The universe is full of things that did not exist but now do. Galaxies, stars, planets, nebulae, black holes... Even in day to day life we are surrounded by our buildings, our furniture, our pets and our plants. To what afterlife do these things go when they are destroyed?
From what realm did the Lego car on the shelf by me come when I built it? To what afterlife will it go when I take it apart to build another?
I'm not framing their argument the way they would ("we're just collections of atoms, nothing special about us") in order to highlight the absurdity of it.
Yeah, I'm not seeing the absurdity.
The universe is fucking amazing. If there's anything absurd here, it's looking at the vastness of the cosmos and all of the ridiculously cool shit in it and thinking, "Oh, the fact that I vaguely understand the underlying principles renders this all meaningless. However, I assert (based on nothing but my own whims) that I am not meaningless. Therefore I must be composed of something more than mere energy. Ignore the fact that I'm treating a particularly human concept (meaning) like some sort of real (and for unexplained reasons desirable) substance."
Being reasonably certain that I'm a collection of atoms renders me (or anyone) no more meaningless, worthless, or absurd than being reasonably certain I know how Sol's light is made renders sunsets ugly.
Atheists believe in something that is obviously untrue (the non-existence of self).
Wha? Who, except for the insane, goes around claiming they don't exist? I'm an atheist. I know lots of atheists. We're all pretty sure that we really do exist.
but this turns out to be the only consistent stance that atheists fall into when they start talking about the afterlife
Assuming I'm not too drunk to see your masterfully subtle point right now, you're talking about "soul" when you say "self". Yeah. About that... If you want me to believe in a soul (immortal or otherwise) then you can start by defining what the damn thing is in concrete terms.
Regardless of my lack of belief in a "soul", let me once again assure you that I am quite certain that the thing which I understand myself to be (my "self", by definition) does in fact exist. Furthermore, I assert that this belief is quite logically compatible with a lack of belief in "souls". I am baffled by assertions to the contrary, though I am willing to listen if you have a reasoned argument to such effect.
the evidence is actually on the side of religious people of various stripes that we'll exist again after we die.
What evidence? Religious fables? Scam-artist mediums cold-reading the dead back into "existence" for their desperate-for-comfort loved ones? I won't deny that there may be actual "supernatural" powers (given the dearth of quality science in the area I'd be a fool to hold an absolute belief) but, even so, unexplained phenomena are a far cry from proof of an afterlife.
I'm summarizing years of arguments here
Then you've been arguing with lunatics for years. I'd stop that if I were you... lunacy can be infectious.
not saying that you believe in whatever, since I obviously don't know what you believe.
Nice. Now I don't even know if you yourself believe any of what you just said. The world would be so much better if people would just say "Speaking in general terms..." in front of general statements instead of tacking on weak apologies for the perceived potential for personal offense at the end.
I'm a game developer. The only good point you make is that using OpenGL makes Mac ports a bit cheaper. The rest of your rant is bullshit, and if you're actually a gamedev (which I doubt) you should know better than to make such silly claims. There's a hell of a lot more to porting to a new platform than porting the graphics subsystem (and porting between DX and GL is trivial compared to what you have to do to squeeze stuff like physics onto console architectures).
We all want to use OpenGL because it's a nicer API than Direct3D
Hah! Bullshit. OpenGL might become a nicer API if Khronos ever gets their heads out of their asses and stops pandering to the CAD crowd. Until then it's an annoying mass of gotchas. Seriously, the backwards compatibility provisions in OpenGL make every Windows release look like a clean break from the prior version.
we can develop for it on our Macs, and our games will support just about every modern gaming platform imaginable (because we aren't tied to Microsoft's platforms).
Mac I'll grant you. What are these other modern gaming platforms? Seriously, what are they? Linux? Unless you mean all the mobile devices using OpenGL ES, but you need to rewrite significant portions of your engine and redo almost all of your art to get a reasonable experience on those, and a DX -> GL ES port is trivial when you're already doing all of that.
DirectX 11 doesn't support Macs, it doesn't support the PS2 or the PS3, it doesn't support the Wii, and it doesn't support most mobile devices.
Again, I'll grant you the Mac. What the fuck are you smoking as far as the rest goes? OpenGL doesn't magically give you free (or even meaningfully cheaper) ports to any of those platforms either:
PS2: No OpenGL here. Just a DMA controller and some hardware registers. The entire create/bind/release metaphor that both GL and DX are based around does not exist. The shading unit can't even express all of the common blend modes, and you have to do ridiculous gymnastics to fit textures into the tiny amount of video RAM you get. You should know this if you've ever worked with a PS2.
PS3: You're an idiot if you're using the GL library directly on the PS3. There's a reason Sony gives direct access to the hardware - if you care about performance you won't be using the wrapper libraries. But again, you'll be rewriting a bunch of your engine to get AI, physics, and other stuff running on the SPUs anyway and a graphics port from either DX or GL is fucking trivial next to that.
XBOX and XBOX 360: DirectX-ish API, so OpenGL gets you nothing here. Even if you start with a DX game you're still porting a bunch of code if you did anything worth mention since there are still fairly significant architectural differences between it and PC. About all you get out of the similarity is a good idea of what entry points will likely be named.
GameCube/Wii: Calling what those platforms expose "OpenGL" is just silly. The structural similarities between the libraries you get and OpenGL are trivial when compared with the mountains of restrictions, special cases, and other odd differences you'll be dealing with. And again, you're going to be rewriting a bunch of your engine to the execution environment so a 5% more direct graphics port saves you fuck all once you tack on the art changes and another QA cycle.
Mobile devices: we already covered the mobile devices. Have you actually worked on one? You should know better than to imply that you get magic free porting to them if you just use OpenGL. There's a hell of a lot more to a usable mobile port than flipping some defines and recompiling with GCC.
Seriously, the starting graphics API is fucking irrelevant to any serious porting effort. GL and DX have near identical capabilities, identical object lifetime management, trivially mappable entry points and trivially mappable state bits, and near identical performance and synchronization behaviors. Porting between the two is trivial compared all the other work a proper port requires.
I really don't get how the whole GL/DX flame war is still going...
Porting a rendering engine that uses DX to OpenGL is almost trivial. The hardest part is translating the shaders that the art team has been busy building, and most engines are either set up in a way that makes this a non-issue or there are tools available that can do a reasonable translation automatically.
Apart from that:
Both APIs have very similar capabilities, leaving little to emulate or work around.
Both APIs use a resource load/bind/release model, leaving resource management code completely compatible between the two.
Both APIs expose their capabilities through very similar sets of state bits (eg D3DBLEND_ONE maps to GL_ONE - no need to expose combinations of one set as very different combinations of the other). There aren't all that many corner cases.
Both APIs have very similar lock/synchronization semantics.
Nobody failed to port to the Mac because it doesn't have DX. They failed to port to the Mac because they didn't see enough of a market to justify bothering with what is really a fairly trivial task (that or they were stupid enough that they didn't wrap their render code in its own subsystem like any sane developer would, and now find that sound.cpp breaks if they uninclude my-graphics-api.h).
Right, because PC game developers have to write a separate version of their engine for each combination of CPU and RAM quantity that they want to support.
Wow, that's an incredibly stupid comment. There's a big difference between differences in the amount of RAM and completely different architectures. The consoles have ridiculously little common ground amongst themselves or with the PC. Of course you rewrite big chunks of your engine for each of them. You can tell when someone hasn't rewritten their engine for the target platform because it invariably becomes yet another shitty port!
