I have to agree. While I did enjoy Thief 3, it wasn't as good as the first two. One of the things that really detracted from the fun (for me) was the loading zones. Some of the zones weren't even really that big, and it really spoilt the immersiveness of the experience. Loading when moving from inside a building to outside (or vice versa) I can cope with; when walking down a corridor? No. The loading zone mist looked stupid too. Ok, so at least it marked the boundary of the current zone, but a weird mist in the middle of a corridor in some guy's house did not look right at all.
That said, I *really* like the orphanage mission. That was genuinely creepy, in the best tradition of the creepier moments of the first two, or of another all-time favourite of mine, System Shock 2.
Since just about every prediction made by the Big Bang theory was the opposite of the matching prediction for the Steady State, then the BB does predict God, in that anyone claiming it doesn't has in effect also claimed that these two theories are opposite in so many other respects, but they have just this one property (God-opposition) in common, instead of being opposite in this way, too.
No, that does not follow logically. Just because two theories produce opposing predictions in most respects, does not prove that they must necessarily oppose in all respects. It certainly *suggests* it, but it does not *prove* it.
Therefore, you can't just say "steady state disproves the existence of God, big bang is the opposite of steady state, therefore big bang proves the existence of God". For one thing, the steady state theory does not disprove the existence of God, it simply doesn't require it. God can survive if you simply allow that (parts of) Genesis are wrong, and He did not create the universe. (Or alternatively, allow that "heaven and earth" does not encompass the whole universe, and refers literally to heaven and the Earth)
(Note that I'm not arguing for or against the existence of God)
I'm sorry, but rms has meant "root-mean-square" to me for about 15 years, or roughly 8 years longer than I've known about GNU or Linux, and it's meant that to mathematicians for a lot, lot longer than that.
Since when does anyone "own" an acronym? Talk about overly touchy...
I'm sorry, I really don't see a lot fo difference between removing features from (say) Office Professional and selling it as Office Student Edition, and removing fonts from StarOffice and giving it away as OpenOffice.
In both cases, you've taken a full product, removed some features, and make it available at a lower cost.
Also a crap measure - what if my code is so good that I have almost no unit tests that require fixing? What if I spend all my time artfully creating subtly broken unit tests, then fixing them? What if I create dozens of trivial unit tests per class/module, meaning that any time there is a bug I'm going to have loads to fix?
It might work if you have a rule that you're not allowed to fix your own bugs, but then you may just end up creating collusion amongst the developers to provide each other with plenty of unit tests to fix.
I have become convinced that there is no easy, scriptable way to measure a developer's performance. It's always going to involve work - talk to the team and project leads and managers, talk to their coworkers, take a look at their work schedule (eg do they generally get stuff done on time, do they take a lot of time off, etc), and so on.
Now before I get flamed and labelled as a Windows fanboy, I should mention that I use OSX as my native desktop OS and Linux (Gentoo) for my personal servers.
I think it's a little sad that you felt the need to end a cogent, reasonable argument that ought to be able to stand or fall on its own merits with a disclaimer like that. No disrespect to you, I'm more than aware that a sizeable minority of people will have written off everything you wrote as being the work of a "M$ shill".
Fact is, the more code an app is composed of, the more likely it is that there are bugs and exploits, and the harder it is likely to be to understand it. Of course, you can take it too far the other way, and write code that's so dense and so cryptic that it's a maintenance nightmare. The point is that the more time you take over designing and writing your code, the more likely it is to be high quality; that applies no matter who's writing your pay cheques, or if you're doing it for the love of it.
Well, it's been a long time since I wrote any C code, so bear with me if I'm misremembering or this has been fixed, but try this:
int main (void) {
for ( ; ; )
{
fork();
} }
Like I said, the syntax may be off, but without process limits in place something like that will spawn processes until the system overloads and is unable to spawn any more. In that situation, you can'teven log in to fix it, let alone run kill...
