that last few years have seen absolutely AMAZING games hit the shelves.
Like which?
I used to love adventure games, the last I bought was Grim Fandango.
I used to love car racing simulations, the last I bought was Need For Speed Underground, which sucks. Why haven't they ever managed to create a *good* physical car simulation since Grand Prix Legends came out in 1997? I don't mean the kind of simulation you drive with your thumbs, I mean something that gives realistic responses with a force-feedback wheel.
The last game I bought in any genre was Sid Meier's Pirates. Yawn! The same half-dozen plays repeated in a couple of dozen places... You call that entertainment?
I propose this law for games: entertainment value is inversely proportional to the square of the money spent on the production.
We don't need those super graphics effects, if you want to see fog and raindrop reflections and all that just leave your parents basement and walk outside. What games need and are sorely lacking today is imagination.
IQ tests may not be perfect, but who is to blame for that?
If a system is imperfect the correct attitude would be to try to improve it. Unfortunately no one dares to try to improve IQ tests for the fear that there could be intrinsic limitations on some people's intelligence.
Let's face it, people do have limitations. I'm too short to play volleyball or basketball, too skinny to play football, too clumsy to play baseball. Why should we deny that some people are too stupid to go to college, even if they get sports scholarships?
Let me see, the government paid $750 billion to rescue failed banks. Don't you think the government should have paid less than that?
Or do you mean to say that rescuing failed companies is not an example of government regulation?
You see, regulation works both ways. If you give the corporations very detailed guidelines on what they can and cannot do, then you are responsible for the results.
The "sub-prime" market bubble that started the current economic crisis was largely the result of government regulations that restricted the banks' autonomy to refuse credit to high-risk clients. When millions of people can claim they were refused mortgages because they belong to a racial minority, this cannot end well.
What do we gain from manned space flight that we wouldn't gain, in a far cheaper way, from unmanned missions?
Have you lived all your life in your mom's basement? What do you gain from leaving your room that you wouldn't gain, in a far cheaper way, from ordering everything delivered to you?
Need a job? Telecommute. Need exercise? Order a treadmill. Need vacations? Watch TV. You don't need to travel, that's what the National Geographic channel is for.
If you want to be completely practical, most of the things we do aren't really necessary. But our species seem to have this intrinsic need to get beyond our reality, to dream of things that have never been done. That's why space flight exists.
What would you do about the freeriders who come from out of town and park here? They don't pay any taxes in this town. And what about people who don't have any cars? Should they pay taxes for your parking place?
The best thing would be to get rid of all taxes and charge directly for every public service. Can't pay? Get a job! Or look for a charity organization that's willing to support you.
It sounds like they programmed it to perform this maneuver (going backward at a decent speed and sliding into a specific zone), and then it did (after several failures apparently).
No, they gave it free choice:
Standford has given the car the ability to choose between two different ways of driving. Junior can follow traditional physical models of driving or it can try to replicate a move its seen before. The latter choice is good for hard to understand but repeatable tasks, such as making James Bond look like a pansy.
I think you could say the same about Delphi-style Pascal. You can go as low level as in C there
I'd say you are 99% right, but not quite. Pascal has a few abstractions that isolate you from the machine, like the set type for instance.
Also, AFAIK, standard Pascal does not have function pointers, although I believe many versions, including Delphi, have implemented their non-standard extensions for this. Without function pointers it's very hard to do scientific programming, try writing a generic procedure to integrate a function, for instance.
I learned Pascal in the early 1980s, when the computer I had was an IBM PC with a 4.77 MHz CPU. I did a lot of programming in Turbo Pascal version 3, but I ended learning C because there were some operations I couldn't do with Turbo Pascal. After I learned C, I never felt the need to use Pascal anymore.
Trying to argue that you extensive knowledge of Pascal, JAVA and Assembly for the given platform means you will be able to work efficiently anyways, since you'll very quickly pick up the C knowledge needed, probably won't get you hired, even if it is true.
Only it's not true. A programmer who doesn't know C is either very lazy or, given the relativeabundanceof each language suffers from some weird form of autism.
