I also remember the Ultima game for NES (the only one I played) with fond memories! the "virtues" dimension really gave the game great depth compared to other series of the same era/system such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
With real magazines ads, editors have some kind of control of the ad after they receive it. For example, they can decide if they accept an ad with a full page giant penis in it selling v14gr4.
However, with web ads, the editors have no control over it. The advertizer has complete control of how the ad looks. And even though at the time of "contracting" the ad the editors may like the types of ad, maybe after a month the ad will get changed to something really annoying.
From the original forum thread, the problem was that someone's computer was slowing to a halt because some random flash ad. That sort of thing is really annoying.
I even have seen similar kind of trouble in pages of open source projects. In one of those pages, the guys used some ad service and got some kind of virus or XSS attack in one of the ads... even though the ad company was supposed to be good!
Here in East Germany there is a strong push to reuse cows shit as an energy source.
As part of my job we met a farmer who told us a story "too good to be true": First, he got a preferential credit and investment from a gorvernment program to have a chunk of a Biofuel generator (he is the owner along with other farmers and a electricity company).
Second, the guy *sells* (or may I say, rents) manure to this biofuel company, which is a separate income for him.
And third, after the manuer is used for electricity generation, the guy gets the manure back and uses as fertilizers for the plants. This however with added value because the manure does not smell (or smells much less), does not attract flies and it is combined with other stuff such as corn (part of the biofuel plant).
Regarding the cows exercising, I think this will be a good idea if the cows had some kind of portable electricity generator allowing them to graze freely in the field.
and people think we're not all connected in the world:)
As a Mexican expat living in Germany, this made me think a bit about those Hollywood metheorite-EOW scenarios.
The thing is, if this comparatively small-scale volcanic eruption is creating all this disruption, I do not want to know what a meteorite impact will do!
So, the first thing we (humans a a whole) do is land all commercial air traffic. Then, I was thinking among the lines of (in the case of the EOW scenario) each country kicking out all of the non-citizens from the country...
Or, people (like me let's say) wanting to get to see to their family/loved ones in their home country...
That will mean a surge of demand for water transport... which anyway would take about 3 months IIRC to get from Europe to USA hoho.
Fortunately (I guess) communication channels won't be affected that much (due mainly to undersea cable) so I could always skype my Mamá!
So far, it has been funny to see the mess that the eruption has provoked. It *really* shows how all the politics/political correctness prevent things from going (some guy was reasonably whining on TV that it took 5 days to make the first agreements!). This shows how much do we still need to progress in global politics/agreements.
I like to resume this with a simple sentence (not mine, I read it here in Slahdot before): It is not Linux Fault, it is Linux Problem
It has always been desktop Linux problem (since eg. Winmodems) and it has never been its fault... however, in general people want to avoid problems and do not care about who is at fault so...
But the majority of them are/using/ the OSS developed by someone else in order to provide solutions to a niche market. (I own one of those companies in Mexico)
The questions is, can developing OSS be profitable?
Man, you are talking about Japan... the only thing you will get after publicizing your fetish tentacle fetish is maybe a bunch of guys asking to recommend a good source lol
Well... tell that to all the "online playing" enabled games. It was not too long ago that EA informed they will shut down several of their online game servers...
I read someone here on slashdot who claimed it was done so that they could avoid certain taxes (putting the PS3 as a general computation machine) but do not quote me on that... in fact I would be happy if someone shed more light to that claim.
Glad I never bought one, I just don't trust Sony enough.
Funny, since the Sony ROOTKIT fiasco I have felt the same way about Sony.
Nevertheless, I almost caved to buy a Sony ebook reader (they were the best ones at the time, even better than Kindle IMHO) and a PS3 (after I got so bored with the Nintendo Wii). Given that the time that passed since the Rootkit fiasco and that it seemed sony ebook Reader was an OK DRM compromise I *almost* got it.
Fortunately I have waited. Frankly, this Sony PS3 move shows that they can screw their *current* paying customers in retrospective and not give a darn about it.
Sincerely I really believe this is class lawsuit stuff... unfortunately from a quick look at boxes pictures I cannot any mention of the "supports OtherOS" in PS3 box
The fact that so far no director has exploited the availability of depth dimension to improve the storyline is what makes current 3D a gimmick.
