I tried using Linux multiple times from when I downloaded my first copy of Red Hat in 1999 or so, through some attempts with Mandrake and SuSe. None of them "just worked" - driver support was missing, programs didn't work as expected (or work at all), etc, etc. So I stuck with Windows.
Good point. No one's ever had driver issues or malfunctioning software in a Windows environment.
On neither platform does everything "just work" all the time. The only reason people put up with Window's bullshit is they've come to accept it as the way things are supposed to work. Your favorite game stops working? Reinstall it. That doesn't work? Reinstall windows. Your new game doesn't work? Upgrade your graphics drivers. Download the patch.
Things fail in both environments. You run into driver issues in both -- some hardware's too old for new versions of windows (like my old adaptec SCSI card that works fine in win2k, but doesn't have drivers available in XP or higher; same with an old voodoo 3 I dug out to try to drive a second monitor), and some hardware's too new for old versions of windows (try installing win2k or older on a new PC).
Wow, is all of the IPv6 internet this much cooler than the regular old, boring IPv4 internet? No one told me IPv6 animates corporate logos! WHY HAVEN'T WE MIGRATED YET?
Human conversational domain might be finite, albeit quite a bit larger than the chess domain. At some point it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between "infinite" and just "very very very large"...
I think it's pretty simple to demonstrate that. Take a language; say, English. Assume a fixed dictionary of something like 5x10^4 words. From that, you can construct 50,000 one-word "discussions". Or (5x10^4)^2 two word conversations. Or (5x10^4)^n n-word conversations. (all of this assumes that you ignore grammatical correctness, neologisms, "verbing" [e.g. "verbing weirds language"], and other perversions of language)
For a fixed dictionary, and a fixed conversation length, the number of possible conversations should be very finite (and easily calculable).
remember being told by various techie fortune tellers that when I grew up GAMES would be completely virtual reality based complete with headsets... My question really is; has has gaming tech progressed any further in this area?
Doing anything interesting requires big, expensive hardware. Having lived in Sillicon Valley for years, I've had the chance to see a couple of groups show off their VR technology.
In the mid/late nineties, Sun had a room they called "Portal" in one of their main buildings. It had projector screens on 3 walls, on which 3d imagery was displayed. The user stood in the middle of the room, with a railing between you and the screens. IIRC, they used the shuttered-glasses 3d technique, which involves wearing glasses that very rapidly alternate between allowing your right and left eye to see; the projected images displayed alternating frames in sync with the shutters.
Moving closer to each of the 3 railings produced "movement" in that direction, which had different effects depending on which demo app was running at the time.
There was probably hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment involved.
NASA AMES has open houses periodically, during which they always like to show off their world-class flight-sim hardware. One of their simulators was recently featured on Mythbusters. They run in the millions of dollars.
The technology is there. It's just too expensive (and big) for home use. Especially the motion tracking and force feedback hardware. The closest thing we have is Wii Sports (which is a huge leap toward in home VR, quite frankly).
On a lightning strike, the circuit might let a 10V transient through which wouldn't harm the old analog tapes at all, but 10V spikes might be enough to glitch or erase modern SSD chips that operate at 3.3V or lower.
Good news: there's more to the electronics hardware than consumer-grade hardware. A little bit of googling turns up press release announcing 50V and 20V chips for industrial applications.
Seems like there's probably already high voltage hardware on the market, if required.
Not only does a $200 PC take up a lot of shelf space for the price, but shipping can't be cheap either. Once you've paid all the costs it takes to get the things on the shelf, keep them there til they sell, and sell them, I can definitely see how there might not be much margin left.
Online, you can keep the things in a warehouse managed by a half dozen people, and get the *customer* to pay the shipping.
Anyone applying for a scientific position who put something like homeopathy, astrology, UFO or werewolf hunting, or new age paganism on their list of hobbies would make me seriously reconsider their application. And yes boys and girls, saying you go to church every Sunday would have the same effect.
I hope you're not in a hiring position in the US, because I'm pretty sure you just admitted to discriminatory hiring practices that are illegal.
In response to your general argument -- every scientist has biases of some sort. The scientist's job is to recognize those biases, and not let them get in the way of their work. Something like UFO hunting does demonstrate an inability to separate fantasy from reality; however, there are a wide variety of reasons that people attend church. There are those who "practice without belief" -- e.g. WP:"Jewish Atheist" -- as well as those who attend for the community aspect. A church is a community of people focused on bettering themselves and each other -- that has value whether you believe in god or not. And there are those who believe, and view science as a way of exploring the universe.
