Many PS3 fans pitch the "won't talk about it until then" as proof that there will be a cut -- some suggest an 80GB unbundled for $449. Hard to say. A lot of people are arguing that Sony will definitely cut to $500 once the 60s are gone, but it's hard to say; I mean, you wouldn't expect them to have a PR stunt with a decapitated goat, but they did. So who can predict what madness Sony's sales people will think of? I'm sort of skeptical about a cut, just because the holiday season tends to boost sales, and they may not need a cut to keep systems moving.
Ahh, yes. It was "her" address (actually, a/dev/null box, as they later confirmed) that was put on all the spam, to give the impression that they gave a fuck whether it was bouncing or not. They didn't. I think it's funny that they apparently never complied with the law that she claimed was a good anti-spam law. I mean, it's bad enough that she was involved with legislation that was utterly worthless; so far as I know, their spam never even complied with that worthless legislation. Insult to injury, that.
So, back in the day, Real spammed. A lot. They spammed constantly, they spammed everybody (like IETF role accounts), and they did so unrepentantly, with forged addresses in the headers and everything.
Good call. Too many people make the mistake of assuming that the forty hours a given project will take can be forty CONSECUTIVE hours of their workdays.
See, brains are complicated things, and sometimes what I really need is a half hour or so NOT looking straight at the problem, although I tend to be sort of absently thinking about it. And then suddenly I know what to do, and I go do it.
As someone on one of the other forums I read commented a couple of weeks back when this was news, "The People's Republic of China has jumped the shark."
Now, imagine what would happen if, at some point after this declaration, there stopped being births in the PRC. People would fall all over themselves trying to figure it out, because it would answer the "when does the embryo turn into a person" question.
Good multiple choice tests can be very hard, and not "reward guessing". See, for instance, the mathematics GRE. I'd like to see anyone "guess" through that.
A good test gives no advantage to random guesses, but some advantage to educated guesses -- which is, after all, the point.
I went into a game store with a friend (a non-gamer). The store guy was trying very hard to persuade us that the n-gage was amazingly good.
His best selling point: The game goes in BEHIND THE BATTERY. That means you'll never lose a game cartridge, because there's no way to get at it without taking the thing apart, yanking the battery out, and messing around inside. MUCH better than those lame cartridge systems, where the cartridge can just sort of fall out.
Uh-huh.
There's probably no way they can ever recover their dignity after that one. I'd be more inclined to buy a gaming product which advertised that it was designed by ten clowns while they were inside a tiny little car.
Let me give an example. I recently stumbled across a chunk of code which "used to work" in 2.6.14, but which had compile errors in 2.6.21, claiming that it was an error to declare an array of negative size. WTF?
Tracing through a series of macros (some with all-lowercase names, in violation of the standard C convention of the last thirty years), I eventually found a complicated expression in a macro expansion, to the effect of BUILD_BUG_ON_ZERO(various && conditions || otherconditions).
That, in turn, is defined to, as you might easily expect, declare an array whose size is negative if and only if the argument evaluates to non-zero.
This has a number of problems.
1. BUILD_BUG_ON_ZERO might be taken to indicate that it is a bug for the condition to be zero. No. It's the same as BUILD_BUG_ON(condition), except that it yields the value (size_t) 0 if the condition is zero, instead of not yielding a value. The name is comprehensible if you're familiar with it, but frankly ill-chosen. 2. Using this macro inside a macro expanded from another macro results in a seriously opaque chunk of code. The error message one gets (about the array declaration) is on a line of code that doesn't declare any arrays, and has no semantic reason to be declaring one. There's nothing to tell you what happened without you carefully following a chain of expansions. The error message is useless.
Really, the kernel is mostly doing pretty well these days. I don't expect to have to reboot a Linux machine because "maybe something got corrupted" or whatever.
But, as someone who has to READ this code, I wish it were written more clearly and better documented. Obviously, this is something any or all of us can work on.
Sony's been very good at marketing SecuROM, and it's amazingly bad. I gave up on NWN2 when the publisher confirmed that, yes, they were seeing the same crashes that thousands of users were, and the crashes were caused by copy protection -- removing SecuROM from the game made the crashes stop.
So, what are the chances that this is Sony's way of trying to harm the success of a game that is, after all, a big deal on the Xbox 360, and not coming out for the PS3?
I spent half an hour once trying to find a way to disable that in NeoOffice, and never succeeded. I hate that feature so much. It distracts me, and I'm a fast enough typist not to benefit much from it.
Some vendors apparently have a wear-leveling system that works by knowing enough about FAT32 to shuffle FAT32 files, but has no concept of how to do anything similar for ntfs, ext2fs, hfs...
