Re:would hate to take a class with that guy
on
Is The Term Paper Dead?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Bullshit. That's exactly what a paper is full of, bullshit; 90% of the papers I wrote in college were bullshit. You quote some of the book, you do some research and quote them, and you basically regurgitate what you've read/discussed in class and add in what looks to be an opinion or position if necessary. The only papers I wrote without bullshitting were papers in fields I was actually interested in, philosophy, computer science and history; all the paper teaches you is the skill (yes it is a skill) of bullshitting. Useful if you want to climb that social ladder, but ultimately corrosive to society.
You REALLY want to teach students to set forth their ideas clearly, then you need more in-class discussion and more philosophy (philosophy's grounding point, after all, is debate). You want students to be better decision makers? Put them in charge of something besides themselves, force them to make decisions and deal with the consequences (even that might not knock sense into some people). The paper is simply busywork and bullshittingfor the student; if anything, preparation for the mounds of paperwork they'll need to wade through in their life and all the asshats they'll have to be polite with to climb that all-important social ladder (the last part is sarcasm, if you couldn't tell).
You've obviously have never been married. Actually, I am married; my wife was quite fine with it as it was convenient for her too and I use it for work-related purposes.
There's a big difference here; the Kyoto Protocol actually WOULD save energy because it is an attempt to reduce emissions and a increase in miles per gallon on vehicles which means less fossil fuels being burned, fossil fuels are stored chemical energy, thus reducing the use of fossil fuels increases energy efficiency assuming that more energy isn't expended to make cars more efficient than would be used on regular cars (or at least that the increased energy to make the car is less than the average lifetime energy savings on fossile fuels). The idea behind this little gem that Congress put out was to reduce energy use by changing when Daylight Savings Time began to increase natural light use, theoretically meaning people would use less electricity. Others already have said why this was a bad idea when it was proposed, but some reasons include that people would use more electricity in the morning instead of at night (getting up earlier means less morning light) and the fact that simply put, lights are no longer the dominate drain on our electricity use; household items and computers are and their use is not going to be effected by when Daylight Savings Time starts, you still need to use that computer at work and your fridge still needs to be on all day.
Or you can do it the easy way; there's no reason the wires have to completely invisible, simply run the wires behind couches and what-not to get to the jacks and you'll have exactly the same effect without needing to punch any holes, though you might punch a few holes in easy to do places. If you are at all capable around the house, you can avoid most of the trouble by simply going through the sheetrock/wood at the right place if it really must come out of the wall (it doesn't).
Maybe it's simply that us "nerds" actually think before we speak; maybe other people should do that too, perhaps speaking before one acts would be a good idea as well. In fact, perhaps if more people paid attention to what they said more often, we wouldn't have as many problems in the world; but I digress.
Back on topic, there's a variety of studies from both sides of the spectrum trying to prove or disprove that violent video games cause indidviduals to be violent; and most of these studies are funded by individuals with a desire to see the study say one thing or another. The truth of the matter is that the evidence isn't very clear either way, and the argument over video game violence is going to continue for a long time. Personally, I think this study is pretty solid; twenty minutes of Quake 2 can be pretty intense, and while I don't think this proves violent video games don't cause violence, it's certainly a step in that direction.
This was actually my thought too; they were probably trying to find terrorist hackers and idiot kiddy script runners using the network, but of course they won't say it was a honeypot operation because they're the US government. In any case, just being "curious" isn't an excuse to break into a computer, just because you could.
Bull. I set up my entire house with jacks, there's one in my living room, one in my room, one in my kitchen, one in my each of my kid's rooms (three total) and one in the computer room; while I wouldn't say the wires are invisible, you do need to pay attention to see them. Total cost: about $50, plus a few hours of my time. It's honestly not that hard to do either, all you're doing is running wires; of course, you do need to have some knowledge about what the hell you're doing.
Personally, I won't do anything that I want to be secure on a wireless network; they're way too easy to break into and that's my advice to anyone working on a wireless network.