For example:
The PC has a bunch of homogeneous cores. You set up some threads. You allocate some memory. You run your algorithms, being mindful of synchronization and cache misses. The OS schedules things relatively sanely (you hope).
The XBOX 360 has six hardware threads split across three cores. Each thread has identical capabilities, including decent math performance. The paired threads can stomp each other's caches very easily if you don't have compatible tasks running on them. Cache misses are incredibly expensive. The pipeline also penalizes branches very heavily, so you'll need to do things that might be slower on PC to avoid if statements.
The PS3 has one core with not that much for math horsepower on it. You also have seven coprosessors that run a specialized instruction set and can perform ridiculous number-crunching feats, but they can only work out of their own dedicated little bit of memory. The main core's job is to DMA math-heavy tasks into them, wait for them to finish, and DMA the results back while running high level logic. Write your own synchronization code. Also, you get to restructure all of your physics (and maybe AI) data so that you can very efficiently batch it into little chunks of math-heavy work.
The Wii has ridiculously fast RAM. It's just silly fast. Cache misses are not a concern. Cramming everything into the limited amount of RAM you have, however is. This affects the core structure of almost every compute-heavy subsystem.
Graphics: just as varied. IO: varied, again. Controls: also very different...
No, nobody wants a "stateless OpenGL" in the way you seem to be taking it. That would be stupid. "Stateless API", in the context of OpenGL, refers to the removal of the excess state that the API imposes.
For example, take binding two textures and disabling a third. In DirectX (example, not actual compiling code):
glActiveTexture( GL_TEXTURE2 ); glDisable( GL_TEXTURE_2D ); glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0 );//not redundant if you care about texture lifetime
That's right, OpenGL has me use one function to store an index in a global, thus modifying the operation of other functions. That sort of garbage is everywhere in OpenGL, and it's incredibly tedious to constantly deal with. It also makes it really tough to interoperate with libraries that need to touch the GL state, since you have to be really careful about what the state is going in and how it's been changed coming out.
It also refers to the most ridiculous bit of OpenGL state, which is the context (OpenGL's equivalent of Direct3D's Device object). In Direct3D, if I need to output to more than one window, I can create multiple swap chains and drive them with the same device. If I need to output on two independent video cards, I simply create a Device object for each one, load my textures into both, and then simply draw to both as I wish.
In OpenGL the only way you can accomplish either goal is to create a new context object (since a context is bound to the output). Contexts can't be used until you bind them to a thread, and switching contexts is an expensive operation. Using more than one (even when you link them together to share resources) is almost always an exercise in frustration.
I expect that the idea is that instead of calls like glClearBuffer(...) which take their context from the program's global environment, you'd have calls like glClearBuffer(context,...). The point of this would be to make it easier for a given program to work with multiple contexts at once, e.g. for mixing render-to-texture with normal rendering. (Note: I am not an OpenGL expert, by any means.)
I'm a game developer. I work with OpenGL. This is exactly what's meant when people bitch about OpenGL being stateful. That and the selector states, which make it annoying to write libraries that target OpenGL and work together nicely.
So, if entropy goes up with time, and things become more disorderly, how is it that species and advanced life forms become more orderly?
Organisms become more orderly by harnessing energy. Harnessing energy produces heat. Heat is, basically, entropy. Life is locally very orderly, but, by being so, it introduces so much additional entropy into its environment that entropy_of( life_form + environment ) > entropy_of( environment ).
This sort of thing is a big part of the problem. I dealt with a good amount of it in high school. Building self confidence and learning self control is essential to combating this. If you don't visibly react, they lose interest (but bear in mind that they might be reading your body language quite well, so if you're gonna just fake your indifference, you had better learn to be a good actor). And if you want to actually fight back effectively then learning to navigate the social web is the only way to get into a position to do so.
My advice to anyone that's dealing with this is simple: calm down. As in force yourself to remain calm, first externally and then internally. Their power over you, like that of most bullies, relies on you getting too worked up to think clearly. Once you have control of your emotions it's usually not hard to spot their weak points and think of ways to exploit them should you need to. No matter how tight-knit the clique, most girls like that don't really trust each other and would love to stab each other in the back. As such they're often in an incredibly fragile position. Even ignoring them convincingly (especially in front of their peers) can be enough to knock them off of their precarious little social perch. Obviously you have to be more aggressive as you deal with the crueler ones.
That's the thing I wish the people screaming at TFA would grasp - strong social skills are weapon that's as powerful in some situations as fists are in others.
All the while the bullying continued simply elsewhere, with a lack of any mention of you passing on your (questionable) skills to classmates or playing mediator (which you would learn many eye-opening experiences) to end the social suppression of others more conclusively.
My post concerned the general value of having social skills. Stuffing it full of, "And then I helped many others 'cuz I'm so good and noble," nonsense would have detracted from my main point, and it would be a misrepresentation of my experiences. I set an example. I helped where I could. I was no crusader out to defend the little guy. If that offends you, well, why are you wasting your time getting emotional about the life of some random stranger? Surely you have better things to turn your mind towards.
Hate to say it, but it sounds like you went from victim to instead became the general runt--the person that had just enough involvement to avoid the bullying, on the edge of the norm.
No. I never wrote that. I was nowhere near the heights of popularity (never cared to invest that much energy into the meaningless social contest), but I was very much inside the room. I made friends, we hung out and helped each other. A few of them were just using me for help on their homework, but they got filtered out. Years later, I still hang out with some of those friends. I help them move. They help me move. I enjoy their company, and as far as I can tell they enjoy mine. I'm still in touch with those that moved away.
You excuse it too much, like when you say people mouthed off simply because they were confused.
You're reading things I didn't write (I assume you're letting your feelings on the subject color your thoughts). I never excused it. I noted that much of what I had perceived as bullying was a misunderstanding (willful ignorance, really) on my part. As for the rest, I choose to understand it, and I used my understanding as a tool. I got over my self-pitying, "This shouldn't be happening! I'm a person too!" mentality and actually looked at the people and saw what makes them tick. That is power, and it is particularly well-suited to intelligent, sensitive individuals like myself and most of the other bullied kids I knew.
Bullying simply shouldn't happen. [...] I'll stay getting bullied. [...] I don't want to compromise *myself* like you seem to, and end up on the sidelines as others get bashed in.
I appreciate the strength of your conviction - it's a rare thing these days. But please consider that you may be letting it get in the way of rational thought. Changing yourself isn't necessarily compromise. Take control of the change and it's simple adaptation. It's the power that drives our species, and it's extremely useful even to an individual.
This study appears to take the usual premise that the problem lies with the victim of bullying.
That wasn't my reading of it. The link they made between social rejection and bullying was more along the lines of, "Mediocre drivers are at greater risk of being in an automotive accident." Pointing out that a better driver might have dodged someone running a red light isn't an argument for the driver's innocence. Nor is pointing out that socially adept people can better avoid confrontations an argument for the innocence of bullies.
And if Emma had simply walked up behind the victim and shoved her off the swing without warning (as bullies are wont to do), this is hardly relevant.
Who says it's Emma you need to win over as a friend? I agree that their five easy steps are bullshit for small children, but Emma's antisocial behavior becomes irrelevant if you can win enough popularity to put yourself out of her reach. (You have noticed how most bullies pick on isolated kids, and not on the popular ones who've got lots of friends to back them up, right?)
In any human group, there's going to be dominant ones, and there's going to be outcasts. If you're not strong enough to be dominant and don't fit with the followers, you'll be an outcast.
