Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't PNG designed to work with images that have large monochromatic blocks, things like cartoons? Again, I might have no idea what I'm talking about, but that was always what I had understood about PNG and GIF. Therefore, it makes sense that it would blow away someting like "target," while performing less well on something like "cafe."
He quite clearly states that when you travel back in time, you create an alternate universe. Therefore, in this universe, we will never see time travelers. This also means that he could simply build a vaporization chamber and claim it's a time machine, because one you're in that alternate universe, there's no way for anyone to confirm that it was successful.
Yeah, seriously. I'm drifting offtopic here, but after RTCW and MOHAA, I decided to do a bit of reading up on Omaha beach. For every company that made it off the beach and captured Axis strongpoints, three were shattered and ineffective. There were entire landing sectors where the only survivors were those that walked along the bottom of the ocean, keeping their noses above the water, moving forward with the tide. Entire boatloads of men lost literally every single man aboard with to concentrated fire from two machine guns.
Part of the problem seems to have been that the planners didn't fully appreciate the difficulty of seizing the BEACH. They thought securing the initial position would be easy, but the hard part would be preventing the troops from being thrown back into the sea. Therefore, the focus of the initial landings was on clearing paths for tanks and landing boats, to enable swift troop buildup. Unfortunately, this was an impossible task with machine guns beating down on the engineers, and so only 4 paths were cleared through the obstacles, of which only one could be marked (making the rest useless).
The other big problem was weather. Simply put, Eisenhower didn't want to miss this landing window, so he gambled on the weather, and lost. As a result, the bombers were unable to bomb the beach for fear of hitting the landing boats. Instead, they bombed inland, depriving the infantry of the bomb craters they'd been expecting to use as cover. Also, the poor visibilty meant that many boats didn't know that they'd drifted off course until they were almost upon the beach, at which point they realized they had no idea where they were.
Again, sorry, totally off topic. I agree, any truly realistic simulation of D-Day would not be any fun to play.
I would argue that more effort is being put into games these days. How long was Blizzard working on Diablo 2? 3 years? More? Contrast that with the Atari days where they'd produce 6 games over maybe half a year, pick the best one out of those six, and release that. There's simply no way around it, today's gamers demand more quality, which means more cost.
Also, the first guy was talking Canadian money. Is your $70ish figure for the N64 American or Canadian?
It's a question of price levels. For tradable goods (such as videogames, or steel), where the price level is set by the world market, the price should float with the exchange rate. For non-tradable goods (such as the price of a haircut, or office lease rates), the price will rise at the domestic inflation rate, which has a much less direct relationship to the exchange rate. Something like a McDonald's hamburger, where part of the price is in the beef, but a very large part of the price is domestic labor and building rents, will fall somewhere in between.
So yeah, the guy who's bitching is probably bitching because his (American or Japanese) videogames are going up with the exchange rate, but most of the things he buys are not commodities traded on the world market, so he doesn't realize how low the exchange rate has fallen.
Don't they burn out in less than a year of constant use though? I thought I remembered that being a problem when they were discussing using them for cell phones.
In case anyone was wondering, I just saw an article yesterday (probably in CNN's archives if you want to check) which pegged the rate of deformation in children born to first and second cousins at about 4% as well. So yeah, for an optimistic estimate, it's not good.
If they're interested in safety, then they should not be riding motorcycles. Trying to make motorcycles safe by making them loud is like driving around with your brights on to make you more visible, it's more distracting than anything.
I have "talked to the riders of 'those fucking things,'" my father rode motorcycles in his youth, until a crash shattered his hip, putting him in a cast for most of a year (during which he lost a good 10 lbs of leg muscle), and permanently shortening one of his legs. And yes, the crash occured despite how noisy his motorcycle was.
Or, they could just give the battlesuits big transparent faceplates. As you say, not a big deal really.
How are they going to handle homosexuality? I'm more interested in how they're going to handle HETEROsexuality. They seemed to be having sex about every night, at least at first, and that's something you definately can't show on TV.
Re: the end of the book. As the above reply said, the Taurans were all just clones of a single individual. As humans started using clones to fight the war, they somehow managed to establish a rapport with the Taurans (I think that part was a little fuzzy), and in communicating established that the Taurans had never attacked humanity, early human ships were simply very accident prone. Furthermore, had the war continued indefinately, humanity would eventually have won, because the Taurans were much less used to fighting.
Your ISP sending you a cd with a rebranded version of Mozilla, along with dialup software and the like, is still a very different matter from a website you visit changing your browser automatically. And, while I could be mistaken, I really don't think that Mozilla allows chrome to be set remotely.
Maybe it'll start a trend in the demolition industry
Three problems. First of all, planes are routinely restored to good-as-new condition as part of regular, government mandated maintenence. As this is less expensive than building a whole new plane, planes really are never "worn out" though you may get models that are out of date and not worth using anymore. These planes will be OLD though, things like 707s.
