I'd mod you up if I could. But I wanted to elaborate on a couple things too:
Building the machine yourself to -save money- is not worth it at this point, imho. However, there are still a number of advantages to building you own:
1) Its valuable in terms of learning (or keeping up to date) how to spec and build PCs.
2) As you said, by controlling the selection of parts you can extend the useful life of the machine, and the re-usability of those components. Note that any decent small systems builder will do the actual assembly of the PC to your specs so that you can still benefit by taking control of the spec without having to actually turn a screwdriver.
3) Additionally controlling the selection of parts will ensure you avoid some of the utter garbage parts that the brand names put into their PCs --especially at the entry level price point. I still have nightmares about the combination PCI network and video card I found in a compaq once. And I recently replaced a fried AGP vid card out of a Dell. Nevermind a fan, this geforce series card didn't even merit a heat sink -- it fried to shave what? 25 cents off manufacturing? Dell's excuse? Its a home computer... it shouldn't be on very long at a time!
4) If you are dealing with windows you get an actual honest to god installation CD for the OS with a custom built unit.
5) If you aren't dealing with windows you can avoid the microsoft tax applied to brand name units.
One friend described the show as the iPod cover show. In fact the entire show should have just been called iPodWorld:(
vs
"This is Mac-world," Jobs said in emphasizing that Tuesday would be about Mac hardware and software and not at all about the music player that's had such a vital role in bolstering Apple's fortunes. And so it was that the iPod, usually at the center of any Apple news event, went through the day without a single update or new release.
I can imagine a whole new specialty of "litigation robot optimization" where engineers, knowledgable about the internal operation of competing robots, find creative ways to enhance the results of their own robot.
Rather than knowledgeable engineers I suspect we'll see a cadre of semi-morons charging outrageous sums of money to add keywords to lawsuits to boost relevance or perhaps set up entire networks of dummy lawsuits to try and distort case outcomes...at least until the alogithms get updated.
I predict they'll be called "Sympathetic End-result Optimizers" so that they won't have to get new business cards.
Has anyone got their invites to the gJustice (beta) yet?
While I agree that gift cards are less personal and meaningful as gifts than actual items, they are more personal and meaningful then cash.
Gift cards strike a reasonable balance between: I wanted to get you something but don't know what you like. (perhaps because I don't see you very often, and don't know you well enough, or perhaps simply don't know what you already have.) I admit I would be a little disappointed if a close family member got me a gift card to a cd store; but I would be quite appreciative of it if an aunt or uncle I didn't see very often had done this for me.
Gift cards also fill in the gap for timed/consumable goods. You can use them to give the gift of Restaurants, Movie/Event Tickets, Spa Services, etc. A gift card beats cash because will help ensure the intended gift is actually redeemed instead of going to pay the electric bill or groceries which is always a risk with cash.
Gift cards also provide a way to give the gift of "shopping". Some people -like- going on shopping trips, almost as much, or even more than they like the hard goods they purchase. For example a husband might who gives his wife a 'gift card' to the mall as part of a commitment to accompany her on a shopping trip. The commitment to spend time spent together at a mall trying on clothes, might be more meaningful and appreciated than any weak attempt at buying her the shirt that she ultimately buys would have accomplished.
Gift cards to walmart on the other hand... those just offend me.:)
In fact a huge number of us already do this with Remote Desktop in XP, or VNC anywhere, or Timbuktu on Win/Mac.. etc
Plus its arguably more secure than having the files on a laptop that might be stolen next time you turn around. I'd generally rely on the the security of an encrypted vpn session and the fact that only keystrokes and images are being sent accross the wire over the potential for a laptop to be stolen and the files accessed.
New cellphone devices have wireless internet access, and terminal clients available to them... the future is now... well.. yesterday; because these have around for a couple years now.
It would be cheaper (and faster) to ditch your current RAM DIMMs, upgrade to some fat >1G chips, and set up a RAM drive.
You might want to rethink that because it won't work:
1) Most editions of Windows only support 4GB of RAM in TOTAL. Including XP Pro, Server 2000 and Server 2003. The 95/98/ME line only supports 1GB of RAM. Its going to be pretty hard to dedicate 4GBs of RAM to a software RAM drive if that's all (or more) than your OS will recognize. (Only Enterprise editions of Windows servers will address more than 4GBs.) How many linux distros support more than 4GB of RAM right now "out of the box (ie from the live cd/dvds or precompiled isos)
2) Most desktop MOTHERBOARDS don't even support >1GB chips or more than 4GB total RAM, including 'gamer' oriented boards like the ASUS A8N32-SLI, for example. You aren't going to have a 4GB RAM drive if you can't put more than 4GBs onto the motherboard. Generally only expensive server boards support more than 4GBs.
