Note the "easily". Science nowadays is extremely complicated and requires years of study to even get to the level. While it's always possible to have another genius coming out of nowhere, it's a lot less likely than it used to be. You won't have a single person make a breakthrough in multiple, largely unrelated domains, like back in the Renaissance, either.
Very fast charge (on the order of 1-2 mins for current battery sizes) would make "gas stations" viable for electric cars. It'd immediately remove the current big stumbling block, which is that once your capacity is depleted you need to wait for a few hours to recharge. Bigger capacity would be nice, but it'd just delay the issue. Fast recharge would let current gas stations convert to electric, allowing us to reuse existing infrastructure and easing the transition between gas and electric.
That's nonsensical. What's the equivalent of a patch for water pipes? Infrastructure is designed to be put in once, and last for a very long time. Software is continuously being modified, updated, upgraded, fixed. It's not the same thing at all.
A significant proportion of the people still using XP do so because their hardware has no modern drivers. The likelihood of Linux drivers, for XP-era drivers, is close to nil. For the people who use XP just because they can't be arsed upgrading (and for corporations/govt organizations who haven't planned an upgrade, too), screw them, they deserve everything they get.
What amuses me however is that while people here criticize Microsoft for not providing support for XP, they don't criticize the hardware manufacturers which haven't bothered making more recent drivers for their hardware. It's a strange double standard, especially since hardware has, if anything, more of a reason to have long term support; it's more expensive, rarer and possibly without a more modern replacement.
You think every small or medium corporation using a 2.4.0 kernel release has the means to hire enough developers to keep a whole Linux distro up to date? Think about it for a second. That's the problem with a lot of the open source advocates: most people don't have the means to maintain stuff by themselves.
One could argue that religion is lack of applied thought in a particular area. I don't know how they do it, but I've seen quite a few people manage to section off their thinking in what could be best described as little boxes. Their rational, educated thinking would permeate their work, but their private lives and religious faith would be completely separated.
That's a bit pedantic. When saying "NP-hard problem", you usually mean it as an upper bound as opposed to a lower bound. Nobody would describe an EXPSPACE problem as "NP-hard" because that's completely besides the point.
Flip side, those colonies were a helluva lot more habitable than Mars. People already lived there well before the colonists arrived, but I don't see too many indigenous species when CO2 freezes on the surface of the planet. The people you send there are basically stranded in the middle of the ocean, not sent to a lush and fertile continent.
This isn't to say the conditions weren't hard back then, but there's a wide gap between the two.
Part of the reason for a corporation is that you dissociate financial liability between the corporation itself and its employees. It's what makes incorporating attractive to smaller companies, since if the company sinks into heavy debt it doesn't take you down with it.
Actually, no, you're diluting the substance by a factor of 100, then diluting the result by another factor of 100, and so on, 100 times. That's 100^100, or 1e200.
And before being so aggressive, I'd suggest reading up on basic statistics. It could very well be that the percentage of incidents to number of cars is higher for the Tesla, but a single event is never statistically significant.
Note that this isn't to say there isn't a problem. It just means that a single event is not enough to draw a conclusion either way.
The current wild west that is video games, where people use the cover of anonymity to act like complete assholes, tends to put things out of character, not in. There's nothing quite as in character as having a supposedly top tier soldier from some elite secret force start screeching obscenities with the voice of a 12 year old while teabagging the corpse of the ally he just shot for no reason, right?
Some would dispute that the App Store and Google Play are part of the "gaming world". While there are excellent games on both stores, most are complete and utter drivel (many people compare the App Store to the far west), at a much much lower percentage than on Steam or the likes.
Another (perhaps even more important) reason is that the Xbox 360 ran on a derivative of DirectX 9. Most games were ported over from consoles, which made it much easier to go from the 360 to DX9 than to recode for DX10. Didn't help that DX10 was a huge step from DX9 with a complete rewrite of most of the API, so it took years for game developers to port their engines over.
If we truly wanted to give kids the best possible education (as opposed to just fulfilling what we consider a societal obligation with minimal effort and cost), each student would have their own tailored curriculum. Note that I don't mean by this that a student who doesn't like history never will do history; that'd be putting blinkers on students. It should be about following their rate of learning at every step of the way, adapting as they mature, and attempting to explain in different ways if they don't understand until one clicks. I don't think anyone (besides perhaps some extreme cases of disabilities) is unable to learn at the very least high school level stuff, it's just that the current "one size fits all" approach fits, well, nobody. In attempting to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.
And the funny thing is? Doing so would also resolve the paradox between meritocracy and equality. If everyone has their own tailored curriculum, then smart students are treated no differently than anyone else.
