Hey, 1037859 AD here, and we installed a plant in 802701 to go back to 2006 and plant the article, because the alternative to what happens in 3042 is even worse.
CMS (= compact muon solenoid) is actually quite big detector. Its main purpose is to find the so called Higgs boson.
See, that's the sort of thing I was talking about. The CMS home page doesn't describe this at ALL. It has a FAQ page.. which promptly goes into details about the construction of the detector and how big it is without ever explaining why the thing is being built. A wikipedia link at the bottom eventually explains it all, but this is a rarity in my experience. It's written for physicists, by physicists.
Part of the problem I have as a non-physicist is that whenever I have to tell someone where I work, they immediatley want to know what the laboratory does, and why. It's difficult to explain the experiments when all you know is that they're building the biggest magnet ever.
Eventually my explanations fail to satisfy, and 9 times of 10 the conversation ends with someone asking "and my taxes are paying for that??" Public interest in theoretical research labs is already pretty damn low, and near as I can see a lack of explanation in layman's terms only hurts it further. Most folks are willing to accept that some types of study may never result in something they can buy at the store, but I also think they'd appreciate having a way to understand why it's important anyways.
Ah, the RCT for the CMS on the LHC in CH. Why didn't you just say that.
IANAPhysicist, but I work in proximity to them. So I know a little bit about this stuff.
RCT = A device that detects a particle after a collision happens in a particle accelerator, which "triggers" to the connected computer that something interesting happened. CMS = Name of the experiment. Like NASA is the name of an organization. LHC = A big particle collider being built at CERN, in Switzerland. Like Fermilab, but bigger.
Physicists are smart folk, but are hideous at PR. Most of the web pages intended to be a PR front fail miserably, and are indecipherable to anyone except physicists. There was even a movement a few years back to get physicsts to name their experiments in more public-friendly ways, which failed miserably.
If you're going to go with something vague like, "your clip is getting light", you'd better not make it catastrophic for the player to run out of ammo.
It probably wouldn't matter. Except in games that "throw away" unused ammo in clips that you swap out, most players reload after every kill. Empty clips simply never happen.
In games that do keep track of ammo on a per-clip basis generally focus on one to two bullets killing someone so a nearly empty clip still isn't much of a problem.
Hearing click-click as you pull the trigger and nothing comes out is plenty of indicator that the gun is empty.;)
er, didn't proofread very well. I didn't intend to make Steam sound like a "good" thing when it comes to used games. I meant to state that Valve has seen how important the used game market is, and has developed a system to lock used game sales out.
I can see a future where online "registration" locks a copy of the game to the original purchaser, by assigning that serial number to a personal account. X3: Reunion does something of this sort. MMOG's have done this since day one.
With services like xbox live, it would be trivial to lock a physical copy of a game to a specific gamer tag. In one fell swoop, the used game market dries up.
Of course this depends on how well dev houses adapt to changing times. Valve has obviously had some foresight with their rollout of Steam, but they're just one tiny company out of thousands.
Create a separate sub-net if you have to to keep the non-production machines off the IT network, and a firewall between your network and theirs to prevent any viruses, or other effects, from leaking from your net to theirs
Just take special care to educate everyone using the private network that it's not supported by the IT department, and questions regarding such are likely to be met with quite a bit of hostility. I work on the other side of the fence from the story submitter, and the general feeling is that even the technologiclly minded developers don't know diddly about maintaining a stable server. People are generally encouraged to set up their own work environment, but as soon as root access is given out it's made clear that it is no longer our (that is, IT's) problem.
More importantly, after a couple years of running a private network, never ever consider passing off the burden of maintaining the rickety development system that is suddenly 24x7 critical to IT. Those kinds of moves are exactly the kind that destroy IT's willingness to accomodate user requests.