The i-RAM lets you build a 4GB RAM Drive today, and add it onto your system *without* sacrificing any system RAM, without installing a new OS, without getting a new mobo. Plus you can max out your system RAM, and then add an i-RAM on top of that!
Anandtech kept saying they couldn't see why you'd use an i-RAM over adding more memory; and they are right... except that maxxing out your system RAM is actually pretty easy; and what do you do THEN? What if you've already got 4GBs of RAM and photoshop is still paging on you? You CAN'T just throw more system RAM at it. i-RAM technology could be a solution.
Finally, another major difference between an i-ram and a software ram drive is that you can't install and boot an OS from a RAM drive.
(PS I am not affiliated with gigabyte or i-ram in anyway.)
That would depend entirely on how good "your average" is, now wouldn't it.;)
I agree for most players being 1% off is probably going to just slow your progress slightly that day.
Then again, if you're doing something challenging, it just takes one bonehead error, or even just a touch of bad luck to wipe out several hours worth of progress. If your grouped or raiding, it doesn't even have to be YOU. One person having a bad day in a 30 person raid guild can blow it for everyone.
This makes it hard for casuals to group or raid outside of dull tedious boring easy content.
The 'hard core players' don't want them along as they may be 'liabilities', and if you throw 30 casuals for a raid, or even 6 for a group together the odds that you'll end up with a total screwup next to you is pretty high.
Uh... you follow the mmorpg crowd better than most, and yet aren't aware of, oh... what's it called... Evercrack...er Evercamp...
Everquest
IF you haven't heard of Everquest (EQ) you don't follow the mmorpg scene, period. And yes, its a MMORPG where you can easily de-level on a bad day, and its been like that since inception in 99.
Over the years they've made recovering lost XP much easier and more accessible, but even today its still quite easy to lose your level on a bad day.
Death in Dark Ages of Camelot (DAoC also costs you xp. You can't actually de-level, but you *can* end up behind where you started within the level on a given day.
Admittedly EQ is no longer the most popular mmorpg by a long shot, but until recently it was the 900lb gorilla of mmorpgs...at least in the western world. And DAoC is also pretty mainstream...these are not 'fringe' titles.
Heh. It probably wasn't a good idea to pick on the gamecube there. Lots of good exclusives is probably the gamecube's biggest selling point. Even if you have a ps2 or xbox, picking up a cube just for its exclusives isn't a bad idea.
Nintendo 1st party exclusives (read: stuff published by Nintendo for Nintendo) tend to be above average quality games. For starters there is the ubiquitous Mario franchise -- and most of the various Mario games are well made and fun to play. From Mario Party 7 to Mario Golf to Wario World...
They also have a variety of excellent non-Mario exclusives including titles like:
Eternal Darkness Pikman / Pikman 2 Zelda Windwaker Metroid Prime / Prime 2 F-Zero GX Zelda Twilight Princess (coming soon... completely different art direction from Windwaker)... Did they release Ikaruga for PS2/Xbox? (Friggen amazing quasi-retro scrolling shooter.)
To sum up: If *all* you like is first person shooters or think the pinnacle of gaming is racing your pimp-mobile into hookers and cops then the 'cube exclusives probably won't do much for you, but for gamers who like more variety of gameplay the 'cube exclusives are quite a treat.
IMO that mess is the sort of nonsense that only makes things worse in the long run.
For starters; its not a hack its a BUNCH of hacks all dangled together that only works if you put it all in just the right order and test it with just the right browsers, while praying in a cemetary with a dead cat. Throw something else at it, something new at it and who knows what will happen, or even what should happen.
I'm sick of reading CSS that says the same thing 5 different ways, each mangling the syntax and semantics 'just-so' to get something read by one browser then ignored by another, and then fixed back up again for a 3rd that manages to parse the previous 'wrong' directive but actually handles the feature correctly... of course we have to mangle it just so that yet another browser ignores it...
Thank god there are only only a few mainstream browsing engines... we'd spend years doing the combinatorial regression testing for each time we modify a line of css if we had many more.
And god forbid one of the browser engines gets patched, fixing a bug or adding a feature that causes them to parse the 'wrong' CSS directives.
