I used to work for a company that did sports simulations on a web site. Most of the engines were based on statistics. Back in March when the maddness hit I used the website to fill out some picks for a pool. I ran each possible game several times and then picked the one that consistently won. It came close and even managed to pick some upsets. If the other team would have won the last game I would have gotten 3rd place in the pool and a bit of cash. So while the current capability is not there if the statistical model is good enough you can get a good idea of what might happen.
I don't think this is the type of flower your neighbors would like you having in the front yard. When its sprouting it has somewhat of a phallic nature to it and then it smells like rotting fish. I've heard of other flowers that have horrible odors and people sending the plants to "friends" as practical jokes. Can anyone name a few of these nasties?
Sounds like you need a light weight content management system that at the very least has an audit trail associated with it. That isn't trivial but you don't need a rocket scientist to build it for you either. Just use one of the free relational dbs and in a week or so you could have a pretty functional system.
I may be wrong on this but couldn't you place Apache in front of the tivo with a proxy pass directive. I would think that you could even have it do basic authentication on that directory. Couple that with ssl and you should have a pretty decent secure system. The only problem that you might run into is if the Tivo pages generate absolute URLs with the server name in them. Worse case scenario is you write a php, perl or jsp front end that makes calls back to the Tivo web server.
Thats what I read too. The news I think is that not many of the people are going to be moving to VB.Net. The numbers are thrown around rather confusingly though. 57% of the 52% of the programmers who are VB developers plan to stick with VB. 33% of those will be moving to VB.Net So whats it all mean? Nothing really. A lot of people can't take the time to move their apps to VB.Net b/c of the syntax changes and given the choice they would rather try to learn C# than VB.Net most likely because its more hot and trendy. Personally I've used VB.Net and think the syntax changes just feel bolted on. Some of it gives you improved features and other changes neuter parts of the language in order to conform to the.Net platform. It kind of leaves you with the feeling that you are programming in Frankenstein.Net. So would I advocate moving to C# instead for my company? The answer is no and the reason is that most of the pc programmers in my company (not a software dev shop) barely know what an object is let alone how to make one. MS has done them a favor in VB.Net and made it compatible enough that they can continue to program the same way they used to in VB6.
A long time ago I read a book called "About Face." It was a book on user interface design by the guy who created Visual Basic (I think). Now don't discredit the book because its associated with a VB guy. From what I remember there weren't any code samples it was all theory. Basically it was talking about all the things your average GUI programmer was doing wrong back then. One idea that stuck in my head was that often people make the mistake of writing one screen to both view/edit and input data. The idea was that data input screens need to be designed for speed and efficiency but this layout is ugly and cumbersome when trying to view or edit a record. A manager of a data entry department at a local company in cincy said that everytime his people have to take their hands away from the keyboard and use the mouse he loses 3 seconds. So if you design a GUI screen that doesn't require the mouse, has lots of short cut keys and other conveniences like auto tabbing to the next field when the current field reaches the required amount of characters you should be able to achieve just as much throughput as a console app.
Sounds like they took away my 2 favorite features. It was always fun to walk around the maps holding the sniper rifle. All you had to do was aim a little higher than normal and you would usually come away with a one click head shot.
I don't think fps games have stagnated. I quite enjoyed the various game types in UT. The one where you have to attack in a certain time limit and then defend for that amount of time makes for a pretty fast paced game. Some might call BF1942 innovative because of all the vehicle types that you can pilot. I personally don't care for the game because its supposed to be realistic yet it takes too many shots to kill the enemy. Thats even if you can shoot him since he is pulling the jumping bean act. That is so damn annoying. For realistic games though I like Ghost Recon with voice chat to your team mates. I'll be buying Rainbow Six 3 when I get some spare change. The demo was pretty cool. Partially opening a door with your mouse wheel so a buddy can shoot them and still have some cover is a good idea.
Aren't most of these broadcasts encrypted now? Not only would it make it harder to eavesdrop but also illegal. Granted if you just sit around listening to this stuff you probably wont get caught but if you do what would happen? I don't imagine that whatever would happen would be all that pleasant or in accordance with your civil rights.
But bottom line is VMware creates virtual machines. It doesn't emulate an OS as it dosn't have to.
So if it is emulating hardware its not an emulator? Before you answer read this from the link you posted above.
MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Its purpose is to document the inner workings of those pioneering games of the video arcade era. Remember Pacman, Space Invaders, DigDug, etc, well, they are all documented and what's more fully playable in the MAME project.
MAME is software, written in 'C' and 'ASM', which emulates the hardware of the original machine the games were built with. This enables the original game programs (often called ROM images) to run quite happily on a PC. The other advantage is that these games will be preserved forever, thanks to this project.
