Come on. Get over yourself. Cops, laywers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, military people... these walks of life deal with human misery, pain and suffering every day.
Are you saying that because other people can do it then the he/she should too? If so I can't help but ask who are you to tell someone what they can and cannot do? This is known as "minimization" and can be a very ineffective, not to mention damaging, way to communicate with someone.
If you're so worried about offending your sunny disposition maybe you should join a convent.
Can you sense the hostility?
Listen, in any field if you can't take enjoyment out of what you're doing then (a) you should change your profession, or (b) realize if you can't do (a) you're in the same boat with about 80% of the rest of the population.
That 80% of the population you claim has the same capability to make choices about their life that the other 20% do. People choose what they do for their own reasons, not for yours or mine.
but you have to keep plugging away.
*YOU* might have to keep plugging away but the OP doesn't. That's for him/her to decide. Besides that, 80% of statistics are made up 20% of the time.
You make some good points but I sense a lot of underlying hostility in your comments that, if I saw in myself (and, believe me I have) would eventually force me to take an inventory about where I am in life.
The OP asked a very good question and you have seemingly interpreted it as him griping about his job. Maybe that is the subtext that spawned the question but it is not how the question is presented.
A treadmill will provide the aerobic workout required to get the body pushing the calories out. It also stays in your home and, as an added benefit, you can jury-rig it to a generator to recharge your laptop so you can use those calories burned to power your slashdot habit.
As someone who is now in the process of recovering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder this, literally, scares the shit out of me.
It is simply stunning that someone can think this is a good idea. Fear is one of the strongest and most primal of all human emotions. Use of such a weapon (if it can even be developed) would be considered flat-out torture in my book. Anyone that has lived through the hell that is PTSD where your in a constant and uncontrollable state of fear would probably agree.
I think it's safe to say that such a weapon would inflict some sort of trauma on the victims. Research suggests that 25% of the population will suffer from PTSD when exposed to a traumatic event (sorry I can't recall where I read this so it could be BS). A weapon that has the potential to leave 25% of victims exposed to this sort of delayed hell is incredibly irresponsible. PTSD can lie latent for many, many years (in my case it's been nearly my whole life).
Just to reiterate, this is a really fucking terrible idea. Don't fuck with fear...
Furthermore, scared people do some crazy shit. This is a very good and very powerful survival mechanism.
I have never been into MMOs. I just didn't get them. However, in the last week things have changed and it's due, in part, to this bug.
You see, until this bug happened EVE was totally off my RADAR screen. When I read about the bug on/. last week I went to the companies website and found myself intrigued. Further discovery that they didn't charge $50 for the box on top of the monthly fee was also appealing. Further, I see client software for Macs and Linux. Intrigued I download the Mac client and create the trial account. Two days later I'm hooked and sending them my CC #.
If it hadn't been for this bug, I probably would have never bought their product! They say that any publicity is good publicity and I think this is true. Sure the SNAFU was pretty bad yet the product was still compelling enough to buy it despite a pretty bad QA miss. This latest response from the company will only help further get their name out there and is truly an opportunity to make lemonade from lemons.
This may mean that the attacker needs insider access to the party operating the trusted software integrity protection or code signing process. Isn't this a bit like saying that door locks are insecure although you may need access to a party trusted with the keys in order to exploit? Aren't these "trusted parties" *always* a potential weak-link in the security chain?
Why on Earth would/. be posting this on the main page? What does this really have to do with Geekdom?
I know that Slashdot doesn't have a neutral editorial staff (as evidenced from the various Linux vs. Windows debates that pop up every few hours around here) but, up until now, all political content had some sort of tech issue embedded within. I'm not sure how I'm going to like a/. that posts such politically charged articles where some technically-themed topic is at hand. For news like this I would rather stick with CNN.com.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it really cheapens the Slashdot brand in a way that stands a high-risk of alienating the core visitors (the bread and butter).
Normally I would just sit here and stew about it quietly but this disturbs me greatly and, frankly, I have some karma to burn.
Perhaps Bush taught them a few too many unwholesome lessons of corruption? The FBI was unwholesomely corrupt long before either Bush became president. Bush might actively promote and allow corruption to happen, but to imply that Bush is responsible for corruption in the FBI is laughable. Bush might be as corrupt (or even more) than Nixon but, if anything, the FBI taught Bush lessons in unwholesome corruption. After all, they have been at it a LOT longer than Bush has!
afaik there's no built-in support for MP3 in the various mail programs (and if there is, that's at best a reason NOT to use a certain mail client). I disagree. Apple Mail supports inline media attachments supporting everything Quicktime does. I find the mp3 an excellent way to attach voicemail to email and use it all the time. if a particular mail client doesn't support inline mp3s, to me this is a reason *NOT* to use it! It's very nice to manage voicemail with the exact same tools as email.
