Contents

1. Unboxing the Fake Intel Core i7-920
2. Next-Gen Augmented Reality Rears Its Unreal Head
3. Farewell To the South Pole Dome
4. LHC Will Be Shut Down In 2011 Because of “Mistake”
5. EU Parliament Rejects ACTA In a 663 To 13 Vote
6. Study Shows TV Makes Kids Fat, Computers Don’t
7. Ex-Sun Chief Dishes Dirt On Gates, Jobs
8. Professors Banning Laptops In the Lecture Hall
9. Rock Band 3 Officially Announced For Holiday 2010
10. Linux Takes Over E-Voting In Australian State
11. Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked
12. The Value of BASIC As a First Programming Language
13. US Considers Some Free Wireless Broadband Service
14. US Gamers Spend $3.8 Billion On MMOs Yearly
15. The World’s First Commercially Available Jetpack
16. Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation
17. Jeff Jaffe Named CEO of W3C
18. NewEgg Confirms Shipping Fake Core i7s
19. Dot-Com Craze Peaked 10 Years Ago This Week

Re:Alphine Stereo for sale - by gad_zuki! (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

>They didn’t even bother to use a real Lamborghini picture! Even that was a fake!

Its like a movie where the killer is always giving the police hints on his next crime. The fraudster gave your friend at least two hints, but he still bought it. Even fraudsters have the occasional attack of conscience.

Re:No way was this an accident - by Knara (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
That’s some darn good police work there, Lou.

Re:No way was this an accident - by amicusNYCL (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Wow, you think? That’s some fine detective work. Tell me, was it the lead “processor” or the solid plastic “fan” that gave it away?

Re:No way was this an accident - by rock217 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Are you sure?

How long before the first fake fake? - by spun (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Dude, I bought a fake i7 on eBay, but it turned out to be real! What a ripoff!

Indoor equivalent of GPS? - by blincoln (Score: 2) Thread

I’ve always thought there were some awesome possibilities for AR applications. But it seems to me that a large percentage of them would be at their best in an indoor environment, where GPS signals don’t penetrate. 
I have to imagine there was a reason the governments of the world went with radio frequencies like that for GPS and its non-US equivalents, but has there been any work done coming up with something that would provide similar functionality indoors?

I’ll wait for the giant rabbit version. - by John Hasler (Score: 2) Thread

BTW, has Apple filed suit yet for the unauthorized use of the letter “i”?

Oh noes! - by Em Emalb (Score: 2, Insightful) Thread

This will be a boon to the advertising “industry”.

Those bastard spawn of ultimate evil.

Re:Oh noes! - by CmdrSammo (Score: 2) Thread
Ding ding ding…correct! I work in the Computer Vision field and have already seen presentations of plans to overlay ads inside video content. The example shown was your classic soap opera. The program detects suitable advertising surfaces for example a table top or a wall in a scene and then renders an advert in that location. This is then embedded in the video and tada you now no longer have to worry so much about piracy because you have adverts embedded in the pirated video in a way you can’t easily cut out. The program automatically calculates the value of an ad location depending on time on screen, angle to camera etc. and gives a web based front end for buying ads from the TV company. 
 
This could, given enough computation power in phones and cameras, allow companies to place ads in our videos and photographs based on location and orientation. Although it is hard to see why this would be better than placing huge billboars - but still I put nothing past an advertiser with enough intent.

ARToolkit is awesome - by anomnomnomymous (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread
I’ve recently started exploring some Augmented Reality toolkits, and I got to say that for now I -really- like ARToolkit: An open source toolkit, which is very easy to set up, and I’m astonished at how good it is. 
If you want to fool around with AR, be sure to give this package a go. Very easy to set up, and the results are amazing. 
 
Only downside (imho) to this is that, for now, it only supports .wrl 3d models (VRML 2.0): But other than that, the source is very cool to modify, and I’ve been able to let it run (albeit slow) on my N900. Still a lot of work to do though.

nopics with noscript - by anagama (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
It would be awfully nice if submitters would include links to sites with pictures where you don’t have enable 50 scripts just to see a jpeg. For example, linking to wikipedia is a no brainer that would save a million keystrokes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen-Scott_South_Pole_Station

Deconstructed? - by wcrowe (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

“Dismantled” would be a better choice.

Of course I may be wrong. Perhaps the Seabees really have been standing around considering the the dome’s true meaning and searching for inconsistencies in its design.

Pictures and more info - by Critical Facilities (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
For anyone interested here is the link on the NSF page showing the old site and the new facility. Pretty cool (pardon the pun).

Re:Pictures and more info - by atomic-penguin (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Here are deconstruction photos of the former dome station.

Dang Air Force cutbacks. - by GiveBenADollar (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Guess they are also getting rid of the F-302s at McMurdo. Homeworld security must not be important to the current administration.

Should have have hired the Prius engineers - by HermDog (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Now there’s a crew who know how to make an unstoppable accelerator!

we were asking for it - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

As a physicist, all I can say is we’ve been asking for this kind of press.

When you hype the bejeezus out of the shiny new multi-billion dollar tool, it’s reasonable for the people who paid for it to expect results. It is jarring when people hear for over a decade about the great results that will come out of an experiment, and then later hear that we have to spend ~50% of the time doing maintenance on the equipment, and the first few years just testing it. I know this is the way things work, this is the way my (much, much smaller) experiments work. This is not a complaint about the science, or being careful. This is a complaint about politics, funding structures and a lack of ability across fields to communicate effectively with the general public. We can’t keep doing this to ourselves if we want the public to trust us. We have to manage the media better.

To begin with, the great achievement of the LHC *is* the LHC, not the search for the Higgs boson. It’s enough that this is the most complicated, impressive, advanced piece of technology on the planet, and that it required input at the cutting edge from nearly every major field of physics. Just like the point of going to the moon was to go to the moon, not to bring back moon rocks.

Re:Agile Construction - by theshowmecanuck (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Given the way Agile is usually implemented, it would have then made a detour under London before making it back to Switzerland. Kind of like the famous cartoon… especially the documentation part. Nice legs…

No… - by Petersko (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
“Now we need someone to pipe up that if they used Agile Methodology when building the LHC, none of the design issues would have happened.”  
 
If they’d have used the Agile Methodology it’d be working, but the particles would travel at 60 miles per hour, and the collisions would be recorded by a police sketch artist. Improvements would be scheduled for a future sprint.

nonstory: its obviously nothing but - by circletimessquare (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

the usual saboteurs from the future, trying to preserving their pathetic little doomed timeline

Obama’s Administration officially looks stupid! - by paulsnx2 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

We were told that ACTA had to remain secret for “National Security Reasons”. We were told it had to remain secret or other countries would walk away from the table.

