This is hugely anecdotal, but computers are generally getting faster. We have faster processors, faster RAM, faster hard drives, etc. And yet a lot of software today runs like molasses. Why? I think programmers have too large a margin of error.
Take a look at the amazing stuff the Demo Scene can do - they can create a beautiful work of visual and auditory art that is squeezed into a few kilobytes. Nowadays we have quad core 3.0 GHZ processors and programmers have a larger margin of error. They can make something that is an inefficient pile of garbage and the sheer speed of the computer can pick up the slack, but we suffer when things get bogged down.
The fastest computer I've ever used was an Amiga with less processing power and RAM than most cheapo cell phones on the market today. They had very little to work with and they did some of the fastest, most efficient programming I've ever seen.
I really wish there were highly notable awards for excellence in programming, especially with relation to efficiency.
The only place where resource efficiency is king is Wall Street, where a few milliseconds faster means making a lot more money than the competition.
Horse shit. Speed limits do almost nothing for safety when arbitrarily applied to roads.
35 on a bend mountain road with a 50 foot cliff drop on one side? Okay. 55/65 on a practically straight road? Unnecessary insanity. German Autobahns have pretty much no speed limits except for certain vehicles (buses, cars with trailers) and certain locations, and yet they're just as safe (if not safer) than most roads in Europe.
You are aware that gas prices are pretty high right now and we're having pretty shitty economic times on top of it? Yet people are still buying and driving SUVs.
No, they aren't. From what I've seen, people have been abandoning their giant jacked-up pickups and mega-size SUVs over the last few years, and when they do buy SUVs, they're now buying the smaller ones and the "crossovers". These smaller SUVs actually get car-like mpgs, frequently in the mid-to-high 20s, which is about the same as many mid-size cars and also small cars (not the econoboxes). So they're buying Nissan Rogues, but not Yukons and Suburbans. Meanwhile, Priuses are still selling like hotcakes.
I concur with this. I live in New Jersey and I see loads of the "huge" SUVs and trucks up for sale.
My area has a large Latino community where the pickup truck is king, so I see a lot of them. You can probably buy a F350 for the price of a lawnmower around here.
You can absolutely say "I don't want any minorities in my home." You absolutely can NOT say "I don't want any minorities in my business."
In practice though, companies can discriminate as they like. All they need to do is make up some B.S. reason. Guy who's a little too dark-skinned wants to work at my restaurant? Oops, lost the application. Headhunters/H.R. people pretty much do this all the time - they'll follow the orders from on high no problem, but they'll also make sure that there isn't a lick of evidence that they've been discriminatory. The undesirable applications will be "on file" until the end of time.
Now that aside, when it comes to private businessess (say a cafe, or a mom and pop store), I thought that they had the right to refuse service to anyone? If, say, some Latino dude is acting like an asshole at a lunch truck, I'd say the driver has every right to refuse service to him - but can that customer turn around and say he was refused service because he was Latino and actually win?
We say it here all the time - you can refuse to do business with anyone you like. I thought it worked both ways?
Hey now, the Wobblys are a proud line of Irish gymnasts, thank you very much! Sure they take the occasional spill or two off the balance beam, but have you any idea how difficult it is to do a handstand without spilling your Guinness?
Well that, and the deletionist slant is absolute shit.
It used to be that you created an article and people would build on it over time. Someone would tag it as a "stub" or needs "credible sources", but it would be around pretty much forever.
The requirements for citation became more and more stringent, and now an article needs around 3 or so good sources to not get into any deep shit (unless it falls under the purview of an asshole admin who doesn't like it). The barrier of entry has been unnecessarily raised. Disk space and bandwidth are cheap, and there's no good reason not to keep bad articles but tag them as unverified. The crappy article of today becomes the featured article of tomorrow.
However, I don't think we'll see it anytime soon. Admins will keep circle-jerking, get 7 people to vote to delete a page, and bam it's gone. Nothing really good or new will be created in niche subjects. Stuff will be removed and declared "not notable", and Wikipedia will stagnate.
Pick nearly any subject, be it a scientific discipline or piece of entertainment, and type that term + "wiki" in google. If you type in "Star Wars Wiki", the Wikipedia Star Wars article will be in the top 5 - but so will Wookieepedia, the Star Wars-dedicated wiki. If Wikipedia were truly accomplishing its mission, stuff like Wookieepedia and the thousands of other topic-centric wikis wouldn't have to exist because the articles would already be on Wikipedia. Sure, this doesn't cover everything - wikis that act as game manuals, for instance - but it'd cover damn near everything.
Part of me wonders if the draconian shift in Wikipedia was done on purpose in order to drive more people towards Wikia (which takes in ad revenue and therefore makes money).
