You make a fair point. I should change my statement from "Any 15-year-old geek can code" to "a large amount of professional software developers can code as much as 15-year-old geeks".
I think the problem is a large amount of people who have coding as their careers just pick it up as purely a job - so they know how to code one language. They know Java, or they know C++, or more commonly, PHP/ASP/web-based languages. But their knowledge is very narrow and limited - what they've been taught in their course. While the 15-year-old geek is probably doing it for love of computers, and has a broader and more in depth knowledge on coding in general.
It astounds me at times to talk to 'professional' web coders who don't know what a compiler is.
It makes sense. Any 15-year-old geek can code. What makes software engineers and good coders different? The fact they can communicate, work in teams and have experience working together.
In fact Dad was telling me that just recently he hired some Law/InformationSystems graduate to do work that seemed more like a manager's aide. Within two years, he's promoted that guy up to be a junior manager. What he studied had nothing to do with what he's doing, rather, the double degree gave him intelligence and analytical skills which are top-notch and thus, very useful. AS opposed to his actual knowledge on the topics of law and information systems.
Either the player is a character on a ride through the story - really just killing baddies and whatnot on the way.
Games which try to have a 'choose your own story' kinda thing - freedom to do what you want, usually either just have multiple paths you can go, or have very basic, non-complex plots (which revolve around quests or not) which are very 1 dimensional.
It's hard to get a nice, interesting plot with true interactive gameplay freedom.
There's a difference between the people who kill bugs as quickly and effeciently as they can, and those who pull out the good 'ol magnifying glass. Granted, you can argue bug spray probably could potentially put them under pain, but ultimately we do it because it's efficient.
The question is, would killing the crab before you dropped it into the pot of hot water change it's taste at all?
[quote]Let's add in the metrics that the amount of utter crap has risen by 70%.
I have not bought a new CD for 2 years because most out there are utter garbage. I have bought a lot of used classic (older than 3 year old release) ones and amazon.com non drm mp3's. but no new CD has interested me for 2 years now. One other thing that influenced this was I started my Sirius subscription over 2 years ago as well.[/quote]
I think you're full of shit.
A lot of people claim 'all new music is shit'. I think that's bullshit. Sure, there's a hellova lot of crap music out there, but no more crap than there was in the 80s.
With the internet becoming such a big thing for musical artists, more and more artists from minority genres (think fancy post-rock that most people don't get into) are able to make it big enough to eventually sign contracts and produce CDs. I'd argue that makes the modern state of music a lot more broad - with more genre's to choose from and a lot more 'musical' bands around too (Which tend not to appeal to the major audiences, but are still available if you look harder).
The only time I had unwanted porn popups was when I looked around for Emulators and ROMs off those shady game sites, or off crack/serial key sites (Yeah, for some reason I was cracking games before I was watching porn o.O)
But yeah. How likely is it your daughter is gonna be hanging out on the 'illegal' part of the internet? I think it's more likely young boys are gonna be trying to look for cracks (for their games) than girls are.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, having a dose of realism in there certainly will help them when they meet an unfortunate truth, yet at the same time it's when people are young that they are most likely to achieve move to big dreams. This is because they have this almost naive view of the world, where they're doing big and awesome things, and they don't have a family to support.
Sure, 95% of them will quickly fold and learn to live with their boring lives. But 5% of them hold onto that dream and make it. If everyone just told the kid they weren't special, and told them they'd get boring jobs and lead a boring life, chances are, that's what they'd do and we wouldn't have that 5% going out there making something amazing.
Parents should encourage them to give them their fancy dreams, and the rest of the world should put them down to make them understand reality and it balances out.
You could always go Gundam 00 style and make epic 'space elevators' which are nothing like real space elevators and are like, 100m wide stretching up into orbit connecting to relays of solar panels. =P
I bought my entire setup at the moment with the intention of overclocking.
I bought the 2 year old Q6600 because I knew I could take it from 2.4GHz to 3.6GHz on air cooling. So stock there were better, newer Penryn models, but overclocked, there weren't that many better. I got my mobo - the Gigabyte E38DQ6 because I knew it had good overclocking features to take my CPU there.
Considering at 3.6GHz, my RAM only had to run at 800MHz to keep 1:1 FSB ratios that wasn't a concern. But I know if I got the E8400/E3100 (another good overclocker), I could use that same RAM - which was good until 1200MHz at its native timings of 4-4-4-12.