But the truth is that most of Europe will walk away if there is no disclosure. And none of the countries that have supported secrecy have threatened to leave the talks. And the US hasn’t even claimed to take a position (though we all know that is a lie).

And to top it all off, despite all the leaks so far, we do not have a single terrorist organization that has been able to leverage the revealed all-so-dangerous-information commit any terrorist act.

At least, as long as you don’t consider Michael Geist a terrorist.

It’s sad to see - by Dr.Syshalt (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
…how the world has changed in recent 150 years. U.S. corporations push draconian laws and European countries are praised for standing up to protect freedoms and privacy.

Not really… - by teslar (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I don’t want to bring the mood down, but this is just a good summary of a bad article. The parliament did not vote against ACTA per se, they voted in favour of resolution RC-B7-0154/2010. Much better summary is the press release from the parliament itself.

In brief, they are mostly pissed off about the secrecy of the negotiations and lack of transparency. The resolution calls on the negotiations being made accessible to the public and the MEPs in a timely manner. So it’s not against ACTA, it’s against how negotiations are conducted. However, the resolution does also call out against the 3-strike rule and personal searches at EU borders. Regarding warrantless searches, they merely want a “clarification” of clauses that would allow such things.

Better than rejected! - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Heh, this is a case where the inappropriately-effusive slashdot story is actually less exciting than the glum reality. This vote was a parliamentary resolution urging the European Commission to (among other things) fight the veil of secrecy that’s kept ACTA out of the mainstream press for the most part. That’s way cooler than “rejecting” some secret draft that we didn’t know about anyway, and that would have been swiftly replaced with another secret draft.

Ouch. - by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
That has got to sting. 
 
Most genocides had higher approval ratings than that.

IS there a link to the study? - by geekoid (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Previous studies showed that the TV made no difference at all. Kids who weren’t active in the house, where no more active when they went outside.

The studies I have read based on TV obesity all showed that TV was not the cause, but just something people who were inactive happened to do. 
Why the child was inactive turns out to be a number of other reasons. depression, stress, bad house hold habits. and so on.

What TV does seem to do is make people think they need to eat, vie food commercials.

Sadly, there are surprisingly few good* studies that try to tease apart the variables in TV watching. I would like to read the detail in this study. 
How were the children selected? What where there daily activities before the study? Was the study done at a time of year that coincide with better weather? How where controls done? was diet monitored?

The reason given seems a little thin, since eating at the computer is as easy as the TV. OF course, there could be a cultural reason for not eating while on the computer.

Quite frankly, I would be for the removing of food commercials. It would never happen, but I would wager that after a year the obesity problem would start to slow down, if not stop.

*lots of bad studies.

Re:IS there a link to the study? - by actionbastard (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
There is no ‘study’. These ‘results’ are from a survey of primary school children conducted in one municipality by a school nurse. No scientists or researchers were involved. There is no empirical data at all. No experiments were conducted. More than likely the ‘study’ consists of anecdotal evidence such as; TV in room, check…fat child, check…TV caused fat child.

What about food commercials? - by CyberSlugGump (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
How many ads for fast food, soft drinks, candy bar, restaurants, etc. do you see during an hour of watching TV versus during an hour of using the computer? Food cues might play a strong role, too.

Re:Not only that I bet many people loose weight… - by Krneki (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

A CIV player.

“Active”? - by IBBoard (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

One theory is that it’s common to have a snack in front of the TV, while a computer requires a more active user, for example when chatting or playing games.

Yeah, because sitting there and typing or moving the mouse is huge amounts of activity! I can eat a bag of M&Ms and drink coke while coding, and I’m sure there are plenty who can scoff pizza, coke and crisps without a problem!

You’ve got to lick your fingers well to make sure that you don’t leave a mess on your keyboard, but other than that the computer “activity” isn’t that much of an obstacle for eating.

Re:Gates and Jobs.. - by MemoryDragon (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Actually Sun already was on the ground when Schwarz took over…

Re:What do you expect? - by El_Muerte_TDS (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

To release a better, or cheaper product.

I appreciate the insight from Schwartz but … - by Lemming Mark (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

It’s interesting what Schwartz has to say about how things work “on the inside”. Companies bluffing and calling each other’s bluff. Showing up and going “I’m watching you”. His description makes it sound a bit like Jobs & Gates hadn’t really thought their cunning plan all the way through, which I would think is unlikely. I’d have guessed they were just testing Sun’s resolve, finding out how Sun evaluated their own patent portfolio, investigating whether these projects (Looking Glass and OpenOffice) were just a tech demo or were something that Sun wanted to stand by and protect. What his blog post didn’t mention was on how many occasions Sun did the same thing to another company, big or small. It would be laudable if they refused to do that but it would also mean they were deliberately pulling their punches, so it would be a bit surprising from a large corporation.

NetApp sued sun over patents ZFS arguably violated: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/. But NetApp alleged that Sun had first demanded patent royalties from NetApp and that they were acting in response to that: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/sun-patent-team.html

Who knows where the truth lies over the ZFS case but it does open the prospect that Sun wasn’t sitting passively by and getting threatened by other companies. On the other hand, there could be more to this story than meets the eye (e.g. the kind of high level meetings Schwartz refers to, preceeding the legal letters) in which case it might not be anything like so simple. We’ve not generally seen Sun visibly holding back (or trying to) the marketplace using patents as much as, say, MS or Apple might have done. But it doesn’t mean that given their investment in patents they didn’t try to use them.

Valuable Java Patents - by ClosedSource (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I wonder which Java patents Schwartz was referring to, Checked Exceptions or Type Erasure?

Book about Microsoft - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
A good, but old, book that gives an idea of the reality of Microsoft is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates. (August 15, 1998)  
 
The book was written by Jennifer Edstrom, the daughter of Pam Edstrom, manager of Microsoft’s P.R. agency, Waggener Edstrom, and a former Microsoft manager. The Amazon.com review says the book ”… presents a harsher and messier history, sharply questioning Microsoft’s ethics and corporate wisdom…”  
 
The book seems authoritative; the authors certainly had inside access to the facts. It’s certainly unusual that the daughter of one of the heads of Microsoft’s P.R. agency would write a book discussing Microsoft’s abusiveness in detail.

