Did you watch X-Men 1 and 2? Considering Wolverine has spent 2 movies trying to find out who screwed him over and still isn't close, that's not bad going, eh?
And as for members of the public that are afraid of the hero - well, if I saw three foot-long blades come out from between some guy's knuckles, I'd not be exactly happy, you know!
I just happen to have the Feb copy of PC Format to hand, which did an interview with the lead designer, a guy called Jack Emmert. Direct quote from that:
Andthe golden advice to anyone thinking of following in Cryptic's steps? Jack's answer is equally simple. "Get ten million dollars. Between initial development and marketing cost, that's ten million."
So provided someone in your team has ten million dollars to spare, you're fine! That CEO got his money by building up a video chip company and selling it. There aren't too many people with that kind of money floating around who are prepared to blow the lot on a game, and much credit to Michael Lewis that he had the balls to do it.
Amongst my colleagues though, I'd guess a reasonably careful person aged 40ish might have 30-50K of savings and investments (excluding pension), and could probably access another 50K by selling their house and moving to a smaller one. So provided 100 people are prepared to risk their entire life's savings that they've spent 20+ years working to build up, you've got that money. I don't think that's too likely though. So the kind of advice in TFA and here, whilst interesting, is not widely relevant for Joe Developer.
Not only did they do that, they went out and had lots of sex with prostitutes. Prostitution was basically *the* option for unmarried women needing money, so there were a damn sight more of them (proportional to the population) than today.
It could be argued that the rise in pornography is the result of a decline in prostitution. And frankly, I'd rather we had pornography filmed by a small number people who know 100% what the score is, where one film can keep hundreds of men (and women) sexually satisfied for a day. Better than high levels of prostitution.
It doesn't matter if that's what your manager wanted you to work on, because as an employee you're responsible for your contribution to the company.
So you're saying that in your company, it doesn't matter what your manager tells you to do, you can goof off and work on another project you're not assigned to? And you actually get *rewarded* for that?!
Every company I've ever worked for has a clause in the contract that says something to the effect of "Refusing to carry out a reasonable request form a manager is gross misconduct", so you can (and will) be fired for not doing what your manager tells you to do. You have the right to tell your manager that you disagree with his decision, but if he persists then you have *no* right to refuse to do it. (Of course, a careful employee will make sure that is documented in an email, to make sure it's available as evidence if things do turn to shit later.;-) You can raise a complaint with your manager's manager too, but if he won't back you then you're SOL.
Nice - I've known a few of those. (Sorry, don't recognise the quote though.)
FWIW though, I've been senior-engineer-ing projects for a bit. Much of that time *has* been spent acting as the interface between the customer(s) and a small team of engineers, varying between 25% and 100% of my time depending on where the project is at and how deeply screwed the latest release was.;-) This tends to be a mix of engineering and project-leading.
Typical scenario is that the customer raises 50 issues. Of those, 10 will be repeats of other issues raised earlier, because someone's not upgraded to using the latest release. Another 10 are clearly the result of misunderstandings or testing cockups. Another 20 are trivial issues which take 5 minutes each to fix. And the final 10 are absolute bitches.
So my job becomes "triage". I need to have a quick look at them all to see which are genuine issues, possibly having a quick word with a few people, so I can reject the 20 irrelevant issues straight out (all of which requires detailed technical knowledge of the whole system, so your generic manager wouldn't have a hope!). Then I can distribute the 10 major issues around in a way that balances the load, and the 20 trivial issues can be handed round as people come free. If I'm lucky, I'll have time to handle one or two major issues myself, but more usually I'm fielding emails and phone calls from the customer, checking where everyone is up to, and acting as "translator" between the terms the customer uses and the terms our place uses.
