Nvidia drivers which were once the best, are now getting worse and worse with each release.
I have to agree with this. I strongly dislike the new driver interface; it reminds me of the reason I left ATI: cumbersome software as a front end to decent hardware.
That said, I've also played >30 hours of Bioshock without a single crash on my 2 year old PC.
BioShock was the first time I was playing a game and felt like I was playing a movie
That's exactly what I was thinking. I think some of the strongest critics are probably those who just blasted their way to the end and didn't explore the entire plot.
To me, the best stories (in games, books, or movies) are those which create a robust enough universe that I can imagine the events that led up to the story, the followup to the epilogue, or alternate outcomes from those present in the story. It's interesting to explore the possibilities of what Rapture might have been like before ADAM was discovered, or what happened to Rapture after you left, or where else Rapture might eventually have gone downhill even if ADAM had not been discovered.
The first time I saw Saturn through a telescope, there was this "connection" with seeing it live. Sure, it looked just like all the photos I'd seen, but this was different in a way that's hard to explain.
The first time I saw the Milky Way and really comprehended what I was looking at, I nearly fell over. I felt a sensory dissonance of gravity when my perspective suddenly shifted from observing from a spot on a planet to observing from a spot in the galaxy (something in my subconscious wanted to reassign the direction of "down" as being based the galactic plane). It was literally awesome, even after having seen the Milky Way hundreds of times in photos, planetariums, or computer simulations.
In 2005, many South Floridians got a really beautiful night sky after Hurricane Wilma hit. The power was out over quite a large region for a few days, and a cold front came through right after the hurricane, which cleared up the sky.
It was the first time I have ever been able to clearly see the Milky Way from my home. Any other time, I have to travel halfway across the state into the Everglades to see it as well as I could those nights.
'E.g.' and 'i.e.' are often mixed up, i.e., sometimes people use 'i.e.' when they mean 'e.g.', e.g., "IE is slow, i.e., it takes 5 minutes just to clear the cache!", and sometimes people use 'e.g.' when they mean 'i.e.', i.e., they give an example instead of stating their point another way.
I think the final straw that got me to switch to Opera was that navigating back/forward seems to always *instantly* display the cached page. It's like it not only caches the content, but also the rendered layout.
Additionally, I don't think I've ever seen Opera delay the back/forward navigation to poll the server for updated content. One (or perhaps both) of IE or FF did that occasionally, and it was mildly irritating.
There are a few features I wish Opera had, but they are pretty minor compared to the advantages.
I wonder if this may be one of the contributing factors to the uncanny valley effect in 3D animation. One complaint is that the faces, and especially the eyes look "dead". Perhaps the 3D studios should hire some anime artists, who sometimes greatly exaggerate the saccade behavior.
I'm certainly no camera geek, so I'm not entirely sure that the post-processing capabilities equates to an infinite depth of field, but it looks like it might be headed in that direction.
The problem is this is one of these types of tools that lets authorities get too lax in their responsibility and vigilance, or overuse it in situations where it is not justified.
Other examples:
Tool: tasers, rubber bullets, etc. Use: Allow law enforcment to deliver "less lethal" ways to subdue threats, protesters, etc. Result: More and more reports of these tools being used to subdue minor threats, or in instances where there was no threat at all.
Tool: air bags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, SUVs, etc. Use: Make drivers safer in emergency situations. Result: People drive much more aggressively because they feel safer if they do get into an accident.
Tool: broadcast flag Use: Prevent viewers from recording movies, sports events, and other high-demand content. Result: Sometimes whole channels get "accidently" flagged. Expect this to not be an accident in the future.
Now we have a "super" V-chip coming along which will likely block educational material and create other false positives. Additionally, technology like this tends to negatively influence creative expression and dilute content in order to get maximum viewership.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have these tools, but the problem is society suffers because people tend to overuse them, so we should carefully consider that factor when deploying new technologies, especially those which are very prone to this scenario.
That's a very good point. In fact, it is likely the government prefers a society where people are mesmerized by television over a society that has a lot of idle free time to think about things like "How can we improve ourselves?" or "What's going on in our government?".
What's to stop the RIAA from randomly picking a hundred IP addresses and then sending them the "pay up or else" letters, and then collecting a few thousand from some random people who thought they got caught?