But yeah, you're right. Choosing components is half of what overclocking - and you gotta know what to look for in different components. But then again, to make best use of your money, you *do* have to do a shitload of research. You can't just rock up at your local computer store and grab whatever parts they have in stock. I spent a month of in depth research into every part, how they would react to each other and whatnot until I decided on what I'd get. Then I had to spend a fair bit of time trying to track down those parts.
Do we really need to have a website detailing what's going on with the 2000 Sydney Olympics with information on how to purchase tickets and whatnot to catelogue history? Sure, one can argue it's a primary source of history, yet at the same time, it's hardly an important one. Results for the olympics, details, reviews, and whatnot are all catelogued all over the place. And then you have secondary sources like Wikipedia which will have summaries and keep the important details there.
Sure, Bush may have dissappeared off the WhiteHouse site, yet, I'm sure you're hardly going to struggle to find mentions of him, his time as president and whatnot in extreme detail all around the internet.
There was also the Stealing the Network series of short stories. I've only read the two short stories by Fydor, the author of Nmap who released them free at http://insecure.org/stc/sti.html and http://insecure.org/stc/. Quite enjoyed the first one. Not exactly well written from a literature point of view, but still interesting to read.
To be fair, and I am in no way supporting the RIAA, however, the same argument could be made to anything that is theft.
You can't afford to buy something normally, but steal it? Yeah, you've got it.
Of course, where the analogy is running short is that 'stealing' a song is producing an illegal copy, where 'stealing' a physical product involves both you obtaining it, and someone else losing it.
IT's amazing how much the times has improved on fuel effeciency too.
Hell, even for fuel hungry modern cars.
My '94 2.2L Honda Prelude VTiR does 10L/100km in city driving when I'm driving well (more like 14L when I'm at the racetrack...).
But take the new BMW M3 V8. One of the top sports coupes in the world - and it does like 8L/100km at its best.
Hell, the Lambourghini Gallardo Superleggera does 13L/100km. For a 5L V10, I think that's bloody amazing when you consider a 1989 3L i6 does more than it.
I bet a modern SUV could kill an 80s small car too.
I run Crysis at the so-called 'Very High' under DirectX 9.0c on XP with an 8800GT with only mild lag here and there. Obviously, this just unlocks textures among other things...but how much more does DirectX 10's features really do? Is it that different that it's worth spending all that money to get a top of the range SLi'd graphics card? And is it those features, or Vista, which makes those requirements necessary?
I've heard different people - some saying that Directx10 Very High is huge leaps above DirectX 9 hacked to play Very High, while others say there's barely a difference. Is there?
Seems like those glasses would not fit over mine. So I guess this product is going purely for the good vision and contact lens market?
I hate that attitude.
People can't cater everything for everyone. You cater for the majority, or a particular demographic(s). Financially, and practically, that is right.
I don't mean to sound offensive, but I'm sick of people with some sort of disability bitching and moaning when products are introduced that cannot suit their (relatively) unique needs. Now I'm not saying that no one should not *care* about people who need glasses, or to more extremes, people who are blind and whatnot....but when a product is made with these things catered for, it's a good thing - it shouldn't be an *expected* thing. Especially not for something as novelty or low-volume selling as a pair of 3D glasses. I can understand if it's something necessary to living - like public infrastructure, or even to some extent commonly used products, but a piece of entertainment? Is catering for those needs worth the money spent into the design, for the extra products sold?
And what about evading the collision all together?
Decent drivers learn that slaming on the brakes isn't always the best way to avoid a collision - sometimes you need to evade a collision. Sometimes you even need to put on the gas to avoid a moving obstacle.
While this feature may be good for less capable drivers, I'm sure this could just mess up drivers who know what they are doing.
Imagine seeing some kid running across the road, so you quickly evade into the oncoming traffic lane only to notice a car moving towards you. You stamp on the gas to try to 'overtake' the kid and move back into your lane only to have the brakes turned on by themselves.
I used OpenOffice for two years on my Home PC, with my High School laptop running Office XP. And to be honest, when it came to reformat my computer for a second time, I went and downloaded a pirated version of Office XP 2003. As great as OpenOffice is, and despite some features it has over Office XP (Such as in built PDF support - which was great), I preferred Office XP as a whole - just the way it behaves in general.