Re:Can it live up to the fans' expectations?
on
Stargate MMO Announced
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As DAoC and WoW have shown (among others as well I'm sure, I just only played these two), three factions seems to be a good minimum. Two is not enough, as any population imbalances become huge hurdles. Three (or more) factions still have population issues, but at least two smaller factions have the option of ganging up on the big guy, and once the big guy runs to lick his wounds, the small guys can beat each other up.
I was raised in Alaska. One summer when we drove to the mainland USA for vacation, my parents were involved in a bit of a fender bender, which required towing and dealing with the insurance company. The company insisted Alaska is not part of the US, and therefore there was no way they could be insuring us. My mother spent over 45 minutes trying to convince them otherwise.
I don't consider myself in the upper crust when it comes to intelligence, but in that case I felt justified in feeling a wee bit superior. It's one thing to make a mistake and admit it, but to talk down at a customer for the better part of an hour is the stuff of legend.
Though the issue wasn't as loudly protested in FFXI as it is WoW, there was quite a bit of segregation between American and Japanese players as well. Japanese would refuse to group with Americans for reasons I never precisely found out, but the common sentiment was that Japanese felt Americans were too stupid to group with.
Americans would refuse to group with Japanese for the same reason.
The game didn't really require much communication to be able to function in a group, and any communication that did need to happen could be done by building comments with pre-translated keywords. And yet the two sides almost exclusively played in their own little world, despite sharing servers with others. Only the bilingual folks were able to exist in both worlds.
Based on my experiences with FFXI, I think the anti-Chinese sentiment in WoW is simply a human's innate tendency towards racism. Don't get me wrong, a lot of gold farmers are in fact Chinese, but a lot of them are European and American as well. Yet, everyone "knows" that all the farmers ruining the game are Chinese.
Re:Extremely easy to disable, and more info
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
I'd love to have comment from Apple, and a clear presentation that information is being sent to Apple for x purpose, and a clear option to allow - or disallow - such use.
You could always set the ID3 tags of all your mp3s to Britney Spears songs. That way if they ever suggest such music to you, you'll know exactly how they found out.
What I want are unobtanium punchcards, punched with little microscopic holes to maximize density. Then in 6000 years when someone digs me up out of the pyramid I built for myself they'll be able to read my blog and see that my mood was "excited".
Thats technically an opt-in, but they still end up complaining and screaming SPAM!
It's still hard to be sympathetic.
Perhaps those companies shouldn't default the checkbox to checked, and/or sneak the checkbox in at the very bottom in a smaller typeface? Obviously the user has every opportunity to stop the emails before they start, but that doesn't neccessarily cure the company sending them of any blame.
I'm fairly sure the loudness in movie previews is caused by a tendency in recent years for audio producers to make a sound "louder" by amplifying the audio signal.
Don't really remember what the procedure is called, but they basically crank up the amplitude of the wave. This results in the sound being percieved as much louder. Of course the downside is that this clips the peaks out of the signal but since they've all decided that louder gets noticed better, it hasn't tempered their antics by much. Several albums have been completely ruined by this practice.
This matches up with my experiences of louder previews, which like you I've noticed in the past year or so. It's definetly loud, but the audio ends up being quite muddy.
It "settles down" for the movie because the people pushing such foolery haven't sunk their claws into movies yet.
You can't "pick it up and use it" because the original creators elected to head out in their own direction and explore different interface methods. Part of that involved eschewing more orthodox philosophies.. an act which will always provoke complaints such as yours.
Once you force feed it to yourself, after a while you'll start to enjoy it and even respect it. I wouldn't call it better than 3dmax or any other modeller you can name, but it's definetly a damn good interface.
I've been using the 2.40 release candidates for the past month, and it's a splendid update to an already splendid program. I've watched people produce things equal in quality to the products of extremely expensive modelling programs with it. I've also seen a lot of newbies create complete crap but that's part of the risk of free software.;)
C'mon, there are all kinds of equally, or more entertaining shows.
Huh? What the hell are you on?
Don't get me wrong, I don't think of Firefly as the TV version of Christ's second coming, but what exists on TV that's worth watching? And what shows exist in sufficient quantity to warrant the "all kinds of" label?
