That is pretty cool. I did something of a similar bent a few years back, though with different goals. I wanted to see if people were capable of participating in an art project without being asshats.
Short version is, they couldn't. There were some cool things a few people did (that link is one example), but it was always done by one person and some scripts, rather than a group.
Don't have it up anymore, the way I stored the data was pretty inefficient and was too expensive in terms of CPU time to keep available.
I'm not a software engineer but... no, wait, I AM a software engineer,
Many physicists seem to consider themselves so brilliant, they can do other people's jobs as well as their own. Fermilab is riddled with examples, from decripit buildings they designed on their own, to gigabytes worth of python code operating mission-critical analysis.
This guy appears to be one of of those types. Because he's employed at a fancy pants government research center, he gets airtime for things he has no business talking about.
He's a physicist. If you thought the socially inept uber nerd was a dying or dead species, they aren't. Far from it really. Walk around Fermilab's cafeteria at lunch and you can witness some absolutely stunning samples. Even worse are the ones who carry these traits, and think they're far more intelligent than they are. The arrogance these guys can carry is indescribable.
Yes I'm generalizing, but it's hard not to. For every well adjusted, friendly physicist there's at least one other who thinks himself a living diety.
I honestly don't see how they're going to attact anyone except nerds to run their software.
It's crap, the documentation is crap, and you can really only figure it out through trial and error. The main BOINC page has a "software" section, but no link to actually download the clients. Instead, they elected to stash the client download link below the list of available projects. So you sort that out, get the client, and run it.
I don't know what it's like for the other projects, but their dumb little wizard for signing onto a project doesn't work at all with seti@home. It says to enter an URL, without clearly explaining that the URL is merely the homepage of the project. So I just guessed by cutting and pasting off the BOINC home page and happened to get it right. Well, so one would think. It never gave positive confirmation. Then it takes you to this little login screen, and I immediatley tried to log in with my old seti@home account. The software thinks about that for a minute, then presents you with a generic communication error and no clue on what to do next. So I tried to make a new account.. same generic error. I only discovered you have to go to the seti@home page and "migrate" your account to the new system by going to the seti@home webpage, looking for some hint on how to proceed. Few minutes later, after filling out a number of forms and getting a "key" in my email, I pasted it into the BOINC wizard and was finally able to attach to the project.
Again, not one single bit of this is documented in a clear format. Only random trial and error figured it out. Even their "help" page is little more than a high brow explanation of the software and the mechanics of how the system functions. Like I said, only nerds are going to take the time to figure this thing out.
At least the old seti@home was as simple as double clicking a file and entering an email address, something easily graspable by your average schmoe.
You can't zoom-in infinitely, or even much. Why people think crappy security cameras are "better" than their personal digital zooming cameras is beyond me. You can't "clear up" an image when it's zoomed-in, you already have all the data. The best you can do is some thresholding/sharpening/convolution operations...
Kind of offtopic, mostly because I agree with everything you said, but I've always wondered if higer "resolution" could be achieved by analyzing the data in several frames of footage from a film. I seem to recall one of the probes around Mars does something like this but can't remember for sure.
As the data in front of the lens shifts, different details get caught. Couldn't some clever programming combine that into a single image with greater detail than originally existed?
> I've come across some documents in this area from a few sources (of course can't remember them off the top of my head).
Uh, then might I suggest holding off on pressing the submit button for a few minutes while you go find them? Can just imagine this new project lead in meetings. "Well guys I was going to unveil our new features, but I can't remember what they are off the top of my head."
Yeah, no kidding. I can usually make do with a single audio CD's worth of music for a few days before needing to swap out.
If the ROKR is failing, the only reason it's doing so is because the cell phone market is absolutely saturated. Everyone that wants one already has a phone, and phones aren't fashion items anymore. iPod is.
Some of the rooms I've seen lately have so many air conditioners dumping air under the floor, the currents are going too fast to rise through holes at a desired rate. Obviously it comes out somewhere, but it may not be where you want it.
Also obviously, some air will always push up all over the place, but it may not be enough in a spot that needs it. It generates hot and cold spots all over the room. I've seen this worked around by adjusting where tiles with holes are placed, and using baffles under the floor.
A lot of places also have plenty of air conditioners, but poor exhaust. So the pressure tends to build up in the room, reducing the effectiveness of air circulation. Even worse, machines near the top of a rack are several degrees warmer than ones near the floor.
While this may be true for the shows offered as evidence, it doesn't mean the point being made is wrong. To me it just seems like the article is misattributing what is causing the rise in female viewership.
In some interview on the Firefly DVD set, there were comments made that Fox had concerns that they weren't getting reactions from the audiences they wanted. They said they got a "much bigger" reaction from female viewers than they did male ones.
