>Or, gawd forbid.. we could teach programmers how to use threading?
My Master's Degree was in High Performance / Parallel Code, and I used to TA the subject, and worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
I worked with one of the original auto-threading compilers back in the day (on the TERA supercomputer). It was a lot easier to port code to be automatically parallelized than it was to refactor code to be multi-threaded. Some code was easy enough to parallelize manually - for example, you can find one loop that does the lion's share of the calculations, and you just worry about parallelizing that - but some was a complete and total bitch to refactor. So an automated tool to find parallelism was pretty neat.
I ran the Quake 2 utilities through the Tera, and it found some minor speedups, but nothing too incredible. I had a few conversations with John Carmack about it, and it confirmed what he thought about auto-parallelizing, too.
So maybe Microsoft has finally done it right. There's no way to tell until I can test it for myself.
And no, without first reading about or googling the invisible menu, it really is possible to not know it exists. There's no screen magic to show that there's something clickable up there for first time users.
A UI should be intuitively usable by new people picking it up for the first time. The fact that you don't understand this basic usability concept meshes will with your high UID.
Earlier today, the entire chess club surrounded one of these new $250 Windows 8 machines. They were all poking at the screen, but while it was changing colors on them, it wasn't responding. (Guess what guys? That's not a touchscreen. Those colors are what you get when you poke a normal LCD display.) They were convinced that all Windows 8 machines had touchscreens, though, and so they never used the touchpad.
And then they tried shutting it down. I was mocking them for a while, as an entire chess club couldn't figure it out, so then they passed it to me and I couldn't figure it out either. Turns out the option to shut it down is hidden behind an invisible menu, hidden behind two other submenus unrelated to shutting things down.
We eventually had to look it up online, as I expect many people will have to do.
It was an interesting case study though, in how fucked up Microsoft made the Metro UI.
Some achievements are so ridiculously stupid, that they're simply not worth doing by any sane individual.
For example, Gears of War 2 (http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/gears-of-war-2/achievements/) had achievements for killing 100,000 monsters and playing 1,999 games of multiplayer.
>>After reading through the first couple paragraphs, the tone of his whole article feels sensationalist and stereotyped to the point I really didn't care what he had to say.
I more took out of it that he was bragging that he could create a procedural world THAT WAS BIGGER THAN SKYRIM to "the disbelief" of nay-sayers.
Well, yeah, great. Procedural worlds can be infinitely large. The actual size doesn't matter, but how much interesting content there is. Which is why there is less Daggerfall-esque generation and more hand-placed stuff like in Skyrim.
Procedural world generators around for a long time, even ElendorMUSH had a pretty sophisticated one back in the 90s. I wrote one in the same time period when I was working on creating VR arcade games. Heightmaps and his other tools have also been around and used for a really long time.
This tells me absolutely nothing about how interesting the game will actually be, just that he's proud of how large it is.
Great, so let me announce that all European politicians are right wing fascists, because I'm judging them from some extreme left-wing Marxist perspective!
Or, you know, we can fucking use the terms in the context that they are used in.
>Zoe represents California's 16th district. It consists of most of the city of San Jose (where I live), Santa Clara, and Morgan Hill. It is probably the nerdiest congressional district in the country. People here care about this stuff, but it is not even on the radar of most politicians.
I watched the SOPA markup live. There were exactly three committee members fighting against it, or trying to patch it to make it less terrible. These were: Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT). Chaffetz in particular has been really good about promoting liberty in congress, but I think all three of them deserve a few bucks from all of us for their next campaigns.
The R/D divide was not as important as the bought-by-the-RIAA/not-bought-by-the-RIAA divide.
Oil Shale reserves have been a known resource for a long time, but the primary argument against them (if you go back 10 years of Slashdot history) is, "Well, if we have that resource, why are we not using it, then??"
Because it's cheaper to get oil other ways, morons. But the resource is there, and so we won't run out of petrol for quite a while.
California is only liberal due to the 52% of the state that is Hispanic or Asian.
Why do Hispanics like Democrats? Immigration issues.
Why do Hispanics hate Democrats? Water issues.
