Too true. For the record, said 2405FPW was calibrated using Mac OS X's calibration in advanced mode, but using my built-in colorimeters (i.e. eyeballs) rather than a store-bought colorimeter. It's also been about a month since I last calibrated it. So it's got good but not perfect calibration.
Did you know? Many LCD monitors, even if they claim to, don't actually support 24-bit color!
If you do this test and can see prominent color banding, then either you're using a crappy monitor or you have superhuman color vision. I performed this test on my Dell 2405FPW, and I see absolutely no color banding in red or blue and only the slightest, itty-bittiest hint of it in green.
I don't believe for a second that the average person could see color banding in this test at all, let alone easily.
I bought a 50" plasma some years ago, and was showing a few of my friends SDTV channels versus HDTV channels. Now, this was a very high-end plasma, properly calibrated, showing some of the prettiest content on Discovery HD, so we are talking a KICK YOU IN THE FACE improvement that anybody with half a brain should have been able to appreciate.
One was suitably impressed. The second said that she could kind of see a difference, but didn't really care. The third said she couldn't even tell.
I suspect these are the same people that buy a nice 24" LCD and then run it in 800x600 resolution. Sadly, I have seen this. After fixing it, I have then seen these same people maintain that aside from the aspect ratio change, they couldn't tell the difference.
Evidently a lot of people desperately need glasses and have absolutely no idea how bad their vision is. The weird part is that even when this is pointed out to them -- "Wait, you seriously can't tell the difference between 800x600 and 1920x1200? Please, for the love of Zeus get your eyes checked!" -- they generally act completely nonplussed and never bother to see an optometrist. I just don't get it. Why do so many people not care about having sharp eyesight?
That whole issue is asinine. When you get right down to it, every display in the world can only display three colors, which are dithered together to create the illusion of full color. Some displays also dither together multiple groups of triads in order to create a broader range of colors.
While you can certainly complain that some monitors have more visible dithering than others, only an idiot would maintain that some monitors dither and others don't. I'd love for somebody to show me a monitor which can produce a true yellow, instead of faking it with small red and green dots.
It's just being pragmatic. If Adolf Hitler had developed a filesystem and named it HitlerFS, nobody would want to use it no matter how amazingly wonderful it was. You can lament this all you like, but it won't change.
Rename HitlerFS to, say, ZFS, and suddenly it's not so offensive. If you want ReiserFS to survive, a rename is in order.
You'd rely on Time Machine if your machine was compromised???
I don't see what you're getting at. I was discussing my user files -- not code, not applications -- and merely pointed out that if they somehow got trashed, I have backups.
You're saying that if your user account got trashed by malware, you WOULDN'T use your backups? You'd just say "Well, you got me! There goes all my valuable data for the last decade! I guess I sure am a sucker!"
What, pray tell, WOULD you do in the event your user files got trashed?
"Kill" doesn't have to mean "thread terminates". Entering an infinite loop or deadlock are equally effective ways to "kill" a thread which will not cause it to release its locks, meaning you still have the problem even in Java.
As for the validity of the IQ test, it had two nearly identical Bible questions (which book comes after Genesis). Is such simple factual knowledge even relevant to IQ?
There's a slight correlation between basic knowledge like this and IQ, but it's hardly a useful type of question. Especially if the person you're testing isn't Christian.
For example, it asked me the date on which we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... I knew it was 1945, but don't know the particular date. I wasn't even born until thirty years later. I'm not sure that the fact that I didn't happen to know the exact date off the top of my head means I'm not as smart as somebody who did.
Nonsense. If you're running any Windows other than Vista, odds are that you are at all times in possession of administrator privileges. And that means that any piece of software you run also has your administrator privileges. If such a piece of software -- Firefox, for example -- has a security hole which allows arbitrary code to run, that arbitrary code has all the permission it needs to do absolutely anything it wants to your computer, such as planting keyloggers.
