Yeah it's bad to gloat. But Google Fiber is the bomb. My network latency on my MMO of choice dropped from 140ms to 45ms. I don't miss Time-Warner at all.
I worked at H&R Block for a tax season. I used TurboTax, and so my manager and a lot of the people I worked with there. I'm not sure how their online service is now, but the year I worked there, they screwed up a bunch of their e-filings royally. It was ugly.
I just received a nice letter from TWC with "Great News. You're getting another special rate." printed on the outside. In it I was told that my promotional rate of $53.98 was expiring, and since they are such great guys, they aren't going to raise it to $78.98, instead it would be only $61.98 (in other words, we could be ass-raping you, but we decided to only force you to give us a blow-job). All that for service with lag spikes every 20-30 minutes and random drops twice a day and only 12 Mbps out of the 25 I am signed for.
A coworker whose son works for TWC tells me the price-hike is all the fault of the networks demanding more money from TWC. How is that my problem? When I went over to internet only, they sent a guy around to put a filter on my line to prevent me from getting even basic cable. I can't even get a local station through them.
They sent this letter the week that the Google Fiber guys put their Fiber Jack in my apartment. Nothing is turned on yet, but I can't wait. Please Google - come take my data/money.
My thought when I wanted to play around with encryption was to use the least significant bits (or some other mutually agreed formula) from a music CD as a one-time pad. Never actually tried it, but it would give someone fits to try and figure out.
I was given a prescription of amitriptyline to help reduce my migraines a few years ago. After taking it for a week, I found that I'd lost all interest in music. I stopped taking it because it really messed me up in other ways such as sleeping 12+ hours a day, but by the time I dropped it music was just a horrible cacophany to me. Glad to say that went away after I stopped taking it, but strangely, banjo still sucks to me.
It's why they're willing to dump obscene amounts of money into marketing instead of research and development. One of our local Kansas City area companies (Garmin) was profiled in the business section of our paper. When the CEO was asked what would happen on the inevitable day when the PR and marketing flacks outnumbered the engineers he answered, "We'll hire more engineers." That is the kind of attitude that makes a corporation world class.
Once my mother asked me to come over and install her new Aiwa home stereo. Of course being a control freak, she wouldn't let me just plug all the wires in. She wanted me to read the manual first. I humored her.
The english was perfect, but a bit unprofessional. "Step one: Open the box. Since you are reading the manual, you have already opened the box. Proceed to step two."
Yeah, I've been browsing it for a few hours. Nice stuff. I refused to do ITunes/IPod because of DRM and now my little Zen player is getting packed full of nice, legal, piano sonatas for reasonable prices. Amazon has a much better chance of competing with ITunes than anyone else, and if they fail and close up shop? Big deal, I can still play my MP3s without having to burn and rip. Now if only they'd sell some Rie Fu tracks...
My favorite director's commentary of all time was from Trey Parker and Matt Stone's first film "Cannibal the Musical." You can hear them getting more and more drunk as the film progresses.
Funny you should say that... On Friday I was helping a friend put together a cheap e-mail box for another friend. He'd ordered all the parts online and was using the PSU that came with the very cheap case. We plugged it in and then got a nasty surprise when we touched the metal. Luckily it wasn't pouring out every watt into the case. It was just enough to be mighty uncomfortable. I'm now a true believer in better power supplies. If the site ever comes back, I'll be reading it.
I agree whole-heatedly to this. I've felt that medicine killed off natural selection for many years. Both sides of my family carry bum sets of genes. There's a huge amount of cancer, heart disease, GI problems and such on both sides. If it hadn't been for modern medicine, I'd have died at least three times before I ever had sex (sadly at age 28 - I'm a geek, what can I say?). In nature I'd have been weeded out as a young child, but thanks to modern technology I have the opportunity to spread my heritage of substandard genes.
But then again, with my social skills, that's probably not anything I have to worry about.:^)
I live near there, though I'll never go back to Blue Springs (a 2 mph traffic accident that did no damage led to driving school, a six month suspended jail sentence, a year's probation, $250 fine - and I had a clean driving record before that). I'm not volunteering to be a thug, but I don't think that number is correct. I believe Blue Spring's area code is 816.
Well, if you had seen the first set of computer generated timelines from the planet "Hollow"(names randomly picked when colonized), you'd think that my nationalism model was pretty funny too. Positive effect - negative effect, what's the difference? One little typo... and you've never seen people so happy about having their society descend into anarchy.
