The storytelling in the movie was amazing. Like most good stories, it focused on the relationships among people. Yes, it was a horror/action movie (and there are some nice action sequences), but that's not what it's really about. I love the fact that monster (and monsterlings) itself is only rarely seen -- and when it does, it's used to heighten the tension among the real characters. Similarly, each action had a purpose, moving the story along. The choices which the characters made (although sometimes eliciting a "don't go in there!!" yell) were exactly what I felt they should do, as characters. They felt scared, hopeless, and ultimately real.
I'm expecting some complaints about the action, the need for dramamine (I agree), and the weird acting, but overall Cloverfield was an excellent story about people thrown into an extreme situation. The action was secondary, and rightly so.
Almost every time one of my non-tech savvy friends is looking for a laptop, I ask if they've looked at Macs. I then, without fail, hear "Macs are more expensive than PC's", and after a few questions, it always turns out that what they have actually found is, "I was looking for cheap laptops, and Apple doesn't make anything in the $500-$1000 range". But, that's not the end of the story. Most of my non-tech savvy friends interpret Apple's low-end laptops ($1100) as being equivalent to a low-end PC laptop ($600). Thus, they think that Macs really do cost $500 more than equivalent PC laptops. These are not the kind of people who carefully compare specs, hard drive size and RPMs, processor speed (mostly they still think Macs are slower too), graphics sets, the value of bundled software, service and repair reputation, etc. They just look at price on a few manufacturers that they've always dealt with.
So no, many people do not understand that Apple has no low-end. They actually think that all PC makers have the same low end, and that the only difference is price.
Yes, they *could* get a touchtone line (and therefore Caller ID), but they would have to pay more for it. As far as my 60-year-old parents are concerned, it's not worth it.
It's not unlike getting cable. They *could*, but it would cost more and they don't really need it.
My parents live in rural central Michigan and still have a pulse line, as do many of their neighbors. They couldn't *get* caller ID if they wanted it. If they get a call during dinnertime, they can either guess about the intent, or just pick it up (and probably talk to the relative on the other end...). There are a surprising number of people in the same situation as them.
Funny. When the RIAA first started its "sue everybody" campaign, a first group of three students were sued for billions of dollars. One (two?) were at RPI, and another was at my school, Michigan Tech. And sure enough -- we got an offer from this never-before-seen service, Ruckus. We also went with it, with no student input as far as I'm aware. Sound like a bunch of opportunistic buggers to me.
My parents have recently switched over to cell phones for all their long-distance service, keeping a basic landline only for emergencies and local calls. They got the simplest cell phone they could find, and it's still a huge effort just to check their call log. The manual is clearly written for someone of my generation, not theirs, and it is no help at all.
They realize this, and they had a great idea: a phone made especially for baby boomers. Have a BIG, bold, backlit keypad, with each number on a separate key. (Theirs has "columns" of numbers all on one key, and it's easy to hit the wrong one.) Have a big, high-contrast screen. Have a very simple interface, with ONLY these features: dial a number, look up missed calls and previous calls, check voicemail, and maybe send text messages. No games, no web browser, no voice recognition training. Then, write a manual that spells things out in very simple steps, with minimal technical language (and define the technical terms clearly).
There's a HUGE market out there for something like this -- the baby boomers! If one company or the other would produce a phone like this, they could probably make a tidy profit from it.
Wow. Nothing says "class" like a thinly-veiled "Macs are for fags" joke.
It's been done before, but effete means "affected, overrefined, or ineffectual," not "effeminate" or any other homosexual slant. Spiro Agnew called the media "effete corps of impudent snobs" and got slammed for the same mistake (of course, the reporters slamming him on it probably didn't appreciate either meaning!).
Think about it: if copyright never expired, where would the motivation to innovate come from?
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet, but Spider Robinson's excellent short story Melancholy Elephants discusses that exact idea. Its point is that, if copyrights are extended indefinitely, we eventually smother our own creativity.
...should provide you with [A] a screenshot of said item, with an arrow pointing to it, and [B] sample instructions on how to find it.
This sounds vaguely like the old Apple Guide which came with Mac OSes for a while. For most help, it would provide step-by-step guided directions -- circling parts of the screen where you should look, hilighting menu items and buttons, selecting icons, etc. It could also open windows, control panels, etc. step by step for you, always giving you a chance to do it yourself if you want.
It was great for users, but horrifically painful for developers, and it was sadly replaced by the mostly crappy OS X HTML-based help system.
You might be interested to know that there is indeed a project to add webcam support to Gaim. That's their old website, the project is now merged with Gaim itself and aiming to be included in the Gaim 2.0 release (and hopefully Adium, Fire, and other libgaim-based messengers, once Gaim gets it working).