Luddites are alive and well. - by Domini (Score: 2) Thread

No wonder the US is doing so badly when it comes to qualified university graduates.

I say let them use computers, play games and even fail if they so wish. One thing I would agree on is that it does tend to distract other students and hampers interactivity.

I took notes at university not because I EVER looked at it again, but more that I would interact better with the material at the time. It made me think and understand it better.

What about note-taking on a handwriting-recognition type tablet computer?

I would not have minded to have a lighter backpack at university…

Then and now - by spaceyhackerlady (Score: 2) Thread

When I was a grad student (late ‘90s) laptops were big and clunky and expensive enough that they weren’t effective classroom tools, and nobody used them.

I didn’t go back to school for a career change, BTW. I went back to school because I was bored with the work I was doing, and felt I had reached a career plateau that would make it difficult to do anything really interesting without some more letters after my name. I wanted a timeout from the rat race. I wanted to do something interesting.

I’m taking a night school course now, ground school for my pilot’s license (yes, it’s interesting). The course setup is high-tech, with all lectures being delivered with a laptop and overhead projector. We still use the whiteboards for diagrams and discussions, and nobody uses a laptop for notes. How do you do navigation problems on a laptop? You get out your charts, your ruler, your protractor and your E6-B.

…laura

Notes from my Father: 4.0 top of med school class. - by 2obvious4u (Score: 2) Thread
The most successful person I’ve ever known, my father, told me the secret to good grades in school. He would take a tape recorder to class and record the lecture, then after class he would go home and transcribe the notes. He was amazed how much he would miss during the lecture. The other students in his class would complain at test time that the professor never covered the material, but my father always had the answers. There were there in his transcriptions. 
 
When I went to college I attempted this method, but I didn’t have the stamina. I ended up with a B/C average when I graduated, but I had a lot of fun. I’m not making seven figures like he does, hell I’m not even earning six figures yet. So was having no social life worth the seven figure salary? Definitely, but how to you train yourself to have that level of self discipline? 
 
The reason transcribing works so well is that during the lecture you miss a large percentage of the material to distractions, then on top of that you only remember a fraction of that. By transcribing the lecture you get exposed at least once to 100% of the material covered, then you can re-enforce what you’ve covered later when you review the transcripts.

Ban laptops or jam the Wi-Fi - by illumnatLA (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
20-some years ago, I started my bachelor’s degree at Ohio University. I ended up in Los Angeles working in the film & TV business as an editor where they really don’t care if you have a degree or not. 
 
Fast forward to now… Economy crash, writers’ strike, production slow down… so I decide use that as an opportunity to return to college to finally finish a bachelor’s degree in Visual Effects. 
 
The classes are held in computer labs and because the systems are used for many different kinds of classes including web design and as generic open labs, they are connected to the internet. 
 
There is nothing as annoying and distracting as someone sitting there working on their Farmville while the instructor is lecturing or while we are supposedly critiquing each others work. It leads to the instructor having to go over simple concepts multiple times due to students not paying attention which really pisses me off as it’s wasting my time & money… Mommy & daddy aren’t paying for my college classes… I am. We have a limited amount of time as it is… I want to get my money’s worth by getting in as many concepts as possible—nott going over the same thing over and over and over because some idiot was tending to his crops. 
 
Now chances are, these idiots who aren’t paying attention in class would’ve found ways to not pay attention in class back in the pre-WiFi internet days, but for the most part, they would’ve been less distracting to other students who did want to pay attention. (They’d be doodling in a notebook or just sleeping.) If they were doing something that was distracting to other students, it would be much easier for an instructor to monitor and deal with… ‘Take those headphones off,’ ‘stop talking back there,’ etc. 
 
These days, the instructor has a bunch of laptop lids pointed in their direction and the students could be doing anything from dutifully taking notes to running their virtual mob to reading Slashdot. 
 
The point I’m eventually getting around to making is that these sorts of distractions that having full internet access in the classroom causes is unfair to the students who do want to pay attention. 
 
I really don’t give a shit if someone wants to waste their time and (parents’) money by not paying attention in the classroom… but I get royally pissed when it wastes my time and my money. 
 
Personally, if I was teaching I would have a policy in place where first time caught on the internet during a lecture or critique would get a warning, second time… auto fail. 
 
But… I digress…

Note taking isn’t stenography - by ENIGMAwastaken (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I see a lot of people commenting on how fast they need to type/write in order to take notes. I find this a little odd, because if you’re taking down more information than you can easily handwrite, you’re probably not taking notes properly in the first place.  
 
The point of taking notes is to compress the information into a salient outline structure and then insert only the most important information. Just copying, verbatim, what a professor says isn’t, in any real sense, “note taking”. Note taking implies that you’re selectively recording the parts of what the professor is saying that are most important. Just copying down everything is something else entirely, and is dreadfully inefficient, first because you can easily get the jist of what someone says without recording their exact wording, and second because it makes reviewing the notes mostly a waste of time.

Weak offering in 2009 - by sorak (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

So, what happened in 2009?

Rock Band 2 was released in 2008, and had some time to die down before 2009. Same for Guitar Hero World tour.

Harmonix released Beatles Rock Band. Were they expecting that to do as well as Rock Band 2? The only logic I can see to Beatles Rock Band is that maybe they are hoping that Beatles fans are like Star Trek fans; there are some compulsive enough to pay any price for anything branded with their favorite franchise. (Before you get angry, The Beatles could have made a great series of track packs, but you cannot expect one band to carry half the industry).

I own Guitar Hero 5. It’s alright, but most reviews complained about a weak song list, and Guitar Hero Van Halen didn’t exactly bring people to stores.

So, is it possible that the decline was due to a weak offering in 2009? These companies are shooting themselves in the foot by providing an even weaker offering in 2010.

Contracting Sales - by dunezone (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Maybe its because the same peripherals could be used from Rock Band with Rock Band 2? The upfront cost of the game initially is expensive but once you have the guitars, microphone, and drum set the cost is significantly cheaper to move to a new edition and that’s where the sales start to contract. The same goes for the Guitar Hero series also.  
 
Personally, I think the genre has entered its maturity when it comes to growth and needs some drastic change or needs to evolve into something different. One solution might be introducing new peripherals but they need more advanced peripherals because at this point you need to justify paying for another 15 pounds of plastic.

