1 - Ritalin is not the only medication out there for treating ADD. Before you go investing money into electronic snake-oil, why don't you just try working with your child's doctor on finding a better medication? If you really want to spend a lot of money finding a good solution with the help of computers, check out the Amen clinic at http://www.amenclinic.com/ac/default.asp.
2 - ADD is a complex neurological disorder. It doesn't just involve concentration. It doesn't just come and go. There is no quick fix. No book, no therapy, no medication, nothing will just fix it. It's there, and it can be managed, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Keep that in mind when looking for ways to "cure" your child's ADD.
3 - If you want good help with a medical problem, don't ask a bunch of random internet posters-especially the Slashdot crowd. Most of the people you get responses from will be wack-jobs ranting about the evil doctors turning them into robots with addictive medications when they were in high school. If you really want to learn about successful ADD treatments, go to some of the national/international ADD conferences and ask around.
" Perhaps having been prescribed various stimulant medicines which shortly turned into an addiction..."
Stimulant medications used to treat ADD are not prescribed in doses large enough to addict the user. If you became addicted to ADD meds, it was because you were abusing them, just the the meth that you later got hooked on.
People like you make me sick. I have ADD, and I'm sick of idiots like you who blame your own stupidity on the medication. I have a serious medical problems that need serious treatment, and it's a real pain in the ass when people won't take it seriously because some pathetic loser like you refuses to deal with his addictions and instead dumps the problem on medications that RESPONSIBLE people do just fine with.
I do at least that in a slow month, and more than that in a busy day, but I have been told that for some companies 2-3 gigs a month is the limit stated by support staff.
I have a question for people who get these messages: What services are you using all of the bandwidth for? I know that I usually pass the two and three gigabyte limits many providers are enforcing with my cable modem, but mine is spread around all over the place-in other words, I'm not using P2P apps or downloading a whole lot of iso images via FTP. For those of you who are getting letters, what are you doing with the bandwidth, and how much of it are you using to download movies/software/music without paying for it?
Yahoo users were still unable to find the "search" button at Yahoo.com among advertisements, sweepstakes offers, pretty buttons, news headlines, shopping categories, and about a hundred other annoyances.
This is why I hardly ever use my computers for games anymore. I got sick of fixing DirectX stuff, driver stuff, performance stuff, defragging, etc. just so I can play games. Of course, if I wasn't so lazy I'd just run them all under WineX, which is less hassle than running them under Windows, but hey, I'm lazy, so Gamecube it is...
I'm a caffiene fiend. At one point in 2002 I was drinking 2-3 cups per hour that I was awake, along with constantly sucking on caffeinated breath mints. I had to get up at work hours on weekends, because if I didn't get the coffee in me on schedule, my body would go into horrible withdrawl and I would end up in bed all weekend. After a while it was really screwing up my life, so I started cutting back by a couple of cups a week, giving up the mints, and replacing coffee with Earl Grey when possible. Over a year later I'm down to one or two cups a day. For a while there I actually tried living without caffiene at all, but I'm just too sluggish. Anyway, here are a few tips: -Eat healthy! If all you eat is crap, you'll feel even worse without the caffience. Keep apples, oranges, and bananas on hand at all times. -Instead of coffee first thing in the morning, eat a balance bar before your morning shower. The rush of sugar and vitamins is a nice start that will make the morning easier. -Exercise! 30 minutes, five times a day minimum will really make life easier all around, especially when kicking caffiene. -Give up beef. For me, eating beef makes me feel like I just chugged a few beers. If beef makes you sluggish, you'll want to reach for the coffee, so just leave it alone. -Eat light lunches-rice, veggies, chicken. The local kabob restaurant and frozen rice bowls (Trader Joe's) are a great help here. A light lunch has the same effect that avoiding beef does. -No sugary snacks-a sugar crash feels just like caffeine withdrawl, so stay away!
I grew up next to a small river. As a child, my friends and I spent many afternoons fishing in the river for bass, sunfish, and catfish. In the late 1980s a trend began among irresponsible fishermen of using "feeder" goldfish, most of which were tiny orange carp, as bait because they were cheaper than minnows. At the end of the day, those guys would toss any extra bait into the river, where they thrived and grew to huge sizes. Native fish were wiped out, followed by the huge snapping turtles that could no longer survive in the screwed-up ecosystem. Those damned goldfish became the kudzu of our water, weren't any fun to fish for, and now the only people who fish in those waters are illegal immigrants desperate for food.
