Oh yeah, and you can get a 16 GB iPhone 4 for SEK 6 990 with no contract and not locked to any provider at Dustin Home, and if they're selling it at that price you know there's someone out there selling it for less. With a contract the price is likely to be a lot less.
The first version was something like 10-15.000 SEK if you counted in the subscription you had to get because back then you couldn't buy it without one.
And yet I didn't even pay SEK 8 000 for mine (including the subscription costs). Of course, you had a choice in what subscription you chose (seriously, Telia has a buttload of different plans) and regardless of what smartphone you get you'll have to pay for the service one way or another so it's not really fair to add that to the cost of the phone unless you do that with every phone (in which case the most expensive phones would probably be whatever models are most popular with teenage girls as they tend to use pre-paid SIM cards that they refill at least once a week).
This might be impossible, but film has a number of things over even the best digital cameras. From color gradients (256 levels of RGB versus infinite),
Actually, regular 8-bit color in photography means that you have 8 bits per color channel which adds up to 24 bits and 16 777 216 possible colors in your palette. With 16 bit RAW images you have 281 474 976 710 656 possible colors. Not quite infinite but close enough as long as you don't insist on taking only really poorly composed shots.
...to the fact that it is quite difficult to doctor film without that being detected (at least easier than firing up Photoshop.)
Personally I find this to be an advantage of digital, even if I slightly botch a picture I can easily fix it in Aperture/Lightroom. It also lessens the reliance on a third party to develop your film (only so you can then scan it and retouch/post-process it digitally).
I stuck with my film camera for a long time before I decided to get a D90 and I'm taking a lot more pictures these days, and I'm enjoying it a lot more, I can take several hundred RAW pictures without worrying about the cost of developing film, then I can pick the best shots when I'm done shooting. No need to wait for development (or developing on your own), just pop the memory card in a computer and go through the pictures, choose those you like the most, apply a few minor tweaks if necessary and finally you have the absolute favorites printed.
Oh, we are well aware of that. And thanks to wikileaks we also have proof that our government lied to the people while changing laws to be more friendly toward US corporations on orders from the US government...
I assume you're american. I'll try to put this as clearly as possible. It's not just the government that can engage in censorship. If a company that sells books decides to stop selling certain books and the only reasonable explanation for this is that they have issues with the content (despite it being legal) then that is indeed censorship. It may not be jack-booted thugs breaking down doors and torching your books but it's still censorship, they are for moral/ideological/other non-business reasons choosing to suddenly pretend that these books don't exist, that's censorship (they clearly had little trouble carrying them before so I doubt it's an issue of the books not being available).
Then, I guess he is not so proud of using drugs, now is he?
I don't think he/she stated that he/she was "proud" of his/her drug use, but even if the parent poster is proud or in no way feels guilty about his/her prior drug use that doesn't mean that it is without consequence to publicly state this fact.
There are plenty of people out there who would be happy to force someone who has not used drugs for years into rehab, or have them fired because "we don't hire druggies". That's not to mention just generally being viewed with suspicion by your peers. And if you have kids and social services find out about any prior drug use (not counting severe alcoholism though) they're very likely to put your kids in foster care (at least around here). Oh, and if you are divorced with shared custody you can bet your former spouse will use any and all drug use in the past as an excuse to get full custody of the kids.
"Free speech" doesn't mean "Free speech as long as you reveal your identity up front".
Did you ever consider that people may not be comfortable attaching their names or even their more commonly used nicknames to posts stating that they have used drugs and that they considered said drug usage to be mostly positive? There are plenty of people who have to pretend to be anti-drugs publically because their employer, friends and many others would never approve of anything short of "Drugs are bad, mmkay?".
It's not about requiring programmers to type faster than they think, it's about there being an advantage to being able to type fast enough to keep up with your thoughts without having to actually think about every other key press.
I sort of agree but the analogy used by Jeff Atwood isn't perfectly suited for the situation.
Imagine that the pianist is trying perform a piece of music. That's the "creating a program" part expressed as "creating a musical performance". Now imagine that this pianist can never remember where the different keys are, do you think the performance he is able to put together is anything like the performance put together by a second pianist who "just knows" what key to press while reading the sheet music?