So...the author of the article linked says he hasn't seen a breakdown of who voted what...but the New York Times article that he linked to gave him the breakdown. Somebody hasn't been reading their sources.
The AI in FEAR really felt like you were fighting against military-minded opponents; they try and flank you, and generally outmaneuver you with their superior numbers. It makes it much a much more interesting to game to play, because otherwise you'd just be playing a shooter where you have Matrix-style speed.
Zero proof? How about a crater almost as big as the continental United States in the Gulf of Mexico as proof of a massive object hitting the Earth? At the very least, that indicates something BIG happened in the Gulf of Mexico. How about a massive disturbance of the global geological time sequences at the same time that the dinosaurs bit it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_of_the_din osaurs/
As for mutation, there's plenty of evidence for bacteria mutating; Penicillin, once the mightiest killer of bacteria in our medicinal arsenal, is now weak against most bacteria infections. How about fossils as evidence for Evolution? Or do you believe God put them there to test our faith? Can we necessarily prove that Evolution takes place yet? No. But there isn't another theory with more evidence for it.
You know, I see no reason that faith and science have to fight; and to be honest, I don't think the average guy thinks science and religion have to be in direct conflict. Only people who take the Bible as the literal word of God himself, who think that since the Bible gives us a story of creation (more meant to teach man the folly of not following God's direct commandments and giving in to temptation) it must be what literally happened. Who's to say God didn't try a few different creatures out before settling on man? Who's to say the Big Bang wasn't started by God (or whatever creationist deity you worship)? I could talk about this for a while, but I'll leave it at that.
They also took into account how long, on average, it took for the vulnerabilities to be fixed. Personally, I think all this report shows is that none of these OSes are significantly more secure than the other; the key is just cover your ass as much as possible. Microsoft fixes its vulnerabilities faster, Mac and Red Hat have fewer severe vulnerabilities; in the end it's all a wash, just cover your ass and investigate if your computer starts acting funny. Not too hard, is it?
Actually, if you read the article, instead of just the summary (as you obviously did) you'd note that they didn't merely count patches, but looked at the number of vulnerabilities and the average time to fix each vulnerability; as well as the severity of each of the vulnerabilites on a scale of low, medium and high. Next time, read the article before you blast it.
Yeah, because relaxing is such a BAD thing, right? Video games (like any other game) are there to amuse people and help them relax; just like TV, movies and books read for enjoyment. If you don't do any of the above, I feel pretty damn sorry for you.
First off, graphical resolution has very little to do with developement costs. Graphics are usually originally vector based (done in things like Illustrator and Maya), or high-res raster files... of which are downscaled immensely when going over to a console. This is pretty much true of any graphic design field. For my TV production (still NTSC), I do a lot of my graphics in vector or high-res raster, just in case I may need to use the graphics later for print, or to do some rescaling animations. Graphics are almost always done with the mindset that they may someday go to print media, which means that even the most advanced HD doesn't come anywhere close. Bottom line is, it takes almost no more developement to do HD graphics than SD, since both are going to be highly downscaled anyway. Eh, wrong. In games you don't just take a high-rest raster file and toss it in and expect it to work; it won't. Game renderers use a different sort of engine, which (while still vector-based) has to model things in real-time with physical reactions to collisions between objects; an object not only needs a model, but properties that determine how actions it performs or has performed on it by other objects will effect it. What's more, you don't usually just buy an engine (assuming you don't make one...which takes far longer) and then use it as is, you usually tweak it to optimize its performance for your game type; optimizing an engine can take quite a bit of time on its own.
Why would game graphics be done with the mindset that they may someday go to print media? They're not going to use a game graphics engine to make a magazine; there are far-better, static renderers out there that will produce a much better shot in a few hours (given a raster or some other sort of file) that an engine designed for modeling games.
