Maybe I am paranoid, maybe I think outside the box. Or maybe having what time of day you walk by a particular Bluetooth advert board every day is valuable information to someone. Even if the boards don't share one large database and they each have their own, one could gather the databases and extrapolate your daily path (or more importantly for the paranoid, if your daily path happened to change). Imagine the fun of spoofing bluetooth information. "Sir, a crime was commited here today, and it seems your phone was in the area...care to explain why you said you were at home?"
It may seem harmless that the technology is watching you, but someone is watching the technology too. The feds have already been demanding search databases from the search engines...why wouldn't they demand access to all of this information as well? Letting the marketing companies pay to track all of the 'suspected terrorists' would be a huge win for them.
Brightside...thats the one...I only found it by digging through old debian source repositories...every search elsewhere lead nowhere. Maybe that is fixed now, but that wasn't the case then...in Sawfish all it takes is uncommenting a few lines.
And yes Devil's Pie is the other...so...let me get this straight...yes...Devil's Pie is a terribly intuitive configuration *cough*. I agree that generally I prefer text configs to GUI configs...however I prefer GUI configs to configure GUIs, it just makes more sense.
I will also point out that I never said it was 'hard', I said it was overly complex. Since Sawfish has far better implementations of both edge flipping and window matching, overly complex pretty much kills it. Additionally, I want my WM to manage my windows...I don't want to have to go get a bunch of 3rd party crap to alter the behavior of my WM to add the features I want.
I think that is largley irrelevant. If a company doesn't meet the requirements for EMI, safety, etc then well...that product is illegal in that country. That doesn't make the company liable for selling it, it just means citizens of said country can be arrested and prosecuted for illegally obtaining that equipment and operating it. If I take a Cisco AP and crank up the transmit power and get a big monster antenna do you think the FCC is going to go after Cisco for selling the equipment or come pounding on my door for illegal use?
EDGE FLIPPING AND WINDOW MATCHING!!!
I'm sorry for shouting but I totally agree with you on the Metacity thing. I think Metacity is trash, even outside of the fact that its missing those two key features, I have noticed flipping back and forth between the two, Sawfish has a considerably sharper display, Metacity looks slightly blurred. Every time I have complained about Metacity not being able to do edge flipping and window matching I'm told to go get such and such projects (i forget the names) and that they do that just fine for metacity and its better designed. Uhm...well the window matching one requires overly complex text configurations to do anything, when Sawfish has a nice point and click setup for window matching (to include window information grabbing with a click). And I searched for 3 damned days for the source for the stupid edge flipping thing for Metacity...apparently its a dead project and has vanished. I did manage to find it tucked away on some archive from another distro's sources, but by that time I gave up and just went back to Sawfish.
Learning about hardware is a must for you it seems.
If what you said was even remotley the case you would see the huge datacenters constantly rebooting...and they dont...for good reason. First I will touch on your ram gets filled with crap thing...ram is not a bucket that needs to be washed out...nor is the internet a series of pipes that gets clogged. When a program grabs a chunk of memory to do stuff there may or may not be stuff there...that is irrelevant and expected...that is why you initialize your variables before using them. If your program is grabbing memory that is already in use by another program...well you have problems...and that has nothing to do with hardware or "ram being filled" it has to do with crappy memory management at the software level.
Now for your hardware stuff... Hardware has a limited life, and startup/shutdowns drain the most life from your hardware.
Crappy hardware lesson 1. HP decided to fix some stupid USB bug they would cause a hard reboot during every soft boot on a particular model of laptop. Well this is all well and good except your display only has a limited number of hard boots it can handle before it starts to die...so...HP forced you to do more damage to your display on every boot to fix a shitty usb/bios error in their hardware. Bad juju.
Crappy hardware lesson 2. Physics says that objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion...so guess what you are doing to all the mechanical parts of your harddrives with constant start and stops....stress (this applies more to the datacenter type things that rarely stop spinning at 10-20k rpm rather than things like laptops which will more frequently park drives spinning at 3,600-7,200rpm for the heat/energy savings)
Crappy hardware lesson 3. Physics again...laws of thermodynamics and all that good stuff...things heating up and cooling down causes material stress. So guess what you do to all those electronic parts every time you fire up that cold computer...heat em up quickly...and then shut em down...cool em off quickly. Throw some hot coffee on an iced window some day and see what happens. If you are running decent hardware and cooling then the temp of a running computer is generally not enough to cause itself to fail and causes less damage than constant power up/power down cycles. Bad cooling systems is another problem entirely.