Though Firefly is only barely science fiction, it only holds claim to the label because it involves a spacefaring humanity in the future, that quote from the interview has always struck me as a bit odd.
Perhaps it's nothing more than the "softening" of traditional sci-fi that is causing the shift.
The thing that gets me is that HBO has been very good about putting Rome episodes up in on demand cable. They stay available for weeks.
Seriously, what's the difference between torrenting the episode, and watching it at my liesure on digital cable? They lose the ability to track viewership and that's it, right?
I would personally opt for PNG for images, to avoid loss of data.
I'd try XPM.;) Sure it's a bloated format, but it's a human readable text file. Bitmap images can easily be seen in a text editor.
As long as the ASCII charset is not lost and forgotten, the file would remain decipherable to any computer geek. Can JPG, PNG, or GIF claim the same thing?
But now we can also run things over with cars...so clearly we've evolved. No more pounding on it with large rocks.
Hitting it with a rock probably would have broken it a lot faster. Cars put out a lot of pressue on their contact patch, but it's spread out evenly over the entire area.
Jagged edges of a rock are not so even, and would have put extreme pressure anywhere they contacted the nano. One or two hits probably would have punctured the casing. A smooth round rock would be mostly the same, but without the punctures.
So put that way, our monkey ancestors were better at destroying than we are. Evolution shmevolution.
Why is it that Penny Arcade gets all the attention around here?
Better marketing. Sluggy is a much more word of mouth deal. PA actively tries to get attention.
I've read both for years and they both are thriving in their respective niche, so I don't see why lines have to be drawn debating which one deserves more recognition.
Chicago suburbia in recent years. I lived in SF's south bay prior to that though, and still had decent experiences.
The theater I go to is one of those massive 30 screen deals, is always clean, lines are decently short, and the people are courteous about being quiet. Is also nice because they quite often run small-run movies which are almost always interesting, gives something to watch when Hollywood is having a dry spell.
I understand a certain percentage of visits will be ruined for a certain percentage of visitors, but in my experience with all the movies I've been to, people shut up and got quiet the minute the lights are turned down.
If it was really as bad as people are making it out to be, it seems like I should have had a lot more problems than I have had. Either I am fantastically lucky, or the problems are being overstated.;) You all know which one I think it is.
Having gone to the movies at least once every two weeks for the past 10 years (usually once a week), I have never once had a showing ruined by a phone ringing, someone's kid screaming, or someone else throwing food.
I think you exaggerate the problem a bit much.
Worst I've ever had to deal with was someone a few rows back who had an obnoxious laugh.
The problem with movies is that the remaining 10% has become "watchable" instead of "spectacular". I blame bigger budgets - these mega-budget movies constrain geniuses.
You can't blame ALL of this on the studios. People who watch movies experience diminishing returns at being "wowed" for each new movie they see, meaning studios have to raise the bar somehow. It's humanly impossible to maintain an upward trend indefinetly. Yet, that appears to be exactly what people expect.
I'm not saying it's a viewer's fault, just that movie studios have been painted into a corner by desensitzing. Even snipping out the special effects and I'd hazard a majority of the "mediocre" movies we've seen this year would have a huge impact on audiences 50 years ago.
Why do your patches seem to fix as much as they break? Is there some constant number of bugs you are required to maintain in the game, and by fixing bug A, you are subsequently required to implement bug B?
10 months after release, and the game is more laggy instead of less. There are visible hitches every time more than a handful of player characters enter clip. Statues in certain instances twitch spastically where they stand, when they didn't at release. In Dire Maul, the guard you can trap into an ice cube continues on his patrol when two months ago, he stood in place properly.
On some servers there isn't a single high level area that doesn't have a handful of suspiciously silent level 60's killing the same stuff over and over for hours. The macroing is advanced enough that if you follow them for a short while, you'll quickly notice them taking the exact same route time and time again, especially in areas that have chests to open.
I know it's not fair to generalize the entirety of China's playerbase as farmers, but it's well known that it is happening, and is also well known that much of the farming is done by people in Asian countries.
On one hand it's interesting to see such an industry spring up, channeling money into poorer hands, but on the other, it'd be real nice to play an online game without having to compete against people doing a job.
Slashdot Mirror
Then after that comes the appeals.
It's kind of hard to appeal the decision a 9mm makes.
That is pretty cool. I did something of a similar bent a few years back, though with different goals. I wanted to see if people were capable of participating in an art project without being asshats.
t ru7h.org/society/
http://web.archive.org/web/20021011144257/http://
Short version is, they couldn't. There were some cool things a few people did (that link is one example), but it was always done by one person and some scripts, rather than a group.
Don't have it up anymore, the way I stored the data was pretty inefficient and was too expensive in terms of CPU time to keep available.