I frequently have times where I look back and think "what did I do that week?!" That doesn't mean I was unproductive though, just that none of my work has been directly channelled into producing LOC. But most managers are smart enough to work out that it's better for 1 engineer to spend 90% of their time dealing with the customer than for 6 engineers to spend 30% of their time dealing with the customer. Plus it gives the customer the "warm-and-fuzzies" because they know there's always someone they can talk to who can take responsibility for getting it sorted (even if the reply is only "Dunno, but I'll check it out today"), instead of just getting told "Oh, that's not my code, talk to Bob instead" which is the typical engineer reaction.
I'm sure some of the team wonder what I've been doing too. They don't get to see my inbox though, or the meetings with customers, or any of that other crap. They can keep doing engineering, and I can keep them productive on that by not doing engineering myself. It's kind of sad that the better an engineer you are, the less likely you are to actually be doing engineering, but it's like being Michelangelo doing the Sistine Chapel - if it's too big for one person, the skill is in directing other people to get the end result you want.
I still can't calculate any shielding plates which will be light enough for the rocket fuel mass of Apollo 13 (28,945 kg) and yet still protect 3 astronauts from the radiation belts around the earth
Yep - which is why they didn't. The various astronauts all reported seeing strange flashes of light, which were cosmic rays hitting their retinas. Radiation is not immediately fatal - 3 days of low-level exposure like this is tolerable. Exposure for years is not, which is why a trip to Mars is such a problem, not only during the trip but also if/when they stay there (without a molten core, Mars hasn't got the protection from cosmic rays and other assorted shit that Earth has).
The *only* purpose of the manned lunar missions was to get one up on the Russians, especially after the Russians got the first satellite and the first man in space. We had the technology then, and we can certainly put it back in place now. But it'll involve throwing vast amounts of money at the problem, like the original program did and like the ISS has done.
The question is what benefit you'll get from this. OK, space travel is great, but until Discovery everyone thought shuttle launches were "so-what" events, and Apollo 13 was a non-event until it blew up. One trip to Mars would be fantastic, but it won't get us anything other than a warm fuzzy feeling, which is all the manned Moon landings ever got us. So the only three reasons for sending people there are one-upmanship, personal aggrandisement, or the intention to create permanent settlements there. And of the two US presidents to set up moon missions, sadly neither has been doing it for the third reason...
That also explains why Europe is never likely to send up manned missions. If you need to convince over a dozen heads of state to support you, you need something more than "this'll make you look good". Only states with vast resources which are ruled by a single person can make that decision. Which leaves the US and China these days, since Russia ceased to be a superpower.
The Commodore 64 was *the* gaming system of its day - like PC, X-box and PlayStationX all rolled into one. Nothing else (Spectrum etc) came close, not even consoles, for a long time.
I also have a soft spot for the venerable Amiga, being the first WIMP system I started using. It was also a great games machine as well - it was the first system to really make 3D work for things like flight sims.
Come on, sewing stuff back on has been around for decades. Fingers and thumbs are old news. A Bobbitt takes a bit more work, but it's still possible. So long as stuff is cut cleanly (not crushed) then it's pretty much 100%.
For approving the method, it'd need to be better than existing methods. It may still have worked, but if other older mthods turn out to work better then you won't bother with the new one.
Oh, and tapes remember where you stopped listening, and resume where you left off
Which is a pain in the arse when you're using them to record, since you inevitably forget to track to the end of what you've already recorded and stomp over something you wanted to keep.
Don't they trust me not to duplicate it and give it to others?
No, because they're not bloody stupid. If you hand it around, that's less income for the authors and publishers, who are the people enforcing these rules.
For music, it makes some sense to have free downloads. Musicians traditionally make their money from gigs and not from CD sales, so more enlightened musicians say "go on, give your friends a copy" in the hope that said friends will be along to the next gig.
But that logic falls down with books. It's been a long time since authors would go on tours and have people pay to hear them read their books. Audio books are alive and well, but only on a recording basis, so the only way of getting money off them is to charge per recording.
The SPP and other systems are a nice idea. Trouble is that experience shows they don't work. Even Stephen King couldn't get enough people to pay for a story delivered by installments about 4 years ago - and if he couldn't make it work, you can forget about anyone else doing it.