Who boots a laptop? Lots of people... My wife for one. She has been a Mac user for years (since long before OS X). At one time she was told that computers needed to be shut down when not in use because it's better for the computer. She also wants to conserve power and sleep mode still consumes power (even if this amount is minuscule it does add up).
I'm very familiar with Riverside and Fantasy. They had some good artists and some good performances but the production and, in general, the performance standards from these labels are quite poor. In fact, I would say that Riverside and Fantasy were nothing more than what K-Tel records was when I was growing-up; simply a way to mass produce poorly produced crap to the masses. Sure Riverside had some great acts like Wes Montgomery but the production values plain suck; just like the old K-Tel cassette I had that sounded like a bad bootleg. (For those that don't remember, K-tel was a record label that produced mostly garbage mix tapes of popular artists and was sold through K-Mart for dirt cheap back in the 70s and 80s.)
I appreciate the advice but I know my tastes. There is a reason that >80% of the jazz CDs I have come from either Blue Note or Columbia. They produce the gems from the eras I tend to study (hard bop).
Wouldn't it be a huge statement if a band, say singed to Capitol Records, that doesn't agree with it's companies practices of suing its customers, stepped-up and offered to pay this (plus whatever it takes to cover the applicable taxes). It would be better still if it was a band that produced some of the music the defendant was found liable for sharing.
I buy a lot of CDs. I've also downloaded a few things but in no proportion to what I buy. This thing has left a bad taste in my mouth for a long time now. I was convinced that the courts would see these strong-arm tactics for what they were--extortion--and act accordingly. I really anticipated a fuilty verdict with damages set for something like $1 to send a message to the RIAA. This did not happen. Now I have to wonder how on earth I'm going to continue to aquire a good collection of classic jazz without sponsoring this cartel.
Jazz is an important art form that has been best documented and controlled by this cartel. With copyrights looking more and more like they will be extended to a holder for eternity this puts music historians in a bad situation when it comes to properly documenting 20th Century musical development.
All my guitars hold tuning pretty well. In fact, any well-maintained guitar with a quality bridge and tuners should hold it's tuning. If not, something is wrong. Sure, fresh strings will stretch a bit but they stabilize within a day or two at the most. This gimmick just doesn't appeal to me. After 20+ years of playing, tuning is a non-issue. You just do it and move on; it only takes a minute and it helps tune your ears as much as the instrument.
The technology here looks cool but I'm not sure how useful it will really be to those who can justify what a guitar with this feature will cost. This feature will be most coveted by beginners and it will be hard to justify the price when competing against a $99 chinese-made Strat rip-off. Besides, when first begining I feel the ear needs to learn to hear the intonation of the instrument. This is a critical part of learning a new instrument. Tuning teaches the ear to listen for intonation. Once one develops enough, tuning is no longer an obstacle and becomes a critical and integral part of warming up.
It reduces energy usage (better for the environment) Really? There have been studies that show the effect on energy use is negligible if it even exists at all. Some evidence suggests that the recent change in the US might have even caused an increase in gasoline consumption.
Delaying the nominal time of sunrise and sunset increases the use of artificial light in the morning and reduces it in the evening. As Franklin's 1784 satire pointed out, energy is conserved if the evening reduction outweighs the morning increase, which can happen if more people need evening light than morning. However, statistically significant evidence for any such effect has proved elusive. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation (DOT) concluded in 1975 that DST might reduce the country's electricity usage by 1% during March and April,[4] but the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) reviewed the DOT study in 1976 and found no significant energy savings.[5] In 2000 when parts of Australia began DST in late winter, overall electricity consumption did not decrease, but the morning peak load and prices increased.[6] In North America, there is no clear evidence that electricity will be saved by the extra DST introduced in 2007,[19] and though one utility did report a decrease in March 2007, five others did not.[20] DST may increase gasoline consumption: U.S. gasoline demand grew an extra 1% during the newly introduced DST in March 2007[21].
DST is a major pain in the ass. If it did truly conserve energy then it would be worth the pain to me. However, until solid evidence is found (and it really should be obvious by now), I say it needs to be abolished.
