Another thing that's more difficult to address is the inordinate amount of setup time that some games take. Witness Axis & Allies. Its a great game, but every time I want to play it, I realize that its going to take at least 30 to 45 minutes to set up, and the thought of that is enough to get me motivated to do something else.
Yeah, that was why I stopped playing Mall Madness a while back...
Add to deteriorating job market and higher fuel costs which hurt teenage consumers the most...
On NPR?? I'm curious... did they bring up the minimum wage increase (and its effect on the "teenage job market", namely: fewer jobs) or did they just blame it all on Bush and HaliburtonExxonMobile?
I worked on the Y2K bug, and I think that 20 years from now, one of two things will happen. First, the one that everyone assumes will happen, is that it will be remembered as a big non-event. There will be some who point out that without the work that went into it, it would have been a huge crash. But you can't prove it now. The second option: I like to think that one day, historians will look back on it as the most successful software project in history.
Dude... 20 years from now everyone's going to be freaking out about the Y2038 problem. I don't think they'll be looking back much except to say "the patches they put in to place won't help us here".
Nowadays, when I give out an email for anything it's to "smith-businessname@domain.com" or something similar. Anything at smith-* will end up at my smith account automatically. Allows for great automatic tracking, and now pre-setup needed (I make them up on the fly). If one of them ever gets compromised, I can simply add a config in there that handles that extension specifically. Furthermore, no automatic spamming bot is going to create wildcards and a blah-* like that.
There is a concept called Zero Point Thinking, which basically says "Knowing what I know now, if I had to start over which way would I do it?".
When you have the answer to that you should head in that direction as quickly as possible since much of your efforts in your current direction will be wasted when you do finally switch.
Clearly, you haven't watched the opening scene of Office Space closely enough.
Just merge C, Ruby, & COBOL syntax into one compiler. Now coders can start migrating away from Cobol without the hassle of rewriting entire programs. They can do it one line at a time, as they get to it.
Now if we could just merge Java, & Perl in there you'd really have something.
What irks me is that some horde their wealth and effectively take it out of circulation. The only reason anyone would want to hold on to over $1Billion (US) is for POWER, not living well.
Only an idiot would make $1 Billion and then stick it under their mattress. The way people with money make more money is to invest it. Even if they're putting it in one truly massive CD (heh), that's still money that's being used to give out loans, purchase capital, etc...
The fact that they're not spending it on a daily basis does not mean that that money "sitting around" in a holding company isn't having positive side-effects.
Besides, don't people complain about ugly American "conspicuous consumption"?
You don't see scientist sneaking into Religious schools to teach evolution.
No, but you do see teachers ridiculing and berating students to *do* have religious beliefs. Wanna try it out? Try stating in open class that you don't believe the theory of evolution is valid and watch the profs at your average University lay into you for being an idiot (or gullible, confused, brainwashed, etc...).
Betcha if this guy had done that there wouldn't be nearly as much outrage about it -- at least not on Slashdot.
Regardless, this guy deserved to go anyway... if he lies during the course of an investigation then he has no place teaching anywhere.
... not when the ability to successfully resolve something may depend on things handled by the directory/metadata structure, with tagging that is indeed OS-specific.
MacOS has had aliases since System 7 and they're far more useful than a unix-style symlink ever has been for me -- in part because everything that needs to open a file on the Mac uses the MacOS APIs. POSIX is "closer to the metal" and therefore pays a price in lost features of abstraction.
If you want Unix-style utilities to work with the new Vista symlinks, then patch the damn copy of "ls" yourself. And then submit it to the FSF.
In all these comments? Sheesh, and I thought you guys were nerds:)
Demos have been doing procedural textures for years... almost a necessity when you're trying to squeeze x number of minutes of... stuff into a 64k binary file. Take a look at fr-08:.the.product by farbrausch for a pretty stunning example of the amount of compression you can get when you need it. They've also got a proof-of-concept FPS that uses all procedural textures and fits into a 96k binary.