Another analogy would be two photographers, their understanding of what makes a photo bad, good or amazing are equal. They have identical cameras but one photographer knows his camera so well that changing the settings is instinctive, he sees an opportunity for a good shot and without even thinking about it he adjusts the camera's settings. The other photographer also knows what settings the camera should have, it's just that he has to stop and think about how to make those changes (thinking: "Oh, which wheel was for changing the exposure time, was it this one? Oh no, wait. The other one. Oh, wrong direction..."). Which photographer do you think will produce the highest ratio of amazing/good to bad photos?
That's really the problem with programmers who type slowly, when typing takes so much active thought that they get sidetracked by it (and yes, I've met guys like that, they figure out how to do something and halfway through writing the code they lose track of the beautiful solution they came up with because they were busy trying to remember how to make a semicolon...).
There were plenty of case modders in the 90s, it's just that back then case modding tended to be more about adapting the case to functionality than art. Examples include people who soldered on homemade IDE controllers to their A500 motherboards, cut the case open and glued on another smaller plastic box for the hard drive. Or overclockers who added fans (since a lot of cases back then weren't really overclocking friendly).
Not to mention crazy stuff like the A3000 I saw that overheated unless it had a 90mm fan blowing air across the top of it with the case disassembled (too many weird heat-generating mods).
But yeah, these days a lot of case modding is more about artistic expression and "ricers" who just slap some LEDs and a biohazard cutout on their case...
Well, there's always the Sea Gripen project, and BAE used to be involved in the development of Gripen so it could probably be pitched as a "british" fighter to the british people.
Yet this problem doesn't exist here in Sweden where the population density is approximately 20.6 per square kilometer (3.3 per square kilometer in the region I live in). Perhaps it's simply that US ISPs aren't doing their jobs properly? (And no, it's not just for sites/services hosted in Sweden that we don't have any bandwidth issues, it's for pretty much anywhere except for sites/services hosted by dodgy providers (surprisingly often in the US) or in certain asian countries that have always been notorious for having crappy bandwidth to the rest of the world).
Just because you own a homework-and-Facebook PC with an Intel GMA doesn't mean you own a gaming PC. Nor does it mean you own an HDTV (a lot of families still use SDTV), or a second gaming PC to put next to the TV.
Perhaps you're from the US, from what I can tell here in Sweden the only people who still keep SD televisions around are ones who fall into the "I don't care for TV" category or the "Bah humbug! First it was TV, then COLOR TV and now they want me to get a flat one! It's all a scam, back in my days... blablabla... get off my lawn" category. Yes, there are those that can't afford a new TV but very few of those seem to play video games.
Bomberman, Street Fighter, and Smash Bros. don't need to split the screen.
Ah, but the topic in this thread was split-screen games.
I think you're missing that for a lot of people it's just as hard to get their friends to all be at the same place at the same time as it is to get them to be in the same place at the same time with their laptops.
Most of the "video game nights" I've been to lately have basically been 20-30% video games and 70-80% networked computer gaming (not counting the time spent drinking beer, eating pizza and arguing about what music to have on in the background).
From that perspective split-screen gaming is kind of pointless (most video games I've played at friends' places the last few years have been games that didn't use split-screen, like fighting games).
Just googled it and realized that the SNES was limited to 512x239 progressive or 512x478 interlaced so the resolution per player was at most 256x239...
Well, as someone who at the time was used to playing Quake on a computer with a resolution of at least 800x600 per player on a 15+ inch monitor I had serious issues with playing Goldeneye on the SNES, my friends (who didn't play computer games, only console games) thought it was amazing and couldn't understand why I bitched about the resolution being 360x288 per player or how on a 20" monitor each player's portion of the screen was tiny and blurry.
The same applies today, I know very few people who don't own a computer (those I know who don't own computers don't own computers because they don't want to, maybe if you're in the "deep south" in the US there are economic considerations but AFAIK this is not the case for most people).
Now, what kind of computer is it the average person has? Well, for one it beats the crap out of 960x540 resolutions when playing games (that's one quarter of a 1080p screen, and also a resolution lower than the one I used when playing games ten years ago).
