I would recommend you check out New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/home.ns. They're not going to go into things at the level of Nature or Science, but will give you quality stories that are food for thought and starting points for further research. As a former scientist, I'd also mention that Science and Nature, while great publications, are cost prohibitive for individuals (unless you use your local library), and are tedious to wade through unless you have a tremendous amount of time.
All news has been screened to make sure that none of Satan's lies (evolution/round earth) get through!
This is an incredibly ignorant statement. You've clearly never read any CS Monitor stories. They are a high quality, fairly unbiased publication. They definitely don't let the whackjob worldview of their parent church seep into their journalism.
Actually, there is a race of aliens called mulefa in Philip Pullman's 'The Amber Spyglass' trilogy that roll around on a single large ball. I think they should name them after these. BTW, It's a pretty good read.
Do you have an elegant, 1-step solution for doing this? I don't mind waiting for a video encode, but I do mind it requiring a lot of my attention.
I'm not sure if you'd call it elegant, but there are quite a few commercial DVD to PSP converters that will do the ripping/encoding within the one application (just google psp dvd converter and you will get a ton of companies selling similiar products , some with free trials).
If you want to keep it free, I think you will have to use DVD decrypter to rip the DVD, but it really shouldn't be that bad once you configure DVD decrypter properly.
I've been bashing Sony with the best of them lately based on their DRM and PS3 pricing fiascos, and their arrogant attitude. That said, I bought a PSP at launch and actually get a lot of use out of it.
I will start out by saying I have the 1.5 firmware and refuse to upgrade. There is a wealth of homebrew emulation and other software out there that really makes this a pretty cool handheld platform. As far as playing newer games that require firmware upgrades, there is an easy and brilliant way around it thanks to the PSP hacking community.
The PSP is great for travel. I could care less about the failure of UMDs. The format was doomed from the start. It is relatively painless to convert existing DVDs to the PSP's format and load them onto a memory stick. I brought a movie with me to watch on the plane on my last business trip, and it was a very enjoyable experience. I also had a few albums loaded onto the same stick to listen to while I was on the road.
The screen is beautiful and great for movies.
Yes, the ergonomics suck for a handheld, it's not perfect.
As far as commercial games go, there are actually enough great games on it to make it a worthwhile platform including tight baseball, some good racers, Tekken, and a decent RPG to name a few. That situation should continue to improve.
I'm not happy with Sony as a company, but I'm pretty happy with my hacked PSP. I'm not sure why so many people are down on the platform; it's got the processing power of close to a PS2 under the hood.
And Time Warner is surprised that their stock is a flaming dog turd, and that they were unable to leverage the AOL merger in terms of media distribution?! These guys are so out of touch with reality that it would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic. They refuse to see any opportunity in new ways of digital distribution, and only look for new ways to screw their consumers.
The economy in a downfall, interest rates lower than the inflation, people with money trying hard to find a place for investment. That's what we have today.
I have to refute these statements. There is no clear evidence at this point the economy is in a "downfall." Interest rates are not currently lower than the most widely accepted measures of inflation (cash in a CD is easily getting over 5%). There are still plenty of other places to deploy capital.
In other words, there's a lot of investment money and not many people daring to pick it up. It kinda feels like dot.com all over again.
There are tons of people willing to pick it up. That's why we have some of these lame ass web 2.0 companies actually receiving funding without any type of viable long term business plan. It feels like dot.com all over again as far as a bunch of greedy VCs not learning their lesson the first time around.
It has been proven (see The Great Mutual Fund Trap) that day trading is a way to lose. People always jump in too late and jump out too early and have their profits eaten up by fees (which they pay whether they win or lose). The guys in that book reported on an analysis done of Etrade and Ameritrade records. The numbers were very clear.
I wouldn't say this hypothesis has been proven. There are some daytraders who consistently make money over the long term. There aren't many, but it can be done. They also don't use Etrade or Ameritrade to execute trades. With those fees, I'm sure it is near impossible to make money daytrading.
The only way to win is:
buy into a broad index fund. That will track the dow, and the DOW will rise over the long term.
dont buy and sell. Buy and hold (or better - buy and ignore).
hold for many years. You will see jumps and dips spanning months and years. But in the long term (many years) you will do better than anything else.
Sorry, this is not the only way to win by any stretch of the imagination. For the record, there is NO guarantee that the DOW will rise over the long term. Even if it does, there may be VERY long stretches where it trades sideways. In the long term, we're all dead. There are plenty of opportunities for the small investor to use an edge to excel in the markets.
Turns out that it is completely random as to wether a fund can beat the DOW.