They've even released a tool for procedural generation publicly.
Given the benefits of procedural generation in terms of space, I wish more games would look into using them... especially online MMORGS or other situations where bandwidth is an issue. It's probably faster and more efficient on a decent CPU/GPU to create procedural textures than it is to download a bzipped version thereof. (Nudge: Can someone at Cyan Worlds please hire these guys as interns?)
Do you think there are actually Iraqis out there who doubt that killing innocent people is morally wrong and need a reminder?
Where have you been for the last few years? The secret phrase for the day is "suicide bomber" (or rather "'mass-murdering fuck-head' who is willing to kill himself in the process as long as it increases the body count"). To be fair, many (but not all) of the suicide bombers nowadays are believed to have been foreign Al Qaeda imports, but they're still getting logistical support from certain segments of the Iraqi community.
As for "kill this animal just as he killed his thousands of victims", that sounds exactly like revenge to me. Please, read what you're saying and think of the real consequences when Iraqis see that even their great American liberators punish people through barbarism.
"Barbarism" is putting people in shedding machines, slowly and feet first. That's what Saddam and his sons did when they didn't like people (or when soccer players lost). Or perhaps we should make him stand in a room with the floor covered in acid (like he did to others). Those would be "revenge" and "an eye for an eye". But the 'just' here is poetic, not prepositional. Hanging is merciful; and that IN ITSELF is an important development in this part of the world. This IS the rule of law and not revenge.
Finally, what the heck does the left have to do with the comments above? Just because they disagree with the Republican government they must be liberals?
No, but the US "left" shares two traits with some glaringly obvious trends in this thread's posts:
1) Moral Relativism - "I think the US is just as bad; if Saddam's being executed, let's kill Bush next!" Examples of this are all over the place... If you really think the US was/is as bad as Saddam's Iraq, please do us all a favor and move to Europe where in a few years' time you'll see what the future of this line of argument is.
2) Disdain for the Democracy/The Public decision - "The Death Penalty is bad, regardless of the prevailing moral viewpoint or what the people of Iraq (legitimately) decide." Note, we're not talking about hanging someone for being gay, Chinese imprisonment of bloggers, shooting someone trying to leave the country, or any of the more widely accepted "legitimate" rights and freedoms that have been curtailed by the corrupt few in a relatively undemocratic society. If the populace legitimately chooses to enforce capital punishment for the most heinous crimes, so be it. The elite don't rule the country any more. (Side note: See also the Left's fascination with Roe v. Wade. The People should be able to decide these things, rather than things being mandated by fiat by judges at the federal level. You can be pro-choice and still feel that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.)
We've all seen the scenes in movies (WarGames, Sneakers, 2001, etc...) where someone is looking at a monitor and we see the reflection of the image on the screen projected out onto their faces.
Question: is the image showing up like that purely a function of the brightness of what the person is looking at? IOW, would an HDR monitor have the effect of "projecting" the image out as if one were staring into an overhead?
Someone mentioned above that pictures/video of stained glass windows were often used as demos of HDR tech. Did it have this sort of effect in the demo room?
Now, I go to sites/do things that they might not like, but it hasn't harmed me or warped me in any sort of way. I learned my morals from them, and make my own decisions.
"(snicker)", you probably believe in free will, too...
I was a teenager not too long ago (but long enough to see the massive culture change over the last six - eight years that I've been around freshmen in college)... and I can tell you that you're smart, but not smart enough to fully understand how you're affected by things.
No matter how introspective you are, you don't yet have the ability to truly and dispassionately observe how your development and psychology is affected by what you're being exposed to or what you're doing. This kind of maturity doesn't come until later... much later. (Hint: There's a reason the drinking age (in CA) is 21... and it's not Puritans.)
Being able to code circles around someone five years older than you does not a mature and unrash person make. You'll feel the same way too someday.:)
bitched, whined, and moaned about a "stolen" election down in Florida in 2000 (and the voters in Palm Beach hadn't been completely incompetant) there wouldn't have been the giant nationwide push for "electronic voting" in the first place, and I'd still be punching ballotcards nicely.