The cost to make a game (or any other product) ALWAYS factors into the end selling price; with very few exceptions (one of them being game consoles, which recoup their losses from licensing fees); any first year business student can tell you that. Nobody is going to sell a game at a loss, nor are they going to sell a game at so low a price to merely recoup their money; they're going to sell their game at a profit, the same as any other product
Now, developers have said that the cost of developing for systems like the PS3 and the 360 is higher, they could be lying and if they are we won't necessarily know without comparing similar titles from the two different "generations of consoles" side-by-side (a tough task, as no two games are exactly the same); assuming they are telling the truth, this would mean their cost went up, and to keep making a profit they would therefore have to increase price. The discrepancy, in my opinon, between Wii games' prices and PS3 and 360 games' prices likely comes from a difference of cost; the reason why is the graphics.
I don't know if you've ever done graphics programming before, but it's extremely time consuming to build a renderer; especially if you do it from scratch or nearly from scratch, like many "next-gen" games are. Not only getting the engine to work, but getting the engine to look good is going to take up a lot of time making a game. You're talking about some rather complex linear algebra here, each image is made up of the color results of thousands of collisions and if only a few are off, the whole image looks bad. Slight imperfections in the formula can ruin the entire image and reducing imperfections can take months of hard programming and mathematical work. Usually this engine also deals with game collisions (bullet impacts, punches, running into walls, etc.).
Next there's making models, which is, again time-consuming; this time because many games go through many many models of their characters before settling on a definate one and each model can take a great deal of time to make and tweak, even with professional tools.
In all, graphics and modelling are going to take more time on a game than actually making the levels and most gameplay elements. Now, if you go with an already-built engine and tweak it, your costs significantly drop for actual graphical development, but you see a big increase in licensing fees (game engines are not cheap). So, if you have a game system where people aren't expecting nearly as much eye-candy (the Wii, as an example) as other systems, you can significantly drop your costs by using a weaker graphics engine. That's why Wii games cost less, more likely than not (that and most of the Wii games out so far are ports of other games for systems that were simply modified for the Wii).
Seriously guys, get a life; the competition in the console market between Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo is not a battle between good and evil...or good, neutral and evil; it's a competition between competing systems to get you to buy their system for money. This is about business, these aren't competing political ideologies or antyhing; just high-tech toys for both grown-ups and children. Buy the system that has what you want (both in terms of games and hardware features) and don't worry about the company behind it. None of these companies cause genocides or anything like that. As for the article itself, I'd say that the PS3 really isn't doing that badly; the idea that it is is really just hype, it's not selling as well as the Wii, that's true, but the generation is young.
I'd say that the article author is right in that computer science as he knew and loved it is dead; by and large. The need for people to write code that interacts directly with the hardware is all but dead in most professional software coding. There are certainly still fields to be explored, like any scientific field, but I think that much like many scientific research fields, computer science research will become a niche. Instead, what I think you will begin to see is specialized computing professionals (and university/tech school training to that effect) and computer science no longer be intertwined. The "old school" is dead, long live the "new school".
What he's pointing out is that the government defined how the word would be used in packaging, paperwork and official government references. That is EXACTLY what New Mexico is aiming to do; define how Pluto is referred to in their state; granted, it is somewhat pointless, but so are most of the things politicians do anyway. This is an attempt to look good to the voters of New Mexico by backing up a "planet" discovered by someone in their state; I've definately seen bigger wastes of time.
The Deseret News is nothing but a rag, I've lived in Utah for years and I don't think I've ever seen them report anything well and timely. The Deseret News will support anything Mormon or Utah over other religions and states, don't bother reading.
Jesus Christ, whoever put "trail of tears" in there needs to have their nuts removed; they obviously have no idea what the Trail of Tears was about, either that or they're an insensitive asshole (I'd probably go for both, myself). Let's never compare Microsoft's screw-ups to murder and relocation again, ever.
You know what that type of advice gets you? A pink slip. If your company has any sort of decent IT department, they'll know immediately when something is plugged into their network with a new MAC address; what's more many companies have a policy that states that plugging in anything unauthorized into the network gets you a search for a new job automatically. Just because IT is overworked, doesn't mean you should just start doing things yourself, in fact that usually results in more work for IT, not less.