Besides of that, I find myself difficult to "get" the 3D effect, mainly because of visual impairment. My right eye view is quite bad and it can only be improved to a certain degree with glasses. It is funny every time I go to an optic to get a new graduation, because the machines they have, which automatically get your eye graduation *always* fail misserable (e.g. I never get to see the "focused" house/ballon/etc with my right eye).
But in my opinion you do not need to be very intelligent to understand that given the way current 3D technology works, the worst vision you have the worst the 3D "experience" will seem.
Not only that, in Mexico those abductions are quite normal.
An example, a uncle of my wife was returning from picking up his two kids from school. He arrived at his home and parked his car in front the door. Just when he was getting down, and (fortunately) after his kids entered the home, two guys approached him and told him: "so, what do you say, we need your car for a business" while at the same time showing him a gun under one guys jacket. The uncle just gave them the keys and said "no problem at all" (because we in Mexico know that if you make any problem you will can get "lead poisoned"). Before leaving the guys said "and no talking to police because you know, we know where you live". And everybody knows that if he goes to police, someone *in* the police may be in contact with those bad guys... and once they know you went to the police, you are screwed.
So, with this new law what will happen is that the guys will not only take the car but also the driver, just as easy as saying "come on pal, we are going to make a trip".
No, Mexico is right now almost a shit-hole. Do not let the "disney world" image painted by the tourism industry deceive you.
And I say that as a Mexican. My family lives there, in different states lying all over the country (north, center and south).
I get sad when I read about the "everything nice and friendly" image of Mexico is advertised to other countries. The worst thing is that the government wants people (both in and outside Mexico) to believe this, when terrible things are happening.
You may have heard it before, Mexico is "El país de no pasa nada" (the country of "nothing happens"). The first step to dealing with a problem is to acknowledge its existence. The issue is that our government does not accept that it is incapable of beating the drug cartels/corruption problems. Sure, just throw a bunch of soldiers and if that does not help, throw some more.
The Mexican governemnt has failed time and time again to combat this problem, in no large part thanks to their massive curruption problem
Yup, people in the USA won't believe how deep corruption has a play in Mexican drugs. Some people even assert that the current president *is* helping a specific cartel by throwing the army to other cartels.
However I believe the main problem of Mexico's drug war is the fact that drugs are illegal in the USA. When USA makes drug legal, the drug cartels will end.
Back when the Mexican drug consumption was being discussed, I argued that it would be better (in Mexico) to pass a law that allowed drug to be (i) transported and (ii) developped (harvested or otherwise). In this way, the Mexican problem would be mainly finished and it would only be a problem of crossing the USA frontier into the "illegal grounds" of the USA.
Drug consumption is not a criminal problem, it is a health issue and it should be tackled as that (e.g. AA groups).
Howdy cow, how many expert opinions about Mexico's problem are there in the USA!
Allow me to intervene, as a Mexican: - LOL to the Castillan heritage comment, the Porfiriatio ended almost 100 years ago. Sure, there is class stratification and a lot of poverty on rural areas but the war of casts is non-existent. - To your comment "Most of Mexico's problems would disappear if drugs were legal, and handled by prescription drug companies." I must add, "if drugs were legal In the USA (I am sure you meant that, just to make it clear), Mexico's problem is not drug consumption, and it recently it was made legal to possess small amount of *all* (mariguana, cocaine, meths, heroin, etc) for personal use.
Now, to the comment about army/gov/carters merging, sadly he is partly right. This is the scenario I see (from friends living ALL around the country): During previous presidential administration, cartels became more and more powerful (they were given space) among the government by paying and corrupting officials (I am talking from police departments to municipal president or even governors (some may argue). At the same time, there was this group of amry special forces who deserted from the Mexican army to became "Los Zetas". This is where the military element of cartels comes in.
Then comes our current president (Felipe Calderón) who throws the army to directly to the cartels. Unfortunately he does it without a real strategy and what happens is exactly the same thing happening when you throw a stone to a bee nest. The problem he also encounters is that law enforcement agencies are controlled by the cartels (Police departments, part of the PGR, AFI, etc). In addition, some third parties have seen how easy is *not* to be caught after doing a crime so they become criminals.
Right now the state of Mexico is deplorable. Just last month convoys of cartels' cars were used to stop all traffic in major intercity highways!, people's cars where seized and burned up. One of those convoys were of more than 10 vans/trucks. In my opinion the "war on drugs" has made Mexico worst than some middle east places with "war on terrorism".