For myself, I simply don't mix width and padding on the same element. I usually double box when I need that feature. Its a little heavier in terms of code, but it doesn't rely on a dogs breakfast of browser parsing errors and voodoo magic to look right. And unlike you I can rest assured that if it doesn't look right in the "next browser engine" its not a batch of conflicting mangled CSS directives causing it.
Even dynamically loading separate CSS sheets for different browsers is better than your hackfest, a default w3c standard one, and one(s) to work around specific bugs in specific browsers that you want to support. Then later, you can easily drop support for these hopefully then-obsolete browsers.
PS -- If you want ***strict***, why wouldn't you specify a strict doctype instead of a transitional one??
Prepaid VISA. To a merchant its the same thing as regular VISA. To you its the same thing as cash; ie you can get one with no credit whatsoever because its prepaid.
Nor can I easily pay my cell phone bill with cash.
Why not, I can pay my cell bill online from my banks website. Don't need credit for that. I suppose I could also use a prepaid VISA if I felt like it.
That being said, I can't think of the last time that I used the local console for anything other then network settings. I do most of my work via TS.
Uh... The GUI component in terminal services *is* running on the server. Your desktop, windows, running programs, all of it... are still on the server. Its just being rendered to a virtual screen that's being piped over to you via RDP.
In other words, using TS is *equivalent* to sitting at the console, as far this conversation is concerned.
If Blackberry's major market was offering non-techie CEOs an easy to use device, I guess it works fine.
That's EXACTLY who the market is, was, and will be. The number of non-techie types out there is astronomical. The market is huge. From CEOs, CFOs, Lawyers, and Politicians to Grandmothers...
Yet as common PC users become power users, I'd guess they'll outgrow the device and want more power and expandability (and customizable user interface)
Uh... WTF!!! Seriously! Most common PC users don't become power users. They don't outgrow the device and want more power and expandibility. They just want simpler, faster, and more reliable. Would you honestly say with a straight face that the transition from DOS to Windows 95 to Windows XP represents "common PC users becoming power users demanding more power and expandability"?
I'd say something more along the lines that it represents a gradual LESSENING of the end users actual required skill set through simpler ui. Sure many actual features have been added... support for pictures, video, 3D, etc... but at the same time the users didn't become more sophisticated or smarter, the machines just got faster and simpler so that the "common pc user" could deal with the new functionality and at the same time, actually know LESS about his device than ever.
Do many users here use their Blackberry and like it? I've been using PDAs since before the original Newton, and this device is just hokey. I feel like I have a trophy wife that looks nice but doesn't actually do anything. What am I missing?
You aren't the target market. And not many on slashdot really are. Talking about the blackberry device here is like trying to sell a minivan into a club full of muscle car enthusiast/mechanics.
The minivan is good car for joe average who just wants to get from point a to b reliably and on time while transporting his 2 kids, dog, and a tent... but it will never thrill a guy who wants to spend his weekends tearing down and rebuilding his engine to eke out another horse or three. Two different worlds. The minivan driver isn't likely to ever become a "power-user" and suddenly want to do custom engine work, and the gearheads are never going to be satisfied driving a vehicle with virtually no outlet to satisfy their urge for aftermarket parts, and performance tweaking.
There is a reason people here say "Yeah, but does it run linux...." when presented with a new gadget, and there is also a reason the average person not on slashdot couldn't care less. Guess which world *you* belong to?:)
While I agree things do get tricky with infinity; I disagree with your conclusion that they will be in there too.
As the random string grows to infinity the probability of any particular finite string being found within the random one grows to 100%.
However the probability of a particular infinitely long string being found does not.
You'll have to forgive my rusty mathematics...
Let R be a single infinitely long string of random numbers. Let R[i] be the ith character of R. And the interval R[i..j] a finite substring of R, and R[i..infinity] an infinitely long substring beginning at R[i] (lets shorthand this as R[i*]).
Clearly there are infintely many infinite substrings within R, but that infinity is countable; in other words: it is true that for any infinitely long substring in R, there exists some integer x, s.t. R[x*] will identify it.
Lets also define L as the set of all infinitely long strings.
The question: is L a subset of R[i*]?
The answer is no. Although they are both infinite, |L| > |R[i*]|
The cardinality of L is greater than R[i*], L is uncountably infinite while R[i*] is countably infinite therefore L can't be a subset of R[i*].
I loosely demonstrated the countability of R[i*] by showing how you could enumerate them. I think its pretty clear that R[i*] is a countable infinity.
Proving the set of infinitely long strings is uncountable is also fairly easy, and can be done with Cantor's diagonal method.