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Bullshit. That's exactly what a paper is full of, bullshit; 90% of the papers I wrote in college were bullshit. You quote some of the book, you do some research and quote them, and you basically regurgitate what you've read/discussed in class and add in what looks to be an opinion or position if necessary. The only papers I wrote without bullshitting were papers in fields I was actually interested in, philosophy, computer science and history; all the paper teaches you is the skill (yes it is a skill) of bullshitting. Useful if you want to climb that social ladder, but ultimately corrosive to society.
You REALLY want to teach students to set forth their ideas clearly, then you need more in-class discussion and more philosophy (philosophy's grounding point, after all, is debate). You want students to be better decision makers? Put them in charge of something besides themselves, force them to make decisions and deal with the consequences (even that might not knock sense into some people). The paper is simply busywork and bullshittingfor the student; if anything, preparation for the mounds of paperwork they'll need to wade through in their life and all the asshats they'll have to be polite with to climb that all-important social ladder (the last part is sarcasm, if you couldn't tell).
There's a big difference here; the Kyoto Protocol actually WOULD save energy because it is an attempt to reduce emissions and a increase in miles per gallon on vehicles which means less fossil fuels being burned, fossil fuels are stored chemical energy, thus reducing the use of fossil fuels increases energy efficiency assuming that more energy isn't expended to make cars more efficient than would be used on regular cars (or at least that the increased energy to make the car is less than the average lifetime energy savings on fossile fuels). The idea behind this little gem that Congress put out was to reduce energy use by changing when Daylight Savings Time began to increase natural light use, theoretically meaning people would use less electricity. Others already have said why this was a bad idea when it was proposed, but some reasons include that people would use more electricity in the morning instead of at night (getting up earlier means less morning light) and the fact that simply put, lights are no longer the dominate drain on our electricity use; household items and computers are and their use is not going to be effected by when Daylight Savings Time starts, you still need to use that computer at work and your fridge still needs to be on all day.
Or you can do it the easy way; there's no reason the wires have to completely invisible, simply run the wires behind couches and what-not to get to the jacks and you'll have exactly the same effect without needing to punch any holes, though you might punch a few holes in easy to do places. If you are at all capable around the house, you can avoid most of the trouble by simply going through the sheetrock/wood at the right place if it really must come out of the wall (it doesn't).
Maybe it's simply that us "nerds" actually think before we speak; maybe other people should do that too, perhaps speaking before one acts would be a good idea as well. In fact, perhaps if more people paid attention to what they said more often, we wouldn't have as many problems in the world; but I digress.
Back on topic, there's a variety of studies from both sides of the spectrum trying to prove or disprove that violent video games cause indidviduals to be violent; and most of these studies are funded by individuals with a desire to see the study say one thing or another. The truth of the matter is that the evidence isn't very clear either way, and the argument over video game violence is going to continue for a long time. Personally, I think this study is pretty solid; twenty minutes of Quake 2 can be pretty intense, and while I don't think this proves violent video games don't cause violence, it's certainly a step in that direction.
This was actually my thought too; they were probably trying to find terrorist hackers and idiot kiddy script runners using the network, but of course they won't say it was a honeypot operation because they're the US government. In any case, just being "curious" isn't an excuse to break into a computer, just because you could.
I've said this for a while now, it makes things much less confusing.
Bull. I set up my entire house with jacks, there's one in my living room, one in my room, one in my kitchen, one in my each of my kid's rooms (three total) and one in the computer room; while I wouldn't say the wires are invisible, you do need to pay attention to see them. Total cost: about $50, plus a few hours of my time. It's honestly not that hard to do either, all you're doing is running wires; of course, you do need to have some knowledge about what the hell you're doing.
Personally, I won't do anything that I want to be secure on a wireless network; they're way too easy to break into and that's my advice to anyone working on a wireless network.
So...the author of the article linked says he hasn't seen a breakdown of who voted what...but the New York Times article that he linked to gave him the breakdown. Somebody hasn't been reading their sources.
