Most of them get answered, but not all. Some questions have no final answer. Or, as Kosh would say, "The answer points to itself";)
I envy you. I would give anything to be able to go back and watch B5 again for the first time. Season 1 is a little slow and awkward.. it's primary strength is providing good backstory. Season 2 is when it really starts to kick into high gear.. and season 3 is... simply unparalleled in television history. The depth and scope and consistency is simply staggering. Season 4 is incredible too, although they had to compress things a bit because they thought season 5 wouldn't happen. As a result, season 5 feels more like an epilogue than the final chapter, but it's still very well done, and I guarantee the series finale will make you cry.
You will never really enjoy Star Trek the same way again, it's a stale, puny joke by comparison.
"By the way, Reloaded was a dreadful movie, just because somebody doesn't like it doesn't mean their dumb or unsophisticated."
Well, no offense there buddy, but just because YOU didn't like the movie, doesn't mean it's a dreadful movie either.
I was dissapointed with Reloaded the first time through, but on subsequent viewings have found a lot more layers, subtle hints, and deeper meaning to the dialogue. Obviously the end product is not for everyone's tastes, but IMHO, these movies are at the very least, meticulously and thoughtfully crafted.
(And no, haven't seen Revolutions yet. I have IMAX tickets in 3 hours:) The reviews do look pretty negative, though)
I want to formally complain about the poor choice of this post's title.
Any diet that has sex as a primary ingredient should definitely NOT be christened the "Programmer's Diet Plan". It's just too misleading for most of us.;)
I'm no expert, but magnetic north is always shifting around, and in fact there is evidence that in the past, it has completely flipped around (magnetic north becomes south and vice versa)
The THC content in regular hemp is so low that smoking it doesn't do a damn thing. There is no reason to outlaw industrial hemp in ADDITION to outlawing marijuana.
If this was during prohibition, would you support outlawing hops and barley because they can be used to make alcohol? Would you demand they be genetically engineered to remove that capability before being made legal?
You can make plastics out of hemp. As well as combustible oil, paper, rope, exceptionally strong fabrics, and thousands of other products (Popular Mechanics estimated 30,000 products, back in 1938). And it can be grown in people's backyards (or farms of course), instead of waging war overseas.
Outlawing hemp is about as ridiculous as outlawing barley during prohibition. But then, barley never threatened the profits of the oil, timber, and petrochem giants.
Geez.. my point was simply that SOME tools are better than others at SOME things.
I'm not trying to "prove" that Java is superior to PHP. But in my experience, Java handles high load network IO and multithreading better. And I'm sure there's things that PHP is better suited to than Java.
I only included an example for context, it was never intended as "proof" of anything.
This article is just way too simplistic. Saying "PHP scales" doesn't mean anything at all.
Sure, I believe it CAN scale well, if implemented efficiently, for certain purposes, like serving web pages. Go to town.
However, when it comes to things like high load networking, Java (with NIO) has it beat handily.
I recently worked on a system that had PHP scripts polling thousands of Internet servers. This is NOT something you want to use PHP for. It was choking to death on their production dual 2.4 Xeon. I rewrote the polling engine in Java, and now it runs on a PII400 test box with 30% load, and I haven't even gotten to any memory optimizations. (ie object pooling)
The moral of this story boys and girls, as always, is that no one tool is going to fit every need.
Huh.. same thing's been happening here all day (Calgary, AB).. and it's more than just Slashdot. I thought it just just me, but perhaps it's a big DDOS or new virus spreading or something?
OK, going to try an analogy. Don't try this at home kids.
Imagine an atomic nucleus as a bunch of magnets, all repulsing each other (protons). But, they have elastic bands holding them together (nuclear force).
The more magnets you add, the more force is exterted on the elastic bands, which makes them stretch and eventually break.
So, you can keep making bigger and bigger atoms by forcing more protons together, but it gets to the point where they tear themselves apart pretty much instantly from the repulsive force.
Apologies to any real physicists, who have probably just fallen out of their chairs laughing.:)
Hey, don't get me wrong. I DO think Postal is pretty stupid. I liked Doom a helluva lot better than Postal 1, and didn't play Postal 2 for more than about 5 minutes.
But saying you pity people who found any entertainment value in it.. I think that's a tad condescending for, as you say, a fairly subtle difference.
By the way.. you didn't HAVE to kill innocents in Postal 1 you know... you only had to kill combatants who were trying to kill you (for what reason I have no clue), to pass the level. There was simply no penalty for offing pedestrians. Or marching bands. Or highly flammable ostriches:D
Reminds me of "Bowling for Columbine" when that guy is protesting Marilyn Manson's concert by essentially saying, "You can't come here and promote violence! Not without a FIGHT you can't!"
