Comment Re:Family Provide Our Best Stories (Score 1) 855
This reminds me of the first time my mom used a mouse. I told her to move the cursor up, and she lifted the mouse off the table.
She was surprisingly good at using the computer after that.
Christmas Tree Made From 70 SCSI Hard Drives
248
Trigger writes "At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array.
Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat.
With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree.
In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39." It's good to see that this guy has plenty to do at work.
Comment It's true. (Score 5, Funny) 371
Steve Jobs doesn't care about Mac people.
Comment Re:Sorry, it's insoluble. (Score 1) 669
Let's see, Paperdisk stores 1MB per page, so he would need to store more than 500,000 pages of paper somewhere. Not all that convenient.
Optimizing Linux Use On a USB Flash Drive? 137
Buckbeak writes "I like to carry my Linux systems around with me, on USB flash drives. Typically, SanDisk Cruzers or Kingston HyperX. I encrypt the root partition and boot off the USB stick. Sometimes, the performance leaves something to be desired. I want to be able to do an 'apt-get upgrade' or 'yum update' while surfing but the experience is sometimes painful. What can I do to maximize the performance of Linux while running off of a slow medium? I've turned on 'noatime' in the mount options and I don't use a swap partition. Is there any way to minimize drive I/O or batch it up more? Is there any easy way to run in memory and write everything out when I shut down? I've tried both EXT2 and EXT3 and it doesn't seem to make much difference. Any other suggestions?"
Red Flag Linux Forced On Chinese Internet Cafes 295
iamhigh writes "Reports are popping up that Chinese Internet Cafes are being required to switch to Red Flag Linux. Red Flag is China's biggest Linux distro and recently received headlines for their Olympic Edition release. The regulations, effective Nov. 5th, are aimed at combating piracy and require only that cafes install either a legal version of Windows or Red Flag. However, Radio Free Asia says that cafes are being forced to install Red Flag even if they have legal versions of Windows. Obviously questions about spying and surveillance have arisen, with no comment from the Chinese Government."
Race and Racism In Video Games 371
SlappingOysters writes "Racism in video games has been a key topic of discussion in the game industry this year, thanks in large part to the controversy surrounding the Resident Evil 5 launch trailer. In this article, GamePlayer speaks to developers, publishers, activists and journalists about the issue to get various perspectives and insights into how the video game industry is moving forward on the topic of racism. A related piece also has interviews with Sue Clark from the UK's Classification Board and Dr. Griseldis Kirsch, a lecturer in Contemporary Japanese Studies, about how racism in video games is viewed by the BBFC and Japan respectively."
Comment Re:How true was this? (Score 5, Informative) 421
I think you misunderstand the uncanny valley concept. In fact, your entire rebuttal is mostly a restatement of the concept itself.
The point is the more realistic something is, the more disturbing any 'defects' in it's simulation are. Stuffed animals don't breath, they don't move, they don't growl. Neither do paintings. These things may be realistic in the sense that they portray a snapshot of the thing they are based on, but they don't come anywhere close actually convincing you that they ARE the thing they were based on. I don't know of anyone who would mistake a stuffed bob cat sitting in someone's den or a museum as the real thing for more than a few seconds. Likewise, people pretty much know when they are looking at a painting or even a photo.
All of those things are on the 'safe' side of the valley. The problem comes when you start getting things that move, sound, and mostly act as if they are alive but clearly aren't. Your actor with the no-spill glass would be in the valley, so to would be photorealistic computer models that didn't have facial expressions when they spoke (ala FF).
And for the record, while the uncanny valley was popularized by talking about computer generated graphics, it was actually coined by a roboticst back in the 70's, and was based on an idea first presented by Freud in the 1910's.
Feed Wii Sports: Future of Fitness? (wired.com)
Submission + - IT world must tackle an inconvenient truth
glamb writes: "The Age is
running a story, IT
world must tackle an inconvenient truth, Computer
conservation needs to be taken more seriously in Australia, writes Brad
Howarth.
POWER consumption through corporate IT use accounts for 0.75 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, according to research group Gartner. That's nearly half the contribution made by the airline industry, a high-profile greenhouse ogre. And the figure does not include the cost of keeping data centres cool enough to operate, an ever-increasing problem as processors get faster and hotter.
Now the fact that humans have caused global warming is irrefutable shouldn’t we, the IT industry, be doing something?
How many PC’s are doing nothing but wasting power and running screen savers because IT departments require desktops run 24x7 and there is no “wake-up mechanism”? How many people leave their PC’s running because Windows does not come back 100% of the time from a hibernation or sleeping?"
POWER consumption through corporate IT use accounts for 0.75 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, according to research group Gartner. That's nearly half the contribution made by the airline industry, a high-profile greenhouse ogre. And the figure does not include the cost of keeping data centres cool enough to operate, an ever-increasing problem as processors get faster and hotter.
Now the fact that humans have caused global warming is irrefutable shouldn’t we, the IT industry, be doing something?
How many PC’s are doing nothing but wasting power and running screen savers because IT departments require desktops run 24x7 and there is no “wake-up mechanism”? How many people leave their PC’s running because Windows does not come back 100% of the time from a hibernation or sleeping?"
Submission + - Can you recommend a team-oriented online game?
An anonymous reader writes: My parents are moving out of town, and my sister and I are looking for an online game to play alongside our mom. (All three of us have played Puzzle Pirates, but my sister has become bored with the puzzles and won't touch it anymore.) Neither my mom nor I enjoy the standard MMORPG fare of kill-level-buy-gear-rinse-repeat. What we're looking for is some sort of cooperative online gaming experience which doesn't hinge on how fast you can click the mouse button or how many hours you've been killing things in dungeons. Does such a thing exist?
What Is Real On YouTube? 277
An anonymous reader writes, "The popularity of user-generated video sites like YouTube has given rise to deceptive videos created for self-promotion, advertising, or even smearing rival brands. This latter format, dubbed the 'smear video,' depicts a rival brand's product exhibiting fictitious faults. One example is the 21-second YouTube video entitled 'Samsung handset, easy to break at one try!', which shows a smiling woman easily snapping the new Samsung Ultra Edition mobile phone in half. Samsung says the phone was rigged to snap and the video has now been removed from the site. The article also accuses those who created the now infamous Lonelygirl15 YouTube videos of 'deception for profit. Misrepresenting commercials as independent user-generated content, actors as members of the public, and fiction as fact.' Will user-generated video sites increasingly confront visitors with the disturbing possibility that the video they're watching is not a home video at all, but a sophisticated ad campaign?"
EA's E3 Lineup 54
Next Gen continues its rundown on E3 2006 offerings, with a listing of what EA will be bringing to the party. As far as I'm concerned, there's only one game on this list: "Spore - As a contrast to Crysis, consider Spore, a game where design is the be-all and end-all of the buzz surrounding it. Enthusiasts of game mechanics in both the player community and the industry itself have placed this game on an untouchable pedestal: the last great hope for innovation from the last great innovator in the industry, Will Wright. While we can concede that he may not be the 'last great innovator', there's no question that Wright has a long pedigree of thinking so powerfully outside the box that the box implodes from the pressure - The Sims in particular changed the way people thought about how to cater to different players. It also may very well be that Spore represents his most ambitious design yet - the player starts with a single-celled organism and ends up with a space-faring civilization. The whole thing is generated on the fly, meaning every player's race and culture will be different." Update: 04/26 22:14 GMT by Z : Sorry, I should point out these are the games *they* want to see at E3 from EA. I missed the disclaimer at the bottom the first time through.