Isn't the cable stuff just softcore, "hand held in a place that conveniently obscures genitals" kind of thing? We have broadband, that stuff is *so* 1998.
And you said "Having worked", as in past tense? I don't know whether to feel happy or sorry for you.
Except I think it almost never turns out like that. It's "a hundred bad mofos are dead, plus that girl's private school that happened to be in the line of fire."
I have a friend who's an MBA and he explained the basics of modern business to me. Starting a business involves taking a loan or raising VC (basically the same thing in my book), getting it going, grow, refinance the loans, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This seemed like insanity to me. Little mom and pop shops that have been around for decades may have indeed started off with a loan, but then they paid it all off and were in the black. They actually *saved* money. We're supposed to hold onto some money in case of emergencies, a savings account or something - why doesn't the same logic apply to businesses? It's nutty.
Will: Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president. -Will, Good Will Hunting
Even if the models weren't bang on about how much of an effect we're having on the climate, we still have the issues of air quality in places like Los Angeles or China. Frankly I think we are having a negative effect on the environment - it's just how much of an effect is what's disputed. We're gonna run out of fossil fuel relatively soon and I'm hopeful we'll have cars that are practical, safe, and just as much fun to drive as gasoline-powered vehicles.
True, but it's not like you need good sound quality anymore. In fact, you'd probably want the opposite considering how mastering a track nowadays seems to involve going to the sound board and jamming every slider and dial up as high as it'll go.
It might be subsidized up to high hell, but honestly I think a lot of us would agree that this is one of those industries where subsidies are a good thing. Better than some giant corporation being able to sell corn at way less than the manufacturing cost and put Mexican farmers out of business.
Moreover, I have a hard time feeling bad about manufacturing - any type of manufacturing - growing in the United States. Our industrial base is in the shitter and while solar might be a small drop in the pond it does give me hope that we might be able to restore our manufacturing power one day.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with basic online game architecture, most multiplayer games have something called a "master server" or "control server". Let's take Valve's game for instance - when you hit "Find Servers", the Master Server is rung up and presents a list of all servers that respond. Valve's system pretty much entails all of their games, so we're still able to play fantastic stuff like Team Fortress Classic over a decade after they've come out.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have TRIBES. Sierra apparently thought that a single server was way too expensive for their gaming heritage and finally shut it down... for about a month. During that time, the community banded together and made their own master server along with a client-side patch (that is quite simple) which permits you to lock onto the new master server and find games (which are indeed still going today).
This is why I've leaned more towards PC gaming. One day Blizzard will shut down WoW... and private servers will spring up, just as there's hundreds of them now. Prefer Vanilla WoW? There's an emulated server for you. Everquest has a movement to have an emulated server where the game is like it was in 1999 - much, much more hardcore. (Everquest has softened up a fair bit over the years, much like WoW has over the years.) So long as there are dedicated fans a game will never die. And if a game does truly die... then it probably wasn't all that good in the first place.
Slashdot is bad with current stories, especially with their bias towards advertising. Had it been a magazine, it would have had one story in 1666 and then a few hundred years of dead space.
Because a Predator missile would slam into the hosting company that dares tarnish important American intellectual property such as Jersey Shore and The Apprentice.
I'm going to use some BS numbers here, but they're roughly right.
Let's say the PS3 and Xbox both sell at a $100 loss, and that Sony and Microsoft respectively make $10 on a new game sale. That means that they have to sell 10 games per PS3 to break even.
Now let's say the Wii makes a $50 profit per console, and that Nintendo also gets a $10 cut from their games. In this sense, they have a 5 game lead just by selling a console. By the time a Wii is purchased, both Sony and Microsoft are 15 games behind. While some people do buy dozens of games, most collections I've personally seen are 10-30 games (and quite a few of them are used, so Sony/Microsoft can't double-dip there... yet.)
I'm sure someone could come in here with the real numbers (or maybe I'll do it myself in the morning), but that's essentially what's going on. Nintendo broke the traditional loss-leader model and they're not exactly in dire financial straits as a result. They don't have to focus on the volume of games (New Cawadooty every year), they can focus on quality
You can't blow up an entire country with a storage capacitor, and that's why a project (that is so greatly needed) will never get that sort of funding.
The only way you'd get enough money to get significant research on a good storage capacitor was if you were in Texas and it came attached to a chair.
He's doing the exact same things corporations have done for hundreds of years. They've shrugged off their debts and destroyed our money, and I find it a bit difficult to speak out against someone who's decided to do the same thing back to them.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree here.
This is hugely anecdotal, but computers are generally getting faster. We have faster processors, faster RAM, faster hard drives, etc. And yet a lot of software today runs like molasses. Why? I think programmers have too large a margin of error.