Bottom line is that there's a range of prices people will pay for anything, with low and high limits. The low limit is usually "gratis" or close to. If charged, they'll willingly pay anywhere within that range (maybe a bit more unwillingly as you go towards the high limit, but they'll still pay). But if they're asked to donate, they'll typically donate the low limit amount - which often amounts to "gratis". If you get a physical item, people are more likely to put money in the pot, because they can see that the article has cost something to produce. But a file? It costs nothing to upload/download, so why pay for it unless you have to? Like it or not, that's the attitude you're dealing with, and that's why no author will use the SPP to make their living.
Let's be clear here. You can sell *copies* of the software. A CD, or a download, or whatever. What you can't sell is the software itself, which means the copyright to it. For example, you can own as many copies of MS Office as you like, but you can't say that MS Office is "yours", because clearly MS own the rights to it.
I don't do these things either. Perhaps if I got a break on the bill when I haul stuff out to the dump? Assuming that I didn't pay for that break with my taxes?
Perhaps you should.
Our (Cambridge UK) trash collection is about to introduce an incentive. The system is: compostables in green wheely-bin; glass, metal and paper in black box; everything else in black wheely-bin. They're about to change from collecting bins every week to only collecting every other week. Now there's no way on earth you can fit all your trash for two weeks in one wheely-bin, so there's a simple alternative: either you trek out to the landfill site yourself to throw away your "everything-together" waste; or you split up your waste into the appropriate categories.
(a) physical attributes inherited from your ancestors; and (b) what games you get experience of.
For (a), you'd have to be pretty damn unobservant not to have noticed that blacks are more likely to be tall and/or heavily muscled than whites, especially amongst blacks of West African origin. Check out any track-and-field gathering, or boxing ring, or whatever sport you like. On the track-and-field front though, whites tend to be thinner and have better stamina (along with blacks from desert areas such as East Africa), giving a natural advantage in stamina events or things like high-jump. This is just the way people's bodies are set up, and it's why Britain has about a 5% black population but 100% of our top sprinters are black. Unless you think whites never had an opportunity to compete at sprinting...
(b) certainly is a factor in some sports - this is your "opportunity to compete". It's why Tiger Woods is such an exception in being a black golf player, and why you're never likely to see a British basketball player putting up much of a challenge against the Americans.
None of which affects whether you're a good games developer or not...:-)
My analog camera has one battery that lasts for years
Your analog camera obviously doesn't have an electrically operated zoom then. My dad has a pretty nice Olympus with a zoom, and he reckons on getting a few months mileage out of his battery. That's still tons more than I get out of the NiMHs in my digi camera. But his battery is some custom 3V Lithium obscurity that's only sold in about 5 places in the UK, and they cost £5 a time. They're such a rarity that he hasn't a hope in hell of finding a shop that sells them by ringing round the phone book (especially in Europe with the language barrier) - he has to rely on the one or two dealers in the UK that he knows.
I OTOH can recharge my AA NiMHs in anyone's battery charger for next to nothing (and chargers are available for charging from 12V or 110V or 240V - you can even get ones that do all three). If I forget to recharge them before I go then I can visit any convenience store in any country anywhere in the world and buy a pack of AAs to use instead, or I can borrow some off my friends who use AAs for their cameras, CD players, torches or whatever. I'll take the digi camera every time.
It's like running your car off rocket fuel instead of standard unleaded. You might get great mileage, but sooner or later you've got to refuel it, and not every filling station sells rocket fuel...;-)
Of course, non-zoom cameras certainly do get through significantly less batteries. You could even go for a fixed-focus no-flash one and be completely battery-free. It depends on the quality of picture you want though.
Parachutes is exactly what they used on every spacecraft before the Shuttle, exactly how they retrieve the solid boosters from the Shuttle, and exactly how they plan to get down the command capsule and the various reuseable stages on the new one.
Parachutes can be a large-scale solution too. Chutes exist to deliver tanks and trucks. When a spacecraft is broken down into its component parts (ie. each individual stages), will it weigh more than a main battletank? Producing a parachute to support a known mass is simply a matter of engineering, and that engineering is extremely well understood.
