Nah, there's a third category -- "resting on their laurels". As in, they've learned something inside out, and feel they can capitalise on that for the rest of their working life.
It's a dangerous game though. I know people in their 50s who mastered MVS and PL/1, and didn't think they'd ever need to know UNIX or OO.
Firstly, congratulations on getting your guy's link onto Slashdot.
I've got news for you: there are thousands of comedians playing night after night in front of crowds of 100 or less. Many of them are subjectively better than most TV comedians. Some of them will break through. Some of them will spend the rest of their life doing it for the love of it. Some of them will make a living wage on it but no more.
There are well worn paths, and your guy seems to be on one. He's doing paid gigs.
The game is a management-sim in which the player manages a game development studio.
In the normal game, you start out in the 8 bit years, writing games and selling them. You use the profits to hire artists and developers, R&D an engine, advertise, licence etc., to make bigger and more profitable games, and as time passes, technology improves. The in-game economy is balanced for a challenging but winnable game.
In the "poisoned" game they seeded the warez sites with, after a couple of hours of play, the in-game advisor says "we're seeing a lot of piracy, it's going to affect our sales". And from then on the in-game economy is deliberately wrecked, so sales figures plummet despite you doing everything right.
On cue, the messageboards see pirate gamers asking why the game suddenly became unwinnable -- asking if they can develop in-game DRM, to beat the in-game pirates.
If church attendance is your metric, then the UK is an overwhelmingly non-religious country.
In the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey 50.9% said "no religion", 19.9% Church of England, 8.6% Catholic.
That contradicts the 2011 census, mind you, which says 59% Christian (with no published breakdown of denomination). Must be slightly differently worded questions.
The inaccurate "socialist prick" bit distracts from the other half of what you said.
It is notoriously difficult to define pornography or obscenity. "The explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purpose of sexual gratification" is clear enough, except that it's sometimes hard to be objective about the "purpose" of a given work.
There's a big grey area of work which some people would like to suppress on the grounds that it's pornography, but its creators would argue was art. There's are also works which the creators intended as pornography, but which they claim is art anyway, in an effort to avoid suppression. The grey area presents a problem of classification when making laws.
But, there's a huge amount of stuff that doesn't fall into the grey area. Work where the creator, the distributor, the consumer and the authorities are all happy to agree that the material is pornography. I don't see any problem with moves that make it easier to keep that stuff away from children. Of course, they'll find it eventually, but hopefully late enough that they'll have learned a bit of context.
I'm not sure the Lib-Dems would claim to be socialists either.
I don't think there's a mainstream socialist party left in the UK -- although I still cling to the hope that Labour will swing back to the left one day.
It seems to me they taught the robot to perform an almost completely unnecessary task.
Well, in this specific task, yes. But more generally what they've done could be useful. Their actual achievement is to program a robot so that it can learn by observation when to go from one task to another. The human wants the robot to help him position the table, then he wants the robot to hold it still. The robot infers when to stop moving, and start holding still, based on the movement of the human (and the table leg).
It's just a toy problem for research, and the techniques can be used for other situations where a computer vision system needs to infer from what it sees, what do do next. When to change from patrolling a site to pursuing an intruder, for example.
You might as well leave the tabletop on the floor and then screw in the legs.
Now, if the human would hold the tabletop near the robot, and the robot would pick up the legs and screw them in, that would be something.
Yes, and it would be less of a challenge. In fact I'm sure it's already been done - recognise a screw hole, quickly and accurately mate it with a screw and rotate until tight.
I'm always tremendously impressed by the accuracy of Ikea instructions, and the little tricks they put into the design to make it more foolproof. I've bought flatpack furniture from other sources, and there tends to be much more to go wrong. Ikea do things like ensure that screws and screw-holes won't line up if you try to join the wrong two parts.
Ikea seem to iterate their designs (the ones they don't phase out) to make them easier to assemble, and cheaper to produce. When I first bought Billy shelving, over a decade ago, it was uniformly laminated. When I bought some more, years later, they'd ascertained which surfaces would be concealed, and used non-matching laminate (presumably cheap, remaindered stock) for those parts.
... and you still wouldn't be able to look at background detail that the cinematographer's defocussed. This has nothing to do with 3D.
Presumably Cynyr also objects to 2D films with shallow depth-of-focus. But it's a long established effect. The cinematographer chooses where to focus, and where you should be looking.
I have trained for, and achieved semi-respectable times in several 10km races, without ever experiencing the endorphin-related pleasure people describe.
Reading around, I've seen people say they get a rush at round about mile 3 -- so towards the end of my typical 5km route. But I've also read that the fitter you are, the harder you have to work to get the rush, so it's a prize that's always retreating from you.
Exercise is necessary, because being out of shape is no fun. Competing an organised race gives you a target and a sense of achievement. But actually enjoying the exercise itself? I envy you people so much.
Exercise causes your body to release endorphins. In non technical lingo, its addictive, and only the discomfort is what keeps it from being as all-consuming as some other addictions.
Repeating myself - but either I don't release endorphins when I exercise (as much as some people), or the endorphins don't have the pleasing effect on me that they have on some people. I don't think that makes me special -- there are lots of people who derive no pleasure from exercise.
People who's bodies deliver them endorphins, and/or whose brains react to them, are lucky.
I really don't to sound like a snob, but you should try out some good exercise uhh.. once in your life so you know that feeling at least.
As an adult, I've run a 52 minute 10km, which I realise isn't brilliant, but at least demonstrates I'm not a couch potato. Neither in the training or the race itself, did I ever experience anything that made me look forward to the next run. People talk about endorphins, but I've never experienced the effect they describe.