I'm not a software engineer but... no, wait, I AM a software engineer,
Many physicists seem to consider themselves so brilliant, they can do other people's jobs as well as their own. Fermilab is riddled with examples, from decripit buildings they designed on their own, to gigabytes worth of python code operating mission-critical analysis.
This guy appears to be one of of those types. Because he's employed at a fancy pants government research center, he gets airtime for things he has no business talking about.
...completely out of his mind?
He's a physicist. If you thought the socially inept uber nerd was a dying or dead species, they aren't. Far from it really. Walk around Fermilab's cafeteria at lunch and you can witness some absolutely stunning samples. Even worse are the ones who carry these traits, and think they're far more intelligent than they are. The arrogance these guys can carry is indescribable.
Yes I'm generalizing, but it's hard not to. For every well adjusted, friendly physicist there's at least one other who thinks himself a living diety.
> BOINC isn't trivial, but it's not hard either.
I honestly don't see how they're going to attact anyone except nerds to run their software.
It's crap, the documentation is crap, and you can really only figure it out through trial and error. The main BOINC page has a "software" section, but no link to actually download the clients. Instead, they elected to stash the client download link below the list of available projects. So you sort that out, get the client, and run it.
I don't know what it's like for the other projects, but their dumb little wizard for signing onto a project doesn't work at all with seti@home. It says to enter an URL, without clearly explaining that the URL is merely the homepage of the project. So I just guessed by cutting and pasting off the BOINC home page and happened to get it right. Well, so one would think. It never gave positive confirmation. Then it takes you to this little login screen, and I immediatley tried to log in with my old seti@home account. The software thinks about that for a minute, then presents you with a generic communication error and no clue on what to do next. So I tried to make a new account.. same generic error. I only discovered you have to go to the seti@home page and "migrate" your account to the new system by going to the seti@home webpage, looking for some hint on how to proceed. Few minutes later, after filling out a number of forms and getting a "key" in my email, I pasted it into the BOINC wizard and was finally able to attach to the project.
Again, not one single bit of this is documented in a clear format. Only random trial and error figured it out. Even their "help" page is little more than a high brow explanation of the software and the mechanics of how the system functions. Like I said, only nerds are going to take the time to figure this thing out.
At least the old seti@home was as simple as double clicking a file and entering an email address, something easily graspable by your average schmoe.
You can't zoom-in infinitely, or even much. Why people think crappy security cameras are "better" than their personal digital zooming cameras is beyond me. You can't "clear up" an image when it's zoomed-in, you already have all the data. The best you can do is some thresholding/sharpening/convolution operations...
Kind of offtopic, mostly because I agree with everything you said, but I've always wondered if higer "resolution" could be achieved by analyzing the data in several frames of footage from a film. I seem to recall one of the probes around Mars does something like this but can't remember for sure.
As the data in front of the lens shifts, different details get caught. Couldn't some clever programming combine that into a single image with greater detail than originally existed?
> I've come across some documents in this area from a few sources (of course can't remember them off the top of my head).
Uh, then might I suggest holding off on pressing the submit button for a few minutes while you go find them? Can just imagine this new project lead in meetings. "Well guys I was going to unveil our new features, but I can't remember what they are off the top of my head."
Little preparation goes a long way.
Yeah, no kidding. I can usually make do with a single audio CD's worth of music for a few days before needing to swap out.
If the ROKR is failing, the only reason it's doing so is because the cell phone market is absolutely saturated. Everyone that wants one already has a phone, and phones aren't fashion items anymore. iPod is.
Some of the rooms I've seen lately have so many air conditioners dumping air under the floor, the currents are going too fast to rise through holes at a desired rate. Obviously it comes out somewhere, but it may not be where you want it.
Also obviously, some air will always push up all over the place, but it may not be enough in a spot that needs it. It generates hot and cold spots all over the room. I've seen this worked around by adjusting where tiles with holes are placed, and using baffles under the floor.
A lot of places also have plenty of air conditioners, but poor exhaust. So the pressure tends to build up in the room, reducing the effectiveness of air circulation. Even worse, machines near the top of a rack are several degrees warmer than ones near the floor.
> Just misclassify things as SciFi.
While this may be true for the shows offered as evidence, it doesn't mean the point being made is wrong. To me it just seems like the article is misattributing what is causing the rise in female viewership.
In some interview on the Firefly DVD set, there were comments made that Fox had concerns that they weren't getting reactions from the audiences they wanted. They said they got a "much bigger" reaction from female viewers than they did male ones.
Though Firefly is only barely science fiction, it only holds claim to the label because it involves a spacefaring humanity in the future, that quote from the interview has always struck me as a bit odd.
Perhaps it's nothing more than the "softening" of traditional sci-fi that is causing the shift.
The thing that gets me is that HBO has been very good about putting Rome episodes up in on demand cable. They stay available for weeks.