Doom had a "just cause" for the violence? It's just a video game, man. Neither the violence nor the "cause" is real... the story & setting is just a flimsy excuse to put you in a shooting gallery, to have fun SHOOTING things, plain and simple.
"At least Doom was fighting against an invasion from Hell or something."
Exactly... you don't even really recall or care much what the actual story was.
Same story with Postal, IMHO, except Postal had a sick & twisted sense of humour... tell me setting a herd of virtual ostriches on fire doesn't warm your heart.:)
In GTA, you can stab, beat, rob, and kill innocents as a matter of course... and it is like the bestselling game of all time. Sure there are missions, but it is the freeform wanton violence and mayhem that make it so popular. The only real difference is GTA is more cartoonish, not as dark as Postal.
One could make an argument that "wrong" encompasses the concept of the event happening at a bad time.
To follow your example, if the situation is such that "you don't mind getting butter on your suit", then it's not really *WRONG* in the disastrous Murphy-esque sense, it's simply an inconvenience.
Perhaps the problem is that "wrong" is too general, and would benefit from a qualifier. How about, "If something can go disastrously wrong, if will."
"If you don't, you're not going to notice a few percent difference."
The problem is that this "few percent" keeps getting bigger and bigger as the sizes increase. Consider:
KB: 1000 vs 1024 = 2.3% difference (yawn) MB: 1,000,000 vs 1,048,576 = 4.6% difference (eh.. I can deal) GB: 1,000,000,000 vs 1,073,741,824 = 6.7% difference (hmmm...) TB: 1,000,000,000,000 vs 1,099,511,627,776 = 9.1% difference (WHOAH! That's like 95 GB missing!)
Personally I think it's about time they addressed this one way or the other. You shouldn't buy a drive advertised as 200 GB and then have your computer tell you it's only 186 GB. People WILL notice this, and it's getting worse and worse, as illustrated above.
"contiki uses a lot of the 64's 58k or so of accessible memory."
The C64 actually had 80KB of memory total (64KB RAM and 16KB ROM), but could only address 64KB at one time.
Normally, it would address 48KB of user RAM and 16KB of ROM (8KB BASIC + 8KB BIOS). However, you could swap out the ROM bank, allowing you to address the remaining 16KB of RAM, making it a true 64KB RAM machine... of course when you did that you lost the BASIC interpreter (not a big deal) and the BIOS routines (which WAS a big deal). Big games and apps like GEOS used this trick to get at the whole 64KB, supplying their own IO routines.
It was always fun lobotomizing a C64 K-Mart display model by switching banks with the right POKE command.:)
C64's didn't use standard ASCII, they used "PETSCII" which had an ecleptic collection including everything from cursor control codes, colour change codes, function key codes, and a large assortment of graphic symbols.
Weird but kinda neat... how many computers do you know where you can write an upward-slanting diagonal, multi-coloured string with a single PRINT statement?:)
This reminds me of the only single-line animation program I've ever seen... It was basically (no pun intended):
Where {cX} are cursor codes for up, down, left, and right.
Ahh.. those were the days. Reaching for the power switch was the longest part of bootup time, and nary a bit was wasted. BASIC interpreter in 8KB, DOS in 8KB, and a complete graphical OS (GEOS) in 64KB. And a dozen games on a 170K floppy:)
I think it's time to dig up an emulator and play some Impossible Mission, Space Taxi, and Jumpman:)
Well, exactly! That was the point. I was illustrating how easily one can blindly disregard and/or mock real evidence once one declares something as "extraordinary", and how silly it looks when it's about something that is widely accepted. It wasn't meant as personal ridicule, sorry if you took offense.
"There *is* evidence for dinosaurs"
Yes. And there *is* evidence for solid, unidentified flying objects in our atmosphere, under intelligent control, capable of maneuvers far exceeding any known propulsion technology. They DO exist. The real questions are, what are they, and what should we do about them?
My question for you would be, why are fossils "acceptable" evidence, but radar records correlated with visual sightings are not?
'Some posters have ridiculed "skeptics" saying that they wouldn't believe it unless you brought an alien (or ghost, whatever) to them. So? This is exactly the same level of evidence I have for the more rational explanations.'
OK.. I'm going to declare that dinosaurs are an extraordinary claim. Multi-ton monsters ruling the earth, and then they expect us to believe they just "went away"? Ha! Utterly preposterous. I don't believe in them, because I haven't seen "extraordinary" proof for them yet.