The Republicans could split the Hispanic vote away from the Democrats on these two issues and take back a majority - but since Bush Sr's decision to abandon the state there hasn't been any sort of organized conservative presence here, other than some Tea Party protests. So the state has been going more and more liberal. (Democrats now have a supermajority in our state legislature.)
But yeah, we had a Republican governor right up through last year, which means it's not really as liberal as people think it is.
> Instead his people cheated blatantly and publicly and drove away, not just a few hundred thousand hardcore Ron Paul supporters, but a bunch of non-Paulite Rs. He lost FAR more than the margin by which he lost some key states in the general election.
He probably has lost Florida because of these shenanigans. Gary Johnson is getting more votes than the margin between Obama and Romney.
Not all of the Libertarians came from the Republican party, of course, but a lot of those were Ron Paul supporters that Romney drove out of the party.
>How about they do their job and regulate interstate commerce?
No, no. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution only applies to intra-state gun sales and eggs that are produced and consumed within the same state. Oh, and medical marijuana. And forcing you to buy healthcare.
(References: Lopez, Perez, Gonzales, NFIB, with only Lopez limiting the Commerce Clause.)
>in some states you even have to pay sales tax on the full $649 price of a smart phone
Yeah, here in California even a free smartphone will run you about fifty bucks in taxes. I was looking at getting one for myself and my wife back in the day, and balked at paying $100 for two "free" phones in taxes.
California is a great fucking state. Great fucking taxes on everything.
Even if you do what the OP did and buy a phone in Arizona, you still owe the state of California sales tax for it. It's called Use Tax, and it's technically illegal for him to avoid paying sales tax by buying his phone out of state.
A friend of mine owns 50 acres in the Central Valley. He used to grow citrus on it to pay the property tax on it.
Then one morning he gets a call, heads out to the farm, finds all 50 acres had been harvested in the middle of the night.
Across the street, there were some pretty ballsy guys selling what were very likely his oranges. The cops didn't do anything ("Can you prove they're your oranges?"). He just wanted to hire them to harvest his farm for next year - it took his normal contract labor something like a week to do the same job.
>Interestingly, the proposed end-state Communist utopia is pretty much the same as a Libertarian utopia, if you strip out the buzzwords
Except for the fact that they're completely opposite, sure.
For example, one friend of mine has established a music studio in his house in SF. He isn't a rich man, but he invested his limited time and money into building it up. It now pays off enough to cover his rent along the Great Highway in SF.
When I proposed this model to a communist here on Slashdot, the communist said that it was wrong of him to privately own this business, and that he should turn it over to the community to own and run, and reap the profits from. I don't think he understood how such a model would completely kill any interest in people doing things exactly like what my friend did. Why would they go to all that effort when the government would take it away at the point of a gun?
See? It is the exact opposite of a Libertarian Utopia.
You could probably dig up the conversation in my comments archive.
>So by your definition, no European country is socialist but Japan and Korea are?
You are aware that the Japan Socialist Party (now the Social Democratic Party since 1996) has been one of the most powerful factions in Japan since WWII?
No, of course you didn't know.
It's no coincidence that the Zaibatsus have close relationships with government.
Slashdot Mirror
>Or, gawd forbid.. we could teach programmers how to use threading?
My Master's Degree was in High Performance / Parallel Code, and I used to TA the subject, and worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
I worked with one of the original auto-threading compilers back in the day (on the TERA supercomputer). It was a lot easier to port code to be automatically parallelized than it was to refactor code to be multi-threaded. Some code was easy enough to parallelize manually - for example, you can find one loop that does the lion's share of the calculations, and you just worry about parallelizing that - but some was a complete and total bitch to refactor. So an automated tool to find parallelism was pretty neat.
I ran the Quake 2 utilities through the Tera, and it found some minor speedups, but nothing too incredible. I had a few conversations with John Carmack about it, and it confirmed what he thought about auto-parallelizing, too.
So maybe Microsoft has finally done it right. There's no way to tell until I can test it for myself.
>you're much more likely getting your money back if you premiere on Netflix.