If something like this were done with those stupid pet goldfish, it would be a great boon for a lot of fishing spots that might eventually be destroyed by idiots using non-native bait.
How about instead of fighting over ways to deliver more crappy promo documentaries and trailers as extra features, they just find a way to let me download the movies alone? I don't need extra crap, I don't need a disc, and I don't need packaging that just wastes space and resources. Physical media is crap!
"Personally, I got toothpaste, tic-tacs, deodorant..."
That's not weird. That's someone's way of telling you that you have bad breath and have body odor. Trust me on this one, even if you don't think you stink and this just seems weird, you really do stink, you need to do something about it, and in civilized circles, this is considered a legitimate way to tell someon that he stinks and avoid confrontation.
The S3 Virge card was, in its own time, one of the highest-selling video chipsets of all time. Because it was small, cheap, had a low power draw and low heat output, Asian computer manufacturers stuffed it into every value PC, server, and laptop they kicked out for well over three years.
But it was never fast. 2D image quality sucked. It was really only good for well-coded D3D games that used a very small texture set. In this case, however, that did not matter, because nobody who bought computers with the S3 Virge was running 3D apps or using Photoshop.
Think about it, if you're in the market for 1000 cheap laptops, for people who won't have admin rights (To install games.) on the systems and will only use them for work that doesn't need some fast, hot, powerful 3D chip, why not get one with an S3 chip and save $20 on each machine?
Think about doing a "Cheapass" game. Unless you plan of doing some incredibly beautiful board/pieces, there's no need to do anything special. Just hire a print shop (A real one that does cheap bulk jobs, not Kinko's.) to do it on cardboard and sell it out of zip-loc baggies. If that one does well, invest in cardboard boxes for the next one.
Pitfalls to avoid in boardgames: -Make a game that can handle at least four players, because very few people look for new games for less than four players. - Don't make it take a long time-stay under two hours. There are some people who like eight hour games, but those people are few and far between, and they already own Risk and everything from Eagle and GMT.
Kinko's is not a cheap option for printing up gaming items. The only thing kinko's does cheaply is bulk, high-speed copying. Everything else is just services sold at premium prices to people who aren't having enough done to enlist a print shop.
What you're missing here is that, regardless of how cutting-edge it was, the CGI in "The Hulk" looked (IMHO) horrible. As George Lucas has learned from the overall negative reaction to his overuse of cutting edge CGI in Star Wars episodes I and II, just because one can do something does not mean that one should do something.
I cannot see how one can think that the Matrix sequels were snubbed. Neither broke any new ground in the CGI field, they simply had a whole lot of unimpressive and obvious CGI scenes and characters, something that didn't really impress anyone when ILM did it in the last two Star Wars movies. It wasn't that the effects in the Matrix Movies were bad, just that they did not deserve any reward, as opposed to the other movies, which, with the exception of "The Hulk," all broke new ground with incredible new effects, or in the case of RoTK, took existing effects to even greater levels than ever seen before without failing to look convincing.
Whale Rider: Low budget yet high quality, with endearing characters and a powerful, touching storyline.
Master and Commander: Finally, Hollywood stops bowing down to minority interests and makes a cool war movie about a bunch of guys on ships kicking ass. No romance, no attempts to be redeeming or have a moral, just a bunch of men at sea doing their job.
The rest seemed pretty lame. "Terminator 3" was not the huge let down that I expected, but I cannot say that it was good. "Finding Nemo" would have been good if it hadn't had the same plot Pixar used in both "Toy Story" movies and "Monsters Inc." I would love to see Pixar do something other than cute character gets lost, hijinks ensue.
Does it really seem realistic to expect Microsoft to not include a media player with Windows? Mac OS has come with Quicktime forever, and now includes iTunes. All of the Linux distros have come with a suite of multimedia applications for years. If anything, Windows Media Player shows that there IS competition out there, and that Microsoft is having to add new features to keep up. Tough shit for Real if that means having another competitor to help choke those last few death rattles out of Real's crap products.
Further, Windows Media Player is just an evolution and consolidation of the various CD/Wav/Video playing tools MS has been adding in including since the Windows 3.1 days, updated with newer codecs and a better UI. Windows is not cheap, and adding newer, better features is necessary for Microsoft to continue adding customers. Real never bitched back when the Windows multimedia stuff was a few different programs under "entertainment," and for them to say that Microsoft is violating antitrust laws now for providing something that consumers got used to a long time ago is just a load of crap.
Of course, I guess when you're running a company that's trying to make money selling that shitty RealOne player, you'll do anything to get the stock price up.
