Of course, then again he probably could have walked away from the accident had he only worn his seatbelt
He wasn't wearging a seatbelt, what was the guy stoopid or something? Guess this is just an example of natural selection in action.
He ran a red light, of course he's stoopid. That's one of the worst traffic offenses, barring driving onto the sidewalk or through a plate-glass storefront or something. Around here (Sunnyvale, CA, USA), they've started putting cameras up on major intersections to automagically photograph red light runners. While it feels a bit oppressive to have the cameras there, I hate people who run red lights enough that I haven't written to the city council yet.
Maybe we don't want a standard toolkit library, but perhaps we want to expand the set of "hints" that a window manager can give to client applications through X system to include look-and-feel information (like themes, menu bar location, etc...) Ideally you would have a system where it would be easy to define new hints, but you also don't want similar hints defined differently by different WMs. You also want these hints to be arbitrarily complicated, perhaps containing (at least a pointer to) an image or somesuch (like a widget background). Lastly, you want clients to be able to ignore hints that it doesn't understand (thus the name "hint"). Any language that can implement an X application should be able to read and understand these hints.
I have been periodically recieving a bunch of Instant Message trying to entice me to visit some "amateur webcam"... They basically hook some kind of rudimentary eliza up to an IM client... it's not very convincing, but it's the thought that pisses me off.
-If
Re:Governmental control...?
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
I was reading an article in Scientific American about this 6 years ago or so... It spoke of a Multiverse, which, as you can imagine, is an infinite number of parallel Universes. Things like Conservation of Mass/Energy would be violated by time travel if you were time-travelling within one Universe, as the Universe would lose mass in the present, and gain mass in the past or future. But if you consider the conservation of Mass/Energy to apply to the Multiverse, then that would imply that you switch Universes without violating that constraint. Or something.
Of course, I've muddled the whole idea up, but the basic gist of the article was that when you travel through time, you don't go to the past of the Universe you are in, you go to the past of a different Universe. It went so far as to say that you wouldn't ever be able to return to the same Universe, even if you travelled back to the same time. Of course, you wouldn't really know the difference.
The guy in this article alluded to that:
If his idea pans out, won't there be a host of potential paradoxes, such as time travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining that those travelers would continue to exist in a ''parallel universe.''
-If
-pedantic
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In line at Back to the Future: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood they said 1.2 Jigowatts...
There's a lot of new stuff in 1.4 that is specifically designed to allow for hardware acceleration of image/component rendering and whatnot. Look at java.awt.image.VolatileImage and go from there. It's beginning to have some DirectX-like capabilities.
IANAV, but I think we're supposed to be more morally and ethically evolved than "animals." Case in point: We are animals, but when we speak about "animals," we don't intend that to include us. What is good enough for animals is not necessarily good enough for us.
Why do we still allow animals to kill each other? Well, once we have a Human society that is entirely vegetarian, then we can think about trying to impose that on animals. In a lot of cases, animals are not omnivores like us, so there's probably a biological barrier. Because we are so mentally evolved, I think we also have to question whether it's ethical to force our morals onto other species. Even if we believe it's wrong to kill other species for food, does that mean we should prevent other species from doing so, beyond defending our own species' lives?
But the biggest problem facing this idea is probably logistics. Try to get a tiger to eat a salad...
I think the line between work and home is a bit fuzzy for many people these days. When I come in to work most weekends, and stay past 9 or 10 at night during the week, I don't have much time to go home and read slashdot if I want to get up in the morning in time to get back to work.
Besides, when you are staring at a bug or problem, and you just can't get your head around it, sometimes you need a BREAK. Surfing the web, or going to the kitchen, or taking a walk around the block, it clears my head, and when I com back to the problem, I can tackle the it with a bit more vigor. People don't work for 8 hours straight (let alone 9 or 10 or 12 or more). It's kind of naive to think that intelligent people can sit and be productive with no recreation all day every day.
This is way off-topic, but I like how it's okay to discuss things unrelated to the story by saying "This is way off-topic." If you don't claim it, you'll get modded down, but as long as you "call" it, it's okay.
It's arguable that you are then creating a corporate environment of internal competition and second-guessing that ultimately leads to a loss of productivity. Having a healthy environment is probably worth the extra money that a company might be able to scam off the employees, if they looked at things in the long term.
Employers don't believe it, but turnover, at least at the engineer level, is quite expensive... much more expensive than keeping employees happy. It's just not immediately obvious that this is the case.
