Comment Re:digital running in our faculty building (Score 2, Interesting) 158
It's a lot of fun to play with friends/coworkers in a game map based off of a real place you are familiar with. I regularly play on a couple maps I've made of my old high school and house in Counter-strike:source.
Some pics too in case anyone's interested.
High school:
http://www.putfile.com/album/122640
House:
http://www.putfile.com/album/78469
Zombie mod in high school ftw.
Comment Re:Memento Mori (Score 4, Funny) 841
Wtf are you doing here? I thought your ass was banned http://www.edf.org/article.cfm?ContentID=4407
Comment Re:Great article (Score 1) 653
There is a lot to configure in the browser. In IE you can enforce privacy settings, connection settings, sound and video settings, security settings, etc with group policy. I know where I work they use GP to prevent people from setting up proxies in the browser and to keep scripts from running on websites as well as making sure the browser plays no sounds. Installing Firefox allows me to circumvent all this, so I could see it being an issue.
Comment Re:Netbooks are the future. (Score 1) 318
I did the same thing. It gets me around the storage space issue, since my Acer only has an 8Gb ssd, and I can use any Windows Apps off the server without sacrificing the performance of the light linux distro.
The only thing more I could ask for is 3g so I could literally use my computer on the move.
Comment Sad to hear (Score 1) 15
Sorry to hear about Linda.
My grandma is not doing to well right now, it's very frustrating that I can't see her since she's in Colombia. It's especially frustrating that I can barely speak Spanish anymore and have trouble conversing on the phone.
I hope for the best for you and your friends.
Comment Re:Who frigging knows? (Score 2, Funny) 162
Microsoft Clippy is the ONLY reason I still keep an XP partition on one of my computers.
If I really need to run Microsoft Office, I do that using CodeWeaver's Crossover Office under Linux.
Microsoft's decision to drop Clippy means that I won't have to even consider Windows 7. I'll just disconnect from my network whenever I want to clip so there is no risk to an abandoned XP partition.
I'm one of those that has bought every copy of Clippy even before Microsoft bought it from Bruce Artwick and SubLogic. I flew it when it was a wire frame grid (that's basically a paperclip, right?) with the profile mountain range to the north. I even wrote a shareware application for it that still can be found in various software repositories on the web. It has evolved into an amazing platform and some enthusiasts have built amazing motion clippypits and even full simulations of jet airliner clippypits.
I also thought every release of Clippy was profitable. For all of Microsoft's other ills, Clippy has been one of the more popular offerings that people preordered, snapped up on release day, etc. there were flawed releases, but Microsoft would release updates that fixed them.
Microsoft Clippy was really a flagship product for them. I don't know what they are thinking. If any of the team read this, I really appreciate all of your fantastic work over the years. You people made stuff.
It really has been an amazing product and extremely useful. I know lots of real clippy enthusiasts that use it to stay sharp and/or used it to make their training more effective. I can count myself among the ones who had a clippy instructor get frustrated that I was clipping more by instruments and less by seat of the pants, doing coordinated procedure turns, holding heading and altitude first time out.
But I wouldn't be surprised if the Linux clippy simulators (X-Clippy and ClippyGear) pick up all the slack. The hard core people will go nuts putting in the hooks for realistic clippypits, added inputs, etc.
It's an end of an era. For me it totally cuts the cord to Redmond, Gates, and Allen.
I'll sure miss updates to Clippy but in a way am kind of relieved that I will never buy another copy of Windows again.
I'm sorry about this.
Comment Re:Easy solution (Score 1) 543
You must be new here, Slashdot is full of people that don't understand sarcasm~
Comment Oh, I've got one. (Score 1) 9
A Mexican, a Jew, and a colored guy go into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "Get the fuck out of here."
Comment Tami (Score 1) 4
Her nickname seems like it's well deserved, but I have to wonder why Tami hasn't been completely ostracized yet?
"Connor's number and Stuart's number were on her 'called numbers' list right before they called Steve's phone last night."
It sounds like everyone's privy to her antics, and she pulls crap like that often enough that she's a nuisance. I'm sure she can be nice and friendly sometimes too, but damn you guys have put up with a lot from her.
Anyways, any idea on why your date stood you up? Did she find out that you knew about her AIDS?
Oklahoma Ambulances Debut Sirens That You Can Feel 128
djupedal writes "Booming like a 1980s video game, the Howler can even make liquids ripple — Oklahoma's largest ambulance company will become the first ambulance service in the nation to outfit its entire fleet with new Howler sirens, designed to emit low-frequency tones that penetrate objects within 200 feet — such as cars — to alert drivers." This is all well and fine, but I wonder what they plan to do when their sirens call up one of the big worms from deep below?
Schneier Calls Quantum Cryptography Impressive But Pointless 233
KindMind writes "Bruce Schneier writes in Wired that quantum cryptography, while an awesome technology, is actually pointless (that is, of no commercial value). His point is that the science of cryptography is not the weak point, but the other links in the chain (like people, etc.) are where it breaks down."
Fungus Fire Spores With 180,000 G Acceleration 69
Hugh Pickens writes "Although a variety of spore discharge processes have evolved among the fungi, those with the longest ranges are powered by hydrostatic pressure and include 'squirt guns' that are most common in the Ascomycota and Zygomycota. In these fungi, fluid-filled stalks that support single spores or spore-filled sporangia, or cells called asci that contain multiple spores, are pressurized by osmosis. Because spores are discharged at such high speeds, most of the information on launch processes from previous studies has been inferred from mathematical models and is subject to a number of errors, but now Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has recorded the discharges with high-speed cameras at 250,000 frames-a-second and discovered that fungi fire their spores with accelerations up to 180,000 g, calling it 'the fastest flight in nature.' Money and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created a video of the first fungus opera."