This is not the case with Mac OS X. My current account has administrator privileges, but they are inactive by default. I have to enter my password in order to elevate to admin permission, and such elevation applies only to the program which requested the change. This makes an attack both less likely and easier to defend against, as the program can't just silently go in and modify my applications -- it has to at least ask for permission first.
Obviously there are still dangers. My user files are still vulnerable to attack at all times, but of course Time Machine means I have backups of my files going back weeks. There is also the danger that a program could trick me into entering my password when its try intentions are nefarious, thereby getting the required permission to trash my computer. The only way to defend against that is to be very careful about when and where I enter my admin password, but that's true of any OS.
Naturally, the Linux guys claimed if it had been Windows, we'd be looking at a dead server at this point in time:)
Nonsense. Every OS makes the basic assumption that the chip is processing instructions correctly. If the chip is told to jump to address A, and instead jumps to address B because it is overheating and confused, the OS is going to crash. Doesn't matter whether it's Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, or AbsolutelyCrashProofOS-Z, it's still going to crash.
In all honestly the stability debate is getting old. The truth is that Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X are all about equally stable nowadays. All three of them pretty much only crash in the face of hardware problems or buggy device drivers.
This hits close to home, as my sister-in-law is mentally ill and unable to properly care for herself, so she is currently living with my wife and me. And her parents absolutely do not understand that this is a real illness -- they have repeatedly told her that she just needs to "snap out of it" and pull herself together, and that she just needs to exercise some willpower and stop feeling the way she does.
And of course every time they have a conversation like this she is left in tears and feeling completely worthless, which is great for somebody that's going through some serious problems to begin with. She has repeatedly said that she wishes she had some kind of gaping wound instead, because at least then people would take it seriously.
Mental illness can be frustrating -- I'm frustrated with her myself sometimes. But I have never doubted for a second that she is truly ill, and she is taking her meds and going to therapy and everything else she needs to do in order to get better. And it's working; just not quickly enough for her parents, evidently.
Believe it or not, some words in the English language have more than one meaning. Since the "bit of wire that gets hot and melts when you put too much current through it" definition obviously doesn't apply, perhaps you should consider that it's talking about the "ignition system for an explosive device" definition.
I don't know the details of this particular weapon, but nuclear ignition fuses can be very sophisticated. In an implosion-style weapon, you've got a bunch of detonators arranged in a pattern on the outside of a sphere of high explosive. It's of utmost importance that the explosive shock wave hit the center of the sphere from all sides at pretty much exactly the same time, to maximize compression on the nuclear material. There are two things that have to happen for this to be the case:
1) Explosive lenses. As each detonator fires, it creates an expanding sphere of detonation throughout the high explosive. All of these spheres will meet in the middle as the entire explosive detonates, but it's a messy and irregular shock front. You instead want a perfectly spherical shock front to all hit the nuclear material (itself a sphere) simultaneously. The most straightforward way to do this is to have two different explosives which detonate at different velocities. Basically directly underneath each detonator (the point that the expanding spherical shock wave would naturally hit first), you've got to slow the explosion down by using a lower-velocity explosive, and in between the detonators (the point that the expanding spherical shock waves would naturally hit last), you've got to speed it up by using a higher-velocity explosive. By precisely calculating and machining the interface between the two types of explosives, you can control how long it takes the shock wave to reach the nuclear material at each point -- ideally, exactly simultaneously.
2) Precise detonation. If one of the detonators fires a couple of milliseconds late, you've got a lopsided shock wave which leads to much poorer compression of the nuclear material. Poor compression leads to low yield or even no nuclear ignition at all. But you've got perhaps dozens of detonators, and making them all go off within microseconds of each other is highly non-trivial. It takes quite a bit of sophistication to time dozens of explosions to all happen at more-or-less precisely the same time, and not only is it hard, nuclear bombs are pretty much the only case in which you ever have to time things this precisely. And that means that short of specialized research into this exact problem, you're not going to have the technology to do it.
