There's a dozen of Greasemonkey scripts for it, too, if that's more to your likings.
Thing is, I think most of the NYT's audience doesn't know any of this stuff, so it's obvious that they just don't care if 0.1% of their readers can bypass the filter.
Actually, I'd have been a lot more interested to know about French, since it's one of the few languages out there that's actively curated by a central organization attempting to limit and document the language's morphing.
I'd be curious to know whether this is actually affecting the language's evolution in any meaningful way. Considering its close ties to English and Spanish, among others, it would be fairly easy to compare them and notice the influence, if influence there is.
That's all symptomatic of a larger, even more pressing issue: the West, particularly North America, is being taught that thinking is hard and should be left to their betters. That science, maths, even grammar and languages are complex and that it's alright if you don't want to put the effort to learn them.
Thinking is rapidly being replaced with following. Sheep are just so much easier to govern, aren't they?
There was a time where saying your computer chip was to contain a few billion transistors would get you laughed out the door, since making even a few hundreds of thousands per machine wasn't trivial, never mind the space needed to manufacture and use them.
Harper isn't a two faced asshole. He's quite content with showing to the world that he's an asshole, thing is some people actually like it. You don't even need to dig to find out what he's doing, he doesn't bother covering up anything anymore. He's got his majority.
I have absolutely no problem getting software to read FLACs; I use foobar at home and have ICS on my phone.
No, the problem is with *obtaining* FLACs. I don't like CDs, I don't want to go out to the shop to buy them and then have to rip them on top, the convenience of online stores is too great. However, I'd pay a premium to get FLAC files online, and I'm sure I'm not alone, yet I've barely seen any service offering that. It's even worse considering that I'm across the border and thus many sites just say no when I try (can't believe even Amazon's MP3 store isn't available!).
Give me quick and easy access to good FLACs and I'm sold.
ReplayGain can't fix poor dynamic range though, that's the big shame. It removes the problem of certain tracks being mastered for maximum level, but still doesn't change the fact that most music nowadays is almost uniformly of the same volume - be that loud or not. There's little to no difference in volume between a quiet passage and a thundering chorus.
Regardless of the bad analogy, you've modified the original statement from "in a random robbery, it's 8 times more likely that the crime has been committed by a black than a white" into "black people are 8 times more likely to commit robbery." That's an important difference because black people in and of themselves are no more likely to commit robbery, but there are more black people in the socioeconomic conditions that increase the likelihood of criminality. The second phrasing implies some form of causality which just isn't there.
I can already tell you that picosecond flashes of a green laser that could be used in household appliances takes less power than the heavy duty recycling machines required for taking the paper, removing the ink and recreating new recycled paper from it. The environmental impact should also be lower since you're not using rather dangerous chemicals to remove the ink from the paper paste.
Remember, you'd need one trillion pulses lasting one picosecond each from a 1W laser to expend one Joule.
Tell that to Notch, Ironclad, Wolfire, Jonathan Blow and the myriad of other indie developers. Development costs are only growing because developers are allowing them to. Not all games (heck, very few games) need ridiculously high resolution graphics that take a week to create a single character. Many benefit from not being all that realistic, demanding less powerful hardware and being easier on developers and artists alike all while being more unique and creative.
Perhaps some part of the AAA market will indeed falter because of the propensity for doing absurdly expensive games, but the majority will live on. This is exactly like movies, really: not ever movie should be Avatar, and for good reason.
Indeed. This is especially true of processors. Most games tend to be GPU-bound, so at worst you'll have to upgrade your GPU once during the lifetime of your computer. A good 5-year old processor can easily play most games at fairly high fidelity as long as it's paired with a good GPU. RAM can be another upgrade, but it's so cheap it's not really a deal-breaker.
Thing is, for some reason people believe that if your brand new PC can play a game at maximum graphics, then it should also be able to do the same five years down the line, otherwise it needs to be replaced. That's just bad logic; if you lower the settings to get a good frame rate, you'll end up with similar (or better) fidelity than you did when you first purchased your computer, just like consoles. The top option of a PC game released in recent years is something no console could run, so it's not all that surprising a PC from the same time can't either.
Sadly, wrong expectations like that are keeping the myth that gaming PCs have a short useful life very much alive.