That is (in breif): Asserting that they are countable, enumerating them (based on the assumption that they are countable), and then constructing a string that isn't in the enumeration by traversing the enumeration on the diagonal. Since the construction isn't in the set you have a contradiction and can conclude that the set isn't countable.
(for more info see see Diagonal Method
I could be mistaken, and my math is rusty... but I think I'm on solid ground.
Right. So they'll buy the 1.99 song and be 'cool'.
On the other hand if the song cost.99, they'd still have another dollar burning a hole in their pocket and could have bought another one.
Kids, for all their disposable income, aren't exactly rich... you double the price of songs they'll just buy half as many.
Its actually worse than that, kids who found they could afford to get pretty much all that they really wanted @.99 per song, will now find that they can only get half of what they want, decide that's not enough and fire up the p2p software again... and at that point they will have little incentive to purchase even the half that they could afford.
English: "We applaud the creation of your new constitution and are preparing to pull our troops out of the country so that the rebuilding process can begin."
Arabic: "All your base are belong to us."
Wow, this is the most advanced translater built. Unlike most which simply try direct literal translations, this one can actually parse the intent of what Bush actually meant when he said that!
It probably depends on the level of dependancy on 'advanced' features of MS Office... most companies I think have much less dependancy than they might think.
For us, we simply phased OO in. 100% of the desktops had OO installed. 98% had Office uninstalled.
Sure we could have left existing Office installs intact indefinately, but by standardizing we ensured that internally everyone was on the same version of OO. (getting rid of the myriad of various office version conflicts and also ensuring there wasn't any silliness where users with Office refused to use OO and users with OO felt like second class citizens or some other nonsense.
For all internal documents we use OO. People adapted pretty quick. A few of our internal documents had issues, We cleaned them up, and there hasn't been an issue in months.
We do get significant inbound correspondance in Excel/Word and even PP, but these are simple documents that OO handles flawlessly. And even if there were the odd formatting hiccup it wouldn't matter, we're not 'publishing' them, just getting information from them. (Purchase Orders, reports, etc).
For outbound correspondance where we might want to send someone a word or excel document... we just don't... we settled on PDF a long time ago. Our pdf requirements are simple and easily met by free pdf creation software (ie not Acrobat). We do not require our customers have proprietary software. This has worked very well for us.
Very occasionally we *are* required to deal with a large complex MS office file from a customer that OO just chokes on. No biggie, we have a couple units with MS Office on them, for just that purpose. So we only need 2 licenses of MS Office vs 150. Most of the use they see is for 'powerpoint' crap that vendors will send as 'training materials'... we just blast these through one of the "MS office" stations into pdf and distribute the pdf version. (Alternatively we could install the free powerpoint viewer from MS, but I don't see an advantage to that.
Overall, for us, stability (by getting rid of the multiple versions of MS Office) has actually improved.
Occasionally
It seems you've also had some sort of US co-dependancy bred into you too -- in fact you sound more like an American shill snuck into Canada than a Canadian. Or maybe a Canadian brainwashed by American television.
I *agree* with the UN taking control over DNS. Its an international entitiy, so it should be handled by the international community. Its just that simple.
It shouldn't be under American control nor Chinese nor Iranian nor French nor German nor Australian nor Canadian.
Its everybodies responsibility; the UN is the closest thing we've got to an organization that fits. It doesn't really even MATTER if the UN doesn't do as good a job as the US did.
US control is undemocratic. If Kansas unilaterally decided that it should be the sole authority for DNS and dictate allocation for the rest of the states the other states would DEMAND inclusion and proper representation in the process. Whether or not Kansas was doing a bang up job and handing it over to a federal beauracracy would create new problems wouldn't matter in the slightest.
This is no different, except on an international instead of interstate scale. The US is but one state, dictating to the rest of them, for no good reason; except inertia.
Every American knows damned well that if ICANN happened to have been founded in ANY other country America would be all over supporting this internationalisation movement.
Its ridiculous.
Its not surprising though. America struggles with the idea that its own citizens ought be treated equal and fairly... its probably far too much for their government to even consider non-Americans as people at all. We've seen ample evidence of it in recent events.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd mod you up if I could. But I wanted to elaborate on a couple things too:
Building the machine yourself to -save money- is not worth it at this point, imho. However, there are still a number of advantages to building you own:
1) Its valuable in terms of learning (or keeping up to date) how to spec and build PCs.