Are bands/labels dumb? - by Shihar (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Why would ANYONE charge to be in Rock Band? If you want a sure way to boost your sales, get yourself featured in Rock Band. Thousands of people discovering or re-discovering your music is a pretty fucking obvious way to scare up some sales. Hell, for any game where music is featured a band is only screwing themselves by putting up barriers for being selected. If I had a band, I would murder my way into getting put on a GTA music station. Even for big name stars, reminding hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people that you still rock isn’t going to hurt. It is even more important if you are an older band whose original followers are in the process getting jammed into nursing homes. You should be fighting over the privilege to introduce yourself to the younger generations via Rock Band.

The music industry has its head jammed so firmly up their ass that is a minor miracle and a testament to monopoly power that they continue to exist each year.

“Holiday”? - by HalfFlat (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
I must have a different calendar. When is Holiday? Is that after or before Septemberary?

Re:Which holiday? - by Fluffeh (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Forget your banter about holidays, this is the funny part of the article:

We ain’t making enough cash off this donkey. Find me a cheaper one. 
 
There. TTFY. 
 
Why can’t a company look at a product and simply say “You know, we had a good idea and we did it well.” Why do they always have to look at how they can do the same idea again and try to fuck someone over harder to make the same money? It’s the IDEA that’s the money maker, not screwing over some part of the liabilities sheet. Seriously. Just once?

Still wrong - by Yvanhoe (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Linux doesn’t make electronic voting a good idea though. How can we check the published program is the one running ? It is akin to use opaque voting boxes without showing they are empty first. 
 
Spread the word to fellow voters : if YOU can’t understand how the vote is secured, refuse the voting system !

Re:Still wrong - by Yvanhoe (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Yes I did. I am not sure of the US system but here (France) any citizen is welcome to participate or oversee the public counting of ballots. We use transparent ballot boxes so you are free to stay in the voting office from the opening to the counting. There are always several people there including opponents.

It is also the scale. Electronic voting makes nation-wide fraud possible. Electronic voting gives a single point of failure for fraud : the machine manufacturer.

Re:Still wrong - by timmarhy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
paper votes can all be pyshically accounted for, and counted by a machine and then checked by multiple hand counters. thats the problem with electronic votes. how do you KNOW the button you pressed turned into the vote you asked for and can’t be tampered with after the fact? while i’m sure there may be a solution like taking a hash of the vote based on it’s time and result and storing it seperately to the vote itself, then checking these later to confirm they match. i’m not sure the public will be very comfortable with this concept for some time.

you can’t track or verify your vote after you’ve cast it obviously - to suggest any voting system is flawed due to a lack of tracking flys in the face of the secret ballot and is for retards.

Re:Still wrong - by jimicus (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

It’s difficult to stuff a paper ballot box (which in most systems is never to be left unattended from when it’s sealed to when the votes get counted) without it being fairly obvious.

OTOH, there are plenty of places to hide an electronic vote stuffer on most electronic systems and it’s a often a lot harder to verify that nobody’s tampered with them.

Pah - by somersault (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

2.6/Gentoo RHEL is nothing compared to my Damn Small Yellow Dog DebuntuSE with FutureKernel 6.4

Google maps link - by shird (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

FYI, a google maps link to the location:

http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=37.769573+-122.483123&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=16

time and date: 2010-06-26 14:28:57

Re:Google maps link - by Farmer Tim (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

What are the laws surrounding drinking alcohol in the Golden Gate Park?

BYO.

Uh - by Threni (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The start of the thread, containing spoilers, isn’t much use if you want to attempt the puzzle and haven’t got the book. Do I need the book? If so, this is something of a non-story, isn’t it?

Re:Uh - by war4peace (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Wait, there is a puzzle? Where? xkcd? What’s that? Who? What year is it? 
Oh, it’s /. - nevermind then, all makes sense now.

The problem is that there’s no article. - by Jesus_666 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The gripe is not that it’s a story about a solved problem, the gripe is about the story being about a solved problem inside a dead-tree version of xkcd - and we can’t even be certain we were told the actual problem so the informational content of this story boils down to: “Randall Munroe has apparently put some tricky puzzles into an xkcd book of his and someone solved a really hard one and got a set of coordinates. You’ll have to trust us on this one, we don’t have further data.” As far as news go that’s really weak. 
 
There’s no link to details about how the answer was found and we can only guess at what the problem was (apparently Randall gave some cyphertext and an initialization vector, leaving the reader to figure out which algorithm was used and how to decrypt the string). There’s no actual article and the matter isn’t urgent/all-important enough to warrant turning a set of posts incompehensible to those without the book into a news story. 
 
Had someone written a nice blog post that explains the problem, how the solution was determined and what the answer means this would have been much more newsworthy. As it is now it’s only of use to the subset of /. readers who own the xkcd books - and those who do and are interested in the puzzles are most likely already reading the xkcd forum, making this story mostly pointless. 
 
In short: This story would be a lot more interesting if it was comprehensible without the book. As it is now it might as well be a stealth ad for the book. “Buy now and you too can have the faintest clue what kdawson is so excited about.”

Re:Started with BASIC, sure… - by Rockoon (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

Most of the experienced assembly programmers I know started with an old-school basic (gw-basic, basica, one of the rom basics) and today also program in a BASIC derivative (VB, PowerBasic, TrueBasic, etc..) 
 
None of them enjoy C++. 
 
I often hear C++ programmers declare that learning assembly is stupid, that processor are too complicated now to write efficient assembly, and so on. 
 
I do not think that these things are a coincidence. Basic programmers from the 70’s and 80’s turned into tinkerers, while C programmers from the 70’s and 80’s turn into architects. Its counter-intuitive when you first think about it, but it seems to be the truth. That Basic programmer had a lot of architecture done for him but had to struggle to tinker, while that C programmer had tinkering handed to him by the language but had to struggle with his own architecture. Each eventually masters what is difficult on the field they play in, while taking for granted that which is easy. 
 
Regardless of the target language, if I need a project lead for a large application I would want a good solid architect, but if I want a library written (perhaps even for that large project) then I would want that heavily experienced tinkerer on the job.

BBC BASIC - by tomalpha (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC back in the 80’s. It was simple, powerful, let you do pretty much anything and best of all came with a built in assembler. Now that was really neat.And it just worked. It was easy to optimise individual subroutines in assembler. This was age 10. At my simple state school with a couple of BBC Model Bs in the corner, I wasn’t the only one doing that either.

I make a living writing C++ now and seem to do fairly well at it. The kids coming out of university that I interview these days haven’t touched BASIC, or C++ for that matter. We want them to write good C++ when they come and work for us. The intelligent ones adapt easily to working with pointers etc. The less able ones that have somehow made it through the interview process struggle.