It doesn't seem to have come up. Creationism in the form we're familiar with it is hugely dominated by reactionary fundamentalists in the US; other religions aren't as likely to have adopted their "this is a modern text" view of the Bible, and are more likely to be comfortable with the notion that some of the material is allegorical or otherwise not intended to be factual history. (That's the historical view of Christianity and Judaism both -- that at least some of the material is probably allegory. It's only modernists who try to treat it all as fact as a matter of dogma.)
No, really. It wasn't the things I got the best help for. School actively got in my way on many of the things I ended up best at, because I could learn on my own.
Do smart kids need help and guidance? Sure. Everyone does. However, in general, they can at least get by with less help and guidance than regular kids, let alone disabled kids. And, after all, the goal of the school is not to maximize the success of every kid, but to get everyone up to a baseline. If you want your kids to get more than that, it's up to you.
I am not at all convinced that gifted kids need that much attention. It might be nice, but I don't think it's as necessary. You know how much time and attention it took to get me reading? Basically none. Someone read to me for a while, until I figured it out. Done. That's a huge number of hours that didn't need to be spent teaching me something.
To put it in perspective, by third grade, I was correcting teachers fairly consistently. The problem here is not that I didn't get enough attention.
You got any sources there? I never heard of any "dungeons and dragons" games prior to Chainmail and then D&D. I have never heard of a pre-TSR game like that, under any name.
So, let's see some sources. Company names, product names, publication dates, stuff like that.
I know. People who, if they get good support and help, can get to a point where they can hold down some kind of job, and earn a living, and at least mostly take care of themselves. If they don't, someone else has to.
I suspect that the lifetime return on investment isn't bad at all for developmentally disabled people -- especially in the slightly higher range, say, IQ 70 or so, where it's quite possible to imagine functional independent life, but it'll take a bit of help getting started.
Speaking as a mildly autistic genius... It was the disability, not the smarts, that I needed help with. If I could have read facial expressions as a kid, I'd probably have been fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Many PS3 fans pitch the "won't talk about it until then" as proof that there will be a cut -- some suggest an 80GB unbundled for $449. Hard to say. A lot of people are arguing that Sony will definitely cut to $500 once the 60s are gone, but it's hard to say; I mean, you wouldn't expect them to have a PR stunt with a decapitated goat, but they did. So who can predict what madness Sony's sales people will think of? I'm sort of skeptical about a cut, just because the holiday season tends to boost sales, and they may not need a cut to keep systems moving.
Ahh, yes. It was "her" address (actually, a /dev/null box, as they later confirmed) that was put on all the spam, to give the impression that they gave a fuck whether it was bouncing or not. They didn't. I think it's funny that they apparently never complied with the law that she claimed was a good anti-spam law. I mean, it's bad enough that she was involved with legislation that was utterly worthless; so far as I know, their spam never even complied with that worthless legislation. Insult to injury, that.
So, back in the day, Real spammed. A lot. They spammed constantly, they spammed everybody (like IETF role accounts), and they did so unrepentantly, with forged addresses in the headers and everything.
Has anything changed?
I somehow don't think so.
Good call. Too many people make the mistake of assuming that the forty hours a given project will take can be forty CONSECUTIVE hours of their workdays.
And yet, somehow, I'm pretty productive.
See, brains are complicated things, and sometimes what I really need is a half hour or so NOT looking straight at the problem, although I tend to be sort of absently thinking about it. And then suddenly I know what to do, and I go do it.
As someone on one of the other forums I read commented a couple of weeks back when this was news, "The People's Republic of China has jumped the shark."
Now, imagine what would happen if, at some point after this declaration, there stopped being births in the PRC. People would fall all over themselves trying to figure it out, because it would answer the "when does the embryo turn into a person" question.
Good multiple choice tests can be very hard, and not "reward guessing". See, for instance, the mathematics GRE. I'd like to see anyone "guess" through that.
A good test gives no advantage to random guesses, but some advantage to educated guesses -- which is, after all, the point.
I went into a game store with a friend (a non-gamer). The store guy was trying very hard to persuade us that the n-gage was amazingly good.
His best selling point: The game goes in BEHIND THE BATTERY. That means you'll never lose a game cartridge, because there's no way to get at it without taking the thing apart, yanking the battery out, and messing around inside. MUCH better than those lame cartridge systems, where the cartridge can just sort of fall out.
Uh-huh.
There's probably no way they can ever recover their dignity after that one. I'd be more inclined to buy a gaming product which advertised that it was designed by ten clowns while they were inside a tiny little car.
They're gonna have to be extra careful not to blow this one up or anything, that saber's irreplaceable.
I'd say "welcome to the Only Able To Troll Zonk Club, twitter".
Really, that's it.