Final lesson. Don't make up some ridiculous crap just to justify your hate for Apple. With your nice "OMG PC SUX" and nerfing your already nerfed mac crap...you kinda let on that either aren't aware, or are just making Apple hate noise...because well...the latest MacBooks run TADA PC hardware.
Even when they were on their own hardware it was still pretty impressive hardware, but now its just an OS.
Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple Fanboy. I don't own a Mac, nor will I because my Dell laptop has roughly the same hardware specs for about 1/2 the price.
SHHH...don't let the cat out of the bag! What will those poor companies like Halliburton and Blackwater Security do without all those lucrative no bid government contracts? TSA!? Think about how many people would be out of work if it wasn't for HomeSec. Its about creating jobs that won't be offshored! I mean really...we onshore those ones...imported workers and all... I almost told the TSA guy to sit in the chair while I screened him because the man barely spoke english.
And some people honestly believe that we are some super high and mighty form of life. Civilized and all that. When you really look at the lowest common denominator of human society it really is quite a pathetic mess. We call ourselves advanced because we can fling our poo with shovels instead of our hands...and we wear clothes to protect from other human shovel flung poo.
Except that some reporters used it to personally identify a 60yr old woman in flordia IIRC. They had her verify that those indeed were her searches and she explained what they were about. So...the concern here is that you CAN be identified by your searches without "personally identifiable information". Now tack that on to "how to murder wife" searches and "how to build bomb" searches and "child pornography" searches, hand it over to the government, and now there is a bit of an issue. You get arrested because a string of child porn searches came from your computer...you should have told your 17yr old daughter to do her english final on child pornography. I think we have established a nice trend of arrest first think...maybe later. God forbid you were searching for anything that could possibly be terrorist related...islam, bombs etc...looks like your thriller novel will never hit the shelves because you have been 'detained for questioning'.
I will be honest, I don't know specifically what all I lost. This is a junk box that I only use for games, and I rarely play games. Most of what I KNOW I lost was data associated with games that I was using to test the 3D when the mobo/vid card decided to choke and send the OS careening into a wall. There may have been other data loss associated with the numerous hard lock reboots (5 to 20 minutes from 0 to lock....24hrs of fighting with it trying to make it stop doing it...you do the math on how many times it locked up). This computer isn't exactly an organized clean install...its just slap game on, rip game off, slap game on, rip game off, shuffle things around to make space for the next game to be slapped on.
ATI killed my entire Insaniquarium tank! All my poor little fishies GONE!
All video games basically boil down to letting steam off. The whole point of Mafia was doing 'crook stuff', GTA is considerably more edgy than that. I'm not saying Rockstar are badguys or they make bad games that shouldn't be allowed to be made. I'm saying that being controversial is worth a great deal of money, and they exploit that quite well. The unfortunate side effect is that it adds fuel to the fire for the antivideo game crowd. I could sit here and make a huge list of video games that play like movies, and games that have easter eggs, and are good games (not that GTA isn't a good game), but none of them involve killing hookers or graphic sex mods. To watch RockStar blame that nonsense on "those evil hackers" like they were just adding bits to the game disc was pathetic.
This really isn't about some puritanical nonsense, they could have just slapped a label on it saying its a little more edgy and been fine, because at that point it is really out of their hands. I thought the outcry about puppet sex in Team America was stupid beyond reason, and actually made me laugh many times harder at the puppet sex scenes once I saw it. So its just a game, no biggie. Fact is its a very edgy game and Rockstar without a doubt publishes very controversial games for the sake of being controversial money making gems. GTA 2 really wasn't any different other than a lack of hookers and the graphics weren't that great. I played GTA2 in multiplayer mode for HOURS because it was great hare krishna crushing, ambulance highjacking, tank stealing, friend killing fun! The best was chasing people onto the subway tracks and watching them fry themselves.
"Its not that bad...really" arguments are nonsense...their games really are that bad for the most part...doesn't make them any less fun...just means they include very questionable content and that parents should be doing their job parenting, not crying for federal parenting assistance. A good parent shouldn't be letting their kids watch R and X rated movies because they aren't paying attention to them just like they shouldn't be letting their kids play video games with very questionable content because they aren't watching.