We have this exciting new DVD technology... is there some way we can have one damn DVD that has all the edits, and you just choose which one you want at the beginning? You'd think a lot of the footage would be common, you'd just have certain branch-points on the video and the audio (perhaps independantly).
I guess the audio would probably have to be entirely duplicated for each version, because of the narration and so on would just be vastly different.
What I don't understand is this: They claim that even though the company may not be making any money on a product (like Elder Scrolls: Arena), they need to enforce "piracy" in order to protect their right to make a sequel with the same brand. But OSS is copyrighted AND distributed freely... That doesn't invalidate the copyright... right? It's not like someone else is making Joe's Own Elder Scrolls, which would likely be a Trademark violation.
In any case, even if they are correct under present law, I think these game companies (most of which are now owned by EA) have a social and moral obligation to make these old games available in some form or another. And if they refuse to, I would think they are obligated to not prevent others to fulfull that role.
I play a lot of these abandonware games, as an aspiring game programmer/writer/designer, they provide a lot of inspiration as well as nostalgia. I pay for the classic games/collections when I can find them (Ultima 1-8, Wizardry 1-8, etc...). But I'm sure as hell going to download them for free if that's the only way I can get them. That's what I would want people to do if I had written them (which is basically what we heard from the game developer side in the article).
What would be really great is if some of these companies released their hardened grip and opened some of the source code for these games. I'd love to hack around on that stuff...
The cost is mostly NRE: Non-Recoverable Engineering. They've been working on this for a long time, and they've been paying engineers money to figure it all out and stuff. They recover this by "value-based pricing", charging insane amounts of money for the things to the people who will pay it. As the price drops, people will pay for it when the cost meets the value for them.
"Expires" refers to cache expiry, not page expiry.
The only effect this might have is to prevent the page from being cached. It's probably done intentionally, and it definately isn't causing your problem.
That was actually what we called it when someone tried to quit the MUD. Most people came back in a couple weeks...:)
There was an entire MUD subculture of speech. Some phrases or words crossed several MUDs, like "bogleg" (originially a mistyping of "boggle"), and some were specific to the MUD I played, like "quitmud." When mudders got together, they spoke what seemed to be another language, leaving any random non-mudders about completely baffled.
Just as a snide/side note: When I read that a good percentage of the EQers in the survey said they play with a romantic partner, I wondered aloud how many of those EQers are playing with a romantic partner they met through the game and never in real life.
Just to flag myself as lame: I met my first girlfriend on a MUD. Actually, I met her while hanging out in real life with other people that I met through the MUD... but whatever... once I had a girlfriend, I stopped playing the MUD. I used to spend hours and hours (and hours) on that MUD, but during the time I was dating her, I quitmud, and never went back to any MMORPG (4 years so far), even after we broke up.
I guess my point is that I used MUD as a substitute for real-life interaction. When I finally had the opportunity to be with other people IRL, MUD didn't interest me in any way, and, in general, I was much happier.
On the other hand, it's not like I would be out clubbing at night without MUD... it was at least some sort of social interaction, one I was actually comfortable with, and one I wouldn't have got otherwise.
Anyway, your last comment reminded me of them old days.
Well, I think the article alluded to Carmack being more focused on building a great game ENGINE, rather than a great GAME. In theory, if someone licenses the next-gen Id game engine, then all their development time is spent building a good game, and not something that puts shapes on the screen (which, to do well, is itself a major project).
It's about specialization, people doing what they are really good at, instead of trying to do everything and selling mediocrity.
I think with modern medicine, only *really* bad gene combinations get selected out. The only way for humans to really evolve is through genetic engineering. It's the natural progression of evolution! It is our density!
I've been reading several keenspot/keenspace comics for a while now. Their model, as far as I can tell, is to give free web space to online comic artists, along with some helpful stuff, like scripts to archive old comics and post new comics. The normal site seems to make revenue off of banner ads, but they have several other revenue making ideas, and presumably they share the profits with the artists. They print up and market collection books, or periodical issues, as well as offering premium no-ads service to people who want it.
Slashdot Mirror
That wouldn't be an appropriate translation, anyway... it would be "Fire in the Jet."
-If
Of course, then again he probably could have walked away from the accident had he only worn his seatbelt
He wasn't wearging a seatbelt, what was the guy stoopid or something? Guess this is just an example of natural selection in action.
He ran a red light, of course he's stoopid. That's one of the worst traffic offenses, barring driving onto the sidewalk or through a plate-glass storefront or something. Around here (Sunnyvale, CA, USA), they've started putting cameras up on major intersections to automagically photograph red light runners. While it feels a bit oppressive to have the cameras there, I hate people who run red lights enough that I haven't written to the city council yet.
