Why should Jamie get to post moderation free, Katzian garbage like this? Put it in a comment like everyone else.
I made *exactly* the same observation about a particularly stupid CmdrTaco editorial attached to a story. I was lucky enough to get a direct reply to my comment in which he proudly said, thought not in so many words: "Fuck you, it's my site, I can write what I want".
Slashdot makes NO pretense at journalistic integrity. It's just a blog.
It will (probably) get smaller, a reduction is more likely the bigger the file is.
It "probably" will not.
The reason is that in a random stream you may get repeating patterns (although you may not), and it's these repeating patterns which deflate uses.
Any encoding that saves space by compressing repeating data, also adds overhead for data that doesn't repeat -- at least as much overhead as you saved on the repetition, over the long run.
"Random" is not "worst-case" performance, at least it's certainly not guaranteed to be.
It does indeed represent the worst case. "Random data" in the context of data compression means "any data whatsoever", and an algorithm that "compresses random data" is implied to compress any data at better than 1:1, over the long run.
Defining "random data" as "this particular set of random data" is just deceptive and misleading.
That's not right. A 1:1 average for a large sample of random data is the best you can ever do. On a case by case basis, you can get lucky and do better, but no algorithm can compress arbitrary random data at better than 1:1 in the long run.
Set Troll to -6 and even a comment that is (Score:5; Troll)* will plummet to -1. [...] If a comment is rated to (Score:5; something), then modded as troll, it becomes (Score:4; Troll).
Then this is obviously a very bad idea, because then a spurious Troll mod by a bad moderator will trash an otherwise good comment.
In fact the "final" value is completely useless, period. The most common moderation reason is the only sensible value to show, and that's of dubious use. I don't know why they don't just show the complete breakdown of moderation. "(Troll:2, Insightful:3, Funny:1, Offtopic:2)" wouldn't be too much to show.
And while we're on the topic, "underrated" and "overrated" should be removed entirely as options, because they are immune from effective metamoderation.
The way it seems to work now, is that the total moderation has a factor from -6 to +6 added to it based on the one, final moderation type
It was far from obvious that that was the case. As I said, I assumed that the modifier was per moderation, not per the "displayed" final mod type. That does make more sense.
But I would rather have control over the moderation values themselves. It may be that only values between -1 and +1 would be useful in real life, but maybe you *really* want to punish a comment with a troll mod, so you give them a -2 instead.
The reason modifiers are rather confusing. They're all zero by default, which I guess means that they modify the initial +1 value up or down. But why bother making it that confusing? Just allow people to set the actual value of the moderation itself.
no, nobody forced them to do anything. Neither did the sweatshop workers of the past
Oh PLEASE. Sweatshop workers? Get your head out of your ass. We're talking about people that have chosen to pursue an artistic endeavour instead of a 9-5 paycheck. They're not struggling to keep their kids from starving to death. What a pathetic analogy.
the big labels DO have an effective monopoly- they have over 90% of a given market between them
Over 50% market share != monopoly. Small labels are just as good at producing albums as big labels. They just don't have as much distribution and can't give the artists as much money.
I repeat: if your greed leads you to choose bucks over art and sign a deal with a big label, then keep your trap shut about "artists rights", because you're not an artist, you're a whore.
they're so big that you can't even open a store in town without having to go through them.
Your analogy just broke.
These artists had every opportunity to sign with an independent label. But they wanted the big bucks. New artists? Same thing. They see the first advance check with all the zeroes, quickly sign every paper thrust in front of them, ride the big ticket publicity machine to the top, buy a big house and a Ferrari, and then bitch a few years later about how much money the labels are "stealing" from them.
It's bullshit. They knew what the contract was when they signed it. They took the money. Nobody forced anyone to do anything.
Big labels don't have a monopoly. They do have all the money. If you want a piece of that money, then shut the hell up and take it like a man when the contract serves them more than you. Or find your own gigs, eat Kraft Dinner, sign independent, and have freedom to express yourself artistically.
But for God's sake, don't take the blood money and then whine about how the contract YOU AGREED TO isn't nice any more.
Carmageddon which on the N64 at least has sucky physics,
Excepting the possibility that the N64 version is completely different from the PC version, you are completely clueless. Carmageddon, of ALL the games you could have chosen, was a pioneer in game physics. It was the very first game that I played that had a real rigid-body simulator built into the engine.