Thank you, sore losers.
The sanest thing would be to let technology progress and become adopted NATURALLY, instead of pushing things ahead faster than they should simply because you've suddenly lost faith in a system that's worked for decades. I don't need an ATM-like machine to handle my voting and I'm perfectly happy to wait hours for paper ballots to be manually shoved around. But then, I'm a Conservative.
Thank you, Democrats, for causing wasted millions of dollars, the introduction of dumb-ass technology, and general country-wide strife to fix a non-existant problem because you couldn't wrap your heads around the fact that Al Gore lost.
What's next? Do we get to spend the next 10 years futzing with the Electoral Collage only to decide that the Great Compromise was a good idea after all?
That being said I did break replication by dropping a test database which did not exist on the slaves (why should they care if they cannot execute drop database on a database which does not exist.
Not going to argue too much with you, but this is a feature-not-a-bug. DROP TABLE returns an error if one or more of the tables don't exist. Errors cause replication halting. That's why DROP TABLE IF EXISTS is there.
Perl's performance for CGI is bad without some sort way of increasing its speed. The major options for this are: - Apache and mod_perl - This can work transparently, but if you look at it funny, it breaks.
Agreed... hate it.
- FastCGI - which isn't transparent by any stretch of the imagination.
I'll take your word on this one -- I've never used it.
- SpeedyCGI - Same problem as FastCGI.
Have to disagree with you on this. As long as your code is already use strict compliant, you shouldn't have to make any changes at all to get things running under SpeedyCGI. I've used it in quite a number of locations, both in a CGI context and for regular sysadmin and mail server duties, without any sort of mind-bending issues (except for if I was doing heavy shell file descriptor magic, since it moves things around when doing its pipe). Strongly recommended.
- PPerl - which isn't necessarily written for use in CGI.
True. See above. PPerl is an interesting choice if you *do* in fact need to do some heavy shell file descriptor magic (see http://smtpd.develooper.com/). I've kept with SpeedyCGI for other reasons though.
- Rolling a custom http server using HTTP::Daemon or Socket. Which is a really bad idea.
That's exactly my point: it's the same data being made available... If you have recipient-checking turned on, then keeping SMTP VRFY off as an anti-spam matter-of-principle doesn't make much sense. Any probing software could just as easily sent a RCPT TO: command as a VRFY one.
There may not be a benefit per se (since SMTP VRFY isn't all that widely used any more, it seems), but it offers little protection at the same time if you're doing recipient checking.
SMTP VRFY (or recipient-checking at the SMTP level in general) being disabled is pointless. Given a choice between allowing people to not send mail to invalid addresses or having to deal with bounce-back scatter and getting your MX server blacklisted for third-party spam, I'll take the former any day.
And I'd wager anyone who's had to admin a qmail server and decide which (if any) recipient-checking patch to use would feel the same way.
It's far less load on the servers to have a more expensive spam identification process on the back end, than have to deal with the billions of messages generated by a dictionary attack on the front end.
If there really is no rigging going on, then WHY do you care if we make the system secure?
Did I say I didn't want to make the system secure? Don't read into my comments what you're expecting me to say...
I'm *ALL* for making the voting machines as secure as possible (though I think this particular vulnerability might be over-blown) and I agree with the critiscism that the machines wouldn't pass the Nevada regulations for slot machines. But remember, Diebold also makes ATMs and has been doing them for some time... I doubt they're *completely* incomptetent in their procedures and design choices.
show something at 12 o'clock that is directly contradicted by the election result then yes, something funny IS going on.
Bull! Have you considered that the voters who show up before noon on election day might not be a random sample of the totality of all persons who will vote that day? It's a well-documented fact (Google it, yo... but here's an anecdote) that election polls ALWAYS skew left during the beginning of the day.
And even by the end of the day, the VNS still wasn't properly accounting for "refuse to speak"s -- people who were randomly selected but didn't want to talk to the poll person. Those have been shown to be more likely to be conservatives.