Split-screen multiplayer was a hack to enabled multiplayer gaming before consoles were networked, sure some people actually liked it but most people are glad it's gone.
There's like a billion generic sci-fi series today. So you have to have a twist in yours to make it interesting. The whole "Ancient Egypt Gods travelling through ancient world gates" angle worked great for Stargate (the original).
The "egyptian angle" along with something about the shows which I can only describe as a "plastic" feel made it uninteresting. SGU was the first Stargate show I was mildly interested in...
I'm afraid I'll have to call shenanigans on those stats, it looks like the same boring numbers I've been hearing for 15+ years and they don't make sense, there are easily 1+ billion people in the world who speak english. It may not be their native language but they can speak it anyway, there aren't a whole lot of people out there who speak mandarin as a second language (compared to english, it's the lingua franca of the post-WW2 world, at least so far).
True, Moon was definitely a lot more pure sci-fi than most "sci-fi" movies these days. I thought it was quite good as well, not great but definitely good.
Please, no more character development for the sake of character development.
I don't mind it when it makes sense but when it seems like any and all characters who have speaking parts in a movie have to have some kind of character development (or be bad guys who die horribly) it gets kind of tiring. In general the problem with a lot of movies is that when one thing becomes old and tired the producers/directors just seem to exaggerate the formulaic parts even more.
Then there's the genre butchering which I suspect won't end anytime soon, while it happens to all genres it seems it's more common with niche genres like sci-fi. When was the last time you saw a big budget sci-fi movie that couldn't more accurately be described as "Epic action/adventure crossover with some romance for the stereotypical female moviegoer and some comedic relief for the kids. In space/the future/whatever!" rather than "sci-fi"?
I believe that the finished dimensions for a "swedish" two-by-four are 50x100 mm before it's planed and approx. 45x95 mm after being planed. And according to wikipedia a "US" two-by-four is 38 x 89 mm which kind of makes me wonder why they call it a 2x4.
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Oh yeah, and you can get a 16 GB iPhone 4 for SEK 6 990 with no contract and not locked to any provider at Dustin Home, and if they're selling it at that price you know there's someone out there selling it for less. With a contract the price is likely to be a lot less.
The first version was something like 10-15.000 SEK if you counted in the subscription you had to get because back then you couldn't buy it without one.
And yet I didn't even pay SEK 8 000 for mine (including the subscription costs). Of course, you had a choice in what subscription you chose (seriously, Telia has a buttload of different plans) and regardless of what smartphone you get you'll have to pay for the service one way or another so it's not really fair to add that to the cost of the phone unless you do that with every phone (in which case the most expensive phones would probably be whatever models are most popular with teenage girls as they tend to use pre-paid SIM cards that they refill at least once a week).
This might be impossible, but film has a number of things over even the best digital cameras. From color gradients (256 levels of RGB versus infinite),
Actually, regular 8-bit color in photography means that you have 8 bits per color channel which adds up to 24 bits and 16 777 216 possible colors in your palette. With 16 bit RAW images you have 281 474 976 710 656 possible colors. Not quite infinite but close enough as long as you don't insist on taking only really poorly composed shots.
...to the fact that it is quite difficult to doctor film without that being detected (at least easier than firing up Photoshop.)
Personally I find this to be an advantage of digital, even if I slightly botch a picture I can easily fix it in Aperture/Lightroom. It also lessens the reliance on a third party to develop your film (only so you can then scan it and retouch/post-process it digitally).
I stuck with my film camera for a long time before I decided to get a D90 and I'm taking a lot more pictures these days, and I'm enjoying it a lot more, I can take several hundred RAW pictures without worrying about the cost of developing film, then I can pick the best shots when I'm done shooting. No need to wait for development (or developing on your own), just pop the memory card in a computer and go through the pictures, choose those you like the most, apply a few minor tweaks if necessary and finally you have the absolute favorites printed.
Oh, we are well aware of that. And thanks to wikileaks we also have proof that our government lied to the people while changing laws to be more friendly toward US corporations on orders from the US government...
