I hate this absolute garbage about "I need to upgrade my Graphics card every year to be able to play newer games!"
Utter, utter bullshit. How long have graphics cards like the 4870 been out for? Find me a game that doesn't run just fine on that (minus pathalogical examples like Crysis that run like crap on pretty much whatever hardware you throw at it).
If you make decent buying decisions, you should be able to stretch your video card for at least 2 1/2 to 3 years.
That, and trying to play an FPS with a controller is about as much fun as trying to pull out your teeth with a set of plyers.
"You know the commercial they'd like to do if they could, and I guarentee if they could they'd do this right here. Here's the woman's face: beautiful. Camera pulls back, naked breast. Camera pulls back, she's totally naked, legs apart, 2 fingers right here, and it just says "Drink Coke"".
The thing is, if you're a coder, you're also probably good at math. You can thus calculate the odds of winning said lottery, and promptly decide "I'm not going to waste my money on that".
People who play the lottery would be a pretty biased sample of the population I'd imagine.
Congratulations, you can google some numbers and stick them into a formula. You're brilliant, and it's oh so funny to come up with bullshit statistics like "only 100 times more likely than finding intelligent life in the universe".
iPods and the like are not the best, and you're kidding yourself if you think they're anywhere close. They basically pulled off a Microsoft of their own - in the right place at the right time. They got a critical mass of brand name recognition and rode that to where they are today.
Terrible stock speakers, comparitively crappy audio decoding hardware, and tying them to annoying and crappy programs (iTunes) is just the start. "Popular" does not imply "Superior".
Yeah, but the alternative Mebi and Gibi sounds like something out yaoi. So I'd rather stick with 1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes.
That's the only qualm I have as well. I want to use correct language, it's just that if I ever used the term "Mebibyte", I'm afraid everyone would think I either had a terrible lisp or I was just generally a bit slow. It sounds ridiculous.
You're missing the point of the metric system. The entire idea is that I don't -have- to remember that there are 12 inches in a foot, that there are 14 pounds in a stone, that there are 4 quarts in a gallon, and all other such examples. Essentially any measurement that is not to do with time or computers will have a common divisor of 10.
It's less strain on your memory and easier to calculate. Yes, the mathematician in me realises that from an abstract point of view, the two systems are isomorphic. That doesn't mean that I want to go around using units with more complicated ratios where I don't have to.
As any good engineer will tell you, don't make a system any more complex than it needs to be.
Ah, the beauty of having your own computer that no-one else will use.
Of course, I'd say the number one porn protector is to install some variant of Linux on there. That way, the only people who will be able to navigate around it will also be able to use Linux, so you know you already have the firepower of "well you look at it too" in your back pocket.
To the post correcting me on composite, thanks. Stupid mistake.
Perhaps it's the extreme tiredness, but I still see nothing in elliptic curve cryptography which makes use of the fact that pi must not contains any patterns in its decimal digits. Unless you were talking about the stupid mistake re prime/composite that someone kindly corrected for me.
Cryptography has nothing to do with a prime "not being a prime". It's to do with quick factorization of primes.
Besides, I don't see why pi having any sort of repeating pattern would disrupt any theorems. I honestly can't think of any theorem that requires such a thing. Irrational and transcendental yes, but no repeating decimal pattern?
That's because the model they use is pretty much the stock standard SRI (Succeptible-Recovered-Infected) infection model. They even say so themselves (while showing that their model contains an extra non-linear term, included via Mass-Action - another pretty common modelling "law").
You can't seriously hope that the industry as a collective moves to $2.99 games. Sure, there's a market for those games, but don't kid yourself, there's a massive market out there for proper games (that sounds rather conceited, but so be it).
Perhaps it's the Australian in me that recognises I'm basically always going to get screwed on price when it comes to games, but I think there have been plenty of reasonably priced games released. I'll freely admit I've become something of a Steam fanboy, they have some fantastic deals on there. Without sounding too much like a shill, I don't know how anyone can complain about something like the Orange Box for $35 (that's about what it costs in Australia). I've bought more games in the past year than ever before - and paid far less for them than what I ever have in the past.