Better than nothing - by kainosnous (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

When I was first learning to “program” I had nothing more than an old computer with DOS. The internet was something I had heard about, but had never experienced myself, and I didn’t know what Linux or even Unix was. The only way I had to learn was from some books I found at the library. At first, it was just .bat files. When I discovered BASIC (I thing it was GW BASIC), I was excited to have it. Later, I discovered QB.

There are some advantages. First, I didn’t have to set anything up or worry about what includes I needed. A simple PRINT “Hello word” was enough. What was better with QB was that with the press of F1 I could browse the list of commands. Also, it came with a Gorillas.bas and Nibbles.bas. I spent hours injecting lines of code into those games.

Sure, if you have a full Linux environment with gcc, man pages, and web access then BASIC is just some lame toy, but if it’s all you have It’s a start.

I’d guess there’s a critical period & an attit - by weston (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

I think the author is mostly on. He’s aware Dijkstra was exaggerating for effect, but also completely correct… if you started programming in the early home computing era, you probably started with a BASIC. I was lucky enough to get some varied exposure earlier to some other languages (LOGO and some shallow assembly), but until I was 15, it was pretty much Basic.

And none of my programming habits now resemble anything close to the BASIC I wrote in when I was that age. Except, occasionally, for the rare cases where global state seems to make sense, and even then, I try to namespace things in one way or another. But by and large, I picked up structured programming, I picked up object-oriented programming, I picked up logic programming, and I’m learning to enjoy functional programming.

I will say… there was a time when I was probably close to being “ruined.” It was when I was learning C++, and I only really had Pascal, basic C, and Basic under my belt. And I had a pretty solidly structured-imperative mindset, and really hadn’t seen any other way of doing things. C++ married data structures and methods in an interesting way, but it didn’t seem like more than a stylistic practice to me. I was pretty sure most languages were alike, you just had syntax and typing differences.

But there was one thing: I’d had to learn Prolog for a very specific job. We were teaching it to high school students in a CS summercamp I worked at for a few years. The first year, I just thought “Man, this is weird,” more or less got through all the exercises, and left it behind, and did what most people do: dismiss it as an odd research toy. The second year, I thought “this is weird, but interesting.” The third year, I thought “Wow. There are all kinds of intriguing ideas here.”

And there are, and I still think it could stand to see more usage in mainstream software, but more importantly, I think I’m pretty lucky I got repeated exposure to a language that forced me to think differently before I got very far into actually working in the software industry.

Because I now think there’s either a critical period (or possibly, at a minimum, a critical attitude of some kind) after which a lot of programmers tend to lose either the humility or the curiosity that drives people to think about different programming constructs and habits. I think if a programmer has been minimally exposed before they reach it, they’ll keep just enough of one or both of those attributes that they’ll be interested in what they don’t already know, rather than arriving at the point where “they’ve already learned the last programming language they’ll ever need.”

And if they don’t get so exposed, they become Blub programmers, where generally $Blub is some industry-leading language that does enough you don’t easily bump up against tasks that are near impossible in it.

To tie this back in with a point I think the author missed, I suspect that some of the difficulties with Basic are actually part of the reason why it didn’t end up ruining more programmers. Almost everybody who really came to grips with it as a tool probably realized that it couldn’t possibly be the last programming language you’d ever need (if it weren’t enough that any effort to look into working as a programmer revealed that Basic was clearly not the strongest payroll ticket).

Dijkstra ? Legend ? - by vikingpower (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Dijkstra, who taught at Eindhoven Technical University - which is how I superficially came to know him - was mostly a self-declared legend. He cultivated his own myth, even going as far as publishing a little book with his own quotes.

Community fiber - by slashqwerty (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
I have heard it would cost $1,500 per home to run fiber to every home in the nation. That’s $225 billion. If you want better and more affordable communications install fiber co-ops throughout the nation that do nothing but the physical installation from the home to a neighborhood hub. From the hub, any ISP that chooses can compete for your business.

This isn’t new - by mrsteveman1 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I don’t remember the name of the company but suffice it to say, there is a company who has been riding the back of the FCC for years, trying to get them to approve some kind of free wireless broadband plan just like is being described here.

The old plan was to have the government collect some revenue from the company in exchange for offering exclusive use of the spectrum. The company was planning to filter the connection, specifically to block porn, because they had some significant ties to the moral morons in the “family” groups.

I don’t recall how they were planning to pay for the whole thing, but i seem to remember they had for-pay plans that might have subsidized the free (censored) plans.

Re:This isn’t new - by mrsteveman1 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Here is the company http://www.m2znetworks.com/

They originally wanted a 15 year exclusive spectrum license, and as you can see from their website, even now after their original plan was totally rejected, they’re entirely committed to filtering things to make it “family friendly” if they get approval as a licensee.

heh - by Pojut (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

First comes government cheese. Then comes government health care. Now comes government internet connections. Next comes government monitoring and censorship of said inter- *NO CARRIER*

Re:heh - by skids (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I see nothing in the liked article that says the “free or low cost service” would be run by the government, just that they’d consider allowing companies, localities, and nonprofits to use these frequencies if that’s what they do with it.

As always, you put a lot of your trust in your ISP, so choose carefully.

Answers from the MMO Survey publisher - by Gamesindustry.com (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Hi guys, good to read your comments. I am Peter Warman, MD of gamesindustry.com, company behind the survey. Just to clarify: indeed, not 72% of 50+ play MMOs. Only 4% of female and 5% of male 50+ people play MMOs. You can see it by scrolling down the graphs here: http://www.gamesindustry.com/about-newzoo/todaysgamers_graphs_USA. The 72% accounts for all platforms. Elderly play mainly on online game portals. The money spent does NOT include Farmville or Facebook games in general. It DOES include kids MMOs/Virtual worlds such as HabboHotel and ClubPenguin. The respondents were selected from a huge panel that represents the complete nations surveyed. A lot of effort has been put in to get respondents representing the country. So we did not just ask gamers but all kinds of peopel evenly distributed across demographics. Please keep the questions coming.

Re:Not me - by EastCoastSurfer (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I don’t really see MMOs as a waste of money. The game fee and then the monthly probably give way more hour/$ of entertainment than most $60 console games. What MMOs do waste is tons of time.