1. Its about a bully who attacks other bullies. What a friend of mine calls a "Dork Defender"
2. You haven't been out much have you? The vast majority of video game players aren't geeks any more. They are Joe Sixpack buying the latest PlayBox360 Cube 2. Maybe some years ago it was mostly/all geeks...but that is absolutely not the case anymore. Geeks will still dig up ancient games that were still good gameplay although old graphics sounds. The target demographic is the ones who will spend $50 per game on the newest flashwizbang regardless of how bad the gameplay is.
I don't really have a problem with Rockstar games...The last one I played for more than 5 minutes was GTA 2, but regardless of your position on how videogames/movies affect kids, (I think they can absolutely affect kids in the absense of good parenting, but with good parenting a kid should have more sense than to believe a game is real) Rockstar games are done in unbelievably bad taste. They know just like anyone with half a brain for marketing knows...controversy, sex, drugs, etc sell VERY VERY well. I seriously doubt their meetings went "Hey, if we add beating up hookers and drugs we might get a bad reputiation..." It probably went more like "Hey, if we add this Hot Coffee thing...and then deny it when people will undoubtably find it...do you have any idea how much free press we will get?! Do you know how many people that didn't buy the game will rush to get it for this controversy! GENIUS!" Very simple math...price of getting caught...lots of free press and maybe a fine...profit of the action...tons of free press and tons of extra sales. I imagine they did the math and figured out they were more likely to make more money even if they got fined.
Well Ext2 isn't journaling...Ext3 is...but Ext3 is just Ext2 + Journaling so consider that hair split. However, this was not a linux machine, it was a windows box. About 30 seconds to 2 minutes into any application running 3D stuff the system would HARD HARD lock. Not like stop moving...not like it crashed and rebooted...but the screen went crazy colors, system locked up, and soundcard went berzerk. Power cycling was the only fix.
They were no longer offering the nvidia cards with the E1505/E1705 and were already starting to offer the ATI cards instead. I bought mine in that time frame and the drivers for the intel card for modular Xorg 7 worked fine. The kernel drivers didn't work though, so I can see how many would consider it a nightmare trying to get on the newest version of X with latest snapshot.
Whew...I almost bought the X1400 upgrade for mine and just opted against it. My last laptop was an HP with an ATI in it and it was a damned disaster. I swore off ATI for any linux system. The last ATI I bought for a desktop was a damned disaster too...24hrs of fighting with drivers and other nonsense to find out that some quirk between the ATI card and AGP chipset makes it go stupid and I had to go to newest AGP drivers with oldest ATI drivers to make it work at all. This all after MANY MANY crashes and much data loss due to repeated crashing.
Exactly...when I was doing research on my latest laptop purchase it basically came out that all the ATI cards xXXX series wouldn't work right at all,some could do shared memory mode, but their hard memory wouldn't work. All of the laptops I looked at with nvidia cards had another issue that made them worthless in linux, however, i don't remember off the top of my head what it was. I went to multiple stores with linux live CDs trying to boot and test all of the laptop configurations I was interested in and got pretty pathetic results. I ultimately ended with a Dell e1505 with an intel GMA 945 that basically everything works with minimal headache. The only thing I don't know is the SD card slot (kernel seems to see it fine, but I don't have any SD cards to test with), and the modem (presumably a win modem, but I haven't had a need for a modem in a few years so its pretty low on the priorty list).
Ok here is the thing...ATI and nvidia can be a bit of a pain...but on a desktop you buy one or the other and you plug it in and go. Laptops on the other hand your selection is FAR more limited and you have to juggle hardware, and more often than not, something just won't work right or well. This makes the Intel integrated laptops even more attractive now instead of the ATI/nvidia ones. I really hope they go backwards with this to and open their recent chipsets up completely as well.
