Ya, well - most external media automounts these days, and you right-click and choose "Eject" or similar to dismount them. Takes all of five seconds to learn.
Burning a CD with k3b looks and feels just like with Nero et al.
It is as easy to wreck NTFS as ext3 by pulling the power. You shouldn't do it in Windows either, whether or not your application crashes.
I don't know how companies tackled the transitions between DOS/Windows before, but Windows and KDE is close enough in look & feel that it would take a rather tech-anxious person to require formal training.
Of course, people love excuses to get paid to sit and drink coffee in a conference chair all day while someone drones "To open a file, click File Open" and such.
It is almost funny how people are fast to grasp for the "I don't want to learn something new" excuse for not having to switch programs, while they can keep themselves busy learning new games and programming languages and whatever in their leisure time. Usually, people PREFER to be subject to new experiences daily.
I suppose I might postulate that reluctance to learn new systems and programs stem more from insecurity about how their work will be affected rather than the level difficulty itself. If I have a task at hand I want to know in advance if I can accomplish it, not run down a chain of events only to come to a grinding halt when I run into uncooperative tools.
Thus, it would be better to tell people "This is just as simple as anything you know, it just looks a tad different. You will have no trouble." than "Oh, this is a whole new paradigm and you need a lot of training! Come sit at this desk and be anxious!" - start with putting people in front of Linux and let them fool around and answer the questions when they come. That's how I learned almost everything I know about computers.
If you need more than ten minutes to get your bearings around KDE/OpenOffice as a former Windows/Office user, you probably shouldn't be in the workforce at all.
Seriously: what is this training?
Learning how to move files by drag 'n drop? Learning how to start a program by navigating the start menu?
Because I can't believe that every user needs to know how to mount a device in the file system, or configure IPchains, or connect to servers manually, or whatever.
Every time I read through the programs of various parties, I find much that I disagree with.
Thus, it is pointless because even though I might agree on some points, there will invariably be showstoppers. A vast heap of vague statements with unknown weight and priority, and a few glaring no-nos. It is easier to count the items I have strong feelings _against_, than everything I am mildly _for_. Chili vs milquetoast.
Thus it is harder to be FOR some party than because I am AGAINST their opposition.
I have to kick myself pretty hard to get out of that mindset every time and actually look up a party that has an ideology that I agree with.
Re:what is up with Elder Scrolls III???
on
Game Breakers
·
· Score: 1
Well, as you instantly considered yourself, there is indeed such a thing as gaining "levels" in real life by obtaining experience and skill, the difference being that we don't get a badge that boasts of our proficiencies (too bad!) and they don't increase uniformly.
You would not send any kid fresh from highschool to negotiate a peace treaty. You would probably wish that the diplomats you were choosing from were having scorecards with skill points though. "John Smith, level 24 Bullshitter".
The thing with the levelling system in games though is that with them I do not have to gain skill as a player, my avatar is getting it instead. I don't swing the sword hoping to find a weak spot on my enemy, I just command my avatar to do it.
And there is a good chance that I want it that way. If I want to micro-manage my avatar, then I can play Unreal Tournament. Different games for different audiences. I'm sure that a game where you would have to guide the spoon into the avatars' mouth to feed them would find happy players, but I personally prefer to consider my game avatar to be somewhat autonomous, only guided by higher powers (me).
Maybe it could be put into a universal "english library" that the decompressor looks into, and the words are put in a 1000x1000 matrix (there are about E+6 words in english)? That could be addressed with only 2x10 bits.
Of course, words can be bent and you need spaces and such, but in average each word should be able to compress into three bytes of data. The whole bible is about 800 000 words, which would mean 2-3 MB of data compressed.
Of course, you might need the "King James' English Decompressor Library", the "New American Standard English..." et cetera.
Also, it would make for some really interesting transcriptions using say a german decompressor library...
That was probably a very fun post if you know what LoD, MoD, Lutzifer, "carding a ticket" and CBI are, and how changing telephone services pertain to the subject.
You carefully position the disc-based media of your choice against the PS3's front-loading drive slot and the magic fairies deep inside suck it up like a particularly enthusiastic four-quid whore.
don't copy because they are cheap bastards, but because they don't have any money.
