The problem is this: I could not do online dating. Even with traditional dating--if I cannot lock eyes with her and see pretty eyes, if her face is beyond cute and into the realm of pretty, if she is not anorexic nor horribly obese, and if her personality is a good match for what I am looking for--that's the woman I would consider dating. Otherwise, rejected as far as dating goes. Maybe friendzone at best.
Jeez, you're looking for too much.
The way I approached online dating is, it would introduce me to interesting women, and we would go for a date. Perhaps a meal, a chat, a chaste kiss at the end. That's usually better than sitting alone in front of the TV, even if there's no attraction whatsoever. For me, it never got awkward enough that a date had to be abandoned, although I know that happens -- what the hell, at least you have a war story.
And that's all I looked for in online dating. If we both had a great time, then a second date would happen, but that's a bonus.
After a few of these kinds of dates -- fewer than I anticipated, actually -- I found myself on a third, fourth, fifth date, and now we share a mortgage. Romance!
If he wanted to, Ridley Scott could make a $20M film; just having his name on it would probably result in $50M worth of box office.
I'm not even sure CGI is the biggest cost. I went to the Harry Potter studio tour recently. The number of *physical things* that were acquired, or designed and built in service of the film, is astonishing. Even the production artists' sketchbooks represent millions of dollars worth of man hours. You can certainly see how the costs mount.
Do you really see a slow paced sci-fi noir action/psychological/ethical thriller playing well today?
Well, depends what you mean by "playing well". I don't see it being box office no. 1, but you can get the same effects on screen much more cheaply nowadays, and there's scope to make something intelligent, with Blade Runner's tone, that makes its money back. The question is whether Ridley Scott wants to be involved with something medium-budget, or whether the studio will let him. That said, he owns his own production companies and should be able to call the shots.
Moon was a critical success, and I imagine made a profit. That's properly intelligent sci-fi. Looper was silly, but it showed that there's an appetite for sci-fi that's not all laser guns and jumpsuits.
I love that it's ambiguous, but I can't abide the fans debating.
Look, there's no right answer. The actors/writers/directors don't have a secret canonical version of what wasn't shown on screen. Both possibilities exist.
See also the excellent recent film 'Kill List', in which lots of background is deliberately left undefined. The writer/director has said quite clearly that all interpretations are equally valid.
You were unlucky enough to see it at the wrong time of your life, with the wrong expectations. It might not be fixable.
It'll be diminished now because that vision of the dark futuristic city, mixing Japan-inspired neon with rain and grime, has been done to death. Also it played to our fears and anticipations in the 80s.
I think it's a great film though, which reads differently depending on your perspective. At one stage, I watched it and saw it as a meditation on fate, the passing of time and the nature of memories. That's explicit in Rutger Hauer's monologues, but also in other aspects of the film.
Then I watched it again more recently, and read it in a completely different way.
Sneaking into someone's office and putting a keylogger inline with their keyboard cable is an example of physical access making black-hat hacking easy.
Sneaking into the same office and plugging a PwnPlug or similar into the physical network is another example.
Those two are increasingly far from actually directly looking at filesystem blocks, but put you at an advantage compared to someone trying to get to a system from the other side of a firewall.
GP has already provided you with a potential scenario - presumably the chargers Vodafone fitted in London taxis were a USB socket and/or an iPod dock mounted in the passenger section of the taxi. The BeagleBoard could be anywhere in the taxi.
Plus, it's a proof of concept. It could certainly be miniaturised.
I doubt that any other smartphone OS is immune to this kind of attack, however.
To bring people out of their shells -- and I am not joking here -- make something, and make it with agile activities . No, don't get all anal-retentive about Scrum methodology, but:
- Make design a group activity. Whiteboard. Write user stories on index cards. - Invite some kids who are *not* interested in coding, to be "stakeholders" -- have them help you write user stories, show them your work in progress, gather their feedback - Pair program (when I was at school, we were two-to-a-keyboard due to hardware shortages anyway)
For example, one pupil has a vague idea for a game. Perhaps he's not much of a programmer, but he knows roughly how it'll work.
Get him, some more technical pupils, some more arty kids, together for a design meeting. The arty ones all brainstorm for a bit. Then the technical ones step in and say, "OK, we've got a lot of cool ideas. By next week I reckon we can have a controllable square sprite, a jump control, some static target sprites, and a score that goes up every time he touches one.".
Then the following week, they show off what they've done, and the non-technical ones are suitably impressed. And the semi-technical ones have learned some more coding skills. And the arty ones have maybe drawn pictures to be scanned into sprites in the meantime. Someone says "I thought the main guy would move faster", or "he should jump higher", or "now, those static targets should move... how should they move"?... and you iterate with that, mixing with non-technical people to build up something cool.