Yup. Be one, or get on one's good side. That's good advice for life, not just for school. And the ones inside the social web tend to be a lot more dominant than the bullies (who are usually semi-outcasts themselves). But you won't get to them unless you work out your self esteem issues and learn to follow along with all the little social conventions (TFA does focus on kids who are socially rejected in general, noting that bullying is just one thing that social isolation puts you at greater risk of - and again I'm wondering if I read the same article as everybody else).
The TFA I read discussed social rejection, and noted that bullies often focus on the socially rejected. This isn't about using your social skills to charm the bully (lol), it's about using them to get friends and hoist yourself out of the immediate target population, or at least get yourself on a better footing to fight back (most bullies have their own social issues - if you can sort yours out that's an automatic advantage).
I've been bullied. I watched other kids get bullied too. I got rid of my bullies by not behaving like the other victims, not by beating anybody up (as if I could). I realized that the only targets were people who were isolated from the main social group and unwilling to fight back (in most cases by their own low self-esteem) and made an effort to not be one of them. I learned to control my emotions so I could think clearly in social situations that weren't going how I wanted. I learned to actually pay attention and read other people's body language properly. I learned the social rules. I made friends outside my usual circle.
The guys that spent 5 minutes between classes laughing at me in the halls every day (not hardcore bullying but hardly pleasant, I assure you)? Most of them weren't being sarcastic or mean like I thought. They were confused by how incongruously I acted. I was the one that was too stupid to read their expressions correctly. Once I clued in, I stopped escalating simple misunderstandings (I actually thought I was sticking up for myself) and quickly made friends with many of them. I had no trouble ignoring the few asshole opportunists (most of who were doing it due to their own self esteem issues) in the lot who were jumping in with a nasty quip just because they saw they had a chance to get a laugh at my expense. Over the next few weeks I got rid of a good two thirds of the grief I'd get at school (the low grade harassment) in this way. I'd say fixing this one mistake of mine is probably where I started to really build my self-confidence.
The scary looking thug (huge muscles, tattoos, scars, rumors that he's done nasty things - seriously scary fucker) that went around threatening people into giving him free shit? The confidence I'd gained making some friends was enough to keep me calm around him. Calm enough to see his insecurity screaming through every little gesture (fucked up home life, he had a lot to be insecure about). Flat-out told him "no" when he punched me and told me to give him my CD collection. He was stunned, I don't think he'd ever seen someone calmly stand up to him before (I admit, it freaked me out afterwards - he had opened up with a punch). He wandered off as though nothing had happened and didn't bother me again.
The asshole who'd steal my shit, trip me, shove my head into my locker, heckle me in class (WTF teachers, how did that shit ever fly?), throw things at me, etc every single chance he got? I was his favorite victim until a few months after I started turning myself around. He turned out to be desperately afraid he'd lose his friends' respect if he didn't act all tough. Getting the courage to go and talk to them (his friends) and find out that they didn't really like him was the key to getting rid of him. Desperate fuckers turn out to be easy to bait, and I only had to get myself seen with his buddies regularly for a few weeks before he freaked out about them ditching him and did something stupid enough to get them to actually ditch him. He never bothered me again. I'd actually been hoping to get something out of them that I could blackmail him with, but I'm not one to complain if a problem takes care of itself.
So I disagree that TFA's conclusion is some bullshit way to avoid having to actually punish bullies. We're social creatures, and learning how to navigate the social web (rather than hovering helplessly around the edges) is definitely empowering. I certainly wouldn't argue with anyone that would just beat the shit out of a bully, but it's hardly the only way to deal with things (and I've seen a couple of guys that did that get shunned even more for being "dangerous" hotheads).
People with advanced degrees are generally viewed with suspicion on the right, and the degrees themselves are usually denigrated by technical people as "worthless" (for some reason).
In many fields the subject matter has been dumbed down and the grades inflated to the point where the degree is truly just a piece of paper with your name on it (there are many reasons, I can elaborate if you wish). In CS, for example, you have either a degree from one of a vanishingly small number of respected institutions or you have nothing. If you can actually get them honestly talking (rather than simply interviewing off a script before passing you on to the real interviewer), most recruiters will confirm that. They put the degree requirement on the page simply to cut down the number of resumes they must review, but they don't consider it to be a statement of actual qualification.
The value of a college or university is (for some fields, yours may be different) in the few remaining hard core courses, in the exposure to other fields you'll get through options (and the high-level English requirement), in a solid recommendation from an impressed teacher (who, you can be sure, has contacts in local industry), and in the many other networking opportunities you will find therein.
Do you have any experience with modern high school life? What, in all honesty, is there for a teacher to do during the, "Please do the odd problems on page 42," period, if the only people in the class who are bothering to actually do them are the ones already bright enough to not need assistance from the teacher? It's not like he has the authority to actually make any of them do the work (doubly true in a substitute position, as seems to be implied). Even if they were forced to break off their little "conversations", they would most likely sit there staring at the page feeling resentful - not reading, not thinking, and not in any way coming up with questions that demand the teacher's actual attention.
I'm fairly young, and based on my memories of high school, I don't find it even remotely implausible that the most useful thing he could currently be doing is posting to Slashdot. He's probably posting from the teacher's desk, with the class in sight, perfectly available to answer the odd question that might arise every now and then - exactly like every high school teacher I can recall.
Heh. I used to sell computers at Staples, and do tuneups there. S' been almost ten years since but things were the same back then. Ridiculous ripoff.
After a while it got really, really depressing watching the idiocy, and listening to the manager's schemes to exploit it better (did your store ever push the $5.99 ESP replacement plans on people buying mice or calculators with the promise that they could just come in with it and get a brand new unit when the old one naturally wore out? that was a classic at our store).
I transferred into the office furniture department after a year of putting up with customers coming in confused and angry because they had been (or feared they were being) ripped off. It was much better. It was actually possible to build a rapport with the customer, find out what they actually need, and help them get it, rather than trying to trick them into buying extra cables, and taking shit from management if you don't get them to buy enough.
Sometimes, though, people want to be ripped off. I remember in early 2001 an angry old man walked in demanding I sell him a Telus internet startup disk. Yeah, that's right, the little old disks you'd get in 1995 with a web browser on them and a little app to create the dialup connection and put a link to it on your desktop (he'd signed up for ADSL, had received his package from the phone co, and apparently decided he had to buy the disk since there wasn't one in the box). After fifteen minutes of trying to explain that he doesn't need to buy anything extra, and all he has to do is follow the instructions in the little booklet they'd given him, I finally caved in and sold him a scratched up old one I dug out of the back for $10 on a tech center SKU.
"No I don't want the super awesome $50 Monster Cables with gold tips."
Heh. Monster sells that cheap? I asked my mom to pick up an HDMI cable for me since she was going to be shopping in the area. I told her, buy the cheapest one you can find. Somehow they talked her into getting a 10 foot cable that cost $80. Had a nice time showing their idiot manager (because apparently you can't get actual cash back for an unopened item without a manager...) my $15 receipt for a 12 foot HDMI cable when I returned the ridiculous Monster one.
What's bad is when you get a salesman who wants to argue with you. "But you need our service plan!!" Sometimes I just want to throttle these guys.
Yup. Bought a new video card a while ago (mine had fried and, unlike with the cable, I couldn't wait for an online order). The sales dude takes me up to the counter and asks me when I'll bring my machine in for the installation. Not whether I'd be interested in them installing it, flat-out when I'll be back with the box. I tell him I'll do it myself...
