I was tempted to wonder what pertinence this article has, but then I remembered that this is Slashdot, and our main demographic is the geeky male.
Oh Noes!!!11one1eleventy! HotTeenJezebel69er is going to know that I served a community service sentence for hacking my college server to give myself good grades!!! OmgZ0rZ!
Actually, now that I think about it, who gives a shit? Seriously?
...is pathetically small, for such a layout. I'd have thought that if they were willing to lash out so much cash on such a relatively pointless enterprise (sorry), they'd invest a bit more and get some kind of decent short-throw projector, so you've actually got a screen that's worth looking at...
That's because it's a stupendously amateurish job. I just love the mild irony that a toy that's allowing someone to look closely at a thing, has been advertised with an image that doesn't bear up to the same scrutiny...
Well, while your opinion appears to be balanced and carefully considered (as such, I can't particularly fault it), my main gripes with Vista are from a home-administration point of view. I had to set up a shared internet connection with Windows Vista for a mate of mine. Naturally, I thought 'I know, ICS has been part of Windows since 98 - I can use that to make this job easy.' Could I bollocks. ICS just plain failed to work - I followed every method I could find on the web, the Microsoft website, the Windows help text - none of them would resolve the issue. Yes, OK, the internet connection that I was trying to share out was from some sodding Fisher Price-esque cable modem (Thanks, ntl), which obviously doesn't help one bit. However, ICS actively touts itself as being able to deal with such a connection - check the Microsoft page about it. I ended up using an old Pentium II machine that my friend had scavenged to run Smoothwall, which worked straight off. The only problem that I had with Smoothwall was remembering to set every machine on the network to look at the Smoothwall box for DNS resolution. Other than that, I had precisely no stumbling points at all. I know comparing a dedicated product to an inbuilt utility isn't a fair test, but nonetheless: I found that a part of the OS that was meant to make life easier only made it harder for everyone involved. I wasted a day tweaking settings in Windows Vista before I decided to take the logical route and build a firewall box. I'm seriously glad that I did, and my friend is glad that he can now throttle back his lodger's torrents, too.
Amen to that. I was on antidepressants for what felt like a looooooong time, and I found that they didn't so much monitor when I was getting down, as much as they cut off both the ups and downs. It's kinda like having a signal compressor attached to your mental state. They're weird things, and, to be honest, I don't reckon that their effects are fully known and noted yet. I know that the clinical test have gone though ok, and that they're considered perfectly safe, but safe and sane are two very different things.
For a couple of years after that, I honestly thought that smoking marijuana was what was sorting my depression out: in some people it exacerbates it, and in others it helps level it out entirely. I was by no measure a stoner - if anything, I was a social smoker at most. However, I've come to a different conclusion. I was (and still am, thank God) in a group of friends that I felt safe with. I've always made it a significant point to never use anything that may impair my judgment around people I don't trust or feel secure around: be it alcohol, weed or whatever. It occurred to me that it had more to do with being comfortable in your surroundings that made a helluva difference.
This is the contentious part: I've always observed (in the people I know with mental health problems) that comforting surroundings are key to helping themselves through it all. That's not me saying that people invent mental issues because they don't like the way that life has set them up - I just reckon that you can deal with anything if you're in the right social space to do so in. History has proven that we're social animals - hell, even the word social stems from the concept of society: a grouping or collection of people that function with dynamic interactions.
What I'm trying to say is that people who find themselves having to cope with depression aren't going to be cured by putting an electrode in their brain to keep buzzing them with the right hormone when they're feeling shit, but by allowing them to be in a position where they can elicit it themselves. Depression is not a curable problem. It's gonna be with me for my whole life. However, the fact that I'm now associated with, and attached to people that are worth being around, I can cope with it more effectively. The first instinct is to close yourself off. The instant you've beaten that, you're halfway towards winning.