However, most people don't. They'll accelerate when they know there's a red light or stopped traffic in front of them
I try to remember to coast whenever the light ahead of me is red, but I get a lot of drivers who aggressively swerve around me just so they can get to the red light and wait sooner. Sometimes after passing me, they'll very rapidly snap back into my lane in a manner which I can only assume is meant to spite me for "driving slowly". Otherwise, I drive usually about 50mph in 45mph zones (which is the posted speed for most of my commute), so i'm not otherwise driving slowly when the lights are green ahead.
This usually happens at least once in each direction of my daily commute.
(cur) (last) 06:33, 2 May 2007 JoshuaZ (Talk | contribs) (42,688 bytes) (Muslix64's exploit - well then, I'm still up, no one's objected, so I'm adding the first citation in.)
(cur) (last) 04:05, 2 May 2007 Tregoweth (Talk | contribs) m (42,384 bytes) (Muslix64's exploit)
(cur) (last) 21:08, 1 May 2007 WJBscribe (Talk | contribs) (42,388 bytes) (Muslix64's exploit - No real reason to specify, meaning is clear without)
One interesting hypothesis is is that a red or brown dwarf in a highly elliptical orbit with our sun periodically (every ~26M years) passes through the Oort Cloud and pulls comets into the inner solar system, causing a wave of extinctions.
Something I didn't know until recently myself is that plants don't convert CO2 to O2. They convert water into O2 and the CO2 becomes biomass. I love learning something that's the opposite of what I thought I knew. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Pfft, you early cent gramps and your "cores". Just pend for 2k50 when you can viz into the main on your very own petaqux rez. =)
Nvidia drivers which were once the best, are now getting worse and worse with each release.
I have to agree with this. I strongly dislike the new driver interface; it reminds me of the reason I left ATI: cumbersome software as a front end to decent hardware.
That said, I've also played >30 hours of Bioshock without a single crash on my 2 year old PC.
From what I understand, both particles are leptons; there are no baryons, so it's not a normal element e.g., Helium.
BioShock was the first time I was playing a game and felt like I was playing a movie
That's exactly what I was thinking. I think some of the strongest critics are probably those who just blasted their way to the end and didn't explore the entire plot.
To me, the best stories (in games, books, or movies) are those which create a robust enough universe that I can imagine the events that led up to the story, the followup to the epilogue, or alternate outcomes from those present in the story. It's interesting to explore the possibilities of what Rapture might have been like before ADAM was discovered, or what happened to Rapture after you left, or where else Rapture might eventually have gone downhill even if ADAM had not been discovered.
It's still not quite the same though.
The first time I saw Saturn through a telescope, there was this "connection" with seeing it live. Sure, it looked just like all the photos I'd seen, but this was different in a way that's hard to explain.
The first time I saw the Milky Way and really comprehended what I was looking at, I nearly fell over. I felt a sensory dissonance of gravity when my perspective suddenly shifted from observing from a spot on a planet to observing from a spot in the galaxy (something in my subconscious wanted to reassign the direction of "down" as being based the galactic plane). It was literally awesome, even after having seen the Milky Way hundreds of times in photos, planetariums, or computer simulations.
In 2005, many South Floridians got a really beautiful night sky after Hurricane Wilma hit. The power was out over quite a large region for a few days, and a cold front came through right after the hurricane, which cleared up the sky.
It was the first time I have ever been able to clearly see the Milky Way from my home. Any other time, I have to travel halfway across the state into the Everglades to see it as well as I could those nights.
'E.g.' and 'i.e.' are often mixed up, i.e., sometimes people use 'i.e.' when they mean 'e.g.', e.g., "IE is slow, i.e., it takes 5 minutes just to clear the cache!", and sometimes people use 'e.g.' when they mean 'i.e.', i.e., they give an example instead of stating their point another way.
I think the final straw that got me to switch to Opera was that navigating back/forward seems to always *instantly* display the cached page. It's like it not only caches the content, but also the rendered layout.
Additionally, I don't think I've ever seen Opera delay the back/forward navigation to poll the server for updated content. One (or perhaps both) of IE or FF did that occasionally, and it was mildly irritating.