2) As you said, by controlling the selection of parts you can extend the useful life of the machine, and the re-usability of those components. Note that any decent small systems builder will do the actual assembly of the PC to your specs so that you can still benefit by taking control of the spec without having to actually turn a screwdriver.
3) Additionally controlling the selection of parts will ensure you avoid some of the utter garbage parts that the brand names put into their PCs --especially at the entry level price point. I still have nightmares about the combination PCI network and video card I found in a compaq once. And I recently replaced a fried AGP vid card out of a Dell. Nevermind a fan, this geforce series card didn't even merit a heat sink -- it fried to shave what? 25 cents off manufacturing? Dell's excuse? Its a home computer... it shouldn't be on very long at a time!
4) If you are dealing with windows you get an actual honest to god installation CD for the OS with a custom built unit.
5) If you aren't dealing with windows you can avoid the microsoft tax applied to brand name units.
One friend described the show as the iPod cover show. In fact the entire show should have just been called iPodWorld :(
vs
"This is Mac-world," Jobs said in emphasizing that Tuesday would be about Mac hardware and software and not at all about the music player that's had such a vital role in bolstering Apple's fortunes. And so it was that the iPod, usually at the center of any Apple news event, went through the day without a single update or new release.
MacWorld Article
Hrmmm... one of you is lying.
5 LoC to the Hogshead? My head can't even hold 1 LoC... and I thought I was on the the 'good side' of the IQ curve ...
I guess its time to Welcome our New Hog Overlords!
I can imagine a whole new specialty of "litigation robot optimization" where engineers, knowledgable about the internal operation of competing robots, find creative ways to enhance the results of their own robot.
Rather than knowledgeable engineers I suspect we'll see a cadre of semi-morons charging outrageous sums of money to add keywords to lawsuits to boost relevance or perhaps set up entire networks of dummy lawsuits to try and distort case outcomes...at least until the alogithms get updated.
I predict they'll be called "Sympathetic End-result Optimizers" so that they won't have to get new business cards.
Has anyone got their invites to the gJustice (beta) yet?
While I agree that gift cards are less personal and meaningful as gifts than actual items, they are more personal and meaningful then cash.
:)
Gift cards strike a reasonable balance between: I wanted to get you something but don't know what you like. (perhaps because I don't see you very often, and don't know you well enough, or perhaps simply don't know what you already have.) I admit I would be a little disappointed if a close family member got me a gift card to a cd store; but I would be quite appreciative of it if an aunt or uncle I didn't see very often had done this for me.
Gift cards also fill in the gap for timed/consumable goods. You can use them to give the gift of Restaurants, Movie/Event Tickets, Spa Services, etc. A gift card beats cash because will help ensure the intended gift is actually redeemed instead of going to pay the electric bill or groceries which is always a risk with cash.
Gift cards also provide a way to give the gift of "shopping". Some people -like- going on shopping trips, almost as much, or even more than they like the hard goods they purchase. For example a husband might who gives his wife a 'gift card' to the mall as part of a commitment to accompany her on a shopping trip. The commitment to spend time spent together at a mall trying on clothes, might be more meaningful and appreciated than any weak attempt at buying her the shirt that she ultimately buys would have accomplished.
Gift cards to walmart on the other hand... those just offend me.
In fact a huge number of us already do this with Remote Desktop in XP, or VNC anywhere, or Timbuktu on Win/Mac .. etc
Plus its arguably more secure than having the files on a laptop that might be stolen next time you turn around. I'd generally rely on the the security of an encrypted vpn session and the fact that only keystrokes and images are being sent accross the wire over the potential for a laptop to be stolen and the files accessed.
New cellphone devices have wireless internet access, and terminal clients available to them... the future is now... well.. yesterday; because these have around for a couple years now.
It would be cheaper (and faster) to ditch your current RAM DIMMs, upgrade to some fat >1G chips, and set up a RAM drive.
You might want to rethink that because it won't work:
1) Most editions of Windows only support 4GB of RAM in TOTAL. Including XP Pro, Server 2000 and Server 2003. The 95/98/ME line only supports 1GB of RAM. Its going to be pretty hard to dedicate 4GBs of RAM to a software RAM drive if that's all (or more) than your OS will recognize. (Only Enterprise editions of Windows servers will address more than 4GBs.) How many linux distros support more than 4GB of RAM right now "out of the box (ie from the live cd/dvds or precompiled isos)
2) Most desktop MOTHERBOARDS don't even support >1GB chips or more than 4GB total RAM, including 'gamer' oriented boards like the ASUS A8N32-SLI, for example. You aren't going to have a 4GB RAM drive if you can't put more than 4GBs onto the motherboard. Generally only expensive server boards support more than 4GBs.
