly can't see IBM doing business with them again... SCO are on a lose/lose path now - please someone just push them over the cliff so the rest of the world can get back to what they were doing..
Versions of Quake2 weren't net compatible with each other!
I'm not sure what you would hope to gain from making Doom 3 clients connect to old Q2 servers - the maps look like the maps look - it wouldn't look any funkier.
As a Q2 fan I always felt that ID missed the point slightly with the MP game when Q3 was released. I didn't want a *new* game - I wanted the *old* game with up to date visuals. After all - MP FPS games are merely the playing field - not the game itself - that is supplied by its players. A football field does nothing in the game.
But - like the man said, Doom 3 isn't primarily a MP game - it's back to the old fear inducing atmosphere that Doom and the single player Q2 provided, and the optimization rules are different for that.
Indeed - that graph does not measure attention span at all (how long each person looked at the page might come close but then thats kinda hard to measure - once they have the page there endeth the interest of your web server in the transaction).
Maybe the./ community should rent itself out as a load tester:) Then again unless you have vast tracts of bandwidth, the traffic is effectively throttled by the pipe anyway.
I agree - plus Geeks may have something else in common - the imagination to see beyond the thin veneer of modern life, and glimpse some of the horrors the human race perpetrates, or just recognise just how precarious our way of life may be (in terms of the resources it consumes, the injustices it inflicts etc etc).
I guess it's true - Ignorance may very well be bliss. The enlightened, are therefore probably subject to a certain amount of depression...
Slashdot Mirror
You can't fly in space - you need some sort of fluid (traditionally a gas) to interact with the flight surfaces and provide lift. You can't float there either as there's nothing to displace.
hmm well I'm fairly sure "flying" has a lot to do with aerodynamics, the passge of air over a shaped surface that creates a pressure differential that "sucks" the craft upwards. tardis - shaped like a brick.
:P
Mind you - I guess we do say things like "the rock flew through the window" so maybe, possibly
"Flying machine" though? - nah.
It won't go in my Nokia car kit. I've stuck with a relaible but boring 6310i because it does. I was hoping that when Nokia got around to maiing a modern device (Like the Sony Erricsson one) that it would be plug compatible and fit in the cradle.
Guess I'll have to get the car re-plumbed.
Photo caption from the BBC article "the tardis was the Doctor's flying machine" How to demonstrate the lack of even basic knowledge of the subject they are reporting on in one phrase... Things like this always make me wonder whether the other stories, that are about things I have no prior knowledge of, are just as inaccurate..
Well of course it was slow - what with all those steam powered servers :)
:P
er..
Is that my coat?
Thanks
Hmm same here - one XP box quite happily connecting to Samba shares on my 2 Linux servers.
There's nothing in it except water though..
Agreed - there is a lot of work involved in categorizing the books - but that doesn't change the system. In fact, it's largely so damm hard because the system is so restrictive. Trying to describe a book from a series of predefined categories is not natural - why not just write an abstract describing the book, and then you could search on the words in the abstract? To uniquely identify the book, you just need a unique number - like the ISBN. This number does not have to say anything about the content of the book. The DDC tries to do both with just some numbers and the mother of all lookup tables. It was designed to be searched by humans. Information technology has moved on - there are far more suitable ways to represent this inside a computer.
I agree though - that designing the model is only part of it - someone still has to type all that sh*t in, and make those decisions - DDC just doesn't help them much though does it?
The main thing though - is that it's a standard, which means that unfortunately, some central body has to maintain the damm thing - and they can't do it for free, and no: $500pa is not a lot. But one of the downsides to centralised standards is that they are blooming difficult to shift later no matter how antiquated they get. VHS for eg.
Well if it is the categories they are claiming as IP I take your point. The "system" isn't worth tuppence though.
er - do you work at the same place as me? (and no I'm not saying :P)
Seriously though - you just described my situation. This whole "one size fits all" centralisation thing is bizzarre. The worst thing I find, is that no one seems to be embarrased at the quotes times/costs for doing things under the new centralised system. I mean - I can see where they were aiming for: more buying clout, economies of scale, re-use of development effort, re-use of spare tech, common standards across the company, assurance of best practice being applied, compliance with legislation etc but sadly, the sheer admin overhead means that these savings, even if they are realised, are wiped out by the excessive time and cost incurred to bring a new system to production. Lots of small nimble efficient teams with total repsonsibilty for their own domains is the way to go. This is not idle conjecture on my part - that's how it used to be, and it damm well worked.
These days, I spend more time submitting procedures for review, attending meetings on compliance (and I'm talking compliance with stuff we made up ourselves here for the most part - not govenmental legislation), and producing project documentation by the truckload. Something is wrong, when the project documents, and approval/procurement process took longer than the development and testing for a new system.
It's almost as if those with vision who formulated this way of working told some slightly deaf people who didn't really speak the language who went off and imposed a gotesque twisted version of the original vision.