The real news in this article is that, according to Michael Robertson, iTunes is selling EMI's catalog as MP3 files. Here, all this time, I thought it was an 256k AAC file.
He stated this fallacy twice. Perhaps the real problem is that he isn't keeping accurate tabs on the competition! (Though, in his defense, his other reasons are all pretty sound as well.)
"Dark fiber" is a term I've always heard used to describe a private fiber line. Because these necessarily run alongside of the telco's lines, they are considered "dark" by the telcos.
So, please, TEST your ads on a shitbox average computer before you force them on us!
And, whatever you might think is an average machine, divide it by at least two. Every large corporation I have worked for have been incredibly stingy with the hardware they issue. My last gig at IBM gave me a 7-year old laptop that I had to upgrade with my own RAM and hard disk to make it remotely usable (4 GB hard disk and 128 MB of RAM barly ran when it was new let alone last year). I fought tooth and nail to get that thing upgraded which they finally did the week I gave my notice.
My point is that companies are usually pretty cheap and will try to pawn off the shittiest hardware you can imagine on employees not realizing that the money they think they are saving is lost 10+ times over in lost productivity.
It probably would cost to much to bother reporting on...
Because when you run a multi-million dollar data center, you clearly can't afford install a few-hundred dollar device in each customer's rack especially if it's a major part of how you bill your customer.
Look, the power companies do exactly what the parent poster suggests. Imagine if power companies charged a flat rate each month based on the square footage of your house. There would no incentive (unless your a save-the-planet hippie type which isn't a bad thing) to turn up the setting on the air conditioner (or turn it off all together), keep incandescent lights running 24/7 along with the giant plasma TV. This is essentially how data centers operate today. There is no motivation to have energy efficient servers unless you're the one that owns the data center and pays the power bill. Today the best a data center owner can do is invest in more efficient cooling systems and that's about it.
According to TFA, the same team announced, last week, some breakthrough with an invisibility cloak. This week they make another spectacular claim regarding levitation (granted on a very small scale). Either this team is having an incredible run and some serious intellectual luck or they are totally full of shit. Given the history of such claims, my money is on the latter.
Maybe next week they will announce they have discovered cold fusion.
I hate to be such a skeptic but these claims seem to lack truthiness according to my gut. Your gut may differ. Either way, I'd take these claims with a very fine grain of salt.
Just because "[ `echo $RANDOM%100|bc` -eq 0 ] && killall -9 init" will cause no harm in 99 of 100 cases...
Not to be too picky (well.. okay... I'm being anal but this is/. and lots of people here are just like this), but, strictly speaking, you could run your script 5000 times and it is possible that init will not be killed.
What you meant was that each time the script is run there is a small chance (1 out of 101, not 100 as you imply) that it will kill init. What you said is that if you run your script 100 times, it will kill init on one of those 100 occasions which simply is not true. In fact, it's possible (highly, highly improbable but possible nonetheless), to execute this 5 billion times and never once meet the condition that causes init to be killed. It's also possible to throw a coin 5 billion times and have it land on heads each time. Because a coin has two sides doesn't mean that two throws will yield one heads and one tails, it simply means that each throw has a 50/50 shot at either side (though I believe it's not really exactly 50/50 but it's pretty close).
Slashdot Mirror
wtf is an 'e-sport?'
WiiSports?
I'd say that would qualify. But, yeah, eEverything is a bit annoying.
But @Nezer don't do /.ers the insult of going Freudtastic on us you simpering wuss.
Says the AC.
Come on. Get over yourself. Cops, laywers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, military people... these walks of life deal with human misery, pain and suffering every day.
Are you saying that because other people can do it then the he/she should too? If so I can't help but ask who are you to tell someone what they can and cannot do? This is known as "minimization" and can be a very ineffective, not to mention damaging, way to communicate with someone.
If you're so worried about offending your sunny disposition maybe you should join a convent.
Can you sense the hostility?
Listen, in any field if you can't take enjoyment out of what you're doing then (a) you should change your profession, or (b) realize if you can't do (a) you're in the same boat with about 80% of the rest of the population.
That 80% of the population you claim has the same capability to make choices about their life that the other 20% do. People choose what they do for their own reasons, not for yours or mine.
but you have to keep plugging away.
*YOU* might have to keep plugging away but the OP doesn't. That's for him/her to decide. Besides that, 80% of statistics are made up 20% of the time.