So then VMWare is an emulator? BTW I do lump VMWare in with with MAME and the various console emulators because they emulate hardware. Some of those emulators require a rom image from the original hardware. Playstation emulators and some of the old machine emulators like the ones for commodores come to mind. The main difference between something like VMWare and MAME is that VMWare doesn't have to do a cpu code translation.
On the surface p2p sounds like a great idea for a PIM app that needs collaboration. Then I start thinking about the holes this leaves. Suppose I use a laptop at work and take it home every now and then. If I leave at 4 and somebody wants to schedule a meeting with me for 7:00 AM the next day after I have left, how does it then confirm the appointment? If I just turn my machine off at night then anybody that wants to poll my schedule will have to wait until I come in in the morning. The next hurdle to get over would be the bandwidth issues. P2P apps are necessarily chatty. On a small lan that might not be such a big deal but a decent sized company will surely squash this like netbios. Will anybody want to invest in a program that they know their company will not be able to use a few years down the road when they have tripled in size? Realistically speaking most small companies are not going to triple in size in the next few years but admitting so is like saying that their growth is permantly stunted.
I haven't seen it mentioned here yet but it could be issues with samba. I don't think samba supports the granularity of locks on a network file that NT does. In a file based DB being able to lock just portions of the file for updates is crucial. I've seen places where people did some pretty sick things with Access so I know its possible to have 50 people use an MDB at the same time. If all 50 are doing updates though Access will pretty quickly shit itself and corrupt the db. It really isn't meant for more than 5 users simultaneously updating. And as others have said seperating the presentation from the data into different MDBs is also a must. Also as another idea you could look into using terminal services and host the databases on that machine. Your bandwidth with probably be much better utilized. I would probably only go that route if a real RDBMS wasn't feasible.
What do you wish you had known before child #1 was born?
That you always have to use birth control
Seriously we had our first a bit early in the marriage. We had accepted the risk of getting pregnant and all so it wasn't like it was that big of a deal. I did find that my son liked to beat up keyboards. I gave him an old broken one that he used to drag around the house by the cord. He kept it until the keys started falling off. Then it became a choking hazard. One thing that I miss is not seeing many movies in the theater anymore. Those are now few and far between.
Guilty as charged. I was testing a theory I had about duplicate stories. Pretty funny that one of the replies to my stolen comment is about the same as the original poster had.
I'm not certain why this is news - we've long known in the absence of gravity, hydrogen bonds (the cause of surface tension) can do interesting things, like causing goodly amounts of water to form a sphere. While it's interesting to see high school kids send such experiments into space (even those are absurdly expensive, and shouldn't be done more than once every five years or so IMO), I'm astonished that this is the sort of thing trained astronauts are doing out there on their expensive vacations. Gregory Benford, the SF writer and an advisor to NASA, wrote a very interesting column a while ago deploring the quality of NASA's "experiments" and the vast amount of funding for the ISS and the shuttle program (a reusable vehicle that costs $0.5B permission?!) that could be better spent on more promising projects.
I've got two stories where buying the extended warranty helped. One was an open box receiver from Circuit City. It died and I got it fixed. They sent me a renewel notice but its a little dated so I didn't get it. So far so good. A friend of mine bought a laptop from CompUSA and it died several times before the extended warranty gave out. I think he ended up convincing them to give him a completely new model when it died one last time before the extended warranty was up. So a couple stories where the product was perhaps a little questionable and it helped. On the whole I think I've seen more times when the extended warranty wouldn't have helped. For the most part though it's a matter of statistics. In general if a product such as a car is going to have a problem it will likely have it sometime during the first (manufacturers) warranty period. Past that period and the odds are in your favor to have a product that will have a normal lifecycle. In other words it will break when the extended warranty would have cut out.
I would argue that Keaton could easily play the psycho batman. Go rent Pacific Heights. Its from 1990 and he plays a tenant who rents part of a house in San Francisco. He gets very crazy in that movie and I'm not talking about Beetleguice crazy.
So let me get this straight. You were feeling an earthquake. While it was still going on you went to a web site to see if you were really feeling an earthquake instead of seeking some kind of shelter? Thats way more geek than me.
I finally got through and was able to download the source code. A brief look at it shows that the main java class source is 841KB. The map editor is another 222KB file. There are a few other classes that are big enough that could probably use some refactoring into either more general classes or have the functionality split out better. Then on the other end of the spectrum I see several classes with names like XXXData.java. They just only contain a few attributes that would be better served in a data file. Mind you this is only my first five minutes look at the code. It doesn't look very maintainable. Most of the functionality seems to be globbed in a few select classes. Use of packages, inheritance and interfaces would be one of the first things I would do if I was taking on the code. Packages for seperation. Inheritance/interfaces for code reuse.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work for a company that did sports simulations on a web site. Most of the engines were based on statistics. Back in March when the maddness hit I used the website to fill out some picks for a pool. I ran each possible game several times and then picked the one that consistently won. It came close and even managed to pick some upsets. If the other team would have won the last game I would have gotten 3rd place in the pool and a bit of cash. So while the current capability is not there if the statistical model is good enough you can get a good idea of what might happen.