Say what you will about the gameplay, or the physical settings (gravity was too low), but you can't say it had sucky physics. The cars and environmental objects interacted in an incredibly realistic manner. It was miles ahead of Re-Volt in that department.
Religion: 57% of the population is Christian with 1% being Protestant. 33% of the population is non-religious and less than 9% of the population is Muslim.
Most "non-religious" people in predominantly Christian countries celebrate Christmas as well, so it's a pretty good bet.
That's something that just won't happen with mp3s.
Shoutcast is MP3, and it offers the same sort of exposure.
But I agree with your main point, that it's important to listen to music that isn't all of your own personal choosing. I'm happy to let someone that has more time to sample everything that is available suggest what I listen to sometimes.
Everyone is going to be highly amused to find they don't need high-end systems their 3d work!
Ah. Also have them inform all the budding artists out there that they can go straight to hell if they don't have $100K on hand for a rackmount SMP renderfarm, because that's the only way to do art, period.
How's the air up there in your ivory tower?
This wasn't a "sky's the limit, what's the best hardware you can ever design on" question -- it was about finding budget hardware to get the job done. When you're working out of your basement, you've already conceded that you're not going to get 5 minute production-quality previews.
A 3D artist only really needs enough power to run the 3D modelling applications. Now, these are pretty hefty applications in general, but they don't need the multi-cpu high-GHz machines needed for production rendering.
A single P3, 512M RAM, with a GF2MX is plenty for running MAX or Maya fast enough for people not already employed by a high-end studio. You can model and animate to your heart's content, generating low-res, low-quality proofs as necessary. You don't *need* photorealistic, hi-res, 30fps proofs to get good work done. It's a luxury for the folks at Pixar.
Don't confuse the needs of an animator with those of final production rendering.
They've been filming for 2 years?, Geez, is this thing gonna be 12 hours long, or what?
"Registered on IMDB" doesn't mean anything more than film execs arguing about who, when, and how the film will be made at some point in the future. That's a LONG way from "in production".
the Interact Mobile Monitor 5.4, a 5.4" LCD that hooks up to your gamecube, providing a screen and power from either AC or an included car adapter... Interact sells an optional battery pack, which IGN claims can power the GameCube and monitor for up to three hours
I can't wait for the Xbox version, complete with diesel generator and trailer.
Slashdot Mirror
I made *exactly* the same observation about a particularly stupid CmdrTaco editorial attached to a story. I was lucky enough to get a direct reply to my comment in which he proudly said, thought not in so many words: "Fuck you, it's my site, I can write what I want".
Slashdot makes NO pretense at journalistic integrity. It's just a blog.
Well, not since LavaRand went down...
"harnessing the power of Lava Lite® lamps to generate truly random numbers since 1996."
Either literature, for their epic fantasy press releases, or economics, for their Theory of Venture Capital Greed:Ignorance ratios.
It "probably" will not.
The reason is that in a random stream you may get repeating patterns (although you may not), and it's these repeating patterns which deflate uses.
Any encoding that saves space by compressing repeating data, also adds overhead for data that doesn't repeat -- at least as much overhead as you saved on the repetition, over the long run.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
It does indeed represent the worst case. "Random data" in the context of data compression means "any data whatsoever", and an algorithm that "compresses random data" is implied to compress any data at better than 1:1, over the long run.
Defining "random data" as "this particular set of random data" is just deceptive and misleading.
That's not right. A 1:1 average for a large sample of random data is the best you can ever do. On a case by case basis, you can get lucky and do better, but no algorithm can compress arbitrary random data at better than 1:1 in the long run.
For truly random data? 1:1 at the absolute best.
[...]
If a comment is rated to (Score:5; something), then modded as troll, it becomes (Score:4; Troll).
Then this is obviously a very bad idea, because then a spurious Troll mod by a bad moderator will trash an otherwise good comment.
In fact the "final" value is completely useless, period. The most common moderation reason is the only sensible value to show, and that's of dubious use. I don't know why they don't just show the complete breakdown of moderation. "(Troll:2, Insightful:3, Funny:1, Offtopic:2)" wouldn't be too much to show.