But of course the reaction of our president when someone suggested to get the blue helmets was of indignation... the guy's pride does not allow him to understand that Mexican drug cartels have absolutely surpassed Mexico's army (which *in general* is trained to help population and not to lead a war)
Ah yeah, that is one of the most irritating things I hate on firefox. Why would I have to restart the web browser after installing an extension like scrapbook? this is from the people who whined that you have to restart Windows for any reason...
What I would really like is an "extension profiler", that is, a program that let you check exact statistics of resources used by the different Firefox extensions. This way you could see which is the extension that is taking more memory or time and it may be a good tool to debug extensions when developing them.
I love Firerox and use it with a bunch of plugins that have no replacement in any other browser (adblock plus, noscript, treetab, scrapbook, downthemall, greasemonkey, etc), however I installed Chrome in my eeePC to be able to stay logged in to google mail while my wife was logged in using Firefox.
I find that google chromes *files* compared to firefox, I am using an adblocker and even though it "just hides" the ads I really could care less, as it is faster than loading the same page in Firefox.
Firefox used to be GREAT when all you had was IE6, or Opera with a banner. Right now their only advantage are the collection of extensions
I quit from being a vocal KDE4 supporter and moved on to GNOME with the KDE 4.4.x release. The forced Akonadi/Nepomuk/MySQL messup coupled with the perennially unstable Kontact made me throw up my hands in disgust.
But those are just apps that you could replace with other apps.
I do not like KDE 4.x, specifically the desktop environment. Because I do not care at all about the "look and feel" of the apps I use, I have no problem using KDE apps in a Gnome desktop. I use RkWard and kMyMoney on a daily basis, in a Gnome desktop.
The problem for me is the KDE desktop which has always felt very "breakable". On every KDE desktop I have used, it is very easy to get the crocodile or now the bomb icon after a "core dump" crash. Meanwhile other desktop environments or operating systems behave normally at the same computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I heard the fat kid that fell to the water was also preparing to DCMA the heck of all those cabrones
+1 geek reference :)
I also remember the Ultima game for NES (the only one I played) with fond memories! the "virtues" dimension really gave the game great depth compared to other series of the same era/system such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
The problem I see with ads is editorial control.
With real magazines ads, editors have some kind of control of the ad after they receive it. For example, they can decide if they accept an ad with a full page giant penis in it selling v14gr4.
However, with web ads, the editors have no control over it. The advertizer has complete control of how the ad looks. And even though at the time of "contracting" the ad the editors may like the types of ad, maybe after a month the ad will get changed to something really annoying.
From the original forum thread, the problem was that someone's computer was slowing to a halt because some random flash ad. That sort of thing is really annoying.
I even have seen similar kind of trouble in pages of open source projects. In one of those pages, the guys used some ad service and got some kind of virus or XSS attack in one of the ads... even though the ad company was supposed to be good!
The slashdot feature is really cool, this is why I see:
orly?
Here's my password: Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!
It was funny at the the first 100 videos... after that it really got old.
Granted, there are some which are quite good and show good imagination on part of the creators
Here in East Germany there is a strong push to reuse cows shit as an energy source.
As part of my job we met a farmer who told us a story "too good to be true": First, he got a preferential credit and investment from a gorvernment program to have a chunk of a Biofuel generator (he is the owner along with other farmers and a electricity company).
Second, the guy *sells* (or may I say, rents) manure to this biofuel company, which is a separate income for him.
And third, after the manuer is used for electricity generation, the guy gets the manure back and uses as fertilizers for the plants. This however with added value because the manure does not smell (or smells much less), does not attract flies and it is combined with other stuff such as corn (part of the biofuel plant).
Regarding the cows exercising, I think this will be a good idea if the cows had some kind of portable electricity generator allowing them to graze freely in the field.
and people think we're not all connected in the world :)
As a Mexican expat living in Germany, this made me think a bit about those Hollywood metheorite-EOW scenarios.
The thing is, if this comparatively small-scale volcanic eruption is creating all this disruption, I do not want to know what a meteorite impact will do!
So, the first thing we (humans a a whole) do is land all commercial air traffic. Then, I was thinking among the lines of (in the case of the EOW scenario) each country kicking out all of the non-citizens from the country...
Or, people (like me let's say) wanting to get to see to their family/loved ones in their home country...
That will mean a surge of demand for water transport... which anyway would take about 3 months IIRC to get from Europe to USA hoho.
Fortunately (I guess) communication channels won't be affected that much (due mainly to undersea cable) so I could always skype my Mamá!
