I had an idea like this a few months ago, but not for the lighting. Instead I was thinking of deer. Here in Iowa, its a huge problem. Lots of people hit deer in the highways.
My idea was the have these boxes spaced along the roadway mounted on reflector poles (many highways already have those in place). Then, when it detected an approaching car, it'd shine a light and/or a sound burst to startle the animals. It would also trigger a number of boxes farther up the road ahead of the car to do the same. So in front of each car there would be a moving sound/light effect to scare away the animals before the car gets there.
If they could incorporate some system to keep the roads clear of larger animals (like deer) it'd make it even more of a sure-sell.
There's a lot to be said for the power of the mind. By taking on this project he could very well have almost willed himself to get better. I'm not saying it cured him (I'm sure modern medicine did much of the work), but it could have been a factor in the remission. He gave himself a new purpose--and a very cool one, at that. Very symbolic. It could be that his mind/soul did the rest.
Perhaps the biggest source of the problem is contrails. The study they did in the near airplane-less skies after 9/11 seems to indicate that they have quite a massive impact on weather patterns.
There seems to be two basic causes of bad performance:
1. Mathematically impossible to do it any other way. 2. Modularity.
Of course crap code/logic also counts, but it can be rewritten.
The problem with modularity is that it forces us to break certain functions down at arbitrary points. This is handy for reusing code, of course, and it saves us a lot of work. Its the main reason we can build the huge systems we build today. However, it comes with a price.
While I don't really know how to solve this practically, it could be solved by writing code that never ever calls other code. In other words, the entire program would be custom-written from beginning to end for this one purpose. Sort of like a novel which tells one complete story and is one unified and self-contained package.
Programs are actually written more like chapters in the mother of all choose-your-own-adventure books. Trying to run the program causes an insane amount of page flipping for the computer (metaphorically and actually:-))
Of course this approach is much more flexible and allows us to build off of the massive code that came before us, but it is also not a very efficient way to think about things.
Personally, I think the languages are still the problem because of where they draw the line for abstractions. It limits you to thinking within very small boxes and forcing you to express yourself in limited ways. In other words, your painting can be as big as you want, but you only get one color (a single return value in many languages). It is like we're still stuck at the Model T stage of language development--it comes in any color you want as long as its black!
Yeah, I understand (I was a software engineer). I guess my point was that those perks were supposed to be there but after awhile the boss just decided to randomly come down on some of us (I wasn't the only one taken off guard by it, either). The boss would remind us how loose the place was, etc. and then later that same day there'd be a little one-on-one chat about taking long lunches. Heck, he even suggested the idea of long lunches with make up time later originally. I'm just complaining... Anyway, if you have a decent enough boss, this kind of stuff doesn't happen because he doesn't have random double standards and stuff.
Dude... nice. I currently don't have a job at all. Haven't for six months now. I used to have a job where they *claimed* that all those things were true, but if you tried to exercise any of them, you'd eventually get in trouble. That creates an insane amount of stress. Sure the pay was great, but the mind games weren't worth it at all. Hopefully you are as well treated as it sounds.
I eventually got let go by them partly because I was trying to exercise the perks they constantly insisted that they had (mostly, though, I think it was because for some reason I was seen as a threat to a few people in the wrong places or something). Want to take a slightly longer lunch to go to the driving range and make up the time later that day or week? Sure! Well, so they say. Then you actually do it a few times over the summer months and the next thing you know you're hauled into the office and scolded for taking "long" lunches (1 hour and 15 minutes is too long). The next day the boss goes fishing for 3 hours in the middle of the day. This happened constantly. And not just with time, but basically everything was like that.
Even the supervision was messed up. The boss would drop by every 20-30 minutes or so or walk behind your cube frequently throughout the day and "stop in" for a chat and to see "what's up." Taking a mind break to read slashdot or CNN is perfectly OK according to him, but if you ever do it and he's walking by, you hear about it in your bi-weekly one-on-one status meeting. Then you get a speech about being committed or dedicated. Etc. Never-mind you just finished all tasks ahead of schedule or that you just got public kudos from other departments for your work. Happened often to me but I'd still get in trouble for not being dedicated. And usually the speech would be about how at "other companies" the supervision is much more intense and that I'd have been in real hot water if I worked for one of *those* places. I had worked at several other companies (bigger and smaller) and that place was the worst BY FAR. Try to politely mention that, and my entire past experience was written off as having been "lucky" or somesuch.
