For some reason, Slashdot book reviewers always seem to spend most of their reviews summarizing the work in mind-numbing detail. Maybe it's the only way they know to make the review long enough. Or maybe they just don't understand that a review isn't the same as an English-class essay that you write just to prove that you read and understand the book.
Well yeah, artificially fertilized corn is not the best choice for growing fuel. I'm not sure what the alternatives are, but let's just assume for the moment that there exists a crop that doesn't need fertilizer and that consumes as much CO2 when you grow it as it produces when you burn it. You still have to plant, cultivate, harvest, process, and distribute it. Which takes energy. So a lot of the fuel you produce has to go right back into the system.
I'm not an expert, but I find it hard to believe that you can find enough cropland in the world to produce enough crop fuel to completely replace fossil fuel. You can maybe make a dent in fossil fuel consumption, but only at an enormous environmental cost -- turning huge plots of land into sugar cane (or whatever) monoculture. If your goal is to pull CO2 out of the air, you'd be better off putting your resources into reforestation. Which doesn't really solve the problem either, but is preferrable to turning the planet into a canefield.
With the Chinese selling off dollars like hotcakes, costs of toys made in the Orient, such as DVD players, PDAs, and iPods, will be just a little higher this year and the trend will only continue.
Actually, that would be a desirable effect. In order for Americans to buy all those toys, they have to earn money themselves. For that to happen we need to sell goods and services to the Chinese. And also consume more American g&s ourselves, which higher prices for imports encourages.
Except that this is not what happens, at least in relation to China. The value of the Yuan against the Dollar isn't set by the market, it's set by the Chinese government. So go ahead and buy that Chinese-made DVD player -- if you have any money with which to do so! With job creation in the U.S. still stagnant, a lot of people don't.
The real danger of the Chinese selling off their dollars is that these dollars are in the form of treasury notes, issued by our government to finance the deficit. As the defict grows and grows, it's getting harder and harder to sell these notes. That raises the prospect that the federal government will simply be unable to pay any of its bills -- not the paycheck of the G.I. in Iraq, not the maintenance cost of all those Interstate highways, nothing. You may think that the government spends a lot of money on useless stuff -- and you'd be right. But we're all dependent on that spending in some way, and the prospect of it suddenly disappearing is scary as hell. A lot more scary than having to cut back on your Christmas gifts!
I don't much care for your adage. The patent files are full of useless inventions that are not the right tool for any conceivable job.
Still, you sort of have a point. There are plenty of applications that work well within MySQL's limitations. Then again, they also work well with other low-end DBMSs, like FireBird/Interbase and PosgreSQL. (Let's leave Oracle out of the discussion -- you don't use that kind of software unless you have deep pockets and serious support infrastructure.) Now, if you know for sure that your application will never evolve beyond MySQL's limitations, I suppose there's no harm in using it. But most application do evolve.
I don't usually care for the usual "It sucks!" versus "It rules!" debates you see on Slashdot. Everything has its strengths and weaknesses. But in this case I have to say that MySQL does suck. Not in the sense that it's totally useless (obviously not, since so many people use it). But it does suck you into a development path that you will come to regret following.
Well yeah -- if you remember how often one Slashdotter's flamebait is often another's plain truth. In this case, the point of comparison is the Ricer -- an exercise in pure technological ego. A lot of people (including me) find that sort of thing supremely irritating. But the suggestion that many Linux diehards have the same mentality is not far off the mark. Linux nerds (and other kinds of techno-nerds as well) often seem to like the technology for its own sake. Nothing wrong with that, but that means accepting that the picture the nerd projects to the outside world is just a little weird. Worth remembering, no matter what drum you march to.
I guess. It sort of depresses me that 20-odd years after the first trip to the moon, the VC was still the only practical place to film in microgravity.
The hard part was that each period of microgravity only lasted about 15 minutes. So that was the maximum length of any take.
Why does the AI in GTA3 suck so thoroughly? Don't get me wrong, I really like the game. But my enjoyment is slightly spoiled by non-player characters that literaly can't find their way out of a corner. Makes it much too easy to avoid the police. What makes it really sad is that the advanced hype for the game promise the most sophisticated AI ever. Not what we got.
I guess my question is rhetorical, 'cause I know the answer. Whoever was assigned to write the AI just totally underestimated the difficulty of the task. Almost all programmers make that mistake -- they don't appreciate the difficulty of emulating human behavior. The exceptions are all serious computer scientists.