It just takes too long. A good example is hardware standards. We can only buy kit from the "approved" list. When I say "we" I mean the centralised procurement team - we not allowed to actually buy anything. By the time something new makes it onto the approved list - having undergone extensive testing, its no longer available! The replacemnt isn't on the list, so where exactly do we get the kit from? A car boot? I mean come on - we can safely assume I think that HP/Dell/IBM et al do a fair bit of testing before releasing a new server: why are we duplicating this effort? Anyway - that's just one of my many soapboxes, but you get the idea. It's just too slow. The industry I work in demands very fast turnaround on new systems, new features for existing systems and security fixes and so on. We all realise that standards and centralised management are there to mitigate risk to the business, but right now, with the spiralling costs, and timelines 100 times longer than before they *are* the biggest risk to business.
We used to get a new Internet web site to market in 3 months. It would probably run on a couple of servers with no backup system. Occasionally shit would break, and people leapt into action until it was working again. Then - watch out here's comes the world of standards, centralised management etc etc. Now we have an online warm standby, diverse Internet routing and an operations manual thats bigger than the bible (so that in theory, any old joe in the data centre can pick this up and fix the system). Trouble is, our web site's now hosted in a different country to the customers, if it breaks, the same thing happens as before, only now, we can't touch the system and have to get it fixed by talking someone through the diagnosis on the phone. This cost about 20 times what it used to cost to run per year (about a 1million now) and the service is worse! Now if we were to add up the losses incurred by the previous setup, sure there was some downtime - longest was about 5 hours when I had to rebuild both firewalls - which is another (very tedious) story - it would come out to no more than 30K. So - do the math - it's all about risk management, but the "one size fits all" centralised IT setup means we literally throw money away. This is why software costs so much - it's still a drop in the ocean compared to the running costs of such a bureaucratic setup.
It *is* a total nightmare - the IT dep
I couldn't agree more - I mean come on guys - you can't copyright/patent counting. I don't claim to be an expert on the DD indexing "system" but I just read the "introduction" pdf and it seems to me to be a simple hierachical identifier, a lot like er.. IP addressing... And in what way is it "decimal" anyway? because it has "."'s between the numbers?!? Give it up guys. Here's Scooters semi-colon numbering system: you define a whole bunch of top level categories, and then some sub categories, and then some sub-sub-categories, and when you get bored of adding tiers, number the books. Write them down as a;b;c;d;....n. Great - now if any of you tea leafs start numbering things like that - I'll see you in court! :P
I mean in this day and age surely some sort of tree structure would be better (and be easier to manipulate by machines). Each book has n number of attributes where n is bigger than 0. You can go on adding nodes of type attribute until the book is described uniqely. Or dammit - just index them by the ISBN and chuck in a whole bunch of keywords to search by..
In other news, the estate of one Pythagoras is suing everyone for making the square of the hypotenuse on their triangles equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides - the thieving swines! Pop-Idol on BBC2 next, after the weather.
Geez, as a Quake player I always regarded Half Speed as being a bit slow - but now it's powered by Steam?! Blimey: Quiet Life Camperstrike 2 - here we come... Ready, set, hide!!
Indeed. "you barstard - you made your wheel round as well! I'm calling my lawyer!"
And it depends on the cloud's altitude - perhaps a more interesting question might "how much does a cloud mass?" which in turn is er.. fairly simple, depending as it does on it's average desnity and it's volume... in fact is anyone bothered about this? At all? I mean they weigh what they weigh - and it's different for each cloud..
Lots of people watch football. I'm not one of them - as I'm probably with you in "I'd rather play than watch" but examine the reasons why millions do watch football: it's to see players with bags more skill than they have playing a game they know, really well. This applies equally well to games like Quake/RTCW etc. I'm sure you realise that it isn't really about "[clicking] really fast for endless hours in front of a screen" I've played Q2 4v4 in 'amateur' leagues in it's heyday and I found seeing better teams, and better players than me play the game is actually watchable and quite entertaining.
:-/ yes - I for one quite like watching the demos of really good players, and hell, if rendering technology continues to advance as it has, soon movie producers wanting a CGI action film, can just tart up a demo of RTCW IV and add some voices :))
The amount of skill and level of commitment necessary to play with the big boys in these games is immense. We had, for example a pretty handy Q2 team, but we knew we would never be on a par with the best teams becuase non of us had the time necessary to perfect the map strategies, communication drills and other choreography necessary to take control of a game and win at that level. We had a plan for each map, and we practised once a week for a few hours (usually just the map that we were due to play next in the league). We'd play friendly games on that map gainst teams we knew, to try out the strategy, and practice any set pieces we'd come up with. This activity, however, was nothing compared to the amount of practice a top level team would need to be putting in: hours of practice every day, until every trick jump was 100%, every set piece was timed down to the last millisecond and so on. It's bloomin time consuming! (Not to mention the cost - you can't play competitively at in these competitions with a pile of junk for a PC. These days this isn't such a problem for Q3 based games as pretty much any new PC can run it OK but it used to be a bit of a hardware race.
