>>Given a choice, nobody would prefer to play on a laggy ISP, so it's really awful that manufacturers don't inform about multiple-frame image processing delays on 60hz monitors.
True, input lag needs to be one of the specs on the box... some LCD monitors are really bad, some are quite decent.
But...
>>CRT technology is so mature and LCD so comparatively half baked that I'm totally revolted by the general consensus to throw out completely superior performance in favor of smaller form factor (it's not like they're moved often).
LCD technology is quite mature. That said, with most consumers buying based solely on price, you end up with quite a lot of crap monitors, and you can't really tell how they'll work out until you run them through your games yourself. I never buy monitors online (unless it's for a server or something that'll get used for 10 minutes every month), but test them as best as I can at my local Frys. Even still, I ended up taking back about four LCD monitors in one day until I found one that met my rather demanding specifications (the Sony HS94P), and even that one the performance of the first two out of the box had noticeable flickering (my eyes are pretty sensitive to flickering), so I finally took the floor model (which didn't flicker) home and have been using that since 1/05, and have been exceptionally happy with it.
>>I found Saving Private Ryan virtually unwatchable, there was no motion blur at all in the action scenes so it looked like they were fighting under a strobe light.
Huh, I thought that was an intentional effect in the movie. Maybe it was because it was filmed digitally and they didn't realize the value of adding film motion blur in? Interesting.
Funny, my parents live near there and my dad got a ticket at that intersection. He fought it in court and lost (at at the same time that scandal was breaking).
He pondered for a while shooting it out with a.30-06.
In my home town of San Diego, a judge shut down the red light camera program after they uncovered that they'd reduced yellow light times to the minimum.
An extensive survey on the safety of the program showed (contrary to the bullshit put out by the city and police leadership) a net increase in accidents, due to increased rear end collisions.
Historical point of fact: Carnegie was not a robber baron. If you look at political cartoons of the era, you'll see political cartoons attacking Morgan, Rockefeller, Stanford, etc., but not him. He was actually popular with the working man, being the poster boy for the American Dream. He started poor, worked hard, worked smart, worked his way up, and became a wealthy man. Then after he established a powerful company, bailed out, started a new company, and did it all over again - several times.
Carnegie, unlike the others, supported Unions to a certain degree, and wrote newspaper editorials to that point. It was part of his management of his image, which he cared greatly about, unlike some of his other multimillionaire compatriots, who'd snarl at reporters and threaten to beat them.
Yes, like the myth that there's no global DDT ban.
>>Due to overuse in America we ended up poising ourselves (basically when we were to spread it, the scientists/instructions said use 1 bag, the spreader used 10 bags, to be sure.)/facepalm. DDT isn't poisonous.
>>Go hit your wiki's, and find out more about the great DDT Myth, FUD brought to you by the anti-environmental movement, and embraced by the USA.
It's not "banned", like the drinking age in America "isn't" officially 21. They just cut off your funding if you use DDT or allow 20 year olds to drink.
>>which is hard to figure out because Windows won't tell you because you don't need to know.
Yep. In Linux you get the rather common sense "permission denied" message when you try installing something and it tries to write to a directory you don't have rights to. In Windows, it fails silently most of the time. Drove me up the wall when a program I'd installed was working on a computer I set up for my mother, when it turns out even though she could see the program with her "mom" account, something or other needed admin privs, and it was dying silently.
>>OK, that just shows that you haven't used Vista, since C:\Documents and Settings has been changed to just C:\Users\,
Ok sure. But you're saying there's no long pathnames in vista?
To the contrary, I have to deal with them all the time. That was just a pathname I copied off this (XP) box.
Breadcrumbs do not work with long pathnames. I just VNCed into a Vista box and confirmed it.
>>And finally, you know you can always press backspace to go up?
Nope, Vista changed that. Which combines to be my biggest gripe about Vista, since breadcrumbs are less functional than the up-arrow. Backspace is now "back" not "up level", which means it gets stuck in loops all the time.