Let me give an example. I recently stumbled across a chunk of code which "used to work" in 2.6.14, but which had compile errors in 2.6.21, claiming that it was an error to declare an array of negative size. WTF?
Tracing through a series of macros (some with all-lowercase names, in violation of the standard C convention of the last thirty years), I eventually found a complicated expression in a macro expansion, to the effect of BUILD_BUG_ON_ZERO(various && conditions || otherconditions).
That, in turn, is defined to, as you might easily expect, declare an array whose size is negative if and only if the argument evaluates to non-zero.
This has a number of problems.
1. BUILD_BUG_ON_ZERO might be taken to indicate that it is a bug for the condition to be zero. No. It's the same as BUILD_BUG_ON(condition), except that it yields the value (size_t) 0 if the condition is zero, instead of not yielding a value. The name is comprehensible if you're familiar with it, but frankly ill-chosen.
2. Using this macro inside a macro expanded from another macro results in a seriously opaque chunk of code. The error message one gets (about the array declaration) is on a line of code that doesn't declare any arrays, and has no semantic reason to be declaring one. There's nothing to tell you what happened without you carefully following a chain of expansions. The error message is useless.
Really, the kernel is mostly doing pretty well these days. I don't expect to have to reboot a Linux machine because "maybe something got corrupted" or whatever.
But, as someone who has to READ this code, I wish it were written more clearly and better documented. Obviously, this is something any or all of us can work on.
Sony's been very good at marketing SecuROM, and it's amazingly bad. I gave up on NWN2 when the publisher confirmed that, yes, they were seeing the same crashes that thousands of users were, and the crashes were caused by copy protection -- removing SecuROM from the game made the crashes stop.
Nevermind, then.
So, what are the chances that this is Sony's way of trying to harm the success of a game that is, after all, a big deal on the Xbox 360, and not coming out for the PS3?
So, after writing that, it occurred to me to try a search engine. Three minutes later, word completion disabled. WIN!
I spent half an hour once trying to find a way to disable that in NeoOffice, and never succeeded. I hate that feature so much. It distracts me, and I'm a fast enough typist not to benefit much from it.
We now know where the intelligent life was. The question is, did they leave any research notes we can carefully avoid pursuing?
I'm not sure.
Some vendors apparently have a wear-leveling system that works by knowing enough about FAT32 to shuffle FAT32 files, but has no concept of how to do anything similar for ntfs, ext2fs, hfs...
It doesn't seem to have come up. Creationism in the form we're familiar with it is hugely dominated by reactionary fundamentalists in the US; other religions aren't as likely to have adopted their "this is a modern text" view of the Bible, and are more likely to be comfortable with the notion that some of the material is allegorical or otherwise not intended to be factual history. (That's the historical view of Christianity and Judaism both -- that at least some of the material is probably allegory. It's only modernists who try to treat it all as fact as a matter of dogma.)
Virtually no one affiliated, even indirectly, with "intelligent design", is anything but some sort of Christian.
Not really. If filtering becomes odious elsewhere, yes. Otherwise, no. Right now, I don't see much point.
No, really. It wasn't the things I got the best help for. School actively got in my way on many of the things I ended up best at, because I could learn on my own.
Do smart kids need help and guidance? Sure. Everyone does. However, in general, they can at least get by with less help and guidance than regular kids, let alone disabled kids. And, after all, the goal of the school is not to maximize the success of every kid, but to get everyone up to a baseline. If you want your kids to get more than that, it's up to you.
I am not at all convinced that gifted kids need that much attention. It might be nice, but I don't think it's as necessary. You know how much time and attention it took to get me reading? Basically none. Someone read to me for a while, until I figured it out. Done. That's a huge number of hours that didn't need to be spent teaching me something.
To put it in perspective, by third grade, I was correcting teachers fairly consistently. The problem here is not that I didn't get enough attention.
You got any sources there? I never heard of any "dungeons and dragons" games prior to Chainmail and then D&D. I have never heard of a pre-TSR game like that, under any name.
So, let's see some sources. Company names, product names, publication dates, stuff like that.
I know. People who, if they get good support and help, can get to a point where they can hold down some kind of job, and earn a living, and at least mostly take care of themselves. If they don't, someone else has to.
I suspect that the lifetime return on investment isn't bad at all for developmentally disabled people -- especially in the slightly higher range, say, IQ 70 or so, where it's quite possible to imagine functional independent life, but it'll take a bit of help getting started.
Speaking as a mildly autistic genius... It was the disability, not the smarts, that I needed help with. If I could have read facial expressions as a kid, I'd probably have been fine.
"behind" is not defined in relative terms, but in absolute terms; it's about keeping students up to the minimum for their grade. You can go past it.