Scratch *is* fun, and would be a great fit for an elementary school computer club.
I think by the time you're in high school, you should be aspiring to something more powerful/advanced.
Having said that, for complete beginners to programming, I'd be tempted to use Scratch just for long enough to introduce a few core concepts. It's wonderful to have an environment where syntax errors are impossible.
If watching American teen movies has taught me anything, the computer club will become the envy of all their classmates and the cheerleaders will certainly agree to go to the prom with them. Cheerleaders dig x86 assembly experts who can talk for hours about the file allocation tables in obselete file systems.
Sufficiently advanced high school programmers can create themselves a Kelly LeBrock.
+1 to that. CS is stuff like formally proving the search efficiency of data structures. Don't try to attract high schoolers with that. It's interesting stuff, but you need a gateway drug.
I sort of assume that the companies building cookie-cutter estates in Britain know what they're doing. They seem like cut-throat capitalists who would pick the cheaper option if it would boost their profit margins.
I suspect that houses built from factory-fabbed modules are better and potentially cheaper - and definitely faster to erect. There was a "Grand Designs" show a while back in which a British couple had one shipped in and build by a German company; it was a beautiful building and took less than a week's work on site.
But the companies have probably got market research that says a shoddily built brick building has higher margins than a well build prefab building. Buyers are irrational; British buyers like brick.
Make something cool; something you can show off to people outside the club, that will impress them and make them want to join in.
Something involving robotics or sensing devices, perhaps -- that seems to engage young imaginations somehow. It's 20 times cooler to make a turtle robot draw a picture, than to draw the same picture on a screen. What about a Raspberry Pi powered school weather station that tweets the current wind speed and temperature, and serves visualisations of historical data on the web?
See if you can come up with a project that can scale -- so your 4 core members can make a start on it, but other people could be brought in whenever they show an interest?
This is the same "who do you sue" argument you'd use against using Apache on Linux for your web hosting business. So you pay money for ISS on Windows, while your competitors outperform you for less cost.
If you want to talk chokepoints you should start with the doorways. Modern British houses are ridiculously small rabbit hutches, The builder have to take the doors off their show houses and fill them with mirrors just to make them look bigger.
I have lived in such a home - the first house I owned was a 2 bedroom new build, and yes, it was pretty cramped. But to be fair, they're like that because that's what the market wants. If you're willing to pay more (or go to a cheaper location), you can get a more spacious house.
Could the misunderstanding be that so many of us in the UK live in homes older than 30 years? My last three homes have been 200, 150 and 100 years old respectively. None of them is likely to get demolished any time soon, and they've been insulated since as best they can -- but they're bound to be inefficient compared to a well-specced new build.
In many parts of the US, newer houses are the norm, and although *some* historic homes are preserved, it's not such a big deal to knock down a wooden house and replace it with something modern.
Yeah, the BBC was a great place to learn, although I never moved onto ASM.
I remember writing bouncing ball routines and turning them into games; cellular automata; 3D projections of geometric figures, which you could animate by cycling the colour palette; random walk fractals and mandelbrots (which, being written in BASIC, by me, could take days to render).
Then I did a CS degree, in which the lecturers expressed a preference for teaching people with no "bad habits" learned from previous programming.
The issue with Closure is that, unlike most games, it does collision detection on the output of the shader. The novelty of the game is that you manipulate light sources, but if you can't see something, it isn't there, and so you fall through it.
The problem is that different graphics cards give different output for the same input. So a pixel that would be white when calculated by an Nvidia shader, is black when calculated by the Intel integrated graphics shader, resulting in an infinite death cycle at an early stage of the game.
It might have been fixed by now. Last I looked in the forums, there were suggestions of tweaks in config files to change gamma correction parameters and so forth. I tried a couple of things, then moved on to doing something fun instead.
The Skyrim glitches are an odd case. In a sense, they're unforgivable. But in another sense, the scope of that game is so huge, if they polished it all, they'd never finish.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is this: I could not do online dating. Even with traditional dating--if I cannot lock eyes with her and see pretty eyes, if her face is beyond cute and into the realm of pretty, if she is not anorexic nor horribly obese, and if her personality is a good match for what I am looking for--that's the woman I would consider dating. Otherwise, rejected as far as dating goes. Maybe friendzone at best.
Jeez, you're looking for too much.
The way I approached online dating is, it would introduce me to interesting women, and we would go for a date. Perhaps a meal, a chat, a chaste kiss at the end. That's usually better than sitting alone in front of the TV, even if there's no attraction whatsoever. For me, it never got awkward enough that a date had to be abandoned, although I know that happens -- what the hell, at least you have a war story.