To really assess someone's ability as a scientist, you need know only how (or if) their beliefs will affect their work. As long as you can assess your results without bias, you do science.
This would work so much better if they used some unobtrusive javascript to hide the content. At least then it would require a person to view page source or enable FireBug.
That would violate google's cloaking rules. They'd probably be pulled out of google's index entirely.
I wonder if they decided it simply wasn't worth the development effort to put their content behind encryption?
Encryption isn't even necessary. The file in question is being served by apache 2.0, which supports HTTP basic authentication. It's trivial to configure.
Yes, I know, secure connections are not rocket science. But it's business; the path perceived most profitable is the path chosen.
Sure, but when the options are: set up HTTP basic auth, or pay the lawyers to bully anyone who posts the URL qtv.mobitv.com/sprintTVlive.mcd... is paying the lawyers for a bunch of C&D letters really cheaper than having your admins drop a couple lines in httpd.conf?
The other day I was looking for some bash command help, and the third google result was from http://www.experts-exchange.com./ If you access it directly, it hides the answers and asks you to pay. But from google, you get to the answers directly because of some glitch.
Actually, it's not a glitch. Experts exchange wants to have their cake and eat it too.
They want to show up in google search results, but they want people to pay for the answers. However, for the relevant text to be included in google's index, they have to make it available on the page for everyone -- they're not allowed to show google different content from what you get when you click on the link. That's called "cloaking", and google has cracked down on it hard for a few years.
So, experts exchange formats their page like this: The original question "Pay to see the first answer" "Pay to see the second answer" "Pay to see the third answer" What looks like a giant page footer footer more footer more footer more footer more footer more footer The original question The actual content of the first answer The actual content of the second answer The actual content of the third answer
Here's an example Note the "premium members only" crap at the top, the giant "footer", and the *real* answers at the bottom.
This way, google indexes the real content at the bottom of the page, but most people see the fake content at the top of the page, and the "footer", and give up before scrolling down to the real content at the bottom.
Some chuckle head could just for "100 PC's are cheaper then the mainframe, and they can be clustered!" Then actually try that.(seen it, it's was ugly and we got the VP to trash the project, and the developer was let go.
I mean, hey, it's how everybody does "web-scale computing", but since you've seen it fail once, it must be a terrible idea, right?
With ticket prices growing constantly (A million tickets sold in 1988 = ~$5 million, a million tickets sold today = ~$10 million), and inflation, even an industry seeing 0% actual growth should report "record" gross sales annually. And of course, the size of the movie viewing demographic is likely to shift over time as well.
5.4% growth in gross receipts and "record sales" aren't terribly telling. They do suggest that the industry hasn't been totally gutted by piracy, but it's not inconceivable that you could come back with some statistics showing that piracy does have some real impact. For example, what percentage of 18-25 year old demographic saw movies in the theater in 2007, relative to other years?
Just got to avoid Intel graphics like the plague and you'll be fine.
The intel GPU in my macbook beats the hell out of the mobile Radeon GPUs that most comparably-priced laptops have (at least, as of a year ago -- I'm talking about the X200, etc.). Granted, most intel GPUs are going to be weak, but they're not all bad.
You mean like those blue-tooth headsets people insist on wearing all the time even when they're not talking on them? Ugggggh
It's not hands free if you have to dig into your pocket, find the thing, and shove it in your ear.
If you have a reasonable expectation that you'll receive a call, say, during your drive home, then the safest thing you can do is leave the thing on, even if it makes you look like an extra from a bad sci fi movie.
Now, if you're in a theater, your phone is off, and you're still wearing the earpiece, then yeah, you're a tool.
In all seriousness, I wrote a custom linux/mysql-based POS system for a client over the course of a year, and had to spend some time with cuecats.
If you do any sort of volume at all, do yourself a favor and spring for a real scanner. They start at $60, but you'll make the difference back in increased employee efficiency in no time.
CueCats are great if you want to scan a half dozen things for kicks. If you need to scan hundreds of items a day, a point-and-shoot scanner is a necessity.
The energy require to accelerate a vehicle to a certain speed will be roughly the same, regardless of the source
Only assuming vehicle weight stays constant (it's gone up dramatically since the 80's). Reducing average vehicle weight is going to be a big part of reducing the energy consumed by personal transportation.
I personally have always found the Playstation DualShock design to be one of the most uncomfortable controllers ever conceived... Why the hell is this thing such a popular controller? It feels entirely unnatural.
You have to compare it to its precursors -- the original sony playstation controller blew the existing controllers out of the water, ergonomically.
