If you're going to copy and paste something, whether for karma whoring or to help innocent schoolchildren, at least include the whole text of the (2 page) article!
And now for page 2... (Give me your -1 Redundant, moderators, I can take it--it's for the poor, filtered widdle childwen!:-)
(Please read the article here instead of below, unless you're filtered: http://www.gamespy.com/editorials/november00/sony/ index2.shtm)
Dave Barry
But enough bitterness. As the old farm saying goes, there is no point in spilling milk on a barn door that has already hatched. So what if we can't buy our kids a PlayStation 2 this year! Who says they need it anyway? What's wrong with the toys we got when I was a boy? Some of them were pretty darned "high tech," too! For example, there was a toy called the "Wheel-O," which was this wheel that you rolled around and around in this metal frame, which the wheel stuck to because of... magnetism! Wow! I bet our kids would think THAT was pretty "cool," huh?
Also we had "Tickle Bee," which was this little bee you dragged around and around in a maze, using the amazing power of... magnetism! And what about electric trains? I spent countless fun hours watching my Lionel train go around and around, and of course around. The train had a milk car with a milkman who loaded and unloaded milk cans by means of the mysterious power of -- prepare to become excited -- magnetism! There was even a missile car that used magnetism to launch a missile, which went straight up and came back down on the train, sometimes hitting the milkman, who apparently represented some kind of military threat. And in the unlikely event that we ever got tired of magnetism, we had: vibration. This was the force that powered a football game in which little vibration-powered football players scooted around on a little football field with a vibrating motor under it. You painstakingly lined up all the players, then you turned on the motor, and suddenly you were watching an incredibly realistic simulation of what a football game would look like if all the players had ingested massive quantities of psychedelic drugs. Some would go in circles; some would take off for parts unknown; some would flop onto their sides and just twitch around. The player with the "ball" -- a little football-shaped piece of felt -- would ALWAYS head directly for the wrong goal line. It was a lot like the production plan for the Sony PlayStation 2.
But my point is that, this year, maybe you don't need to give your child the "latest" toy. Maybe your child will be just as happy with a toy from the attic! Because in the end, the holiday season is not about material things. Ho ho ho.
First of all, we don't even bother to store it...
on
Son of HAL For Sale
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· Score: 1
"The human brain NEVER loses one shred of information that it encounters."
Um, I don't know who taught you Psyc 101, but s/he should be shot.
First of all, studies on attention clearly show that we don't even bother to store most of the information we "encounter". The basic point is that the "job" of attention is to ignore all the irrelevant stimuli that we encounter and focus on what's important. And as the other poster already corrected you on, many studies on memory show us that we invent details to fill in our memories of scenes based on what we expect them to look like (e.g. placing a wine bottle in a picnic scene). That's why eyewitness testimony is so overrated...
Fucking is a wonderful act (without which none of us would be here), yet the only verbs for having sex are taboo... sorry, but what the fuck is up with that?
Note: In the more "acceptable" phrasings like "have sex" used above, the wonderful verb for having sex--fuck--is replaced by a noun--sex--and coupled with the generic verb "have", which can be used equally well with ice cream as with sex. Fucking, if done right, is definitely a verb--NOT a noun--for both parties involved (hopefully, since it's not much fun if either person just lies there:-), and should be referred to as such. I mean, really people, we've advanced way too far technologically to still be saddled with this pathetic Dark Ages Christian taboo bullshit...
Oops, "Network Neighbourhood" is now deemed too hard--it's devolved to "My Network Places" and "Computers Near Me". Can't wait until that level of sophistication shows up in Gnome;)
No, it's probably because the people at M$ have the un-fun job of trying to make a UI that even the uber-incompetent can use ("My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood", etc). I bet that makes their programmers' skin crawl too...
When CBC was showing coverage of the Canadian men in the beach volleyball quarterfinals, the women's marathon was being run. CBC did some switching back and forth, and some split-screens, but what really impressed me was that Brian Williams (a CBC commentator) actually said (when they were switching back to volleyball) that anyone who wanted to watch the marathon could see it live on TSN (Canada's ESPN). Phenomenal.