Take a look at the amazing stuff the Demo Scene can do - they can create a beautiful work of visual and auditory art that is squeezed into a few kilobytes. Nowadays we have quad core 3.0 GHZ processors and programmers have a larger margin of error. They can make something that is an inefficient pile of garbage and the sheer speed of the computer can pick up the slack, but we suffer when things get bogged down.
The fastest computer I've ever used was an Amiga with less processing power and RAM than most cheapo cell phones on the market today. They had very little to work with and they did some of the fastest, most efficient programming I've ever seen.
I really wish there were highly notable awards for excellence in programming, especially with relation to efficiency.
The only place where resource efficiency is king is Wall Street, where a few milliseconds faster means making a lot more money than the competition.
Horse shit. Speed limits do almost nothing for safety when arbitrarily applied to roads.
35 on a bend mountain road with a 50 foot cliff drop on one side? Okay. 55/65 on a practically straight road? Unnecessary insanity. German Autobahns have pretty much no speed limits except for certain vehicles (buses, cars with trailers) and certain locations, and yet they're just as safe (if not safer) than most roads in Europe.
You are aware that gas prices are pretty high right now and we're having pretty shitty economic times on top of it? Yet people are still buying and driving SUVs.
No, they aren't. From what I've seen, people have been abandoning their giant jacked-up pickups and mega-size SUVs over the last few years, and when they do buy SUVs, they're now buying the smaller ones and the "crossovers". These smaller SUVs actually get car-like mpgs, frequently in the mid-to-high 20s, which is about the same as many mid-size cars and also small cars (not the econoboxes). So they're buying Nissan Rogues, but not Yukons and Suburbans. Meanwhile, Priuses are still selling like hotcakes.
I concur with this. I live in New Jersey and I see loads of the "huge" SUVs and trucks up for sale.
My area has a large Latino community where the pickup truck is king, so I see a lot of them. You can probably buy a F350 for the price of a lawnmower around here.
You can absolutely say "I don't want any minorities in my home." You absolutely can NOT say "I don't want any minorities in my business."
In practice though, companies can discriminate as they like. All they need to do is make up some B.S. reason. Guy who's a little too dark-skinned wants to work at my restaurant? Oops, lost the application. Headhunters/H.R. people pretty much do this all the time - they'll follow the orders from on high no problem, but they'll also make sure that there isn't a lick of evidence that they've been discriminatory. The undesirable applications will be "on file" until the end of time.
Now that aside, when it comes to private businessess (say a cafe, or a mom and pop store), I thought that they had the right to refuse service to anyone? If, say, some Latino dude is acting like an asshole at a lunch truck, I'd say the driver has every right to refuse service to him - but can that customer turn around and say he was refused service because he was Latino and actually win?
We say it here all the time - you can refuse to do business with anyone you like. I thought it worked both ways?
Hey now, the Wobblys are a proud line of Irish gymnasts, thank you very much! Sure they take the occasional spill or two off the balance beam, but have you any idea how difficult it is to do a handstand without spilling your Guinness?
Well that, and the deletionist slant is absolute shit.
It used to be that you created an article and people would build on it over time. Someone would tag it as a "stub" or needs "credible sources", but it would be around pretty much forever.
The requirements for citation became more and more stringent, and now an article needs around 3 or so good sources to not get into any deep shit (unless it falls under the purview of an asshole admin who doesn't like it). The barrier of entry has been unnecessarily raised. Disk space and bandwidth are cheap, and there's no good reason not to keep bad articles but tag them as unverified. The crappy article of today becomes the featured article of tomorrow.
However, I don't think we'll see it anytime soon. Admins will keep circle-jerking, get 7 people to vote to delete a page, and bam it's gone. Nothing really good or new will be created in niche subjects. Stuff will be removed and declared "not notable", and Wikipedia will stagnate.
Pick nearly any subject, be it a scientific discipline or piece of entertainment, and type that term + "wiki" in google. If you type in "Star Wars Wiki", the Wikipedia Star Wars article will be in the top 5 - but so will Wookieepedia, the Star Wars-dedicated wiki. If Wikipedia were truly accomplishing its mission, stuff like Wookieepedia and the thousands of other topic-centric wikis wouldn't have to exist because the articles would already be on Wikipedia. Sure, this doesn't cover everything - wikis that act as game manuals, for instance - but it'd cover damn near everything.
Part of me wonders if the draconian shift in Wikipedia was done on purpose in order to drive more people towards Wikia (which takes in ad revenue and therefore makes money).
Isn't the cable stuff just softcore, "hand held in a place that conveniently obscures genitals" kind of thing? We have broadband, that stuff is *so* 1998.
And you said "Having worked", as in past tense? I don't know whether to feel happy or sorry for you.
Except I think it almost never turns out like that. It's "a hundred bad mofos are dead, plus that girl's private school that happened to be in the line of fire."