The only reason a 747 isn't fitted with a parachute is that there are vanishing few cases in which a wing will fall off, due to careful selection of flightpaths to avoid heavy weather and engineering the wings to many times the expected maximum conditions. And an airliner with both wings, even without engines, is still tons better than a parachute (look up the Gimli Glider incident). Parachutes *do* exist as an emergency option for smaller planes which are less robust or less able to get out of the way of storms. They're not actually very big - hardly any bigger in diameter than the plane's wingspan. If someone found a need for a parachute to support a 747, rest assured that it could be made (actually it'd be "they" rather than "it" because there'd be multiple chutes, but whatever).
Yep, there are certainly bugs in engine control software. It's software, that's life. If this concerns you, I'd advise you not to buy any model of car within the first two years of it coming out. And note that's "model" - so a 1.6 litre is a different model from a 1.8 litre. It's not uncommon that the engine controllers for different sizes of engine will have been developed by different people - they don't necessarily share software or even hardware. So make sure the model of car you want has been around for a little while before you buy it, and by then it should be OK.
If you don't, you can usually get free software upgrades as you need them (for definite if your car is still under warranty). If you've got a new model of car, it's a good idea to check this periodically anyway, even if you're not having problems with it at the time. The problems may be related to some specific case such as unusual environmental conditions, so it might run fine right up to the point it dies horribly in the middle of nowhere!:-/
"I am very sure that you will be still able to drive your car on your own," said Symantec Corp's mobile virus specialist Guido Sanchidrian.
Are we reading the same article?;-) The guy claiming things could be infected is Kaspersky, who apparently knows shit about automotive systems.
FWIW, air-con is usually run by the engine control system. The simple reason for this is that to use air-con, you need the engine on. Also the air-con puts a significant load on the engine, so the engine controller needs to know how much extra fuel to add to keep the car idling smoothly, otherwise you'll get sudden dips in engine RPM at idle as air-con turns on and off. But you're right that there are always separate systems for engine control and random interior stuff.
Re things talking, they'll only talk over a CAN bus (or MOST, LIN or something similar). Things do generally need to talk: a good example would be a car radio that turns the volume up as your speed increases. But they'll only talk using a protocol in which data is sent in packets and the meaning of every byte of the packet is defined *exactly*. There's no scope for random connections or uploading/downloading. As you say, it ain't happening.
A decreasing fuel economy is not a big deal, as every SUV buyer in the US will testify. However, increased cost *is* a big deal. You need UV sources, plus water sources, plus some reacting chamber, all arranged so that water and UV and exhaust gas reach the sides of the reacting chamber together. Suppose some manufacturer decides to take a stand and says, "Here you are. Oh, but it doesn't have any trunk space, and the fuel economy is worse, and it costs $5k more than the old one." That's going to sell *real* well, isn't it?
Depends on the processes. However if what you're after is something to take in a bunch of files, call a command-line program (or programs) to munge them in some way, and spit them out elsewhere, Python isn't a bad tool for connecting the dots. It's not blindingly fast itself, but if you're just using it for scripting then no problems there.
Python's default GUI provision is a bit basic though. If you want to build a Python user interface quickly, the PMW widget set (http://pmw.sourceforge.com/ is worth a look.
PS. During WW2 there was a chronic shortage of gasoline in the UK, so many vehicles were converted to run on coal-gas, stored in large canvas balloons on the roof. Imagine a truck being attacked by a 20-foot jellyfish and you get the idea.
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Did you watch X-Men 1 and 2? Considering Wolverine has spent 2 movies trying to find out who screwed him over and still isn't close, that's not bad going, eh?
And as for members of the public that are afraid of the hero - well, if I saw three foot-long blades come out from between some guy's knuckles, I'd not be exactly happy, you know!
Grab.