There's no denying it, C is the basis of everything in computing. Anyone who has studied or done any professional work in computing has had contact with the C language at some time. A programmer who never had at least the curiosity to learn C, if only to understand some function he downloaded from the web, will never, ever, be a competent programmer.
If you understand programming, picking up any given language is straightforward.
How can you understand programming if you don't understand how it works under the hood?
Teaching assembly (which CPU?) wouldn't be practical but C is the next best thing. I agree with you that any programmer should be able to pick up a new language without too much effort, but unless you know how the internal structures of the programs work you will never be able to write good code, at best your code will be painfully slow, at worst it will be outright dangerous.
If only one language is taught, then it should be C for anyone who expects to be a professional programmer, knowing C they can easily pick up any other procedural language. A programmer who doesn't know C is like a doctor who doesn't know anatomy.
in the not too distant future (few months from now iirc) it should run out of fuel for attitude control.
Unfortunately not. A geostationary satellite uses about 90% of its fuel for inclination control (north-south maneuvers), 9% for east-west maneuvers, and just 1% for attitude control. It could easily run a hundred years of attitude maneuvers with the fuel it has now.
The original plan was to completely eliminate the '%' string formatting operator by version 3.2
I don't know if they are still committed to this, since, as I mentioned, this is one of the stupidest decisions one can imagine. But they still mention in the str.format method documentation that "This method of string formatting is the new standard in Python 3.0, and should be preferred to the % formatting described in String Formatting Operations in new code."
In the PEP-3101 documentation the abstract says: "This PEP proposes a new system for built-in string formatting operations, intended as a replacement for the existing '%' string formatting operator"
In the official Python 3 specification it's mentioned that "A new system for built-in string formatting operations replaces the % string formatting operator. (However, the % operator is still supported; it will be deprecated in Python 3.1 and removed from the language at some later time.)"
So, there is a very well defined intention to eliminate the '%' string formatting operator, although I believe they will find it harder to implement than they thought at first.
If they go ahead and implement every stupid proposal that has been made for Python 3, I think the best solution would be to fork Python. Name it the "Python 2.7" version, one that will never reach version 3. My proposal is to do like Donald Knuth did for TeX versions, which approach the value of pi. Let's have Python 2.7, 2.7.1,... 2.7.1.8.2.8.1.8.2.8.4.5.9.0.4.5, etc.
I don't want to load 20 modules before I can begin coding.
That's why I don't like Matlab. Not only you have to import every single function you use, but each function comes in a separate file. And when you find the function you need on the web, you have to shell out an extra $5k to get the libraries it depends on.
My only worry about Python is that version 3 abomination. They not only managed to make each change towards a more complicated way to use, but also deprecated such a basic thing as string formatting. About one third of the code I write is related to text I/O, so a quick and easy way to format strings is very near the top priority on any language.
Last time I checked there are ten times as many references to the C language on Google as references to Python, so I cannot imagine why they want to get rid of the C-compatible string formatting. They created something that, in every single example I have seen, takes at least twice as much effort to write, offering no significant advantage.
If somebody needs a more sophisticated method for formatting strings, go ahead and create a new formatting library. But leave the true and tested way that has been working for nearly forty years alone. You cannot deprecate a basic functionality of a language just like that without dire consequences.
Nope, happens all the time. There's a bunch of derelict satellites up there and we must maneuver the operating satellites to get out of their path.
The problem with AMC-11 is that Galaxy-15 failed just recently and its transponders are still operating. Normally they shut down the transponders when a satellite fails, but in this case the command decoder itself seems to have failed, so Galaxy-15 is not accepting any commands.
Given enough time, the on-board computer will take over and shut down the transponders. This will happen automatically when the sun and earth sensors detect the orbit has deviated too much from the nominal conditions.
Famine sets in, and after the temporary greenhouse impact of a few hundreds of millions of corpses decaying, anthropogenic global warming reduces by virtue of less "anthropo" to "genic" that carbon dioxide.
Those few hundred millions of corpses come from third-world farmers, none of which own SUVs. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide goes on unchecked.
Many commercial satellites have small payloads for special uses. To put anything in geostationary orbit will cost at least $60 million for the launcher alone, so it makes sense to piggyback a small transponder in a bigger satellite.