It still seems like you are assuming that a user presses every key at even intervals. I type my password...PASS
P 100ms
A 110ms
S 90ms
S 40ms (finger is already there right)
You can't encode anything onto that because you adding 10ms to P press is the same result as A press. You can't separate your induced delay from the user induced delay. The only way it works is if you are able to add delay that you can distinguish from typing variance degree of certainty, but so many people type at different speeds and variences it would really be impossible with a single solution. Or if you were adding a large enough delay that it was easily distinguishable, but then you defeat the purpose because it becomes terribly noticable. Even if you get semi accurate numbers to base your 'average' typist on...you have to deal with proper typists, hunt n peck typeists, and the late night one handed typists....oh...and god forbid your typist is missing a finger or something...:)
The only thing SharePoint and other such nonsense packages "solve" is the middle management justification for existance by making themselves look busy and important in their reports to senior management about their integration of interoperable enterprise system management document revision organizational structure buzzword buzzword buzzword buzzword.
With the original point...how the hell canthey possibly say open source is less organized? I mean seriously, every closed source enterprise out there that has a non technical guy holding the checkbook is a hodgepodge of these strange 3rd party nonsense packages.
You forgot to mention the Novell integration stuff...the ActiveX stuff...then there is the whole MS-Java VM vs Sun-Java VM... I assume you have never been to a trade show either...where every vendor is willing to sell you a different "Document Management" system for upwards of $10,000 that really is just a stupid crutch replacement instead of having admins actually MANAGE the file storage and keep users from saving crap all over the network where they don't need to be. I mean...these vendors can't even explain what the hell their products do half the time...I just wander over, ask a few basic technical questions and the market bimbos (I will never understand selling software with sex appeal) are filling my bag with promo junk to make me stop asking questions in front of other potential dupes...er customers. Yeah...the closed source world makes SO much more sense and is SO less complex. But hey...as long as its going strong I can go to trade shows and get bags full of free goodies. The best stuff always came from the vendor that could actually answer my tech questions...they were generally happy to have someone that could speak intelligently with them about their product and thus broke out the expensive promo stuff.:)
Ahh...great...maybe I can expect a call from authorities if Google ever caves. I got one of those stupid ICQ Child Porn spams one day and started googling for reporting agencies. Not that I think it would do much good, but hey...I would rather have reported it and have it do nothing than to not have reported it and have no chance of it doing anything.
In Soviet....err...In America the government watches you! Ahh...how the times have changed...Working on losing the 1st Ammendment and 4th Ammendment in 8 years. As Thomas Jefferson said "The beauty of the 2nd Ammendment is that you don't need it until the government tries to take it away"... I recently had a picture taken of my baby girl at the National Archives with those 3 terribly important documents honestly wondering if they will mean anything or even exist by the time she is old enough to show her kids the picture.
But hey...may just be me being a pessimist...so maybe the spooks won't get up and arms datamining slashdot and seeing my TJ quote and come interrogate me for being a terrorist...just in case...
You know what...I just did some fact checking because it had been a while since I read up on this. The Gravina island with a population of 50...will be connected to the sprawling city Ketchikan population 8,000. The airport runs fewer than 10 commercial flights per day.
All for a bridge that is nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. So for you to be so hung up on "nowhere" as just being a media buzz attack, you maybe should check it out yourself...it really is almost "nowhere" not some growing sprawl that desperately needs this monster bridge. Also the residents of Alaska are actually apparently pretty upset by this and have been rather vocal in their local news and paper how this is unacceptable. This was one of the qoutes I found in articles on the subject.
"How is the bridge going to pay for itself?" asks Susan Walsh, Sallee's wife, who works as a nurse in Ketchikan. She notes that a ferry, which runs every 15 minutes in the summer, already connects Gravina to Ketchikan. "It can get us to the hospital in five minutes. How is this bridge fair to the rest of the country?"
Fine...lets split hairs then. We will call it a small sparsley populated island with a working ferry that doesn't really a bridge nearly as bad as Katrina victims need cleanup, clean water, food, and places to live. "Nowhere" is just considerably shorter and works to describe all the other small cities throughout the US. And as long as you are on this kick about how he is just representing his people...I will point out that my original gripe is that this ass threatened to resign if he didn't get these funds. So if he is representing his people...do we kick Alaska out of the union if he resigns, since he is only representing the will of the people...if we don't get what we want we are leaving.
OJ didn't do it either.
and MJ is completely innocent.
Oh and lets not forget MS isn't exactly being held to any form of punishment even though they were found guilty....
I would trust the real peers of this guy to have a more accurate picture than any government, court, or "jury of peers" because a jury is NEVER really your peers. So axe or not, this is certainly no reason to believe the aunt in question has an axe to grind.