Second, have you been to ground zero? The parking meters for a good block or so away from the hole actually have the plastic faces melted off. Though it may look tidy now, I would guess that there was far more collateral damage than would really be permitted in a controlled demolition.
Finally, it's very difficult to find pilots willing to sacrifice their lives just so you can get your demolition project done quicker:)
I actually have never noticed that. My dead grandfather was fairly overweight and smoked until the day he died. My living grandfather swims every day, and if he ever smoked, it was before I was born. Both were born around 1915. As for booze, a single drink (preferably wine) a day is actually believed to be good for you, sort of a workout for your liver.
Having said that, I generally agree with your philosophy. Maybe eating only hummus would let me live to be 110 years old, but then what's the point in living that long? There's certainly an amount of comfort that is worth giving up a few years for, so long as you acknowledge that that's what you're doing, and you're not simply relying on future medical progress (or disbelieving statistical life expectancy data).
Re:No need for fitness!!
on
Chase the Rabbits
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· Score: 5, Interesting
A high school bio teacher once told me that a friend of his in his youth (he was probably about 60) said the same thing to him when told he should quit smoking. "By the time I'm old enough, they'll have a cure for cancer." Oops.
Definately. One thing that made me curious about the stats on AIBO sales is what the breakdown of that is for Japan vs. the rest of the world. I just can't see westerners paying $1,500 for a robot dog, much less $40,000 for a robotic child.
We have enough space for REAL dogs, and REAL children, so why bother?
I don't know about the companies that you folks work for, but for most of us, the internet is a vital tool, which companies simply can't switch off. I spent a year working at UBS PaineWebber, and I used the Internet dozens of times every day to solve problems.
Yes, we surfed the net and wasted company time, but for most people, the time savings of being able to look up the phone number for the Bumfuck, Idaho branch of TD Waterhouse, or check breaking company news without having to go over to the Bloomberg machine, or do a google search to track down who bought Joe's Pickel Factory so we know what to do with the old stock certificate someone gave us, far outweighs the wasted time.
No, I can't actually. My fairly standard mid-tower has 5 bays, plus an extra space on the side for a hard drive. At current, I have one dvd drive, one cd-rw drive, one floppy drive, one zip drive (which I'm seriously considering getting rid of, the media's just too expensive, and Mandrake's had some serious trouble with it), and one hard drive, and I still have one empty bay. I might get a second hard drive at some point, and put it in the spare bay, but what else would I get? A dvd writer maybe, but then I wouldn't need the dvd drive or the cd writer, resulting in a net reduction of bay usage.
The fact of the matter is, unless you've got a mini-tower, computer cases have room to spare. In my last computer I even stuck a 5.25" floppy drive, just because of how amusing it looked in a modern computer, and I never once needed the space it took up.
Re:Most shareware these days isn't really sharewar
on
More On Policing Shareware
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· Score: 2, Informative
No, time limited software is also a demo. Shareware is software given away free, but has a marked price that one is supposed to send in, based on the honor system.
True shareware has absolutely no limitations whatsoever. I would still consider software with nag screens shareware, but I suppose that might be something of a grey area.
Why bother abandoning them? It costs maybe $6, and I wouldn't be using the room it takes up anyway. I rarely use it, but on the off chance that I need it, it's there.
What would have been perfect is if the cd format had originally been done with a plastic case around them, just like a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk. Unfortunately, the guy who thought up cds based them on records, and just didn't really think of a protective case.
Slashdot Mirror
I really like it, it just doesn't seem all that practical.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't PNG designed to work with images that have large monochromatic blocks, things like cartoons? Again, I might have no idea what I'm talking about, but that was always what I had understood about PNG and GIF. Therefore, it makes sense that it would blow away someting like "target," while performing less well on something like "cafe."
If you make a new account, it's now down to four.
He quite clearly states that when you travel back in time, you create an alternate universe. Therefore, in this universe, we will never see time travelers. This also means that he could simply build a vaporization chamber and claim it's a time machine, because one you're in that alternate universe, there's no way for anyone to confirm that it was successful.
Yeah, seriously. I'm drifting offtopic here, but after RTCW and MOHAA, I decided to do a bit of reading up on Omaha beach. For every company that made it off the beach and captured Axis strongpoints, three were shattered and ineffective. There were entire landing sectors where the only survivors were those that walked along the bottom of the ocean, keeping their noses above the water, moving forward with the tide. Entire boatloads of men lost literally every single man aboard with to concentrated fire from two machine guns.
Part of the problem seems to have been that the planners didn't fully appreciate the difficulty of seizing the BEACH. They thought securing the initial position would be easy, but the hard part would be preventing the troops from being thrown back into the sea. Therefore, the focus of the initial landings was on clearing paths for tanks and landing boats, to enable swift troop buildup. Unfortunately, this was an impossible task with machine guns beating down on the engineers, and so only 4 paths were cleared through the obstacles, of which only one could be marked (making the rest useless).