The reason why I feel it's wrong to call it a GPS satellite is because true GPS satellites need to have their orbits determined to much higher precision. Typically, a commercial satellite has its orbit controlled within a 100 meter precision, if it's collocated with other satellites, or several hundred meters if not. A GPS satellite needs to have its orbit determined with a better than one meter precision.
The WAAS system exchanges precision for reliability in applications like aircraft landing where an outage is inadmissible. There are a few occasions when, due to an unfavorable alignment of the satellites, the GPS is unable to provide a good precision. This situation does not last long, but it could put a landing aircraft in danger if it happens at a bad moment.
The WAAS, being transmitted from geostationary satellites, is always visible from its coverage area, so, although it's not as precise as "true" GPS, it's always there.
there probably is a "three body" problem in this case. So, isn't it the same phenomenon, just a degenerate case?
It's a different problem. In a three body problem all three bodies move in relation to each other. In the geopotential problem the masses forming the earth are rigidly attached to each other and the satellite moves with relation to them.
For geostationary satellites the problem is made more difficult because the satellite moves very slowly relative to the geopotential, so a small east-west acceleration adds up over time. When a satellite moves in an orbit with a different period the acceleration is east-to-west at some times and west-to-east at other times, so the net effect is much smaller.
it appears you read the title but not the summaries or the articles, yet somehow knew that this is a commercial communications satellite
I know it because I happen to be an expert in the field, I could write an article about Galaxy 15 if it weren't for the NDAs. To call it a "GPS satellite" just because it has one transponder dedicated to GPS is wrong, a GPS satellite is one of the dedicated satellites that have 12 hour orbit period.
This reminds me of the joke of the old man who complained "I own a farm and they don't call me a farmer, I own a shop and they don't call me a shopkeeper, I have several trucks and they don't call me a trucker, I have built several houses and they don't call me a builder, but I sucked a cock just once..."
Correct, but it also carried a lot of other traffic. To call it a "GPS satellite" would be like calling it a "religious satellite" if it carries a televangelist channel, or a "financial satellite" if some bank uses it.
I do believe there's a major ecological disaster underway right now in the Gulf of Mexico teaching us this lesson right now
Oil spills have happened many times before, check wikipedia for a start. Now give me one example of an intentional biological attack that had any significant consequences.
They might as well design defenses against an attack of pink unicorns, it has never happened before, but that's not reason to ignore the danger, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Like which?
I used to love adventure games, the last I bought was Grim Fandango.
I used to love car racing simulations, the last I bought was Need For Speed Underground, which sucks. Why haven't they ever managed to create a *good* physical car simulation since Grand Prix Legends came out in 1997? I don't mean the kind of simulation you drive with your thumbs, I mean something that gives realistic responses with a force-feedback wheel.
The last game I bought in any genre was Sid Meier's Pirates. Yawn! The same half-dozen plays repeated in a couple of dozen places... You call that entertainment?
I propose this law for games: entertainment value is inversely proportional to the square of the money spent on the production.
We don't need those super graphics effects, if you want to see fog and raindrop reflections and all that just leave your parents basement and walk outside. What games need and are sorely lacking today is imagination.
IQ tests may not be perfect, but who is to blame for that?
If a system is imperfect the correct attitude would be to try to improve it. Unfortunately no one dares to try to improve IQ tests for the fear that there could be intrinsic limitations on some people's intelligence.
Let's face it, people do have limitations. I'm too short to play volleyball or basketball, too skinny to play football, too clumsy to play baseball. Why should we deny that some people are too stupid to go to college, even if they get sports scholarships?
FTFY
Lat time I saw a website with VRML was in 2002. It was a great idea that failed, I don't know why.
Let me see, the government paid $750 billion to rescue failed banks. Don't you think the government should have paid less than that?
Or do you mean to say that rescuing failed companies is not an example of government regulation?
You see, regulation works both ways. If you give the corporations very detailed guidelines on what they can and cannot do, then you are responsible for the results.
The "sub-prime" market bubble that started the current economic crisis was largely the result of government regulations that restricted the banks' autonomy to refuse credit to high-risk clients. When millions of people can claim they were refused mortgages because they belong to a racial minority, this cannot end well.