I just happen to have the Feb copy of PC Format to hand, which did an interview with the lead designer, a guy called Jack Emmert. Direct quote from that:
Andthe golden advice to anyone thinking of following in Cryptic's steps? Jack's answer is equally simple. "Get ten million dollars. Between initial development and marketing cost, that's ten million."
So provided someone in your team has ten million dollars to spare, you're fine! That CEO got his money by building up a video chip company and selling it. There aren't too many people with that kind of money floating around who are prepared to blow the lot on a game, and much credit to Michael Lewis that he had the balls to do it.
Amongst my colleagues though, I'd guess a reasonably careful person aged 40ish might have 30-50K of savings and investments (excluding pension), and could probably access another 50K by selling their house and moving to a smaller one. So provided 100 people are prepared to risk their entire life's savings that they've spent 20+ years working to build up, you've got that money. I don't think that's too likely though. So the kind of advice in TFA and here, whilst interesting, is not widely relevant for Joe Developer.
Grab.
Not only did they do that, they went out and had lots of sex with prostitutes. Prostitution was basically *the* option for unmarried women needing money, so there were a damn sight more of them (proportional to the population) than today.
It could be argued that the rise in pornography is the result of a decline in prostitution. And frankly, I'd rather we had pornography filmed by a small number people who know 100% what the score is, where one film can keep hundreds of men (and women) sexually satisfied for a day. Better than high levels of prostitution.
Grab.
It doesn't matter if that's what your manager wanted you to work on, because as an employee you're responsible for your contribution to the company.
;-) You can raise a complaint with your manager's manager too, but if he won't back you then you're SOL.
So you're saying that in your company, it doesn't matter what your manager tells you to do, you can goof off and work on another project you're not assigned to? And you actually get *rewarded* for that?!
Every company I've ever worked for has a clause in the contract that says something to the effect of "Refusing to carry out a reasonable request form a manager is gross misconduct", so you can (and will) be fired for not doing what your manager tells you to do. You have the right to tell your manager that you disagree with his decision, but if he persists then you have *no* right to refuse to do it. (Of course, a careful employee will make sure that is documented in an email, to make sure it's available as evidence if things do turn to shit later.
Grab.
Nice - I've known a few of those. (Sorry, don't recognise the quote though.)
;-) This tends to be a mix of engineering and project-leading.
FWIW though, I've been senior-engineer-ing projects for a bit. Much of that time *has* been spent acting as the interface between the customer(s) and a small team of engineers, varying between 25% and 100% of my time depending on where the project is at and how deeply screwed the latest release was.
Typical scenario is that the customer raises 50 issues. Of those, 10 will be repeats of other issues raised earlier, because someone's not upgraded to using the latest release. Another 10 are clearly the result of misunderstandings or testing cockups. Another 20 are trivial issues which take 5 minutes each to fix. And the final 10 are absolute bitches.
So my job becomes "triage". I need to have a quick look at them all to see which are genuine issues, possibly having a quick word with a few people, so I can reject the 20 irrelevant issues straight out (all of which requires detailed technical knowledge of the whole system, so your generic manager wouldn't have a hope!). Then I can distribute the 10 major issues around in a way that balances the load, and the 20 trivial issues can be handed round as people come free. If I'm lucky, I'll have time to handle one or two major issues myself, but more usually I'm fielding emails and phone calls from the customer, checking where everyone is up to, and acting as "translator" between the terms the customer uses and the terms our place uses.
I frequently have times where I look back and think "what did I do that week?!" That doesn't mean I was unproductive though, just that none of my work has been directly channelled into producing LOC. But most managers are smart enough to work out that it's better for 1 engineer to spend 90% of their time dealing with the customer than for 6 engineers to spend 30% of their time dealing with the customer. Plus it gives the customer the "warm-and-fuzzies" because they know there's always someone they can talk to who can take responsibility for getting it sorted (even if the reply is only "Dunno, but I'll check it out today"), instead of just getting told "Oh, that's not my code, talk to Bob instead" which is the typical engineer reaction.