Fossils? Please. Carbon dating is unreliable, these are all either hoaxes or normal but misinterpreted geological phenomena. Scientific journals? Obviously these publications are already biased towards believing this stuff, and they will slant all data to favour their wild claims, so we can't rely on anything they say.
Nope. I don't buy it. I need to see a real dinosaur. They will need to invent a time machine to allow me to go back and view them myself, or they will need to clone one from recovered DNA, and parade it through Central Park.
And if they do THAT, I will come up with other reasons why it's a complete fake, and still refuse to believe it.
This is from memory, please forgive any inaccuracies.
[Scene: A debating forum setup in the meadow. Opus vs. Milo]
Milo: Do you support lowering the speed limit from 55 to 50, thus saving the lives of 5000 lives every year?
Opus: Why yes! I fully support measures that increase the safe-
Milo: Then, you'd also support lowering it to 45, saving another 10,000 lives?
Opus: Er... well, yes. I suppose if it prevents so many deaths-
Milo: So then, you'd support lowering it to 35, saving an additional 30,000 lives per year?
Opus: Um.. I ah.. 35 is getting kind of slow, isn't it?
Milo: My competitor here would send 30,000 innocent men, women and children to a burning, agonizing death just so he can zip along to his manicurist at 45 MPH.
Opus: Hey! I don't even HAVE a manicurist.
Milo: He probably doesn't. Most mass murderers don't have manicurists. Hitler didn't.
Oh, absolutely. This mindset can be summarized by the Classic Skeptic Party Line: "Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Proof"... which is simply bad science. You don't "raise the bar" for what level of evidence is acceptable just because you would be uncomfortable with the conclusion the evidence points to, but that's exactly what UFO debunkers do. In their mind, they have already convinced themselves that such ideas are unbelievable, so they dismiss ALL evidence as phony, with no true scientific investigation.
The simple, undeniable facts are:
There are radar records of UFOs which correlate with visual sightings, which make evident beyond any reasonable doubt 3 definite characteristics:
1) The objects are solid. 2) The objects are under intelligent control. 3) The objects are capable of maneuvers far exceeding any known propulsion technology.
Any rational investigation must start with these and go from there, without dismissing them.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of them get answered, but not all. Some questions have no final answer. Or, as Kosh would say, "The answer points to itself" ;)
I envy you. I would give anything to be able to go back and watch B5 again for the first time. Season 1 is a little slow and awkward.. it's primary strength is providing good backstory. Season 2 is when it really starts to kick into high gear.. and season 3 is... simply unparalleled in television history. The depth and scope and consistency is simply staggering. Season 4 is incredible too, although they had to compress things a bit because they thought season 5 wouldn't happen. As a result, season 5 feels more like an epilogue than the final chapter, but it's still very well done, and I guarantee the series finale will make you cry.
You will never really enjoy Star Trek the same way again, it's a stale, puny joke by comparison.
"By the way, Reloaded was a dreadful movie, just because somebody doesn't like it doesn't mean their dumb or unsophisticated."
:) The reviews do look pretty negative, though)
Well, no offense there buddy, but just because YOU didn't like the movie, doesn't mean it's a dreadful movie either.
I was dissapointed with Reloaded the first time through, but on subsequent viewings have found a lot more layers, subtle hints, and deeper meaning to the dialogue. Obviously the end product is not for everyone's tastes, but IMHO, these movies are at the very least, meticulously and thoughtfully crafted.
(And no, haven't seen Revolutions yet. I have IMAX tickets in 3 hours
I want to formally complain about the poor choice of this post's title.
;)
Any diet that has sex as a primary ingredient should definitely NOT be christened the "Programmer's Diet Plan". It's just too misleading for most of us.
Here's a great link from the Geographic Survey of Canada: http://www.geolab.nrcan.gc.ca/geomag/northpole_e.s html
Check out the link on the side menu: "Magnetic Reversals" too.
I'm no expert, but magnetic north is always shifting around, and in fact there is evidence that in the past, it has completely flipped around (magnetic north becomes south and vice versa)
Uh oh. Make no threatening motions, and move veeeery slowly towards the wall socket. If it has a web cam attached, you're screwed.
The THC content in regular hemp is so low that smoking it doesn't do a damn thing. There is no reason to outlaw industrial hemp in ADDITION to outlawing marijuana.
If this was during prohibition, would you support outlawing hops and barley because they can be used to make alcohol? Would you demand they be genetically engineered to remove that capability before being made legal?
You can make plastics out of hemp. As well as combustible oil, paper, rope, exceptionally strong fabrics, and thousands of other products (Popular Mechanics estimated 30,000 products, back in 1938). And it can be grown in people's backyards (or farms of course), instead of waging war overseas.