The NES controller was square. Nothing to wrap your palms around. The SNES controller was a little better -- round, rather than square. But still, there's nothing to wrap your palms around. The Genesis controller was a little closer. The N64 controller finally introduced the concept of handles, but damn was that thing awkward -- what's up with designing a controller with 3 handles? Do they only employ people with 3 arms in Nintendo's R&D department? And it was huge.
The playstation controller followed all of these. It fit well ergonomically, had only two handles instead of 3, was still small, and put all 12 buttons (including dpad) (+2 more for analog) within easy reach.
Compared to its precursors, it was big leap forward.
I won't for a second argue that there haven't been innovations since then, however.
All these pie in the sky projects are simple ways of creating high paying white collar jobs in the home districts of powerful senators.
On the other hand, cutting edge military technology is what allowed us to roll over most of Iraq in a matter of weeks. Had we stopped research during the last major conflict, we'd be going in with 1970's era technology, and American fatalities would have been much higher than the 1000s.
What's more, modern research focuses on reducing civilian casualties. The weapons of yesteryear -- landmines, carpet bombing, napalm -- kill far more innocent civilians than, say, a cruise missile.
Keeping America on the bleeding edge is more than just corporate welfare. It keeps us a superpower. And yes, as you said, it also keeps senators in office, and their constituents rolling in pork.
Of course, the question of whether we *should* spend what it costs to remain a superpower is a difficult one. Lord knows no amount of technology will actually bring lasting stability back to Iraq.
There have always been girls and women in gaming. Gamers have always come in different races and ages and income brackets.
"The King of Kong" (an excellent documentary) mentions Doris Self, a (female) senior citizen who held the world record high score on Q*Bert.
There are always consumers who fall well outside the core demographic for any product. They'll remain largely ignored by major market forces until you can demonstrate that it's economically viable to pursue them.
Because while there are a few hardcore gaming grannies, there's still not that much money to be made by catering to them directly.
P.S.: watch "The King of Kong". Best documentary I've seen in years.
Irritating first line of article... Perhaps Microsoft deserves to take over Yahoo.
Yahoo! News rarely if ever posts anything written by Yahoo! employees. If they do have anyone writing exclusively for Yahoo! News, I've never seen it. In this case, the source is clearly identified by the logo that links to livescience.com and the tag at the top:
Clara Moskowitz LiveScience Staff Writer SPACE.com
So maybe Microsoft "deserves" to take over LiveScience.com...
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.amazon.com/God-Hates-Us-All-Slayer/dp/B00005NV8K/
On neither platform does everything "just work" all the time. The only reason people put up with Window's bullshit is they've come to accept it as the way things are supposed to work. Your favorite game stops working? Reinstall it. That doesn't work? Reinstall windows. Your new game doesn't work? Upgrade your graphics drivers. Download the patch.
Things fail in both environments. You run into driver issues in both -- some hardware's too old for new versions of windows (like my old adaptec SCSI card that works fine in win2k, but doesn't have drivers available in XP or higher; same with an old voodoo 3 I dug out to try to drive a second monitor), and some hardware's too new for old versions of windows (try installing win2k or older on a new PC).
For a fixed dictionary, and a fixed conversation length, the number of possible conversations should be very finite (and easily calculable).
In the mid/late nineties, Sun had a room they called "Portal" in one of their main buildings. It had projector screens on 3 walls, on which 3d imagery was displayed. The user stood in the middle of the room, with a railing between you and the screens. IIRC, they used the shuttered-glasses 3d technique, which involves wearing glasses that very rapidly alternate between allowing your right and left eye to see; the projected images displayed alternating frames in sync with the shutters.
Moving closer to each of the 3 railings produced "movement" in that direction, which had different effects depending on which demo app was running at the time.
There was probably hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment involved.
NASA AMES has open houses periodically, during which they always like to show off their world-class flight-sim hardware. One of their simulators was recently featured on Mythbusters. They run in the millions of dollars.
The technology is there. It's just too expensive (and big) for home use. Especially the motion tracking and force feedback hardware. The closest thing we have is Wii Sports (which is a huge leap toward in home VR, quite frankly).
Seems like there's probably already high voltage hardware on the market, if required.
Not only does a $200 PC take up a lot of shelf space for the price, but shipping can't be cheap either. Once you've paid all the costs it takes to get the things on the shelf, keep them there til they sell, and sell them, I can definitely see how there might not be much margin left.
Online, you can keep the things in a warehouse managed by a half dozen people, and get the *customer* to pay the shipping.