The devices which were inappropriately shipped are a solution to problem #2. Problem #1 is actually quite a bit easier -- the underlying math and science is quite straightforward (as these things go). Solve #1 and #2, and you've got the ability to create a perfectly spherical shock wave. Put a an appropriate sphere of plutonium in the middle of a sufficiently powerful spherical shock wave, and you've got a nuclear bomb.
The word "buckyball" is hardly new. I'm pretty sure it's been around since the mid-1980s, and I don't consider it to be any more obscure than, say, "triglyceride". Yet few people complain when the word triglyceride appears in an article without a definition.
And is it really that hard to look it up in Google? I'm pretty sure you've got Internet access, or else your ability to post here is a really neat trick.
Existing cryptography is based on difficult mathematics. RSA, for example, is equivalent to finding a prime factorization of a very large number. By "equivalent" I mean that factoring the number is sufficient to break the encryption, and breaking the encryption (even if you managed to do it without actually attempting to factor the number) tells you the prime factors, so you can't do one without also doing the other. If you developed an incredibly fast, novel way of breaking RSA, you would also have developed an incredibly fast, novel way of factoring large numbers, and vice versa.
So RSA is directly tied to the difficulty of factoring large numbers. As long as that remains difficult, RSA remains difficult. The second someone comes up with a fast way to factor large numbers, RSA is shattered. It's similar with other encryption algorithms -- they all fundamentally rely on certain mathematical operations being "hard". Since we generally can't prove there's no more efficient way to solve these mathematical problems, and our rapidly increasing computing power continues to make "hard" a highly relative term, it's impossible to be completely confident in any of these algorithms.
Quantum communication is different. Rather than relying on hard mathematical problems, it relies on the laws of physics. You can't intercept quantum communications without changing the signal in an obvious and measurable way which would instantly alert the communicating parties. There's no algorithm to crack, no mathematical puzzle to solve. It's just the basic properties of light that make it impossible to intercept the photons without being noticed.
Of course it's still possible that quantum communication could be "cracked" -- but the only way that would be possible is if our understanding of the laws of physics is incorrect. "Cracking" quantum communication would be basically the same as building a successful perpetual motion machine (and thereby "cracking" the laws of thermodynamics) -- yes, it's theoretically possible that our understanding of physics is flawed and therefore our trusted "laws" aren't actually true, but... well, how long has it been since any of the basic known laws of physics have been shown to be completely incorrect? I mean, even Newton's 300-year-old laws aren't really wrong -- they're extremely good approximations that work essentially perfectly for all but very high energy situations. My money's on the physicists with this one.
Thank you, well said. To me this is equivalent to bitching about, say, the Mini Cooper. "But I've got three kids! This car is too small, which makes it completely useless to me, and therefore the manufacturers are idiots!"
Not everybody has the same needs, and if the MacBook Air doesn't fit your needs.... then don't buy it. It's not like it's the only notebook Apple offers, or that Apple is the only company selling notebooks.
I call BS. Apples don't "just work" any more than XP machines do.
I concede that Apples are not perfect machines the way many fanboys claim they are, but I strongly disagree that they have as many problems as XP machines. "Just work" includes things like not having to resort to Google every time I want to find an infrequently accessed setting or command, which I find myself doing embarrassingly often on XP and Vista. They're both horribly laid out, and completely different from one another with respect to how to perform many common tasks.
OS X, even after a decade of dedicated Windows use, makes far more sense to me, and obviously to many others. It's clearly a personal matter, and you might not share the same opinion, but you can't deny that many people feel OS X is easier to navigate.
Wireless networking is hell if you want WPA encryption.
Wait... what? I've got WPA encryption on my network. The user experience was: OS X told me that the network required a password and prompted me to enter it. I entered it. And presto, I was hooked up to the network. Where exactly is the "hell" part?