Seriously, what's the difference between torrenting the episode, and watching it at my liesure on digital cable? They lose the ability to track viewership and that's it, right?
Sounds absolutely juvenile if you ask me.
But, the downside will be that every other word uttered by a participant in the sport will be "sponsor".
I would personally opt for PNG for images, to avoid loss of data.
;) Sure it's a bloated format, but it's a human readable text file. Bitmap images can easily be seen in a text editor.
I'd try XPM.
As long as the ASCII charset is not lost and forgotten, the file would remain decipherable to any computer geek. Can JPG, PNG, or GIF claim the same thing?
But now we can also run things over with cars...so clearly we've evolved. No more pounding on it with large rocks.
Hitting it with a rock probably would have broken it a lot faster. Cars put out a lot of pressue on their contact patch, but it's spread out evenly over the entire area.
Jagged edges of a rock are not so even, and would have put extreme pressure anywhere they contacted the nano. One or two hits probably would have punctured the casing. A smooth round rock would be mostly the same, but without the punctures.
So put that way, our monkey ancestors were better at destroying than we are. Evolution shmevolution.
A history lesson sure ain't why I read those.
Am pretty sure every 14 year old kid has the exact same pages dog-eared.
But it eases the rebuilding of the levees, which is a prerequisite to pumping water out of the city.
Building a barrier in standing water is a lot easier than building one in rushing water.
Why is it that Penny Arcade gets all the attention around here?
Better marketing. Sluggy is a much more word of mouth deal. PA actively tries to get attention.
I've read both for years and they both are thriving in their respective niche, so I don't see why lines have to be drawn debating which one deserves more recognition.
The ice shelves are where they hunt seal until the summer melts.
Not our problem they chose an unsustainable business model.
So, no, it's not streaming.
Yeah, it's even more basic. Us internet veterans call it "downloading a file".
The energy the tech industry invests in rebranding benign ideas into something flashy and new is laughable.
Chicago suburbia in recent years. I lived in SF's south bay prior to that though, and still had decent experiences.
;) You all know which one I think it is.
The theater I go to is one of those massive 30 screen deals, is always clean, lines are decently short, and the people are courteous about being quiet. Is also nice because they quite often run small-run movies which are almost always interesting, gives something to watch when Hollywood is having a dry spell.
I understand a certain percentage of visits will be ruined for a certain percentage of visitors, but in my experience with all the movies I've been to, people shut up and got quiet the minute the lights are turned down.
If it was really as bad as people are making it out to be, it seems like I should have had a lot more problems than I have had. Either I am fantastically lucky, or the problems are being overstated.
Having gone to the movies at least once every two weeks for the past 10 years (usually once a week), I have never once had a showing ruined by a phone ringing, someone's kid screaming, or someone else throwing food.
I think you exaggerate the problem a bit much.
Worst I've ever had to deal with was someone a few rows back who had an obnoxious laugh.
The problem with movies is that the remaining 10% has become "watchable" instead of "spectacular". I blame bigger budgets - these mega-budget movies constrain geniuses.
You can't blame ALL of this on the studios. People who watch movies experience diminishing returns at being "wowed" for each new movie they see, meaning studios have to raise the bar somehow. It's humanly impossible to maintain an upward trend indefinetly. Yet, that appears to be exactly what people expect.
I'm not saying it's a viewer's fault, just that movie studios have been painted into a corner by desensitzing. Even snipping out the special effects and I'd hazard a majority of the "mediocre" movies we've seen this year would have a huge impact on audiences 50 years ago.
Why do your patches seem to fix as much as they break? Is there some constant number of bugs you are required to maintain in the game, and by fixing bug A, you are subsequently required to implement bug B?
10 months after release, and the game is more laggy instead of less. There are visible hitches every time more than a handful of player characters enter clip. Statues in certain instances twitch spastically where they stand, when they didn't at release. In Dire Maul, the guard you can trap into an ice cube continues on his patrol when two months ago, he stood in place properly.
What gives?
Curing cancer won't fix all the problems, I've heard the lack of oxygen on mars could kill astronauts as well.
When we fix that, then we can travel to mars.
More like 1.5 million sweatshop farmers.
On some servers there isn't a single high level area that doesn't have a handful of suspiciously silent level 60's killing the same stuff over and over for hours. The macroing is advanced enough that if you follow them for a short while, you'll quickly notice them taking the exact same route time and time again, especially in areas that have chests to open.
I know it's not fair to generalize the entirety of China's playerbase as farmers, but it's well known that it is happening, and is also well known that much of the farming is done by people in Asian countries.
On one hand it's interesting to see such an industry spring up, channeling money into poorer hands, but on the other, it'd be real nice to play an online game without having to compete against people doing a job.