Welcome to the world of fast-food computer gaming - by Opportunist (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Why? Because MMOs will be what will eventually remain of games, at least A-Title games, in the forseeable future. Think of it: Recurring revenue, no copying worries, customer loyality even big brand names could only dream of today (aka fanboys that will defend any shit you cram down their throat) and even the “this sucks” lamenters will pay. They might not play (for now, when their favorite class gets nerfed) but they still pay!

Even add-ons are superior to sequels, despite (usually) not going for the same amount of dough. Think about it: A sequel may or may not be to your customer’s liking, so he may or may not buy it. He WILL have to buy the add-on just to stay in the loop, like it or not, buy it or the months you “invested” in the game are wasted. And just like the main game, you will sell them not only today but for years to come. And when your next add-on is due, bundle the original and the first add-on and again you can sell them to all those that didn’t catch on earlier. Oh, did I forget to mention that you can still sell your same old, dated game five years down the road? Yes, that’s right. You can still sell your title five years after its initial release and people will still buy it! Now name a single non-MMO that can boast this (I’m not talking about the 2-bucks-bin here, ok?).

Wait, it gets better. If you craft your game carefully and make it juuuust easy enough that you can play it with half your brain’s attention, people will actually go out and buy TWO, read it, TWO copies of your game. Or three! Or four! Watch people buy their own group, their own raid, their own … well, however large you make your sensible grouping, you just have to dumb it down enough. And people will go and buy not one, but five or ten copies of your game and pay for every single one every month.

And since companies tend to follow exactly that logic, this is what we get: Shallow, repetitive, faceroller MMOs that fulfill only a single letter in MMORPG. And that’s only if the servers are not offline.

No not really - by Sycraft-fu (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

While MMOs are attractive, they aren’t easy. An MMO requires a substantial investment to start up, far more than a single player game. Also MMOs are the sort of thing that there’s more of a limit on how many there can be. Many people will pay for one MMO, far less will pay for two MMOs, and so on. As such to get in to the market you either have to get a new segment of gamers that weren’t doing MMOs before, or take gamers away from MMOs already out there. With a single player game, you just have to convince someone they want to play your game, they may well play others.

MMOs will doubtless continue to be very popular, but they are hardly all that is going to be out there. I mean look at Blizzard they are -THE- kings of the MMO world currently, yet they are making Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, both non-MMO games. Reason is they know they’ll make money on those too. Heck some of their WoW players will buy them. Just because people play MMOs doesn’t mean they don’t also play other games. I’ve played an MMO of one kind or another for about 6 years now or so. However I still buy single player games all the time. Just because I like MMOs doesn’t mean that’s all I play.

So sorry, I’m not buying this doom and gloom “Only MMOs are the future!” All evidence seems to say there will continue to be games of many different types. After all, MMOs are not new, yet game studios continue to roll out non-MMO titles as well as MMO ones.

As for your analogy, well guess what? Fast food hasn’t taken over the world. You are right that I can find McDonalds all over my city. However I can find hundreds of non fast food restaurants too. There are sit down chain restaurants like Olive Garden or P.F. Changs, and there are plenty of little ones that are just someone running their own thing. Fast food has not replaced where you can go to eat, it has supplemented it. Also turns out that you can eat fast food for one meal, and then eat at a nice place the next, they don’t get mad at you or anything.

I think it’ll be the same for MMOs. Sure, a lot of people are going to play them, but it won’t be the only thing they’ll play.

Re:Corporate Shills - by Rei (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Some of my fondest coding memories were programming for an LP mud. :) I loved the fact that wizards (coders) could literally have programming wars. For example, one wizard makes a dest (“destruct” — basically, kicking off another player or wizard, with a lot of fanfare) that has a big leadup to it. So another wizard, tired of getting dested, writes a rapid counter-dest that kicks off the wizard doing the dest before it completes. So the first wizard writes an insta-dest that doesn’t give the second wizard a chance to counter. So the second wizard writes an object that seeks out the first wizard’s inventory, intercepts their commands, and if they try to start a dest against them, it instead turns the dest on its caster. So the first wizard writes an object that scans their inventory for objects to intercept the dest, and if it finds something that shouldn’t be there, the object kills it off for them and then dests its owner. And on and on, back and forth.

Then there was the simply humorous aspects. A friend of mine had a dest where he would pick up a flower and contemplate whether the person being dested loved them. ”(S)He loves me; (S)He loves me not. (S)He loves me.”… and so forth, ending up on ”(S)He loves me not.” As they throw the flower away, the person gets kicked off the server. So I wrote a parody wherein, first thing, an object gets added to the inventory of the target to prevent them from quitting or counter-desting. A bumbling ogre version of my friend stumbles in and picks up the person being dested and starts pulling off limbs, doing the ”(S)He loves me, (s)he loves me not” thing with them, and causing the person to randomly scream out in pain.

I used to occasionally disguise myself as the developer’s board in the main development room. When people tried to interact with me, I’d manually make up responses. Occasionally I’d jump into other wizard’s inventory or other things like that, perhaps making myself into a talking sword and having them wield me or the like. A neat feature was that you could “patch” objects to call any function that object possessed, including the objects that it inherited from. So changing things’ descriptions or making them call actions was a snap.

I once wrote a program that would compile statistics about the most used words on the wizard chat line. When I informed everyone of it, all of the sudden, they started shouting out random obscene words over and over for days on end to try to get them high up on the ranking list. ;)

At one time, I accidentally wrote an object that landed on the floor of the room everyone logged in to and which dested anyone the instant they logged in. This kicked off all but one player, who was in another room coding an area. I couldn’t get in to tell them not to log out and to please dest all objects in the login room; if they logged out, we’d have to wait for a sysadmin to restart the server! So I connected in through the FTP server and uploaded some files in the area they were working with file names in all caps that would tell them what to do as soon as they LS’ed. Thankfully they did ls, noticed the files, and fixed the problem!

How loud is it? - by Mr_Blank (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Having my head 1 meter from a 100+ decibel turbo props for 30 minutes at a time does not sound like a good idea. Crashing in the equivalent of a flying motorcycle (human body moving fast on a structure required to hold a combustion engine) does not sound good for my health either.

Not a proper jetpack! - by Dun Malg (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
This design does not meet the basic definition of a proper science fiction jetpack. Specifically, you cannot walk around with it on your back, then decide “you know, I think I’ll fly over that wall” and then WHOOOOOOSH! over the wall you go. This thing is obviously too big and heavy to tote around on your back. Heck, I don’t even really see the point of harnessing to it with straps—- you’d be better off with a seat, maybe with and instrument panel, and perhaps a windscreen, because if you can’t carry the thing on your back, what does it matter?