Is it just me, or does the "...through inaction..." part of rule 1 seem dangerous? I mean, what happens if a rule 1 results in a robot attempting to help a person and harming him? For example, moving someone with a broken neck because of a percieved danger and creating a quadraplegic when unnecessary?
"Internet Connection Firewall will be enabled by default..."
About damned time. I just hope that DHCP works through it by default, because right now it doesn't, and if it blocks DHCP, all of those broadband users who connect the PC right to the cable/dsl "modem" will deactivate the firewall to get online.
Of course, what we really need is for ISPs to include a user-manageable firewall in the damned devices in the first place.
"There are no regimented standards or massive expenditure in a particular monopoly's software'."
Are you brain dead? Iraq's computer infrastructure is being built by the US Government and its contractors. This is same US Government where the biggest donor to both sides in important election is Microsoft. The US Government that standardizes on Microsoft products anywhere it can unless it just has to do otherwise. Do you really think that Iraq won't be turned into one big, nasty, Active-Directory,.net, Internet Explorer only mess?
" I wonder what Steve Jobs would say if he sees people doing such things to his machines!!"
Probably something along the lines of "55 operating systems on one Mac! Wow! Thank god I'm not such a huge loser and I actually have sex now and then!"
I made a lot of money in 2003. I used it to buy just about anything I wanted and had time/space for; the same holds true for material desires down the road. Christmas drives me nuts, because it means that my friends and family will be wasting money buying me more stuff that will likely end up in a closet or at the salvation army. My only really memorable gift from xmas 2002 was a Barnes&Noble gift card, and I still haven't had time to read the damned books I bought with it!
So how about everyone just does me a favor and gives the money away? Following are my favourite charities:
I'm sure, in fact I know, that I have left a lot of worth organizations out. But seriously, my christmas wish is that people would stop wasting money buying cheap asian trinkets and spend it on something useful. Christmas doesn't have to be a load of crap. Make it worthwhile.
Unless, of course, you want to get me gift certificates at the Apple store.
Slashdot Mirror
1 - Ritalin is not the only medication out there for treating ADD. Before you go investing money into electronic snake-oil, why don't you just try working with your child's doctor on finding a better medication? If you really want to spend a lot of money finding a good solution with the help of computers, check out the Amen clinic at http://www.amenclinic.com/ac/default.asp.
2 - ADD is a complex neurological disorder. It doesn't just involve concentration. It doesn't just come and go. There is no quick fix. No book, no therapy, no medication, nothing will just fix it. It's there, and it can be managed, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Keep that in mind when looking for ways to "cure" your child's ADD.
3 - If you want good help with a medical problem, don't ask a bunch of random internet posters-especially the Slashdot crowd. Most of the people you get responses from will be wack-jobs ranting about the evil doctors turning them into robots with addictive medications when they were in high school. If you really want to learn about successful ADD treatments, go to some of the national/international ADD conferences and ask around.
" Perhaps having been prescribed various stimulant medicines which shortly turned into an addiction..."
Stimulant medications used to treat ADD are not prescribed in doses large enough to addict the user. If you became addicted to ADD meds, it was because you were abusing them, just the the meth that you later got hooked on.
People like you make me sick. I have ADD, and I'm sick of idiots like you who blame your own stupidity on the medication. I have a serious medical problems that need serious treatment, and it's a real pain in the ass when people won't take it seriously because some pathetic loser like you refuses to deal with his addictions and instead dumps the problem on medications that RESPONSIBLE people do just fine with.
You don't need a robot-you need an illegal immigrant maid.
I do at least that in a slow month, and more than that in a busy day, but I have been told that for some companies 2-3 gigs a month is the limit stated by support staff.
I have a question for people who get these messages: What services are you using all of the bandwidth for? I know that I usually pass the two and three gigabyte limits many providers are enforcing with my cable modem, but mine is spread around all over the place-in other words, I'm not using P2P apps or downloading a whole lot of iso images via FTP. For those of you who are getting letters, what are you doing with the bandwidth, and how much of it are you using to download movies/software/music without paying for it?
Yahoo users were still unable to find the "search" button at Yahoo.com among advertisements, sweepstakes offers, pretty buttons, news headlines, shopping categories, and about a hundred other annoyances.
This is why I hardly ever use my computers for games anymore. I got sick of fixing DirectX stuff, driver stuff, performance stuff, defragging, etc. just so I can play games. Of course, if I wasn't so lazy I'd just run them all under WineX, which is less hassle than running them under Windows, but hey, I'm lazy, so Gamecube it is...