There are many who would argue the random walk/efficient market hypothesis is severely flawed. I'm not a huge fan of mutual funds, especially with the proliferation of ETFS, but there are some funds that have outperformed the market over the long term due to brilliant managers. Marty Whitman comes to mind as one of them.
I'm currently trying to basically do the same thing you are, and trade full time for a living either for a firm or on my own. I can offer some advice for what it's worth. I was a licensed proprietary equities trader at a small Wall Street firm for around 3 years. I had Series 7/55 licenses at the time due to regulations, but they aren't necessarily required. The way these firms work is that they provide capital for you to leverage in addition to your own, and you trade in an intraday time frame (i.e. daytrading). Daytrading is IMO the most difficult time frame to trade in for many reasons including the amount of noise in that time frame, but it can be done profitably. I've seen too many successful traders to know that it can be. Very few make it long term, and it is difficult, but that is one option for you. I guarantee you will learn a ton about trading that way in a hurry.
You can also go for your CFA or something similiar depending on how much academic training you want, and if you feel like it would help in getting a job.
Buying and holding an S&P fund as some have mentioned here may be good advice for those unwilling or uncapable of more actively managing their portfolios, but you'll be leaving a ton of money on the table that way. It is possible with a lot of hard work to do much better than that.
A book can't teach you how to trade, but I would read Reminescences of a Stock Operator, Confessions of a Speculator, Practical Speculation, and Common Stocks & Uncommon Profits to get started. William O'Neil's CANSLIM method isn't a bad one to read up on either (IBD). You may want to read up on statistical analysis also. David Dreman's books are a good place to go on value investing. You can also read up on technical analysis, but tread carefully in those waters. There is a lot of nonsense out there.
If I were to give you one piece of trading advice, it would be to CUT YOUR LOSSES, and make preservation of your capital your number one priority. You can't trade if you are out of capital.
Don't paper trade. It is absolutely worthless for learning how to trade. Trading involves a ton of emotion (we're all human), and paper trading is easy because there are no consequences.
Be prepared to lose. A great trader would be one who wins 60% of the time. The key to success is gaining more on the infrequent winners than on the more frequent losers. If you're a perfectionist, and don't like to lose, look for another field.
Look for a niche and exploit it; don't try to go up against the big boys where you have NO edge.
Use the internet. There is a lot of free info out there that is valuable. Just be sure to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Good luck, and remember trading is a ZERO SUM game. Every dollar you make is coming out of someone else's pocket. Don't ever forget that. Your opponents won't!
Don't get discouraged, and be willing to fail, and try again.
You mean when you don't devote all the country's resources to war, you can actually spend money on developing infrastructure at home and abroad that improves the lives of citizens?!?? AMAAAAAZING!!
How the hell does this parent get modded insightful, and not -1 Troll? The current state of America's high speed (or lack thereof) infrastructure has nothing to do with war spending. It has more to do with the current competitive landscape in the telecom/Baby Bell sector, and the politics of telecom and cable tv. It also has to do with the physical size of the US compared to a small European country, and the fact that at this point, the US doesn't believe in a near completely state run socialist infrastructure to implement new technologies.
I would think that even on a Mac, 512MB would be less than ideal for any type of multitasking of memory hungry apps, or any type of photo/video editing under OSX.
The parent says that programming is like writing or composing.
That's NOT what the parent is explicitly saying (nor would I think what he is trying to say). Please go back and read the original parent (focus on the comparison made) more carefully before spouting off.
Why is it that Apple seems determined to continue to ship systems with too little RAM? Dell is notorious for pulling the same crap. A new system should not be shipping with anything less than 1 Gig. It's disingenuous to price systems this way.
"It is crafting not static works, like books, but dynamic, responsive, living words -- programming is to writing what composing is to playing music."
No offense, but you need to read some great literature before making this kind of comparison. It's completely offbase, and shows an utter disregard for the power of the written word. I'm sure programming is a creative activity, but to compare most programming problem solving to writing a great work enters the real of the ridiculous.
A writer like Shakespeare was a composer of the highest order. Programming may be abstract and creative, but in the grand scheme of things, to promote it as more creative than the great written works of civilization is laughable.
It should be pretty obvious based on common sense. The PS1 is using a much simpler chipset in terms of number of transistors. Each generation of PC chips has consumed more power for the most part. Consoles aren't going to be any different (with the possible exception of thw Wii). In any case, a PS1 is ancient chip technology compared to an Xbox360.
Hey, let's double our chances of data loss by distributing data over TWO drives instead of one.
Dumbass.
In case you didn't realize it, the purpose of RAID0 is to increase performance. People running it are not concerned about data loss on those drives; they are trading off reliability for increased performance.
and by the way, It's DUMAS!