How do studios get paid by Netflix streaming anyway? Just something I've always been curious about.
Which still doesn't excuse the multiple levels of non-intuitive indirection you have to get through to shut down a Win8 machine.
Older people mostly.
And no, without first reading about or googling the invisible menu, it really is possible to not know it exists. There's no screen magic to show that there's something clickable up there for first time users.
A UI should be intuitively usable by new people picking it up for the first time. The fact that you don't understand this basic usability concept meshes will with your high UID.
Earlier today, the entire chess club surrounded one of these new $250 Windows 8 machines. They were all poking at the screen, but while it was changing colors on them, it wasn't responding. (Guess what guys? That's not a touchscreen. Those colors are what you get when you poke a normal LCD display.) They were convinced that all Windows 8 machines had touchscreens, though, and so they never used the touchpad.
And then they tried shutting it down. I was mocking them for a while, as an entire chess club couldn't figure it out, so then they passed it to me and I couldn't figure it out either. Turns out the option to shut it down is hidden behind an invisible menu, hidden behind two other submenus unrelated to shutting things down.
We eventually had to look it up online, as I expect many people will have to do.
It was an interesting case study though, in how fucked up Microsoft made the Metro UI.
You should have bought a Sun. Back when you could buy Suns. They were exceptionally modular and hot-swappable.
Some achievements are so ridiculously stupid, that they're simply not worth doing by any sane individual.
For example, Gears of War 2 (http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/gears-of-war-2/achievements/) had achievements for killing 100,000 monsters and playing 1,999 games of multiplayer.
Seriously, fuck that noise.
>>After reading through the first couple paragraphs, the tone of his whole article feels sensationalist and stereotyped to the point I really didn't care what he had to say.
I more took out of it that he was bragging that he could create a procedural world THAT WAS BIGGER THAN SKYRIM to "the disbelief" of nay-sayers.
Well, yeah, great. Procedural worlds can be infinitely large. The actual size doesn't matter, but how much interesting content there is. Which is why there is less Daggerfall-esque generation and more hand-placed stuff like in Skyrim.
Procedural world generators around for a long time, even ElendorMUSH had a pretty sophisticated one back in the 90s. I wrote one in the same time period when I was working on creating VR arcade games. Heightmaps and his other tools have also been around and used for a really long time.
This tells me absolutely nothing about how interesting the game will actually be, just that he's proud of how large it is.
Great, so let me announce that all European politicians are right wing fascists, because I'm judging them from some extreme left-wing Marxist perspective!
Or, you know, we can fucking use the terms in the context that they are used in.
>Zoe represents California's 16th district. It consists of most of the city of San Jose (where I live), Santa Clara, and Morgan Hill. It is probably the nerdiest congressional district in the country. People here care about this stuff, but it is not even on the radar of most politicians.
I watched the SOPA markup live. There were exactly three committee members fighting against it, or trying to patch it to make it less terrible. These were: Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT). Chaffetz in particular has been really good about promoting liberty in congress, but I think all three of them deserve a few bucks from all of us for their next campaigns.
The R/D divide was not as important as the bought-by-the-RIAA/not-bought-by-the-RIAA divide.
I can't tell if they just developed normal myomer technology, or MASC...
Oh, lord. Dailies. Hated those damn things.
Thank you for inoculating me against any desire to buy Pandaren. =)
Because it doesn't work with his applications, for example.
Major applications, like older versions of MATLAB, won't run on anything after XP, even in compatibility mode.
(And this MATLAB code we licensed won't run on anything but the older versions of MATLAB.)
>>Of course, the end products are interchangable: diesel is diesel and Jet A is Jet A.
Unless you live in California. :p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_California#Petroleum
Don't confuse peakers with fact.
Oil Shale reserves have been a known resource for a long time, but the primary argument against them (if you go back 10 years of Slashdot history) is, "Well, if we have that resource, why are we not using it, then??"
Because it's cheaper to get oil other ways, morons. But the resource is there, and so we won't run out of petrol for quite a while.
Speaking as a Californian:
California is only liberal due to the 52% of the state that is Hispanic or Asian.