Whenever I flip through the major network stations, all I see is new reality shows and faceless "family dramas". Surely you're not suggesting anyone watch that crap?
Only new show this season I watched completely was HBO's Rome, and it wasn't so much because it is a great show, I'm just a fan of all things Roman. When new episodes pop up in on demand I'll watch Mythbusters as well. Other than that.. TV is absolute crap.
Shouldn't be citing encyclopedias to begin with. When I was in school, I had teachers that would mark student's work down if they used an encyclopedia as a source.
To my eyes their only legitimite use is for someone new to a subject getting a concentrated overview to get them started with real research.
Interestingly enough the film begins with a scene not in the book at all that does a lot to set up some of how things will work out.
I'm glad you pointed that out. It's been 15+ years since I read the novels, and though it didn't seem right to witness the bombing of London in the opening scenes I couldn't remeber if it had been in the books.
Those opening scenes were the only ones in the movie that triggered any kind of emotional reaction in me, which is both good and bad. Illustrates the importance of adapting even better I think.;)
Quite honestly, I felt the effects in this film were very poorly done.
The entire movie was very poorly done. It's as if the script writer merely made a bulleted list of every major plot point in the novel, and handed it off to the director. There was absolutely no character to the movie, everyone trouped around the countryside methodicly completing task A before moving on to task B. Felt more like they were connecting the dots than telling a story.
I suppose it merely proves there's something to be said for "adapting" rather than doing a 1 to 1 conversion. Not sticking to the story may piss off the hardcore fans, but at least it produces a watchable movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, 1037859 AD here, and we installed a plant in 802701 to go back to 2006 and plant the article, because the alternative to what happens in 3042 is even worse.
(hopefully not bad PR):
;)
You did fine.
CMS (= compact muon solenoid) is actually quite big detector. Its main purpose is to find the so called Higgs boson.
See, that's the sort of thing I was talking about. The CMS home page doesn't describe this at ALL. It has a FAQ page.. which promptly goes into details about the construction of the detector and how big it is without ever explaining why the thing is being built. A wikipedia link at the bottom eventually explains it all, but this is a rarity in my experience. It's written for physicists, by physicists.
Part of the problem I have as a non-physicist is that whenever I have to tell someone where I work, they immediatley want to know what the laboratory does, and why. It's difficult to explain the experiments when all you know is that they're building the biggest magnet ever.
Eventually my explanations fail to satisfy, and 9 times of 10 the conversation ends with someone asking "and my taxes are paying for that??" Public interest in theoretical research labs is already pretty damn low, and near as I can see a lack of explanation in layman's terms only hurts it further. Most folks are willing to accept that some types of study may never result in something they can buy at the store, but I also think they'd appreciate having a way to understand why it's important anyways.
Ah, the RCT for the CMS on the LHC in CH. Why didn't you just say that.
IANAPhysicist, but I work in proximity to them. So I know a little bit about this stuff.
RCT = A device that detects a particle after a collision happens in a particle accelerator, which "triggers" to the connected computer that something interesting happened.
CMS = Name of the experiment. Like NASA is the name of an organization.
LHC = A big particle collider being built at CERN, in Switzerland. Like Fermilab, but bigger.
Physicists are smart folk, but are hideous at PR. Most of the web pages intended to be a PR front fail miserably, and are indecipherable to anyone except physicists. There was even a movement a few years back to get physicsts to name their experiments in more public-friendly ways, which failed miserably.
Man, $38,800 for a 360? I wouldn't buy one either with that kind of markup.
And what's with those weird graphics they use on their posters, the squiggly ones. Did their printer break?
If you're going to go with something vague like, "your clip is getting light", you'd better not make it catastrophic for the player to run out of ammo.
;)
It probably wouldn't matter. Except in games that "throw away" unused ammo in clips that you swap out, most players reload after every kill. Empty clips simply never happen.