I have at least half a dozen chronically unemployed friends who all use old laid-off scrapheap computers of mine. They can't come up with $50 to pay their bills, so if they copy some lame game to play on their AthlonXP 1800+ w/ GeForce2, it's not like some game producer was losing a sale.
an adapter for connecting 2.5" laptop harddrives to standard ATA flat cables.
It was a two inch long snip of flat cable with connectors on the ends.
Packaged in a carton a cubic foot big and stuffed with curlies.
I got more like that from that particular on-line-shop, but this was by far the worst example.
The problem is that the patent system tries to cover a wide range of conceptually different areas. Software is different from biogenetics that is different from mechanical devices, which are different from business methods, et cetera.
While some business ventures need to be protected, others don't. In order to create progress, it might be necessary to allow patenting medicine. That does not necessarily apply for kitchen utensils or engine components or network protocols or how to drive nails into wood with a hard weight.
Still, the patent system tries to make a broad sweep and sort all that in the same "If it is valuable, someone can own it" drawer.
Ideally, we should branch the patent system into different varieties. This is already done in the instance of copyright, but we need more such definitions.
Further, patents should generally be EXTREMELY limited in scope, and sparse.
Well, I'd rather blame the whole concept of public limited stock corporations - or whatever the correct term is in the country where you are.
The idea that the ownership should be distributed over a faceless mass who hardly even know they own stock (through investment funds) and even less know or care what their money does - combined with a board of directors that have no personal responsibility for the corporation - is a contemporary societal disease that hopefully the future generations will snort and roll their eyes about, the same way that we do when we hear about slavery, letters of indulgence, child marriage and such tales of past eras.
Future people! I apologize for this era when we burned all the petroleum and created humongous corporations that devoured everything!
You who will live without this fantastic material known as "plastic" and will be born into serfdom and branded with company logotypes in the forehead at birth, know that some of us were sorry!
Well, that problem is not specifically tied to RME but generic for all diesel engines (for which RME is targeted as a replacement to the petroleum based kerosene/naphta fuel used today).
The problem is that diesels generally work with a surplus of air and when you heat air a lot its nitrogen starts to react with the oxygen and you get NO and NO2 which cause smog and cancer and what have you.
NOx is hard to decompose in catalysators so the best remedy is (probably) to see to it that the air/fuel mixture is stoichiometric - that is, balanced such that all air reacts with all fuel. Preferrably in a perfect combustion that leaves only carbon dioxide and water steam for exhaust. This is what Otto cycle (gasoline, ethanol, etc) engines do.
The Diesel cycle is slightly more energy efficient than the Otto cycle, but the emissions are thusly harder to remedy. I'm actually not that sure what diesels DO in order to decrease NOx emissions. ?=/
RME is basically vegetable oil that has reacted with methanol in some kind of way to leave a fluid that behaves very much like diesel fuel. The advantage is that it can be fed to diesel engines with little or no adjustment.
But I suppose it would be smarter to skip the extra step and run diesels on SVO (straight vegetable oil) instead. This requires some modifications though, and SVO varies heavily in composition and quality.
Hydrogen is theoretically the most effective and clean fuel, but practically it is a nightmare.
Forget hydrogen. There is an abundance of alternatives out there already that can utilize the current infrastructure and car fleet with little or no cost, like ethanol and SVO and RME and so on. My personal fav would be hydrogen peroxide, but then again I am just a geek.
Governments and universities and car manufacturers like to speak of big, expensive and complex system changes because
1 - they won't happen. Keeps the oligopoly happy. 2 - they make politicians look smart and progressive. 2 - they require aeons of scientific funding to universities and such. 3 - they require us to purchase a new car from the manufacturers.
Thus, simple infrastructure changes such as using ethanol or RME aren't favoured because they are cheap and simple and only benefit us, the plebs.
I'm a hobby thermodynamist and I am much interested in what happens in combustion engines, but one of the seldom-discussed areas that I'd like to know more about is that of partial throttle operation.
I shall study Atkinson more. Thanks for the heads-up!
More like "We're going to torture the world with a war between proprietary standards because we think we can make more money that way. Bwahaha! Lettem burrrrn!"
No next-gen optical media for me, and that's that!