I've always assumed the same thing, and I assume that the reference was deliberate (pretentious allusions to historical events that most people "beneath" them would not recognize make some very educated people quite amused--and chances are that the people who first read the GoF book and labelled it as such were CS profs who have lunch in the same cafeteria as history profs. Besides, the GoF have such very long names, and we CS types abbrev. everything:-)
This is an honest question for any of the engineers here: would using a headset(which would move the phone from right beside your head to your hip pocket) help at all? (Yes, I understand the idea of the inverse-square law, so I would naively think that this would help a fair bit--I just would like to know if there's some other factor I don't know about that would cancel out this seemingly easy-to-achieve benefit...)
AMEN!!! Seriously, in banking there's really something to be said for an oligarchy (as opposed to Mom and Pop's Fly by Night Bank of San Mateo, California)...
(CAD == Canadian dollars, USD == US dollars) It varies across Canada, with BC (the province above Washington state) having cheaper prices (12-15 CAD) than, say, Saskatchewan (14-18 CAD)--largely because of the a&b sound music chain in BC and the larger population. With the PST (provicial tax) and GST (federal tax) a new CD in BC will end up costing you 14-18 CAD. But 1 USD = 1.5 CAD (well, more like 1.47 right now), but this still means that new CDs in BC end up costing you only 9-12 USD! Of course, living in California this doesn't help me much:-)
Re:Competing with pretty good products
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 1
First, I agree with you that having source code under any license is a Good Thing. For example, even though Java is not Open Source, you get the source code for Swing etc under SCSL. This is extremely useful, and it even let me find a bug in JTabbedPane. (Yes, I write Java code. I'm not an Open Source zealot--just an advocate where it is the better solution!) However, all I could do then is submit the bug to Sun in their "bug parade" and wait for an engineer to fix it. If Java was Open Source, I could have just submitted diffs and the change would have gotten in a lot faster.
Now, as far as MySQL goes, I understand their desire not to Open Source (GPL, BSD, etc) their latest code. They have to find the most effective way to make money. And it's good you can get their source under some kind of license. But regarding their GPLing an obsolete version: so what? That's useless. What are people going to do: fork it? Take a couple year old product and re-invent features in the latest version? I didn't think so...
Re:Competing with pretty good products
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 1
By Open Source I mean (L)GPL, BSD-style, Apache-style, MPL, ExoLab, etc--basically, the licenses approved by OpenSource.org. And I don't consider a product which has an open-sourced outdated version to be an Open Source product, and I don't think anyone else around here does either. All that is to me is an empty marketing gesture. If Oracle open-sourced Oracle 6.x, would that make Oracle 8i Open Source? Hardly. At least Oracle doesn't insult its clients by making such a pointless gesture.
Re:Competing with pretty good products
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 1
Most of the other open source products...???? Um, MySQL is not Open Source. Cheap: yes, Open Source: no.
me too! i think i thought of it in grade 9. it's a great idea--it's basically like "avoid the ti-fighters and blow up the death star" except the death star is the egg and the ti fighters are the defender cells that are coming after you.
...another one of my favorite ideas was a bird flight simulator -- fly around and shit on people, swoop down and steal fast food, get twigs to build your nest (or just raid the nests of other birds and steal their eggs if you're one of the species that does that), etc...
the only reason i saw this is because the katz filter doesn't work on forward/back links at the top of stories!! so i guess it's good that the/. code has this bug...
Slashdot Mirror
i saw it on vhs ages ago (it was the first anime i'd seen), in "Victoria, Canada" as you americans like to say :) don't know about michigan though...