In response to your general argument -- every scientist has biases of some sort. The scientist's job is to recognize those biases, and not let them get in the way of their work. Something like UFO hunting does demonstrate an inability to separate fantasy from reality; however, there are a wide variety of reasons that people attend church. There are those who "practice without belief" -- e.g. WP:"Jewish Atheist" -- as well as those who attend for the community aspect. A church is a community of people focused on bettering themselves and each other -- that has value whether you believe in god or not. And there are those who believe, and view science as a way of exploring the universe.
To really assess someone's ability as a scientist, you need know only how (or if) their beliefs will affect their work. As long as you can assess your results without bias, you do science.
They want to show up in google search results, but they want people to pay for the answers. However, for the relevant text to be included in google's index, they have to make it available on the page for everyone -- they're not allowed to show google different content from what you get when you click on the link. That's called "cloaking", and google has cracked down on it hard for a few years.
So, experts exchange formats their page like this:
The original question
"Pay to see the first answer"
"Pay to see the second answer"
"Pay to see the third answer"
What looks like a giant page footer footer
more footer
more footer
more footer
more footer
more footer
The original question
The actual content of the first answer
The actual content of the second answer
The actual content of the third answer
Here's an example Note the "premium members only" crap at the top, the giant "footer", and the *real* answers at the bottom.
This way, google indexes the real content at the bottom of the page, but most people see the fake content at the top of the page, and the "footer", and give up before scrolling down to the real content at the bottom.
It's kinda scummy.
What do those idiots at google know, anyway?
With ticket prices growing constantly (A million tickets sold in 1988 = ~$5 million, a million tickets sold today = ~$10 million), and inflation, even an industry seeing 0% actual growth should report "record" gross sales annually. And of course, the size of the movie viewing demographic is likely to shift over time as well.
5.4% growth in gross receipts and "record sales" aren't terribly telling. They do suggest that the industry hasn't been totally gutted by piracy, but it's not inconceivable that you could come back with some statistics showing that piracy does have some real impact. For example, what percentage of 18-25 year old demographic saw movies in the theater in 2007, relative to other years?
If you have a reasonable expectation that you'll receive a call, say, during your drive home, then the safest thing you can do is leave the thing on, even if it makes you look like an extra from a bad sci fi movie.
Now, if you're in a theater, your phone is off, and you're still wearing the earpiece, then yeah, you're a tool.
In all seriousness, I wrote a custom linux/mysql-based POS system for a client over the course of a year, and had to spend some time with cuecats.
If you do any sort of volume at all, do yourself a favor and spring for a real scanner. They start at $60, but you'll make the difference back in increased employee efficiency in no time.
CueCats are great if you want to scan a half dozen things for kicks. If you need to scan hundreds of items a day, a point-and-shoot scanner is a necessity.
The IPv4 crunch has been 2 years away for at least 10 years.
By the way, the idea of reallocating parts of Class-A blocks has been technically feasible for over a decade. Say hi to CIDR
She's 7. She'll give up her password for a candy bar, or at the first threat of an Indian burn from an older peer.
The NES controller was square. Nothing to wrap your palms around.
The SNES controller was a little better -- round, rather than square. But still, there's nothing to wrap your palms around.
The Genesis controller was a little closer.
The N64 controller finally introduced the concept of handles, but damn was that thing awkward -- what's up with designing a controller with 3 handles? Do they only employ people with 3 arms in Nintendo's R&D department? And it was huge.
The playstation controller followed all of these. It fit well ergonomically, had only two handles instead of 3, was still small, and put all 12 buttons (including dpad) (+2 more for analog) within easy reach.
Compared to its precursors, it was big leap forward.
I won't for a second argue that there haven't been innovations since then, however.
What's more, modern research focuses on reducing civilian casualties. The weapons of yesteryear -- landmines, carpet bombing, napalm -- kill far more innocent civilians than, say, a cruise missile.
Keeping America on the bleeding edge is more than just corporate welfare. It keeps us a superpower. And yes, as you said, it also keeps senators in office, and their constituents rolling in pork.
Of course, the question of whether we *should* spend what it costs to remain a superpower is a difficult one. Lord knows no amount of technology will actually bring lasting stability back to Iraq.
There are always consumers who fall well outside the core demographic for any product. They'll remain largely ignored by major market forces until you can demonstrate that it's economically viable to pursue them.
Because while there are a few hardcore gaming grannies, there's still not that much money to be made by catering to them directly.
P.S.: watch "The King of Kong". Best documentary I've seen in years.