There are people out there who simply have deficient neural connections to fire out those chemicals. For them, this 'brain pacemaker' is ideal. For those of us who have psychologically-rooted depression issues, I would say that people are going to be of greater use. A big thing that many people cite as a central or main point to their depression is the fact that they don't feel as if they belong, or function. This is a social thing. Depression was far less frequently documented as a state of mind, much less an infirmity historically because people had far more well-defined functions. My personal pet hate with the first world today is that function is being displaced by aesthetic. For example: in the UK (where I live), it is only just becoming appropriately acceptable to be someone that is of a technical bent. This is the dying vestiges of a mindset brought about most notably within the Thatcher era: the technical underclass is subservient to the economic/corporate/managerial class or caste. Ergo, it is not desirable to be one of these greasemonkeys: become a go-getter. I tried to be many things; PR person, Salesman, Teacher, but I realised that I am, through and through, a technical bod. I love to understand why things work, and how they do so. I solved my displacement issues. I still teach, but it is about the things that I know best: computers - their use, their function and their internals. I can still sell such ideas to people: I VJ for a hobby/sideline, and it's a great way of showing that geekery works for people, as opposed to beneath them. My point is that because I found what I was good at, I killed off my sense of not belonging.
Unfortunately, though, it probably won't be. Your average Joe doesn't get the whole problem with the MPAA and RIAA, and will probably continue to not care.
The only people who are likely to care, and actually be able to do anything about it will probably kick off another Operation Sundevil (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil for details). Hackers of any description will be labelled as cyberterrorists, and places like Slashdot are going to be treated like 4chan was in that retarded news report we all saw recently.
Yeah, you can't really cite Deus Ex yet: we're still catching up on the Nanotech plague. Once we've got a 'Gray Goo' scenario a la Eric Drexler, then yes, you'll be able to pull that one.
...but the quote that's at the bottom of this page for me happens to be:
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. -- George Santayana
I'm sure there's an irony in there somewhere...
I've just browsed through the EULA for Windows XP. I can't find that statement anywhere. All that I could find that was even remotely close to that was a bunch of disclaimers stating that Microsoft would not be held responsible for any failings that were a direct result of their software.
Read the EULA. Pay attention to the section regarding life critical application. It clearly states it is not to be used in life support applications. It simply isn't reliable for that. MS is avoiding lawsuits from people depending on Windows for life support by explicitly stating it is not designed, manufactured, or intended for that. What you've quoted is the EULA for Internet Explorer. Quite frankly, anyone that's stupid enough to sign their life away to a notably flaky browser's support for Java applets deserves whatever happens to them. The industry has already proven that IE is, frankly, bollocks; especially when it comes to supporting anything that conforms to a non-Microsoft standard.
Now: how the hell could anyone's life seriously depend on this, I ask? Are there people out there that are actually coding ECG/EEG software in Java that will only run on Internet Explorer? I seriously doubt it.
Don't get me wrong: I don't use Windows anymore, so I have nothing to gain in protecting its reputation, but the parent's statements are misguiding at best, and slanderous at worst.
If anyone wishes to prove me wrong, the XP EULA can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/eula.mspx
Nah... he's just doing the whole Max Clifford thing, basically. He's a shitstirrer, who profits from the storm that he whips up. Once the hassle surrounding the game manufacturer dies down, their sales will have gone up a bit, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Clifford for reference
I'm seriously pleased that I'm not the only one to have noticed this. I'm a sysadmin, and I can safely say that on a quiet day, I don't do anything work-related. On a shit one, I tend to pull in a few extra hours until everything settles down.
Re:Notably absent?
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I find myself wondering why there isn't a "WTF?" moderator tag...
Whether these will have some kind of geek antiquity value in a few years' time?
I don't like the idea of buying an SCO share (That's a whole 44 cents, kids), but how weird would it be to be able to claim that you had your own slice of the demon corp?
Did anyone else notice TFA's mention of Sun's "bang up profits" of $329? Niagara for teh win!