So yeah, enjoy it if you really can do those things without having trouble doing them. I'm about 2 weeks from being out of state unemployment benefits and I have yet to find a job. Living month to month and sometimes week to week is a whole new kind of stress I've never had before. Although I prefer it to the games I had to deal with in the office.
Have you ever gone to a chiropractor? I've only been to the one my family has known, but I get the impression they practice a different style than most. Perhaps that is the difference. In any case, there does seem to be a huge number of people who think that chiropractors are like witch doctors or something. I don't understand it. At my last job there were a few people who had back troubles, neck problems, etc. As did I. I started going to the chiropractor (which, ironically, was like a mile from the office). After a couple months of regular visits I was feeling far better than I had in ages--and not just my back but nearly everything. Even in better moods. And yet they wouldn't go even once to try it out. Too afraid and they usually got a little smile on their face when I'd tell them to give it a shot--like I was a silly kid who just didn't know any better.
I did have one brief incident where my back gave out entirely. Got rushed to the chiropractor and was fixed up in minutes. A painful day on my couch, a couple more visits, and since then I've been fine. I haven't had to go back in more than six months. I also got a new bed/mattress on the recommendation of my chiropractor as well. I think that made the bulk of the difference, really.
The thing about chiropractors is that they basically just fix the immediate problem. In other words, they aren't a final solution to what causes your bones to get out of alignment or whatever. They can just put it back together. But how is that any different from other medical professions?
I went in to the doctor several years ago after my dad got some treatment for hurting wrists. It didn't require anything like this. Just a normal appointment. And all the doctor did was give me a shot of something in my wrists (which was scary... big long needle... yikes). Anyway, it took like 5 minutes. It worked amazingly well, too. No idea what it was though, sorry. That was quite a few years ago now and I was still in high school at the time. My wrists have been quite happy since then. Occasional dull pain after long days on the keyboard, but after a rest it goes away. Nothing at all like what I had in the past before the treatment.
Maybe reaction time? If you are thinking faster, then you should be able to notice changes faster and therefore react to those changes more quickly. So those who have very fast reaction times over a wide variety of situations might actually be thinking/processing faster than those with slower reaction times.
Actually, people do seem to interested in seeing this stuff. That's why Ogrish exists. And no, I don't enjoy seeing it or even ever visit the site. But, for those crazy folk that like it, there's a place for them. That's all I'm saying.
I agree. I'm in Iowa and (at least in my district) the forms are VERY simple. They consist of a bunch of items that have partial arrows drawn next to them. Sort of like this:
= => Mr. Person = => Mrs. Person
And all you do is fill in the arrow line next to the people you want to vote for to make a solid arrow. Easy and I can see where it would be very simple for the scanners to read it, too.
My girlfriend does this all the time. It takes the form of a story that is authored by different people (from the POV of your character). She's part of 2 or 3 of these things (and one of them is Firefly-based:-). She seems to enjoy it. I haven't tried it yet myself. Honestly, it doesn't appeal much. But it must work ok. She's been doing it for a few years now.
Wouldn't a flat panel for C-Band need to be rather huge? I'm not that familiar with how that stuff works, but it seems there had to be a reason why the BUDs where, well, big.
But isn't the goal to do something you love? Heck, you spend most of your day at work, right? Seems like a huge waste of existence to just grin and bear it unless you really do have no other choice. Maybe I'm too idealistic...
Is there any place to get the original and use something like ScummVM to play it on modern hardware (assuming there is, say, a MacOSX version..:-)? I used to have it years ago, but I must have tossed a box of stuff as some point. I had The Dig, Full Throttle, and Day of the Tentacle, too. Damn that was good stuff. They are all sadly missing from my boxes of CDs and things. (Well, those and lots of other things on account of moving and not thinking when tossing stuff, I guess.)
There are different kinds of hard, though. Many of the older games seemed to eventually come down to pure reflexes and sense of timing. It didn't challenge your mind so much as your hand-eye coordination. So maybe this guy just prefers that sort of game over some of the more modern games with puzzles and mystery.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of this sort of thing going on for the GameBoy Advance, too. Its a lot of fun developing for such limited systems. :-)
(Well, except for the tracking part...)
I had an idea like this a few months ago, but not for the lighting. Instead I was thinking of deer. Here in Iowa, its a huge problem. Lots of people hit deer in the highways.