/insert badmammajammma's rant against Apple fanboi
Ditto. The parent's defense of Apple would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic. It's amazing to see some of the blind followers of Apple on/. try to justify employing the Chinese labor system as a feather in Apple's cap.
Yes, they do release a Linux/Windows/Mac version, but by not releasing the code people like me, who run on a powerpc are just out of the games. Just becasue we are a minority does that mean that we are not allowed to have that piece of software? Is this discrimination really justified for the sake of the "precious source code" that the company wrote?
I don't get this mentality. Google is a corporation designed around making as much money as possible within a capitalistic framework (hopefully in an ethical manner). Why would you expect them to release source code on a product that THEY'VE paid for the resources to develop. Do you believe that there is no valid intellectual property that people have a right to protect?
It's nice when a company releases source code, but it kills me when SOME linux users expect source for every single application ported. You're running a processor that is not in widespread use in the community that this application was written for. I'd say, yeah, they were justified in discriminating, because it's not worthwhile for them to port to everything from a toaster to a Beowulf cluster, and they probably have some IP in that code that they feel like protecting.
Having done it many times I can testify that it takes a surprising amount of time to get a fresh windows install to be something that you can actually work with.
No offense, but you're either installing Windows on a VERY old system, using dial up to install patches, or just offbase here.
I install XP on new builds frequently, and also do reimaging as a part time business on existing boxes, and it is a relatively quick process, especially if the install CD already has SP2 included in the build.
I know this is/. and it's standard operating procedure to bash M$, but the fact of the matter, is that in a desktop environment, XP is very easy to install and configure, and doesn't take more than a few hours including patches and service packs on a newer machine. Security is a major issue due to poor design choices and user error, but with a little common sense, a free virus scanner, and a firewall, XP is also remarkably stable.
The article IMO hit the nail on the head, Linux can be a pain in the arse to set up on a desktop especially if there are problems on the hardware support side, and it really doesn't buy the average user anything in terms of functionality or ease of use over Windows in a desktop environment.
There are plenty of other reasons to run Linux, but if the community has a goal of penetrating the desktop (maybe they don't), they have a herculean task ahead of them.
Could someone please explain to me how this is even remotely fucking funny? It's like a shitty knock knock joke without the punch line.. So WTF?
Since we're on the subject of light...Chuck Norris invented black. In fact, he invented the entire spectrum of visible light. Except pink. Tom Cruise invented pink.
Anyways, sounds like you better get a humor transplant and head over to
http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/index.html before Chuck sees your comments here and eats your entire family.
C'mon, this is Slashdot... Isn't it obvious?! Your parent is modded as troll because some of the moderators can't seem to differentiate between the ORIGINAL posting which was a troll, and your response which wasn't.
This isn't a zero sum game. There isn't any perticular reason it would be impossible for the shareholders of Adobe to be bought out at a premium (Albiet in freshly created Apple shares), and for Apple's share price to remain the same dispite the increase in outstanding shares.
All that would be required for that to happen is for the market to percieve the value of Apple+Adobe as higher than the combined values of the two seperate companies.
Andy Fastow, is that you?
If Apple bought Adobe at these prices it would be under pressure for a ton of reasons. First of all, it is TOO large an acquisition for them. It doesn't make sense financially. It would be incredible DILUTIVE to earnings. The share price would not remain the same. It would be under pressure because it would take Apple forever to earn back a decent return on their 30+ billion in capital that they invested in Adobe. Apple would either have to exhaust their cash, issue a ton of debt, or a ton of new stock (which does matter), or all of the above.
Slashdot Mirror
I would recommend you check out New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/home.ns. They're not going to go into things at the level of Nature or Science, but will give you quality stories that are food for thought and starting points for further research. As a former scientist, I'd also mention that Science and Nature, while great publications, are cost prohibitive for individuals (unless you use your local library), and are tedious to wade through unless you have a tremendous amount of time.
This is an incredibly ignorant statement. You've clearly never read any CS Monitor stories. They are a high quality, fairly unbiased publication. They definitely don't let the whackjob worldview of their parent church seep into their journalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulefa
I'm not sure if you'd call it elegant, but there are quite a few commercial DVD to PSP converters that will do the ripping/encoding within the one application (just google psp dvd converter and you will get a ton of companies selling similiar products , some with free trials).
If you want to keep it free, I think you will have to use DVD decrypter to rip the DVD, but it really shouldn't be that bad once you configure DVD decrypter properly.