You make some good points but I sense a lot of underlying hostility in your comments that, if I saw in myself (and, believe me I have) would eventually force me to take an inventory about where I am in life.
The OP asked a very good question and you have seemingly interpreted it as him griping about his job. Maybe that is the subtext that spawned the question but it is not how the question is presented.
A treadmill will provide the aerobic workout required to get the body pushing the calories out. It also stays in your home and, as an added benefit, you can jury-rig it to a generator to recharge your laptop so you can use those calories burned to power your slashdot habit.
Web 3.0??? WTF?!1!!!?
Enough already!!!!
As someone who is now in the process of recovering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder this, literally, scares the shit out of me.
It is simply stunning that someone can think this is a good idea. Fear is one of the strongest and most primal of all human emotions. Use of such a weapon (if it can even be developed) would be considered flat-out torture in my book. Anyone that has lived through the hell that is PTSD where your in a constant and uncontrollable state of fear would probably agree.
I think it's safe to say that such a weapon would inflict some sort of trauma on the victims. Research suggests that 25% of the population will suffer from PTSD when exposed to a traumatic event (sorry I can't recall where I read this so it could be BS). A weapon that has the potential to leave 25% of victims exposed to this sort of delayed hell is incredibly irresponsible. PTSD can lie latent for many, many years (in my case it's been nearly my whole life).
Just to reiterate, this is a really fucking terrible idea. Don't fuck with fear...
Furthermore, scared people do some crazy shit. This is a very good and very powerful survival mechanism.
I have never been into MMOs. I just didn't get them. However, in the last week things have changed and it's due, in part, to this bug.
/. last week I went to the companies website and found myself intrigued. Further discovery that they didn't charge $50 for the box on top of the monthly fee was also appealing. Further, I see client software for Macs and Linux. Intrigued I download the Mac client and create the trial account. Two days later I'm hooked and sending them my CC #.
You see, until this bug happened EVE was totally off my RADAR screen. When I read about the bug on
If it hadn't been for this bug, I probably would have never bought their product! They say that any publicity is good publicity and I think this is true. Sure the SNAFU was pretty bad yet the product was still compelling enough to buy it despite a pretty bad QA miss. This latest response from the company will only help further get their name out there and is truly an opportunity to make lemonade from lemons.
Why on Earth would /. be posting this on the main page? What does this really have to do with Geekdom?
/. that posts such politically charged articles where some technically-themed topic is at hand. For news like this I would rather stick with CNN.com.
I know that Slashdot doesn't have a neutral editorial staff (as evidenced from the various Linux vs. Windows debates that pop up every few hours around here) but, up until now, all political content had some sort of tech issue embedded within. I'm not sure how I'm going to like a
I guess what I'm trying to say is it really cheapens the Slashdot brand in a way that stands a high-risk of alienating the core visitors (the bread and butter).
Normally I would just sit here and stew about it quietly but this disturbs me greatly and, frankly, I have some karma to burn.
I'm very familiar with Riverside and Fantasy. They had some good artists and some good performances but the production and, in general, the performance standards from these labels are quite poor. In fact, I would say that Riverside and Fantasy were nothing more than what K-Tel records was when I was growing-up; simply a way to mass produce poorly produced crap to the masses. Sure Riverside had some great acts like Wes Montgomery but the production values plain suck; just like the old K-Tel cassette I had that sounded like a bad bootleg. (For those that don't remember, K-tel was a record label that produced mostly garbage mix tapes of popular artists and was sold through K-Mart for dirt cheap back in the 70s and 80s.)
I appreciate the advice but I know my tastes. There is a reason that >80% of the jazz CDs I have come from either Blue Note or Columbia. They produce the gems from the eras I tend to study (hard bop).
Wouldn't it be a huge statement if a band, say singed to Capitol Records, that doesn't agree with it's companies practices of suing its customers, stepped-up and offered to pay this (plus whatever it takes to cover the applicable taxes). It would be better still if it was a band that produced some of the music the defendant was found liable for sharing.
I buy a lot of CDs. I've also downloaded a few things but in no proportion to what I buy. This thing has left a bad taste in my mouth for a long time now. I was convinced that the courts would see these strong-arm tactics for what they were--extortion--and act accordingly. I really anticipated a fuilty verdict with damages set for something like $1 to send a message to the RIAA. This did not happen. Now I have to wonder how on earth I'm going to continue to aquire a good collection of classic jazz without sponsoring this cartel.