I recently started taking glucosamine to see if my knee pains would subside.
Not only does it seem to alleviate that problem as advertised, I also feel much better in my wrists!
The last years I have felt aches in my wrists that seem much similar to the descriptions of RSI I have read. My motorbike put a lot of stress on the wrists, and I type away on computers all days long.
Glucosamine is supposed to be one building block of which the body makes cartilege and joint liquid from, and I suppose it might also be beneficial for tendon tunnles.
In fact, I was kind of depressed util recently as I figured I will have to live with chronic sore wrists, but after a few weeks on glucosamine they feel like they used to again.
The car industry must stop showing toys presented as the "environmentally friendly" alternatives. >:[
Actually, there is nothing that stops the building of 500 BHP SUVs using electric motors - today.
Granted, batteries for such a car would be rather big yet they would not last very far given todays technology - but since we're already purchasing cars with pricetags having six digits, then how unfeasible is it to charge such 500 BHP SUVs with fuel cells, really?
All that aside, an Otto or Diesel engine using biofuels, modern engine management and state of the art emission control equipment (catalysators) are already extremely benign on the environment compared to the average car in say the '70s.
I rushed to this section to point out pretty much exactly what you wrote there.
The path to hell is lined with good intentions. Although individuals of an organization might be good people, the direction of the organization is not dictated by this. It's the brain that is responsible for the movement of the body, not the cells. Actually, I find it astonishing to what extent a company rather takes character by its top management.
Apple is kind of stylish, like Steve Jobs. Although I don't know about Bill Gates, Microsoft rather seems to have Aspergers...
Slashdot Mirror
Ya, well - most external media automounts these days, and you right-click and choose "Eject" or similar to dismount them. Takes all of five seconds to learn.
Burning a CD with k3b looks and feels just like with Nero et al.
It is as easy to wreck NTFS as ext3 by pulling the power. You shouldn't do it in Windows either, whether or not your application crashes.
I don't know how companies tackled the transitions between DOS/Windows before, but Windows and KDE is close enough in look & feel that it would take a rather tech-anxious person to require formal training.
Of course, people love excuses to get paid to sit and drink coffee in a conference chair all day while someone drones "To open a file, click File Open" and such.
It is almost funny how people are fast to grasp for the "I don't want to learn something new" excuse for not having to switch programs, while they can keep themselves busy learning new games and programming languages and whatever in their leisure time. Usually, people PREFER to be subject to new experiences daily.
I suppose I might postulate that reluctance to learn new systems and programs stem more from insecurity about how their work will be affected rather than the level difficulty itself. If I have a task at hand I want to know in advance if I can accomplish it, not run down a chain of events only to come to a grinding halt when I run into uncooperative tools.
Thus, it would be better to tell people "This is just as simple as anything you know, it just looks a tad different. You will have no trouble." than "Oh, this is a whole new paradigm and you need a lot of training! Come sit at this desk and be anxious!" - start with putting people in front of Linux and let them fool around and answer the questions when they come. That's how I learned almost everything I know about computers.
If you need more than ten minutes to get your bearings around KDE/OpenOffice as a former Windows/Office user, you probably shouldn't be in the workforce at all.
Seriously: what is this training?
Learning how to move files by drag 'n drop?
Learning how to start a program by navigating the start menu?
Because I can't believe that every user needs to know how to mount a device in the file system, or configure IPchains, or connect to servers manually, or whatever.
Every time I read through the programs of various parties, I find much that I disagree with.
Thus, it is pointless because even though I might agree on some points, there will invariably be showstoppers. A vast heap of vague statements with unknown weight and priority, and a few glaring no-nos. It is easier to count the items I have strong feelings _against_, than everything I am mildly _for_. Chili vs milquetoast.
Thus it is harder to be FOR some party than because I am AGAINST their opposition.
I have to kick myself pretty hard to get out of that mindset every time and actually look up a party that has an ideology that I agree with.
Well, as you instantly considered yourself, there is indeed such a thing as gaining "levels" in real life by obtaining experience and skill, the difference being that we don't get a badge that boasts of our proficiencies (too bad!) and they don't increase uniformly.