That's utter bullshit. The PS3's Cell processor is so difficult to work with that the possible advantage of heavy parallelization is cancelled out by the amount of work required (and thus rarely actually put in) to port a game from more traditional architectures (like the three-core Xbox 360).
Furthermore, you're not really speaking of the downsides. The PS3's GPU is a souped up 7800GTX, which is ancient. All consoles have tiny amounts of RAM, with the PS3 going in at 256mb. That's so small compromises have to be made on texture quality in many instances. Bandwidth doesn't matter if there's not enough RAM.
If consoles were so much better, why are fields of view going smaller and smaller, why are textures so blurry, why is there never any antialiasation and most importantly why are games rendered in sub-720p resolutions in the days of 1080p? That's because consoles are underpowered and outpaced by current PCs.
That comes down to being savvy. You can buy the game and the DLC for $70 total, the Deluxe doesn't add much beyond that. On top of that, if you look around a bit you can find the base game for $50, which comes down to $60 for the game and the DLC.
Sure, it's still high, but not as outrageously high as the Digital Deluxe edition.
Honestly, this is what's happening in the video games industry. It's all about profit, profit, profit. The big publishers aren't allowed to care about a game's quality anymore, only whether it sells a lot. Metacritic is a bullet point on their marketing list, sometimes even deciding whether a team gets laid off.
When a developer dares to innovate, they're brought back in line. When a game or series turns a profit without being in the top 10 of the charts for a bazillion months, it gets axed. If that was the studio's sole product, it's closed down. If the series is popular, then it must be monetized until it's sucked dry, then tossed away. If the game can't be made into a series, then you have to product "DLC" to extend the profit as much as possible.
Support is secondary, games should be dropped as soon as possible to avoid losses from server maintenance and such. Patches are kept to a minimum, especially if the game doesn't sell well, even if it's broken at launch.
This is what a shareholder-based industry looks like after it's been corrupted entirely.
It depends, really. The problem is that most edutainment is built with the purpose of being educational first, whereas the true purpose of a game should always be to entertain first. If it isn't fun, it's not going to engage students and thus won't be any less of a chore than a bad book.
However, if it's built to be fun first, then you can get some truly superb games out of it. It's a shame they're not integrated into schools though. For example, SpaceChem, which has nothing to do with actual chemistry, would best be compared to a game about building logical circuits. No, you're not building proper circuits, but the skills you learn can easily be applied to it. Your brain becomes used to thinking in that way, and it's an interesting introduction to programming for instance.
Likewise, Portal can be an excellent tool to develop spatial awareness and a basic understanding of physics, as well as problem solving. You won't actually be told by the game "you are falling because of gravity which exerts a force of...", but the mechanics behind the game will force you to understand how it all works. Facts aren't important, understanding is.
As a last example, you can easily give very interesting presentations on orbits, planets and space in general with the likes of Universe Sandbox. It might be the least gamey of the games I've mentioned, but it wasn't built for schools at all. Even then, the fact it's interactive and open-ended means students can experiment, fuelling their curiosity and thirst for knowledge. What would happen if the Sun suddenly turned into a black hole? You can try that. Instead of attempting to explain complicated concepts surrounding it, you can just let the students try it and see the result immediately.
That won't change the fact that you're wasting hours of their lives each day because they still have to suffer through the normal classes which don't stimulate or challenge them at all. Worse, it can put them off of it, and then good luck attracting them to math coaching after class. It's long enough to be stuck in school each day for 5-8 hours without having to take additional time just so that you actually learn something. The courses themselves should adapt to the kids, not the other way around.
The problem with the sports comparison is that sports is always an extracurricular activity. You're not going to school to learn how to play football, but you are there to learn math. Being brighter than others in a subject shouldn't be a disadvantage for you.
DirectX at least has the advantage of being arguably better than the competition. Windows 8 doesn't even have that, and ironically its biggest competitor will be... Windows 7.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a dozen of Greasemonkey scripts for it, too, if that's more to your likings.
Thing is, I think most of the NYT's audience doesn't know any of this stuff, so it's obvious that they just don't care if 0.1% of their readers can bypass the filter.
Actually, I'd have been a lot more interested to know about French, since it's one of the few languages out there that's actively curated by a central organization attempting to limit and document the language's morphing.