I'm sure some of the team wonder what I've been doing too. They don't get to see my inbox though, or the meetings with customers, or any of that other crap. They can keep doing engineering, and I can keep them productive on that by not doing engineering myself. It's kind of sad that the better an engineer you are, the less likely you are to actually be doing engineering, but it's like being Michelangelo doing the Sistine Chapel - if it's too big for one person, the skill is in directing other people to get the end result you want.
Grab.
I still can't calculate any shielding plates which will be light enough for the rocket fuel mass of Apollo 13 (28,945 kg) and yet still protect 3 astronauts from the radiation belts around the earth
Yep - which is why they didn't. The various astronauts all reported seeing strange flashes of light, which were cosmic rays hitting their retinas. Radiation is not immediately fatal - 3 days of low-level exposure like this is tolerable. Exposure for years is not, which is why a trip to Mars is such a problem, not only during the trip but also if/when they stay there (without a molten core, Mars hasn't got the protection from cosmic rays and other assorted shit that Earth has).
The *only* purpose of the manned lunar missions was to get one up on the Russians, especially after the Russians got the first satellite and the first man in space. We had the technology then, and we can certainly put it back in place now. But it'll involve throwing vast amounts of money at the problem, like the original program did and like the ISS has done.
The question is what benefit you'll get from this. OK, space travel is great, but until Discovery everyone thought shuttle launches were "so-what" events, and Apollo 13 was a non-event until it blew up. One trip to Mars would be fantastic, but it won't get us anything other than a warm fuzzy feeling, which is all the manned Moon landings ever got us. So the only three reasons for sending people there are one-upmanship, personal aggrandisement, or the intention to create permanent settlements there. And of the two US presidents to set up moon missions, sadly neither has been doing it for the third reason...
That also explains why Europe is never likely to send up manned missions. If you need to convince over a dozen heads of state to support you, you need something more than "this'll make you look good". Only states with vast resources which are ruled by a single person can make that decision. Which leaves the US and China these days, since Russia ceased to be a superpower.
Grab.
The Commodore 64 was *the* gaming system of its day - like PC, X-box and PlayStationX all rolled into one. Nothing else (Spectrum etc) came close, not even consoles, for a long time.
I also have a soft spot for the venerable Amiga, being the first WIMP system I started using. It was also a great games machine as well - it was the first system to really make 3D work for things like flight sims.
Grab.
Come on, sewing stuff back on has been around for decades. Fingers and thumbs are old news. A Bobbitt takes a bit more work, but it's still possible. So long as stuff is cut cleanly (not crushed) then it's pretty much 100%.
For approving the method, it'd need to be better than existing methods. It may still have worked, but if other older mthods turn out to work better then you won't bother with the new one.
Grab.
Oh, and tapes remember where you stopped listening, and resume where you left off
Which is a pain in the arse when you're using them to record, since you inevitably forget to track to the end of what you've already recorded and stomp over something you wanted to keep.
Don't they trust me not to duplicate it and give it to others?
No, because they're not bloody stupid. If you hand it around, that's less income for the authors and publishers, who are the people enforcing these rules.
For music, it makes some sense to have free downloads. Musicians traditionally make their money from gigs and not from CD sales, so more enlightened musicians say "go on, give your friends a copy" in the hope that said friends will be along to the next gig.
But that logic falls down with books. It's been a long time since authors would go on tours and have people pay to hear them read their books. Audio books are alive and well, but only on a recording basis, so the only way of getting money off them is to charge per recording.
The SPP and other systems are a nice idea. Trouble is that experience shows they don't work. Even Stephen King couldn't get enough people to pay for a story delivered by installments about 4 years ago - and if he couldn't make it work, you can forget about anyone else doing it.
Bottom line is that there's a range of prices people will pay for anything, with low and high limits. The low limit is usually "gratis" or close to. If charged, they'll willingly pay anywhere within that range (maybe a bit more unwillingly as you go towards the high limit, but they'll still pay). But if they're asked to donate, they'll typically donate the low limit amount - which often amounts to "gratis". If you get a physical item, people are more likely to put money in the pot, because they can see that the article has cost something to produce. But a file? It costs nothing to upload/download, so why pay for it unless you have to? Like it or not, that's the attitude you're dealing with, and that's why no author will use the SPP to make their living.