The i-RAM lets you build a 4GB RAM Drive today, and add it onto your system *without* sacrificing any system RAM, without installing a new OS, without getting a new mobo. Plus you can max out your system RAM, and then add an i-RAM on top of that!
Anandtech kept saying they couldn't see why you'd use an i-RAM over adding more memory; and they are right... except that maxxing out your system RAM is actually pretty easy; and what do you do THEN? What if you've already got 4GBs of RAM and photoshop is still paging on you? You CAN'T just throw more system RAM at it. i-RAM technology could be a solution.
Finally, another major difference between an i-ram and a software ram drive is that you can't install and boot an OS from a RAM drive.
(PS I am not affiliated with gigabyte or i-ram in anyway.)
cheers
That would depend entirely on how good "your average" is, now wouldn't it. ;)
I agree for most players being 1% off is probably going to just slow your progress slightly that day.
Then again, if you're doing something challenging, it just takes one bonehead error, or even just a touch of bad luck to wipe out several hours worth of progress. If your grouped or raiding, it doesn't even have to be YOU. One person having a bad day in a 30 person raid guild can blow it for everyone.
This makes it hard for casuals to group or raid outside of dull tedious boring easy content.
The 'hard core players' don't want them along as they may be 'liabilities', and if you throw 30 casuals for a raid, or even 6 for a group together the odds that you'll end up with a total screwup next to you is pretty high.
Uh... you follow the mmorpg crowd better than most, and yet aren't aware of, oh... what's it called... Evercrack...er Evercamp...
Everquest
IF you haven't heard of Everquest (EQ) you don't follow the mmorpg scene, period. And yes, its a MMORPG where you can easily de-level on a bad day, and its been like that since inception in 99.
Over the years they've made recovering lost XP much easier and more accessible, but even today its still quite easy to lose your level on a bad day.
Death in Dark Ages of Camelot (DAoC also costs you xp. You can't actually de-level, but you *can* end up behind where you started within the level on a given day.
Admittedly EQ is no longer the most popular mmorpg by a long shot, but until recently it was the 900lb gorilla of mmorpgs...at least in the western world. And DAoC is also pretty mainstream...these are not 'fringe' titles.
Yeah, but they're all just kids' games.
/sigh
Rated E for Everyone means just that: EVERYONE. To reject a game based on the fact that its rated E is just juvenile. (It's ironic actually.)
That said, your comment wasn't even accurate the Metroids are rated Teen, and Eternal Darkness is rated Mature.
Heh. It probably wasn't a good idea to pick on the gamecube there. Lots of good exclusives is probably the gamecube's biggest selling point. Even if you have a ps2 or xbox, picking up a cube just for its exclusives isn't a bad idea.
...
Nintendo 1st party exclusives (read: stuff published by Nintendo for Nintendo) tend to be above average quality games. For starters there is the ubiquitous Mario franchise -- and most of the various Mario games are well made and fun to play. From Mario Party 7 to Mario Golf to Wario World...
They also have a variety of excellent non-Mario exclusives including titles like:
Eternal Darkness
Pikman / Pikman 2
Zelda Windwaker
Metroid Prime / Prime 2
F-Zero GX
Zelda Twilight Princess (coming soon... completely different art direction from Windwaker)
Did they release Ikaruga for PS2/Xbox? (Friggen amazing quasi-retro scrolling shooter.)
To sum up: If *all* you like is first person shooters or think the pinnacle of gaming is racing your pimp-mobile into hookers and cops then the 'cube exclusives probably won't do much for you, but for gamers who like more variety of gameplay the 'cube exclusives are quite a treat.
IMO that mess is the sort of nonsense that only makes things worse in the long run.
... of course we have to mangle it just so that yet another browser ignores it...
For starters; its not a hack its a BUNCH of hacks all dangled together that only works if you put it all in just the right order and test it with just the right browsers, while praying in a cemetary with a dead cat. Throw something else at it, something new at it and who knows what will happen, or even what should happen.
I'm sick of reading CSS that says the same thing 5 different ways, each mangling the syntax and semantics 'just-so' to get something read by one browser then ignored by another, and then fixed back up again for a 3rd that manages to parse the previous 'wrong' directive but actually handles the feature correctly
Thank god there are only only a few mainstream browsing engines... we'd spend years doing the combinatorial regression testing for each time we modify a line of css if we had many more.