I'm a caffiene fiend. At one point in 2002 I was drinking 2-3 cups per hour that I was awake, along with constantly sucking on caffeinated breath mints. I had to get up at work hours on weekends, because if I didn't get the coffee in me on schedule, my body would go into horrible withdrawl and I would end up in bed all weekend. After a while it was really screwing up my life, so I started cutting back by a couple of cups a week, giving up the mints, and replacing coffee with Earl Grey when possible. Over a year later I'm down to one or two cups a day. For a while there I actually tried living without caffiene at all, but I'm just too sluggish. Anyway, here are a few tips:
-Eat healthy! If all you eat is crap, you'll feel even worse without the caffience. Keep apples, oranges, and bananas on hand at all times.
-Instead of coffee first thing in the morning, eat a balance bar before your morning shower. The rush of sugar and vitamins is a nice start that will make the morning easier.
-Exercise! 30 minutes, five times a day minimum will really make life easier all around, especially when kicking caffiene.
-Give up beef. For me, eating beef makes me feel like I just chugged a few beers. If beef makes you sluggish, you'll want to reach for the coffee, so just leave it alone.
-Eat light lunches-rice, veggies, chicken. The local kabob restaurant and frozen rice bowls (Trader Joe's) are a great help here. A light lunch has the same effect that avoiding beef does.
-No sugary snacks-a sugar crash feels just like caffeine withdrawl, so stay away!
Hope this helps..
In the future, when you get /. to pump your new distro, make sure that your servers can handle the load first.
Morons.
I grew up next to a small river. As a child, my friends and I spent many afternoons fishing in the river for bass, sunfish, and catfish. In the late 1980s a trend began among irresponsible fishermen of using "feeder" goldfish, most of which were tiny orange carp, as bait because they were cheaper than minnows. At the end of the day, those guys would toss any extra bait into the river, where they thrived and grew to huge sizes. Native fish were wiped out, followed by the huge snapping turtles that could no longer survive in the screwed-up ecosystem. Those damned goldfish became the kudzu of our water, weren't any fun to fish for, and now the only people who fish in those waters are illegal immigrants desperate for food.
If something like this were done with those stupid pet goldfish, it would be a great boon for a lot of fishing spots that might eventually be destroyed by idiots using non-native bait.
How about instead of fighting over ways to deliver more crappy promo documentaries and trailers as extra features, they just find a way to let me download the movies alone? I don't need extra crap, I don't need a disc, and I don't need packaging that just wastes space and resources. Physical media is crap!
"Personally, I got toothpaste, tic-tacs, deodorant..."
That's not weird. That's someone's way of telling you that you have bad breath and have body odor. Trust me on this one, even if you don't think you stink and this just seems weird, you really do stink, you need to do something about it, and in civilized circles, this is considered a legitimate way to tell someon that he stinks and avoid confrontation.
The S3 Virge card was, in its own time, one of the highest-selling video chipsets of all time. Because it was small, cheap, had a low power draw and low heat output, Asian computer manufacturers stuffed it into every value PC, server, and laptop they kicked out for well over three years.
But it was never fast. 2D image quality sucked. It was really only good for well-coded D3D games that used a very small texture set. In this case, however, that did not matter, because nobody who bought computers with the S3 Virge was running 3D apps or using Photoshop.
Think about it, if you're in the market for 1000 cheap laptops, for people who won't have admin rights (To install games.) on the systems and will only use them for work that doesn't need some fast, hot, powerful 3D chip, why not get one with an S3 chip and save $20 on each machine?
Think about doing a "Cheapass" game. Unless you plan of doing some incredibly beautiful board/pieces, there's no need to do anything special. Just hire a print shop (A real one that does cheap bulk jobs, not Kinko's.) to do it on cardboard and sell it out of zip-loc baggies. If that one does well, invest in cardboard boxes for the next one.
Pitfalls to avoid in boardgames:
-Make a game that can handle at least four players, because very few people look for new games for less than four players.
- Don't make it take a long time-stay under two hours. There are some people who like eight hour games, but those people are few and far between, and they already own Risk and everything from Eagle and GMT.
Kinko's is not a cheap option for printing up gaming items. The only thing kinko's does cheaply is bulk, high-speed copying. Everything else is just services sold at premium prices to people who aren't having enough done to enlist a print shop.