The AI in FEAR really felt like you were fighting against military-minded opponents; they try and flank you, and generally outmaneuver you with their superior numbers. It makes it much a much more interesting to game to play, because otherwise you'd just be playing a shooter where you have Matrix-style speed.
Zero proof? How about a crater almost as big as the continental United States in the Gulf of Mexico as proof of a massive object hitting the Earth? At the very least, that indicates something BIG happened in the Gulf of Mexico. How about a massive disturbance of the global geological time sequences at the same time that the dinosaurs bit it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_of_the_din osaurs/
As for mutation, there's plenty of evidence for bacteria mutating; Penicillin, once the mightiest killer of bacteria in our medicinal arsenal, is now weak against most bacteria infections. How about fossils as evidence for Evolution? Or do you believe God put them there to test our faith? Can we necessarily prove that Evolution takes place yet? No. But there isn't another theory with more evidence for it.
You know, I see no reason that faith and science have to fight; and to be honest, I don't think the average guy thinks science and religion have to be in direct conflict. Only people who take the Bible as the literal word of God himself, who think that since the Bible gives us a story of creation (more meant to teach man the folly of not following God's direct commandments and giving in to temptation) it must be what literally happened. Who's to say God didn't try a few different creatures out before settling on man? Who's to say the Big Bang wasn't started by God (or whatever creationist deity you worship)? I could talk about this for a while, but I'll leave it at that.
They also took into account how long, on average, it took for the vulnerabilities to be fixed. Personally, I think all this report shows is that none of these OSes are significantly more secure than the other; the key is just cover your ass as much as possible. Microsoft fixes its vulnerabilities faster, Mac and Red Hat have fewer severe vulnerabilities; in the end it's all a wash, just cover your ass and investigate if your computer starts acting funny. Not too hard, is it?
Read the article, not the summary; they looked at how fast problems were fixed and the number of vulnerabilities, not just the number of patches.
Actually, if you read the article, instead of just the summary (as you obviously did) you'd note that they didn't merely count patches, but looked at the number of vulnerabilities and the average time to fix each vulnerability; as well as the severity of each of the vulnerabilites on a scale of low, medium and high. Next time, read the article before you blast it.
Yeah, because relaxing is such a BAD thing, right? Video games (like any other game) are there to amuse people and help them relax; just like TV, movies and books read for enjoyment. If you don't do any of the above, I feel pretty damn sorry for you.
First off, graphical resolution has very little to do with developement costs. Graphics are usually originally vector based (done in things like Illustrator and Maya), or high-res raster files... of which are downscaled immensely when going over to a console. This is pretty much true of any graphic design field. For my TV production (still NTSC), I do a lot of my graphics in vector or high-res raster, just in case I may need to use the graphics later for print, or to do some rescaling animations. Graphics are almost always done with the mindset that they may someday go to print media, which means that even the most advanced HD doesn't come anywhere close. Bottom line is, it takes almost no more developement to do HD graphics than SD, since both are going to be highly downscaled anyway. Eh, wrong. In games you don't just take a high-rest raster file and toss it in and expect it to work; it won't. Game renderers use a different sort of engine, which (while still vector-based) has to model things in real-time with physical reactions to collisions between objects; an object not only needs a model, but properties that determine how actions it performs or has performed on it by other objects will effect it. What's more, you don't usually just buy an engine (assuming you don't make one...which takes far longer) and then use it as is, you usually tweak it to optimize its performance for your game type; optimizing an engine can take quite a bit of time on its own.
Why would game graphics be done with the mindset that they may someday go to print media? They're not going to use a game graphics engine to make a magazine; there are far-better, static renderers out there that will produce a much better shot in a few hours (given a raster or some other sort of file) that an engine designed for modeling games.
