Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:I'll be hoisting a pint... (Score 4, Interesting) 115

The lab isn't going anywhere. While a few groups are justifiably concerned about their jobs, the overall mood around the lab is optimism. New projects are underway, accelerator research is ongoing, and proposals for new experiments are always in the works.

There's plenty of work left to be done. The real concern going forward is keeping the government willing to spend money on it.

Comment Re:Mods (Score 2, Informative) 704

Wish I had mod points (har har, no pun intended), because this is the way to go.

Get him into a FPS that has an active mod community (TF2 would be my pick, but it's far from the only option). Even just making maps for these games is a start.. scripting game events with entities in Quake/Source based games requires a lot of if/else logic and it's a very roundabout way to get someone thinking like a programmer. From there, they'll probably want to make new guns. This will naturally lead into making mods, which require "real" programming.

Other games that might work is Civ 4, WoW, or X3. All three have great support for mods via a scripting interface.

Comment The offensive part. (Score 4, Insightful) 521

The thing that bugs me about being endlessly monitored and categorized is that it's never used to make my life better. It's only ever done to help some random corporation improve their profits by some fraction of a percentage.

If being tracked watching a TV show for a full season resulted in them going "hey, thanks for being a loyal viewer, have this X as a token of our appreciation", I wouldn't complain so much. It wouldn't necessarily have to be a material bonus, in this day and age they could simply grant access to some kind of insider info website. The possibilities are only limited by imagination.

But no. Everything I do gets dumped into a database and sold to the highest bidder. It serves no purpose but to try and get more money out of my wallet. Or if the government is involved, measure my odds of being a terrorist.

Comment Re:Sounds like a cop-out for bad customer service (Score 4, Insightful) 364

Really? Where I'm at, as IT gets progressively more like the exact thing TFA advises against, I think "customer service" is actually getting poorer.

Back in the day, users would send an email to IT to get stuff fixed. If the problem warranted, a discussion would develop, an agreement would be made, and work would be done.

Today, we have a faceless ticketing system where users are forced to fill in drop downs that categorize their problem, to make sure reporting is nice and easy for the management. If IT has to query the user, they're supposed to put this query through the ticketing system. Direct communication is becoming less and less desirable, as is customization. If a user asks for something special or unique, the response is almost always "we don't support that".

Comment Re:Gold plated baby! (Score 2, Insightful) 524

Because new specs come out for the cables. There was cat 3, and cat 5, and cat 5e, and now cat 6 is out. They are all rated for increasing amounts of bandwidth.

I haven't yet come into a situation where this has been an issue though. I run gigabit over cat 5 constantly (despite claim that cat 5 is not rated for it), and have never had an increase in errors or interruptions. Which is what I think the OP was asking about.. are the new specifications really necessary?

In my experience, the answer is no.

Comment Re:In other words... (Score 1) 842

I think that's another concern. Who gets to decide whether a piece of software is an "application" or not? Of course it's gonna be Microsoft. What it says to me is you gotta pay Microsoft to get your software on their whitelist, which basically kills any "power user" tools for whoever this is sold to.

I could also see something happen where Firefox is considered an application.. but IE is not. And google chrome, with every tab being a new process? Congratulations on only being able to open three tabs.

I suspect this version will go unnoticed, like the Vista starter version did. Anyone who would buy it will just pirate the ultimate edition.

Comment Re:Random searches (Score 1) 355

linux desktop viable (17,800) 196,000

Perhaps the best part is the top link in 2001 was arguing why the linux desktop is a good option.. and the top link today is why it has failed.

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.

Working...