‘Jetpack’ my patootie - by macraig (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

That’s not a ‘jetpack’… it’s a VTOL without the jet. And just as noisy… it’s a boom box car that breaks wind.

nah - by JackSpratts (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
that’s not a rocket pack. this is a rocket pack. self-taught guy’s been building them for years: http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/2/26/jetpacks-this-mexican-inventor-s-been-making-them-for-years—2

All I could think of - by voss (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Was not buck rogers, but the terminator H-K units. Someone is gonna realize, carrying a 200 pound human makes no sense…but strapping on a 100 pounds of 
bulletproofing and some .30 cal machine guns and thermal imaging units and a remote control system and youre there.

Re:Their search parsing tech probably helps too - by MichaelSmith (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

There is nothing wrong with that. My son forms connections like that all the time, and he is only slightly younger than google.

Asian languages and vastly different grammar - by penguinchris (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Several others have noted this as well - for Asian languages, Google has a lot of work to do. The Chinese translation near the top is impressive, but while Chinese and Japanese translations are probably pretty good on Google, other Asian languages suffer greatly.

I’ve been translating a lot of Thai lately, and initially I thought Google was great - the interface is really slick, and it seemed to give a decent result. Passing the translation back through often gave me really weird stuff, but I was expecting that. So it was great, until I tried using it to communicate with someone in Thai - even for really, really basic stuff, often they had absolutely no idea. It was just way off.

While you can feed western languages through it and get great, usable results, for Asian languages besides Chinese and Japanese it’s next to useless. I’m guessing there isn’t much of an incentive for Google to focus on other Asian languages - for example, in Android 2.1 on the Nexus One there is no way to even install fonts for less-popular Asian scripts like Thai, much less inputting text in those scripts - despite this capability being available on certain other Android phones (you can install it on the Nexus One if you root it, of course).

Based on what their technique for learning translation is, though, hopefully this will improve over time. It’s an impressive system as it is, but very much limited to “popular” languages and those very similar to English.

Re:Similar languages - by MBCook (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

This seems like the ideal opportunity to mention Translation Party. You give it English, and it translates it to and back from Japanese until the input and output English are the same.

It can be a ton of fun.

Re:Similar languages - by hardburn (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I’ve worked on payment processing for web sites in Korea before. The translations of error messages we get from the system, then passed through Google translate, are exactly as good as the translations we get back from a human translator. That is, not useful at all.

Converting that article from English to Chinese to - by Rei (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

English, with Google Translate:

—- 
Google’s rapid rise to the translation of business executives is a result of what Google released a complex problem, and its powerful computing power for reminding me. The data center, and its Web search, it may be now, when attacked with the network, is the world’s largest computer. Google’s machine translation technology is being used to push forward the limit. Last month, for example, it indicated that it was a combination of image analysis of the translation tools to enable a person, says that while walking in the German mobile phone menu, photos and immediately the English translation. … In the mid-90s, researchers began to favor a so-called statistical methods. They found that if they ate the computer or hundreds of thousands of millions of paragraphs and the translation of humans, it can learn how to make an accurate translation of the new text of speculation. Facts have proved that this technology requires large amounts of data and a lot of computing power, is the right of Google’s alley. … Google’s service is sufficient to convey the essence of news articles, it has become a quick translation of millions of people everywhere. 
—-

Okay, perhaps not spectacular… but compared to Babelfish:

—- …Is anything the prompt possible to occur to the translation business’s crown trapezoid’s Google quick rise, when Google unties it when the complex question violence computing power. Perhaps the data central network it for the net search establishment now is, when attacks together, world large-scale computer. Google uses that machine to push in the translation technology limit. The previous month, for example, it said that it operates and the image analysis unifies its translation tool, allows the human to adopt a menu the handset picture and obtains one with German immediately English translation. … in the mid-1990s, researcher started to favor the so-called statistical method. They have discovered that if they have fed the translation which the computer thousands or the tens of thousands of paragraphs and their person cause, its possibly academic society does about what kind of guesses translator accurately the new text. _ it this technology, requests the huge large amount data finally and completely the calculated horsepower, is correct Google the alley. … The Google service is enough good expresses the news article the essence, and it has become translation quick origin tens of thousands of people 
—-

Re:Witch hunts - by Jeremy Allison - Sam (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Jeff was *definitely* one of the architects Novell/Microsoft deal, and had been part of the leadership for at least a year when it was finalized. I know. I was there.

But don’t let facts get in the way of your post.

Jeremy.

Re:Oh, HIM - by bth (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
It is fine to argue with Jeff’s software philosophy, his use of buzz words in his blog, or his politics. But he is not an idiot MBA who doesn’t know his way around a PC. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE (for his technical contributions in algorithms and computer networks). He was a researcher before he became a corporate exec (see his publications at http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/j/Jaffe:Jeffrey_M=.html/ and http://portal.acm.org/results.cfm?coll=portal&dl=ACM&query=Jeffrey+M.+Jaffe&short=1/).

Re:w3c outliving its usefulness - by DragonWriter (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Given all of the link ins between the w3C and the corporations, maybe it is times to abolish it and start with a new standards body.

The links between W3C and the corporations that actually implement technology used on the web are one of the things that make it useful as a standards body.

If the major vendors weren’t involved in the standards body, it would be an academic exercise with no impact on the real world.

Re:How about? - by dkf (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The main reason to not do that is that you probably won’t get either the (main) browser makers or the users to show up. Without them, you’re simply irrelevant. But if they do turn up, you’ve effectively got the W3C (with maybe a round of musical chairmanships at the top). Lot of fuss and bother to achieve nothing of value.

Re:Mixed Feelings - by causality (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Agreed. It’s not an issue of acceptability of standards. Microsoft has lots of talented employees to whom it could assign that task. It’s an issue of trust. Time and again, this company has proven that it will act in its own interests (which is acceptable from a corporation) to the detriment of everyone else’s interests (which is not acceptable from anyone).  
 
Meanwhile, it has given few or no examples of honoring the purpose of open standards. There’s simply no reason whatsoever to believe that this time they really intend to play fair and be honest, and by that I mean the-truth-and-the-whole-truth honesty. It’s an amazing example of collective stupidity and/or a collective short memory that anyone even pretends this is a question. It might be comedic if it didn’t cause so many complications for so many people.  
 