Grab.
Bull. Of course you can sell the software.
Let's be clear here. You can sell *copies* of the software. A CD, or a download, or whatever. What you can't sell is the software itself, which means the copyright to it. For example, you can own as many copies of MS Office as you like, but you can't say that MS Office is "yours", because clearly MS own the rights to it.
Graham.
MS Project?! Man, you are sick! I suggest some time going cold turkey to make your hair un-pointy...
I don't do these things either. Perhaps if I got a break on the bill when I haul stuff out to the dump? Assuming that I didn't pay for that break with my taxes?
Perhaps you should.
Our (Cambridge UK) trash collection is about to introduce an incentive. The system is: compostables in green wheely-bin; glass, metal and paper in black box; everything else in black wheely-bin. They're about to change from collecting bins every week to only collecting every other week. Now there's no way on earth you can fit all your trash for two weeks in one wheely-bin, so there's a simple alternative: either you trek out to the landfill site yourself to throw away your "everything-together" waste; or you split up your waste into the appropriate categories.
Grab.
Man, do they not have gears in cars where you come from?
Grab.
Nope, it's about:-
:-)
(a) physical attributes inherited from your ancestors; and
(b) what games you get experience of.
For (a), you'd have to be pretty damn unobservant not to have noticed that blacks are more likely to be tall and/or heavily muscled than whites, especially amongst blacks of West African origin. Check out any track-and-field gathering, or boxing ring, or whatever sport you like. On the track-and-field front though, whites tend to be thinner and have better stamina (along with blacks from desert areas such as East Africa), giving a natural advantage in stamina events or things like high-jump. This is just the way people's bodies are set up, and it's why Britain has about a 5% black population but 100% of our top sprinters are black. Unless you think whites never had an opportunity to compete at sprinting...
(b) certainly is a factor in some sports - this is your "opportunity to compete". It's why Tiger Woods is such an exception in being a black golf player, and why you're never likely to see a British basketball player putting up much of a challenge against the Americans.
None of which affects whether you're a good games developer or not...
Grab.
My analog camera has one battery that lasts for years
;-)
Your analog camera obviously doesn't have an electrically operated zoom then. My dad has a pretty nice Olympus with a zoom, and he reckons on getting a few months mileage out of his battery. That's still tons more than I get out of the NiMHs in my digi camera. But his battery is some custom 3V Lithium obscurity that's only sold in about 5 places in the UK, and they cost £5 a time. They're such a rarity that he hasn't a hope in hell of finding a shop that sells them by ringing round the phone book (especially in Europe with the language barrier) - he has to rely on the one or two dealers in the UK that he knows.
I OTOH can recharge my AA NiMHs in anyone's battery charger for next to nothing (and chargers are available for charging from 12V or 110V or 240V - you can even get ones that do all three). If I forget to recharge them before I go then I can visit any convenience store in any country anywhere in the world and buy a pack of AAs to use instead, or I can borrow some off my friends who use AAs for their cameras, CD players, torches or whatever. I'll take the digi camera every time.
It's like running your car off rocket fuel instead of standard unleaded. You might get great mileage, but sooner or later you've got to refuel it, and not every filling station sells rocket fuel...
Of course, non-zoom cameras certainly do get through significantly less batteries. You could even go for a fixed-focus no-flash one and be completely battery-free. It depends on the quality of picture you want though.
Graham.
Parachutes is exactly what they used on every spacecraft before the Shuttle, exactly how they retrieve the solid boosters from the Shuttle, and exactly how they plan to get down the command capsule and the various reuseable stages on the new one.