You might also consider that Gaim supports a whole boatload of protocols whose official clients have webcam support (AIM, MSN, Yahoo for a start). It's one thing to get webcam support working on one protocol, it's quite another to get it working on all of them. From what I know of the Gaim developers, they want support across the board, not piecemeal. I can totally understand this -- if you were to implement webcam/voice support on only one protocol, people would complain more than if you hadn't done it at all!
I don't know how many times I've written this same comment -- pretty much every single IM-related article that shows up on Slashdot has someone complaining about Gaim and voice/video without actually checking out the facts.
You are correct. Adium X is basically gaim with a pretty GUI.
No. Adium X uses libgaim, which is the protocol-handling code from Gaim, and that is it. The majority of the app -- all of the interface and logic that doesn't explicitly talk to servers -- is original work. Even some of the protocol-handling code isn't libgaim -- for example, Bonjour (i.e. Rendevouz) support. If you try it, you'll find some significant feature differences from Gaim as well.
Once upon a time, Adium came with a plugin (disabled by default) that would count the number of times you (or someone you talked with) used phrases like "omg" and "ic" and other annoying things. If you used them too much in a given time range, it would send the message: "The person you are talking too is too lame to use real language. Please stop talking to them."
Generalized problem: find a similar method (to the division by 3 or 6 rules) for any integer. Not all are fast ways, but there is a relatively simple solution for any integer. A fun one to try is 11. Hint: write the number in base 11 and use modular arithmetic.
You're onto, but not quite at, a type of solution that works for this problem, and my favorite generalization:
Suppose you have an infinite number of quarters, and (say) 25 are heads, the rest tails. You can reach all of the quarters, but you can't see or feel their state. Find a finite-time way to split the coins into two groups which have equal numbers of heads.
Asymptotic solutions ("spend 1 second flipping one coin, 1/2 second flipping the next, 1/4 flipping...") are not allowed.;)
The problem, as stated, is incomplete. If it is being defined recursively, we need some starting conditions, like x(1) = 1. However, as the OP didn't actually ask a question, I'll state what I think he was trying for here:
This is called the "Collatz Conjecture": given a positive integer a_1 = n, let a_i = a_{i-1}/2 if a_i is even, and a_i = 3a_{i-1}+1 if n is odd. Repeat. In other words, take a number, divide by two if it's even and take three times it plus one if it's odd, and repeat ad nauseum. Try a few integers, and you'll find that they eventually end up cycling: 1, 2, 4, 1,... Does this always happen? The answer is, alas, unknown.
This problem fascinated me through high school, and I eventually ended up going into mathematics partly because of the fun I had exploring its ins and outs.
I also saw it as a "noob" -- I got dragged to the movie by my housemates. I came back and started reading everything I could find about the series. If you like the series, you may like the movie -- I don't know. But the movie is enough to make me want to see the series.
This was an article related to the "Top 10 Dot-Com Busts" that was linked here yesterday. It was linked from that article. This isn't a dupe on anyone's part, just a companion article.
Holy crap, I go offline for 12 hours and you guys are giving me this kind of jobs?? I quit!
Nothing like signing on to/. and seeing your name in the top headline.
-- David Clark
Reading through those other slides, this presentation is like something from another world. Slides with "WOW!" and "YIKES!" on them in huge letters -- when did Motorola slip into the Comic Book dimension?
The only downside to the Google satellite images is that the highest resolution images cover metropolitian areas.
Actually, it seems much weirder than that. Looking at my home state of Michigan, there are super-high-resolution bits out in the middle of nowhere. Someone decided they needed high-res photos of lovely fields and a bit of expressway. Usualy, I can't find any significant features, political or geographical, to justify it. Makes me want to put on a tinfoil hat sometimes...:)
Because this is a horribly simplified and popularized version of actual scientific work. It happens all the time: you hear "Study says: People would be happier if they chose jobs they liked." Everyone posts to/. saying "I could have told you that, who's paying these guys?" And all it really is, is that there was actual good scientific research going on, and the press got ahold of the simplest sound bite they could and presented THAT. There's usually a lot more than meets the eye.
(why buy a year-old Edition 1 of something, if you can have Edition 1.1.18?)
Easy. Because I need the information NOW. Because I want the physical copy that I can grab off a shelf any time I need it. Because there will always be a newer version coming out, and if I really need the book, I have to get it eventually.
Perhaps this trend will encourage people to be a bit more conservative about actually buying a book, but people who need a book will still buy it when they need it. Of course, this begs questions like... will we eventually get the x.0.1 updates for free somehow? Will publishing ever expand to such an extreme anyhow?
Slashdot Mirror
The storytelling in the movie was amazing. Like most good stories, it focused on the relationships among people. Yes, it was a horror/action movie (and there are some nice action sequences), but that's not what it's really about. I love the fact that monster (and monsterlings) itself is only rarely seen -- and when it does, it's used to heighten the tension among the real characters. Similarly, each action had a purpose, moving the story along. The choices which the characters made (although sometimes eliciting a "don't go in there!!" yell) were exactly what I felt they should do, as characters. They felt scared, hopeless, and ultimately real.