Stop begging the question. Just because the polls and results didn't match up doesn't mean you've proven your hypothesis.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that was why I stopped playing Mall Madness a while back...
Add to deteriorating job market and higher fuel costs which hurt teenage consumers the most...
On NPR?? I'm curious... did they bring up the minimum wage increase (and its effect on the "teenage job market", namely: fewer jobs) or did they just blame it all on Bush and HaliburtonExxonMobile?
Well, okay.... maybe 30 years from now
Dude... 20 years from now everyone's going to be freaking out about the Y2038 problem. I don't think they'll be looking back much except to say "the patches they put in to place won't help us here".
Or you could just use qmail
Nowadays, when I give out an email for anything it's to
"smith-businessname@domain.com" or something similar. Anything at smith-* will end up at my smith account automatically. Allows for great automatic tracking, and now pre-setup needed (I make them up on the fly). If one of them ever gets compromised, I can simply add a config in there that handles that extension specifically. Furthermore, no automatic spamming bot is going to create wildcards and a blah-* like that.
Clearly, you haven't watched the opening scene of Office Space closely enough.
That's the difference... we have choice in America :)
amazing the hurdles science can leap when they put their minds to it
Sounds like a job for Parrot!
Note: I'm kidding... sort of.
What irks me is that some horde their wealth and effectively take it out of circulation. The only reason anyone would want to hold on to over $1Billion (US) is for POWER, not living well.
Only an idiot would make $1 Billion and then stick it under their mattress. The way people with money make more money is to invest it. Even if they're putting it in one truly massive CD (heh), that's still money that's being used to give out loans, purchase capital, etc...
The fact that they're not spending it on a daily basis does not mean that that money "sitting around" in a holding company isn't having positive side-effects.
Besides, don't people complain about ugly American "conspicuous consumption"?
They don't mention the potential for experiments like 'what happens if I put my lunch in front of a 300 megaelectronvolt beam?'
Whatever you do, don't cross the streams!
You don't see scientist sneaking into Religious schools to teach evolution.
No, but you do see teachers ridiculing and berating students to *do* have religious beliefs. Wanna try it out? Try stating in open class that you don't believe the theory of evolution is valid and watch the profs at your average University lay into you for being an idiot (or gullible, confused, brainwashed, etc...).
Betcha if this guy had done that there wouldn't be nearly as much outrage about it -- at least not on Slashdot.
Regardless, this guy deserved to go anyway... if he lies during the course of an investigation then he has no place teaching anywhere.
... not when the ability to successfully resolve something may depend on things handled by the directory/metadata structure, with tagging that is indeed OS-specific.
MacOS has had aliases since System 7 and they're far more useful than a unix-style symlink ever has been for me -- in part because everything that needs to open a file on the Mac uses the MacOS APIs. POSIX is "closer to the metal" and therefore pays a price in lost features of abstraction.
If you want Unix-style utilities to work with the new Vista symlinks, then patch the damn copy of "ls" yourself. And then submit it to the FSF.
Wow... so how did I comment on this story while totally missing what was already put in the summary -- and TFA? No more posting before coffee. =/
In all these comments? Sheesh, and I thought you guys were nerds :)
.the .product by farbrausch for a pretty stunning example of the amount of compression you can get when you need it. They've also got a proof-of-concept FPS that uses all procedural textures and fits into a 96k binary.
Demos have been doing procedural textures for years... almost a necessity when you're trying to squeeze x number of minutes of... stuff into a 64k binary file. Take a look at fr-08:
They've even released a tool for procedural generation publicly.
Given the benefits of procedural generation in terms of space, I wish more games would look into using them... especially online MMORGS or other situations where bandwidth is an issue. It's probably faster and more efficient on a decent CPU/GPU to create procedural textures than it is to download a bzipped version thereof. (Nudge: Can someone at Cyan Worlds please hire these guys as interns?)