In games that do keep track of ammo on a per-clip basis generally focus on one to two bullets killing someone so a nearly empty clip still isn't much of a problem.
Hearing click-click as you pull the trigger and nothing comes out is plenty of indicator that the gun is empty.
PC Halo was ported by a third party as well. Gearbox did the work.
er, didn't proofread very well. I didn't intend to make Steam sound like a "good" thing when it comes to used games. I meant to state that Valve has seen how important the used game market is, and has developed a system to lock used game sales out.
I can see a future where online "registration" locks a copy of the game to the original purchaser, by assigning that serial number to a personal account. X3: Reunion does something of this sort. MMOG's have done this since day one.
With services like xbox live, it would be trivial to lock a physical copy of a game to a specific gamer tag. In one fell swoop, the used game market dries up.
Of course this depends on how well dev houses adapt to changing times. Valve has obviously had some foresight with their rollout of Steam, but they're just one tiny company out of thousands.
And in 4 years it'll be able to drink alcohol, too!
Create a separate sub-net if you have to to keep the non-production machines off the IT network, and a firewall between your network and theirs to prevent any viruses, or other effects, from leaking from your net to theirs
Just take special care to educate everyone using the private network that it's not supported by the IT department, and questions regarding such are likely to be met with quite a bit of hostility. I work on the other side of the fence from the story submitter, and the general feeling is that even the technologiclly minded developers don't know diddly about maintaining a stable server. People are generally encouraged to set up their own work environment, but as soon as root access is given out it's made clear that it is no longer our (that is, IT's) problem.
More importantly, after a couple years of running a private network, never ever consider passing off the burden of maintaining the rickety development system that is suddenly 24x7 critical to IT. Those kinds of moves are exactly the kind that destroy IT's willingness to accomodate user requests.
As DAoC and WoW have shown (among others as well I'm sure, I just only played these two), three factions seems to be a good minimum. Two is not enough, as any population imbalances become huge hurdles. Three (or more) factions still have population issues, but at least two smaller factions have the option of ganging up on the big guy, and once the big guy runs to lick his wounds, the small guys can beat each other up.
I was raised in Alaska. One summer when we drove to the mainland USA for vacation, my parents were involved in a bit of a fender bender, which required towing and dealing with the insurance company. The company insisted Alaska is not part of the US, and therefore there was no way they could be insuring us. My mother spent over 45 minutes trying to convince them otherwise.
I don't consider myself in the upper crust when it comes to intelligence, but in that case I felt justified in feeling a wee bit superior. It's one thing to make a mistake and admit it, but to talk down at a customer for the better part of an hour is the stuff of legend.
Though the issue wasn't as loudly protested in FFXI as it is WoW, there was quite a bit of segregation between American and Japanese players as well. Japanese would refuse to group with Americans for reasons I never precisely found out, but the common sentiment was that Japanese felt Americans were too stupid to group with.
Americans would refuse to group with Japanese for the same reason.
The game didn't really require much communication to be able to function in a group, and any communication that did need to happen could be done by building comments with pre-translated keywords. And yet the two sides almost exclusively played in their own little world, despite sharing servers with others. Only the bilingual folks were able to exist in both worlds.
Based on my experiences with FFXI, I think the anti-Chinese sentiment in WoW is simply a human's innate tendency towards racism. Don't get me wrong, a lot of gold farmers are in fact Chinese, but a lot of them are European and American as well. Yet, everyone "knows" that all the farmers ruining the game are Chinese.
I'd love to have comment from Apple, and a clear presentation that information is being sent to Apple for x purpose, and a clear option to allow - or disallow - such use.
You could always set the ID3 tags of all your mp3s to Britney Spears songs. That way if they ever suggest such music to you, you'll know exactly how they found out.
What I want are unobtanium punchcards, punched with little microscopic holes to maximize density. Then in 6000 years when someone digs me up out of the pyramid I built for myself they'll be able to read my blog and see that my mood was "excited".