Furthermore, I've had X lock up hard on me several times in the past. Sure, the underlying OS may still be functional, but when it's the only machine you have there's no way to ssh in and kill it, so it might as well be completely hosed. (For that matter, when the Windows UI locks up it may be that the underlying OS is ok, you just can't ssh in to tell...)
One of the conditions of getting a Phd in the group I was in was that you had to have at least two articles published during your studies - if you didn't, you weren't likely to make the grade.
How can a scientist not publish? With the exception of secret, corporate/government only stuff, there's no other reason to be a scientist but to let other people know what you discover!
Personally, I'd say that a photogrpah is defined by the process through which it is created. Therefore, to my mind, a picture of the image on the screen of my monitor, taken by use of a camera ("traditional" or digital), camera phone, pin-hole camera, direct neural download, etc is a photograph. Conversely, a copy of the image on the screen dumped to the harddrive by the OS, game, etc that is causing it to be displayed is not.
For me, I think the difference is that there needs to be a physical process external to the thing that the image is being created of. Dumping a screenshot, while arguably a physical process (movement of electrons, pressing of key, etc) is not an external process. I'd also like to include something about the apparatus used to create the image, but don't have time to word it to include all of the examples above.
Maybe what I'm really feeling is that there needs to be a lens involved, and that without one, it's not a photograph. That would exclude pinhole cameras, however...
While I appreciate that digital cameras have somewhat blurred the distinctions, I still feel that it's a hell of a stretch equating screenshots with photographs. Even a perfectly photo-realistic scene captured from a game wouldn't be a photograph to my mind; that would require pointing an actual, physical object at some other, actual physical objects and pressing a button (or even saying "take photograph!" for that matter). Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud.
I'm not arguing that purely digital representations aren't art, just that they're not photographs, in the same way that a painting or a sculpture isn't.
No, it's not OpenBSD's problem, but at the same time they cannot reasonably expect Hifn to violate said law just for their convenience.
IF Hifn are required by the government to make people jump through these hoops, then Theo's anger is entirely misdirected. There's no point shouting at someone who has no more control over a situation than you do.
If in fact they are *not* required to make people jump through those hoops, then fine, shout away, but from the information I currently have, that's not at all clear.
That's pretty much exactly what I was going to say.
I remember playing Dragon's Lair in the arcade once. It sucked, even when not compared to the other games available.
What makes them think people are going to pay for a game of comparable quality (in gameplay terms at least) to some of the worse after-thought games that get stuck on kids' DVDs as extras? I understand the power of nostalgia, but I'm slap bang in the target demographic age-wise and an avid gamer, and I'm not touching it with a barge pole.
While you are of course 100% correct (how can you possibly design a solution to a set of requirements you don't have?), that's the fault of the submittor. Those missing requirements really should have been supplied already...
I for one don't care to support a company who engages in such practices
Well, it would appear that a condition of obtaining an export licence for their products is that they be able to identify their customers. This condition was stipulated by the US government (or an agency thereof), so it would appear that Hifn had a choice: agree, or not export their products.
From what I've read so far at least, it would appear that you do not care to support a company that complies with the law and demands of its government? I'm not trolling, so please tell me what I'm missing.
While that's true, if you skimp on the processor too much, you're going to starve your expensive GPU.
Also, Tom's did a benchmark a few months ago comparing performance with various amounts of RAM. While they found a decent improvement going 512MB -> 1Gig, they didn't find much difference going 1Gig -> 2Gig.
That said, even after reading it I included a matched pair of 1Gig sticks in my upgrade; it didn't add much to the price and it can't hurt. (Besides which, being able to alt-tab out of a game without swapping like mad is very nice)
Alastair Reynolds is a British author who's written three novels with a similar theme (the Revelation Space series). Basically, a huge war millennia ago threatened to destroy all life in the galaxy. The eventual winners created a race of machines and seeded them throughout the galaxy. They sit and wait to detect civillisations that reach a certain level of technological advancement, then wipe them out. The idea is to prevent large-scale space-faring civillisations from springing up, meeting, clashing and destroying everything.