What Apples do do is have more preloaded software. So, if you are considering the default software package, then sure. I have had to split my time equally between OSX and XP, and I spent far more time fiddling getting stuff to work in OSX.
What exactly did you have to fiddle with on the OS X side of things to get it to work?
If you don't want to say "hell" you can substitute "Detroit"
Hey hey hey, there are kids reading this. You know you can't say words like "Detroit" in polite company! Now go wash your mouth out with soap, young man!
Sure. But that doesn't give you the right to make copies of it, otherwise [Shady Publishing Company] could just have someone mail them a copy of [Popular Book] and then publish it with impunity.
The earliest "lighting" in 3D games was none at all: ambient only. In Doom, each sector had a defined brightness and all of the surfaces in the sector were the same brightness.
With the advent of "true" 3D, lighting could be computed in real time. You'd have a light source, and each polygon's brightness would be computed by looking at its distance and angle to the light source. This was slightly better than ambient-only lighting, but still looked like crap and was relatively expensive to implement, particularly as the number of light sources increased.
Before long we realized that there was little point in computing the lighting at runtime, since most lights stayed in one place anyway. So we used much more powerful algorithms, such as radiosity, to pre-compute the lighting of the scene, and then the "lighting" is just a static texture. You can do dynamic lights on top of that for e.g. spell effects and muzzle flash, but most of the "lighting" in the game is just prerendered texture maps.
Seems like ray tracing could use very similar techniques.
I don't get the collective perception that keeping a phone number is unusual.
Slashdot's primary demographic is high school and college students. Ten years seems like forever to kids, and the college-age ones often do switch phone numbers frequently as they move from dorm to dorm and apartment to apartment over their college career.
Go to a site with a retiree-age demographic, and you'll find a bunch of people who are surprised at not having the same phone number for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Too true. For the record, said 2405FPW was calibrated using Mac OS X's calibration in advanced mode, but using my built-in colorimeters (i.e. eyeballs) rather than a store-bought colorimeter. It's also been about a month since I last calibrated it. So it's got good but not perfect calibration.
Did you know? Many LCD monitors, even if they claim to, don't actually support 24-bit color!
If you do this test and can see prominent color banding, then either you're using a crappy monitor or you have superhuman color vision. I performed this test on my Dell 2405FPW, and I see absolutely no color banding in red or blue and only the slightest, itty-bittiest hint of it in green.
I don't believe for a second that the average person could see color banding in this test at all, let alone easily.
I bought a 50" plasma some years ago, and was showing a few of my friends SDTV channels versus HDTV channels. Now, this was a very high-end plasma, properly calibrated, showing some of the prettiest content on Discovery HD, so we are talking a KICK YOU IN THE FACE improvement that anybody with half a brain should have been able to appreciate.
One was suitably impressed. The second said that she could kind of see a difference, but didn't really care. The third said she couldn't even tell.
I suspect these are the same people that buy a nice 24" LCD and then run it in 800x600 resolution. Sadly, I have seen this. After fixing it, I have then seen these same people maintain that aside from the aspect ratio change, they couldn't tell the difference.
Evidently a lot of people desperately need glasses and have absolutely no idea how bad their vision is. The weird part is that even when this is pointed out to them -- "Wait, you seriously can't tell the difference between 800x600 and 1920x1200? Please, for the love of Zeus get your eyes checked!" -- they generally act completely nonplussed and never bother to see an optometrist. I just don't get it. Why do so many people not care about having sharp eyesight?
That whole issue is asinine. When you get right down to it, every display in the world can only display three colors, which are dithered together to create the illusion of full color. Some displays also dither together multiple groups of triads in order to create a broader range of colors.
While you can certainly complain that some monitors have more visible dithering than others, only an idiot would maintain that some monitors dither and others don't. I'd love for somebody to show me a monitor which can produce a true yellow, instead of faking it with small red and green dots.