The worst part? You can't disable this functionality. You can use the old start menu if you hate the new one, but you're stuck with their idiotic folder navigation scheme whether you like it or not.
>>Then again, KDE4 seems to be getting panned for some of the same reasons as Vista (people resistant to change).
KDE4 blows, but my opinion of it is based on the simple fact that it wouldn't install out of the box on a default installation from SUSE.
>>The replacement for the up arrow is the breadcrumb system
Which was one of the stupidest fucking decisions Microsoft ever implemented. Up arrow (and backspace) always works. Breadcrumbs are 1) small and hard to click on and 2) do not work with long pathnames. Fortunately, Windows doesn't use long pathnames like "C:\Documents and Settings\Users\Shakauvm\My Documents\My Music", right?
>>An analogy would be like two cars; both can be the same model, but that doesn't mean they're the same car.
Right, and this is like people completely hating the 2006 Corvette, but loving the 2008 Corvette. The exact same people.
I think it's either due to some really clever marketing on Microsoft's part (Mohave?), people just running out of hate for Microsoft (and realizing they'll be forced to upgrade out of XP *sometimes*), or maybe Win7 really is better than chocolate chip cookies.
I wasn't being snide, I was actually curious why it was this way.
For mousers, the up button is pretty nice. Having a single mousing target for the "go up a level" task is far better than having the moving target that is the end of the breadcrumb list. (The backspace keyboard shortcut is even better at this task.)
Yeah, and they changed that in Vista too. Backspace is no longer "up-level", but "back", which lets you get stuck in loops sometimes, especially if you use shortcuts. I'm used to just pounding backspace a couple times to go up some levels, and it's really REALLY irritating for Vista to have changed that.
After poking around, I found that ctrl-up is now up arrow, but bleh.
And yeah, thanks for agreeing that clicking on a breadcrumb (especially when some folders can get hidden!) isn't anywhere near as clean as a simple up-arrow for mouse users.
This is the main reason why I haven't upgraded to Vista, actually. =)
I'm curious why all these people who hated Vista are showering love on Windows 7. Is it some sort of mass psychology type thing?
I'm a UNIX guy, and I don't consider myself a Microsoft hater per se, the visual changes in Windows 7 just look hideous. I try and keep my screen as clean as possible to cut down on the distractions (meaning my windows machine looks about the same now as it did in 1995), and by this benchmark, Windows 7 is even worse than Vista with all its worthless gizmos and gadgets and stuff like that.
Is it really so hard to understand that I don't want shit moving around on my screen when I'm trying to think? Or that I don't want to see icons for anything except stuff I'm actually working on? The new Windows 7 taskbar looks -- crap, I already used "hideous" -- uh, distracting.
Combine with all sorts of stupid decisions in Vista like to replace the up-arrow button with a refresh button that does nothing in all common cases, and, yeah... I'm mystified why people are so positive about Win7,
>>And the fact that you're so quick to dismiss their responsibility and blame it on the victims... well, maybe _that_ idiocy is proof of what's wrong with education.
As one of the Victims of Katrina said (on NPR). "Don't call us victims! If you have to call us anything, call us... heroes!"
That's part of the problem. You get your house flooded, that qualifies you to be a hero these days?
Actually, Katrina was very instructive on a number of different fronts. As the GP said, the people of New Orleans acted like idiots. You also had Mayor "Chocolate Factory" Nagin acting like a criminal idiot, refusing to release school buses for evacuation, AS PER HIS CITY'S EVACUATION PLAN. And then, yeah, you also had FEMA acting like idiots.
But since only the behavior of FEMA could plausibly be blamed on Bush, FEMA was the focus. That, and racism:
Mayor Nagin: "[T]he more I think about it, definitely race played into this. If it's race, fine, let's call a spade a spade, a diamond a diamond. We can never let this happen again. Even if you hate black people and you are in a leadership position, this did not help anybody."