I've been bashing Sony with the best of them lately based on their DRM and PS3 pricing fiascos, and their arrogant attitude. That said, I bought a PSP at launch and actually get a lot of use out of it.
I will start out by saying I have the 1.5 firmware and refuse to upgrade. There is a wealth of homebrew emulation and other software out there that really makes this a pretty cool handheld platform. As far as playing newer games that require firmware upgrades, there is an easy and brilliant way around it thanks to the PSP hacking community.
The PSP is great for travel. I could care less about the failure of UMDs. The format was doomed from the start. It is relatively painless to convert existing DVDs to the PSP's format and load them onto a memory stick. I brought a movie with me to watch on the plane on my last business trip, and it was a very enjoyable experience. I also had a few albums loaded onto the same stick to listen to while I was on the road.
The screen is beautiful and great for movies.
Yes, the ergonomics suck for a handheld, it's not perfect.
As far as commercial games go, there are actually enough great games on it to make it a worthwhile platform including tight baseball, some good racers, Tekken, and a decent RPG to name a few. That situation should continue to improve.
I'm not happy with Sony as a company, but I'm pretty happy with my hacked PSP. I'm not sure why so many people are down on the platform; it's got the processing power of close to a PS2 under the hood.
Netcraft confirms PC gaming is dead.
pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels; bring home for Emma
In a word, YES!
And Time Warner is surprised that their stock is a flaming dog turd, and that they were unable to leverage the AOL merger in terms of media distribution?! These guys are so out of touch with reality that it would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic. They refuse to see any opportunity in new ways of digital distribution, and only look for new ways to screw their consumers.
I have to refute these statements. There is no clear evidence at this point the economy is in a "downfall." Interest rates are not currently lower than the most widely accepted measures of inflation (cash in a CD is easily getting over 5%). There are still plenty of other places to deploy capital.
In other words, there's a lot of investment money and not many people daring to pick it up. It kinda feels like dot.com all over again.
There are tons of people willing to pick it up. That's why we have some of these lame ass web 2.0 companies actually receiving funding without any type of viable long term business plan. It feels like dot.com all over again as far as a bunch of greedy VCs not learning their lesson the first time around.
I wouldn't say this hypothesis has been proven. There are some daytraders who consistently make money over the long term. There aren't many, but it can be done. They also don't use Etrade or Ameritrade to execute trades. With those fees, I'm sure it is near impossible to make money daytrading.
The only way to win is: buy into a broad index fund. That will track the dow, and the DOW will rise over the long term. dont buy and sell. Buy and hold (or better - buy and ignore). hold for many years. You will see jumps and dips spanning months and years. But in the long term (many years) you will do better than anything else.
Sorry, this is not the only way to win by any stretch of the imagination. For the record, there is NO guarantee that the DOW will rise over the long term. Even if it does, there may be VERY long stretches where it trades sideways. In the long term, we're all dead. There are plenty of opportunities for the small investor to use an edge to excel in the markets.
Turns out that it is completely random as to wether a fund can beat the DOW.
There are many who would argue the random walk/efficient market hypothesis is severely flawed. I'm not a huge fan of mutual funds, especially with the proliferation of ETFS, but there are some funds that have outperformed the market over the long term due to brilliant managers. Marty Whitman comes to mind as one of them.
You can also go for your CFA or something similiar depending on how much academic training you want, and if you feel like it would help in getting a job.
Buying and holding an S&P fund as some have mentioned here may be good advice for those unwilling or uncapable of more actively managing their portfolios, but you'll be leaving a ton of money on the table that way. It is possible with a lot of hard work to do much better than that.
A book can't teach you how to trade, but I would read Reminescences of a Stock Operator, Confessions of a Speculator, Practical Speculation, and Common Stocks & Uncommon Profits to get started. William O'Neil's CANSLIM method isn't a bad one to read up on either (IBD). You may want to read up on statistical analysis also. David Dreman's books are a good place to go on value investing. You can also read up on technical analysis, but tread carefully in those waters. There is a lot of nonsense out there.
If I were to give you one piece of trading advice, it would be to CUT YOUR LOSSES, and make preservation of your capital your number one priority. You can't trade if you are out of capital.
Don't paper trade. It is absolutely worthless for learning how to trade. Trading involves a ton of emotion (we're all human), and paper trading is easy because there are no consequences.
Be prepared to lose. A great trader would be one who wins 60% of the time. The key to success is gaining more on the infrequent winners than on the more frequent losers. If you're a perfectionist, and don't like to lose, look for another field.
Look for a niche and exploit it; don't try to go up against the big boys where you have NO edge.