The other big problem was weather. Simply put, Eisenhower didn't want to miss this landing window, so he gambled on the weather, and lost. As a result, the bombers were unable to bomb the beach for fear of hitting the landing boats. Instead, they bombed inland, depriving the infantry of the bomb craters they'd been expecting to use as cover. Also, the poor visibilty meant that many boats didn't know that they'd drifted off course until they were almost upon the beach, at which point they realized they had no idea where they were.
Again, sorry, totally off topic. I agree, any truly realistic simulation of D-Day would not be any fun to play.
Also, the first guy was talking Canadian money. Is your $70ish figure for the N64 American or Canadian?
So yeah, the guy who's bitching is probably bitching because his (American or Japanese) videogames are going up with the exchange rate, but most of the things he buys are not commodities traded on the world market, so he doesn't realize how low the exchange rate has fallen.
Don't they burn out in less than a year of constant use though? I thought I remembered that being a problem when they were discussing using them for cell phones.
In case anyone was wondering, I just saw an article yesterday (probably in CNN's archives if you want to check) which pegged the rate of deformation in children born to first and second cousins at about 4% as well. So yeah, for an optimistic estimate, it's not good.
I have "talked to the riders of 'those fucking things,'" my father rode motorcycles in his youth, until a crash shattered his hip, putting him in a cast for most of a year (during which he lost a good 10 lbs of leg muscle), and permanently shortening one of his legs. And yes, the crash occured despite how noisy his motorcycle was.
How are they going to handle homosexuality? I'm more interested in how they're going to handle HETEROsexuality. They seemed to be having sex about every night, at least at first, and that's something you definately can't show on TV.
Re: the end of the book. As the above reply said, the Taurans were all just clones of a single individual. As humans started using clones to fight the war, they somehow managed to establish a rapport with the Taurans (I think that part was a little fuzzy), and in communicating established that the Taurans had never attacked humanity, early human ships were simply very accident prone. Furthermore, had the war continued indefinately, humanity would eventually have won, because the Taurans were much less used to fighting.
Who else here thinks the silencing ought to be mandatory for motorcycles? God those fucking things piss me off.
Your ISP sending you a cd with a rebranded version of Mozilla, along with dialup software and the like, is still a very different matter from a website you visit changing your browser automatically. And, while I could be mistaken, I really don't think that Mozilla allows chrome to be set remotely.
Three problems. First of all, planes are routinely restored to good-as-new condition as part of regular, government mandated maintenence. As this is less expensive than building a whole new plane, planes really are never "worn out" though you may get models that are out of date and not worth using anymore. These planes will be OLD though, things like 707s.
Second, have you been to ground zero? The parking meters for a good block or so away from the hole actually have the plastic faces melted off. Though it may look tidy now, I would guess that there was far more collateral damage than would really be permitted in a controlled demolition.
Finally, it's very difficult to find pilots willing to sacrifice their lives just so you can get your demolition project done quicker :)
Having said that, I generally agree with your philosophy. Maybe eating only hummus would let me live to be 110 years old, but then what's the point in living that long? There's certainly an amount of comfort that is worth giving up a few years for, so long as you acknowledge that that's what you're doing, and you're not simply relying on future medical progress (or disbelieving statistical life expectancy data).
A high school bio teacher once told me that a friend of his in his youth (he was probably about 60) said the same thing to him when told he should quit smoking. "By the time I'm old enough, they'll have a cure for cancer." Oops.
but not as cool as the widget, from Guinness. The self-foaming can!
Oh, I just assumed Operation Sandstorm was the Canadian name for it.
But I seem to recall having a mouse for my Apple IIe. Am I remembering wrong?
We have enough space for REAL dogs, and REAL children, so why bother?
Yes, we surfed the net and wasted company time, but for most people, the time savings of being able to look up the phone number for the Bumfuck, Idaho branch of TD Waterhouse, or check breaking company news without having to go over to the Bloomberg machine, or do a google search to track down who bought Joe's Pickel Factory so we know what to do with the old stock certificate someone gave us, far outweighs the wasted time.
The fact of the matter is, unless you've got a mini-tower, computer cases have room to spare. In my last computer I even stuck a 5.25" floppy drive, just because of how amusing it looked in a modern computer, and I never once needed the space it took up.
True shareware has absolutely no limitations whatsoever. I would still consider software with nag screens shareware, but I suppose that might be something of a grey area.
Why bother abandoning them? It costs maybe $6, and I wouldn't be using the room it takes up anyway. I rarely use it, but on the off chance that I need it, it's there.
What would have been perfect is if the cd format had originally been done with a plastic case around them, just like a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk. Unfortunately, the guy who thought up cds based them on records, and just didn't really think of a protective case.