Slashdot seems to have yet another case of rose tinted glasses. Hell, I remember buying Street Fighter 2 Turbo on my Mega drive back in...whenever it was. That cost me $120. A lot of the other mega drive games of the day were $80+ (SNES owners can leave their sniggering for another day). I'd never pay that for a game these days, and thankfully, I don't have to.
That is really a gross exaggeration. For a start the typical IQ for a university student is 125, 100 or less really don't even get a look in.
Where are you pulling this number from? An IQ of 125 is higher than roughly ~94-95% of the population. That might be true for certain courses, but is certainly not true for the collective of university students. Just because you have a brilliant theoretical physicist at the university, that's balanced out by 15 dimwits taking "IT for marketing" and other such inane drivel.
There is no where in the world that modern marketing does not put down menial jobs and inflate the importance of qualified profession and this is spread through out mass media. Now c'mon how many parents tell their children from the earliest age that they want them to grow up to be labourers, cleaners or junk food professionals.
This is true, but implication one way doesn't necessarily imply the other way is true. Just because few parents would tell their children that they wish for them to grow up and work in such menial jobs, I'm willing to bet that there are still many parents out there that do not place that much value in education, for a variety of reasons.
The reason they bring in 'cheap' labour from overseas, cheap, get it cheap, because the work fucking sucks and nobody wants to do that shitty work for shitty pay (pay people enough and they will be quite happy to do the most disgusting jobs, gonzo porn anyone).
Quite true. But the only reason these people are willing to do it is because their life would otherwise be even worse if they remained where they were - or at least they are lead to believe so.
Now I have done many jobs, and weirdly enough I did enjoy the physical labour but, seriously fuck you if you think I would do that hard work for minimum wage. I know which were the easier jobs the professional ones with the higher pay versus brickies labourer, soldier, waiter (everyone else eating, drinking and smoking while I'm not, fuck you lazy buggers go find a buffet), production worker, fish cleaner (damn them freezers were cold numb ears, nose and hands were really irritating). I never look down my nose at people doing the crap jobs and yes they are way underpaid for the hard work they do.
I think anyone who looks down on someone else for doing a job that they consider "beneath" them is, to put it lightly, a god damn moron. Not only does society need many of these people to do these jobs in order to function the way it does currently, but many of these people would work harder than the brain dead dolts shuffling from meeting to meeting.
It is hard to blame someone for feeling frustrated after running up a massive debt pursuing a career that from the earliest age via every message system possible has been told they must get a higher education and a professional job, otherwise you end up as a menial labourer, with no real hope of a future and it's your fault that you are exploited by the rich and greedy and an uncaring government and, by a whole bunch of stuck up arse holes who do have professional jobs and think menial works should be treated like shit on minimum wage and be thankful for it.
I agree. In regards to the article however, the reverse is also true: just because you have a (most likely) bullshit degree, does not entitle you to be hired by whoever you choose. She has brought it on herself - if she really wanted the employment, she should also be taking it on her shoulders to go out and find things to apply for. If she thinks that they're not doing a good enough job "selling her", then its up to her to rectify that by doing it herself.
I'm not sure which is more indicative of a sense of entitlement here - the ridiculous "get me a job now!" stupidity or the fact that she's launching a ridiculous, frivilous lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
You sure? We could talk a bit about reach and flexibility...
I hate this absolute garbage about "I need to upgrade my Graphics card every year to be able to play newer games!"
Utter, utter bullshit. How long have graphics cards like the 4870 been out for? Find me a game that doesn't run just fine on that (minus pathalogical examples like Crysis that run like crap on pretty much whatever hardware you throw at it).
If you make decent buying decisions, you should be able to stretch your video card for at least 2 1/2 to 3 years.
That, and trying to play an FPS with a controller is about as much fun as trying to pull out your teeth with a set of plyers.