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Maybe I am paranoid, maybe I think outside the box. Or maybe having what time of day you walk by a particular Bluetooth advert board every day is valuable information to someone. Even if the boards don't share one large database and they each have their own, one could gather the databases and extrapolate your daily path (or more importantly for the paranoid, if your daily path happened to change). Imagine the fun of spoofing bluetooth information. "Sir, a crime was commited here today, and it seems your phone was in the area...care to explain why you said you were at home?"
It may seem harmless that the technology is watching you, but someone is watching the technology too. The feds have already been demanding search databases from the search engines...why wouldn't they demand access to all of this information as well? Letting the marketing companies pay to track all of the 'suspected terrorists' would be a huge win for them.
I thought it was funny. :)
Brightside...thats the one...I only found it by digging through old debian source repositories...every search elsewhere lead nowhere. Maybe that is fixed now, but that wasn't the case then...in Sawfish all it takes is uncommenting a few lines.
And yes Devil's Pie is the other...so...let me get this straight...yes...Devil's Pie is a terribly intuitive configuration *cough*. I agree that generally I prefer text configs to GUI configs...however I prefer GUI configs to configure GUIs, it just makes more sense.
I will also point out that I never said it was 'hard', I said it was overly complex. Since Sawfish has far better implementations of both edge flipping and window matching, overly complex pretty much kills it. Additionally, I want my WM to manage my windows...I don't want to have to go get a bunch of 3rd party crap to alter the behavior of my WM to add the features I want.
I think that is largley irrelevant. If a company doesn't meet the requirements for EMI, safety, etc then well...that product is illegal in that country. That doesn't make the company liable for selling it, it just means citizens of said country can be arrested and prosecuted for illegally obtaining that equipment and operating it. If I take a Cisco AP and crank up the transmit power and get a big monster antenna do you think the FCC is going to go after Cisco for selling the equipment or come pounding on my door for illegal use?
EDGE FLIPPING AND WINDOW MATCHING!!! I'm sorry for shouting but I totally agree with you on the Metacity thing. I think Metacity is trash, even outside of the fact that its missing those two key features, I have noticed flipping back and forth between the two, Sawfish has a considerably sharper display, Metacity looks slightly blurred. Every time I have complained about Metacity not being able to do edge flipping and window matching I'm told to go get such and such projects (i forget the names) and that they do that just fine for metacity and its better designed. Uhm...well the window matching one requires overly complex text configurations to do anything, when Sawfish has a nice point and click setup for window matching (to include window information grabbing with a click). And I searched for 3 damned days for the source for the stupid edge flipping thing for Metacity...apparently its a dead project and has vanished. I did manage to find it tucked away on some archive from another distro's sources, but by that time I gave up and just went back to Sawfish.
Learning about hardware is a must for you it seems.
If what you said was even remotley the case you would see the huge datacenters constantly rebooting...and they dont...for good reason. First I will touch on your ram gets filled with crap thing...ram is not a bucket that needs to be washed out...nor is the internet a series of pipes that gets clogged. When a program grabs a chunk of memory to do stuff there may or may not be stuff there...that is irrelevant and expected...that is why you initialize your variables before using them. If your program is grabbing memory that is already in use by another program...well you have problems...and that has nothing to do with hardware or "ram being filled" it has to do with crappy memory management at the software level.
Now for your hardware stuff... Hardware has a limited life, and startup/shutdowns drain the most life from your hardware.
Crappy hardware lesson 1. HP decided to fix some stupid USB bug they would cause a hard reboot during every soft boot on a particular model of laptop. Well this is all well and good except your display only has a limited number of hard boots it can handle before it starts to die...so...HP forced you to do more damage to your display on every boot to fix a shitty usb/bios error in their hardware. Bad juju.
Crappy hardware lesson 2. Physics says that objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion...so guess what you are doing to all the mechanical parts of your harddrives with constant start and stops....stress (this applies more to the datacenter type things that rarely stop spinning at 10-20k rpm rather than things like laptops which will more frequently park drives spinning at 3,600-7,200rpm for the heat/energy savings)
Crappy hardware lesson 3. Physics again...laws of thermodynamics and all that good stuff...things heating up and cooling down causes material stress. So guess what you do to all those electronic parts every time you fire up that cold computer...heat em up quickly...and then shut em down...cool em off quickly. Throw some hot coffee on an iced window some day and see what happens. If you are running decent hardware and cooling then the temp of a running computer is generally not enough to cause itself to fail and causes less damage than constant power up/power down cycles. Bad cooling systems is another problem entirely.