Assuming ascii is still around by then.
Then again, they were burned with a good quality Yamaha drive.
What does the drive have to do with anything?
It's the discs that corrode.
Let's hope they shitcan that stupid jingle, as well.
Maybe then I'll be able to watch computer commercials without wincing, for once.
Thats technically an opt-in, but they still end up complaining and screaming SPAM!
It's still hard to be sympathetic.
Perhaps those companies shouldn't default the checkbox to checked, and/or sneak the checkbox in at the very bottom in a smaller typeface? Obviously the user has every opportunity to stop the emails before they start, but that doesn't neccessarily cure the company sending them of any blame.
I'm fairly sure the loudness in movie previews is caused by a tendency in recent years for audio producers to make a sound "louder" by amplifying the audio signal.
Don't really remember what the procedure is called, but they basically crank up the amplitude of the wave. This results in the sound being percieved as much louder. Of course the downside is that this clips the peaks out of the signal but since they've all decided that louder gets noticed better, it hasn't tempered their antics by much. Several albums have been completely ruined by this practice.
This matches up with my experiences of louder previews, which like you I've noticed in the past year or so. It's definetly loud, but the audio ends up being quite muddy.
It "settles down" for the movie because the people pushing such foolery haven't sunk their claws into movies yet.
The animation and fluid simulator is nice and all but I think my favorite enhancement ended up being the particle system changes.
The particle guides made setting up effects I'd waste days trying to accomplish in 2.37 something that could be done in 15 minutes.
You can't "pick it up and use it" because the original creators elected to head out in their own direction and explore different interface methods. Part of that involved eschewing more orthodox philosophies.. an act which will always provoke complaints such as yours.
;)
Once you force feed it to yourself, after a while you'll start to enjoy it and even respect it. I wouldn't call it better than 3dmax or any other modeller you can name, but it's definetly a damn good interface.
I've been using the 2.40 release candidates for the past month, and it's a splendid update to an already splendid program. I've watched people produce things equal in quality to the products of extremely expensive modelling programs with it. I've also seen a lot of newbies create complete crap but that's part of the risk of free software.
C'mon, there are all kinds of equally, or more entertaining shows.
Huh? What the hell are you on?
Don't get me wrong, I don't think of Firefly as the TV version of Christ's second coming, but what exists on TV that's worth watching? And what shows exist in sufficient quantity to warrant the "all kinds of" label?
Whenever I flip through the major network stations, all I see is new reality shows and faceless "family dramas". Surely you're not suggesting anyone watch that crap?
Only new show this season I watched completely was HBO's Rome, and it wasn't so much because it is a great show, I'm just a fan of all things Roman. When new episodes pop up in on demand I'll watch Mythbusters as well. Other than that.. TV is absolute crap.
Shouldn't be citing encyclopedias to begin with. When I was in school, I had teachers that would mark student's work down if they used an encyclopedia as a source.
To my eyes their only legitimite use is for someone new to a subject getting a concentrated overview to get them started with real research.
Interestingly enough the film begins with a scene not in the book at all that does a lot to set up some of how things will work out.
;)
I'm glad you pointed that out. It's been 15+ years since I read the novels, and though it didn't seem right to witness the bombing of London in the opening scenes I couldn't remeber if it had been in the books.
Those opening scenes were the only ones in the movie that triggered any kind of emotional reaction in me, which is both good and bad. Illustrates the importance of adapting even better I think.
Quite honestly, I felt the effects in this film were very poorly done.
The entire movie was very poorly done. It's as if the script writer merely made a bulleted list of every major plot point in the novel, and handed it off to the director. There was absolutely no character to the movie, everyone trouped around the countryside methodicly completing task A before moving on to task B. Felt more like they were connecting the dots than telling a story.
I suppose it merely proves there's something to be said for "adapting" rather than doing a 1 to 1 conversion. Not sticking to the story may piss off the hardcore fans, but at least it produces a watchable movie.