-If
Maybe we don't want a standard toolkit library, but perhaps we want to expand the set of "hints" that a window manager can give to client applications through X system to include look-and-feel information (like themes, menu bar location, etc...) Ideally you would have a system where it would be easy to define new hints, but you also don't want similar hints defined differently by different WMs. You also want these hints to be arbitrarily complicated, perhaps containing (at least a pointer to) an image or somesuch (like a widget background). Lastly, you want clients to be able to ignore hints that it doesn't understand (thus the name "hint"). Any language that can implement an X application should be able to read and understand these hints.
-If
I have been periodically recieving a bunch of Instant Message trying to entice me to visit some "amateur webcam"... They basically hook some kind of rudimentary eliza up to an IM client... it's not very convincing, but it's the thought that pisses me off.
-If
I was reading an article in Scientific American about this 6 years ago or so... It spoke of a Multiverse, which, as you can imagine, is an infinite number of parallel Universes. Things like Conservation of Mass/Energy would be violated by time travel if you were time-travelling within one Universe, as the Universe would lose mass in the present, and gain mass in the past or future. But if you consider the conservation of Mass/Energy to apply to the Multiverse, then that would imply that you switch Universes without violating that constraint. Or something.
Of course, I've muddled the whole idea up, but the basic gist of the article was that when you travel through time, you don't go to the past of the Universe you are in, you go to the past of a different Universe. It went so far as to say that you wouldn't ever be able to return to the same Universe, even if you travelled back to the same time. Of course, you wouldn't really know the difference.
The guy in this article alluded to that:
If his idea pans out, won't there be a host of potential paradoxes, such as time travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining that those travelers would continue to exist in a ''parallel universe.''
-If
In line at Back to the Future: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood they said 1.2 Jigowatts...
-If
Is "Inciteful" the same as "FlameBait?"
Where in San Francisco? I'd like to see one next time I'm up there. Any near the BART?
-If
There's a lot of new stuff in 1.4 that is specifically designed to allow for hardware acceleration of image/component rendering and whatnot. Look at java.awt.image.VolatileImage and go from there. It's beginning to have some DirectX-like capabilities.
-If
IANAV, but I think we're supposed to be more morally and ethically evolved than "animals." Case in point: We are animals, but when we speak about "animals," we don't intend that to include us. What is good enough for animals is not necessarily good enough for us.
Why do we still allow animals to kill each other? Well, once we have a Human society that is entirely vegetarian, then we can think about trying to impose that on animals. In a lot of cases, animals are not omnivores like us, so there's probably a biological barrier. Because we are so mentally evolved, I think we also have to question whether it's ethical to force our morals onto other species. Even if we believe it's wrong to kill other species for food, does that mean we should prevent other species from doing so, beyond defending our own species' lives?
But the biggest problem facing this idea is probably logistics. Try to get a tiger to eat a salad...
-If
I think the line between work and home is a bit fuzzy for many people these days. When I come in to work most weekends, and stay past 9 or 10 at night during the week, I don't have much time to go home and read slashdot if I want to get up in the morning in time to get back to work.
Besides, when you are staring at a bug or problem, and you just can't get your head around it, sometimes you need a BREAK . Surfing the web, or going to the kitchen, or taking a walk around the block, it clears my head, and when I com back to the problem, I can tackle the it with a bit more vigor. People don't work for 8 hours straight (let alone 9 or 10 or 12 or more). It's kind of naive to think that intelligent people can sit and be productive with no recreation all day every day.
-If
This is way off-topic, but I like how it's okay to discuss things unrelated to the story by saying "This is way off-topic." If you don't claim it, you'll get modded down, but as long as you "call" it, it's okay.
Blackout! No tag backs!
-If
We should start a PayPal donation pool to buy the poor guy some more bandwidth so he's not down for 2 weeks.
-If
It's arguable that you are then creating a corporate environment of internal competition and second-guessing that ultimately leads to a loss of productivity. Having a healthy environment is probably worth the extra money that a company might be able to scam off the employees, if they looked at things in the long term.
Employers don't believe it, but turnover, at least at the engineer level, is quite expensive... much more expensive than keeping employees happy. It's just not immediately obvious that this is the case.
-If
We have this exciting new DVD technology... is there some way we can have one
damn DVD that has all the edits, and you just choose which one you want at the beginning?
You'd think a lot of the footage would be common, you'd just have certain branch-points on the
video and the audio (perhaps independantly).