So far, it has been funny to see the mess that the eruption has provoked. It *really* shows how all the politics/political correctness prevent things from going (some guy was reasonably whining on TV that it took 5 days to make the first agreements!). This shows how much do we still need to progress in global politics/agreements.
I like to resume this with a simple sentence (not mine, I read it here in Slahdot before):
It is not Linux Fault, it is Linux Problem
It has always been desktop Linux problem (since eg. Winmodems) and it has never been its fault... however, in general people want to avoid problems and do not care about who is at fault so...
s/questions/question/g
But the majority of them are /using/ the OSS developed by someone else in order to provide solutions to a niche market. (I own one of those companies in Mexico)
The questions is, can developing OSS be profitable?
You missed FreeBSD. For servers some people consider it better than Linux and you can use ZFS.
My take is that FreeBSD is -the- OS that will replace Solaris now that it is going to be closed.
Man, you are talking about Japan... the only thing you will get after publicizing your fetish tentacle fetish is maybe a bunch of guys asking to recommend a good source lol
Well... tell that to all the "online playing" enabled games. It was not too long ago that EA informed they will shut down several of their online game servers...
I read someone here on slashdot who claimed it was done so that they could avoid certain taxes (putting the PS3 as a general computation machine) but do not quote me on that... in fact I would be happy if someone shed more light to that claim.
it depends whether the feature was actually advertised, or just happened to be there.
I believe it was written on the box.
I am not so sure about that after looking at some PS3 boxes pictures
Glad I never bought one, I just don't trust Sony enough.
Funny, since the Sony ROOTKIT fiasco I have felt the same way about Sony.
Nevertheless, I almost caved to buy a Sony ebook reader (they were the best ones at the time, even better than Kindle IMHO) and a PS3 (after I got so bored with the Nintendo Wii). Given that the time that passed since the Rootkit fiasco and that it seemed sony ebook Reader was an OK DRM compromise I *almost* got it.
Fortunately I have waited. Frankly, this Sony PS3 move shows that they can screw their *current* paying customers in retrospective and not give a darn about it.
Sincerely I really believe this is class lawsuit stuff... unfortunately from a quick look at boxes pictures I cannot any mention of the "supports OtherOS" in PS3 box
What do you want?
I want them to hire me... only if they do that they I will dissipate my doubts of them being evil.
The fact that so far no director has exploited the availability of depth dimension to improve the storyline is what makes current 3D a gimmick.
Besides of that, I find myself difficult to "get" the 3D effect, mainly because of visual impairment. My right eye view is quite bad and it can only be improved to a certain degree with glasses.
It is funny every time I go to an optic to get a new graduation, because the machines they have, which automatically get your eye graduation *always* fail misserable (e.g. I never get to see the "focused" house/ballon/etc with my right eye).
But in my opinion you do not need to be very intelligent to understand that given the way current 3D technology works, the worst vision you have the worst the 3D "experience" will seem.
Not only that, in Mexico those abductions are quite normal.
An example, a uncle of my wife was returning from picking up his two kids from school. He arrived at his home and parked his car in front the door. Just when he was getting down, and (fortunately) after his kids entered the home, two guys approached him and told him: "so, what do you say, we need your car for a business" while at the same time showing him a gun under one guys jacket. The uncle just gave them the keys and said "no problem at all" (because we in Mexico know that if you make any problem you will can get "lead poisoned"). Before leaving the guys said "and no talking to police because you know, we know where you live". And everybody knows that if he goes to police, someone *in* the police may be in contact with those bad guys... and once they know you went to the police, you are screwed.
So, with this new law what will happen is that the guys will not only take the car but also the driver, just as easy as saying "come on pal, we are going to make a trip".
No, Mexico is right now almost a shit-hole. Do not let the "disney world" image painted by the tourism industry deceive you.
And I say that as a Mexican. My family lives there, in different states lying all over the country (north, center and south).
I get sad when I read about the "everything nice and friendly" image of Mexico is advertised to other countries. The worst thing is that the government wants people (both in and outside Mexico) to believe this, when terrible things are happening.
You may have heard it before, Mexico is "El país de no pasa nada" (the country of "nothing happens"). The first step to dealing with a problem is to acknowledge its existence. The issue is that our government does not accept that it is incapable of beating the drug cartels/corruption problems. Sure, just throw a bunch of soldiers and if that does not help, throw some more.