>>If I write a relatively small piece of software where I have carried out a formal mathematical proof of the algorithms used in that software, I should obtain a much better bug ratio than the industry average
I once wrote some formally verified code. No bugs in the code, no errors in my proof, and the damn thing still gave incorrect results.
Real life is like that sometimes.
>>So far the sample size on the latter is pretty small but the ones that have predicted the absence of global life-ending catastrophe have been 100% accurate.
Yeah, it's the problem of induction. As Russell said, a turkey, basing his proof on all available evidence, could decide every day of his life that the farmer loves him, and wants to take care of him... until the last day of his life.
>>But the point is that the foundation of this paper's statistical argument is itself invalid.
Sure, it's not a statistically meaningful conclusion. But it still may be useful to consider how often scientific papers make errors... in fact, with the LHC, they've already found that black holes created with it might last 50 times as long as they previously thought.
But it's not statistically valid, since these are presumably run-of-the-mill papers in which a person contributes a small amount to the literature to get his name on another paper, and might just be recalling it due to errors because he forgot to carry the 2.
Personally, I'd have argued instead from Kuhnian paradigm shifts in science. How often have we found out that everything we know in physics is wrong? There's no way of setting odds to the statement "everything we know right now is wrong", but there's certainly a great deal of evidence it might be.
>>For a value x with an error sigma, the probability of x being being between x-sigma --> x+sigma is 67%.
If the error is normally distributed. Errors comprised of lots of little errors averaged together (central limit theorem) are normally distributed. Most everything else (such as the rate of experts being wrong) are not.
Yeah, if that's all he studied, it wasn't properly controlled.
However, the summary doesn't mention that they divided the kids into 4 groups. Two with DS games, one with pencil-and-paper games, and one control. The DS games improved kids results by 19%, the pen-and-paper by 18%, vs control.
So they do work. The summary should have said, "Suduku is just as good as Brain Age" instead of saying "Brain games go Bust"...
>>Of course this reasoning is total bullshit, and just the sort of abuse statistics gets a bad name for.
While you're right, the reality is that it's actually somewhat worse than these guys have stated.
For scientific theories at the forefront of technology, there have been a tremendous number of mistakes made, as in, ALL the scientists were wrong. Remember the Michelson-Morley experiment? It invalidated basically every theory and model we had to that date. The notion that inertia somehow doesn't apply to light -- even though light is sorta a particle, or rather, has particle-like traits -- was completely unexpected.
Since the LHC is essentially breaking new ground, and we (obviously) don't even know yet if it will confirm or reject our current theories, ANY predictions made using our current theories is suspect. The only counterarguments I find plausible are the ones along the lines that it's not using an energy level higher than what happens all the time in nature anyway.
Counterarguments to the black-hole-eating-the-Earth theory, based on models that the LHC itself is going to test, is circular and invalid.
>>I had my fill of first person shooters years ago and yet for some reason they're still being developed and offer little to nothing different over the last one.
CustomTF is still an open source project under development (started in 1999). Quake engine is open source, game code is open source, anyone can submit patches to me, or fork off their own versions. It is based on Team Fortress, but modified so that you can build your own class, using a pricing system for each component you want to buy, so you can play a scout that drops sentry guns or a sniper with a rocket launcher.
It has all sorts of interesting options to it beyond what were in the original Team Fortress. A lot more.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Given a choice, nobody would prefer to play on a laggy ISP, so it's really awful that manufacturers don't inform about multiple-frame image processing delays on 60hz monitors.
True, input lag needs to be one of the specs on the box... some LCD monitors are really bad, some are quite decent.
But...
>>CRT technology is so mature and LCD so comparatively half baked that I'm totally revolted by the general consensus to throw out completely superior performance in favor of smaller form factor (it's not like they're moved often).