"You know the commercial they'd like to do if they could, and I guarentee if they could they'd do this right here. Here's the woman's face: beautiful. Camera pulls back, naked breast. Camera pulls back, she's totally naked, legs apart, 2 fingers right here, and it just says "Drink Coke"".
Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending...
The thing is, if you're a coder, you're also probably good at math. You can thus calculate the odds of winning said lottery, and promptly decide "I'm not going to waste my money on that".
People who play the lottery would be a pretty biased sample of the population I'd imagine.
...George Carlin's all suicide channel on cable TV?
http://xkcd.com/384/
Congratulations, you can google some numbers and stick them into a formula. You're brilliant, and it's oh so funny to come up with bullshit statistics like "only 100 times more likely than finding intelligent life in the universe".
I have always thought of programming as the art of converting caffeine into an executable. Coffee is part of the cost of doing business.
Mathematicians had the monopoly on this first, since they are devices for turning coffee into theorems.
iPods and the like are not the best, and you're kidding yourself if you think they're anywhere close. They basically pulled off a Microsoft of their own - in the right place at the right time. They got a critical mass of brand name recognition and rode that to where they are today.
Terrible stock speakers, comparitively crappy audio decoding hardware, and tying them to annoying and crappy programs (iTunes) is just the start. "Popular" does not imply "Superior".
Or in two words: sampling bias.
The sky is blue, the grass is green, and rabbits are procreating at a fast rate.
If they teach everyone to touch type, there won't be any reason to own a keyboard with no markings on the keys.
You're removing both my entertainment when anyone wants to use such a keyboard, and the knowledge that my porn collection is slightly safer!
Yeah, but the alternative Mebi and Gibi sounds like something out yaoi. So I'd rather stick with 1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes.
That's the only qualm I have as well. I want to use correct language, it's just that if I ever used the term "Mebibyte", I'm afraid everyone would think I either had a terrible lisp or I was just generally a bit slow. It sounds ridiculous.
We need some better names here.
You're missing the point of the metric system. The entire idea is that I don't -have- to remember that there are 12 inches in a foot, that there are 14 pounds in a stone, that there are 4 quarts in a gallon, and all other such examples. Essentially any measurement that is not to do with time or computers will have a common divisor of 10.
It's less strain on your memory and easier to calculate. Yes, the mathematician in me realises that from an abstract point of view, the two systems are isomorphic. That doesn't mean that I want to go around using units with more complicated ratios where I don't have to.
As any good engineer will tell you, don't make a system any more complex than it needs to be.
Ah, the beauty of having your own computer that no-one else will use.
Of course, I'd say the number one porn protector is to install some variant of Linux on there. That way, the only people who will be able to navigate around it will also be able to use Linux, so you know you already have the firepower of "well you look at it too" in your back pocket.
To the post correcting me on composite, thanks. Stupid mistake.
Perhaps it's the extreme tiredness, but I still see nothing in elliptic curve cryptography which makes use of the fact that pi must not contains any patterns in its decimal digits. Unless you were talking about the stupid mistake re prime/composite that someone kindly corrected for me.
Cryptography has nothing to do with a prime "not being a prime". It's to do with quick factorization of primes.
Besides, I don't see why pi having any sort of repeating pattern would disrupt any theorems. I honestly can't think of any theorem that requires such a thing. Irrational and transcendental yes, but no repeating decimal pattern?
Maybe you can enlighten me to such a theorem.
...but this reminds me of this, in a way.
http://bash.org/?117002 [bash.org]
In this case it's probably more akin to -
Given: ZFC
Prove: The continuum hypothesis
Given the legal systems of every country on Earth, I'm pretty sure you can find at least two contradictory laws.
That's because the model they use is pretty much the stock standard SRI (Succeptible-Recovered-Infected) infection model. They even say so themselves (while showing that their model contains an extra non-linear term, included via Mass-Action - another pretty common modelling "law").
Still, a fun application of stability analysis.
You can't seriously hope that the industry as a collective moves to $2.99 games. Sure, there's a market for those games, but don't kid yourself, there's a massive market out there for proper games (that sounds rather conceited, but so be it).