I think the difference is how many of that demographic actually *do* read it.
In Japan, manga and anime are common across more age groups. Of course, I'm not saying all middle-aged business men are reading manga or watching anime, but more older Japanese men will be inclined to read/watch manga/anime than Western older middle aged men read comics. It tends to be more of the geekier ones who do (I am of course, not referring to newspaper type comics).
It's more acceptable and done in Japan for an older person to be into that kinda stuff.
I'd like to note firearms aren't completely banned in Australia. If you have a valid reason (farmer, security guard, etc) or you are part of a shooting club, you can own a firearm.
If you join a Gun Club you can get your Walther PPK (I always wanted a USP when I was younger).
the firearm rules ni Australia are not as bad as youm ake them out to be. They make it hard for you to get guns, but not impossible. So those who really really need/want them, can get them.
Bittorrent was different in that due to use of torrent files, if you found a good tracker, there was a low chance of their being fakes. If there was fakes, no one would seed them. You can also read the comments to various torrents to make sure what you're getting is good.
The problem with the more decentralized type of P2P networks (Limewire, Kazaa, etc) - is there's no way of validating your download. It could be fake, bad quality or misnamed.
I always was a fan of X-Wing vs Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance was even more fun.
But there was never a big online community for the latter (despite their being multiplayer support).
Imagine epic battles between pro clans. That'd be awesome. Especially with the 'realistic' mods out there - which made everything ridiculously fast and more realistic.
Slashdot Mirror
You make a fair point. I should change my statement from "Any 15-year-old geek can code" to "a large amount of professional software developers can code as much as 15-year-old geeks".
I think the problem is a large amount of people who have coding as their careers just pick it up as purely a job - so they know how to code one language. They know Java, or they know C++, or more commonly, PHP/ASP/web-based languages. But their knowledge is very narrow and limited - what they've been taught in their course. While the 15-year-old geek is probably doing it for love of computers, and has a broader and more in depth knowledge on coding in general.
It astounds me at times to talk to 'professional' web coders who don't know what a compiler is.
~Jarik
It makes sense. Any 15-year-old geek can code. What makes software engineers and good coders different? The fact they can communicate, work in teams and have experience working together.
In fact Dad was telling me that just recently he hired some Law/InformationSystems graduate to do work that seemed more like a manager's aide. Within two years, he's promoted that guy up to be a junior manager. What he studied had nothing to do with what he's doing, rather, the double degree gave him intelligence and analytical skills which are top-notch and thus, very useful. AS opposed to his actual knowledge on the topics of law and information systems.
~Jarik
Yeah. I already have that going - quick searches on all major websites that I may visit.
It is quite useful "g ", "anfo ", "ebay term" etc etc.
I think the problem is that it's one or another:
Either the player is a character on a ride through the story - really just killing baddies and whatnot on the way.
Games which try to have a 'choose your own story' kinda thing - freedom to do what you want, usually either just have multiple paths you can go, or have very basic, non-complex plots (which revolve around quests or not) which are very 1 dimensional.
It's hard to get a nice, interesting plot with true interactive gameplay freedom.
I think the problem is partly the way they die.
There's a difference between the people who kill bugs as quickly and effeciently as they can, and those who pull out the good 'ol magnifying glass. Granted, you can argue bug spray probably could potentially put them under pain, but ultimately we do it because it's efficient.
The question is, would killing the crab before you dropped it into the pot of hot water change it's taste at all?
~Jarik
[quote]Let's add in the metrics that the amount of utter crap has risen by 70%.
I have not bought a new CD for 2 years because most out there are utter garbage. I have bought a lot of used classic (older than 3 year old release) ones and amazon.com non drm mp3's. but no new CD has interested me for 2 years now. One other thing that influenced this was I started my Sirius subscription over 2 years ago as well.[/quote]
I think you're full of shit.
A lot of people claim 'all new music is shit'. I think that's bullshit. Sure, there's a hellova lot of crap music out there, but no more crap than there was in the 80s.
With the internet becoming such a big thing for musical artists, more and more artists from minority genres (think fancy post-rock that most people don't get into) are able to make it big enough to eventually sign contracts and produce CDs. I'd argue that makes the modern state of music a lot more broad - with more genre's to choose from and a lot more 'musical' bands around too (Which tend not to appeal to the major audiences, but are still available if you look harder).