My idea was the have these boxes spaced along the roadway mounted on reflector poles (many highways already have those in place). Then, when it detected an approaching car, it'd shine a light and/or a sound burst to startle the animals. It would also trigger a number of boxes farther up the road ahead of the car to do the same. So in front of each car there would be a moving sound/light effect to scare away the animals before the car gets there.
If they could incorporate some system to keep the roads clear of larger animals (like deer) it'd make it even more of a sure-sell.
There's a lot to be said for the power of the mind. By taking on this project he could very well have almost willed himself to get better. I'm not saying it cured him (I'm sure modern medicine did much of the work), but it could have been a factor in the remission. He gave himself a new purpose--and a very cool one, at that. Very symbolic. It could be that his mind/soul did the rest.
So *you* have me Lucky Charms! I've been looking all over for them! Dammit.. I'm hungry...
Maybe he wanted to make a sweet Quake 3 map?
Perhaps the biggest source of the problem is contrails. The study they did in the near airplane-less skies after 9/11 seems to indicate that they have quite a massive impact on weather patterns.
Perhaps it will free up some funds for some original game concepts instead of the same old crap over and over and over...
Well, one can hope, anyway.
So if it crashes, do you trip and fall? Boy, that'd suck on stairs...
Ohhhh.. Ok. :-) Hee hee...
Uhh. yeah. What's your point?
There seems to be two basic causes of bad performance:
:-))
1. Mathematically impossible to do it any other way.
2. Modularity.
Of course crap code/logic also counts, but it can be rewritten.
The problem with modularity is that it forces us to break certain functions down at arbitrary points. This is handy for reusing code, of course, and it saves us a lot of work. Its the main reason we can build the huge systems we build today. However, it comes with a price.
While I don't really know how to solve this practically, it could be solved by writing code that never ever calls other code. In other words, the entire program would be custom-written from beginning to end for this one purpose. Sort of like a novel which tells one complete story and is one unified and self-contained package.
Programs are actually written more like chapters in the mother of all choose-your-own-adventure books. Trying to run the program causes an insane amount of page flipping for the computer (metaphorically and actually
Of course this approach is much more flexible and allows us to build off of the massive code that came before us, but it is also not a very efficient way to think about things.
Personally, I think the languages are still the problem because of where they draw the line for abstractions. It limits you to thinking within very small boxes and forcing you to express yourself in limited ways. In other words, your painting can be as big as you want, but you only get one color (a single return value in many languages). It is like we're still stuck at the Model T stage of language development--it comes in any color you want as long as its black!
Yeah, I understand (I was a software engineer). I guess my point was that those perks were supposed to be there but after awhile the boss just decided to randomly come down on some of us (I wasn't the only one taken off guard by it, either). The boss would remind us how loose the place was, etc. and then later that same day there'd be a little one-on-one chat about taking long lunches. Heck, he even suggested the idea of long lunches with make up time later originally. I'm just complaining... Anyway, if you have a decent enough boss, this kind of stuff doesn't happen because he doesn't have random double standards and stuff.
Dude... nice. I currently don't have a job at all. Haven't for six months now. I used to have a job where they *claimed* that all those things were true, but if you tried to exercise any of them, you'd eventually get in trouble. That creates an insane amount of stress. Sure the pay was great, but the mind games weren't worth it at all. Hopefully you are as well treated as it sounds.
I eventually got let go by them partly because I was trying to exercise the perks they constantly insisted that they had (mostly, though, I think it was because for some reason I was seen as a threat to a few people in the wrong places or something). Want to take a slightly longer lunch to go to the driving range and make up the time later that day or week? Sure! Well, so they say. Then you actually do it a few times over the summer months and the next thing you know you're hauled into the office and scolded for taking "long" lunches (1 hour and 15 minutes is too long). The next day the boss goes fishing for 3 hours in the middle of the day. This happened constantly. And not just with time, but basically everything was like that.
Even the supervision was messed up. The boss would drop by every 20-30 minutes or so or walk behind your cube frequently throughout the day and "stop in" for a chat and to see "what's up." Taking a mind break to read slashdot or CNN is perfectly OK according to him, but if you ever do it and he's walking by, you hear about it in your bi-weekly one-on-one status meeting. Then you get a speech about being committed or dedicated. Etc. Never-mind you just finished all tasks ahead of schedule or that you just got public kudos from other departments for your work. Happened often to me but I'd still get in trouble for not being dedicated. And usually the speech would be about how at "other companies" the supervision is much more intense and that I'd have been in real hot water if I worked for one of *those* places. I had worked at several other companies (bigger and smaller) and that place was the worst BY FAR. Try to politely mention that, and my entire past experience was written off as having been "lucky" or somesuch.