My favorite stupid mistake (on this game) though had to be the immortal planetary governor of Mars. Two little typos and the bastard won every election for 400 years and refused to die of old age.
My all-time favorite blunder on any game I've written had a simulated starship being chased down by a SAR drone (Search and Rescue - it was going out to collect an ejected pilot). I would pause, try to debug the problem, restart, run away again, pause, debug, rinse, repeat... for two hours before I found that little mistake.
I'm a self-taught programmer, and I'll admit not a very skilled one because I've had few opportunities for my code to be used outside of my own computer. That hasn't stopped me from trying though. I've been writing games on and off for years, and this has been my experience.
My first computer was a C64, and the game I was writing quickly grew beyond it's capabilities. It was a case of "Wouldn't it be nice if I could do this..."
Next, was a C128, and the same thing happened again, but more quickly this time and for the same reason.
Then came the Amiga 500 (upgraded of course). I rewrote my old code and thought I might be able to get it all to work. It wasn't feature-creep this time though - my apartment was broken into and my computer stolen.
Then I finally got my first PC, and I started a new game. I had it working! Everything I wanted and more was in it except... A full featured open-ended universe for the player to well... play in. So I started a universe creator that turned into a strategy game that has become an enormous resource hog. To give you some idea of the kind of creeping bloat we're talking about now, I'm working on simulating nationalism and religious strife and their effects on planetary economies. It has become less a programming task than an endless crusade. By the time I finish one feature (I just rewrote the code for diseases), I have two new ones. I WILL exceed the capabilities again of this machine.
So keeping in mind that I'm a disorganized and crappy programmer, here's Tim's Law of Feature Creep (as it applies to Tim): Regardless of resource supply, demand WILL grow to meet it.
And for good measure, here's Tim's Law of Social Interaction: Nothing good will come of a conversation that starts with: "Here, smell this."
Seeing as that's my only social law, it's easy to see why I'm 35, single, and dateless for almost 12 years.:^)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah it's bad to gloat. But Google Fiber is the bomb. My network latency on my MMO of choice dropped from 140ms to 45ms. I don't miss Time-Warner at all.
I worked at H&R Block for a tax season. I used TurboTax, and so my manager and a lot of the people I worked with there. I'm not sure how their online service is now, but the year I worked there, they screwed up a bunch of their e-filings royally. It was ugly.
I just received a nice letter from TWC with "Great News. You're getting another special rate." printed on the outside. In it I was told that my promotional rate of $53.98 was expiring, and since they are such great guys, they aren't going to raise it to $78.98, instead it would be only $61.98 (in other words, we could be ass-raping you, but we decided to only force you to give us a blow-job). All that for service with lag spikes every 20-30 minutes and random drops twice a day and only 12 Mbps out of the 25 I am signed for. A coworker whose son works for TWC tells me the price-hike is all the fault of the networks demanding more money from TWC. How is that my problem? When I went over to internet only, they sent a guy around to put a filter on my line to prevent me from getting even basic cable. I can't even get a local station through them. They sent this letter the week that the Google Fiber guys put their Fiber Jack in my apartment. Nothing is turned on yet, but I can't wait. Please Google - come take my data/money.
My thought when I wanted to play around with encryption was to use the least significant bits (or some other mutually agreed formula) from a music CD as a one-time pad. Never actually tried it, but it would give someone fits to try and figure out.
When they find my search history, my defense will be that I clicked on an unmarked slashdot link.
Which is obviously an attempt to bolster your insanity plea.
And nothing of value was lost...
As someone with only one functional eye, I sure hope that 3D doesn't become the standard and screw me over.
I was given a prescription of amitriptyline to help reduce my migraines a few years ago. After taking it for a week, I found that I'd lost all interest in music. I stopped taking it because it really messed me up in other ways such as sleeping 12+ hours a day, but by the time I dropped it music was just a horrible cacophany to me. Glad to say that went away after I stopped taking it, but strangely, banjo still sucks to me.
The english was perfect, but a bit unprofessional. "Step one: Open the box. Since you are reading the manual, you have already opened the box. Proceed to step two."
I told her to return it to the retailer.
Yeah, I've been browsing it for a few hours. Nice stuff. I refused to do ITunes/IPod because of DRM and now my little Zen player is getting packed full of nice, legal, piano sonatas for reasonable prices. Amazon has a much better chance of competing with ITunes than anyone else, and if they fail and close up shop? Big deal, I can still play my MP3s without having to burn and rip. Now if only they'd sell some Rie Fu tracks...
Agnostics are just atheists without the strength of their convictions.