I'm expecting some complaints about the action, the need for dramamine (I agree), and the weird acting, but overall Cloverfield was an excellent story about people thrown into an extreme situation. The action was secondary, and rightly so.
In the words of a friend,
The enemy of my enemy is... a low priority!
Almost every time one of my non-tech savvy friends is looking for a laptop, I ask if they've looked at Macs. I then, without fail, hear "Macs are more expensive than PC's", and after a few questions, it always turns out that what they have actually found is, "I was looking for cheap laptops, and Apple doesn't make anything in the $500-$1000 range". But, that's not the end of the story. Most of my non-tech savvy friends interpret Apple's low-end laptops ($1100) as being equivalent to a low-end PC laptop ($600). Thus, they think that Macs really do cost $500 more than equivalent PC laptops. These are not the kind of people who carefully compare specs, hard drive size and RPMs, processor speed (mostly they still think Macs are slower too), graphics sets, the value of bundled software, service and repair reputation, etc. They just look at price on a few manufacturers that they've always dealt with.
So no, many people do not understand that Apple has no low-end. They actually think that all PC makers have the same low end, and that the only difference is price.
Yes, they *could* get a touchtone line (and therefore Caller ID), but they would have to pay more for it. As far as my 60-year-old parents are concerned, it's not worth it.
It's not unlike getting cable. They *could*, but it would cost more and they don't really need it.
My parents live in rural central Michigan and still have a pulse line, as do many of their neighbors. They couldn't *get* caller ID if they wanted it. If they get a call during dinnertime, they can either guess about the intent, or just pick it up (and probably talk to the relative on the other end...). There are a surprising number of people in the same situation as them.
Funny. When the RIAA first started its "sue everybody" campaign, a first group of three students were sued for billions of dollars. One (two?) were at RPI, and another was at my school, Michigan Tech. And sure enough -- we got an offer from this never-before-seen service, Ruckus. We also went with it, with no student input as far as I'm aware. Sound like a bunch of opportunistic buggers to me.
My parents have recently switched over to cell phones for all their long-distance service, keeping a basic landline only for emergencies and local calls. They got the simplest cell phone they could find, and it's still a huge effort just to check their call log. The manual is clearly written for someone of my generation, not theirs, and it is no help at all.
They realize this, and they had a great idea: a phone made especially for baby boomers. Have a BIG, bold, backlit keypad, with each number on a separate key. (Theirs has "columns" of numbers all on one key, and it's easy to hit the wrong one.) Have a big, high-contrast screen. Have a very simple interface, with ONLY these features: dial a number, look up missed calls and previous calls, check voicemail, and maybe send text messages. No games, no web browser, no voice recognition training. Then, write a manual that spells things out in very simple steps, with minimal technical language (and define the technical terms clearly).
There's a HUGE market out there for something like this -- the baby boomers! If one company or the other would produce a phone like this, they could probably make a tidy profit from it.
Wow. Nothing says "class" like a thinly-veiled "Macs are for fags" joke.
It's been done before, but effete means "affected, overrefined, or ineffectual," not "effeminate" or any other homosexual slant. Spiro Agnew called the media "effete corps of impudent snobs" and got slammed for the same mistake (of course, the reporters slamming him on it probably didn't appreciate either meaning!).
Think about it: if copyright never expired, where would the motivation to innovate come from?
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet, but Spider Robinson's excellent short story Melancholy Elephants discusses that exact idea. Its point is that, if copyrights are extended indefinitely, we eventually smother our own creativity.
...should provide you with [A] a screenshot of said item, with an arrow pointing to it, and [B] sample instructions on how to find it.
This sounds vaguely like the old Apple Guide which came with Mac OSes for a while. For most help, it would provide step-by-step guided directions -- circling parts of the screen where you should look, hilighting menu items and buttons, selecting icons, etc. It could also open windows, control panels, etc. step by step for you, always giving you a chance to do it yourself if you want.
It was great for users, but horrifically painful for developers, and it was sadly replaced by the mostly crappy OS X HTML-based help system.
You might be interested to know that there is indeed a project to add webcam support to Gaim. That's their old website, the project is now merged with Gaim itself and aiming to be included in the Gaim 2.0 release (and hopefully Adium, Fire, and other libgaim-based messengers, once Gaim gets it working).
You might also consider that Gaim supports a whole boatload of protocols whose official clients have webcam support (AIM, MSN, Yahoo for a start). It's one thing to get webcam support working on one protocol, it's quite another to get it working on all of them. From what I know of the Gaim developers, they want support across the board, not piecemeal. I can totally understand this -- if you were to implement webcam/voice support on only one protocol, people would complain more than if you hadn't done it at all!