So yeah, enjoy it if you really can do those things without having trouble doing them. I'm about 2 weeks from being out of state unemployment benefits and I have yet to find a job. Living month to month and sometimes week to week is a whole new kind of stress I've never had before. Although I prefer it to the games I had to deal with in the office.
Have you ever gone to a chiropractor? I've only been to the one my family has known, but I get the impression they practice a different style than most. Perhaps that is the difference. In any case, there does seem to be a huge number of people who think that chiropractors are like witch doctors or something. I don't understand it. At my last job there were a few people who had back troubles, neck problems, etc. As did I. I started going to the chiropractor (which, ironically, was like a mile from the office). After a couple months of regular visits I was feeling far better than I had in ages--and not just my back but nearly everything. Even in better moods. And yet they wouldn't go even once to try it out. Too afraid and they usually got a little smile on their face when I'd tell them to give it a shot--like I was a silly kid who just didn't know any better.
I did have one brief incident where my back gave out entirely. Got rushed to the chiropractor and was fixed up in minutes. A painful day on my couch, a couple more visits, and since then I've been fine. I haven't had to go back in more than six months. I also got a new bed/mattress on the recommendation of my chiropractor as well. I think that made the bulk of the difference, really.
The thing about chiropractors is that they basically just fix the immediate problem. In other words, they aren't a final solution to what causes your bones to get out of alignment or whatever. They can just put it back together. But how is that any different from other medical professions?
I went in to the doctor several years ago after my dad got some treatment for hurting wrists. It didn't require anything like this. Just a normal appointment. And all the doctor did was give me a shot of something in my wrists (which was scary... big long needle... yikes). Anyway, it took like 5 minutes. It worked amazingly well, too. No idea what it was though, sorry. That was quite a few years ago now and I was still in high school at the time. My wrists have been quite happy since then. Occasional dull pain after long days on the keyboard, but after a rest it goes away. Nothing at all like what I had in the past before the treatment.
Maybe reaction time? If you are thinking faster, then you should be able to notice changes faster and therefore react to those changes more quickly. So those who have very fast reaction times over a wide variety of situations might actually be thinking/processing faster than those with slower reaction times.
Warthog? Don't you mean the Puma?
Actually, people do seem to interested in seeing this stuff. That's why Ogrish exists. And no, I don't enjoy seeing it or even ever visit the site. But, for those crazy folk that like it, there's a place for them. That's all I'm saying.
I agree. I'm in Iowa and (at least in my district) the forms are VERY simple. They consist of a bunch of items that have partial arrows drawn next to them. Sort of like this:
= => Mr. Person
= => Mrs. Person
And all you do is fill in the arrow line next to the people you want to vote for to make a solid arrow. Easy and I can see where it would be very simple for the scanners to read it, too.
My girlfriend does this all the time. It takes the form of a story that is authored by different people (from the POV of your character). She's part of 2 or 3 of these things (and one of them is Firefly-based :-). She seems to enjoy it. I haven't tried it yet myself. Honestly, it doesn't appeal much. But it must work ok. She's been doing it for a few years now.
Shouldn't Maxis be the ones adding stuff to their games?
Wouldn't a flat panel for C-Band need to be rather huge? I'm not that familiar with how that stuff works, but it seems there had to be a reason why the BUDs where, well, big.
hint: a life isn't what you do at work
But isn't the goal to do something you love? Heck, you spend most of your day at work, right? Seems like a huge waste of existence to just grin and bear it unless you really do have no other choice. Maybe I'm too idealistic...
Is there any place to get the original and use something like ScummVM to play it on modern hardware (assuming there is, say, a MacOSX version.. :-)? I used to have it years ago, but I must have tossed a box of stuff as some point. I had The Dig, Full Throttle, and Day of the Tentacle, too. Damn that was good stuff. They are all sadly missing from my boxes of CDs and things. (Well, those and lots of other things on account of moving and not thinking when tossing stuff, I guess.)
There are different kinds of hard, though. Many of the older games seemed to eventually come down to pure reflexes and sense of timing. It didn't challenge your mind so much as your hand-eye coordination. So maybe this guy just prefers that sort of game over some of the more modern games with puzzles and mystery.