If you like space opera, they're a pretty good read.
Step 2) Microsoft adapt their software to work with established standards such as PDF, ODF, OpenGL, HTML etc etc etc.
Read the comments on the story about Adobe perhaps maybe thinking about suing MS under anti-trust laws for trying to include PDF creation tools in Office; most of the highly-rated ones were screaming bloody murder about it, with many cries of "embrace and extend".
As for HTML, I can only assume you are referring somewhat obliquely to the non-standards compliant aspects of HTML that MS has introduced with IE. It might surprise you to know, then, that ASP.NET controls all emit standards-compliant code, and function well in IE and Firefox (not checked Opera personally). Not all of them are 100% identical across both browsers, but they degrade gracefully (eg a DHTML treelist might require a page refresh in Firefox).
MS has a long way to go, but at least parts of it are making steps in the right direction.
It really depends on what you're doing for those 15 hours. I've done my fair share of 75+ hour weeks, and I'm not doing it again without a damn good reason. If nothing else, it would mean my daughter not seeing me at all during the week, which is simply not acceptable.
Also, remember that we're supposed to get around 8 hours sleep a night; add that to the 15 hours working, and that leaves you 1 hour for everything else, including washing, cooking, eating, travelling to and from work, etc.
Either you have zero time to yourself, or you probably don't get enough sleep.
Eh? The worm itself (at least from the description here) sounds relatively serious; the 2 would seem rather low, until you factor in that the company doing the rating is the same company that's currently failing to stop it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree. While I did enjoy Thief 3, it wasn't as good as the first two. One of the things that really detracted from the fun (for me) was the loading zones. Some of the zones weren't even really that big, and it really spoilt the immersiveness of the experience. Loading when moving from inside a building to outside (or vice versa) I can cope with; when walking down a corridor? No. The loading zone mist looked stupid too. Ok, so at least it marked the boundary of the current zone, but a weird mist in the middle of a corridor in some guy's house did not look right at all.
That said, I *really* like the orphanage mission. That was genuinely creepy, in the best tradition of the creepier moments of the first two, or of another all-time favourite of mine, System Shock 2.
It's not just the truth, it's the definition of fundamentalism - the belief that what is written in a holy book is competely true.
Since just about every prediction made by the Big Bang theory was the opposite of the matching prediction for the Steady State, then the BB does predict God, in that anyone claiming it doesn't has in effect also claimed that these two theories are opposite in so many other respects, but they have just this one property (God-opposition) in common, instead of being opposite in this way, too.
No, that does not follow logically. Just because two theories produce opposing predictions in most respects, does not prove that they must necessarily oppose in all respects. It certainly *suggests* it, but it does not *prove* it.
Therefore, you can't just say "steady state disproves the existence of God, big bang is the opposite of steady state, therefore big bang proves the existence of God". For one thing, the steady state theory does not disprove the existence of God, it simply doesn't require it. God can survive if you simply allow that (parts of) Genesis are wrong, and He did not create the universe. (Or alternatively, allow that "heaven and earth" does not encompass the whole universe, and refers literally to heaven and the Earth)
(Note that I'm not arguing for or against the existence of God)
Treading on "our" acronyms?
I'm sorry, but rms has meant "root-mean-square" to me for about 15 years, or roughly 8 years longer than I've known about GNU or Linux, and it's meant that to mathematicians for a lot, lot longer than that.
Since when does anyone "own" an acronym? Talk about overly touchy...
I'm sorry, I really don't see a lot fo difference between removing features from (say) Office Professional and selling it as Office Student Edition, and removing fonts from StarOffice and giving it away as OpenOffice.
In both cases, you've taken a full product, removed some features, and make it available at a lower cost.
Also a crap measure - what if my code is so good that I have almost no unit tests that require fixing? What if I spend all my time artfully creating subtly broken unit tests, then fixing them? What if I create dozens of trivial unit tests per class/module, meaning that any time there is a bug I'm going to have loads to fix?