The Mexican governemnt has failed time and time again to combat this problem, in no large part thanks to their massive curruption problem
Yup, people in the USA won't believe how deep corruption has a play in Mexican drugs. Some people even assert that the current president *is* helping a specific cartel by throwing the army to other cartels.
However I believe the main problem of Mexico's drug war is the fact that drugs are illegal in the USA. When USA makes drug legal, the drug cartels will end.
Back when the Mexican drug consumption was being discussed, I argued that it would be better (in Mexico) to pass a law that allowed drug to be (i) transported and (ii) developped (harvested or otherwise). In this way, the Mexican problem would be mainly finished and it would only be a problem of crossing the USA frontier into the "illegal grounds" of the USA.
Drug consumption is not a criminal problem, it is a health issue and it should be tackled as that (e.g. AA groups).
Howdy cow, how many expert opinions about Mexico's problem are there in the USA!
Allow me to intervene, as a Mexican:
- LOL to the Castillan heritage comment, the Porfiriatio ended almost 100 years ago. Sure, there is class stratification and a lot of poverty on rural areas but the war of casts is non-existent.
- To your comment "Most of Mexico's problems would disappear if drugs were legal, and handled by prescription drug companies." I must add, "if drugs were legal In the USA (I am sure you meant that, just to make it clear), Mexico's problem is not drug consumption, and it recently it was made legal to possess small amount of *all* (mariguana, cocaine, meths, heroin, etc) for personal use.
Now, to the comment about army/gov/carters merging, sadly he is partly right. This is the scenario I see (from friends living ALL around the country):
During previous presidential administration, cartels became more and more powerful (they were given space) among the government by paying and corrupting officials (I am talking from police departments to municipal president or even governors (some may argue).
At the same time, there was this group of amry special forces who deserted from the Mexican army to became "Los Zetas". This is where the military element of cartels comes in.
Then comes our current president (Felipe Calderón) who throws the army to directly to the cartels. Unfortunately he does it without a real strategy and what happens is exactly the same thing happening when you throw a stone to a bee nest.
The problem he also encounters is that law enforcement agencies are controlled by the cartels (Police departments, part of the PGR, AFI, etc). In addition, some third parties have seen how easy is *not* to be caught after doing a crime so they become criminals.
Right now the state of Mexico is deplorable. Just last month convoys of cartels' cars were used to stop all traffic in major intercity highways!, people's cars where seized and burned up. One of those convoys were of more than 10 vans/trucks. In my opinion the "war on drugs" has made Mexico worst than some middle east places with "war on terrorism".
But of course the reaction of our president when someone suggested to get the blue helmets was of indignation... the guy's pride does not allow him to understand that Mexican drug cartels have absolutely surpassed Mexico's army (which *in general* is trained to help population and not to lead a war)
Ah yeah, that is one of the most irritating things I hate on firefox. Why would I have to restart the web browser after installing an extension like scrapbook? this is from the people who whined that you have to restart Windows for any reason...
What I would really like is an "extension profiler", that is, a program that let you check exact statistics of resources used by the different Firefox extensions. This way you could see which is the extension that is taking more memory or time and it may be a good tool to debug extensions when developing them.
I love Firerox and use it with a bunch of plugins that have no replacement in any other browser (adblock plus, noscript, treetab, scrapbook, downthemall, greasemonkey, etc), however I installed Chrome in my eeePC to be able to stay logged in to google mail while my wife was logged in using Firefox.
I find that google chromes *files* compared to firefox, I am using an adblocker and even though it "just hides" the ads I really could care less, as it is faster than loading the same page in Firefox.
Firefox used to be GREAT when all you had was IE6, or Opera with a banner. Right now their only advantage are the collection of extensions
I quit from being a vocal KDE4 supporter and moved on to GNOME with the KDE 4.4.x release. The forced Akonadi/Nepomuk/MySQL messup coupled with the perennially unstable Kontact made me throw up my hands in disgust.
But those are just apps that you could replace with other apps.
I do not like KDE 4.x, specifically the desktop environment. Because I do not care at all about the "look and feel" of the apps I use, I have no problem using KDE apps in a Gnome desktop. I use RkWard and kMyMoney on a daily basis, in a Gnome desktop.
The problem for me is the KDE desktop which has always felt very "breakable". On every KDE desktop I have used, it is very easy to get the crocodile or now the bomb icon after a "core dump" crash. Meanwhile other desktop environments or operating systems behave normally at the same computers.