Final lesson. Don't make up some ridiculous crap just to justify your hate for Apple. With your nice "OMG PC SUX" and nerfing your already nerfed mac crap...you kinda let on that either aren't aware, or are just making Apple hate noise...because well...the latest MacBooks run TADA PC hardware. Even when they were on their own hardware it was still pretty impressive hardware, but now its just an OS.
Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple Fanboy. I don't own a Mac, nor will I because my Dell laptop has roughly the same hardware specs for about 1/2 the price.
SHHH...don't let the cat out of the bag! What will those poor companies like Halliburton and Blackwater Security do without all those lucrative no bid government contracts? TSA!? Think about how many people would be out of work if it wasn't for HomeSec. Its about creating jobs that won't be offshored! I mean really...we onshore those ones...imported workers and all... I almost told the TSA guy to sit in the chair while I screened him because the man barely spoke english.
And some people honestly believe that we are some super high and mighty form of life. Civilized and all that. When you really look at the lowest common denominator of human society it really is quite a pathetic mess. We call ourselves advanced because we can fling our poo with shovels instead of our hands...and we wear clothes to protect from other human shovel flung poo.
Except that some reporters used it to personally identify a 60yr old woman in flordia IIRC. They had her verify that those indeed were her searches and she explained what they were about. So...the concern here is that you CAN be identified by your searches without "personally identifiable information". Now tack that on to "how to murder wife" searches and "how to build bomb" searches and "child pornography" searches, hand it over to the government, and now there is a bit of an issue. You get arrested because a string of child porn searches came from your computer...you should have told your 17yr old daughter to do her english final on child pornography. I think we have established a nice trend of arrest first think...maybe later. God forbid you were searching for anything that could possibly be terrorist related...islam, bombs etc...looks like your thriller novel will never hit the shelves because you have been 'detained for questioning'.
I will be honest, I don't know specifically what all I lost. This is a junk box that I only use for games, and I rarely play games. Most of what I KNOW I lost was data associated with games that I was using to test the 3D when the mobo/vid card decided to choke and send the OS careening into a wall. There may have been other data loss associated with the numerous hard lock reboots (5 to 20 minutes from 0 to lock....24hrs of fighting with it trying to make it stop doing it...you do the math on how many times it locked up). This computer isn't exactly an organized clean install...its just slap game on, rip game off, slap game on, rip game off, shuffle things around to make space for the next game to be slapped on.
ATI killed my entire Insaniquarium tank! All my poor little fishies GONE!
All video games basically boil down to letting steam off. The whole point of Mafia was doing 'crook stuff', GTA is considerably more edgy than that. I'm not saying Rockstar are badguys or they make bad games that shouldn't be allowed to be made. I'm saying that being controversial is worth a great deal of money, and they exploit that quite well. The unfortunate side effect is that it adds fuel to the fire for the antivideo game crowd. I could sit here and make a huge list of video games that play like movies, and games that have easter eggs, and are good games (not that GTA isn't a good game), but none of them involve killing hookers or graphic sex mods. To watch RockStar blame that nonsense on "those evil hackers" like they were just adding bits to the game disc was pathetic.
This really isn't about some puritanical nonsense, they could have just slapped a label on it saying its a little more edgy and been fine, because at that point it is really out of their hands. I thought the outcry about puppet sex in Team America was stupid beyond reason, and actually made me laugh many times harder at the puppet sex scenes once I saw it. So its just a game, no biggie. Fact is its a very edgy game and Rockstar without a doubt publishes very controversial games for the sake of being controversial money making gems. GTA 2 really wasn't any different other than a lack of hookers and the graphics weren't that great. I played GTA2 in multiplayer mode for HOURS because it was great hare krishna crushing, ambulance highjacking, tank stealing, friend killing fun! The best was chasing people onto the subway tracks and watching them fry themselves.
"Its not that bad...really" arguments are nonsense...their games really are that bad for the most part...doesn't make them any less fun...just means they include very questionable content and that parents should be doing their job parenting, not crying for federal parenting assistance. A good parent shouldn't be letting their kids watch R and X rated movies because they aren't paying attention to them just like they shouldn't be letting their kids play video games with very questionable content because they aren't watching.