It might work if you have a rule that you're not allowed to fix your own bugs, but then you may just end up creating collusion amongst the developers to provide each other with plenty of unit tests to fix.
I have become convinced that there is no easy, scriptable way to measure a developer's performance. It's always going to involve work - talk to the team and project leads and managers, talk to their coworkers, take a look at their work schedule (eg do they generally get stuff done on time, do they take a lot of time off, etc), and so on.
Now before I get flamed and labelled as a Windows fanboy, I should mention that I use OSX as my native desktop OS and Linux (Gentoo) for my personal servers.
I think it's a little sad that you felt the need to end a cogent, reasonable argument that ought to be able to stand or fall on its own merits with a disclaimer like that. No disrespect to you, I'm more than aware that a sizeable minority of people will have written off everything you wrote as being the work of a "M$ shill".
Fact is, the more code an app is composed of, the more likely it is that there are bugs and exploits, and the harder it is likely to be to understand it. Of course, you can take it too far the other way, and write code that's so dense and so cryptic that it's a maintenance nightmare. The point is that the more time you take over designing and writing your code, the more likely it is to be high quality; that applies no matter who's writing your pay cheques, or if you're doing it for the love of it.
Well, it's been a long time since I wrote any C code, so bear with me if I'm misremembering or this has been fixed, but try this:
int main (void)
{
for ( ; ; )
{
fork();
}
}
Like I said, the syntax may be off, but without process limits in place something like that will spawn processes until the system overloads and is unable to spawn any more. In that situation, you can'teven log in to fix it, let alone run kill...
Furthermore, I've had X lock up hard on me several times in the past. Sure, the underlying OS may still be functional, but when it's the only machine you have there's no way to ssh in and kill it, so it might as well be completely hosed. (For that matter, when the Windows UI locks up it may be that the underlying OS is ok, you just can't ssh in to tell...)
He doesn't publish?
One of the conditions of getting a Phd in the group I was in was that you had to have at least two articles published during your studies - if you didn't, you weren't likely to make the grade.
How can a scientist not publish? With the exception of secret, corporate/government only stuff, there's no other reason to be a scientist but to let other people know what you discover!
Yeah; I think that'll do very nicely, thank you.
Personally, I'd say that a photogrpah is defined by the process through which it is created. Therefore, to my mind, a picture of the image on the screen of my monitor, taken by use of a camera ("traditional" or digital), camera phone, pin-hole camera, direct neural download, etc is a photograph. Conversely, a copy of the image on the screen dumped to the harddrive by the OS, game, etc that is causing it to be displayed is not.
For me, I think the difference is that there needs to be a physical process external to the thing that the image is being created of. Dumping a screenshot, while arguably a physical process (movement of electrons, pressing of key, etc) is not an external process. I'd also like to include something about the apparatus used to create the image, but don't have time to word it to include all of the examples above.
Maybe what I'm really feeling is that there needs to be a lens involved, and that without one, it's not a photograph. That would exclude pinhole cameras, however...
While I appreciate that digital cameras have somewhat blurred the distinctions, I still feel that it's a hell of a stretch equating screenshots with photographs. Even a perfectly photo-realistic scene captured from a game wouldn't be a photograph to my mind; that would require pointing an actual, physical object at some other, actual physical objects and pressing a button (or even saying "take photograph!" for that matter). Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud.
I'm not arguing that purely digital representations aren't art, just that they're not photographs, in the same way that a painting or a sculpture isn't.
This has to be one of the most ridiculous misapplications of this topic that I've ever seen.
1. You have no right, natural, God-given or otherwise, to have your content hosted on Flickr.
2. The accounts have not been deleted, they have just been delisted. That means that they won't show up in a search.
3. As I understand it, you can still provide people with direct links to the screenshots.
Please, help me out here - in what way is this a YRO issue?
No, it's not OpenBSD's problem, but at the same time they cannot reasonably expect Hifn to violate said law just for their convenience.