This, so much this. A lot of students get quite the scare when they realize that, gasp, a computer science degree is largely about doing science. While we do have introductory programming courses here, they're mostly seen as giving students the basic toolkit with which they will do their actual degree, a bit like how a physics degree has a few introductory pure math courses. Many courses I've taken don't even have programming at all in them, and some of those were very enjoyable at that!
In the end, the ones who realized that a comp sci degree isn't about learning programming tend to be those who do best at programming. I've met students who'd never used C++ and picked it up in a matter of hours. Perhaps they didn't have as much refinement as someone who's been doing it for 10+ years, but they understood that you can easily transfer high-level notions (ie. the focus of a comp sci degree) to any language.
Perhaps the pitfall of this is for the mediocre students, who don't realize this. They tend to have difficulty adjusting to another language than the one they were taught with.
That's sadly a byproduct of how game engines are developed, I'm afraid. For the most part, game engines originate from graphics engine (so just graphics and then stuff tacked onto it), which means the vast majority of programmers working on the engine will be either generalist programmers or graphics programmers. In both cases, it's unlikely that they'll know how to deal with audio in any real capacity (I know I don't), so they'll use the same model that graphics uses: pushing commands.
Now, I'm sure that the larger devs have dedicated sound engineers, but I'm not sure just how much leeway they have with designing (and most likely, scrapping and completely redoing) the sound engine. It's also likely that their bosses will come from either a managerial background or a generalist programming or graphics programming background. Game development could use more specialists and needs to give them the flexibility they need.
Huh? Developer: Respawn. Publisher: EA. Only thing Microsoft does is handle the servers, because EA uses Azure. But don't let that get in the way of some nice Microsoft trolling, eh?
Not saying that they're absolutely right, but there are a few elements to keep in mind:
-While playing back a single FLAC (or another lossless format) isn't too expensive, games aren't music players. When you have 128 FLACs playing back at the same time, the dynamics change.
-The game's minimum spec includes dual-core CPUs. You can't dedicate an entire core to sound in that situation, yet I doubt they wanted to specifically code their engine to behave differently for dual-cores.
Now, I also heard that their sound assets were particularly inefficient (ie. repeated sounds, looping sounds being repeated multiple times in the track, etc.), so that might also account for some of the size.
Slashdot Mirror
Note the "easily". Science nowadays is extremely complicated and requires years of study to even get to the level. While it's always possible to have another genius coming out of nowhere, it's a lot less likely than it used to be. You won't have a single person make a breakthrough in multiple, largely unrelated domains, like back in the Renaissance, either.
Very fast charge (on the order of 1-2 mins for current battery sizes) would make "gas stations" viable for electric cars. It'd immediately remove the current big stumbling block, which is that once your capacity is depleted you need to wait for a few hours to recharge. Bigger capacity would be nice, but it'd just delay the issue. Fast recharge would let current gas stations convert to electric, allowing us to reuse existing infrastructure and easing the transition between gas and electric.
That's nonsensical. What's the equivalent of a patch for water pipes? Infrastructure is designed to be put in once, and last for a very long time. Software is continuously being modified, updated, upgraded, fixed. It's not the same thing at all.
A significant proportion of the people still using XP do so because their hardware has no modern drivers. The likelihood of Linux drivers, for XP-era drivers, is close to nil. For the people who use XP just because they can't be arsed upgrading (and for corporations/govt organizations who haven't planned an upgrade, too), screw them, they deserve everything they get.
What amuses me however is that while people here criticize Microsoft for not providing support for XP, they don't criticize the hardware manufacturers which haven't bothered making more recent drivers for their hardware. It's a strange double standard, especially since hardware has, if anything, more of a reason to have long term support; it's more expensive, rarer and possibly without a more modern replacement.
You think every small or medium corporation using a 2.4.0 kernel release has the means to hire enough developers to keep a whole Linux distro up to date? Think about it for a second. That's the problem with a lot of the open source advocates: most people don't have the means to maintain stuff by themselves.
Relevant SMBC.
One could argue that religion is lack of applied thought in a particular area. I don't know how they do it, but I've seen quite a few people manage to section off their thinking in what could be best described as little boxes. Their rational, educated thinking would permeate their work, but their private lives and religious faith would be completely separated.
That's a bit pedantic. When saying "NP-hard problem", you usually mean it as an upper bound as opposed to a lower bound. Nobody would describe an EXPSPACE problem as "NP-hard" because that's completely besides the point.
Flip side, those colonies were a helluva lot more habitable than Mars. People already lived there well before the colonists arrived, but I don't see too many indigenous species when CO2 freezes on the surface of the planet. The people you send there are basically stranded in the middle of the ocean, not sent to a lush and fertile continent.
This isn't to say the conditions weren't hard back then, but there's a wide gap between the two.