I assume you're american. I'll try to put this as clearly as possible. It's not just the government that can engage in censorship. If a company that sells books decides to stop selling certain books and the only reasonable explanation for this is that they have issues with the content (despite it being legal) then that is indeed censorship. It may not be jack-booted thugs breaking down doors and torching your books but it's still censorship, they are for moral/ideological/other non-business reasons choosing to suddenly pretend that these books don't exist, that's censorship (they clearly had little trouble carrying them before so I doubt it's an issue of the books not being available).
Then, I guess he is not so proud of using drugs, now is he?
I don't think he/she stated that he/she was "proud" of his/her drug use, but even if the parent poster is proud or in no way feels guilty about his/her prior drug use that doesn't mean that it is without consequence to publicly state this fact.
There are plenty of people out there who would be happy to force someone who has not used drugs for years into rehab, or have them fired because "we don't hire druggies". That's not to mention just generally being viewed with suspicion by your peers. And if you have kids and social services find out about any prior drug use (not counting severe alcoholism though) they're very likely to put your kids in foster care (at least around here). Oh, and if you are divorced with shared custody you can bet your former spouse will use any and all drug use in the past as an excuse to get full custody of the kids.
"Free speech" doesn't mean "Free speech as long as you reveal your identity up front".
Did you ever consider that people may not be comfortable attaching their names or even their more commonly used nicknames to posts stating that they have used drugs and that they considered said drug usage to be mostly positive? There are plenty of people who have to pretend to be anti-drugs publically because their employer, friends and many others would never approve of anything short of "Drugs are bad, mmkay?".
It's not about requiring programmers to type faster than they think, it's about there being an advantage to being able to type fast enough to keep up with your thoughts without having to actually think about every other key press.
I sort of agree but the analogy used by Jeff Atwood isn't perfectly suited for the situation.
Imagine that the pianist is trying perform a piece of music. That's the "creating a program" part expressed as "creating a musical performance". Now imagine that this pianist can never remember where the different keys are, do you think the performance he is able to put together is anything like the performance put together by a second pianist who "just knows" what key to press while reading the sheet music?
Another analogy would be two photographers, their understanding of what makes a photo bad, good or amazing are equal. They have identical cameras but one photographer knows his camera so well that changing the settings is instinctive, he sees an opportunity for a good shot and without even thinking about it he adjusts the camera's settings. The other photographer also knows what settings the camera should have, it's just that he has to stop and think about how to make those changes (thinking: "Oh, which wheel was for changing the exposure time, was it this one? Oh no, wait. The other one. Oh, wrong direction..."). Which photographer do you think will produce the highest ratio of amazing/good to bad photos?
That's really the problem with programmers who type slowly, when typing takes so much active thought that they get sidetracked by it (and yes, I've met guys like that, they figure out how to do something and halfway through writing the code they lose track of the beautiful solution they came up with because they were busy trying to remember how to make a semicolon...).
There were plenty of case modders in the 90s, it's just that back then case modding tended to be more about adapting the case to functionality than art. Examples include people who soldered on homemade IDE controllers to their A500 motherboards, cut the case open and glued on another smaller plastic box for the hard drive. Or overclockers who added fans (since a lot of cases back then weren't really overclocking friendly).
Not to mention crazy stuff like the A3000 I saw that overheated unless it had a 90mm fan blowing air across the top of it with the case disassembled (too many weird heat-generating mods).
But yeah, these days a lot of case modding is more about artistic expression and "ricers" who just slap some LEDs and a biohazard cutout on their case...
Well, there's always the Sea Gripen project, and BAE used to be involved in the development of Gripen so it could probably be pitched as a "british" fighter to the british people.
Yet this problem doesn't exist here in Sweden where the population density is approximately 20.6 per square kilometer (3.3 per square kilometer in the region I live in). Perhaps it's simply that US ISPs aren't doing their jobs properly? (And no, it's not just for sites/services hosted in Sweden that we don't have any bandwidth issues, it's for pretty much anywhere except for sites/services hosted by dodgy providers (surprisingly often in the US) or in certain asian countries that have always been notorious for having crappy bandwidth to the rest of the world).
Just because you own a homework-and-Facebook PC with an Intel GMA doesn't mean you own a gaming PC. Nor does it mean you own an HDTV (a lot of families still use SDTV), or a second gaming PC to put next to the TV.