IF Hifn are required by the government to make people jump through these hoops, then Theo's anger is entirely misdirected. There's no point shouting at someone who has no more control over a situation than you do.
If in fact they are *not* required to make people jump through those hoops, then fine, shout away, but from the information I currently have, that's not at all clear.
That's pretty much exactly what I was going to say.
I remember playing Dragon's Lair in the arcade once. It sucked, even when not compared to the other games available.
What makes them think people are going to pay for a game of comparable quality (in gameplay terms at least) to some of the worse after-thought games that get stuck on kids' DVDs as extras? I understand the power of nostalgia, but I'm slap bang in the target demographic age-wise and an avid gamer, and I'm not touching it with a barge pole.
While you are of course 100% correct (how can you possibly design a solution to a set of requirements you don't have?), that's the fault of the submittor. Those missing requirements really should have been supplied already...
I for one don't care to support a company who engages in such practices
Well, it would appear that a condition of obtaining an export licence for their products is that they be able to identify their customers. This condition was stipulated by the US government (or an agency thereof), so it would appear that Hifn had a choice: agree, or not export their products.
From what I've read so far at least, it would appear that you do not care to support a company that complies with the law and demands of its government? I'm not trolling, so please tell me what I'm missing.
You had me all excited, until I read: "UK astronomers have spotted a giant cloud of methyl alcohol".
Methanol? Bah! Can't drink that...
True, Real Christians are typically well read and well thougt out individuals.
"Real Christians" are typically just like everyone else. As a group, they're generally neither better nor worse read than the average.
While that's true, if you skimp on the processor too much, you're going to starve your expensive GPU.
Also, Tom's did a benchmark a few months ago comparing performance with various amounts of RAM. While they found a decent improvement going 512MB -> 1Gig, they didn't find much difference going 1Gig -> 2Gig.
That said, even after reading it I included a matched pair of 1Gig sticks in my upgrade; it didn't add much to the price and it can't hurt. (Besides which, being able to alt-tab out of a game without swapping like mad is very nice)
Alastair Reynolds is a British author who's written three novels with a similar theme (the Revelation Space series). Basically, a huge war millennia ago threatened to destroy all life in the galaxy. The eventual winners created a race of machines and seeded them throughout the galaxy. They sit and wait to detect civillisations that reach a certain level of technological advancement, then wipe them out. The idea is to prevent large-scale space-faring civillisations from springing up, meeting, clashing and destroying everything.
If you like space opera, they're a pretty good read.
Step 2) Microsoft adapt their software to work with established standards such as PDF, ODF, OpenGL, HTML etc etc etc.
Read the comments on the story about Adobe perhaps maybe thinking about suing MS under anti-trust laws for trying to include PDF creation tools in Office; most of the highly-rated ones were screaming bloody murder about it, with many cries of "embrace and extend".
As for HTML, I can only assume you are referring somewhat obliquely to the non-standards compliant aspects of HTML that MS has introduced with IE. It might surprise you to know, then, that ASP.NET controls all emit standards-compliant code, and function well in IE and Firefox (not checked Opera personally). Not all of them are 100% identical across both browsers, but they degrade gracefully (eg a DHTML treelist might require a page refresh in Firefox).
MS has a long way to go, but at least parts of it are making steps in the right direction.
It's almost unheard of outside of the Internet.
Also 15 hours/day doesn't sound bad.
It really depends on what you're doing for those 15 hours. I've done my fair share of 75+ hour weeks, and I'm not doing it again without a damn good reason. If nothing else, it would mean my daughter not seeing me at all during the week, which is simply not acceptable.
Also, remember that we're supposed to get around 8 hours sleep a night; add that to the 15 hours working, and that leaves you 1 hour for everything else, including washing, cooking, eating, travelling to and from work, etc.
Either you have zero time to yourself, or you probably don't get enough sleep.
Eh? The worm itself (at least from the description here) sounds relatively serious; the 2 would seem rather low, until you factor in that the company doing the rating is the same company that's currently failing to stop it.