Outlawing hemp is about as ridiculous as outlawing barley during prohibition. But then, barley never threatened the profits of the oil, timber, and petrochem giants.
Geez.. my point was simply that SOME tools are better than others at SOME things.
I'm not trying to "prove" that Java is superior to PHP. But in my experience, Java handles high load network IO and multithreading better. And I'm sure there's things that PHP is better suited to than Java.
I only included an example for context, it was never intended as "proof" of anything.
This article is just way too simplistic. Saying "PHP scales" doesn't mean anything at all.
Sure, I believe it CAN scale well, if implemented efficiently, for certain purposes, like serving web pages. Go to town.
However, when it comes to things like high load networking, Java (with NIO) has it beat handily.
I recently worked on a system that had PHP scripts polling thousands of Internet servers. This is NOT something you want to use PHP for. It was choking to death on their production dual 2.4 Xeon. I rewrote the polling engine in Java, and now it runs on a PII400 test box with 30% load, and I haven't even gotten to any memory optimizations. (ie object pooling)
The moral of this story boys and girls, as always, is that no one tool is going to fit every need.
How many other systems could you write an animation program on a single 80 character code line?
Huh.. same thing's been happening here all day (Calgary, AB).. and it's more than just Slashdot. I thought it just just me, but perhaps it's a big DDOS or new virus spreading or something?
I always vastly preferred the bot AI in UT, but I suppose that doesn't matter for multiplayer.
OK, going to try an analogy. Don't try this at home kids.
:)
Imagine an atomic nucleus as a bunch of magnets, all repulsing each other (protons). But, they have elastic bands holding them together (nuclear force).
The more magnets you add, the more force is exterted on the elastic bands, which makes them stretch and eventually break.
So, you can keep making bigger and bigger atoms by forcing more protons together, but it gets to the point where they tear themselves apart pretty much instantly from the repulsive force.
Apologies to any real physicists, who have probably just fallen out of their chairs laughing.
Hey, don't get me wrong. I DO think Postal is pretty stupid. I liked Doom a helluva lot better than Postal 1, and didn't play Postal 2 for more than about 5 minutes.
:D
But saying you pity people who found any entertainment value in it.. I think that's a tad condescending for, as you say, a fairly subtle difference.
By the way.. you didn't HAVE to kill innocents in Postal 1 you know... you only had to kill combatants who were trying to kill you (for what reason I have no clue), to pass the level. There was simply no penalty for offing pedestrians. Or marching bands. Or highly flammable ostriches
Reminds me of "Bowling for Columbine" when that guy is protesting Marilyn Manson's concert by essentially saying, "You can't come here and promote violence! Not without a FIGHT you can't!"
Doom had a "just cause" for the violence? It's just a video game, man. Neither the violence nor the "cause" is real... the story & setting is just a flimsy excuse to put you in a shooting gallery, to have fun SHOOTING things, plain and simple.
:)
"At least Doom was fighting against an invasion from Hell or something."
Exactly... you don't even really recall or care much what the actual story was.
Same story with Postal, IMHO, except Postal had a sick & twisted sense of humour... tell me setting a herd of virtual ostriches on fire doesn't warm your heart.
In GTA, you can stab, beat, rob, and kill innocents as a matter of course... and it is like the bestselling game of all time. Sure there are missions, but it is the freeform wanton violence and mayhem that make it so popular. The only real difference is GTA is more cartoonish, not as dark as Postal.
One could make an argument that "wrong" encompasses the concept of the event happening at a bad time.
To follow your example, if the situation is such that "you don't mind getting butter on your suit", then it's not really *WRONG* in the disastrous Murphy-esque sense, it's simply an inconvenience.
Perhaps the problem is that "wrong" is too general, and would benefit from a qualifier. How about, "If something can go disastrously wrong, if will."
What can I say.. I'm a fan of succinctness.
"If you don't, you're not going to notice a few percent difference."
The problem is that this "few percent" keeps getting bigger and bigger as the sizes increase. Consider:
KB: 1000 vs 1024 = 2.3% difference (yawn)
MB: 1,000,000 vs 1,048,576 = 4.6% difference (eh.. I can deal)
GB: 1,000,000,000 vs 1,073,741,824 = 6.7% difference (hmmm...)
TB: 1,000,000,000,000 vs 1,099,511,627,776 = 9.1% difference (WHOAH! That's like 95 GB missing!)
Personally I think it's about time they addressed this one way or the other. You shouldn't buy a drive advertised as 200 GB and then have your computer tell you it's only 186 GB. People WILL notice this, and it's getting worse and worse, as illustrated above.