I have a friend who's an MBA and he explained the basics of modern business to me. Starting a business involves taking a loan or raising VC (basically the same thing in my book), getting it going, grow, refinance the loans, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This seemed like insanity to me. Little mom and pop shops that have been around for decades may have indeed started off with a loan, but then they paid it all off and were in the black. They actually *saved* money. We're supposed to hold onto some money in case of emergencies, a savings account or something - why doesn't the same logic apply to businesses? It's nutty.
Will: Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president. -Will, Good Will Hunting
That's a common misconception.
I'm suing you for giving me a headache trying to think up of a third-tier recursive joke. Have you no decency?!
Well, geeks and soldiers deployed overseas who don't have a constant internet connection. Remember guys, Blizzard hates the troops!
Quick, I need 39 more guys - I've got a fantastic plan.
Even if the models weren't bang on about how much of an effect we're having on the climate, we still have the issues of air quality in places like Los Angeles or China. Frankly I think we are having a negative effect on the environment - it's just how much of an effect is what's disputed. We're gonna run out of fossil fuel relatively soon and I'm hopeful we'll have cars that are practical, safe, and just as much fun to drive as gasoline-powered vehicles.
True, but it's not like you need good sound quality anymore. In fact, you'd probably want the opposite considering how mastering a track nowadays seems to involve going to the sound board and jamming every slider and dial up as high as it'll go.
It might be subsidized up to high hell, but honestly I think a lot of us would agree that this is one of those industries where subsidies are a good thing. Better than some giant corporation being able to sell corn at way less than the manufacturing cost and put Mexican farmers out of business.
Moreover, I have a hard time feeling bad about manufacturing - any type of manufacturing - growing in the United States. Our industrial base is in the shitter and while solar might be a small drop in the pond it does give me hope that we might be able to restore our manufacturing power one day.
Yes, it needs to be measured in Libraries of Congress per Hectare!
Yes, they can turn off the server after a while.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with basic online game architecture, most multiplayer games have something called a "master server" or "control server". Let's take Valve's game for instance - when you hit "Find Servers", the Master Server is rung up and presents a list of all servers that respond. Valve's system pretty much entails all of their games, so we're still able to play fantastic stuff like Team Fortress Classic over a decade after they've come out.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have TRIBES. Sierra apparently thought that a single server was way too expensive for their gaming heritage and finally shut it down... for about a month. During that time, the community banded together and made their own master server along with a client-side patch (that is quite simple) which permits you to lock onto the new master server and find games (which are indeed still going today).
This is why I've leaned more towards PC gaming. One day Blizzard will shut down WoW... and private servers will spring up, just as there's hundreds of them now. Prefer Vanilla WoW? There's an emulated server for you. Everquest has a movement to have an emulated server where the game is like it was in 1999 - much, much more hardcore. (Everquest has softened up a fair bit over the years, much like WoW has over the years.) So long as there are dedicated fans a game will never die. And if a game does truly die... then it probably wasn't all that good in the first place.
Slashdot is bad with current stories, especially with their bias towards advertising. Had it been a magazine, it would have had one story in 1666 and then a few hundred years of dead space.
that already has him winning awards and getting international accolades from folks like Xeni Jardin and Miles O'Brien.
A nod from the Chief Engineer of DS9? That's quite the seal of approval!
Because a Predator missile would slam into the hosting company that dares tarnish important American intellectual property such as Jersey Shore and The Apprentice.
I'm going to use some BS numbers here, but they're roughly right.
Let's say the PS3 and Xbox both sell at a $100 loss, and that Sony and Microsoft respectively make $10 on a new game sale. That means that they have to sell 10 games per PS3 to break even.
Now let's say the Wii makes a $50 profit per console, and that Nintendo also gets a $10 cut from their games. In this sense, they have a 5 game lead just by selling a console. By the time a Wii is purchased, both Sony and Microsoft are 15 games behind. While some people do buy dozens of games, most collections I've personally seen are 10-30 games (and quite a few of them are used, so Sony/Microsoft can't double-dip there... yet.)
I'm sure someone could come in here with the real numbers (or maybe I'll do it myself in the morning), but that's essentially what's going on. Nintendo broke the traditional loss-leader model and they're not exactly in dire financial straits as a result. They don't have to focus on the volume of games (New Cawadooty every year), they can focus on quality
You can't blow up an entire country with a storage capacitor, and that's why a project (that is so greatly needed) will never get that sort of funding.
The only way you'd get enough money to get significant research on a good storage capacitor was if you were in Texas and it came attached to a chair.
He's doing the exact same things corporations have done for hundreds of years. They've shrugged off their debts and destroyed our money, and I find it a bit difficult to speak out against someone who's decided to do the same thing back to them.