LCD technology is quite mature. That said, with most consumers buying based solely on price, you end up with quite a lot of crap monitors, and you can't really tell how they'll work out until you run them through your games yourself. I never buy monitors online (unless it's for a server or something that'll get used for 10 minutes every month), but test them as best as I can at my local Frys. Even still, I ended up taking back about four LCD monitors in one day until I found one that met my rather demanding specifications (the Sony HS94P), and even that one the performance of the first two out of the box had noticeable flickering (my eyes are pretty sensitive to flickering), so I finally took the floor model (which didn't flicker) home and have been using that since 1/05, and have been exceptionally happy with it.
Much better than the Sony CRT that it replaced.
>>I found Saving Private Ryan virtually unwatchable, there was no motion blur at all in the action scenes so it looked like they were fighting under a strobe light.
Huh, I thought that was an intentional effect in the movie. Maybe it was because it was filmed digitally and they didn't realize the value of adding film motion blur in? Interesting.
Funny, my parents live near there and my dad got a ticket at that intersection. He fought it in court and lost (at at the same time that scandal was breaking).
He pondered for a while shooting it out with a .30-06.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DEEDA1738F932A25757C0A9629C8B63
In my home town of San Diego, a judge shut down the red light camera program after they uncovered that they'd reduced yellow light times to the minimum.
An extensive survey on the safety of the program showed (contrary to the bullshit put out by the city and police leadership) a net increase in accidents, due to increased rear end collisions.
>>See Rockefeller and Carnegie for context.
Historical point of fact:
Carnegie was not a robber baron. If you look at political cartoons of the era, you'll see political cartoons attacking Morgan, Rockefeller, Stanford, etc., but not him. He was actually popular with the working man, being the poster boy for the American Dream. He started poor, worked hard, worked smart, worked his way up, and became a wealthy man. Then after he established a powerful company, bailed out, started a new company, and did it all over again - several times.
Carnegie, unlike the others, supported Unions to a certain degree, and wrote newspaper editorials to that point. It was part of his management of his image, which he cared greatly about, unlike some of his other multimillionaire compatriots, who'd snarl at reporters and threaten to beat them.
>>Yay, Urban Myths live on.
Yes, like the myth that there's no global DDT ban.
>>Due to overuse in America we ended up poising ourselves (basically when we were to spread it, the scientists/instructions said use 1 bag, the spreader used 10 bags, to be sure.) /facepalm. DDT isn't poisonous.
>>Go hit your wiki's, and find out more about the great DDT Myth, FUD brought to you by the anti-environmental movement, and embraced by the USA.
It's not "banned", like the drinking age in America "isn't" officially 21. They just cut off your funding if you use DDT or allow 20 year olds to drink.
>>with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
Well, there you go. Catholics can't possibly be in a cult with a pope that looks like an Evil Santa Claus.
Don't get me wrong, I think Benedict is actually a very smart guy, he just put all his stat points into Int instead of Cha.
>>which is hard to figure out because Windows won't tell you because you don't need to know.
Yep. In Linux you get the rather common sense "permission denied" message when you try installing something and it tries to write to a directory you don't have rights to. In Windows, it fails silently most of the time. Drove me up the wall when a program I'd installed was working on a computer I set up for my mother, when it turns out even though she could see the program with her "mom" account, something or other needed admin privs, and it was dying silently.
>>I think my head just exploded. Compound, of one element. What next transparent aluminum?
I think most people don't realize is that Boron is the mythic "Fifth Element" we hear so much about in the films.
It can do anything.
At UCSD, we already have one of those things.
It commemorated Bush's catline reflexes 12 years before it happened. UCSD is very progressive.
http://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/StuartCollection/Murray.htm
>>Explorer2 is actually pretty nice besides that, it has tabs and lets you split the window into two panes.
Hmm, I'll have to check that out, thanks!
>>OK, that just shows that you haven't used Vista, since C:\Documents and Settings has been changed to just C:\Users\,
Ok sure. But you're saying there's no long pathnames in vista?
To the contrary, I have to deal with them all the time. That was just a pathname I copied off this (XP) box.
Breadcrumbs do not work with long pathnames. I just VNCed into a Vista box and confirmed it.
>>And finally, you know you can always press backspace to go up?