BB: "Oh, but we have special equipment!" Me: "What, a Phillips screwdriver?" BB: "No, no we have a special electronics lab with static protection..." Me: "A grounding strap (that I bet your tech ignores) hardly qualifies as a lab." BB: "But we've got a trained -" Me: "I already said I'll install it myself. Why are you still badgering me about this?" BB: "But we'll install the drivers and optimize them for you!" Me: "Like hell I'd let you near my work files. Just drop the damn -" BB: "Nothing to worry about! We're sworn to the highest standards of confidentiality, your information is safe with us!"
At that point I told him to fetch me his manager...who proceeded to defend him, and kept trying to sell the "service". I went over to Staples and bought the same card for a bit more, though they shut up about their extended warranty at the first "no, thanks".
The verb in the sentence isn't need, it's the phrase need not, meaning is not required to, or it is not necessary for (the sentence subject) to (the sentence object). "Need not" doesn't change in any conjugation. "He need not", "we need not", and "they need not" are all correct.
It's a semi-archaic formulation that isn't used often, but it's still common in literature and formal speech.
The sentences immediately preceding what I quoted (emphasis mine):
In C++ you could create an array of actual objects and then all the objects are contiguous in memory and incrementing to the next object is incrementing a point by sizeof(theObject). For small objects, you might be within the range of the memory cache on each increment.
I wasn't talking about a list. I was talking about what (I thought) you were talking about. I figured your complaint was that.NET makes it impossible to allocate certain types on the stack, thus utterly destroying locality of reference. I was just pointing out that.NET heap is set up such that you can have heap-allocated objects near each other in memory if you're careful with the order you allocate in.
But the term "list" is a bit generic. std::list<T> is a linked list. System.Collections.Generic.List<T> is an array list (analogous to std::vector<T>). We're probably just getting mixed up over what the different libraries call things.
The managed object system most likely cannot possibly put the actual objects into contiguous memory and so you still have the cache misses when dereferencing the object pointers.
Depends on your VM. The.NET VM defragments memory when it garbage-collects, which is slow on the GC side (except for generation 0 collections), but makes allocations ridiculously fast since all the free memory is in one block and you can just increment the pointer to it by sizeof( Type ). And since that's their allocation strategy, if you allocate objects you intend to use together at the same time, they are pretty much guaranteed to end up next to each other in memory.
However, language really is a self-correcting form of communication. I hate the use of "ur" as a bastardized "your," but linguistically speaking, it's pretty efficient. People who spell horribly usually spell with a more consistent logic than centuries of archaisms -- why not spell "dependent" as "dependant" when we have words such as "rampant, occupant," and attendant?" Other than the baggage caused by inherited languages, why do we persist in using "right" instead of "rite?"
Agreed. If this goes on long enough we might actually end up with sane spelling rules.
The thing that bothers me is the amount of trouble most people have writing complex sentences. In college, I would proofread essays for anyone that bought me lunch, and it really depressed me to see otherwise intelligent people writing the way they spoke (misplaced dependent clauses, randomly placed commas, colloquialisms that wouldn't mean anything to their nearly-retired profs). And not just that, but the fact that many didn't even understand why I was telling them that their sentences are ambiguous. I would try to read them back to them with the emphasis in the wrong place, and they would just argue that, "Anyone that knew anything about the topic wouldn't be confused." (That, followed by the argument that they should write as if their audience doesn't know about the topic - else what would the point be?) It was actually fun when CS students did that to me, because I knew enough about the topic to (usually) misread their essay back to them in a way that made sense, but completely failed to communicate their idea.
People may be reading more today than ever, but it seems that they are reading less formal writing than before. That really is unfortunate, and something we need to correct, especially with the rise of the internet where the bulk of information is still textual. It depresses me to know that there are many bright, intelligent, people out there with whom I can't have a decently deep online conversation, because they don't know how to communicate if you take away their ability to use tone of voice.
That, and the fact that I'll probably live to see "fuck" become an otherwise meaningless emphatic particle, is what bugs me about modern literacy. Otherwise "proper" spelling can go to hell - I have no love at all for the hideous mess of rote memorization that it is.
Chances are, they hate your perceived wealth (or that of the country you come from) instead of (or at least more than) than your appearance. A huge portion of Central and Eastern Europe's wealth is held by Western European companies, and that's led to the perception that their land is being bought out from under them (and the economic turmoil in the region leaves no shortage of conspiracy theories that the West is economically undermining them to leave them unable to compete). That tends to generate a lot of ill will towards tourists from Western Europe, which is why the assorted racists get away with shit like that. When (well, if) the economy recovers most of that will vanish.
An anecdote to match yours: my mother and I went to visit Bulgaria, where our family is from, about a year ago. We hadn't been in the country for decades (my family fled the Communists) but she still speaks the language very well. She went into a store to buy some boza (a drink common in the Balkans) and all they had was some in bottles, which she didn't want since it wasn't fresh (boza goes bad very quickly after its made, the preservatives they used to make it fit to bottle left it tasting flat and stale) and she asked if there were any shops that still made it fresh. Apparently there weren't, and hadn't been for many years, and asking gave her away as a Bulgarian who'd been living in a richer country for many years. As soon as she did that the store owner's demeanor changed from friendly to absolutely frigid. That happened several times in several different places, all in big cities (the people in the two villages we visited were actually quite friendly, generally asking questions about life where we live).
Also common: seeing foreign (mostly British) tourists going on about how friendly the Bulgarian staff at hotels and restaurants is, completely oblivious to the subtle little slights and expressions of contempt (if not outright hostility) all around them (very subtle, you have to know the language very well to catch it). I've encountered that in several other places (I think snobby locals are to be expected as part of the tourist experience), but not even close to the degree I saw it there. A friend from Russia says the same is very common in his country, so I'm guessing the sentiment is fairly widespread.
The woman could easily pass for a Slav, the shape of her face, the color of her skin and hair, none of it is uncommon in the region. And Asians are fairly common in the region. There are lots of people from Central and East Asia spread all over the Slavic countries (not to the extent there are here, but common enough in the cities that you'd run into a few each day as you go about your business). There are also quite a few of them in the Russian media (which is widely available throughout the region).
On the other hand, black people who are neither tourists nor there on short business trips are very uncommon (though that's apparently changing). A Russian friend of mine, who was no shut-in by any stretch of the imagination, was in her late twenties when she first met a black man who spoke fluent, unaccented, Russian. She lived, studied, and worked in Moscow for twenty-some years and never in that time met a single black who did so, nor had she see more than a token few in the media (excepting foreign media), nor (to her knowledge) had any of her friends. Such people do, of course, exist. She knew they existed. But she was still surprised enough the first time she met one that she had to pause for a second just to take the experience in. She's not a racist; it's just the surprise of breaking a long-held and often-reinforced expectation - sort of the same as being pleasantly surprised by good service in your hometown after years of utterly shitty service. That, in my admittedly limited experience, is typical of most Slavic countries.
The black man in the picture isn't going to piss off the nationalists or the racists in any significant way (most of them probably aren't going to buy Microsoft anyway) - I don't think that was their motivation. He is, however, incongruous, and that's something you want to minimize in an advertisement, as it might make people think rather than just leaving a subconscious impression. Granted, they probably failed horribly at that (what with the mismatched lighting and the skyscrapers in the background), but I imagine the conversation went: "If you have time for nothing else, take out the black man, his skin and his spot in the image draw attention, the rest is in the background so most people won't even see it."
Slashdot Mirror
The universe is full of things that did not exist but now do. Galaxies, stars, planets, nebulae, black holes... Even in day to day life we are surrounded by our buildings, our furniture, our pets and our plants. To what afterlife do these things go when they are destroyed?