I'd be curious to know whether this is actually affecting the language's evolution in any meaningful way. Considering its close ties to English and Spanish, among others, it would be fairly easy to compare them and notice the influence, if influence there is.
Physicists are mathematically rigorous to everyone but mathematicians.
Obviously the submitter is American and did the conversion from British-meters to American-meters.
That's all symptomatic of a larger, even more pressing issue: the West, particularly North America, is being taught that thinking is hard and should be left to their betters. That science, maths, even grammar and languages are complex and that it's alright if you don't want to put the effort to learn them.
Thinking is rapidly being replaced with following. Sheep are just so much easier to govern, aren't they?
There was a time where saying your computer chip was to contain a few billion transistors would get you laughed out the door, since making even a few hundreds of thousands per machine wasn't trivial, never mind the space needed to manufacture and use them.
That was 30 years ago.
Basing your opinion of a country's citizens from rightsholding groups isn't exactly fair. All countries would be filled with cunts.
And then what? Do you think the Liberals will go against it? Do you think the NDP will get elected without Layton at the helm?
If this gets implemented, I'm afraid we'll be stuck with it for a long, long time.
Aren't those just mythical creatures? I don't think we've ever documented a specimen of that species.
Harper isn't a two faced asshole. He's quite content with showing to the world that he's an asshole, thing is some people actually like it. You don't even need to dig to find out what he's doing, he doesn't bother covering up anything anymore. He's got his majority.
I could give you dozens, but I'll just say: Kyoto.
I have absolutely no problem getting software to read FLACs; I use foobar at home and have ICS on my phone.
No, the problem is with *obtaining* FLACs. I don't like CDs, I don't want to go out to the shop to buy them and then have to rip them on top, the convenience of online stores is too great. However, I'd pay a premium to get FLAC files online, and I'm sure I'm not alone, yet I've barely seen any service offering that. It's even worse considering that I'm across the border and thus many sites just say no when I try (can't believe even Amazon's MP3 store isn't available!).
Give me quick and easy access to good FLACs and I'm sold.
ReplayGain can't fix poor dynamic range though, that's the big shame. It removes the problem of certain tracks being mastered for maximum level, but still doesn't change the fact that most music nowadays is almost uniformly of the same volume - be that loud or not. There's little to no difference in volume between a quiet passage and a thundering chorus.
Regardless of the bad analogy, you've modified the original statement from "in a random robbery, it's 8 times more likely that the crime has been committed by a black than a white" into "black people are 8 times more likely to commit robbery." That's an important difference because black people in and of themselves are no more likely to commit robbery, but there are more black people in the socioeconomic conditions that increase the likelihood of criminality. The second phrasing implies some form of causality which just isn't there.
I can already tell you that picosecond flashes of a green laser that could be used in household appliances takes less power than the heavy duty recycling machines required for taking the paper, removing the ink and recreating new recycled paper from it. The environmental impact should also be lower since you're not using rather dangerous chemicals to remove the ink from the paper paste.
Remember, you'd need one trillion pulses lasting one picosecond each from a 1W laser to expend one Joule.
Tell that to Notch, Ironclad, Wolfire, Jonathan Blow and the myriad of other indie developers. Development costs are only growing because developers are allowing them to. Not all games (heck, very few games) need ridiculously high resolution graphics that take a week to create a single character. Many benefit from not being all that realistic, demanding less powerful hardware and being easier on developers and artists alike all while being more unique and creative.
Perhaps some part of the AAA market will indeed falter because of the propensity for doing absurdly expensive games, but the majority will live on. This is exactly like movies, really: not ever movie should be Avatar, and for good reason.
The AppleTV's not even in the same league. That's like complaining that your TV uses more power than your digital clock.
Indeed. This is especially true of processors. Most games tend to be GPU-bound, so at worst you'll have to upgrade your GPU once during the lifetime of your computer. A good 5-year old processor can easily play most games at fairly high fidelity as long as it's paired with a good GPU. RAM can be another upgrade, but it's so cheap it's not really a deal-breaker.
Thing is, for some reason people believe that if your brand new PC can play a game at maximum graphics, then it should also be able to do the same five years down the line, otherwise it needs to be replaced. That's just bad logic; if you lower the settings to get a good frame rate, you'll end up with similar (or better) fidelity than you did when you first purchased your computer, just like consoles. The top option of a PC game released in recent years is something no console could run, so it's not all that surprising a PC from the same time can't either.