And speaking of honest mistakes, I forgot to change from HTML Formatted to Plain Old Text in my submission, so it was completely unreadable :-)
If you're going to copy and paste something, whether for karma whoring or to help innocent schoolchildren, at least include the whole text of the (2 page) article! And now for page 2... (Give me your -1 Redundant, moderators, I can take it--it's for the poor, filtered widdle childwen! :-)
(Please read the article here instead of below, unless you're filtered: http://www.gamespy.com/editorials/november00/sony/ index2.shtm)
Dave Barry
But enough bitterness. As the old farm saying goes, there is no point in spilling milk on a barn door that has already hatched. So what if we can't buy our kids a PlayStation 2 this year! Who says they need it anyway? What's wrong with the toys we got when I was a boy? Some of them were pretty darned "high tech," too! For example, there was a toy called the "Wheel-O," which was this wheel that you rolled around and around in this metal frame, which the wheel stuck to because of ... magnetism! Wow! I bet our kids would think THAT was pretty "cool," huh?
Also we had "Tickle Bee," which was this little bee you dragged around and around in a maze, using the amazing power of ... magnetism! And what about electric trains? I spent countless fun hours watching my Lionel train go around and around, and of course around. The train had a milk car with a milkman who loaded and unloaded milk cans by means of the mysterious power of -- prepare to become excited -- magnetism! There was even a missile car that used magnetism to launch a missile, which went straight up and came back down on the train, sometimes hitting the milkman, who apparently represented some kind of military threat. And in the unlikely event that we ever got tired of magnetism, we had: vibration. This was the force that powered a football game in which little vibration-powered football players scooted around on a little football field with a vibrating motor under it. You painstakingly lined up all the players, then you turned on the motor, and suddenly you were watching an incredibly realistic simulation of what a football game would look like if all the players had ingested massive quantities of psychedelic drugs. Some would go in circles; some would take off for parts unknown; some would flop onto their sides and just twitch around. The player with the "ball" -- a little football-shaped piece of felt -- would ALWAYS head directly for the wrong goal line. It was a lot like the production plan for the Sony PlayStation 2.
But my point is that, this year, maybe you don't need to give your child the "latest" toy. Maybe your child will be just as happy with a toy from the attic! Because in the end, the holiday season is not about material things. Ho ho ho.
"The human brain NEVER loses one shred of information that it encounters."
Um, I don't know who taught you Psyc 101, but s/he should be shot.
First of all, studies on attention clearly show that we don't even bother to store most of the information we "encounter". The basic point is that the "job" of attention is to ignore all the irrelevant stimuli that we encounter and focus on what's important. And as the other poster already corrected you on, many studies on memory show us that we invent details to fill in our memories of scenes based on what we expect them to look like (e.g. placing a wine bottle in a picnic scene). That's why eyewitness testimony is so overrated...
I know you're a troll, but I'll bite...
:-), and should be referred to as such. I mean, really people, we've advanced way too far technologically to still be saddled with this pathetic Dark Ages Christian taboo bullshit...
Fucking is a wonderful act (without which none of us would be here), yet the only verbs for having sex are taboo... sorry, but what the fuck is up with that?
Note: In the more "acceptable" phrasings like "have sex" used above, the wonderful verb for having sex--fuck--is replaced by a noun--sex--and coupled with the generic verb "have", which can be used equally well with ice cream as with sex. Fucking, if done right, is definitely a verb--NOT a noun--for both parties involved (hopefully, since it's not much fun if either person just lies there
Oops, "Network Neighbourhood" is now deemed too hard--it's devolved to "My Network Places" and "Computers Near Me". Can't wait until that level of sophistication shows up in Gnome ;)
No, it's probably because the people at M$ have the un-fun job of trying to make a UI that even the uber-incompetent can use ("My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood", etc). I bet that makes their programmers' skin crawl too...
Ditto. It's sad that a party with people like Orrin Hatch and Colin Powell fields a presidential candidate like Shrub though :)
When CBC was showing coverage of the Canadian men in the beach volleyball quarterfinals, the women's marathon was being run. CBC did some switching back and forth, and some split-screens, but what really impressed me was that Brian Williams (a CBC commentator) actually said (when they were switching back to volleyball) that anyone who wanted to watch the marathon could see it live on TSN (Canada's ESPN). Phenomenal.