Seriously, though: the processor looks cool and all that, but how many of us are likely to seriously be able to play with one anytime soon? (And if anyone answers with 'I am!', I will happily trade jobs with you for a week)
there are a couple of estimates on the brain's storage capacity: the last one I heard was about 16 terabytes, but that was nearly a decade ago. According to researchers from google answers, somewhere in the range of half a petabyte up to a petabyte. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=52 5801
Well, I had an abnormal experience of ATI/nVidia - I had an nVidia 7300LE (fairly low end, I know) in my 64-bit Ubuntu box (which was also, in an attempt to get a working driver, a Debian, Fedora, Mandrake and even Gentoo box, in various stages). 3D definitely did not 'just work' - the 3D acceleration drivers had this ugly habit of making xorg take 6 and a half minutes to start up. The relevant thread on ubuntuforums can be found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=484455
I'm now running an ATI X600 - it's massively superior, in terms of functionality. The control panel leaves a lot to be desired (the general impression of being in control would be a good start), but it works, and it's acceptable. I do fluxus-based 3D livecoding, which takes a lot out of the graphics card: as such, I need it to be able to cope with some hardcore abuse.
I'm not massively pro-ATI or pro-nVidia: the most functional product will get my money, as far as I'm concerned. I don't really care if it's GPL'ed or not, truth be told. Binary blobs suck, but shit happens. Get over it. Until someone out there can keep up with the graphics card industry in terms of writing decent GPL'ed drivers, I'll happily use the blobs.
While I'm not entirely anti-piracy, at least not when it's levelled against corporations, I'm hoping that this means I can walk down Brick Lane without the normal Chinese DVD touts screaming "You Wan' Dee Wee Dee?!" at me. Wishful thinking, I know, but I can dream.
I used to collect Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, and I played for some time, back when I was about 13. I even went so far as to submit self-designed stats for a legendary character in the Warhammer universe. My submission was answered by one of their designers: a guy named Tuomas Pirinen: not only was he very polite, he was actually quite encouraging about the whole thing, even my rough sketches (which, although not particularly bad, were obviously drawn by an arty teen). I've still got the letter he sent me, somewhere. I found the whole thing to be quite satisfying.
Imagine my amusement when I discovered that he left Games Workshop, to work in IT, because 'IT pays better' - http://everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=871858/
Sorry - did you think that I'd actually RTFA?
I was aiming for a throwaway smartarse comment, not anything insightful. I haven't had nearly enough sleep to be insightful.
Slashdot Mirror
I was tempted to wonder what pertinence this article has, but then I remembered that this is Slashdot, and our main demographic is the geeky male. Oh Noes!!!11one1eleventy! HotTeenJezebel69er is going to know that I served a community service sentence for hacking my college server to give myself good grades!!! OmgZ0rZ!
Actually, now that I think about it, who gives a shit? Seriously?
...is pathetically small, for such a layout. I'd have thought that if they were willing to lash out so much cash on such a relatively pointless enterprise (sorry), they'd invest a bit more and get some kind of decent short-throw projector, so you've actually got a screen that's worth looking at...
That's because it's a stupendously amateurish job. I just love the mild irony that a toy that's allowing someone to look closely at a thing, has been advertised with an image that doesn't bear up to the same scrutiny...
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=530772
You gonna be a bit more polite, now?
Well, while your opinion appears to be balanced and carefully considered (as such, I can't particularly fault it), my main gripes with Vista are from a home-administration point of view.
I had to set up a shared internet connection with Windows Vista for a mate of mine. Naturally, I thought 'I know, ICS has been part of Windows since 98 - I can use that to make this job easy.'
Could I bollocks. ICS just plain failed to work - I followed every method I could find on the web, the Microsoft website, the Windows help text - none of them would resolve the issue. Yes, OK, the internet connection that I was trying to share out was from some sodding Fisher Price-esque cable modem (Thanks, ntl), which obviously doesn't help one bit.
However, ICS actively touts itself as being able to deal with such a connection - check the Microsoft page about it. I ended up using an old Pentium II machine that my friend had scavenged to run Smoothwall, which worked straight off. The only problem that I had with Smoothwall was remembering to set every machine on the network to look at the Smoothwall box for DNS resolution. Other than that, I had precisely no stumbling points at all.