I don't think this is the type of flower your neighbors would like you having in the front yard. When its sprouting it has somewhat of a phallic nature to it and then it smells like rotting fish. I've heard of other flowers that have horrible odors and people sending the plants to "friends" as practical jokes. Can anyone name a few of these nasties?
Sounds like you need a light weight content management system that at the very least has an audit trail associated with it. That isn't trivial but you don't need a rocket scientist to build it for you either. Just use one of the free relational dbs and in a week or so you could have a pretty functional system.
I may be wrong on this but couldn't you place Apache in front of the tivo with a proxy pass directive. I would think that you could even have it do basic authentication on that directory. Couple that with ssl and you should have a pretty decent secure system. The only problem that you might run into is if the Tivo pages generate absolute URLs with the server name in them. Worse case scenario is you write a php, perl or jsp front end that makes calls back to the Tivo web server.
Beat it with 100% items and power ups and you will get a special ending.
Thats what I read too. The news I think is that not many of the people are going to be moving to VB.Net. The numbers are thrown around rather confusingly though. 57% of the 52% of the programmers who are VB developers plan to stick with VB. 33% of those will be moving to VB.Net So whats it all mean? Nothing really. A lot of people can't take the time to move their apps to VB.Net b/c of the syntax changes and given the choice they would rather try to learn C# than VB.Net most likely because its more hot and trendy. .Net platform. It kind of leaves you with the feeling that you are programming in Frankenstein.Net. So would I advocate moving to C# instead for my company? The answer is no and the reason is that most of the pc programmers in my company (not a software dev shop) barely know what an object is let alone how to make one. MS has done them a favor in VB.Net and made it compatible enough that they can continue to program the same way they used to in VB6.
Personally I've used VB.Net and think the syntax changes just feel bolted on. Some of it gives you improved features and other changes neuter parts of the language in order to conform to the
A long time ago I read a book called "About Face." It was a book on user interface design by the guy who created Visual Basic (I think). Now don't discredit the book because its associated with a VB guy. From what I remember there weren't any code samples it was all theory. Basically it was talking about all the things your average GUI programmer was doing wrong back then. One idea that stuck in my head was that often people make the mistake of writing one screen to both view/edit and input data. The idea was that data input screens need to be designed for speed and efficiency but this layout is ugly and cumbersome when trying to view or edit a record. A manager of a data entry department at a local company in cincy said that everytime his people have to take their hands away from the keyboard and use the mouse he loses 3 seconds. So if you design a GUI screen that doesn't require the mouse, has lots of short cut keys and other conveniences like auto tabbing to the next field when the current field reaches the required amount of characters you should be able to achieve just as much throughput as a console app.
Sounds like they took away my 2 favorite features. It was always fun to walk around the maps holding the sniper rifle. All you had to do was aim a little higher than normal and you would usually come away with a one click head shot.
I don't think fps games have stagnated. I quite enjoyed the various game types in UT. The one where you have to attack in a certain time limit and then defend for that amount of time makes for a pretty fast paced game. Some might call BF1942 innovative because of all the vehicle types that you can pilot. I personally don't care for the game because its supposed to be realistic yet it takes too many shots to kill the enemy. Thats even if you can shoot him since he is pulling the jumping bean act. That is so damn annoying. For realistic games though I like Ghost Recon with voice chat to your team mates. I'll be buying Rainbow Six 3 when I get some spare change. The demo was pretty cool. Partially opening a door with your mouse wheel so a buddy can shoot them and still have some cover is a good idea.
Aren't most of these broadcasts encrypted now? Not only would it make it harder to eavesdrop but also illegal. Granted if you just sit around listening to this stuff you probably wont get caught but if you do what would happen? I don't imagine that whatever would happen would be all that pleasant or in accordance with your civil rights.
But bottom line is VMware creates virtual machines. It doesn't emulate an OS as it dosn't have to.
So if it is emulating hardware its not an emulator? Before you answer read this from the link you posted above.
MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Its purpose is to document the inner workings of those pioneering games of the video arcade era. Remember Pacman, Space Invaders, DigDug, etc, well, they are all documented and what's more fully playable in the MAME project.
MAME is software, written in 'C' and 'ASM', which emulates the hardware of the original machine the games were built with. This enables the original game programs (often called ROM images) to run quite happily on a PC. The other advantage is that these games will be preserved forever, thanks to this project.
So then VMWare is an emulator? BTW I do lump VMWare in with with MAME and the various console emulators because they emulate hardware. Some of those emulators require a rom image from the original hardware. Playstation emulators and some of the old machine emulators like the ones for commodores come to mind. The main difference between something like VMWare and MAME is that VMWare doesn't have to do a cpu code translation.