I'm posting this from K-Meleon running on Win2K. It is insanely fast.
I've always assumed the same thing, and I assume that the reference was deliberate (pretentious allusions to historical events that most people "beneath" them would not recognize make some very educated people quite amused--and chances are that the people who first read the GoF book and labelled it as such were CS profs who have lunch in the same cafeteria as history profs. Besides, the GoF have such very long names, and we CS types abbrev. everything :-)
This is an honest question for any of the engineers here: would using a headset(which would move the phone from right beside your head to your hip pocket) help at all? (Yes, I understand the idea of the inverse-square law, so I would naively think that this would help a fair bit--I just would like to know if there's some other factor I don't know about that would cancel out this seemingly easy-to-achieve benefit...)
"Above them on the performance scale they have Win2k..."
ROTFL! +5 funny!
you must be joking, konstant--usually you're pretty insightful, but come on, that's absurd. Solaris kicks Windows 2000's ass for performance.
thanks for making my monday morning. wish i had mod points.
AMEN!!! Seriously, in banking there's really something to be said for an oligarchy (as opposed to Mom and Pop's Fly by Night Bank of San Mateo, California)...
that's why their new OS code names are Whistler and Blackcomb ... maybe they don't just want to ski there :-)
this is the funniest thing i have ever read on /. thank you!
(CAD == Canadian dollars, USD == US dollars) :-)
It varies across Canada, with BC (the province above Washington state) having cheaper prices (12-15 CAD) than, say, Saskatchewan (14-18 CAD)--largely because of the a&b sound music chain in BC and the larger population. With the PST (provicial tax) and GST (federal tax) a new CD in BC will end up costing you 14-18 CAD. But 1 USD = 1.5 CAD (well, more like 1.47 right now), but this still means that new CDs in BC end up costing you only 9-12 USD! Of course, living in California this doesn't help me much
First, I agree with you that having source code under any license is a Good Thing. For example, even though Java is not Open Source, you get the source code for Swing etc under SCSL. This is extremely useful, and it even let me find a bug in JTabbedPane. (Yes, I write Java code. I'm not an Open Source zealot--just an advocate where it is the better solution!) However, all I could do then is submit the bug to Sun in their "bug parade" and wait for an engineer to fix it. If Java was Open Source, I could have just submitted diffs and the change would have gotten in a lot faster.
Now, as far as MySQL goes, I understand their desire not to Open Source (GPL, BSD, etc) their latest code. They have to find the most effective way to make money. And it's good you can get their source under some kind of license. But regarding their GPLing an obsolete version: so what? That's useless. What are people going to do: fork it? Take a couple year old product and re-invent features in the latest version? I didn't think so...
By Open Source I mean (L)GPL, BSD-style, Apache-style, MPL, ExoLab, etc--basically, the licenses approved by OpenSource.org. And I don't consider a product which has an open-sourced outdated version to be an Open Source product, and I don't think anyone else around here does either. All that is to me is an empty marketing gesture. If Oracle open-sourced Oracle 6.x, would that make Oracle 8i Open Source? Hardly. At least Oracle doesn't insult its clients by making such a pointless gesture.
Most of the other open source products...???? Um, MySQL is not Open Source. Cheap: yes, Open Source: no.
me too! i think i thought of it in grade 9. it's a great idea--it's basically like "avoid the ti-fighters and blow up the death star" except the death star is the egg and the ti fighters are the defender cells that are coming after you.
...another one of my favorite ideas was a bird flight simulator -- fly around and shit on people, swoop down and steal fast food, get twigs to build your nest (or just raid the nests of other birds and steal their eggs if you're one of the species that does that), etc...
(although an effective troll at that--exactly the right mixture of offensive moralistic crap and unsubstantiated "evidence". sheesh.)
the only reason i saw this is because the katz filter doesn't work on forward/back links at the top of stories!! so i guess it's good that the /. code has this bug...
...announce that a bunch of dot com companies (named after rivers?) have recorded record PROFITS! :)