It's just being pragmatic. If Adolf Hitler had developed a filesystem and named it HitlerFS, nobody would want to use it no matter how amazingly wonderful it was. You can lament this all you like, but it won't change.
Rename HitlerFS to, say, ZFS, and suddenly it's not so offensive. If you want ReiserFS to survive, a rename is in order.
Is freezing a big problems with the computers you're using?
Mod parent up.
You'd rely on Time Machine if your machine was compromised???
I don't see what you're getting at. I was discussing my user files -- not code, not applications -- and merely pointed out that if they somehow got trashed, I have backups.
You're saying that if your user account got trashed by malware, you WOULDN'T use your backups? You'd just say "Well, you got me! There goes all my valuable data for the last decade! I guess I sure am a sucker!"
What, pray tell, WOULD you do in the event your user files got trashed?
The threads are dead in the sense that they are nonfunctional. We call it a "dead"lock for a reason, numbnuts.
Of course it wouldn't be illegal.
"Kill" doesn't have to mean "thread terminates". Entering an infinite loop or deadlock are equally effective ways to "kill" a thread which will not cause it to release its locks, meaning you still have the problem even in Java.
As for the validity of the IQ test, it had two nearly identical Bible questions (which book comes after Genesis). Is such simple factual knowledge even relevant to IQ?
There's a slight correlation between basic knowledge like this and IQ, but it's hardly a useful type of question. Especially if the person you're testing isn't Christian.
For example, it asked me the date on which we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... I knew it was 1945, but don't know the particular date. I wasn't even born until thirty years later. I'm not sure that the fact that I didn't happen to know the exact date off the top of my head means I'm not as smart as somebody who did.
Nonsense. If you're running any Windows other than Vista, odds are that you are at all times in possession of administrator privileges. And that means that any piece of software you run also has your administrator privileges. If such a piece of software -- Firefox, for example -- has a security hole which allows arbitrary code to run, that arbitrary code has all the permission it needs to do absolutely anything it wants to your computer, such as planting keyloggers.
This is not the case with Mac OS X. My current account has administrator privileges, but they are inactive by default. I have to enter my password in order to elevate to admin permission, and such elevation applies only to the program which requested the change. This makes an attack both less likely and easier to defend against, as the program can't just silently go in and modify my applications -- it has to at least ask for permission first.
Obviously there are still dangers. My user files are still vulnerable to attack at all times, but of course Time Machine means I have backups of my files going back weeks. There is also the danger that a program could trick me into entering my password when its try intentions are nefarious, thereby getting the required permission to trash my computer. The only way to defend against that is to be very careful about when and where I enter my admin password, but that's true of any OS.
Naturally, the Linux guys claimed if it had been Windows, we'd be looking at a dead server at this point in time :)
Nonsense. Every OS makes the basic assumption that the chip is processing instructions correctly. If the chip is told to jump to address A, and instead jumps to address B because it is overheating and confused, the OS is going to crash. Doesn't matter whether it's Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, or AbsolutelyCrashProofOS-Z, it's still going to crash.
In all honestly the stability debate is getting old. The truth is that Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X are all about equally stable nowadays. All three of them pretty much only crash in the face of hardware problems or buggy device drivers.
This hits close to home, as my sister-in-law is mentally ill and unable to properly care for herself, so she is currently living with my wife and me. And her parents absolutely do not understand that this is a real illness -- they have repeatedly told her that she just needs to "snap out of it" and pull herself together, and that she just needs to exercise some willpower and stop feeling the way she does.
And of course every time they have a conversation like this she is left in tears and feeling completely worthless, which is great for somebody that's going through some serious problems to begin with. She has repeatedly said that she wishes she had some kind of gaping wound instead, because at least then people would take it seriously.
Mental illness can be frustrating -- I'm frustrated with her myself sometimes. But I have never doubted for a second that she is truly ill, and she is taking her meds and going to therapy and everything else she needs to do in order to get better. And it's working; just not quickly enough for her parents, evidently.