Do you think there are actually Iraqis out there who doubt that killing innocent people is morally wrong and need a reminder?
e .php for some live reaction from Iraq to the verdict.
Where have you been for the last few years? The secret phrase for the day is "suicide bomber" (or rather "'mass-murdering fuck-head' who is willing to kill himself in the process as long as it increases the body count"). To be fair, many (but not all) of the suicide bombers nowadays are believed to have been foreign Al Qaeda imports, but they're still getting logistical support from certain segments of the Iraqi community.
As for "kill this animal just as he killed his thousands of victims", that sounds exactly like revenge to me. Please, read what you're saying and think of the real consequences when Iraqis see that even their great American liberators punish people through barbarism.
"Barbarism" is putting people in shedding machines, slowly and feet first. That's what Saddam and his sons did when they didn't like people (or when soccer players lost). Or perhaps we should make him stand in a room with the floor covered in acid (like he did to others). Those would be "revenge" and "an eye for an eye". But the 'just' here is poetic, not prepositional. Hanging is merciful; and that IN ITSELF is an important development in this part of the world. This IS the rule of law and not revenge.
Incidentally, check out http://pajamasmedia.com/2006/11/the_day_of_justic
Finally, what the heck does the left have to do with the comments above? Just because they disagree with the Republican government they must be liberals?
No, but the US "left" shares two traits with some glaringly obvious trends in this thread's posts:
1) Moral Relativism - "I think the US is just as bad; if Saddam's being executed, let's kill Bush next!" Examples of this are all over the place... If you really think the US was/is as bad as Saddam's Iraq, please do us all a favor and move to Europe where in a few years' time you'll see what the future of this line of argument is.
2) Disdain for the Democracy/The Public decision - "The Death Penalty is bad, regardless of the prevailing moral viewpoint or what the people of Iraq (legitimately) decide." Note, we're not talking about hanging someone for being gay, Chinese imprisonment of bloggers, shooting someone trying to leave the country, or any of the more widely accepted "legitimate" rights and freedoms that have been curtailed by the corrupt few in a relatively undemocratic society. If the populace legitimately chooses to enforce capital punishment for the most heinous crimes, so be it. The elite don't rule the country any more. (Side note: See also the Left's fascination with Roe v. Wade. The People should be able to decide these things, rather than things being mandated by fiat by judges at the federal level. You can be pro-choice and still feel that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.)
We've all seen the scenes in movies (WarGames, Sneakers, 2001, etc...) where someone is looking at a monitor and we see the reflection of the image on the screen projected out onto their faces.
Question: is the image showing up like that purely a function of the brightness of what the person is looking at? IOW, would an HDR monitor have the effect of "projecting" the image out as if one were staring into an overhead?
Someone mentioned above that pictures/video of stained glass windows were often used as demos of HDR tech. Did it have this sort of effect in the demo room?
Now, I go to sites/do things that they might not like, but it hasn't harmed me or warped me in any sort of way. I learned my morals from them, and make my own decisions.
:)
"(snicker)", you probably believe in free will, too...
I was a teenager not too long ago (but long enough to see the massive culture change over the last six - eight years that I've been around freshmen in college)... and I can tell you that you're smart, but not smart enough to fully understand how you're affected by things.
No matter how introspective you are, you don't yet have the ability to truly and dispassionately observe how your development and psychology is affected by what you're being exposed to or what you're doing. This kind of maturity doesn't come until later... much later. (Hint: There's a reason the drinking age (in CA) is 21... and it's not Puritans.)
Being able to code circles around someone five years older than you does not a mature and unrash person make. You'll feel the same way too someday.
bitched, whined, and moaned about a "stolen" election down in Florida in 2000 (and the voters in Palm Beach hadn't been completely incompetant) there wouldn't have been the giant nationwide push for "electronic voting" in the first place, and I'd still be punching ballotcards nicely.
Thank you, sore losers.