Sadly, wrong expectations like that are keeping the myth that gaming PCs have a short useful life very much alive.
That's utter bullshit. The PS3's Cell processor is so difficult to work with that the possible advantage of heavy parallelization is cancelled out by the amount of work required (and thus rarely actually put in) to port a game from more traditional architectures (like the three-core Xbox 360).
Furthermore, you're not really speaking of the downsides. The PS3's GPU is a souped up 7800GTX, which is ancient. All consoles have tiny amounts of RAM, with the PS3 going in at 256mb. That's so small compromises have to be made on texture quality in many instances. Bandwidth doesn't matter if there's not enough RAM.
If consoles were so much better, why are fields of view going smaller and smaller, why are textures so blurry, why is there never any antialiasation and most importantly why are games rendered in sub-720p resolutions in the days of 1080p? That's because consoles are underpowered and outpaced by current PCs.
That comes down to being savvy. You can buy the game and the DLC for $70 total, the Deluxe doesn't add much beyond that. On top of that, if you look around a bit you can find the base game for $50, which comes down to $60 for the game and the DLC.
Sure, it's still high, but not as outrageously high as the Digital Deluxe edition.
Honestly, this is what's happening in the video games industry. It's all about profit, profit, profit. The big publishers aren't allowed to care about a game's quality anymore, only whether it sells a lot. Metacritic is a bullet point on their marketing list, sometimes even deciding whether a team gets laid off.
When a developer dares to innovate, they're brought back in line. When a game or series turns a profit without being in the top 10 of the charts for a bazillion months, it gets axed. If that was the studio's sole product, it's closed down. If the series is popular, then it must be monetized until it's sucked dry, then tossed away. If the game can't be made into a series, then you have to product "DLC" to extend the profit as much as possible.
Support is secondary, games should be dropped as soon as possible to avoid losses from server maintenance and such. Patches are kept to a minimum, especially if the game doesn't sell well, even if it's broken at launch.
This is what a shareholder-based industry looks like after it's been corrupted entirely.
It depends, really. The problem is that most edutainment is built with the purpose of being educational first, whereas the true purpose of a game should always be to entertain first. If it isn't fun, it's not going to engage students and thus won't be any less of a chore than a bad book.
However, if it's built to be fun first, then you can get some truly superb games out of it. It's a shame they're not integrated into schools though. For example, SpaceChem, which has nothing to do with actual chemistry, would best be compared to a game about building logical circuits. No, you're not building proper circuits, but the skills you learn can easily be applied to it. Your brain becomes used to thinking in that way, and it's an interesting introduction to programming for instance.
Likewise, Portal can be an excellent tool to develop spatial awareness and a basic understanding of physics, as well as problem solving. You won't actually be told by the game "you are falling because of gravity which exerts a force of...", but the mechanics behind the game will force you to understand how it all works. Facts aren't important, understanding is.
As a last example, you can easily give very interesting presentations on orbits, planets and space in general with the likes of Universe Sandbox. It might be the least gamey of the games I've mentioned, but it wasn't built for schools at all. Even then, the fact it's interactive and open-ended means students can experiment, fuelling their curiosity and thirst for knowledge. What would happen if the Sun suddenly turned into a black hole? You can try that. Instead of attempting to explain complicated concepts surrounding it, you can just let the students try it and see the result immediately.
That's edutainment done right.
That won't change the fact that you're wasting hours of their lives each day because they still have to suffer through the normal classes which don't stimulate or challenge them at all. Worse, it can put them off of it, and then good luck attracting them to math coaching after class. It's long enough to be stuck in school each day for 5-8 hours without having to take additional time just so that you actually learn something. The courses themselves should adapt to the kids, not the other way around.
The problem with the sports comparison is that sports is always an extracurricular activity. You're not going to school to learn how to play football, but you are there to learn math. Being brighter than others in a subject shouldn't be a disadvantage for you.
Wait, so they're dropping support but not really?
I know people continuously rave about diminishing quality of reporting on Slashdot, but that's like a 180 from what TFS says.
DirectX at least has the advantage of being arguably better than the competition. Windows 8 doesn't even have that, and ironically its biggest competitor will be... Windows 7.