"contiki uses a lot of the 64's 58k or so of accessible memory."
:)
The C64 actually had 80KB of memory total (64KB RAM and 16KB ROM), but could only address 64KB at one time.
Normally, it would address 48KB of user RAM and 16KB of ROM (8KB BASIC + 8KB BIOS). However, you could swap out the ROM bank, allowing you to address the remaining 16KB of RAM, making it a true 64KB RAM machine... of course when you did that you lost the BASIC interpreter (not a big deal) and the BIOS routines (which WAS a big deal). Big games and apps like GEOS used this trick to get at the whole 64KB, supplying their own IO routines.
It was always fun lobotomizing a C64 K-Mart display model by switching banks with the right POKE command.
Weird but kinda neat... how many computers do you know where you can write an upward-slanting diagonal, multi-coloured string with a single PRINT statement?
This reminds me of the only single-line animation program I've ever seen... It was basically (no pun intended):Where {cX} are cursor codes for up, down, left, and right.
Ahh.. those were the days. Reaching for the power switch was the longest part of bootup time, and nary a bit was wasted. BASIC interpreter in 8KB, DOS in 8KB, and a complete graphical OS (GEOS) in 64KB. And a dozen games on a 170K floppy
I think it's time to dig up an emulator and play some Impossible Mission, Space Taxi, and Jumpman
"Now look who's raising the bar."
Well, exactly! That was the point. I was illustrating how easily one can blindly disregard and/or mock real evidence once one declares something as "extraordinary", and how silly it looks when it's about something that is widely accepted. It wasn't meant as personal ridicule, sorry if you took offense.
"There *is* evidence for dinosaurs"
Yes. And there *is* evidence for solid, unidentified flying objects in our atmosphere, under intelligent control, capable of maneuvers far exceeding any known propulsion technology. They DO exist. The real questions are, what are they, and what should we do about them?
My question for you would be, why are fossils "acceptable" evidence, but radar records correlated with visual sightings are not?
'Some posters have ridiculed "skeptics" saying that they wouldn't believe it unless you brought an alien (or ghost, whatever) to them. So? This is exactly the same level of evidence I have for the more rational explanations.'
OK.. I'm going to declare that dinosaurs are an extraordinary claim. Multi-ton monsters ruling the earth, and then they expect us to believe they just "went away"? Ha! Utterly preposterous. I don't believe in them, because I haven't seen "extraordinary" proof for them yet.
Fossils? Please. Carbon dating is unreliable, these are all either hoaxes or normal but misinterpreted geological phenomena. Scientific journals? Obviously these publications are already biased towards believing this stuff, and they will slant all data to favour their wild claims, so we can't rely on anything they say.
Nope. I don't buy it. I need to see a real dinosaur. They will need to invent a time machine to allow me to go back and view them myself, or they will need to clone one from recovered DNA, and parade it through Central Park.
And if they do THAT, I will come up with other reasons why it's a complete fake, and still refuse to believe it.
This is from memory, please forgive any inaccuracies.
[Scene: A debating forum setup in the meadow. Opus vs. Milo]
Milo: Do you support lowering the speed limit from 55 to 50, thus saving the lives of 5000 lives every year?
Opus: Why yes! I fully support measures that increase the safe-
Milo: Then, you'd also support lowering it to 45, saving another 10,000 lives?
Opus: Er... well, yes. I suppose if it prevents so many deaths-
Milo: So then, you'd support lowering it to 35, saving an additional 30,000 lives per year?
Opus: Um.. I ah.. 35 is getting kind of slow, isn't it?
Milo: My competitor here would send 30,000 innocent men, women and children to a burning, agonizing death just so he can zip along to his manicurist at 45 MPH.
Opus: Hey! I don't even HAVE a manicurist.
Milo: He probably doesn't. Most mass murderers don't have manicurists. Hitler didn't.
Opus: {Hiding under his podium}
Oh, absolutely. This mindset can be summarized by the Classic Skeptic Party Line: "Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Proof"... which is simply bad science. You don't "raise the bar" for what level of evidence is acceptable just because you would be uncomfortable with the conclusion the evidence points to, but that's exactly what UFO debunkers do. In their mind, they have already convinced themselves that such ideas are unbelievable, so they dismiss ALL evidence as phony, with no true scientific investigation.
The simple, undeniable facts are:
There are radar records of UFOs which correlate with visual sightings, which make evident beyond any reasonable doubt 3 definite characteristics:
1) The objects are solid.
2) The objects are under intelligent control.
3) The objects are capable of maneuvers far exceeding any known propulsion technology.
Any rational investigation must start with these and go from there, without dismissing them.