You would not send any kid fresh from highschool to negotiate a peace treaty. You would probably wish that the diplomats you were choosing from were having scorecards with skill points though. "John Smith, level 24 Bullshitter".
The thing with the levelling system in games though is that with them I do not have to gain skill as a player, my avatar is getting it instead. I don't swing the sword hoping to find a weak spot on my enemy, I just command my avatar to do it.
And there is a good chance that I want it that way. If I want to micro-manage my avatar, then I can play Unreal Tournament. Different games for different audiences. I'm sure that a game where you would have to guide the spoon into the avatars' mouth to feed them would find happy players, but I personally prefer to consider my game avatar to be somewhat autonomous, only guided by higher powers (me).
what are you going to do about it?
Raving and ranting about 1984 is all good, but what are you going to DO about it?
Well?
PS: Don't blame me, I'm european.
$50, has flashlight.
http://www.nokia.se/phones/1100/
Maybe it could be put into a universal "english library" that the decompressor looks into, and the words are put in a 1000x1000 matrix (there are about E+6 words in english)? That could be addressed with only 2x10 bits.
Of course, words can be bent and you need spaces and such, but in average each word should be able to compress into three bytes of data. The whole bible is about 800 000 words, which would mean 2-3 MB of data compressed.
Of course, you might need the "King James' English Decompressor Library", the "New American Standard English..." et cetera.
Also, it would make for some really interesting transcriptions using say a german decompressor library...
That was probably a very fun post if you know what LoD, MoD, Lutzifer, "carding a ticket" and CBI are, and how changing telephone services pertain to the subject.
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/738/738858p2.html
You carefully position the disc-based media of your choice against the PS3's front-loading drive slot and the magic fairies deep inside suck it up like a particularly enthusiastic four-quid whore.
o_Ô
don't copy because they are cheap bastards, but because they don't have any money. I have at least half a dozen chronically unemployed friends who all use old laid-off scrapheap computers of mine. They can't come up with $50 to pay their bills, so if they copy some lame game to play on their AthlonXP 1800+ w/ GeForce2, it's not like some game producer was losing a sale.
from the oil camp.
Actually, I've been thinking it might be sane to use ocean algae for biofuel production?
Make a bigass SHIFT instead. Move Caps Lock to the Print Screen island, begone the Windows keys and MAKE USE OF BUCKLING SPRINGS AGAIN.
The above typed capitals were all typed with right little finger on the right SHIFT button, as any computer literate should do it.
an adapter for connecting 2.5" laptop harddrives to standard ATA flat cables. It was a two inch long snip of flat cable with connectors on the ends. Packaged in a carton a cubic foot big and stuffed with curlies. I got more like that from that particular on-line-shop, but this was by far the worst example.
The problem is that the patent system tries to cover a wide range of conceptually different areas. Software is different from biogenetics that is different from mechanical devices, which are different from business methods, et cetera. While some business ventures need to be protected, others don't. In order to create progress, it might be necessary to allow patenting medicine. That does not necessarily apply for kitchen utensils or engine components or network protocols or how to drive nails into wood with a hard weight. Still, the patent system tries to make a broad sweep and sort all that in the same "If it is valuable, someone can own it" drawer. Ideally, we should branch the patent system into different varieties. This is already done in the instance of copyright, but we need more such definitions. Further, patents should generally be EXTREMELY limited in scope, and sparse.
Well, I'd rather blame the whole concept of public limited stock corporations - or whatever the correct term is in the country where you are.
The idea that the ownership should be distributed over a faceless mass who hardly even know they own stock (through investment funds) and even less know or care what their money does - combined with a board of directors that have no personal responsibility for the corporation - is a contemporary societal disease that hopefully the future generations will snort and roll their eyes about, the same way that we do when we hear about slavery, letters of indulgence, child marriage and such tales of past eras.
Future people! I apologize for this era when we burned all the petroleum and created humongous corporations that devoured everything!
You who will live without this fantastic material known as "plastic" and will be born into serfdom and branded with company logotypes in the forehead at birth, know that some of us were sorry!
Well, that problem is not specifically tied to RME but generic for all diesel engines (for which RME is targeted as a replacement to the petroleum based kerosene/naphta fuel used today).