Jazz is an important art form that has been best documented and controlled by this cartel. With copyrights looking more and more like they will be extended to a holder for eternity this puts music historians in a bad situation when it comes to properly documenting 20th Century musical development.
All my guitars hold tuning pretty well. In fact, any well-maintained guitar with a quality bridge and tuners should hold it's tuning. If not, something is wrong. Sure, fresh strings will stretch a bit but they stabilize within a day or two at the most. This gimmick just doesn't appeal to me. After 20+ years of playing, tuning is a non-issue. You just do it and move on; it only takes a minute and it helps tune your ears as much as the instrument.
The technology here looks cool but I'm not sure how useful it will really be to those who can justify what a guitar with this feature will cost. This feature will be most coveted by beginners and it will be hard to justify the price when competing against a $99 chinese-made Strat rip-off. Besides, when first begining I feel the ear needs to learn to hear the intonation of the instrument. This is a critical part of learning a new instrument. Tuning teaches the ear to listen for intonation. Once one develops enough, tuning is no longer an obstacle and becomes a critical and integral part of warming up.
It should be noted that the Joint Quantum Institute does *entirely different* research than the Quantum Joint Institute located in Amsterdam.
Here is a quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time on the subject:
DST is a major pain in the ass. If it did truly conserve energy then it would be worth the pain to me. However, until solid evidence is found (and it really should be obvious by now), I say it needs to be abolished.
The real news in this article is that, according to Michael Robertson, iTunes is selling EMI's catalog as MP3 files. Here, all this time, I thought it was an 256k AAC file.
He stated this fallacy twice. Perhaps the real problem is that he isn't keeping accurate tabs on the competition! (Though, in his defense, his other reasons are all pretty sound as well.)
Live and learn.
"Dark fiber" is a term I've always heard used to describe a private fiber line. Because these necessarily run alongside of the telco's lines, they are considered "dark" by the telcos.
And, whatever you might think is an average machine, divide it by at least two. Every large corporation I have worked for have been incredibly stingy with the hardware they issue. My last gig at IBM gave me a 7-year old laptop that I had to upgrade with my own RAM and hard disk to make it remotely usable (4 GB hard disk and 128 MB of RAM barly ran when it was new let alone last year). I fought tooth and nail to get that thing upgraded which they finally did the week I gave my notice.
My point is that companies are usually pretty cheap and will try to pawn off the shittiest hardware you can imagine on employees not realizing that the money they think they are saving is lost 10+ times over in lost productivity.
About three articles down from this story, on the main page, this story is mentioned with a bunch of other patent news for the day.
At least this dupe is buried under the "read more" link and not as blatant as past dupes.
Because when you run a multi-million dollar data center, you clearly can't afford install a few-hundred dollar device in each customer's rack especially if it's a major part of how you bill your customer.
Look, the power companies do exactly what the parent poster suggests. Imagine if power companies charged a flat rate each month based on the square footage of your house. There would no incentive (unless your a save-the-planet hippie type which isn't a bad thing) to turn up the setting on the air conditioner (or turn it off all together), keep incandescent lights running 24/7 along with the giant plasma TV. This is essentially how data centers operate today. There is no motivation to have energy efficient servers unless you're the one that owns the data center and pays the power bill. Today the best a data center owner can do is invest in more efficient cooling systems and that's about it.
Which Madonna?
According to TFA, the same team announced, last week, some breakthrough with an invisibility cloak. This week they make another spectacular claim regarding levitation (granted on a very small scale). Either this team is having an incredible run and some serious intellectual luck or they are totally full of shit. Given the history of such claims, my money is on the latter.
Maybe next week they will announce they have discovered cold fusion.
I hate to be such a skeptic but these claims seem to lack truthiness according to my gut. Your gut may differ. Either way, I'd take these claims with a very fine grain of salt.
Not to be too picky (well.. okay... I'm being anal but this is
What you meant was that each time the script is run there is a small chance (1 out of 101, not 100 as you imply) that it will kill init. What you said is that if you run your script 100 times, it will kill init on one of those 100 occasions which simply is not true. In fact, it's possible (highly, highly improbable but possible nonetheless), to execute this 5 billion times and never once meet the condition that causes init to be killed. It's also possible to throw a coin 5 billion times and have it land on heads each time. Because a coin has two sides doesn't mean that two throws will yield one heads and one tails, it simply means that each throw has a 50/50 shot at either side (though I believe it's not really exactly 50/50 but it's pretty close).
Otherwise, your point is well taken.