I don't know how many times I've written this same comment -- pretty much every single IM-related article that shows up on Slashdot has someone complaining about Gaim and voice/video without actually checking out the facts.
You are correct. Adium X is basically gaim with a pretty GUI.
No. Adium X uses libgaim, which is the protocol-handling code from Gaim, and that is it. The majority of the app -- all of the interface and logic that doesn't explicitly talk to servers -- is original work. Even some of the protocol-handling code isn't libgaim -- for example, Bonjour (i.e. Rendevouz) support. If you try it, you'll find some significant feature differences from Gaim as well.
Once upon a time, Adium came with a plugin (disabled by default) that would count the number of times you (or someone you talked with) used phrases like "omg" and "ic" and other annoying things. If you used them too much in a given time range, it would send the message: "The person you are talking too is too lame to use real language. Please stop talking to them."
Generalized problem: find a similar method (to the division by 3 or 6 rules) for any integer. Not all are fast ways, but there is a relatively simple solution for any integer. A fun one to try is 11. Hint: write the number in base 11 and use modular arithmetic.
You're onto, but not quite at, a type of solution that works for this problem, and my favorite generalization:
;)
Suppose you have an infinite number of quarters, and (say) 25 are heads, the rest tails. You can reach all of the quarters, but you can't see or feel their state. Find a finite-time way to split the coins into two groups which have equal numbers of heads.
Asymptotic solutions ("spend 1 second flipping one coin, 1/2 second flipping the next, 1/4 flipping...") are not allowed.
A few corrections:
..., not 1, 2 ,4 ,1, ...
We divide by two if a_{i-1} is even, not if a_i is even. Likewise for a_{i-1} being odd.
The cycle is 4, 2, 1, 4,
Someone remind me not to write math at 1:00 am again... especially when it comes to my thesis!
The problem, as stated, is incomplete. If it is being defined recursively, we need some starting conditions, like x(1) = 1. However, as the OP didn't actually ask a question, I'll state what I think he was trying for here:
... Does this always happen? The answer is, alas, unknown.
This is called the "Collatz Conjecture": given a positive integer a_1 = n, let a_i = a_{i-1}/2 if a_i is even, and a_i = 3a_{i-1}+1 if n is odd. Repeat. In other words, take a number, divide by two if it's even and take three times it plus one if it's odd, and repeat ad nauseum. Try a few integers, and you'll find that they eventually end up cycling: 1, 2, 4, 1,
This problem fascinated me through high school, and I eventually ended up going into mathematics partly because of the fun I had exploring its ins and outs.
Ah, the sad stories I've heard of all those poor poutine addicts. Breaking in to grocery stores just to get their cholesterol fix...
I also saw it as a "noob" -- I got dragged to the movie by my housemates. I came back and started reading everything I could find about the series. If you like the series, you may like the movie -- I don't know. But the movie is enough to make me want to see the series.
This was an article related to the "Top 10 Dot-Com Busts" that was linked here yesterday. It was linked from that article. This isn't a dupe on anyone's part, just a companion article.
Holy crap, I go offline for 12 hours and you guys are giving me this kind of jobs?? I quit! Nothing like signing on to /. and seeing your name in the top headline.
-- David Clark
Reading through those other slides, this presentation is like something from another world. Slides with "WOW!" and "YIKES!" on them in huge letters -- when did Motorola slip into the Comic Book dimension?
The only downside to the Google satellite images is that the highest resolution images cover metropolitian areas.
:)
Actually, it seems much weirder than that. Looking at my home state of Michigan, there are super-high-resolution bits out in the middle of nowhere. Someone decided they needed high-res photos of lovely fields and a bit of expressway. Usualy, I can't find any significant features, political or geographical, to justify it. Makes me want to put on a tinfoil hat sometimes...
Why do we need scientists to tell us this?
/. saying "I could have told you that, who's paying these guys?" And all it really is, is that there was actual good scientific research going on, and the press got ahold of the simplest sound bite they could and presented THAT. There's usually a lot more than meets the eye.
Because this is a horribly simplified and popularized version of actual scientific work. It happens all the time: you hear "Study says: People would be happier if they chose jobs they liked." Everyone posts to
(why buy a year-old Edition 1 of something, if you can have Edition 1.1.18?)
Easy. Because I need the information NOW. Because I want the physical copy that I can grab off a shelf any time I need it. Because there will always be a newer version coming out, and if I really need the book, I have to get it eventually.
Perhaps this trend will encourage people to be a bit more conservative about actually buying a book, but people who need a book will still buy it when they need it. Of course, this begs questions like... will we eventually get the x.0.1 updates for free somehow? Will publishing ever expand to such an extreme anyhow?