I'm a big fan of PZ's blog, and he did say in another post that Pivar was a crackpot.
Pivar is a classic crackpot, and Lifecode isn't a science book by any measure. There is no theory there, and no evidence or observation. I can't believe any scientist would be taken in by it. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/07/pseudoIANAEB (I am not an evolutionary biologist) but I'd side with Myers. Pivar sounds like a crackpot and a tool as well.
My favorite director's commentary of all time was from Trey Parker and Matt Stone's first film "Cannibal the Musical." You can hear them getting more and more drunk as the film progresses.
Suppose you wished we'd just stayed up in the trees then, ya?
For my money, this whole leaving the oceans thing was a bad idea.
The Home Depot would surprise me, because I do work there and I know they use Win2000 with a Java app for their POS in all their American stores.
I would have thought that too. The outlet was a three-prong, and the power strip had a tester light that was showing that it was properly grounded.
Funny you should say that... On Friday I was helping a friend put together a cheap e-mail box for another friend. He'd ordered all the parts online and was using the PSU that came with the very cheap case. We plugged it in and then got a nasty surprise when we touched the metal. Luckily it wasn't pouring out every watt into the case. It was just enough to be mighty uncomfortable. I'm now a true believer in better power supplies. If the site ever comes back, I'll be reading it.
Heck, it's been eight years for me. I missed a few "launch windows."
I agree whole-heatedly to this. I've felt that medicine killed off natural selection for many years. Both sides of my family carry bum sets of genes. There's a huge amount of cancer, heart disease, GI problems and such on both sides. If it hadn't been for modern medicine, I'd have died at least three times before I ever had sex (sadly at age 28 - I'm a geek, what can I say?). In nature I'd have been weeded out as a young child, but thanks to modern technology I have the opportunity to spread my heritage of substandard genes.
:^)
But then again, with my social skills, that's probably not anything I have to worry about.
I live near there, though I'll never go back to Blue Springs (a 2 mph traffic accident that did no damage led to driving school, a six month suspended jail sentence, a year's probation, $250 fine - and I had a clean driving record before that). I'm not volunteering to be a thug, but I don't think that number is correct. I believe Blue Spring's area code is 816.
Dang, I just searched the page for "mouse organ" before I posted. Missed it by half-an-hour.
Well, if you had seen the first set of computer generated timelines from the planet "Hollow"(names randomly picked when colonized), you'd think that my nationalism model was pretty funny too. Positive effect - negative effect, what's the difference? One little typo... and you've never seen people so happy about having their society descend into anarchy.
My favorite stupid mistake (on this game) though had to be the immortal planetary governor of Mars. Two little typos and the bastard won every election for 400 years and refused to die of old age.
My all-time favorite blunder on any game I've written had a simulated starship being chased down by a SAR drone (Search and Rescue - it was going out to collect an ejected pilot). I would pause, try to debug the problem, restart, run away again, pause, debug, rinse, repeat... for two hours before I found that little mistake.
I'm a self-taught programmer, and I'll admit not a very skilled one because I've had few opportunities for my code to be used outside of my own computer. That hasn't stopped me from trying though. I've been writing games on and off for years, and this has been my experience.
:^)
My first computer was a C64, and the game I was writing quickly grew beyond it's capabilities. It was a case of "Wouldn't it be nice if I could do this..."
Next, was a C128, and the same thing happened again, but more quickly this time and for the same reason.
Then came the Amiga 500 (upgraded of course). I rewrote my old code and thought I might be able to get it all to work. It wasn't feature-creep this time though - my apartment was broken into and my computer stolen.
Then I finally got my first PC, and I started a new game. I had it working! Everything I wanted and more was in it except... A full featured open-ended universe for the player to well... play in. So I started a universe creator that turned into a strategy game that has become an enormous resource hog. To give you some idea of the kind of creeping bloat we're talking about now, I'm working on simulating nationalism and religious strife and their effects on planetary economies. It has become less a programming task than an endless crusade. By the time I finish one feature (I just rewrote the code for diseases), I have two new ones. I WILL exceed the capabilities again of this machine.
So keeping in mind that I'm a disorganized and crappy programmer, here's Tim's Law of Feature Creep (as it applies to Tim): Regardless of resource supply, demand WILL grow to meet it.
And for good measure, here's Tim's Law of Social Interaction: Nothing good will come of a conversation that starts with: "Here, smell this."
Seeing as that's my only social law, it's easy to see why I'm 35, single, and dateless for almost 12 years.