1. Its about a bully who attacks other bullies. What a friend of mine calls a "Dork Defender"
2. You haven't been out much have you? The vast majority of video game players aren't geeks any more. They are Joe Sixpack buying the latest PlayBox360 Cube 2. Maybe some years ago it was mostly/all geeks...but that is absolutely not the case anymore. Geeks will still dig up ancient games that were still good gameplay although old graphics sounds. The target demographic is the ones who will spend $50 per game on the newest flashwizbang regardless of how bad the gameplay is.
I don't really have a problem with Rockstar games...The last one I played for more than 5 minutes was GTA 2, but regardless of your position on how videogames/movies affect kids, (I think they can absolutely affect kids in the absense of good parenting, but with good parenting a kid should have more sense than to believe a game is real) Rockstar games are done in unbelievably bad taste. They know just like anyone with half a brain for marketing knows...controversy, sex, drugs, etc sell VERY VERY well. I seriously doubt their meetings went "Hey, if we add beating up hookers and drugs we might get a bad reputiation..." It probably went more like "Hey, if we add this Hot Coffee thing...and then deny it when people will undoubtably find it...do you have any idea how much free press we will get?! Do you know how many people that didn't buy the game will rush to get it for this controversy! GENIUS!" Very simple math...price of getting caught...lots of free press and maybe a fine...profit of the action...tons of free press and tons of extra sales. I imagine they did the math and figured out they were more likely to make more money even if they got fined.
Well Ext2 isn't journaling...Ext3 is...but Ext3 is just Ext2 + Journaling so consider that hair split. However, this was not a linux machine, it was a windows box. About 30 seconds to 2 minutes into any application running 3D stuff the system would HARD HARD lock. Not like stop moving...not like it crashed and rebooted...but the screen went crazy colors, system locked up, and soundcard went berzerk. Power cycling was the only fix.
They were no longer offering the nvidia cards with the E1505/E1705 and were already starting to offer the ATI cards instead. I bought mine in that time frame and the drivers for the intel card for modular Xorg 7 worked fine. The kernel drivers didn't work though, so I can see how many would consider it a nightmare trying to get on the newest version of X with latest snapshot.
Whew...I almost bought the X1400 upgrade for mine and just opted against it. My last laptop was an HP with an ATI in it and it was a damned disaster. I swore off ATI for any linux system. The last ATI I bought for a desktop was a damned disaster too...24hrs of fighting with drivers and other nonsense to find out that some quirk between the ATI card and AGP chipset makes it go stupid and I had to go to newest AGP drivers with oldest ATI drivers to make it work at all. This all after MANY MANY crashes and much data loss due to repeated crashing.
Exactly...when I was doing research on my latest laptop purchase it basically came out that all the ATI cards xXXX series wouldn't work right at all,some could do shared memory mode, but their hard memory wouldn't work. All of the laptops I looked at with nvidia cards had another issue that made them worthless in linux, however, i don't remember off the top of my head what it was. I went to multiple stores with linux live CDs trying to boot and test all of the laptop configurations I was interested in and got pretty pathetic results. I ultimately ended with a Dell e1505 with an intel GMA 945 that basically everything works with minimal headache. The only thing I don't know is the SD card slot (kernel seems to see it fine, but I don't have any SD cards to test with), and the modem (presumably a win modem, but I haven't had a need for a modem in a few years so its pretty low on the priorty list).
Ok here is the thing...ATI and nvidia can be a bit of a pain...but on a desktop you buy one or the other and you plug it in and go. Laptops on the other hand your selection is FAR more limited and you have to juggle hardware, and more often than not, something just won't work right or well. This makes the Intel integrated laptops even more attractive now instead of the ATI/nvidia ones. I really hope they go backwards with this to and open their recent chipsets up completely as well.
It still seems like you are assuming that a user presses every key at even intervals. I type my password...PASS :)
P 100ms
A 110ms
S 90ms
S 40ms
(finger is already there right) You can't encode anything onto that because you adding 10ms to P press is the same result as A press. You can't separate your induced delay from the user induced delay. The only way it works is if you are able to add delay that you can distinguish from typing variance degree of certainty, but so many people type at different speeds and variences it would really be impossible with a single solution. Or if you were adding a large enough delay that it was easily distinguishable, but then you defeat the purpose because it becomes terribly noticable. Even if you get semi accurate numbers to base your 'average' typist on...you have to deal with proper typists, hunt n peck typeists, and the late night one handed typists....oh...and god forbid your typist is missing a finger or something...