Perhaps you're from the US, from what I can tell here in Sweden the only people who still keep SD televisions around are ones who fall into the "I don't care for TV" category or the "Bah humbug! First it was TV, then COLOR TV and now they want me to get a flat one! It's all a scam, back in my days... blablabla... get off my lawn" category. Yes, there are those that can't afford a new TV but very few of those seem to play video games.
Bomberman, Street Fighter, and Smash Bros. don't need to split the screen.
Ah, but the topic in this thread was split-screen games.
I think you're missing that for a lot of people it's just as hard to get their friends to all be at the same place at the same time as it is to get them to be in the same place at the same time with their laptops.
Most of the "video game nights" I've been to lately have basically been 20-30% video games and 70-80% networked computer gaming (not counting the time spent drinking beer, eating pizza and arguing about what music to have on in the background).
From that perspective split-screen gaming is kind of pointless (most video games I've played at friends' places the last few years have been games that didn't use split-screen, like fighting games).
My bad, of course it was for the N64. Nevertheless, the resolution was still pitifully low.
Just googled it and realized that the SNES was limited to 512x239 progressive or 512x478 interlaced so the resolution per player was at most 256x239...
Well, as someone who at the time was used to playing Quake on a computer with a resolution of at least 800x600 per player on a 15+ inch monitor I had serious issues with playing Goldeneye on the SNES, my friends (who didn't play computer games, only console games) thought it was amazing and couldn't understand why I bitched about the resolution being 360x288 per player or how on a 20" monitor each player's portion of the screen was tiny and blurry.
The same applies today, I know very few people who don't own a computer (those I know who don't own computers don't own computers because they don't want to, maybe if you're in the "deep south" in the US there are economic considerations but AFAIK this is not the case for most people).
Now, what kind of computer is it the average person has? Well, for one it beats the crap out of 960x540 resolutions when playing games (that's one quarter of a 1080p screen, and also a resolution lower than the one I used when playing games ten years ago).
Split-screen multiplayer was a hack to enabled multiplayer gaming before consoles were networked, sure some people actually liked it but most people are glad it's gone.
Actually, according to the backstory Eli was an MIT dropout who moved back in with his mom who had HIV.
There's like a billion generic sci-fi series today. So you have to have a twist in yours to make it interesting. The whole "Ancient Egypt Gods travelling through ancient world gates" angle worked great for Stargate (the original).
The "egyptian angle" along with something about the shows which I can only describe as a "plastic" feel made it uninteresting. SGU was the first Stargate show I was mildly interested in...
I'm afraid I'll have to call shenanigans on those stats, it looks like the same boring numbers I've been hearing for 15+ years and they don't make sense, there are easily 1+ billion people in the world who speak english. It may not be their native language but they can speak it anyway, there aren't a whole lot of people out there who speak mandarin as a second language (compared to english, it's the lingua franca of the post-WW2 world, at least so far).
True, Moon was definitely a lot more pure sci-fi than most "sci-fi" movies these days. I thought it was quite good as well, not great but definitely good.
Please, no more character development for the sake of character development.
I don't mind it when it makes sense but when it seems like any and all characters who have speaking parts in a movie have to have some kind of character development (or be bad guys who die horribly) it gets kind of tiring. In general the problem with a lot of movies is that when one thing becomes old and tired the producers/directors just seem to exaggerate the formulaic parts even more.
Then there's the genre butchering which I suspect won't end anytime soon, while it happens to all genres it seems it's more common with niche genres like sci-fi. When was the last time you saw a big budget sci-fi movie that couldn't more accurately be described as "Epic action/adventure crossover with some romance for the stereotypical female moviegoer and some comedic relief for the kids. In space/the future/whatever!" rather than "sci-fi"?
No, a Swedish "2x4" is 50x100 mm, after planing the approx dimensions are 45x95 mm. Those are the "standard" dimensions available.
According to Wikipedia the dimensions for a US "2x4" are actually 38x89 mm when planed and finished.
Congratulations, you successfully managed to ignore population density.
I believe that the finished dimensions for a "swedish" two-by-four are 50x100 mm before it's planed and approx. 45x95 mm after being planed. And according to wikipedia a "US" two-by-four is 38 x 89 mm which kind of makes me wonder why they call it a 2x4.