Perhaps it's the Australian in me that recognises I'm basically always going to get screwed on price when it comes to games, but I think there have been plenty of reasonably priced games released. I'll freely admit I've become something of a Steam fanboy, they have some fantastic deals on there. Without sounding too much like a shill, I don't know how anyone can complain about something like the Orange Box for $35 (that's about what it costs in Australia). I've bought more games in the past year than ever before - and paid far less for them than what I ever have in the past.
Slashdot seems to have yet another case of rose tinted glasses. Hell, I remember buying Street Fighter 2 Turbo on my Mega drive back in...whenever it was. That cost me $120. A lot of the other mega drive games of the day were $80+ (SNES owners can leave their sniggering for another day). I'd never pay that for a game these days, and thankfully, I don't have to.
iCensor.
That is really a gross exaggeration. For a start the typical IQ for a university student is 125, 100 or less really don't even get a look in.
Where are you pulling this number from? An IQ of 125 is higher than roughly ~94-95% of the population. That might be true for certain courses, but is certainly not true for the collective of university students. Just because you have a brilliant theoretical physicist at the university, that's balanced out by 15 dimwits taking "IT for marketing" and other such inane drivel.
There is no where in the world that modern marketing does not put down menial jobs and inflate the importance of qualified profession and this is spread through out mass media. Now c'mon how many parents tell their children from the earliest age that they want them to grow up to be labourers, cleaners or junk food professionals.
This is true, but implication one way doesn't necessarily imply the other way is true. Just because few parents would tell their children that they wish for them to grow up and work in such menial jobs, I'm willing to bet that there are still many parents out there that do not place that much value in education, for a variety of reasons.
The reason they bring in 'cheap' labour from overseas, cheap, get it cheap, because the work fucking sucks and nobody wants to do that shitty work for shitty pay (pay people enough and they will be quite happy to do the most disgusting jobs, gonzo porn anyone).
Quite true. But the only reason these people are willing to do it is because their life would otherwise be even worse if they remained where they were - or at least they are lead to believe so.
Now I have done many jobs, and weirdly enough I did enjoy the physical labour but, seriously fuck you if you think I would do that hard work for minimum wage. I know which were the easier jobs the professional ones with the higher pay versus brickies labourer, soldier, waiter (everyone else eating, drinking and smoking while I'm not, fuck you lazy buggers go find a buffet), production worker, fish cleaner (damn them freezers were cold numb ears, nose and hands were really irritating). I never look down my nose at people doing the crap jobs and yes they are way underpaid for the hard work they do.
I think anyone who looks down on someone else for doing a job that they consider "beneath" them is, to put it lightly, a god damn moron. Not only does society need many of these people to do these jobs in order to function the way it does currently, but many of these people would work harder than the brain dead dolts shuffling from meeting to meeting.
It is hard to blame someone for feeling frustrated after running up a massive debt pursuing a career that from the earliest age via every message system possible has been told they must get a higher education and a professional job, otherwise you end up as a menial labourer, with no real hope of a future and it's your fault that you are exploited by the rich and greedy and an uncaring government and, by a whole bunch of stuck up arse holes who do have professional jobs and think menial works should be treated like shit on minimum wage and be thankful for it.
I agree. In regards to the article however, the reverse is also true: just because you have a (most likely) bullshit degree, does not entitle you to be hired by whoever you choose. She has brought it on herself - if she really wanted the employment, she should also be taking it on her shoulders to go out and find things to apply for. If she thinks that they're not doing a good enough job "selling her", then its up to her to rectify that by doing it herself.
I'm not sure which is more indicative of a sense of entitlement here - the ridiculous "get me a job now!" stupidity or the fact that she's launching a ridiculous, frivilous lawsuit.
Obligatory:
http://xkcd.com/558/
If Toyota implodes, a lot of car manufacturers are going to die well before them. Until recently, they hadn't posted a loss for 70 years.
They have a massive, massive stockpile of cash. I'd be very surprised if they're going anywhere soon.