And god forbid one of the browser engines gets patched, fixing a bug or adding a feature that causes them to parse the 'wrong' CSS directives.
For myself, I simply don't mix width and padding on the same element. I usually double box when I need that feature. Its a little heavier in terms of code, but it doesn't rely on a dogs breakfast of browser parsing errors and voodoo magic to look right. And unlike you I can rest assured that if it doesn't look right in the "next browser engine" its not a batch of conflicting mangled CSS directives causing it.
Even dynamically loading separate CSS sheets for different browsers is better than your hackfest, a default w3c standard one, and one(s) to work around specific bugs in specific browsers that you want to support. Then later, you can easily drop support for these hopefully then-obsolete browsers.
PS -- If you want ***strict***, why wouldn't you specify a strict doctype instead of a transitional one??
I can't buy from NewEgg with cash
Prepaid VISA. To a merchant its the same thing as regular VISA. To you its the same thing as cash; ie you can get one with no credit whatsoever because its prepaid.
Nor can I easily pay my cell phone bill with cash.
Why not, I can pay my cell bill online from my banks website. Don't need credit for that. I suppose I could also use a prepaid VISA if I felt like it.
That being said, I can't think of the last time that I used the local console for anything other then network settings. I do most of my work via TS.
Uh... The GUI component in terminal services *is* running on the server. Your desktop, windows, running programs, all of it... are still on the server. Its just being rendered to a virtual screen that's being piped over to you via RDP.
In other words, using TS is *equivalent* to sitting at the console, as far this conversation is concerned.
If Blackberry's major market was offering non-techie CEOs an easy to use device, I guess it works fine.
That's EXACTLY who the market is, was, and will be. The number of non-techie types out there is astronomical. The market is huge. From CEOs, CFOs, Lawyers, and Politicians to Grandmothers...
Yet as common PC users become power users, I'd guess they'll outgrow the device and want more power and expandability (and customizable user interface)
Uh... WTF!!! Seriously! Most common PC users don't become power users. They don't outgrow the device and want more power and expandibility. They just want simpler, faster, and more reliable. Would you honestly say with a straight face that the transition from DOS to Windows 95 to Windows XP represents "common PC users becoming power users demanding more power and expandability"?
I'd say something more along the lines that it represents a gradual LESSENING of the end users actual required skill set through simpler ui. Sure many actual features have been added... support for pictures, video, 3D, etc... but at the same time the users didn't become more sophisticated or smarter, the machines just got faster and simpler so that the "common pc user" could deal with the new functionality and at the same time, actually know LESS about his device than ever.
Do many users here use their Blackberry and like it? I've been using PDAs since before the original Newton, and this device is just hokey. I feel like I have a trophy wife that looks nice but doesn't actually do anything. What am I missing?
You aren't the target market. And not many on slashdot really are. Talking about the blackberry device here is like trying to sell a minivan into a club full of muscle car enthusiast/mechanics.
The minivan is good car for joe average who just wants to get from point a to b reliably and on time while transporting his 2 kids, dog, and a tent... but it will never thrill a guy who wants to spend his weekends tearing down and rebuilding his engine to eke out another horse or three. Two different worlds. The minivan driver isn't likely to ever become a "power-user" and suddenly want to do custom engine work, and the gearheads are never going to be satisfied driving a vehicle with virtually no outlet to satisfy their urge for aftermarket parts, and performance tweaking.
There is a reason people here say "Yeah, but does it run linux...." when presented with a new gadget, and there is also a reason the average person not on slashdot couldn't care less. Guess which world *you* belong to? :)
While I agree things do get tricky with infinity; I disagree with your conclusion that they will be in there too.
As the random string grows to infinity the probability of any particular finite string being found within the random one grows to 100%.
However the probability of a particular infinitely long string being found does not.
You'll have to forgive my rusty mathematics...
Let R be a single infinitely long string of random numbers. Let R[i] be the ith character of R. And the interval R[i..j] a finite substring of R, and R[i..infinity] an infinitely long substring beginning at R[i] (lets shorthand this as R[i*]).
Clearly there are infintely many infinite substrings within R, but that infinity is countable; in other words: it is true that for any infinitely long substring in R, there exists some integer x, s.t. R[x*] will identify it.
Lets also define L as the set of all infinitely long strings.
The question: is L a subset of R[i*]?
The answer is no. Although they are both infinite, |L| > |R[i*]|
The cardinality of L is greater than R[i*], L is uncountably infinite while R[i*] is countably infinite therefore L can't be a subset of R[i*].