Nope, Vista changed that. Which combines to be my biggest gripe about Vista, since breadcrumbs are less functional than the up-arrow. Backspace is now "back" not "up level", which means it gets stuck in loops all the time.
The worst part? You can't disable this functionality. You can use the old start menu if you hate the new one, but you're stuck with their idiotic folder navigation scheme whether you like it or not.
>>Then again, KDE4 seems to be getting panned for some of the same reasons as Vista (people resistant to change).
KDE4 blows, but my opinion of it is based on the simple fact that it wouldn't install out of the box on a default installation from SUSE.
>>The replacement for the up arrow is the breadcrumb system
Which was one of the stupidest fucking decisions Microsoft ever implemented. Up arrow (and backspace) always works. Breadcrumbs are 1) small and hard to click on and 2) do not work with long pathnames. Fortunately, Windows doesn't use long pathnames like "C:\Documents and Settings\Users\Shakauvm\My Documents\My Music", right?
Oh... that's a default directory?
>>An analogy would be like two cars; both can be the same model, but that doesn't mean they're the same car.
Right, and this is like people completely hating the 2006 Corvette, but loving the 2008 Corvette. The exact same people.
I think it's either due to some really clever marketing on Microsoft's part (Mohave?), people just running out of hate for Microsoft (and realizing they'll be forced to upgrade out of XP *sometimes*), or maybe Win7 really is better than chocolate chip cookies.
I wasn't being snide, I was actually curious why it was this way.
For mousers, the up button is pretty nice. Having a single mousing target for the "go up a level" task is far better than having the moving target that is the end of the breadcrumb list. (The backspace keyboard shortcut is even better at this task.)
Yeah, and they changed that in Vista too. Backspace is no longer "up-level", but "back", which lets you get stuck in loops sometimes, especially if you use shortcuts. I'm used to just pounding backspace a couple times to go up some levels, and it's really REALLY irritating for Vista to have changed that.
After poking around, I found that ctrl-up is now up arrow, but bleh.
And yeah, thanks for agreeing that clicking on a breadcrumb (especially when some folders can get hidden!) isn't anywhere near as clean as a simple up-arrow for mouse users.
This is the main reason why I haven't upgraded to Vista, actually. =)
>>It's a pretty good game too, you should get it.
Awesome, thanks for that link. I spent most of my freshman year of college playing Marathon / Marathon 2 in UCSD's Mac labs. =)
I'm curious why all these people who hated Vista are showering love on Windows 7. Is it some sort of mass psychology type thing?
I'm a UNIX guy, and I don't consider myself a Microsoft hater per se, the visual changes in Windows 7 just look hideous. I try and keep my screen as clean as possible to cut down on the distractions (meaning my windows machine looks about the same now as it did in 1995), and by this benchmark, Windows 7 is even worse than Vista with all its worthless gizmos and gadgets and stuff like that.
Is it really so hard to understand that I don't want shit moving around on my screen when I'm trying to think? Or that I don't want to see icons for anything except stuff I'm actually working on? The new Windows 7 taskbar looks -- crap, I already used "hideous" -- uh, distracting.
Combine with all sorts of stupid decisions in Vista like to replace the up-arrow button with a refresh button that does nothing in all common cases, and, yeah... I'm mystified why people are so positive about Win7,
>>And the fact that you're so quick to dismiss their responsibility and blame it on the victims... well, maybe _that_ idiocy is proof of what's wrong with education.
As one of the Victims of Katrina said (on NPR). "Don't call us victims! If you have to call us anything, call us... heroes!"
That's part of the problem. You get your house flooded, that qualifies you to be a hero these days?
Actually, Katrina was very instructive on a number of different fronts. As the GP said, the people of New Orleans acted like idiots. You also had Mayor "Chocolate Factory" Nagin acting like a criminal idiot, refusing to release school buses for evacuation, AS PER HIS CITY'S EVACUATION PLAN. And then, yeah, you also had FEMA acting like idiots.