Naturally Microsoft doesn’t have to bear the cost of those complications. When it decided long ago that IE would not follow standards very well, this forced many Web developers to expend a great deal of extra effort to handle IE’s incompatibilities. Let X equal the amount of time and effort it would take to design such a Web site for a single universal standard to which all browsers adhere. Let Y equal the (larger) amount of time and effort it took to design such a Web site that handles IE’s intentional incompatibilities. Do you think Microsoft has ever had to pay for Y - X? In principle this makes them a lot like spammers, not in the sense that MS sends tons of unsolicited e-mails, but in the sense that others have to bear the cost of their marketing.

Who is IPEX? - by eepok (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?s=d01ac05d09e4f3d3bfb4364cdbc5d2af&p=1035432866&postcount=927

From [H] Forums:

Re:Who is IPEX? - by hey! (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

No. Gray market does not mean counterfeit. It is just as legal as “normal” channels, although manufacturers don’t like it.

Let’s say I manufacture a widget in Indonesia and sell it to US distributors for $100. I sell the same widget to Indian distributors for $10, because you can’t sell this widget for as much there. I make the Indian distributor promise he won’t sell back to the US and undercut my official channel price. But I can’t control what people downstream do with the widget. Indians being smart and enterprising, somebody there figures out he can buy a boatload of widgets from the distributor, ship them back to the US, and sell them at a profit for $40.

That’s gray market. It’s the legitimate goods, made on the same assembly line, and passing from hand to hand by completely legal sales. The manufacturers don’t like it, and I may cut off my Indian distributor if I think he’s involved with this or turning a blind eye. That means the incentive is for gray market sellers to be secretive, and therein lies the potential for a black marketeer to step into the process and represent himself as a gray marketeer.

When somebody steals widgets from the Indonesian factory, or repackages rejects being thrown out and represents them as good, or sells a non-functional plastic knock-off and represents it as functional, that’s *black* market.

You may end up buying black market goods from somebody who represents himself as a gray marketeer. It could be because he is a fraud, but not necessarily. Goods pass from hand to hand in the gray market, and the fraud may be removed one or two transactions from your purchase.

Re:Why does NewEgg even need a distributor? - by swb (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I get why Intel doesn’t want to *retail* them, but what’s the point of a wholesaler when you have a retail distributor as huge as Newegg?

And the same is true of other products sold via other retailers.

It almost seems like “we/they” put up with a needless set of middlemen who only mark stuff up.

D&H Distributing - by ptbarnett (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
HardOCP was apparently the original source of the allegation that D&H Distributing was the source of the counterfeit CPUs. They have since apologized to D&H, claiming that their source of information was someone inside NewEgg.

Counterfeit Intel CPU Saga Comes to a Close

At no time did HardOCP speculate as to what company was supplying the counterfeit processors to Newegg. Our source that informed us of the supplier being D&H Distributing came from within Newegg’s organization. We belived the information to be accurate and reported it to our readers. Newegg is stating that IPEX shipped it the counterfeit processors. I am not sure as to why we would get conflicting information, and we will further investigate that.

At this time we offer our apologies to D&H Distributing for naming it as the supplying distributor. HardOCP was simply reporting the information that we believed to be accurate. We would NEVER “speculate” on something of this nature, as there is NOTHING for us to gain by misinforming our readers. We will be investigating further as to why we were misinformed on this detail.

Re:D&H Distributing - by bfagan (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

This is exactly why trustworthy reporting outlets try to verify sources before reporting as fact. However, this becomes difficult in this time of now, faster, beat the other guy, instant publishing.

Ahhhh, dot.com - by Opportunist (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I spent the dot.com time in a bank auditing company. So I had a perfect view when the whole crap started to crash and burn.

Assessment of risk was completely off the bat. Everyone thought the internet is the next big thing. That really will take off. Everyone will buy everything online. Soon. Any time now. It’s so much easier. And with a concentrated storage, logistics and delivery, you simply HAVE to be cheaper (overhead-wise) than everyone else, and computers are cheaper than brick-and-mortar stores, and no shop rents, and and and… it just MUST be a huge thing! And those loans, they will pay for themselves. Easily. They have no expense, you see? They can all invest it in their computers. And stuff. And what they need. And marketing is so big, it just HAS to take off like crazy!

Believe it or not, THAT was actually the reasoning behind the unsecured multi million loans! Everyone was so hyped up about how easily they should be able to recover their investments. Hell, NOT throwing money at them would have been so stupid because everyone else did it and you just can’t stay out of it because then your revenue would be lower and nobody would give you money (sounds familiar? It reminds me a lot of the current “we had to do those high risk businesses because else we could not offer those insane interest rates and if we didn’t, nobody would have invested with us… It’s the same bull all over again).

What appearantly everyone failed (or refused) to see was that a lot of these people had little more than a pipe dream for a business plan and no experience with running a business whatsoever. We’ll certainly hear a lot of stories of people who worked at dot.com businesses at the time. Tell me: These were startups, right? How many had expensive paid-by-company lunches or parties? What cars did your bosses drive, at company expense? Where was your office, and how was it furnished? What PR stunts did you stage?

That’s not how you “invest” money. That’s how you squander it. And that’s what made the bubble burst.

Re:Where were YOU when the bomb dropped? - by spun (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I’m pretty sure that I was head of IT for a non-profit medical marijuana club in San Francisco.

Kozmo.com - by 93 Escort Wagon (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Seems like we have these retrospectives on the dot-com bubble every 1-2 years - guess it’s being driven by all the still-unemployed programmers.

I will mention (as I do in every dot-com retrospective thread) a bunch of my coworkers did their best to bankrupt Kozmo.com - unintentionally, of course. But with no minimum charge, it was the “go to” place whenever anyone was jonesing for a pint of Ben and Jerry’s or even a Snickers bar.

Oh, and we can’t have one of these threads without mentioning Eazel!

It’s amazing how so many of these companies had no business plan whatsoever. It’s REALLY amazing that, back then, some people were actually defending this practice! People who asked “what’s the long term business plan” were ridiculed as being small minded or being guilty of outmoded thinking.

Re:Kozmo.com - by ClosedSource (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

But now we have companies with down-to-earth business plans - like twitter.

When you don’t make anything… - by copponex (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

When you don’t have a manufacturing sector, it’s hard to create actual wealth. When corporate structures have co-opted your government into forcing you to compete with third world wages and shifted the tax burden from the richest to the middle class, it’s impossible.

Hey, welcome to 18th Century France! I can’t wait to see what happens next…

Signal to Noise ratio over time