And that's all I looked for in online dating. If we both had a great time, then a second date would happen, but that's a bonus.
After a few of these kinds of dates -- fewer than I anticipated, actually -- I found myself on a third, fourth, fifth date, and now we share a mortgage. Romance!
Well, sure, by "cheap" I mean, say, $20M rather than $100M.
As approximate benchmarks, Moon cost $5M (box office $10M), Prometheus $120M (box office $400M).
If he wanted to, Ridley Scott could make a $20M film; just having his name on it would probably result in $50M worth of box office.
I'm not even sure CGI is the biggest cost. I went to the Harry Potter studio tour recently. The number of *physical things* that were acquired, or designed and built in service of the film, is astonishing. Even the production artists' sketchbooks represent millions of dollars worth of man hours. You can certainly see how the costs mount.
Do you really see a slow paced sci-fi noir action/psychological/ethical thriller playing well today?
Well, depends what you mean by "playing well". I don't see it being box office no. 1, but you can get the same effects on screen much more cheaply nowadays, and there's scope to make something intelligent, with Blade Runner's tone, that makes its money back. The question is whether Ridley Scott wants to be involved with something medium-budget, or whether the studio will let him. That said, he owns his own production companies and should be able to call the shots.
Moon was a critical success, and I imagine made a profit. That's properly intelligent sci-fi.
Looper was silly, but it showed that there's an appetite for sci-fi that's not all laser guns and jumpsuits.
The new Dredd film is notable for being a sci-fi action film that lasts 95 minutes without getting boring (which is pretty unusual nowadays).
It's also notable for more-or-less nailing the tone of the comic, which the Stallone one came nowhere near doing.
I'd love to see a sequel, but I think its box office performance precludes that.
I love that it's ambiguous, but I can't abide the fans debating.
Look, there's no right answer. The actors/writers/directors don't have a secret canonical version of what wasn't shown on screen. Both possibilities exist.
See also the excellent recent film 'Kill List', in which lots of background is deliberately left undefined. The writer/director has said quite clearly that all interpretations are equally valid.
You were unlucky enough to see it at the wrong time of your life, with the wrong expectations. It might not be fixable.
It'll be diminished now because that vision of the dark futuristic city, mixing Japan-inspired neon with rain and grime, has been done to death. Also it played to our fears and anticipations in the 80s.
I think it's a great film though, which reads differently depending on your perspective. At one stage, I watched it and saw it as a meditation on fate, the passing of time and the nature of memories. That's explicit in Rutger Hauer's monologues, but also in other aspects of the film.
Then I watched it again more recently, and read it in a completely different way.
That's evidence of depth.
I trust Ridley Scott.
Even after Prometheus?
I mean, it wasn't awful. But it wasn't good either.
Disasterpeace could do it justice, I feel.
Agreed, the new Dredd movie was great.
Well, there's a continuum.
Sneaking into someone's office and putting a keylogger inline with their keyboard cable is an example of physical access making black-hat hacking easy.
Sneaking into the same office and plugging a PwnPlug or similar into the physical network is another example.
Those two are increasingly far from actually directly looking at filesystem blocks, but put you at an advantage compared to someone trying to get to a system from the other side of a firewall.
GP has already provided you with a potential scenario - presumably the chargers Vodafone fitted in London taxis were a USB socket and/or an iPod dock mounted in the passenger section of the taxi. The BeagleBoard could be anywhere in the taxi.
Plus, it's a proof of concept. It could certainly be miniaturised.
I doubt that any other smartphone OS is immune to this kind of attack, however.
No compiler, near instant results...just need a text editor, browser...so how are Python/Ruby/Perl different? Oh, you don't need a browser...
You need Python/Ruby/Perl installed, which might not be the case.
You probably do have a browser installed.
Not that I'd personally use JS for teaching.
To bring people out of their shells -- and I am not joking here -- make something, and make it with agile activities . No, don't get all anal-retentive about Scrum methodology, but:
- Make design a group activity. Whiteboard. Write user stories on index cards.
- Invite some kids who are *not* interested in coding, to be "stakeholders" -- have them help you write user stories, show them your work in progress, gather their feedback
- Pair program (when I was at school, we were two-to-a-keyboard due to hardware shortages anyway)
For example, one pupil has a vague idea for a game. Perhaps he's not much of a programmer, but he knows roughly how it'll work.
Get him, some more technical pupils, some more arty kids, together for a design meeting. The arty ones all brainstorm for a bit. Then the technical ones step in and say, "OK, we've got a lot of cool ideas. By next week I reckon we can have a controllable square sprite, a jump control, some static target sprites, and a score that goes up every time he touches one.".