I would think that vmware is as much an emulator as MAME and snes9x are arcade and console emulators.
On the surface p2p sounds like a great idea for a PIM app that needs collaboration. Then I start thinking about the holes this leaves. Suppose I use a laptop at work and take it home every now and then. If I leave at 4 and somebody wants to schedule a meeting with me for 7:00 AM the next day after I have left, how does it then confirm the appointment? If I just turn my machine off at night then anybody that wants to poll my schedule will have to wait until I come in in the morning. The next hurdle to get over would be the bandwidth issues. P2P apps are necessarily chatty. On a small lan that might not be such a big deal but a decent sized company will surely squash this like netbios. Will anybody want to invest in a program that they know their company will not be able to use a few years down the road when they have tripled in size? Realistically speaking most small companies are not going to triple in size in the next few years but admitting so is like saying that their growth is permantly stunted.
I haven't seen it mentioned here yet but it could be issues with samba. I don't think samba supports the granularity of locks on a network file that NT does. In a file based DB being able to lock just portions of the file for updates is crucial. I've seen places where people did some pretty sick things with Access so I know its possible to have 50 people use an MDB at the same time. If all 50 are doing updates though Access will pretty quickly shit itself and corrupt the db. It really isn't meant for more than 5 users simultaneously updating. And as others have said seperating the presentation from the data into different MDBs is also a must.
Also as another idea you could look into using terminal services and host the databases on that machine. Your bandwidth with probably be much better utilized. I would probably only go that route if a real RDBMS wasn't feasible.
That you always have to use birth control
Seriously we had our first a bit early in the marriage. We had accepted the risk of getting pregnant and all so it wasn't like it was that big of a deal. I did find that my son liked to beat up keyboards. I gave him an old broken one that he used to drag around the house by the cord. He kept it until the keys started falling off. Then it became a choking hazard. One thing that I miss is not seeing many movies in the theater anymore. Those are now few and far between.
This is slashdot. His breasts are probably big enough its just the gut they flop on that turns people off.
Guilty as charged. I was testing a theory I had about duplicate stories. Pretty funny that one of the replies to my stolen comment is about the same as the original poster had.
I'm not certain why this is news - we've long known in the absence of gravity, hydrogen bonds (the cause of surface tension) can do interesting things, like causing goodly amounts of water to form a sphere. While it's interesting to see high school kids send such experiments into space (even those are absurdly expensive, and shouldn't be done more than once every five years or so IMO), I'm astonished that this is the sort of thing trained astronauts are doing out there on their expensive vacations. Gregory Benford, the SF writer and an advisor to NASA, wrote a very interesting column a while ago deploring the quality of NASA's "experiments" and the vast amount of funding for the ISS and the shuttle program (a reusable vehicle that costs $0.5B permission?!) that could be better spent on more promising projects.
I guess its nice to know that along with us Americans the Brits also have the best legislature money can buy.
I've got two stories where buying the extended warranty helped. One was an open box receiver from Circuit City. It died and I got it fixed. They sent me a renewel notice but its a little dated so I didn't get it. So far so good. A friend of mine bought a laptop from CompUSA and it died several times before the extended warranty gave out. I think he ended up convincing them to give him a completely new model when it died one last time before the extended warranty was up. So a couple stories where the product was perhaps a little questionable and it helped. On the whole I think I've seen more times when the extended warranty wouldn't have helped.
For the most part though it's a matter of statistics. In general if a product such as a car is going to have a problem it will likely have it sometime during the first (manufacturers) warranty period. Past that period and the odds are in your favor to have a product that will have a normal lifecycle. In other words it will break when the extended warranty would have cut out.
I would argue that Keaton could easily play the psycho batman. Go rent Pacific Heights. Its from 1990 and he plays a tenant who rents part of a house in San Francisco. He gets very crazy in that movie and I'm not talking about Beetleguice crazy.
I think I'll send him a copy of windows for his birthday.
So let me get this straight. You were feeling an earthquake. While it was still going on you went to a web site to see if you were really feeling an earthquake instead of seeking some kind of shelter? Thats way more geek than me.
I finally got through and was able to download the source code. A brief look at it shows that the main java class source is 841KB. The map editor is another 222KB file. There are a few other classes that are big enough that could probably use some refactoring into either more general classes or have the functionality split out better. Then on the other end of the spectrum I see several classes with names like XXXData.java. They just only contain a few attributes that would be better served in a data file. Mind you this is only my first five minutes look at the code. It doesn't look very maintainable. Most of the functionality seems to be globbed in a few select classes. Use of packages, inheritance and interfaces would be one of the first things I would do if I was taking on the code. Packages for seperation. Inheritance/interfaces for code reuse.