I loosely demonstrated the countability of R[i*] by showing how you could enumerate them. I think its pretty clear that R[i*] is a countable infinity.
Proving the set of infinitely long strings is uncountable is also fairly easy, and can be done with Cantor's diagonal method.
That is (in breif): Asserting that they are countable, enumerating them (based on the assumption that they are countable), and then constructing a string that isn't in the enumeration by traversing the enumeration on the diagonal. Since the construction isn't in the set you have a contradiction and can conclude that the set isn't countable. (for more info see see Diagonal Method
I could be mistaken, and my math is rusty... but I think I'm on solid ground.
What about infinitely long patterns?
Right. So they'll buy the 1.99 song and be 'cool'.
.99, they'd still have another dollar burning a hole in their pocket and could have bought another one.
.99 per song, will now find that they can only get half of what they want, decide that's not enough and fire up the p2p software again... and at that point they will have little incentive to purchase even the half that they could afford.
On the other hand if the song cost
Kids, for all their disposable income, aren't exactly rich... you double the price of songs they'll just buy half as many.
Its actually worse than that, kids who found they could afford to get pretty much all that they really wanted @
Yeah I don't know what happened. There *were* paragraphs. :/
English: "We applaud the creation of your new constitution and are preparing to pull our troops out of the country so that the rebuilding process can begin."
Arabic: "All your base are belong to us."
Wow, this is the most advanced translater built. Unlike most which simply try direct literal translations, this one can actually parse the intent of what Bush actually meant when he said that!
Bravo!
It probably depends on the level of dependancy on 'advanced' features of MS Office... most companies I think have much less dependancy than they might think. For us, we simply phased OO in. 100% of the desktops had OO installed. 98% had Office uninstalled. Sure we could have left existing Office installs intact indefinately, but by standardizing we ensured that internally everyone was on the same version of OO. (getting rid of the myriad of various office version conflicts and also ensuring there wasn't any silliness where users with Office refused to use OO and users with OO felt like second class citizens or some other nonsense. For all internal documents we use OO. People adapted pretty quick. A few of our internal documents had issues, We cleaned them up, and there hasn't been an issue in months. We do get significant inbound correspondance in Excel/Word and even PP, but these are simple documents that OO handles flawlessly. And even if there were the odd formatting hiccup it wouldn't matter, we're not 'publishing' them, just getting information from them. (Purchase Orders, reports, etc). For outbound correspondance where we might want to send someone a word or excel document... we just don't... we settled on PDF a long time ago. Our pdf requirements are simple and easily met by free pdf creation software (ie not Acrobat). We do not require our customers have proprietary software. This has worked very well for us. Very occasionally we *are* required to deal with a large complex MS office file from a customer that OO just chokes on. No biggie, we have a couple units with MS Office on them, for just that purpose. So we only need 2 licenses of MS Office vs 150. Most of the use they see is for 'powerpoint' crap that vendors will send as 'training materials'... we just blast these through one of the "MS office" stations into pdf and distribute the pdf version. (Alternatively we could install the free powerpoint viewer from MS, but I don't see an advantage to that. Overall, for us, stability (by getting rid of the multiple versions of MS Office) has actually improved. Occasionally
It seems you've also had some sort of US co-dependancy bred into you too -- in fact you sound more like an American shill snuck into Canada than a Canadian. Or maybe a Canadian brainwashed by American television.
I *agree* with the UN taking control over DNS. Its an international entitiy, so it should be handled by the international community. Its just that simple.
It shouldn't be under American control nor Chinese nor Iranian nor French nor German nor Australian nor Canadian.
Its everybodies responsibility; the UN is the closest thing we've got to an organization that fits. It doesn't really even MATTER if the UN doesn't do as good a job as the US did.
US control is undemocratic. If Kansas unilaterally decided that it should be the sole authority for DNS and dictate allocation for the rest of the states the other states would DEMAND inclusion and proper representation in the process. Whether or not Kansas was doing a bang up job and handing it over to a federal beauracracy would create new problems wouldn't matter in the slightest.
This is no different, except on an international instead of interstate scale. The US is but one state, dictating to the rest of them, for no good reason; except inertia.
Every American knows damned well that if ICANN happened to have been founded in ANY other country America would be all over supporting this internationalisation movement.
Its ridiculous.
Its not surprising though. America struggles with the idea that its own citizens ought be treated equal and fairly... its probably far too much for their government to even consider non-Americans as people at all. We've seen ample evidence of it in recent events.