The problem is that diesels generally work with a surplus of air and when you heat air a lot its nitrogen starts to react with the oxygen and you get NO and NO2 which cause smog and cancer and what have you.
NOx is hard to decompose in catalysators so the best remedy is (probably) to see to it that the air/fuel mixture is stoichiometric - that is, balanced such that all air reacts with all fuel. Preferrably in a perfect combustion that leaves only carbon dioxide and water steam for exhaust. This is what Otto cycle (gasoline, ethanol, etc) engines do.
The Diesel cycle is slightly more energy efficient than the Otto cycle, but the emissions are thusly harder to remedy. I'm actually not that sure what diesels DO in order to decrease NOx emissions. ?=/
RME is basically vegetable oil that has reacted with methanol in some kind of way to leave a fluid that behaves very much like diesel fuel. The advantage is that it can be fed to diesel engines with little or no adjustment.
But I suppose it would be smarter to skip the extra step and run diesels on SVO (straight vegetable oil) instead. This requires some modifications though, and SVO varies heavily in composition and quality.
Hydrogen is theoretically the most effective and clean fuel, but practically it is a nightmare.
Forget hydrogen. There is an abundance of alternatives out there already that can utilize the current infrastructure and car fleet with little or no cost, like ethanol and SVO and RME and so on. My personal fav would be hydrogen peroxide, but then again I am just a geek.
Governments and universities and car manufacturers like to speak of big, expensive and complex system changes because
1 - they won't happen. Keeps the oligopoly happy.
2 - they make politicians look smart and progressive.
2 - they require aeons of scientific funding to universities and such.
3 - they require us to purchase a new car from the manufacturers.
Thus, simple infrastructure changes such as using ethanol or RME aren't favoured because they are cheap and simple and only benefit us, the plebs.
Most interesting!
I'm a hobby thermodynamist and I am much interested in what happens in combustion engines, but one of the seldom-discussed areas that I'd like to know more about is that of partial throttle operation.
I shall study Atkinson more. Thanks for the heads-up!
"The market will decide the winner", eh?
More like "We're going to torture the world with a war between proprietary standards because we think we can make more money that way. Bwahaha! Lettem burrrrn!"
No next-gen optical media for me, and that's that!
This which you describe sounds basically like what an EGR valve does as well.
The Atkinson cycle might be smarter though, as it requires no expensive and failure-prone EGR valve.
I recently started taking glucosamine to see if my knee pains would subside.
Not only does it seem to alleviate that problem as advertised, I also feel much better in my wrists!
The last years I have felt aches in my wrists that seem much similar to the descriptions of RSI I have read. My motorbike put a lot of stress on the wrists, and I type away on computers all days long.
Glucosamine is supposed to be one building block of which the body makes cartilege and joint liquid from, and I suppose it might also be beneficial for tendon tunnles.
In fact, I was kind of depressed util recently as I figured I will have to live with chronic sore wrists, but after a few weeks on glucosamine they feel like they used to again.
So Try It!
The car industry must stop showing toys presented as the "environmentally friendly" alternatives. >:[
Actually, there is nothing that stops the building of 500 BHP SUVs using electric motors - today.
Granted, batteries for such a car would be rather big yet they would not last very far given todays technology - but since we're already purchasing cars with pricetags having six digits, then how unfeasible is it to charge such 500 BHP SUVs with fuel cells, really?
All that aside, an Otto or Diesel engine using biofuels, modern engine management and state of the art emission control equipment (catalysators) are already extremely benign on the environment compared to the average car in say the '70s.
I rushed to this section to point out pretty much exactly what you wrote there.
The path to hell is lined with good intentions. Although individuals of an organization might be good people, the direction of the organization is not dictated by this. It's the brain that is responsible for the movement of the body, not the cells. Actually, I find it astonishing to what extent a company rather takes character by its top management.
Apple is kind of stylish, like Steve Jobs. Although I don't know about Bill Gates, Microsoft rather seems to have Aspergers...
get cranky and seize operations in Europe to punish us.
Sincerely
A swede
People should be more thoughtful when they name things.
How do you pronounce it?
Will people stare at you with raised eyebrows when you stutter forth an attempt to mention it?
"We should use Post...postgreesc... post-grayscu... Myesscueell"