Parachutes can be a large-scale solution too. Chutes exist to deliver tanks and trucks. When a spacecraft is broken down into its component parts (ie. each individual stages), will it weigh more than a main battletank? Producing a parachute to support a known mass is simply a matter of engineering, and that engineering is extremely well understood.
The only reason a 747 isn't fitted with a parachute is that there are vanishing few cases in which a wing will fall off, due to careful selection of flightpaths to avoid heavy weather and engineering the wings to many times the expected maximum conditions. And an airliner with both wings, even without engines, is still tons better than a parachute (look up the Gimli Glider incident). Parachutes *do* exist as an emergency option for smaller planes which are less robust or less able to get out of the way of storms. They're not actually very big - hardly any bigger in diameter than the plane's wingspan. If someone found a need for a parachute to support a 747, rest assured that it could be made (actually it'd be "they" rather than "it" because there'd be multiple chutes, but whatever).
Grab.
Bollocks. You ever heard of these new-fangled things they call "parachutes"...?
Yep, there are certainly bugs in engine control software. It's software, that's life. If this concerns you, I'd advise you not to buy any model of car within the first two years of it coming out. And note that's "model" - so a 1.6 litre is a different model from a 1.8 litre. It's not uncommon that the engine controllers for different sizes of engine will have been developed by different people - they don't necessarily share software or even hardware. So make sure the model of car you want has been around for a little while before you buy it, and by then it should be OK.
:-/
If you don't, you can usually get free software upgrades as you need them (for definite if your car is still under warranty). If you've got a new model of car, it's a good idea to check this periodically anyway, even if you're not having problems with it at the time. The problems may be related to some specific case such as unusual environmental conditions, so it might run fine right up to the point it dies horribly in the middle of nowhere!
Grab.
"I am very sure that you will be still able to drive your car on your own," said Symantec Corp's mobile virus specialist Guido Sanchidrian.
;-) The guy claiming things could be infected is Kaspersky, who apparently knows shit about automotive systems.
Are we reading the same article?
FWIW, air-con is usually run by the engine control system. The simple reason for this is that to use air-con, you need the engine on. Also the air-con puts a significant load on the engine, so the engine controller needs to know how much extra fuel to add to keep the car idling smoothly, otherwise you'll get sudden dips in engine RPM at idle as air-con turns on and off. But you're right that there are always separate systems for engine control and random interior stuff.
Re things talking, they'll only talk over a CAN bus (or MOST, LIN or something similar). Things do generally need to talk: a good example would be a car radio that turns the volume up as your speed increases. But they'll only talk using a protocol in which data is sent in packets and the meaning of every byte of the packet is defined *exactly*. There's no scope for random connections or uploading/downloading. As you say, it ain't happening.
Grab.
*News*paper. That clearly excludes the Sun right there...
Grab.
even if it does decrease my fuel economy by 5%
A decreasing fuel economy is not a big deal, as every SUV buyer in the US will testify. However, increased cost *is* a big deal. You need UV sources, plus water sources, plus some reacting chamber, all arranged so that water and UV and exhaust gas reach the sides of the reacting chamber together. Suppose some manufacturer decides to take a stand and says, "Here you are. Oh, but it doesn't have any trunk space, and the fuel economy is worse, and it costs $5k more than the old one." That's going to sell *real* well, isn't it?
Grab.
Oops, that's http://pmw.sourceforge.net./ Should have used preview... ;-)
Depends on the processes. However if what you're after is something to take in a bunch of files, call a command-line program (or programs) to munge them in some way, and spit them out elsewhere, Python isn't a bad tool for connecting the dots. It's not blindingly fast itself, but if you're just using it for scripting then no problems there.
Python's default GUI provision is a bit basic though. If you want to build a Python user interface quickly, the PMW widget set (http://pmw.sourceforge.com/ is worth a look.
Grab.
But a Hummer *is* a small tank...
Grab.
PS. During WW2 there was a chronic shortage of gasoline in the UK, so many vehicles were converted to run on coal-gas, stored in large canvas balloons on the roof. Imagine a truck being attacked by a 20-foot jellyfish and you get the idea.