The sanest thing would be to let technology progress and become adopted NATURALLY, instead of pushing things ahead faster than they should simply because you've suddenly lost faith in a system that's worked for decades. I don't need an ATM-like machine to handle my voting and I'm perfectly happy to wait hours for paper ballots to be manually shoved around. But then, I'm a Conservative.
Thank you, Democrats, for causing wasted millions of dollars, the introduction of dumb-ass technology, and general country-wide strife to fix a non-existant problem because you couldn't wrap your heads around the fact that Al Gore lost.
What's next? Do we get to spend the next 10 years futzing with the Electoral Collage only to decide that the Great Compromise was a good idea after all?
That being said I did break replication by dropping a test database which did not exist on the slaves (why should they care if they cannot execute drop database on a database which does not exist.
. html
Not going to argue too much with you, but this is a feature-not-a-bug. DROP TABLE returns an error if one or more of the tables don't exist. Errors cause replication halting. That's why DROP TABLE IF EXISTS is there.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/drop-table
Perl's performance for CGI is bad without some sort way of increasing its speed. The major options for this are:
- Apache and mod_perl - This can work transparently, but if you look at it funny, it breaks.
Agreed... hate it.
- FastCGI - which isn't transparent by any stretch of the imagination.
I'll take your word on this one -- I've never used it.
- SpeedyCGI - Same problem as FastCGI.
Have to disagree with you on this. As long as your code is already use strict compliant, you shouldn't have to make any changes at all to get things running under SpeedyCGI. I've used it in quite a number of locations, both in a CGI context and for regular sysadmin and mail server duties, without any sort of mind-bending issues (except for if I was doing heavy shell file descriptor magic, since it moves things around when doing its pipe). Strongly recommended.
- PPerl - which isn't necessarily written for use in CGI.
True. See above. PPerl is an interesting choice if you *do* in fact need to do some heavy shell file descriptor magic (see http://smtpd.develooper.com/). I've kept with SpeedyCGI for other reasons though.
- Rolling a custom http server using HTTP::Daemon or Socket. Which is a really bad idea.
Not if you enjoy pain. =)
That's exactly my point: it's the same data being made available... If you have recipient-checking turned on, then keeping SMTP VRFY off as an anti-spam matter-of-principle doesn't make much sense. Any probing software could just as easily sent a RCPT TO: command as a VRFY one.
There may not be a benefit per se (since SMTP VRFY isn't all that widely used any more, it seems), but it offers little protection at the same time if you're doing recipient checking.
And turn off SMTP VRFY.
SMTP VRFY (or recipient-checking at the SMTP level in general) being disabled is pointless. Given a choice between allowing people to not send mail to invalid addresses or having to deal with bounce-back scatter and getting your MX server blacklisted for third-party spam, I'll take the former any day.
And I'd wager anyone who's had to admin a qmail server and decide which (if any) recipient-checking patch to use would feel the same way.
It's far less load on the servers to have a more expensive spam identification process on the back end, than have to deal with the billions of messages generated by a dictionary attack on the front end.
If there really is no rigging going on, then WHY do you care if we make the system secure?
Did I say I didn't want to make the system secure? Don't read into my comments what you're expecting me to say...
I'm *ALL* for making the voting machines as secure as possible (though I think this particular vulnerability might be over-blown) and I agree with the critiscism that the machines wouldn't pass the Nevada regulations for slot machines. But remember, Diebold also makes ATMs and has been doing them for some time... I doubt they're *completely* incomptetent in their procedures and design choices.
show something at 12 o'clock that is directly contradicted by the election result then yes, something funny IS going on.
Bull! Have you considered that the voters who show up before noon on election day might not be a random sample of the totality of all persons who will vote that day? It's a well-documented fact (Google it, yo... but here's an anecdote) that election polls ALWAYS skew left during the beginning of the day.
And even by the end of the day, the VNS still wasn't properly accounting for "refuse to speak"s -- people who were randomly selected but didn't want to talk to the poll person. Those have been shown to be more likely to be conservatives.
Stop begging the question. Just because the polls and results didn't match up doesn't mean you've proven your hypothesis.