The only thing SharePoint and other such nonsense packages "solve" is the middle management justification for existance by making themselves look busy and important in their reports to senior management about their integration of interoperable enterprise system management document revision organizational structure buzzword buzzword buzzword buzzword.
With the original point...how the hell canthey possibly say open source is less organized? I mean seriously, every closed source enterprise out there that has a non technical guy holding the checkbook is a hodgepodge of these strange 3rd party nonsense packages.
You forgot to mention the Novell integration stuff...the ActiveX stuff...then there is the whole MS-Java VM vs Sun-Java VM... I assume you have never been to a trade show either...where every vendor is willing to sell you a different "Document Management" system for upwards of $10,000 that really is just a stupid crutch replacement instead of having admins actually MANAGE the file storage and keep users from saving crap all over the network where they don't need to be. I mean...these vendors can't even explain what the hell their products do half the time...I just wander over, ask a few basic technical questions and the market bimbos (I will never understand selling software with sex appeal) are filling my bag with promo junk to make me stop asking questions in front of other potential dupes...er customers. Yeah...the closed source world makes SO much more sense and is SO less complex. But hey...as long as its going strong I can go to trade shows and get bags full of free goodies. The best stuff always came from the vendor that could actually answer my tech questions...they were generally happy to have someone that could speak intelligently with them about their product and thus broke out the expensive promo stuff. :)
I don't get it either. I was actually hoping for some +funny, but hey...I like gallows humor :)
Ahh...great...maybe I can expect a call from authorities if Google ever caves. I got one of those stupid ICQ Child Porn spams one day and started googling for reporting agencies. Not that I think it would do much good, but hey...I would rather have reported it and have it do nothing than to not have reported it and have no chance of it doing anything.
In Soviet....err...In America the government watches you! Ahh...how the times have changed...Working on losing the 1st Ammendment and 4th Ammendment in 8 years. As Thomas Jefferson said "The beauty of the 2nd Ammendment is that you don't need it until the government tries to take it away"... I recently had a picture taken of my baby girl at the National Archives with those 3 terribly important documents honestly wondering if they will mean anything or even exist by the time she is old enough to show her kids the picture.
But hey...may just be me being a pessimist...so maybe the spooks won't get up and arms datamining slashdot and seeing my TJ quote and come interrogate me for being a terrorist...just in case...
Last post!
You know what...I just did some fact checking because it had been a while since I read up on this. The Gravina island with a population of 50...will be connected to the sprawling city Ketchikan population 8,000. The airport runs fewer than 10 commercial flights per day. All for a bridge that is nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. So for you to be so hung up on "nowhere" as just being a media buzz attack, you maybe should check it out yourself...it really is almost "nowhere" not some growing sprawl that desperately needs this monster bridge. Also the residents of Alaska are actually apparently pretty upset by this and have been rather vocal in their local news and paper how this is unacceptable. This was one of the qoutes I found in articles on the subject.
"How is the bridge going to pay for itself?" asks Susan Walsh, Sallee's wife, who works as a nurse in Ketchikan. She notes that a ferry, which runs every 15 minutes in the summer, already connects Gravina to Ketchikan. "It can get us to the hospital in five minutes. How is this bridge fair to the rest of the country?"
Fine...lets split hairs then. We will call it a small sparsley populated island with a working ferry that doesn't really a bridge nearly as bad as Katrina victims need cleanup, clean water, food, and places to live. "Nowhere" is just considerably shorter and works to describe all the other small cities throughout the US. And as long as you are on this kick about how he is just representing his people...I will point out that my original gripe is that this ass threatened to resign if he didn't get these funds. So if he is representing his people...do we kick Alaska out of the union if he resigns, since he is only representing the will of the people...if we don't get what we want we are leaving.
OJ didn't do it either.
and MJ is completely innocent.
Oh and lets not forget MS isn't exactly being held to any form of punishment even though they were found guilty....
I would trust the real peers of this guy to have a more accurate picture than any government, court, or "jury of peers" because a jury is NEVER really your peers. So axe or not, this is certainly no reason to believe the aunt in question has an axe to grind.