~Jarik
It really depends on the kinda sites they go on.
The only time I had unwanted porn popups was when I looked around for Emulators and ROMs off those shady game sites, or off crack/serial key sites (Yeah, for some reason I was cracking games before I was watching porn o.O)
But yeah. How likely is it your daughter is gonna be hanging out on the 'illegal' part of the internet? I think it's more likely young boys are gonna be trying to look for cracks (for their games) than girls are.
~Jarik
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, having a dose of realism in there certainly will help them when they meet an unfortunate truth, yet at the same time it's when people are young that they are most likely to achieve move to big dreams. This is because they have this almost naive view of the world, where they're doing big and awesome things, and they don't have a family to support.
Sure, 95% of them will quickly fold and learn to live with their boring lives. But 5% of them hold onto that dream and make it. If everyone just told the kid they weren't special, and told them they'd get boring jobs and lead a boring life, chances are, that's what they'd do and we wouldn't have that 5% going out there making something amazing.
Parents should encourage them to give them their fancy dreams, and the rest of the world should put them down to make them understand reality and it balances out.
My thoughts anyway.
~Jarik
If the politicians/leaders have shackles on your mouth, you are no longer free. They own your mouth and control what can be said. You are a slave.
I hardly think that because you are limited in what you can express, you are a slave. That is a hyperbole of epic proportions.
This is nothing to do with politicians/leaders having control of what you say, or think - rather, limiting what you say or think.
Take the Sydney Cronolla Riots in Australia - where born-Australians and Middle Easterns in the Cronulla Beach Area degraded into urban warfare in 2005. This was fuelled by commentaries on the radio against Lebanese people. If a ban was put on that type of racial hate inciting commentary, I'd hardly say that suddenly everyone was a "slave" to the government.
~Jarik
You could always go Gundam 00 style and make epic 'space elevators' which are nothing like real space elevators and are like, 100m wide stretching up into orbit connecting to relays of solar panels. =P
I bought my entire setup at the moment with the intention of overclocking.
I bought the 2 year old Q6600 because I knew I could take it from 2.4GHz to 3.6GHz on air cooling. So stock there were better, newer Penryn models, but overclocked, there weren't that many better. I got my mobo - the Gigabyte E38DQ6 because I knew it had good overclocking features to take my CPU there.
Considering at 3.6GHz, my RAM only had to run at 800MHz to keep 1:1 FSB ratios that wasn't a concern. But I know if I got the E8400/E3100 (another good overclocker), I could use that same RAM - which was good until 1200MHz at its native timings of 4-4-4-12.
But yeah, you're right. Choosing components is half of what overclocking - and you gotta know what to look for in different components. But then again, to make best use of your money, you *do* have to do a shitload of research. You can't just rock up at your local computer store and grab whatever parts they have in stock. I spent a month of in depth research into every part, how they would react to each other and whatnot until I decided on what I'd get. Then I had to spend a fair bit of time trying to track down those parts.
~Jarik
~Jarik
Do we really need to have a website detailing what's going on with the 2000 Sydney Olympics with information on how to purchase tickets and whatnot to catelogue history? Sure, one can argue it's a primary source of history, yet at the same time, it's hardly an important one. Results for the olympics, details, reviews, and whatnot are all catelogued all over the place. And then you have secondary sources like Wikipedia which will have summaries and keep the important details there.
Sure, Bush may have dissappeared off the WhiteHouse site, yet, I'm sure you're hardly going to struggle to find mentions of him, his time as president and whatnot in extreme detail all around the internet.
There was also the Stealing the Network series of short stories. I've only read the two short stories by Fydor, the author of Nmap who released them free at http://insecure.org/stc/sti.html and http://insecure.org/stc/. Quite enjoyed the first one. Not exactly well written from a literature point of view, but still interesting to read.
To be fair, and I am in no way supporting the RIAA, however, the same argument could be made to anything that is theft.
You can't afford to buy something normally, but steal it? Yeah, you've got it.
Of course, where the analogy is running short is that 'stealing' a song is producing an illegal copy, where 'stealing' a physical product involves both you obtaining it, and someone else losing it.
[quote]Can we neuter them ? We don't want that kind of genes polluting our gene pool.[/quote]
Eh, that'd be kinda redundant. I doubt many of them get laid anyway.
IT's amazing how much the times has improved on fuel effeciency too.