Yes, by all means, let's have less regulation.
Yes, we do, don't we? Because blind belief in an ancient Middle-East mythological creature is not exactly compatible with sound reasoning...
Have you lived all your life in your mom's basement? What do you gain from leaving your room that you wouldn't gain, in a far cheaper way, from ordering everything delivered to you?
Need a job? Telecommute. Need exercise? Order a treadmill. Need vacations? Watch TV. You don't need to travel, that's what the National Geographic channel is for.
If you want to be completely practical, most of the things we do aren't really necessary. But our species seem to have this intrinsic need to get beyond our reality, to dream of things that have never been done. That's why space flight exists.
What would you do about the freeriders who come from out of town and park here? They don't pay any taxes in this town. And what about people who don't have any cars? Should they pay taxes for your parking place?
The best thing would be to get rid of all taxes and charge directly for every public service. Can't pay? Get a job! Or look for a charity organization that's willing to support you.
No, they gave it free choice:
Standford has given the car the ability to choose between two different ways of driving. Junior can follow traditional physical models of driving or it can try to replicate a move its seen before. The latter choice is good for hard to understand but repeatable tasks, such as making James Bond look like a pansy.
I'd say you are 99% right, but not quite. Pascal has a few abstractions that isolate you from the machine, like the set type for instance.
Also, AFAIK, standard Pascal does not have function pointers, although I believe many versions, including Delphi, have implemented their non-standard extensions for this. Without function pointers it's very hard to do scientific programming, try writing a generic procedure to integrate a function, for instance.
I learned Pascal in the early 1980s, when the computer I had was an IBM PC with a 4.77 MHz CPU. I did a lot of programming in Turbo Pascal version 3, but I ended learning C because there were some operations I couldn't do with Turbo Pascal. After I learned C, I never felt the need to use Pascal anymore.
Only it's not true. A programmer who doesn't know C is either very lazy or, given the relative abundance of each language suffers from some weird form of autism.
There's no denying it, C is the basis of everything in computing. Anyone who has studied or done any professional work in computing has had contact with the C language at some time. A programmer who never had at least the curiosity to learn C, if only to understand some function he downloaded from the web, will never, ever, be a competent programmer.
How can you understand programming if you don't understand how it works under the hood?
Teaching assembly (which CPU?) wouldn't be practical but C is the next best thing. I agree with you that any programmer should be able to pick up a new language without too much effort, but unless you know how the internal structures of the programs work you will never be able to write good code, at best your code will be painfully slow, at worst it will be outright dangerous.
If only one language is taught, then it should be C for anyone who expects to be a professional programmer, knowing C they can easily pick up any other procedural language. A programmer who doesn't know C is like a doctor who doesn't know anatomy.
Unfortunately not. A geostationary satellite uses about 90% of its fuel for inclination control (north-south maneuvers), 9% for east-west maneuvers, and just 1% for attitude control. It could easily run a hundred years of attitude maneuvers with the fuel it has now.
The original plan was to completely eliminate the '%' string formatting operator by version 3.2
I don't know if they are still committed to this, since, as I mentioned, this is one of the stupidest decisions one can imagine. But they still mention in the str.format method documentation that "This method of string formatting is the new standard in Python 3.0, and should be preferred to the % formatting described in String Formatting Operations in new code."
In the PEP-3101 documentation the abstract says: "This PEP proposes a new system for built-in string formatting operations, intended as a replacement for the existing '%' string formatting operator"
In the official Python 3 specification it's mentioned that "A new system for built-in string formatting operations replaces the % string formatting operator. (However, the % operator is still supported; it will be deprecated in Python 3.1 and removed from the language at some later time.)"
So, there is a very well defined intention to eliminate the '%' string formatting operator, although I believe they will find it harder to implement than they thought at first.
If they go ahead and implement every stupid proposal that has been made for Python 3, I think the best solution would be to fork Python. Name it the "Python 2.7" version, one that will never reach version 3. My proposal is to do like Donald Knuth did for TeX versions, which approach the value of pi. Let's have Python 2.7, 2.7.1, ... 2.7.1.8.2.8.1.8.2.8.4.5.9.0.4.5, etc.