I guess the audio would probably have to be entirely duplicated for each version, because of
the narration and so on would just be vastly different.
-If
What I don't understand is this: They claim that even though the company may not be making any money on a product (like Elder Scrolls: Arena), they need to enforce "piracy" in order to protect their right to make a sequel with the same brand. But OSS is copyrighted AND distributed freely... That doesn't invalidate the copyright... right? It's not like someone else is making Joe's Own Elder Scrolls, which would likely be a Trademark violation.
In any case, even if they are correct under present law, I think these game companies (most of which are now owned by EA) have a social and moral obligation to make these old games available in some form or another. And if they refuse to, I would think they are obligated to not prevent others to fulfull that role.
I play a lot of these abandonware games, as an aspiring game programmer/writer/designer, they provide a lot of inspiration as well as nostalgia. I pay for the classic games/collections when I can find them (Ultima 1-8, Wizardry 1-8, etc...). But I'm sure as hell going to download them for free if that's the only way I can get them. That's what I would want people to do if I had written them (which is basically what we heard from the game developer side in the article).
I went to Al Lowe's web site and he said to order the LSL collection: To order it, go to Amazon.com. It's shipping now! Purchase Leisure Suit Larry's Ultimate Pleasure Pack. Guess what? Availability: This item is out of stock.
What would be really great is if some of these companies released their hardened grip and opened some of the source code for these games. I'd love to hack around on that stuff...
-If
H202 is Hydrogen Peroxide... you put it on wounds and it fizzes! It's fun!
-If
The cost is mostly NRE: Non-Recoverable Engineering. They've been working on this for a long time, and they've been paying engineers money to figure it all out and stuff. They recover this by "value-based pricing", charging insane amounts of money for the things to the people who will pay it. As the price drops, people will pay for it when the cost meets the value for them.
-If
"Expires" refers to cache expiry, not page expiry.
The only effect this might have is to prevent the page from being cached. It's probably done intentionally, and it definately isn't causing your problem.
-If
How many sites could a blacklist site blacklist if a blacklist site could blacklist sites?
How many sites could a blacklist site blacklist site blacklist if a blacklist site blacklist site could blacklist blacklist sites?
Whee!
-If
during the time I was dating her, I quitmud,
:)
Stealthily trying to coin a new verb, eh?
That was actually what we called it when someone tried to quit the MUD. Most people came back in a couple weeks...
There was an entire MUD subculture of speech. Some phrases or words crossed several MUDs, like "bogleg" (originially a mistyping of "boggle"), and some were specific to the MUD I played, like "quitmud." When mudders got together, they spoke what seemed to be another language, leaving any random non-mudders about completely baffled.
-If
Just to flag myself as lame: I met my first girlfriend on a MUD. Actually, I met her while hanging out in real life with other people that I met through the MUD... but whatever... once I had a girlfriend, I stopped playing the MUD. I used to spend hours and hours (and hours) on that MUD, but during the time I was dating her, I quitmud, and never went back to any MMORPG (4 years so far), even after we broke up.
I guess my point is that I used MUD as a substitute for real-life interaction. When I finally had the opportunity to be with other people IRL, MUD didn't interest me in any way, and, in general, I was much happier.
On the other hand, it's not like I would be out clubbing at night without MUD... it was at least some sort of social interaction, one I was actually comfortable with, and one I wouldn't have got otherwise.
Anyway, your last comment reminded me of them old days.
-If
Well, I think the article alluded to Carmack being more focused on building a great game ENGINE, rather than a great GAME. In theory, if someone licenses the next-gen Id game engine, then all their development time is spent building a good game, and not something that puts shapes on the screen (which, to do well, is itself a major project).
It's about specialization, people doing what they are really good at, instead of trying to do everything and selling mediocrity.
-If
I think with modern medicine, only *really* bad gene combinations get selected out. The only way for humans to really evolve is through genetic engineering. It's the natural progression of evolution! It is our density!
-If
I've been reading several keenspot/keenspace comics for a while now. Their model, as far as I can tell, is to give free web space to online comic artists, along with some helpful stuff, like scripts to archive old comics and post new comics. The normal site seems to make revenue off of banner ads, but they have several other revenue making ideas, and presumably they share the profits with the artists. They print up and market collection books, or periodical issues, as well as offering premium no-ads service to people who want it.
I have no idea how well they are doing, but I frequent:
www.rpgworldcomic.com
www.crfh.net
www.bobbins.org
and a couple others.
-If