I know comparing a dedicated product to an inbuilt utility isn't a fair test, but nonetheless: I found that a part of the OS that was meant to make life easier only made it harder for everyone involved. I wasted a day tweaking settings in Windows Vista before I decided to take the logical route and build a firewall box. I'm seriously glad that I did, and my friend is glad that he can now throttle back his lodger's torrents, too.
Sorry- that last line was supposed to read as"...time to stop ranting, and go..." - i tried to do a smartarse divtag, and it was having none of it :)
Amen to that. I was on antidepressants for what felt like a looooooong time, and I found that they didn't so much monitor when I was getting down, as much as they cut off both the ups and downs. It's kinda like having a signal compressor attached to your mental state. They're weird things, and, to be honest, I don't reckon that their effects are fully known and noted yet. I know that the clinical test have gone though ok, and that they're considered perfectly safe, but safe and sane are two very different things.
For a couple of years after that, I honestly thought that smoking marijuana was what was sorting my depression out: in some people it exacerbates it, and in others it helps level it out entirely. I was by no measure a stoner - if anything, I was a social smoker at most. However, I've come to a different conclusion. I was (and still am, thank God) in a group of friends that I felt safe with. I've always made it a significant point to never use anything that may impair my judgment around people I don't trust or feel secure around: be it alcohol, weed or whatever. It occurred to me that it had more to do with being comfortable in your surroundings that made a helluva difference.
This is the contentious part: I've always observed (in the people I know with mental health problems) that comforting surroundings are key to helping themselves through it all. That's not me saying that people invent mental issues because they don't like the way that life has set them up - I just reckon that you can deal with anything if you're in the right social space to do so in. History has proven that we're social animals - hell, even the word social stems from the concept of society: a grouping or collection of people that function with dynamic interactions.
What I'm trying to say is that people who find themselves having to cope with depression aren't going to be cured by putting an electrode in their brain to keep buzzing them with the right hormone when they're feeling shit, but by allowing them to be in a position where they can elicit it themselves. Depression is not a curable problem. It's gonna be with me for my whole life. However, the fact that I'm now associated with, and attached to people that are worth being around, I can cope with it more effectively. The first instinct is to close yourself off. The instant you've beaten that, you're halfway towards winning.
There are people out there who simply have deficient neural connections to fire out those chemicals. For them, this 'brain pacemaker' is ideal. For those of us who have psychologically-rooted depression issues, I would say that people are going to be of greater use. A big thing that many people cite as a central or main point to their depression is the fact that they don't feel as if they belong, or function. This is a social thing. Depression was far less frequently documented as a state of mind, much less an infirmity historically because people had far more well-defined functions. My personal pet hate with the first world today is that function is being displaced by aesthetic. For example: in the UK (where I live), it is only just becoming appropriately acceptable to be someone that is of a technical bent. This is the dying vestiges of a mindset brought about most notably within the Thatcher era: the technical underclass is subservient to the economic/corporate/managerial class or caste. Ergo, it is not desirable to be one of these greasemonkeys: become a go-getter. I tried to be many things; PR person, Salesman, Teacher, but I realised that I am, through and through, a technical bod. I love to understand why things work, and how they do so. I solved my displacement issues. I still teach, but it is about the things that I know best: computers - their use, their function and their internals. I can still sell such ideas to people: I VJ for a hobby/sideline, and it's a great way of showing that geekery works for people, as opposed to beneath them. My point is that because I found what I was good at, I killed off my sense of not belonging.
Unfortunately, though, it probably won't be. Your average Joe doesn't get the whole problem with the MPAA and RIAA, and will probably continue to not care.
The only people who are likely to care, and actually be able to do anything about it will probably kick off another Operation Sundevil (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil for details). Hackers of any description will be labelled as cyberterrorists, and places like Slashdot are going to be treated like 4chan was in that retarded news report we all saw recently.
Remember, they're in it for the Lulz.
Yeah, you can't really cite Deus Ex yet: we're still catching up on the Nanotech plague. Once we've got a 'Gray Goo' scenario a la Eric Drexler, then yes, you'll be able to pull that one.
I'm sure there's an irony in there somewhere...