So, RQ2: why didn't they hire some of those? They had the budget for big name actors to do the voices, to render a couple hundred buildings in detail, and to develop the VR engine to make it all work. Surely they could hire an AI expert or two. Answer: they just didn't know any better. Too bad.
Heard Tom Hanks talk about the making of A13. Turns out he didn't get sick unless he forgot to take his Scopdex. Never used Scopdex? Not suprising, since it's a combination of scopolamine and dexedrine. Just say no!
They'd be better off if they did. It's always amazed me that MS manages to have such bad UI designs, considering how much effort they expend on usability studies. I'm guessing that the design process is so numbers-driven and bureaucratized that anything like a creative spark or a critical attitude about design mistakes just gets stepped on.
We'd all take the Secret Service a lot more seriously if they updated their name. Back in 1865 it may have been way cool to call your treasury cops a "secret service", but now it alternates between quaintness and confusion Since they're now part of DHS, how about "Homeland Enforcement"? Make a great TV show!
Boringness is too subjective a criterion for badness. When I see a movie full of explosions, chases, and meaningless titilation, I'm bored to tears. But I don't consider these things as signs that the movie is bad. It just means the filmmaker were aiming at an audience (a rather big audience) that I don't happen to belong to.
There's an episode of The Sopranos where Tony tells his shrink how he and his friends used to let a guy with a cleft palate hang around with them, just so they could snicker at his funny way of talking. (He's recently had that particular role reversed on him, which makes him feel guilty.) I think that's the same, cruel appeal that Ed Wood has. It's entertaining to snicker at a guy who manages to make every mistake a movie person could possibly make -- swooping microphones, lame dialogue, actors standing around visibly wondering what they're supposed to be doing. I've never been able to laugh at Ed Wood, perhaps for the same reason I can't laugh at people with speech defects. But whether you can laugh at the badness or not, it's definitely there.
"I was thinking about the life of a pumpkin. Grow up in the sun, happily entwined with the others, and then someone comes along, cuts you open and rips your guts out."
Hey, I'm opposed to the war too. But the righteousnous of the war is neither here nor there. Unless you're an absolute pacifist and want to disband the Armed Forces, you should be be interested in how the Irag war is being fought. Whether it should be fought at all is a whole different issue.
The majority of the Delphi & BCB IDEs are implemented in Delphi with VCL, while the JBuilder & CBX IDEs are built in JBuilder. I don't know about Kylix.
Kylix is basically a Linux port of Delphi. There are even WINE widgets filling in for Windows controls -- which was supposed to be a temporary expedient, but they never got round to writing Linux-native widgets.
Since I mentioned WINE, I have to answer the question that always gets asked: no, Kylix is not a WINE application, it just uses some WINE resources. Delphi actually runs pretty well under WINE, but Kylix aims to be a fully native Linux app. Or perhaps I should use the past tense, since my spies tell me that there are no plans for further development of Kylix.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, Slashdot book reviewers always seem to spend most of their reviews summarizing the work in mind-numbing detail. Maybe it's the only way they know to make the review long enough. Or maybe they just don't understand that a review isn't the same as an English-class essay that you write just to prove that you read and understand the book.
I'm not an expert, but I find it hard to believe that you can find enough cropland in the world to produce enough crop fuel to completely replace fossil fuel. You can maybe make a dent in fossil fuel consumption, but only at an enormous environmental cost -- turning huge plots of land into sugar cane (or whatever) monoculture. If your goal is to pull CO2 out of the air, you'd be better off putting your resources into reforestation. Which doesn't really solve the problem either, but is preferrable to turning the planet into a canefield.
By "organic" I assume you mean "crop-based". Except that it takes energy to grow crops. By some calculations, it takes more than you produce.
Except that this is not what happens, at least in relation to China. The value of the Yuan against the Dollar isn't set by the market, it's set by the Chinese government. So go ahead and buy that Chinese-made DVD player -- if you have any money with which to do so! With job creation in the U.S. still stagnant, a lot of people don't.
The real danger of the Chinese selling off their dollars is that these dollars are in the form of treasury notes, issued by our government to finance the deficit. As the defict grows and grows, it's getting harder and harder to sell these notes. That raises the prospect that the federal government will simply be unable to pay any of its bills -- not the paycheck of the G.I. in Iraq, not the maintenance cost of all those Interstate highways, nothing. You may think that the government spends a lot of money on useless stuff -- and you'd be right. But we're all dependent on that spending in some way, and the prospect of it suddenly disappearing is scary as hell. A lot more scary than having to cut back on your Christmas gifts!