Believe it or not, some words in the English language have more than one meaning. Since the "bit of wire that gets hot and melts when you put too much current through it" definition obviously doesn't apply, perhaps you should consider that it's talking about the "ignition system for an explosive device" definition.
I don't know the details of this particular weapon, but nuclear ignition fuses can be very sophisticated. In an implosion-style weapon, you've got a bunch of detonators arranged in a pattern on the outside of a sphere of high explosive. It's of utmost importance that the explosive shock wave hit the center of the sphere from all sides at pretty much exactly the same time, to maximize compression on the nuclear material. There are two things that have to happen for this to be the case:
1) Explosive lenses. As each detonator fires, it creates an expanding sphere of detonation throughout the high explosive. All of these spheres will meet in the middle as the entire explosive detonates, but it's a messy and irregular shock front. You instead want a perfectly spherical shock front to all hit the nuclear material (itself a sphere) simultaneously. The most straightforward way to do this is to have two different explosives which detonate at different velocities. Basically directly underneath each detonator (the point that the expanding spherical shock wave would naturally hit first), you've got to slow the explosion down by using a lower-velocity explosive, and in between the detonators (the point that the expanding spherical shock waves would naturally hit last), you've got to speed it up by using a higher-velocity explosive. By precisely calculating and machining the interface between the two types of explosives, you can control how long it takes the shock wave to reach the nuclear material at each point -- ideally, exactly simultaneously.
2) Precise detonation. If one of the detonators fires a couple of milliseconds late, you've got a lopsided shock wave which leads to much poorer compression of the nuclear material. Poor compression leads to low yield or even no nuclear ignition at all. But you've got perhaps dozens of detonators, and making them all go off within microseconds of each other is highly non-trivial. It takes quite a bit of sophistication to time dozens of explosions to all happen at more-or-less precisely the same time, and not only is it hard, nuclear bombs are pretty much the only case in which you ever have to time things this precisely. And that means that short of specialized research into this exact problem, you're not going to have the technology to do it.
The devices which were inappropriately shipped are a solution to problem #2. Problem #1 is actually quite a bit easier -- the underlying math and science is quite straightforward (as these things go). Solve #1 and #2, and you've got the ability to create a perfectly spherical shock wave. Put a an appropriate sphere of plutonium in the middle of a sufficiently powerful spherical shock wave, and you've got a nuclear bomb.
While this is true, it's much easier to be sure that the data isn't falsified and the logic is sound if it was paid for by a disinterested entity.
The word "buckyball" is hardly new. I'm pretty sure it's been around since the mid-1980s, and I don't consider it to be any more obscure than, say, "triglyceride". Yet few people complain when the word triglyceride appears in an article without a definition.
And is it really that hard to look it up in Google? I'm pretty sure you've got Internet access, or else your ability to post here is a really neat trick.
Existing cryptography is based on difficult mathematics. RSA, for example, is equivalent to finding a prime factorization of a very large number. By "equivalent" I mean that factoring the number is sufficient to break the encryption, and breaking the encryption (even if you managed to do it without actually attempting to factor the number) tells you the prime factors, so you can't do one without also doing the other. If you developed an incredibly fast, novel way of breaking RSA, you would also have developed an incredibly fast, novel way of factoring large numbers, and vice versa.
So RSA is directly tied to the difficulty of factoring large numbers. As long as that remains difficult, RSA remains difficult. The second someone comes up with a fast way to factor large numbers, RSA is shattered. It's similar with other encryption algorithms -- they all fundamentally rely on certain mathematical operations being "hard". Since we generally can't prove there's no more efficient way to solve these mathematical problems, and our rapidly increasing computing power continues to make "hard" a highly relative term, it's impossible to be completely confident in any of these algorithms.