Now: how the hell could anyone's life seriously depend on this, I ask? Are there people out there that are actually coding ECG/EEG software in Java that will only run on Internet Explorer? I seriously doubt it.
Don't get me wrong: I don't use Windows anymore, so I have nothing to gain in protecting its reputation, but the parent's statements are misguiding at best, and slanderous at worst.
If anyone wishes to prove me wrong, the XP EULA can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/eula.mspx
Nah... he's just doing the whole Max Clifford thing, basically. He's a shitstirrer, who profits from the storm that he whips up. Once the hassle surrounding the game manufacturer dies down, their sales will have gone up a bit, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Clifford for reference
I'm seriously pleased that I'm not the only one to have noticed this. I'm a sysadmin, and I can safely say that on a quiet day, I don't do anything work-related. On a shit one, I tend to pull in a few extra hours until everything settles down.
I find myself wondering why there isn't a "WTF?" moderator tag...
Whether these will have some kind of geek antiquity value in a few years' time? I don't like the idea of buying an SCO share (That's a whole 44 cents, kids), but how weird would it be to be able to claim that you had your own slice of the demon corp?
am i alone in finding the levitating frog cooler? or is it just the weed talking again?
Does that mean that we get to call Dell's old daughterboards Dobos? Sounds an awful lot like Doobies. Yay for IT-based spliffage!
You mean, aside from the fact that they make a big fuckoff explosion?
Did anyone else notice TFA's mention of Sun's "bang up profits" of $329? Niagara for teh win! Seriously, though: the processor looks cool and all that, but how many of us are likely to seriously be able to play with one anytime soon? (And if anyone answers with 'I am!', I will happily trade jobs with you for a week)
Careful with your mockery... that dog is one 133t h4xx0r.
there are a couple of estimates on the brain's storage capacity: the last one I heard was about 16 terabytes, but that was nearly a decade ago. According to researchers from google answers, somewhere in the range of half a petabyte up to a petabyte.2 5801
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=5
Well, I had an abnormal experience of ATI/nVidia - I had an nVidia 7300LE (fairly low end, I know) in my 64-bit Ubuntu box (which was also, in an attempt to get a working driver, a Debian, Fedora, Mandrake and even Gentoo box, in various stages). 3D definitely did not 'just work' - the 3D acceleration drivers had this ugly habit of making xorg take 6 and a half minutes to start up. The relevant thread on ubuntuforums can be found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=484455 I'm now running an ATI X600 - it's massively superior, in terms of functionality. The control panel leaves a lot to be desired (the general impression of being in control would be a good start), but it works, and it's acceptable. I do fluxus-based 3D livecoding, which takes a lot out of the graphics card: as such, I need it to be able to cope with some hardcore abuse. I'm not massively pro-ATI or pro-nVidia: the most functional product will get my money, as far as I'm concerned. I don't really care if it's GPL'ed or not, truth be told. Binary blobs suck, but shit happens. Get over it. Until someone out there can keep up with the graphics card industry in terms of writing decent GPL'ed drivers, I'll happily use the blobs.
While I'm not entirely anti-piracy, at least not when it's levelled against corporations, I'm hoping that this means I can walk down Brick Lane without the normal Chinese DVD touts screaming "You Wan' Dee Wee Dee?!" at me. Wishful thinking, I know, but I can dream.
I used to collect Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, and I played for some time, back when I was about 13. I even went so far as to submit self-designed stats for a legendary character in the Warhammer universe. My submission was answered by one of their designers: a guy named Tuomas Pirinen: not only was he very polite, he was actually quite encouraging about the whole thing, even my rough sketches (which, although not particularly bad, were obviously drawn by an arty teen). I've still got the letter he sent me, somewhere. I found the whole thing to be quite satisfying. Imagine my amusement when I discovered that he left Games Workshop, to work in IT, because 'IT pays better' - http://everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=871858/
Sorry - did you think that I'd actually RTFA? I was aiming for a throwaway smartarse comment, not anything insightful. I haven't had nearly enough sleep to be insightful.