From what realm did the Lego car on the shelf by me come when I built it? To what afterlife will it go when I take it apart to build another?
I'm not framing their argument the way they would ("we're just collections of atoms, nothing special about us") in order to highlight the absurdity of it.
Yeah, I'm not seeing the absurdity.
The universe is fucking amazing. If there's anything absurd here, it's looking at the vastness of the cosmos and all of the ridiculously cool shit in it and thinking, "Oh, the fact that I vaguely understand the underlying principles renders this all meaningless. However, I assert (based on nothing but my own whims) that I am not meaningless. Therefore I must be composed of something more than mere energy. Ignore the fact that I'm treating a particularly human concept (meaning) like some sort of real (and for unexplained reasons desirable) substance."
Being reasonably certain that I'm a collection of atoms renders me (or anyone) no more meaningless, worthless, or absurd than being reasonably certain I know how Sol's light is made renders sunsets ugly.
Atheists believe in something that is obviously untrue (the non-existence of self).
Wha? Who, except for the insane, goes around claiming they don't exist? I'm an atheist. I know lots of atheists. We're all pretty sure that we really do exist.
but this turns out to be the only consistent stance that atheists fall into when they start talking about the afterlife
Assuming I'm not too drunk to see your masterfully subtle point right now, you're talking about "soul" when you say "self". Yeah. About that... If you want me to believe in a soul (immortal or otherwise) then you can start by defining what the damn thing is in concrete terms.
Regardless of my lack of belief in a "soul", let me once again assure you that I am quite certain that the thing which I understand myself to be (my "self", by definition) does in fact exist. Furthermore, I assert that this belief is quite logically compatible with a lack of belief in "souls". I am baffled by assertions to the contrary, though I am willing to listen if you have a reasoned argument to such effect.
the evidence is actually on the side of religious people of various stripes that we'll exist again after we die.
What evidence? Religious fables? Scam-artist mediums cold-reading the dead back into "existence" for their desperate-for-comfort loved ones? I won't deny that there may be actual "supernatural" powers (given the dearth of quality science in the area I'd be a fool to hold an absolute belief) but, even so, unexplained phenomena are a far cry from proof of an afterlife.
I'm summarizing years of arguments here
Then you've been arguing with lunatics for years. I'd stop that if I were you... lunacy can be infectious.
not saying that you believe in whatever, since I obviously don't know what you believe.
Nice. Now I don't even know if you yourself believe any of what you just said. The world would be so much better if people would just say "Speaking in general terms..." in front of general statements instead of tacking on weak apologies for the perceived potential for personal offense at the end.
Thanks for the correction.
I'm a game developer. The only good point you make is that using OpenGL makes Mac ports a bit cheaper. The rest of your rant is bullshit, and if you're actually a gamedev (which I doubt) you should know better than to make such silly claims. There's a hell of a lot more to porting to a new platform than porting the graphics subsystem (and porting between DX and GL is trivial compared to what you have to do to squeeze stuff like physics onto console architectures).
We all want to use OpenGL because it's a nicer API than Direct3D
Hah! Bullshit. OpenGL might become a nicer API if Khronos ever gets their heads out of their asses and stops pandering to the CAD crowd. Until then it's an annoying mass of gotchas. Seriously, the backwards compatibility provisions in OpenGL make every Windows release look like a clean break from the prior version.
we can develop for it on our Macs, and our games will support just about every modern gaming platform imaginable (because we aren't tied to Microsoft's platforms).
Mac I'll grant you. What are these other modern gaming platforms? Seriously, what are they? Linux? Unless you mean all the mobile devices using OpenGL ES, but you need to rewrite significant portions of your engine and redo almost all of your art to get a reasonable experience on those, and a DX -> GL ES port is trivial when you're already doing all of that.
DirectX 11 doesn't support Macs, it doesn't support the PS2 or the PS3, it doesn't support the Wii, and it doesn't support most mobile devices.
Again, I'll grant you the Mac. What the fuck are you smoking as far as the rest goes? OpenGL doesn't magically give you free (or even meaningfully cheaper) ports to any of those platforms either:
PS2: No OpenGL here. Just a DMA controller and some hardware registers. The entire create/bind/release metaphor that both GL and DX are based around does not exist. The shading unit can't even express all of the common blend modes, and you have to do ridiculous gymnastics to fit textures into the tiny amount of video RAM you get. You should know this if you've ever worked with a PS2.
PS3: You're an idiot if you're using the GL library directly on the PS3. There's a reason Sony gives direct access to the hardware - if you care about performance you won't be using the wrapper libraries. But again, you'll be rewriting a bunch of your engine to get AI, physics, and other stuff running on the SPUs anyway and a graphics port from either DX or GL is fucking trivial next to that.
XBOX and XBOX 360: DirectX-ish API, so OpenGL gets you nothing here. Even if you start with a DX game you're still porting a bunch of code if you did anything worth mention since there are still fairly significant architectural differences between it and PC. About all you get out of the similarity is a good idea of what entry points will likely be named.
GameCube/Wii: Calling what those platforms expose "OpenGL" is just silly. The structural similarities between the libraries you get and OpenGL are trivial when compared with the mountains of restrictions, special cases, and other odd differences you'll be dealing with. And again, you're going to be rewriting a bunch of your engine to the execution environment so a 5% more direct graphics port saves you fuck all once you tack on the art changes and another QA cycle.
Mobile devices: we already covered the mobile devices. Have you actually worked on one? You should know better than to imply that you get magic free porting to them if you just use OpenGL. There's a hell of a lot more to a usable mobile port than flipping some defines and recompiling with GCC.
Seriously, the starting graphics API is fucking irrelevant to any serious porting effort. GL and DX have near identical capabilities, identical object lifetime management, trivially mappable entry points and trivially mappable state bits, and near identical performance and synchronization behaviors. Porting between the two is trivial compared all the other work a proper port requires.
I really don't get how the whole GL/DX flame war is still going...
Porting a rendering engine that uses DX to OpenGL is almost trivial. The hardest part is translating the shaders that the art team has been busy building, and most engines are either set up in a way that makes this a non-issue or there are tools available that can do a reasonable translation automatically.
Apart from that:
Nobody failed to port to the Mac because it doesn't have DX. They failed to port to the Mac because they didn't see enough of a market to justify bothering with what is really a fairly trivial task (that or they were stupid enough that they didn't wrap their render code in its own subsystem like any sane developer would, and now find that sound.cpp breaks if they uninclude my-graphics-api.h).
Right, because PC game developers have to write a separate version of their engine for each combination of CPU and RAM quantity that they want to support.
Wow, that's an incredibly stupid comment. There's a big difference between differences in the amount of RAM and completely different architectures. The consoles have ridiculously little common ground amongst themselves or with the PC. Of course you rewrite big chunks of your engine for each of them. You can tell when someone hasn't rewritten their engine for the target platform because it invariably becomes yet another shitty port!
For example:
The PC has a bunch of homogeneous cores. You set up some threads. You allocate some memory. You run your algorithms, being mindful of synchronization and cache misses. The OS schedules things relatively sanely (you hope).
The XBOX 360 has six hardware threads split across three cores. Each thread has identical capabilities, including decent math performance. The paired threads can stomp each other's caches very easily if you don't have compatible tasks running on them. Cache misses are incredibly expensive. The pipeline also penalizes branches very heavily, so you'll need to do things that might be slower on PC to avoid if statements.