Did nobody note the awesome "Internet Exploder" typo?
Part of the reason for a corporation is that you dissociate financial liability between the corporation itself and its employees. It's what makes incorporating attractive to smaller companies, since if the company sinks into heavy debt it doesn't take you down with it.
Actually, no, you're diluting the substance by a factor of 100, then diluting the result by another factor of 100, and so on, 100 times. That's 100^100, or 1e200.
Good point highlighting how Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode in 2014 by the way...
And before being so aggressive, I'd suggest reading up on basic statistics. It could very well be that the percentage of incidents to number of cars is higher for the Tesla, but a single event is never statistically significant.
Note that this isn't to say there isn't a problem. It just means that a single event is not enough to draw a conclusion either way.
It's how you spell and pronounce Plato in the majority of languages across the world.
The current wild west that is video games, where people use the cover of anonymity to act like complete assholes, tends to put things out of character, not in. There's nothing quite as in character as having a supposedly top tier soldier from some elite secret force start screeching obscenities with the voice of a 12 year old while teabagging the corpse of the ally he just shot for no reason, right?
Some would dispute that the App Store and Google Play are part of the "gaming world". While there are excellent games on both stores, most are complete and utter drivel (many people compare the App Store to the far west), at a much much lower percentage than on Steam or the likes.
Another (perhaps even more important) reason is that the Xbox 360 ran on a derivative of DirectX 9. Most games were ported over from consoles, which made it much easier to go from the 360 to DX9 than to recode for DX10. Didn't help that DX10 was a huge step from DX9 with a complete rewrite of most of the API, so it took years for game developers to port their engines over.
Replace DX12 with Mantle and ask again.
I have no idea either, but I did notice that it seems like every single release of Enlightenment makes the front page for whatever reason.
This.
If we truly wanted to give kids the best possible education (as opposed to just fulfilling what we consider a societal obligation with minimal effort and cost), each student would have their own tailored curriculum. Note that I don't mean by this that a student who doesn't like history never will do history; that'd be putting blinkers on students. It should be about following their rate of learning at every step of the way, adapting as they mature, and attempting to explain in different ways if they don't understand until one clicks. I don't think anyone (besides perhaps some extreme cases of disabilities) is unable to learn at the very least high school level stuff, it's just that the current "one size fits all" approach fits, well, nobody. In attempting to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.
And the funny thing is? Doing so would also resolve the paradox between meritocracy and equality. If everyone has their own tailored curriculum, then smart students are treated no differently than anyone else.
This, so much this. A lot of students get quite the scare when they realize that, gasp, a computer science degree is largely about doing science. While we do have introductory programming courses here, they're mostly seen as giving students the basic toolkit with which they will do their actual degree, a bit like how a physics degree has a few introductory pure math courses. Many courses I've taken don't even have programming at all in them, and some of those were very enjoyable at that!
In the end, the ones who realized that a comp sci degree isn't about learning programming tend to be those who do best at programming. I've met students who'd never used C++ and picked it up in a matter of hours. Perhaps they didn't have as much refinement as someone who's been doing it for 10+ years, but they understood that you can easily transfer high-level notions (ie. the focus of a comp sci degree) to any language.
Perhaps the pitfall of this is for the mediocre students, who don't realize this. They tend to have difficulty adjusting to another language than the one they were taught with.
That's sadly a byproduct of how game engines are developed, I'm afraid. For the most part, game engines originate from graphics engine (so just graphics and then stuff tacked onto it), which means the vast majority of programmers working on the engine will be either generalist programmers or graphics programmers. In both cases, it's unlikely that they'll know how to deal with audio in any real capacity (I know I don't), so they'll use the same model that graphics uses: pushing commands.
Now, I'm sure that the larger devs have dedicated sound engineers, but I'm not sure just how much leeway they have with designing (and most likely, scrapping and completely redoing) the sound engine. It's also likely that their bosses will come from either a managerial background or a generalist programming or graphics programming background. Game development could use more specialists and needs to give them the flexibility they need.
Huh? Developer: Respawn. Publisher: EA. Only thing Microsoft does is handle the servers, because EA uses Azure. But don't let that get in the way of some nice Microsoft trolling, eh?
Not saying that they're absolutely right, but there are a few elements to keep in mind:
-While playing back a single FLAC (or another lossless format) isn't too expensive, games aren't music players. When you have 128 FLACs playing back at the same time, the dynamics change.
-The game's minimum spec includes dual-core CPUs. You can't dedicate an entire core to sound in that situation, yet I doubt they wanted to specifically code their engine to behave differently for dual-cores.
Now, I also heard that their sound assets were particularly inefficient (ie. repeated sounds, looping sounds being repeated multiple times in the track, etc.), so that might also account for some of the size.