But since only the behavior of FEMA could plausibly be blamed on Bush, FEMA was the focus. That, and racism:
Mayor Nagin: "[T]he more I think about it, definitely race played into this. If it's race, fine, let's call a spade a spade, a diamond a diamond. We can never let this happen again. Even if you hate black people and you are in a leadership position, this did not help anybody."
>>If I write a relatively small piece of software where I have carried out a formal mathematical proof of the algorithms used in that software, I should obtain a much better bug ratio than the industry average
I once wrote some formally verified code. No bugs in the code, no errors in my proof, and the damn thing still gave incorrect results.
Real life is like that sometimes.
>>So far the sample size on the latter is pretty small but the ones that have predicted the absence of global life-ending catastrophe have been 100% accurate.
Yeah, it's the problem of induction. As Russell said, a turkey, basing his proof on all available evidence, could decide every day of his life that the farmer loves him, and wants to take care of him... until the last day of his life.
>>But the point is that the foundation of this paper's statistical argument is itself invalid.
Sure, it's not a statistically meaningful conclusion. But it still may be useful to consider how often scientific papers make errors... in fact, with the LHC, they've already found that black holes created with it might last 50 times as long as they previously thought.
But it's not statistically valid, since these are presumably run-of-the-mill papers in which a person contributes a small amount to the literature to get his name on another paper, and might just be recalling it due to errors because he forgot to carry the 2.
Personally, I'd have argued instead from Kuhnian paradigm shifts in science. How often have we found out that everything we know in physics is wrong? There's no way of setting odds to the statement "everything we know right now is wrong", but there's certainly a great deal of evidence it might be.
>>For a value x with an error sigma, the probability of x being being between x-sigma --> x+sigma is 67%.
If the error is normally distributed. Errors comprised of lots of little errors averaged together (central limit theorem) are normally distributed. Most everything else (such as the rate of experts being wrong) are not.
Out of curiosity, what will you say when we start colliding particles at higher energies than those observed?
Yeah, if that's all he studied, it wasn't properly controlled.
However, the summary doesn't mention that they divided the kids into 4 groups. Two with DS games, one with pencil-and-paper games, and one control. The DS games improved kids results by 19%, the pen-and-paper by 18%, vs control.
So they do work. The summary should have said, "Suduku is just as good as Brain Age" instead of saying "Brain games go Bust"...
>>Of course this reasoning is total bullshit, and just the sort of abuse statistics gets a bad name for.
While you're right, the reality is that it's actually somewhat worse than these guys have stated.
For scientific theories at the forefront of technology, there have been a tremendous number of mistakes made, as in, ALL the scientists were wrong. Remember the Michelson-Morley experiment? It invalidated basically every theory and model we had to that date. The notion that inertia somehow doesn't apply to light -- even though light is sorta a particle, or rather, has particle-like traits -- was completely unexpected.
Since the LHC is essentially breaking new ground, and we (obviously) don't even know yet if it will confirm or reject our current theories, ANY predictions made using our current theories is suspect. The only counterarguments I find plausible are the ones along the lines that it's not using an energy level higher than what happens all the time in nature anyway.
Counterarguments to the black-hole-eating-the-Earth theory, based on models that the LHC itself is going to test, is circular and invalid.
>>I had my fill of first person shooters years ago and yet for some reason they're still being developed and offer little to nothing different over the last one.
CustomTF is still an open source project under development (started in 1999). Quake engine is open source, game code is open source, anyone can submit patches to me, or fork off their own versions. It is based on Team Fortress, but modified so that you can build your own class, using a pricing system for each component you want to buy, so you can play a scout that drops sentry guns or a sniper with a rocket launcher.
It has all sorts of interesting options to it beyond what were in the original Team Fortress. A lot more.
Latest version came out, oh, today.
Information:
http://wiki.quakeworld.nu/Prozac-TF
Forums:
www.customtf.net/forum/
Server:
http://quake.phoenixlabs.org/
Download:
http://customtf.sourceforge.net/customtf/index.html