That's why I don't like Matlab. Not only you have to import every single function you use, but each function comes in a separate file. And when you find the function you need on the web, you have to shell out an extra $5k to get the libraries it depends on.
My only worry about Python is that version 3 abomination. They not only managed to make each change towards a more complicated way to use, but also deprecated such a basic thing as string formatting. About one third of the code I write is related to text I/O, so a quick and easy way to format strings is very near the top priority on any language.
Last time I checked there are ten times as many references to the C language on Google as references to Python, so I cannot imagine why they want to get rid of the C-compatible string formatting. They created something that, in every single example I have seen, takes at least twice as much effort to write, offering no significant advantage.
If somebody needs a more sophisticated method for formatting strings, go ahead and create a new formatting library. But leave the true and tested way that has been working for nearly forty years alone. You cannot deprecate a basic functionality of a language just like that without dire consequences.
Nope, happens all the time. There's a bunch of derelict satellites up there and we must maneuver the operating satellites to get out of their path.
The problem with AMC-11 is that Galaxy-15 failed just recently and its transponders are still operating. Normally they shut down the transponders when a satellite fails, but in this case the command decoder itself seems to have failed, so Galaxy-15 is not accepting any commands.
Given enough time, the on-board computer will take over and shut down the transponders. This will happen automatically when the sun and earth sensors detect the orbit has deviated too much from the nominal conditions.
You forgot to mention that every time you download software God kills a programmer.
I hate programmers, that's why I download so much.
It's the same in my family too. When a kid is born, they always blame it on the balls.
Those few hundred millions of corpses come from third-world farmers, none of which own SUVs. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide goes on unchecked.
Many commercial satellites have small payloads for special uses. To put anything in geostationary orbit will cost at least $60 million for the launcher alone, so it makes sense to piggyback a small transponder in a bigger satellite.
The reason why I feel it's wrong to call it a GPS satellite is because true GPS satellites need to have their orbits determined to much higher precision. Typically, a commercial satellite has its orbit controlled within a 100 meter precision, if it's collocated with other satellites, or several hundred meters if not. A GPS satellite needs to have its orbit determined with a better than one meter precision.
The WAAS system exchanges precision for reliability in applications like aircraft landing where an outage is inadmissible. There are a few occasions when, due to an unfavorable alignment of the satellites, the GPS is unable to provide a good precision. This situation does not last long, but it could put a landing aircraft in danger if it happens at a bad moment.
The WAAS, being transmitted from geostationary satellites, is always visible from its coverage area, so, although it's not as precise as "true" GPS, it's always there.
It's a different problem. In a three body problem all three bodies move in relation to each other. In the geopotential problem the masses forming the earth are rigidly attached to each other and the satellite moves with relation to them.
For geostationary satellites the problem is made more difficult because the satellite moves very slowly relative to the geopotential, so a small east-west acceleration adds up over time. When a satellite moves in an orbit with a different period the acceleration is east-to-west at some times and west-to-east at other times, so the net effect is much smaller.
I know it because I happen to be an expert in the field, I could write an article about Galaxy 15 if it weren't for the NDAs. To call it a "GPS satellite" just because it has one transponder dedicated to GPS is wrong, a GPS satellite is one of the dedicated satellites that have 12 hour orbit period.
This reminds me of the joke of the old man who complained "I own a farm and they don't call me a farmer, I own a shop and they don't call me a shopkeeper, I have several trucks and they don't call me a trucker, I have built several houses and they don't call me a builder, but I sucked a cock just once..."
Correct, but it also carried a lot of other traffic. To call it a "GPS satellite" would be like calling it a "religious satellite" if it carries a televangelist channel, or a "financial satellite" if some bank uses it.
This is a commercial communications satellite that hasnothing to do with the Global Positioning System
Oil spills have happened many times before, check wikipedia for a start. Now give me one example of an intentional biological attack that had any significant consequences.
They might as well design defenses against an attack of pink unicorns, it has never happened before, but that's not reason to ignore the danger, right?