I think some games lend themselves to the spectatot thing more than others. QuakeIII for example - has no "plot" as such - the game is the game and exists for it's own sake - this sort of thing makes good spectator material. RTCW on the other hand, is more like a war movie. UT2K3 goes all out to appear to be a "sport" complete with excitable commentator!
To get back to the plot though
and another thing!
They couldn't shoot the coke can becuase of the force field, but they were were able to walk up to the ship and place the can there. Surely all we're arguing about then, is the speed of the object ? All they needed was some slower missiles to penetrate the field. (Not that they would have done much damage to a thing with that much mass anyway..).
And then we have the famous triangulation scene where Goldblum pin-points his ex-wife's position by triangualtion - but doesn't move. Thats a pretty odd looking triangle.
An why oh why would a species that's mastered interstellar travel, planet busting weapons etc etc need some clapped out old earth comms satellites to synchronise their attacks? Imagine the alian commander berating his underlings "you forgot the f**king clocks again didn't you? Well you'd better come up with a cunning plan to time our attacks or it'll be no new Mac for you come xmas!". And why was it important to synchronise them anyway? It wasn't as if the people in LA seeing Moscow go up would then go "oh right *that's* what they're up to - we know exactly what to do to stop them now..."
Makes you cringe. Don't even start on "Jumpin' Jack Flash"....
and in another 16 years or so (if a light bulb last 6 months and the flourescents cost around 32 times the price of incandescents (25p for a 100W versus about 8 quid for am equivalent flourescent) here you may have recouped your investment in these flourescent bulbs (ok you save a few pounds on the leccy each year too with your ligting potion being about a quarter of what it was). You'll have to endure the strange dingy light they emit for that time too. Don't know exactly what the difference is in the spectrum they emit, but I find those flourescent bulbs have the ability to transform any room into a dingy hole at the flick of a switch.
My kitchen is lit by some very wasteful and expensive 50watt halogen lights for a total of 7 lights = 350watts. These things are so inefficient, they need a heat shield to prevent them inducing combustion in the ceiling. But: I like the light they produce.
I will admit though - at least you won't have to change them every few months: that is a pain.
Well indeed - Alex Bell invents the telephone, only to realise no bugger else has bothered. John Logie Baird invents the TV, and there's nothing on for 36 years..
LOL - I concur - the vac is highly effective at removing flies (airborne or stationery). I occasionally zap some Raid up the pipe too just in case the little buggers start breeding in the dust bag :)
Exactly - why do we still describe user processes (to users) in terms of hardware components? Hard drive? The average Joe doesn't care how his documents are kept inside the machine - it could be a disk, tape, drum, solid state, or fairy dust. To them, the "computer" is, as it is represented on the screen - the little yellow folder thingies that you can drag about to different places in different windows. It's about time we stopped calling the damm things "computers" anyway - it falls woefully short as a descriptive for Today's multimedia "information terminals" or "workstations". Computer - something that "computes" stuff. Now how many average users actually use the machines to crunch numbers? Not many. I'll bet most of em are used as Internet access terminals and email devices.
Right - I have to go feed the little demons that write all ma shit down on tiny bits of paper inside my PC.
No but you have to put up with UnixWare - from what I remember of it, thats worse :P
SCO needs to just go away to be honest. Is anyone really interested in the ramblings of a dying and long irrelevant company? Even if they did by some miracle get a court to back them over this, they will have left a bad taste in many peoples mouths - will anyone ever buy anything from them ever again? Certainly can't see IBM doing business with them again... SCO are on a lose/lose path now - please someone just push them over the cliff so the rest of the world can get back to what they were doing..
Versions of Quake2 weren't net compatible with each other!
I'm not sure what you would hope to gain from making Doom 3 clients connect to old Q2 servers - the maps look like the maps look - it wouldn't look any funkier.
As a Q2 fan I always felt that ID missed the point slightly with the MP game when Q3 was released. I didn't want a *new* game - I wanted the *old* game with up to date visuals. After all - MP FPS games are merely the playing field - not the game itself - that is supplied by its players. A football field does nothing in the game.
But - like the man said, Doom 3 isn't primarily a MP game - it's back to the old fear inducing atmosphere that Doom and the single player Q2 provided, and the optimization rules are different for that.
Not to mention SSWord, PowerMad and Axis - wasn't it called VolksOffice? :P
Indeed - that graph does not measure attention span at all (how long each person looked at the page might come close but then thats kinda hard to measure - once they have the page there endeth the interest of your web server in the transaction).
./ community should rent itself out as a load tester :) Then again unless you have vast tracts of bandwidth, the traffic is effectively throttled by the pipe anyway.
Maybe the
I agree - plus Geeks may have something else in common - the imagination to see beyond the thin veneer of modern life, and glimpse some of the horrors the human race perpetrates, or just recognise just how precarious our way of life may be (in terms of the resources it consumes, the injustices it inflicts etc etc).
I guess it's true - Ignorance may very well be bliss. The enlightened, are therefore probably subject to a certain amount of depression...
(But don't they all play CS already?!?)