Why do Hispanics like Democrats? Immigration issues.
Why do Hispanics hate Democrats? Water issues.
The Republicans could split the Hispanic vote away from the Democrats on these two issues and take back a majority - but since Bush Sr's decision to abandon the state there hasn't been any sort of organized conservative presence here, other than some Tea Party protests. So the state has been going more and more liberal. (Democrats now have a supermajority in our state legislature.)
But yeah, we had a Republican governor right up through last year, which means it's not really as liberal as people think it is.
>We're going how the rest of the world define political spectrum, not America.
Yes, this makes total sense when talking about American politics. Pfft.
At the time I posted, it was true.
Also, I'm sure some of Ron Paul's supporters switched to Obama, too.
> Instead his people cheated blatantly and publicly and drove away, not just a few hundred thousand hardcore Ron Paul supporters, but a bunch of non-Paulite Rs. He lost FAR more than the margin by which he lost some key states in the general election.
He probably has lost Florida because of these shenanigans. Gary Johnson is getting more votes than the margin between Obama and Romney.
Not all of the Libertarians came from the Republican party, of course, but a lot of those were Ron Paul supporters that Romney drove out of the party.
>How about they do their job and regulate interstate commerce?
No, no. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution only applies to intra-state gun sales and eggs that are produced and consumed within the same state. Oh, and medical marijuana. And forcing you to buy healthcare.
(References: Lopez, Perez, Gonzales, NFIB, with only Lopez limiting the Commerce Clause.)
Or as the SCOTUS says: "Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself 'commercial'" (from Gonzales - http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-1454.ZS.html)
Why on earth would Congress try to use the powers of the Commerce Clause to, you know, *actually* regulate interstate commerce?
>in some states you even have to pay sales tax on the full $649 price of a smart phone
Yeah, here in California even a free smartphone will run you about fifty bucks in taxes. I was looking at getting one for myself and my wife back in the day, and balked at paying $100 for two "free" phones in taxes.
California is a great fucking state. Great fucking taxes on everything.
Even if you do what the OP did and buy a phone in Arizona, you still owe the state of California sales tax for it. It's called Use Tax, and it's technically illegal for him to avoid paying sales tax by buying his phone out of state.
A friend of mine owns 50 acres in the Central Valley. He used to grow citrus on it to pay the property tax on it.
Then one morning he gets a call, heads out to the farm, finds all 50 acres had been harvested in the middle of the night.
Across the street, there were some pretty ballsy guys selling what were very likely his oranges. The cops didn't do anything ("Can you prove they're your oranges?"). He just wanted to hire them to harvest his farm for next year - it took his normal contract labor something like a week to do the same job.
>Interestingly, the proposed end-state Communist utopia is pretty much the same as a Libertarian utopia, if you strip out the buzzwords
Except for the fact that they're completely opposite, sure.
For example, one friend of mine has established a music studio in his house in SF. He isn't a rich man, but he invested his limited time and money into building it up. It now pays off enough to cover his rent along the Great Highway in SF.
When I proposed this model to a communist here on Slashdot, the communist said that it was wrong of him to privately own this business, and that he should turn it over to the community to own and run, and reap the profits from. I don't think he understood how such a model would completely kill any interest in people doing things exactly like what my friend did. Why would they go to all that effort when the government would take it away at the point of a gun?
See? It is the exact opposite of a Libertarian Utopia.
You could probably dig up the conversation in my comments archive.
Doesn't matter. All the sides are the short side.
>And government does not control industry in Europe.
There has been a trend away from Socialism toward Social Democracy in Europe. For example, France Télécom was owned by the French government until 2004, at which point they privatized, as has happened with many socialist industries in Europe. Now the government only owns a quarter of it.
Did you know that? Of course you didn't.
>So by your definition, no European country is socialist but Japan and Korea are?
You are aware that the Japan Socialist Party (now the Social Democratic Party since 1996) has been one of the most powerful factions in Japan since WWII?
No, of course you didn't know.
It's no coincidence that the Zaibatsus have close relationships with government.