The cost to make a game (or any other product) ALWAYS factors into the end selling price; with very few exceptions (one of them being game consoles, which recoup their losses from licensing fees); any first year business student can tell you that. Nobody is going to sell a game at a loss, nor are they going to sell a game at so low a price to merely recoup their money; they're going to sell their game at a profit, the same as any other product
Now, developers have said that the cost of developing for systems like the PS3 and the 360 is higher, they could be lying and if they are we won't necessarily know without comparing similar titles from the two different "generations of consoles" side-by-side (a tough task, as no two games are exactly the same); assuming they are telling the truth, this would mean their cost went up, and to keep making a profit they would therefore have to increase price. The discrepancy, in my opinon, between Wii games' prices and PS3 and 360 games' prices likely comes from a difference of cost; the reason why is the graphics.
I don't know if you've ever done graphics programming before, but it's extremely time consuming to build a renderer; especially if you do it from scratch or nearly from scratch, like many "next-gen" games are. Not only getting the engine to work, but getting the engine to look good is going to take up a lot of time making a game. You're talking about some rather complex linear algebra here, each image is made up of the color results of thousands of collisions and if only a few are off, the whole image looks bad. Slight imperfections in the formula can ruin the entire image and reducing imperfections can take months of hard programming and mathematical work. Usually this engine also deals with game collisions (bullet impacts, punches, running into walls, etc.).
Next there's making models, which is, again time-consuming; this time because many games go through many many models of their characters before settling on a definate one and each model can take a great deal of time to make and tweak, even with professional tools.
In all, graphics and modelling are going to take more time on a game than actually making the levels and most gameplay elements. Now, if you go with an already-built engine and tweak it, your costs significantly drop for actual graphical development, but you see a big increase in licensing fees (game engines are not cheap). So, if you have a game system where people aren't expecting nearly as much eye-candy (the Wii, as an example) as other systems, you can significantly drop your costs by using a weaker graphics engine. That's why Wii games cost less, more likely than not (that and most of the Wii games out so far are ports of other games for systems that were simply modified for the Wii).
We're #1! We're #1! The US is #1! WOOOO!
Wow, somebody's a racist.
Seriously guys, get a life; the competition in the console market between Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo is not a battle between good and evil...or good, neutral and evil; it's a competition between competing systems to get you to buy their system for money. This is about business, these aren't competing political ideologies or antyhing; just high-tech toys for both grown-ups and children. Buy the system that has what you want (both in terms of games and hardware features) and don't worry about the company behind it. None of these companies cause genocides or anything like that. As for the article itself, I'd say that the PS3 really isn't doing that badly; the idea that it is is really just hype, it's not selling as well as the Wii, that's true, but the generation is young.
I'd say that the article author is right in that computer science as he knew and loved it is dead; by and large. The need for people to write code that interacts directly with the hardware is all but dead in most professional software coding. There are certainly still fields to be explored, like any scientific field, but I think that much like many scientific research fields, computer science research will become a niche. Instead, what I think you will begin to see is specialized computing professionals (and university/tech school training to that effect) and computer science no longer be intertwined. The "old school" is dead, long live the "new school".
What he's pointing out is that the government defined how the word would be used in packaging, paperwork and official government references. That is EXACTLY what New Mexico is aiming to do; define how Pluto is referred to in their state; granted, it is somewhat pointless, but so are most of the things politicians do anyway. This is an attempt to look good to the voters of New Mexico by backing up a "planet" discovered by someone in their state; I've definately seen bigger wastes of time.
The Deseret News is nothing but a rag, I've lived in Utah for years and I don't think I've ever seen them report anything well and timely. The Deseret News will support anything Mormon or Utah over other religions and states, don't bother reading.
Jesus Christ, whoever put "trail of tears" in there needs to have their nuts removed; they obviously have no idea what the Trail of Tears was about, either that or they're an insensitive asshole (I'd probably go for both, myself). Let's never compare Microsoft's screw-ups to murder and relocation again, ever.
You know what that type of advice gets you? A pink slip. If your company has any sort of decent IT department, they'll know immediately when something is plugged into their network with a new MAC address; what's more many companies have a policy that states that plugging in anything unauthorized into the network gets you a search for a new job automatically. Just because IT is overworked, doesn't mean you should just start doing things yourself, in fact that usually results in more work for IT, not less.