Hell, even for fuel hungry modern cars.
My '94 2.2L Honda Prelude VTiR does 10L/100km in city driving when I'm driving well (more like 14L when I'm at the racetrack...).
But take the new BMW M3 V8. One of the top sports coupes in the world - and it does like 8L/100km at its best.
Hell, the Lambourghini Gallardo Superleggera does 13L/100km. For a 5L V10, I think that's bloody amazing when you consider a 1989 3L i6 does more than it.
I bet a modern SUV could kill an 80s small car too.
~Jarik
Mmm, fair enough actually.
Hmm.
I run Crysis at the so-called 'Very High' under DirectX 9.0c on XP with an 8800GT with only mild lag here and there. Obviously, this just unlocks textures among other things...but how much more does DirectX 10's features really do? Is it that different that it's worth spending all that money to get a top of the range SLi'd graphics card? And is it those features, or Vista, which makes those requirements necessary?
I've heard different people - some saying that Directx10 Very High is huge leaps above DirectX 9 hacked to play Very High, while others say there's barely a difference. Is there?
~Jarik
Seems like those glasses would not fit over mine. So I guess this product is going purely for the good vision and contact lens market?
I hate that attitude.
People can't cater everything for everyone. You cater for the majority, or a particular demographic(s). Financially, and practically, that is right.
I don't mean to sound offensive, but I'm sick of people with some sort of disability bitching and moaning when products are introduced that cannot suit their (relatively) unique needs. Now I'm not saying that no one should not *care* about people who need glasses, or to more extremes, people who are blind and whatnot....but when a product is made with these things catered for, it's a good thing - it shouldn't be an *expected* thing. Especially not for something as novelty or low-volume selling as a pair of 3D glasses. I can understand if it's something necessary to living - like public infrastructure, or even to some extent commonly used products, but a piece of entertainment? Is catering for those needs worth the money spent into the design, for the extra products sold?
~Jarik
And what about evading the collision all together?
Decent drivers learn that slaming on the brakes isn't always the best way to avoid a collision - sometimes you need to evade a collision. Sometimes you even need to put on the gas to avoid a moving obstacle.
While this feature may be good for less capable drivers, I'm sure this could just mess up drivers who know what they are doing.
Imagine seeing some kid running across the road, so you quickly evade into the oncoming traffic lane only to notice a car moving towards you. You stamp on the gas to try to 'overtake' the kid and move back into your lane only to have the brakes turned on by themselves.
~Jarik
I used OpenOffice for two years on my Home PC, with my High School laptop running Office XP. And to be honest, when it came to reformat my computer for a second time, I went and downloaded a pirated version of Office XP 2003. As great as OpenOffice is, and despite some features it has over Office XP (Such as in built PDF support - which was great), I preferred Office XP as a whole - just the way it behaves in general.
I think the difference is how many of that demographic actually *do* read it.
In Japan, manga and anime are common across more age groups. Of course, I'm not saying all middle-aged business men are reading manga or watching anime, but more older Japanese men will be inclined to read/watch manga/anime than Western older middle aged men read comics. It tends to be more of the geekier ones who do (I am of course, not referring to newspaper type comics).
It's more acceptable and done in Japan for an older person to be into that kinda stuff.
I'd like to note firearms aren't completely banned in Australia. If you have a valid reason (farmer, security guard, etc) or you are part of a shooting club, you can own a firearm.
If you join a Gun Club you can get your Walther PPK (I always wanted a USP when I was younger).
the firearm rules ni Australia are not as bad as youm ake them out to be. They make it hard for you to get guns, but not impossible. So those who really really need/want them, can get them.
~Jarik
Agreed.
Bittorrent was different in that due to use of torrent files, if you found a good tracker, there was a low chance of their being fakes. If there was fakes, no one would seed them. You can also read the comments to various torrents to make sure what you're getting is good.
The problem with the more decentralized type of P2P networks (Limewire, Kazaa, etc) - is there's no way of validating your download. It could be fake, bad quality or misnamed.
~Jarik
That would kick ass.
I always was a fan of X-Wing vs Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance was even more fun.
But there was never a big online community for the latter (despite their being multiplayer support).
Imagine epic battles between pro clans. That'd be awesome. Especially with the 'realistic' mods out there - which made everything ridiculously fast and more realistic.
~Jarik