The PS3 has one core with not that much for math horsepower on it. You also have seven coprosessors that run a specialized instruction set and can perform ridiculous number-crunching feats, but they can only work out of their own dedicated little bit of memory. The main core's job is to DMA math-heavy tasks into them, wait for them to finish, and DMA the results back while running high level logic. Write your own synchronization code. Also, you get to restructure all of your physics (and maybe AI) data so that you can very efficiently batch it into little chunks of math-heavy work.
The Wii has ridiculously fast RAM. It's just silly fast. Cache misses are not a concern. Cramming everything into the limited amount of RAM you have, however is. This affects the core structure of almost every compute-heavy subsystem.
Graphics: just as varied. IO: varied, again. Controls: also very different...
No, nobody wants a "stateless OpenGL" in the way you seem to be taking it. That would be stupid. "Stateless API", in the context of OpenGL, refers to the removal of the excess state that the API imposes.
For example, take binding two textures and disabling a third. In DirectX (example, not actual compiling code):
myDevice->SetTexture( 0, myFirstTexture );
myDevice->SetTexture( 1, mySecondTexture );
myDevice->SetTexture( 2, NULL );
There. Done. Yes, myDevice is storing "state", but it stores only state which is relevant to the operation of the GPU. Now, the same thing in OpenGL:
glActiveTexture( GL_TEXTURE0 );
glEnable( GL_TEXTURE_2D );
glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, myFirstTexture->glId );
glActiveTexture( GL_TEXTURE1 );
glEnable( GL_TEXTURE_2D );
glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, mySecondTexture->glId );
glActiveTexture( GL_TEXTURE2 ); //not redundant if you care about texture lifetime
glDisable( GL_TEXTURE_2D );
glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0 );
That's right, OpenGL has me use one function to store an index in a global, thus modifying the operation of other functions. That sort of garbage is everywhere in OpenGL, and it's incredibly tedious to constantly deal with. It also makes it really tough to interoperate with libraries that need to touch the GL state, since you have to be really careful about what the state is going in and how it's been changed coming out.
It also refers to the most ridiculous bit of OpenGL state, which is the context (OpenGL's equivalent of Direct3D's Device object). In Direct3D, if I need to output to more than one window, I can create multiple swap chains and drive them with the same device. If I need to output on two independent video cards, I simply create a Device object for each one, load my textures into both, and then simply draw to both as I wish.
In OpenGL the only way you can accomplish either goal is to create a new context object (since a context is bound to the output). Contexts can't be used until you bind them to a thread, and switching contexts is an expensive operation. Using more than one (even when you link them together to share resources) is almost always an exercise in frustration.
I expect that the idea is that instead of calls like glClearBuffer(...) which take their context from the program's global environment, you'd have calls like glClearBuffer(context, ...). The point of this would be to make it easier for a given program to work with multiple contexts at once, e.g. for mixing render-to-texture with normal rendering. (Note: I am not an OpenGL expert, by any means.)
I'm a game developer. I work with OpenGL. This is exactly what's meant when people bitch about OpenGL being stateful. That and the selector states, which make it annoying to write libraries that target OpenGL and work together nicely.
So, if entropy goes up with time, and things become more disorderly, how is it that species and advanced life forms become more orderly?
Organisms become more orderly by harnessing energy. Harnessing energy produces heat. Heat is, basically, entropy. Life is locally very orderly, but, by being so, it introduces so much additional entropy into its environment that entropy_of( life_form + environment ) > entropy_of( environment ).
Sounds like a case of the Stockholm syndrome.
Looks like you're not reading what's been written.
This sort of thing is a big part of the problem. I dealt with a good amount of it in high school. Building self confidence and learning self control is essential to combating this. If you don't visibly react, they lose interest (but bear in mind that they might be reading your body language quite well, so if you're gonna just fake your indifference, you had better learn to be a good actor). And if you want to actually fight back effectively then learning to navigate the social web is the only way to get into a position to do so.
My advice to anyone that's dealing with this is simple: calm down. As in force yourself to remain calm, first externally and then internally. Their power over you, like that of most bullies, relies on you getting too worked up to think clearly. Once you have control of your emotions it's usually not hard to spot their weak points and think of ways to exploit them should you need to. No matter how tight-knit the clique, most girls like that don't really trust each other and would love to stab each other in the back. As such they're often in an incredibly fragile position. Even ignoring them convincingly (especially in front of their peers) can be enough to knock them off of their precarious little social perch. Obviously you have to be more aggressive as you deal with the crueler ones.
That's the thing I wish the people screaming at TFA would grasp - strong social skills are weapon that's as powerful in some situations as fists are in others.
All the while the bullying continued simply elsewhere, with a lack of any mention of you passing on your (questionable) skills to classmates or playing mediator (which you would learn many eye-opening experiences) to end the social suppression of others more conclusively.
My post concerned the general value of having social skills. Stuffing it full of, "And then I helped many others 'cuz I'm so good and noble," nonsense would have detracted from my main point, and it would be a misrepresentation of my experiences. I set an example. I helped where I could. I was no crusader out to defend the little guy. If that offends you, well, why are you wasting your time getting emotional about the life of some random stranger? Surely you have better things to turn your mind towards.
Hate to say it, but it sounds like you went from victim to instead became the general runt--the person that had just enough involvement to avoid the bullying, on the edge of the norm.
No. I never wrote that. I was nowhere near the heights of popularity (never cared to invest that much energy into the meaningless social contest), but I was very much inside the room. I made friends, we hung out and helped each other. A few of them were just using me for help on their homework, but they got filtered out. Years later, I still hang out with some of those friends. I help them move. They help me move. I enjoy their company, and as far as I can tell they enjoy mine. I'm still in touch with those that moved away.
You excuse it too much, like when you say people mouthed off simply because they were confused.
You're reading things I didn't write (I assume you're letting your feelings on the subject color your thoughts). I never excused it. I noted that much of what I had perceived as bullying was a misunderstanding (willful ignorance, really) on my part. As for the rest, I choose to understand it, and I used my understanding as a tool. I got over my self-pitying, "This shouldn't be happening! I'm a person too!" mentality and actually looked at the people and saw what makes them tick. That is power, and it is particularly well-suited to intelligent, sensitive individuals like myself and most of the other bullied kids I knew.
Bullying simply shouldn't happen.
[...]
I'll stay getting bullied.
[...]
I don't want to compromise *myself* like you seem to, and end up on the sidelines as others get bashed in.
I appreciate the strength of your conviction - it's a rare thing these days. But please consider that you may be letting it get in the way of rational thought. Changing yourself isn't necessarily compromise. Take control of the change and it's simple adaptation. It's the power that drives our species, and it's extremely useful even to an individual.
This study appears to take the usual premise that the problem lies with the victim of bullying.
That wasn't my reading of it. The link they made between social rejection and bullying was more along the lines of, "Mediocre drivers are at greater risk of being in an automotive accident." Pointing out that a better driver might have dodged someone running a red light isn't an argument for the driver's innocence. Nor is pointing out that socially adept people can better avoid confrontations an argument for the innocence of bullies.
And if Emma had simply walked up behind the victim and shoved her off the swing without warning (as bullies are wont to do), this is hardly relevant.
Who says it's Emma you need to win over as a friend? I agree that their five easy steps are bullshit for small children, but Emma's antisocial behavior becomes irrelevant if you can win enough popularity to put yourself out of her reach. (You have noticed how most bullies pick on isolated kids, and not on the popular ones who've got lots of friends to back them up, right?)
