Comment Re:I might as well say (Score 1) 624
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
Are you Alan Perlis?
Comment Re:Christ ... (Score 1) 328
Honestly, this is way too complicated to properly explain here, and it's also offtopic - I just wanted to remark how the fact that cell phones can be used to track your (past) location is prominent here, too.
Comment Re:Christ ... (Score 1) 328
Actual trial starts on April 6th. But the coverage of the whole affair has been far from "minimal"...
Comment Re:Christ ... (Score 2) 328
In the most recent Berlusconi trial - here in Italy - the prosecution is working not just on the actual recording of the voice conversation over cellular phones, but the case rests at least in part on the fact that a minor spent one or more nights inside Berlusconi's villa... as demonstrated by checking what cellular repeater was covering the minor's cellphone over the night.
And this had been under scrutiny for at least six months.
Comment Re:I have an e-mail from Antarcica - from 1994 (Score 1) 498
Congratulations Sir! (or Madam!!!)
Can someone vote this "funny", at least?
Comment Re:Cruise Ship + Cantenna = ?? (Score 1) 308
Yeah, right.
Cruise ships use a satellite link. Which is used both for Internet connection and cellular phones (assuming you are so rich or desperate that you don't mind the bill, which is really not cheap).
For the parent who suggests trying to "steal" a bit of bandwith from cruise ships using wifi... do you have an idea of how close you should be to the ship? (hint, hulls are made of steel... and wifi repeaters are set up in the main halls, casinos and other common areas, not outside the hull) so even if you were close enough to touch the hull with your hand I doubt you'll get much (in fact, wifi coverage is a problem even inside the ship itself).
And if you think that you can actually just "trail" a cruise ship with a sailboat you are either joking or have no idea of what you are talking about.
When PC Ports of Console Games Go Wrong 398
A post up at Gamasutra complains about the lack of effort put into the PC ports of some console games. The author picks on the unimpressively-reviewed Ninja Blade in particular: "Just as a quick guide to what we're dealing with here: when you create a new save file at the start of Ninja Blade on the PC, it warns you not to 'turn off your console.' Yes, Ninja Blade is one of those conversions: not so much converted as made to perfunctorily run on a different machine. In-game, you're asked to press A, B, X and Y in various sequences as part of Ninja Blade's extraordinary abundance of quick-time events. Whether you have an Xbox 360 pad plugged in or not, the game captions these button icons with text describing the PC equivalent controls. Only it doesn't always do that. Sometimes, you're left staring at a giant, pulsating, green letter A, and no idea what to do with it." What awful ports have you had the misfortune to experience?
Comment Re:Additional risk to us: (Score 1) 522
I think that this quote comes from Gen. Patton.
Even if this was invented for a movie, it would still not be Wayne (I think Patton was played by George C. Scott)
Comment Re:Though tangental to the post, I'm reminded of.. (Score 1) 176
See also www.stackoverflow.com and other similar sites: and I admit that the idea of "being good at something real and gaining experience points" has some appeal to me, too.
Submission + - Tastes like chicken (sciencecentric.com)
pamar writes: "Prof. Fu-Hung Hsieh, an MU professor of biological engineering and food science in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources and the College of Engineering, is leading the project to create a low-cost soy substitute for chicken."
Game Difficulty As a Virtue 204
The Wii and various mobile gaming platforms have done wonders for the trend toward casual or "easy" games. But the success of a few recent titles, despite their difficulty, has caused some to wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far; whether a little frustration can be seen as a good thing. Quoting:
"The evidence is subtle but compelling. For one example, look to major consumer website GameSpot's Game of the Year for 2009: Atlus' PS3 RPG Demon's Souls, which received widespread critical acclaim – none of which failed to include a mention of the game's steep challenge. GameSpot called it 'ruthlessly, unforgivingly difficult.' Demon's Souls was a sleeper hit, an anomaly in the era of accessibility. One would think the deck was stacked against a game that demanded such vicious persistence, such precise attention – and yet a surge of praise from critics and developers alike praised the game for reintroducing the experience of meaningful challenge, of a game that demanded something from its players rather than looked for ways to hand them things. It wasn't just Demon's Souls that recently flipped the proverbial bird to the 'gaming for everyone' trend. In many ways, the independent development scene can be viewed on the macro level as a harbinger of trends to come, and over the past year and into 2010, many indies have decided to be brutal to their players."
Comment Re:How it's done, and has been done for a century. (Score 1) 202
Neat. Where can I read a bit more about this?
TIA
The Perfect Way To Slice a Pizza 282
iamapizza writes "New Scientist reports on the quest of two math boffins for the perfect way to slice a pizza. It's an interesting and in-depth article; 'The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-center, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-center cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighboring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?' This is useful, of course, if you're familiar with the concept of 'sharing' a pizza."
Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 1) 224
I made my personal business cards using moo (http://us.moo.com). With the design I wanted, putting in my linkedin profile wasn't impossible: it was cut off due to width.
Therefore I used a Tinyurl, worked like a charm, and now that you can use a sort of alias for them, next time I will use a tinyurl which actually has my name in it.
Comment Re:Mediawiki... (Score 1) 557
...SharePoint works just fine, and has a much wider feature set than Alfresco. Alfresco does have its pluses...
Personally I found the Lists (in Sharepoint) frustrating to work with: they make easy things easy, and moderately complex things impossible (or much harder than they should be, anyway).
The Lookup() function is laughable and won't work nice with the idea of deploying anything as part of a Solution.
Modeling complex documents in Alfresco seemed better, imho. I agree that in terms of UI and "customization" Sharepoint is much better (in fact, we used Liferay as a front-end to Alfresco)
but IMHO Sharepoint is showing signs of a kitchen-sink approach and I would be wary to use it in a CMS role, unless your documents are always single Office files, and there is no idea of aggregates of disparate documents.