And while we're on the topic, "underrated" and "overrated" should be removed entirely as options, because they are immune from effective metamoderation.
If that was the case, then how did Isildur ever manage to hack the ring off such a nebulous entity? Sauron fought man-to-man in the book too.
It was far from obvious that that was the case. As I said, I assumed that the modifier was per moderation, not per the "displayed" final mod type. That does make more sense.
But I would rather have control over the moderation values themselves. It may be that only values between -1 and +1 would be useful in real life, but maybe you *really* want to punish a comment with a troll mod, so you give them a -2 instead.
i.e.
Interesting: +1
Funny: 0
Troll: -2
etc....
Seconded. The graphic looks totally out of place, and doesn't serve the function well in the first place.
Oh PLEASE. Sweatshop workers? Get your head out of your ass. We're talking about people that have chosen to pursue an artistic endeavour instead of a 9-5 paycheck. They're not struggling to keep their kids from starving to death. What a pathetic analogy.
the big labels DO have an effective monopoly- they have over 90% of a given market between them
Over 50% market share != monopoly. Small labels are just as good at producing albums as big labels. They just don't have as much distribution and can't give the artists as much money.
I repeat: if your greed leads you to choose bucks over art and sign a deal with a big label, then keep your trap shut about "artists rights", because you're not an artist, you're a whore.
Your analogy just broke.
These artists had every opportunity to sign with an independent label. But they wanted the big bucks. New artists? Same thing. They see the first advance check with all the zeroes, quickly sign every paper thrust in front of them, ride the big ticket publicity machine to the top, buy a big house and a Ferrari, and then bitch a few years later about how much money the labels are "stealing" from them.
It's bullshit. They knew what the contract was when they signed it. They took the money. Nobody forced anyone to do anything.
Big labels don't have a monopoly. They do have all the money. If you want a piece of that money, then shut the hell up and take it like a man when the contract serves them more than you. Or find your own gigs, eat Kraft Dinner, sign independent, and have freedom to express yourself artistically. But for God's sake, don't take the blood money and then whine about how the contract YOU AGREED TO isn't nice any more.
Excepting the possibility that the N64 version is completely different from the PC version, you are completely clueless. Carmageddon, of ALL the games you could have chosen, was a pioneer in game physics. It was the very first game that I played that had a real rigid-body simulator built into the engine.
Say what you will about the gameplay, or the physical settings (gravity was too low), but you can't say it had sucky physics. The cars and environmental objects interacted in an incredibly realistic manner. It was miles ahead of Re-Volt in that department.
Religion: 57% of the population is Christian with 1% being Protestant. 33% of the population is non-religious and less than 9% of the population is Muslim.
Most "non-religious" people in predominantly Christian countries celebrate Christmas as well, so it's a pretty good bet.
Shoutcast is MP3, and it offers the same sort of exposure.
But I agree with your main point, that it's important to listen to music that isn't all of your own personal choosing. I'm happy to let someone that has more time to sample everything that is available suggest what I listen to sometimes.
I really miss my old Micronaut toys. The rocket launchers on those things could fire small bits of plastic at near relativistic speeds.
Ah. Also have them inform all the budding artists out there that they can go straight to hell if they don't have $100K on hand for a rackmount SMP renderfarm, because that's the only way to do art, period.
How's the air up there in your ivory tower?
This wasn't a "sky's the limit, what's the best hardware you can ever design on" question -- it was about finding budget hardware to get the job done. When you're working out of your basement, you've already conceded that you're not going to get 5 minute production-quality previews.
A single P3, 512M RAM, with a GF2MX is plenty for running MAX or Maya fast enough for people not already employed by a high-end studio. You can model and animate to your heart's content, generating low-res, low-quality proofs as necessary. You don't *need* photorealistic, hi-res, 30fps proofs to get good work done. It's a luxury for the folks at Pixar.
Don't confuse the needs of an animator with those of final production rendering.
"Registered on IMDB" doesn't mean anything more than film execs arguing about who, when, and how the film will be made at some point in the future. That's a LONG way from "in production".
I think curling is still a step up from race-walking.
Thanks for the heads-up.
And, appropriately, that was the stupidest reply ever.
I can't wait for the Xbox version, complete with diesel generator and trailer.