In any human group, there's going to be dominant ones, and there's going to be outcasts. If you're not strong enough to be dominant and don't fit with the followers, you'll be an outcast.
Yup. Be one, or get on one's good side. That's good advice for life, not just for school. And the ones inside the social web tend to be a lot more dominant than the bullies (who are usually semi-outcasts themselves). But you won't get to them unless you work out your self esteem issues and learn to follow along with all the little social conventions (TFA does focus on kids who are socially rejected in general, noting that bullying is just one thing that social isolation puts you at greater risk of - and again I'm wondering if I read the same article as everybody else).
The TFA I read discussed social rejection, and noted that bullies often focus on the socially rejected. This isn't about using your social skills to charm the bully (lol), it's about using them to get friends and hoist yourself out of the immediate target population, or at least get yourself on a better footing to fight back (most bullies have their own social issues - if you can sort yours out that's an automatic advantage).
I've been bullied. I watched other kids get bullied too. I got rid of my bullies by not behaving like the other victims, not by beating anybody up (as if I could). I realized that the only targets were people who were isolated from the main social group and unwilling to fight back (in most cases by their own low self-esteem) and made an effort to not be one of them. I learned to control my emotions so I could think clearly in social situations that weren't going how I wanted. I learned to actually pay attention and read other people's body language properly. I learned the social rules. I made friends outside my usual circle.
The guys that spent 5 minutes between classes laughing at me in the halls every day (not hardcore bullying but hardly pleasant, I assure you)? Most of them weren't being sarcastic or mean like I thought. They were confused by how incongruously I acted. I was the one that was too stupid to read their expressions correctly. Once I clued in, I stopped escalating simple misunderstandings (I actually thought I was sticking up for myself) and quickly made friends with many of them. I had no trouble ignoring the few asshole opportunists (most of who were doing it due to their own self esteem issues) in the lot who were jumping in with a nasty quip just because they saw they had a chance to get a laugh at my expense. Over the next few weeks I got rid of a good two thirds of the grief I'd get at school (the low grade harassment) in this way. I'd say fixing this one mistake of mine is probably where I started to really build my self-confidence.
The scary looking thug (huge muscles, tattoos, scars, rumors that he's done nasty things - seriously scary fucker) that went around threatening people into giving him free shit? The confidence I'd gained making some friends was enough to keep me calm around him. Calm enough to see his insecurity screaming through every little gesture (fucked up home life, he had a lot to be insecure about). Flat-out told him "no" when he punched me and told me to give him my CD collection. He was stunned, I don't think he'd ever seen someone calmly stand up to him before (I admit, it freaked me out afterwards - he had opened up with a punch). He wandered off as though nothing had happened and didn't bother me again.
The asshole who'd steal my shit, trip me, shove my head into my locker, heckle me in class (WTF teachers, how did that shit ever fly?), throw things at me, etc every single chance he got? I was his favorite victim until a few months after I started turning myself around. He turned out to be desperately afraid he'd lose his friends' respect if he didn't act all tough. Getting the courage to go and talk to them (his friends) and find out that they didn't really like him was the key to getting rid of him. Desperate fuckers turn out to be easy to bait, and I only had to get myself seen with his buddies regularly for a few weeks before he freaked out about them ditching him and did something stupid enough to get them to actually ditch him. He never bothered me again. I'd actually been hoping to get something out of them that I could blackmail him with, but I'm not one to complain if a problem takes care of itself.
So I disagree that TFA's conclusion is some bullshit way to avoid having to actually punish bullies. We're social creatures, and learning how to navigate the social web (rather than hovering helplessly around the edges) is definitely empowering. I certainly wouldn't argue with anyone that would just beat the shit out of a bully, but it's hardly the only way to deal with things (and I've seen a couple of guys that did that get shunned even more for being "dangerous" hotheads).
People with advanced degrees are generally viewed with suspicion on the right, and the degrees themselves are usually denigrated by technical people as "worthless" (for some reason).
In many fields the subject matter has been dumbed down and the grades inflated to the point where the degree is truly just a piece of paper with your name on it (there are many reasons, I can elaborate if you wish). In CS, for example, you have either a degree from one of a vanishingly small number of respected institutions or you have nothing. If you can actually get them honestly talking (rather than simply interviewing off a script before passing you on to the real interviewer), most recruiters will confirm that. They put the degree requirement on the page simply to cut down the number of resumes they must review, but they don't consider it to be a statement of actual qualification.
The value of a college or university is (for some fields, yours may be different) in the few remaining hard core courses, in the exposure to other fields you'll get through options (and the high-level English requirement), in a solid recommendation from an impressed teacher (who, you can be sure, has contacts in local industry), and in the many other networking opportunities you will find therein.
Do you have any experience with modern high school life? What, in all honesty, is there for a teacher to do during the, "Please do the odd problems on page 42," period, if the only people in the class who are bothering to actually do them are the ones already bright enough to not need assistance from the teacher? It's not like he has the authority to actually make any of them do the work (doubly true in a substitute position, as seems to be implied). Even if they were forced to break off their little "conversations", they would most likely sit there staring at the page feeling resentful - not reading, not thinking, and not in any way coming up with questions that demand the teacher's actual attention.
I'm fairly young, and based on my memories of high school, I don't find it even remotely implausible that the most useful thing he could currently be doing is posting to Slashdot. He's probably posting from the teacher's desk, with the class in sight, perfectly available to answer the odd question that might arise every now and then - exactly like every high school teacher I can recall.
Heh. I used to sell computers at Staples, and do tuneups there. S' been almost ten years since but things were the same back then. Ridiculous ripoff.
After a while it got really, really depressing watching the idiocy, and listening to the manager's schemes to exploit it better (did your store ever push the $5.99 ESP replacement plans on people buying mice or calculators with the promise that they could just come in with it and get a brand new unit when the old one naturally wore out? that was a classic at our store).
I transferred into the office furniture department after a year of putting up with customers coming in confused and angry because they had been (or feared they were being) ripped off. It was much better. It was actually possible to build a rapport with the customer, find out what they actually need, and help them get it, rather than trying to trick them into buying extra cables, and taking shit from management if you don't get them to buy enough.
Sometimes, though, people want to be ripped off. I remember in early 2001 an angry old man walked in demanding I sell him a Telus internet startup disk. Yeah, that's right, the little old disks you'd get in 1995 with a web browser on them and a little app to create the dialup connection and put a link to it on your desktop (he'd signed up for ADSL, had received his package from the phone co, and apparently decided he had to buy the disk since there wasn't one in the box). After fifteen minutes of trying to explain that he doesn't need to buy anything extra, and all he has to do is follow the instructions in the little booklet they'd given him, I finally caved in and sold him a scratched up old one I dug out of the back for $10 on a tech center SKU.
"No I don't want the super awesome $50 Monster Cables with gold tips."
Heh. Monster sells that cheap? I asked my mom to pick up an HDMI cable for me since she was going to be shopping in the area. I told her, buy the cheapest one you can find. Somehow they talked her into getting a 10 foot cable that cost $80. Had a nice time showing their idiot manager (because apparently you can't get actual cash back for an unopened item without a manager...) my $15 receipt for a 12 foot HDMI cable when I returned the ridiculous Monster one.
What's bad is when you get a salesman who wants to argue with you. "But you need our service plan!!" Sometimes I just want to throttle these guys.
Yup. Bought a new video card a while ago (mine had fried and, unlike with the cable, I couldn't wait for an online order). The sales dude takes me up to the counter and asks me when I'll bring my machine in for the installation. Not whether I'd be interested in them installing it, flat-out when I'll be back with the box. I tell him I'll do it myself...