There are a few features I wish Opera had, but they are pretty minor compared to the advantages.
I wonder if this may be one of the contributing factors to the uncanny valley effect in 3D animation. One complaint is that the faces, and especially the eyes look "dead". Perhaps the 3D studios should hire some anime artists, who sometimes greatly exaggerate the saccade behavior.
I'm certainly no camera geek, so I'm not entirely sure that the post-processing capabilities equates to an infinite depth of field, but it looks like it might be headed in that direction.
Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera
The star is not travelling at light speed.
The problem is this is one of these types of tools that lets authorities get too lax in their responsibility and vigilance, or overuse it in situations where it is not justified.
Other examples:
Tool: tasers, rubber bullets, etc.
Use: Allow law enforcment to deliver "less lethal" ways to subdue threats, protesters, etc.
Result: More and more reports of these tools being used to subdue minor threats, or in instances where there was no threat at all.
Tool: air bags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, SUVs, etc.
Use: Make drivers safer in emergency situations.
Result: People drive much more aggressively because they feel safer if they do get into an accident.
Tool: broadcast flag
Use: Prevent viewers from recording movies, sports events, and other high-demand content.
Result: Sometimes whole channels get "accidently" flagged. Expect this to not be an accident in the future.
Now we have a "super" V-chip coming along which will likely block educational material and create other false positives. Additionally, technology like this tends to negatively influence creative expression and dilute content in order to get maximum viewership.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have these tools, but the problem is society suffers because people tend to overuse them, so we should carefully consider that factor when deploying new technologies, especially those which are very prone to this scenario.
What's in that for government?
That's a very good point. In fact, it is likely the government prefers a society where people are mesmerized by television over a society that has a lot of idle free time to think about things like "How can we improve ourselves?" or "What's going on in our government?".
The chances of dying from an asteroid or comet impact are about equal to the chances of dying in a passenger aircraft crash. In fact, you're *less* likely to die from a flood, tornado, or from a venom bite/sting than from an asteroid/comet impact.
What's to stop the RIAA from randomly picking a hundred IP addresses and then sending them the "pay up or else" letters, and then collecting a few thousand from some random people who thought they got caught?
Someone should patent commenting on patenting a process of obtaining patents. =)
Boil em, smash em, stick them in a stew.
However, most people don't. They'll accelerate when they know there's a red light or stopped traffic in front of them
I try to remember to coast whenever the light ahead of me is red, but I get a lot of drivers who aggressively swerve around me just so they can get to the red light and wait sooner. Sometimes after passing me, they'll very rapidly snap back into my lane in a manner which I can only assume is meant to spite me for "driving slowly". Otherwise, I drive usually about 50mph in 45mph zones (which is the posted speed for most of my commute), so i'm not otherwise driving slowly when the lights are green ahead.
This usually happens at least once in each direction of my daily commute.
The regenerative braking only recovers a portion of the energy you've already used.
I wonder how much more improved this will be if/when ultracapacitors become practical to use for this purpose.
I've donated hundreds of dollars to Wikipedia, but i'm starting to wonder if I will feel less generous in the next round of fundraising.
One interesting hypothesis is is that a red or brown dwarf in a highly elliptical orbit with our sun periodically (every ~26M years) passes through the Oort Cloud and pulls comets into the inner solar system, causing a wave of extinctions.
BTW, one of the physcists researching this idea, Richard A. Muller teaches a great physics course, titled "Physics for Future Presidents" which is available online for free on google video.
4. Put them on your hub caps for extra bling.
Why stop at the hubcaps when you can cover the whole car?
It pains me everytime I have to throw away perfectly good alumim(i)um foil.
I can relate to the Al foil dilemma. I guess it bothers me to toss out something that used to be more valuable than gold.
Just imagine 50 years from now when we're equally conflicted with tossing out titanium foil.
Something I didn't know until recently myself is that plants don't convert CO2 to O2. They convert water into O2 and the CO2 becomes biomass. I love learning something that's the opposite of what I thought I knew. =)
They are the ultimate couch potatos.
Especially these guys.
PS: It's odd that until now I never noticed what a potato plant looks like, even after all these years of consuming their delicious tubers.