Quantum communication is different. Rather than relying on hard mathematical problems, it relies on the laws of physics. You can't intercept quantum communications without changing the signal in an obvious and measurable way which would instantly alert the communicating parties. There's no algorithm to crack, no mathematical puzzle to solve. It's just the basic properties of light that make it impossible to intercept the photons without being noticed.
Of course it's still possible that quantum communication could be "cracked" -- but the only way that would be possible is if our understanding of the laws of physics is incorrect. "Cracking" quantum communication would be basically the same as building a successful perpetual motion machine (and thereby "cracking" the laws of thermodynamics) -- yes, it's theoretically possible that our understanding of physics is flawed and therefore our trusted "laws" aren't actually true, but... well, how long has it been since any of the basic known laws of physics have been shown to be completely incorrect? I mean, even Newton's 300-year-old laws aren't really wrong -- they're extremely good approximations that work essentially perfectly for all but very high energy situations. My money's on the physicists with this one.
Thank you, well said. To me this is equivalent to bitching about, say, the Mini Cooper. "But I've got three kids! This car is too small, which makes it completely useless to me, and therefore the manufacturers are idiots!"
Not everybody has the same needs, and if the MacBook Air doesn't fit your needs.... then don't buy it. It's not like it's the only notebook Apple offers, or that Apple is the only company selling notebooks.
I call BS. Apples don't "just work" any more than XP machines do.
I concede that Apples are not perfect machines the way many fanboys claim they are, but I strongly disagree that they have as many problems as XP machines. "Just work" includes things like not having to resort to Google every time I want to find an infrequently accessed setting or command, which I find myself doing embarrassingly often on XP and Vista. They're both horribly laid out, and completely different from one another with respect to how to perform many common tasks.
OS X, even after a decade of dedicated Windows use, makes far more sense to me, and obviously to many others. It's clearly a personal matter, and you might not share the same opinion, but you can't deny that many people feel OS X is easier to navigate.
Wireless networking is hell if you want WPA encryption.
Wait... what? I've got WPA encryption on my network. The user experience was: OS X told me that the network required a password and prompted me to enter it. I entered it. And presto, I was hooked up to the network. Where exactly is the "hell" part?
What Apples do do is have more preloaded software. So, if you are considering the default software package, then sure. I have had to split my time equally between OSX and XP, and I spent far more time fiddling getting stuff to work in OSX.
What exactly did you have to fiddle with on the OS X side of things to get it to work?
If you don't want to say "hell" you can substitute "Detroit"
Hey hey hey, there are kids reading this. You know you can't say words like "Detroit" in polite company! Now go wash your mouth out with soap, young man!
Sure. But that doesn't give you the right to make copies of it, otherwise [Shady Publishing Company] could just have someone mail them a copy of [Popular Book] and then publish it with impunity.
The earliest "lighting" in 3D games was none at all: ambient only. In Doom, each sector had a defined brightness and all of the surfaces in the sector were the same brightness.
With the advent of "true" 3D, lighting could be computed in real time. You'd have a light source, and each polygon's brightness would be computed by looking at its distance and angle to the light source. This was slightly better than ambient-only lighting, but still looked like crap and was relatively expensive to implement, particularly as the number of light sources increased.
Before long we realized that there was little point in computing the lighting at runtime, since most lights stayed in one place anyway. So we used much more powerful algorithms, such as radiosity, to pre-compute the lighting of the scene, and then the "lighting" is just a static texture. You can do dynamic lights on top of that for e.g. spell effects and muzzle flash, but most of the "lighting" in the game is just prerendered texture maps.
Seems like ray tracing could use very similar techniques.
I don't get the collective perception that keeping a phone number is unusual.
Slashdot's primary demographic is high school and college students. Ten years seems like forever to kids, and the college-age ones often do switch phone numbers frequently as they move from dorm to dorm and apartment to apartment over their college career.
Go to a site with a retiree-age demographic, and you'll find a bunch of people who are surprised at not having the same phone number for decades.