Then the following week, they show off what they've done, and the non-technical ones are suitably impressed. And the semi-technical ones have learned some more coding skills. And the arty ones have maybe drawn pictures to be scanned into sprites in the meantime. Someone says "I thought the main guy would move faster", or "he should jump higher", or "now, those static targets should move... how should they move"? ... and you iterate with that, mixing with non-technical people to build up something cool.
Scratch *is* fun, and would be a great fit for an elementary school computer club.
I think by the time you're in high school, you should be aspiring to something more powerful/advanced.
Having said that, for complete beginners to programming, I'd be tempted to use Scratch just for long enough to introduce a few core concepts. It's wonderful to have an environment where syntax errors are impossible.
If watching American teen movies has taught me anything, the computer club will become the envy of all their classmates and the cheerleaders will certainly agree to go to the prom with them. Cheerleaders dig x86 assembly experts who can talk for hours about the file allocation tables in obselete file systems.
Sufficiently advanced high school programmers can create themselves a Kelly LeBrock.
+1 to that. CS is stuff like formally proving the search efficiency of data structures. Don't try to attract high schoolers with that. It's interesting stuff, but you need a gateway drug.
I sort of assume that the companies building cookie-cutter estates in Britain know what they're doing. They seem like cut-throat capitalists who would pick the cheaper option if it would boost their profit margins.
I suspect that houses built from factory-fabbed modules are better and potentially cheaper - and definitely faster to erect. There was a "Grand Designs" show a while back in which a British couple had one shipped in and build by a German company; it was a beautiful building and took less than a week's work on site.
But the companies have probably got market research that says a shoddily built brick building has higher margins than a well build prefab building. Buyers are irrational; British buyers like brick.
What you're describing *is* "the market".
We'd all like a 5 bedroom mansion, but we can't all afford one.
Make something cool; something you can show off to people outside the club, that will impress them and make them want to join in.
Something involving robotics or sensing devices, perhaps -- that seems to engage young imaginations somehow. It's 20 times cooler to make a turtle robot draw a picture, than to draw the same picture on a screen. What about a Raspberry Pi powered school weather station that tweets the current wind speed and temperature, and serves visualisations of historical data on the web?
See if you can come up with a project that can scale -- so your 4 core members can make a start on it, but other people could be brought in whenever they show an interest?
This is the same "who do you sue" argument you'd use against using Apache on Linux for your web hosting business. So you pay money for ISS on Windows, while your competitors outperform you for less cost.
If you want to talk chokepoints you should start with the doorways. Modern British houses are ridiculously small rabbit hutches, The builder have to take the doors off their show houses and fill them with mirrors just to make them look bigger.
I have lived in such a home - the first house I owned was a 2 bedroom new build, and yes, it was pretty cramped. But to be fair, they're like that because that's what the market wants. If you're willing to pay more (or go to a cheaper location), you can get a more spacious house.
Could the misunderstanding be that so many of us in the UK live in homes older than 30 years? My last three homes have been 200, 150 and 100 years old respectively. None of them is likely to get demolished any time soon, and they've been insulated since as best they can -- but they're bound to be inefficient compared to a well-specced new build.
In many parts of the US, newer houses are the norm, and although *some* historic homes are preserved, it's not such a big deal to knock down a wooden house and replace it with something modern.
Yeah, the BBC was a great place to learn, although I never moved onto ASM.
I remember writing bouncing ball routines and turning them into games; cellular automata; 3D projections of geometric figures, which you could animate by cycling the colour palette; random walk fractals and mandelbrots (which, being written in BASIC, by me, could take days to render).
Then I did a CS degree, in which the lecturers expressed a preference for teaching people with no "bad habits" learned from previous programming.
The issue with Closure is that, unlike most games, it does collision detection on the output of the shader. The novelty of the game is that you manipulate light sources, but if you can't see something, it isn't there, and so you fall through it.
The problem is that different graphics cards give different output for the same input. So a pixel that would be white when calculated by an Nvidia shader, is black when calculated by the Intel integrated graphics shader, resulting in an infinite death cycle at an early stage of the game.
It might have been fixed by now. Last I looked in the forums, there were suggestions of tweaks in config files to change gamma correction parameters and so forth. I tried a couple of things, then moved on to doing something fun instead.
The Skyrim glitches are an odd case. In a sense, they're unforgivable. But in another sense, the scope of that game is so huge, if they polished it all, they'd never finish.
You have to understand that most people don't want to build their own gaming device.
I know it's not that hard. Most people don't want to do it anyway.