Still, you sort of have a point. There are plenty of applications that work well within MySQL's limitations. Then again, they also work well with other low-end DBMSs, like FireBird/Interbase and PosgreSQL. (Let's leave Oracle out of the discussion -- you don't use that kind of software unless you have deep pockets and serious support infrastructure.) Now, if you know for sure that your application will never evolve beyond MySQL's limitations, I suppose there's no harm in using it. But most application do evolve.
I don't usually care for the usual "It sucks!" versus "It rules!" debates you see on Slashdot. Everything has its strengths and weaknesses. But in this case I have to say that MySQL does suck. Not in the sense that it's totally useless (obviously not, since so many people use it). But it does suck you into a development path that you will come to regret following.
Not much of a promo, since the books they're "giving away" are public domain. They probably just copied the text from Project Gutenberg.
Well yeah -- if you remember how often one Slashdotter's flamebait is often another's plain truth. In this case, the point of comparison is the Ricer -- an exercise in pure technological ego. A lot of people (including me) find that sort of thing supremely irritating. But the suggestion that many Linux diehards have the same mentality is not far off the mark. Linux nerds (and other kinds of techno-nerds as well) often seem to like the technology for its own sake. Nothing wrong with that, but that means accepting that the picture the nerd projects to the outside world is just a little weird. Worth remembering, no matter what drum you march to.
The hard part was that each period of microgravity only lasted about 15 minutes. So that was the maximum length of any take.
I guess my question is rhetorical, 'cause I know the answer. Whoever was assigned to write the AI just totally underestimated the difficulty of the task. Almost all programmers make that mistake -- they don't appreciate the difficulty of emulating human behavior. The exceptions are all serious computer scientists.
So, RQ2: why didn't they hire some of those? They had the budget for big name actors to do the voices, to render a couple hundred buildings in detail, and to develop the VR engine to make it all work. Surely they could hire an AI expert or two. Answer: they just didn't know any better. Too bad.
Heard Tom Hanks talk about the making of A13. Turns out he didn't get sick unless he forgot to take his Scopdex. Never used Scopdex? Not suprising, since it's a combination of scopolamine and dexedrine. Just say no!
You got to get some better material!
I have to wonder if SW2 wasn't influenced by P9. They're certainly bad in a similar way...
Look, Ed Wood is a guy who fought at Iwo Jima -- while wearing women's underwear. I don't want to know what went on in his head!
We'd all take the Secret Service a lot more seriously if they updated their name. Back in 1865 it may have been way cool to call your treasury cops a "secret service", but now it alternates between quaintness and confusion Since they're now part of DHS, how about "Homeland Enforcement"? Make a great TV show!
There's an episode of The Sopranos where Tony tells his shrink how he and his friends used to let a guy with a cleft palate hang around with them, just so they could snicker at his funny way of talking. (He's recently had that particular role reversed on him, which makes him feel guilty.) I think that's the same, cruel appeal that Ed Wood has. It's entertaining to snicker at a guy who manages to make every mistake a movie person could possibly make -- swooping microphones, lame dialogue, actors standing around visibly wondering what they're supposed to be doing. I've never been able to laugh at Ed Wood, perhaps for the same reason I can't laugh at people with speech defects. But whether you can laugh at the badness or not, it's definitely there.
My joke might be crappy, but at least it isn't a simple repition of the same joke we've been hearing for 4 years.
"I was thinking about the life of a pumpkin. Grow up in the sun, happily entwined with the others, and then someone comes along, cuts you open and rips your guts out."
-1 Repetitive (old joke)
So the French are claiming they invented H-Bombs now? How like them!
Space travel has now been reduced to the status of a theme park ride. A six-figure ride, true, that only makes it even more pathetic.
Hey, I'm opposed to the war too. But the righteousnous of the war is neither here nor there. Unless you're an absolute pacifist and want to disband the Armed Forces, you should be be interested in how the Irag war is being fought. Whether it should be fought at all is a whole different issue.
Since I mentioned WINE, I have to answer the question that always gets asked: no, Kylix is not a WINE application, it just uses some WINE resources. Delphi actually runs pretty well under WINE, but Kylix aims to be a fully native Linux app. Or perhaps I should use the past tense, since my spies tell me that there are no plans for further development of Kylix.