What you're missing here is that, regardless of how cutting-edge it was, the CGI in "The Hulk" looked (IMHO) horrible. As George Lucas has learned from the overall negative reaction to his overuse of cutting edge CGI in Star Wars episodes I and II, just because one can do something does not mean that one should do something.
Wouldn't it be great when little kids watching at Imax theatres noticed overlooked sheepshaggers at work behind the shrubberies?
I cannot see how one can think that the Matrix sequels were snubbed. Neither broke any new ground in the CGI field, they simply had a whole lot of unimpressive and obvious CGI scenes and characters, something that didn't really impress anyone when ILM did it in the last two Star Wars movies. It wasn't that the effects in the Matrix Movies were bad, just that they did not deserve any reward, as opposed to the other movies, which, with the exception of "The Hulk," all broke new ground with incredible new effects, or in the case of RoTK, took existing effects to even greater levels than ever seen before without failing to look convincing.
Whale Rider: Low budget yet high quality, with endearing characters and a powerful, touching storyline.
Master and Commander: Finally, Hollywood stops bowing down to minority interests and makes a cool war movie about a bunch of guys on ships kicking ass. No romance, no attempts to be redeeming or have a moral, just a bunch of men at sea doing their job.
The rest seemed pretty lame. "Terminator 3" was not the huge let down that I expected, but I cannot say that it was good. "Finding Nemo" would have been good if it hadn't had the same plot Pixar used in both "Toy Story" movies and "Monsters Inc." I would love to see Pixar do something other than cute character gets lost, hijinks ensue.
Does it really seem realistic to expect Microsoft to not include a media player with Windows? Mac OS has come with Quicktime forever, and now includes iTunes. All of the Linux distros have come with a suite of multimedia applications for years. If anything, Windows Media Player shows that there IS competition out there, and that Microsoft is having to add new features to keep up. Tough shit for Real if that means having another competitor to help choke those last few death rattles out of Real's crap products.
Further, Windows Media Player is just an evolution and consolidation of the various CD/Wav/Video playing tools MS has been adding in including since the Windows 3.1 days, updated with newer codecs and a better UI. Windows is not cheap, and adding newer, better features is necessary for Microsoft to continue adding customers. Real never bitched back when the Windows multimedia stuff was a few different programs under "entertainment," and for them to say that Microsoft is violating antitrust laws now for providing something that consumers got used to a long time ago is just a load of crap.
Of course, I guess when you're running a company that's trying to make money selling that shitty RealOne player, you'll do anything to get the stock price up.
Is it just me, or does the "...through inaction..." part of rule 1 seem dangerous? I mean, what happens if a rule 1 results in a robot attempting to help a person and harming him? For example, moving someone with a broken neck because of a percieved danger and creating a quadraplegic when unnecessary?
"Internet Connection Firewall will be enabled by default..."
About damned time. I just hope that DHCP works through it by default, because right now it doesn't, and if it blocks DHCP, all of those broadband users who connect the PC right to the cable/dsl "modem" will deactivate the firewall to get online.
Of course, what we really need is for ISPs to include a user-manageable firewall in the damned devices in the first place.
"There are no regimented standards or massive expenditure in a particular monopoly's software'."
.net, Internet Explorer only mess?
Are you brain dead? Iraq's computer infrastructure is being built by the US Government and its contractors. This is same US Government where the biggest donor to both sides in important election is Microsoft. The US Government that standardizes on Microsoft products anywhere it can unless it just has to do otherwise. Do you really think that Iraq won't be turned into one big, nasty, Active-Directory,
" I wonder what Steve Jobs would say if he sees people doing such things to his machines!!"
Probably something along the lines of "55 operating systems on one Mac! Wow! Thank god I'm not such a huge loser and I actually have sex now and then!"
I made a lot of money in 2003. I used it to buy just about anything I wanted and had time/space for; the same holds true for material desires down the road. Christmas drives me nuts, because it means that my friends and family will be wasting money buying me more stuff that will likely end up in a closet or at the salvation army. My only really memorable gift from xmas 2002 was a Barnes&Noble gift card, and I still haven't had time to read the damned books I bought with it!
So how about everyone just does me a favor and gives the money away? Following are my favourite charities:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Human Rights Campaign
The Sierra Club
Amnesty International
Greenpeace
I'm sure, in fact I know, that I have left a lot of worth organizations out. But seriously, my christmas wish is that people would stop wasting money buying cheap asian trinkets and spend it on something useful. Christmas doesn't have to be a load of crap. Make it worthwhile.
Unless, of course, you want to get me gift certificates at the Apple store.