BB: "Oh, but we have special equipment!"
Me: "What, a Phillips screwdriver?"
BB: "No, no we have a special electronics lab with static protection..."
Me: "A grounding strap (that I bet your tech ignores) hardly qualifies as a lab."
BB: "But we've got a trained -"
Me: "I already said I'll install it myself. Why are you still badgering me about this?"
BB: "But we'll install the drivers and optimize them for you!"
Me: "Like hell I'd let you near my work files. Just drop the damn -"
BB: "Nothing to worry about! We're sworn to the highest standards of confidentiality, your information is safe with us!"
At that point I told him to fetch me his manager...who proceeded to defend him, and kept trying to sell the "service". I went over to Staples and bought the same card for a bit more, though they shut up about their extended warranty at the first "no, thanks".
The verb in the sentence isn't need, it's the phrase need not, meaning is not required to, or it is not necessary for (the sentence subject) to (the sentence object). "Need not" doesn't change in any conjugation. "He need not", "we need not", and "they need not" are all correct.
It's a semi-archaic formulation that isn't used often, but it's still common in literature and formal speech.
The sentences immediately preceding what I quoted (emphasis mine):
In C++ you could create an array of actual objects and then all the objects are contiguous in memory and incrementing to the next object is incrementing a point by sizeof(theObject). For small objects, you might be within the range of the memory cache on each increment.
I wasn't talking about a list. I was talking about what (I thought) you were talking about. I figured your complaint was that .NET makes it impossible to allocate certain types on the stack, thus utterly destroying locality of reference. I was just pointing out that .NET heap is set up such that you can have heap-allocated objects near each other in memory if you're careful with the order you allocate in.
But the term "list" is a bit generic. std::list<T> is a linked list. System.Collections.Generic.List<T> is an array list (analogous to std::vector<T>). We're probably just getting mixed up over what the different libraries call things.
The managed object system most likely cannot possibly put the actual objects into contiguous memory and so you still have the cache misses when dereferencing the object pointers.
Depends on your VM. The .NET VM defragments memory when it garbage-collects, which is slow on the GC side (except for generation 0 collections), but makes allocations ridiculously fast since all the free memory is in one block and you can just increment the pointer to it by sizeof( Type ). And since that's their allocation strategy, if you allocate objects you intend to use together at the same time, they are pretty much guaranteed to end up next to each other in memory.
However, language really is a self-correcting form of communication. I hate the use of "ur" as a bastardized "your," but linguistically speaking, it's pretty efficient. People who spell horribly usually spell with a more consistent logic than centuries of archaisms -- why not spell "dependent" as "dependant" when we have words such as "rampant, occupant," and attendant?" Other than the baggage caused by inherited languages, why do we persist in using "right" instead of "rite?"
Agreed. If this goes on long enough we might actually end up with sane spelling rules.
The thing that bothers me is the amount of trouble most people have writing complex sentences. In college, I would proofread essays for anyone that bought me lunch, and it really depressed me to see otherwise intelligent people writing the way they spoke (misplaced dependent clauses, randomly placed commas, colloquialisms that wouldn't mean anything to their nearly-retired profs). And not just that, but the fact that many didn't even understand why I was telling them that their sentences are ambiguous. I would try to read them back to them with the emphasis in the wrong place, and they would just argue that, "Anyone that knew anything about the topic wouldn't be confused." (That, followed by the argument that they should write as if their audience doesn't know about the topic - else what would the point be?) It was actually fun when CS students did that to me, because I knew enough about the topic to (usually) misread their essay back to them in a way that made sense, but completely failed to communicate their idea.
People may be reading more today than ever, but it seems that they are reading less formal writing than before. That really is unfortunate, and something we need to correct, especially with the rise of the internet where the bulk of information is still textual. It depresses me to know that there are many bright, intelligent, people out there with whom I can't have a decently deep online conversation, because they don't know how to communicate if you take away their ability to use tone of voice.
That, and the fact that I'll probably live to see "fuck" become an otherwise meaningless emphatic particle, is what bugs me about modern literacy. Otherwise "proper" spelling can go to hell - I have no love at all for the hideous mess of rote memorization that it is.
Chances are, they hate your perceived wealth (or that of the country you come from) instead of (or at least more than) than your appearance. A huge portion of Central and Eastern Europe's wealth is held by Western European companies, and that's led to the perception that their land is being bought out from under them (and the economic turmoil in the region leaves no shortage of conspiracy theories that the West is economically undermining them to leave them unable to compete). That tends to generate a lot of ill will towards tourists from Western Europe, which is why the assorted racists get away with shit like that. When (well, if) the economy recovers most of that will vanish.
An anecdote to match yours: my mother and I went to visit Bulgaria, where our family is from, about a year ago. We hadn't been in the country for decades (my family fled the Communists) but she still speaks the language very well. She went into a store to buy some boza (a drink common in the Balkans) and all they had was some in bottles, which she didn't want since it wasn't fresh (boza goes bad very quickly after its made, the preservatives they used to make it fit to bottle left it tasting flat and stale) and she asked if there were any shops that still made it fresh. Apparently there weren't, and hadn't been for many years, and asking gave her away as a Bulgarian who'd been living in a richer country for many years. As soon as she did that the store owner's demeanor changed from friendly to absolutely frigid. That happened several times in several different places, all in big cities (the people in the two villages we visited were actually quite friendly, generally asking questions about life where we live).
Also common: seeing foreign (mostly British) tourists going on about how friendly the Bulgarian staff at hotels and restaurants is, completely oblivious to the subtle little slights and expressions of contempt (if not outright hostility) all around them (very subtle, you have to know the language very well to catch it). I've encountered that in several other places (I think snobby locals are to be expected as part of the tourist experience), but not even close to the degree I saw it there. A friend from Russia says the same is very common in his country, so I'm guessing the sentiment is fairly widespread.
The woman could easily pass for a Slav, the shape of her face, the color of her skin and hair, none of it is uncommon in the region. And Asians are fairly common in the region. There are lots of people from Central and East Asia spread all over the Slavic countries (not to the extent there are here, but common enough in the cities that you'd run into a few each day as you go about your business). There are also quite a few of them in the Russian media (which is widely available throughout the region).
On the other hand, black people who are neither tourists nor there on short business trips are very uncommon (though that's apparently changing). A Russian friend of mine, who was no shut-in by any stretch of the imagination, was in her late twenties when she first met a black man who spoke fluent, unaccented, Russian. She lived, studied, and worked in Moscow for twenty-some years and never in that time met a single black who did so, nor had she see more than a token few in the media (excepting foreign media), nor (to her knowledge) had any of her friends. Such people do, of course, exist. She knew they existed. But she was still surprised enough the first time she met one that she had to pause for a second just to take the experience in. She's not a racist; it's just the surprise of breaking a long-held and often-reinforced expectation - sort of the same as being pleasantly surprised by good service in your hometown after years of utterly shitty service. That, in my admittedly limited experience, is typical of most Slavic countries.
The black man in the picture isn't going to piss off the nationalists or the racists in any significant way (most of them probably aren't going to buy Microsoft anyway) - I don't think that was their motivation. He is, however, incongruous, and that's something you want to minimize in an advertisement, as it might make people think rather than just leaving a subconscious impression. Granted, they probably failed horribly at that (what with the mismatched lighting and the skyscrapers in the background), but I imagine the conversation went: "If you have time for nothing else, take out the black man, his skin and his spot in the image draw attention, the rest is in the background so most people won't even see it."