Use the internet. There is a lot of free info out there that is valuable. Just be sure to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Good luck, and remember trading is a ZERO SUM game. Every dollar you make is coming out of someone else's pocket. Don't ever forget that. Your opponents won't!
Don't get discouraged, and be willing to fail, and try again.
How the hell does this parent get modded insightful, and not -1 Troll? The current state of America's high speed (or lack thereof) infrastructure has nothing to do with war spending. It has more to do with the current competitive landscape in the telecom/Baby Bell sector, and the politics of telecom and cable tv. It also has to do with the physical size of the US compared to a small European country, and the fact that at this point, the US doesn't believe in a near completely state run socialist infrastructure to implement new technologies.
I would think that even on a Mac, 512MB would be less than ideal for any type of multitasking of memory hungry apps, or any type of photo/video editing under OSX.
That's NOT what the parent is explicitly saying (nor would I think what he is trying to say). Please go back and read the original parent (focus on the comparison made) more carefully before spouting off.
Why is it that Apple seems determined to continue to ship systems with too little RAM? Dell is notorious for pulling the same crap. A new system should not be shipping with anything less than 1 Gig. It's disingenuous to price systems this way.
No offense, but you need to read some great literature before making this kind of comparison. It's completely offbase, and shows an utter disregard for the power of the written word. I'm sure programming is a creative activity, but to compare most programming problem solving to writing a great work enters the real of the ridiculous.
A writer like Shakespeare was a composer of the highest order. Programming may be abstract and creative, but in the grand scheme of things, to promote it as more creative than the great written works of civilization is laughable.
It should be pretty obvious based on common sense. The PS1 is using a much simpler chipset in terms of number of transistors. Each generation of PC chips has consumed more power for the most part. Consoles aren't going to be any different (with the possible exception of thw Wii). In any case, a PS1 is ancient chip technology compared to an Xbox360.
In case you didn't realize it, the purpose of RAID0 is to increase performance. People running it are not concerned about data loss on those drives; they are trading off reliability for increased performance. and by the way, It's DUMAS!
Ditto. The parent's defense of Apple would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic. It's amazing to see some of the blind followers of Apple on /. try to justify employing the Chinese labor system as a feather in Apple's cap.
I don't get this mentality. Google is a corporation designed around making as much money as possible within a capitalistic framework (hopefully in an ethical manner). Why would you expect them to release source code on a product that THEY'VE paid for the resources to develop. Do you believe that there is no valid intellectual property that people have a right to protect?
It's nice when a company releases source code, but it kills me when SOME linux users expect source for every single application ported. You're running a processor that is not in widespread use in the community that this application was written for. I'd say, yeah, they were justified in discriminating, because it's not worthwhile for them to port to everything from a toaster to a Beowulf cluster, and they probably have some IP in that code that they feel like protecting.
No offense, but you're either installing Windows on a VERY old system, using dial up to install patches, or just offbase here. I install XP on new builds frequently, and also do reimaging as a part time business on existing boxes, and it is a relatively quick process, especially if the install CD already has SP2 included in the build. I know this is /. and it's standard operating procedure to bash M$, but the fact of the matter, is that in a desktop environment, XP is very easy to install and configure, and doesn't take more than a few hours including patches and service packs on a newer machine. Security is a major issue due to poor design choices and user error, but with a little common sense, a free virus scanner, and a firewall, XP is also remarkably stable.
The article IMO hit the nail on the head, Linux can be a pain in the arse to set up on a desktop especially if there are problems on the hardware support side, and it really doesn't buy the average user anything in terms of functionality or ease of use over Windows in a desktop environment.
There are plenty of other reasons to run Linux, but if the community has a goal of penetrating the desktop (maybe they don't), they have a herculean task ahead of them.
Since we're on the subject of light...Chuck Norris invented black. In fact, he invented the entire spectrum of visible light. Except pink. Tom Cruise invented pink.
Anyways, sounds like you better get a humor transplant and head over to http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/index.html before Chuck sees your comments here and eats your entire family.
C'mon, this is Slashdot... Isn't it obvious?! Your parent is modded as troll because some of the moderators can't seem to differentiate between the ORIGINAL posting which was a troll, and your response which wasn't.
Just another day in da /. hood
Andy Fastow, is that you?
If Apple bought Adobe at these prices it would be under pressure for a ton of reasons. First of all, it is TOO large an acquisition for them. It doesn't make sense financially. It would be incredible DILUTIVE to earnings. The share price would not remain the same. It would be under pressure because it would take Apple forever to earn back a decent return on their 30+ billion in capital that they invested in Adobe. Apple would either have to exhaust their cash, issue a ton of debt, or a ton of new stock (which does matter), or all of the above.