The only reason I persevere with exercise is that in my early 30s, I realised that running 20 metres to catch a bus left me bright red and out of breath -- which I really didn't like. Running is a tedious, uncomfortable chore that keeps me from being in that state.
Being out of shape, having to forgo fun activities. feeling weak and lethargic...these would cause me more discomfort than sore muscles and bruises.
Sure, and for those reasons I do a bit of running. But it's like washing dishes. I wash the dishes because, although unpleasant, it's less unpleasant than having a filthy kitchen. Running's not pleasant, but it's worth it to not be out of shape.
But many people seem to actively enjoy the pain of exercise -- if, hypothetically, they could stop exercising and remain fit, they would still run for the fun of it. I envy them because what's a chore for me (in order to stay in shape) is a pleasure for them. Like sitting through a meal, eager for the pleasure of washing the dishes.
I'm glad you said "some people" because I'm pretty certain the endorphin/adrenaline thing is highly variable depending on the individual. I've done a fair amount of running (it seems to be the cheapest form of exercise, with the least travel/preparation/cleanup overhead) and never knowingly experienced an endorphin rush.
Thanking someone for battering you seems utterly alien; one step away from self-harm. And although you get an endorphin rush from the initial impact, generally a painful bruise outlasts it.
Sorry, I know millions of people enjoy this stuff. I just feel left out, and tend to over-analyse in a futile effort to crack it. Bottom line is, we all have different physiology and psychology.
The active pursuit of risk of pain and discomfort.
Which, if not illusory, will translate to actual pain and discomfort some of the time.
Or, if illusory, will cease to be effective over time.
And of course this doesn't account for people who voluntarily take part in games like rugby on cold, rainy days, when the discomfort starts well before kickoff.
I'm not a doctor either, but I'm given to understand that a quarter teaspoon of table salt stirred into a glass of normal orange squash is equivalent to branded isotonic drinks and rehydration sachets.
Getting shot and the possibility of getting hurt are on the plus side. That's what makes things not-boring.
This is one of the things I find puzzling about people who enjoy sport and exercise. The active pursuit of pain and discomfort. Paintball: you're likely to get a bruising, painful projectile whack you. Many team sports: an obligation to spend hours in the cold and wet. Cyclists actively prefer hilly routes. And so on.
Don't get me wrong, I exercise because it's not pleasant finding that going upstairs or running for a bus almost kills you. But enjoying the discomfort? I'll never get it.
We need to get away from the term "cloud" -- it's a misnomer.
No, it's just frequently misused.
One remote server, is not a cloud. Two load-balanced remote servers is not a cloud.
Dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of remote servers, configured such that data is stored redundantly and the software routes around a failed node; controlled by infrastructure such that adding or removing nodes is negligible effort -- that's a cloud.
Of course the marketers misuse it, because they want their non-cloud product to bask in the halo effect of the buzzword.
How hard is it to understand that the cost/benefit depends on your size?
Car analogy: If you're an individual who needs a car a couple of times a year, you rent one on those occasions. If you drive almost every day, you buy a car and you get it insured. If you're a small company, you give your travelling staff a car allowance. If you're a big company, you buy a company car scheme and insure all the cars under one policy. If you're a gigantic company, you self-insure all your staff's company cars.
Draw a graph of the cost vs scale of a third-party cloud, versus your own datacentre. At some point the graphs will cross. That's where you switch.
Yes, I'm particularly keen on the road-train idea, in which a line of cars, coordinated by the leader, traverses a motorway nose-to-tail such that they're in each others' slipstream. It's a transition towards fully-automated cars, because the lead vehicle is controlled by a driver, and the automation in the back cars is limited to a very specific situation.
I am not a video expert, but if I was digitising film footage that I had filmed in B&W for artistic reasons, I would scan it in full colour at the highest bit-depth my hardware could handle.
The colour of the greys, any colour artefacts of the grain, of any tiny scratches, all of these are things a cinematographer might want to retain.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet he read some instructions. He did not take interface elements for granted.
Nah, there's a third category -- "resting on their laurels". As in, they've learned something inside out, and feel they can capitalise on that for the rest of their working life.
It's a dangerous game though. I know people in their 50s who mastered MVS and PL/1, and didn't think they'd ever need to know UNIX or OO.
Firstly, congratulations on getting your guy's link onto Slashdot.
I've got news for you: there are thousands of comedians playing night after night in front of crowds of 100 or less. Many of them are subjectively better than most TV comedians. Some of them will break through. Some of them will spend the rest of their life doing it for the love of it. Some of them will make a living wage on it but no more.
There are well worn paths, and your guy seems to be on one. He's doing paid gigs.
The game is a management-sim in which the player manages a game development studio.
In the normal game, you start out in the 8 bit years, writing games and selling them. You use the profits to hire artists and developers, R&D an engine, advertise, licence etc., to make bigger and more profitable games, and as time passes, technology improves. The in-game economy is balanced for a challenging but winnable game.
In the "poisoned" game they seeded the warez sites with, after a couple of hours of play, the in-game advisor says "we're seeing a lot of piracy, it's going to affect our sales". And from then on the in-game economy is deliberately wrecked, so sales figures plummet despite you doing everything right.
On cue, the messageboards see pirate gamers asking why the game suddenly became unwinnable -- asking if they can develop in-game DRM, to beat the in-game pirates.
If church attendance is your metric, then the UK is an overwhelmingly non-religious country.
In the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey 50.9% said "no religion", 19.9% Church of England, 8.6% Catholic.
That contradicts the 2011 census, mind you, which says 59% Christian (with no published breakdown of denomination). Must be slightly differently worded questions.
The inaccurate "socialist prick" bit distracts from the other half of what you said.
It is notoriously difficult to define pornography or obscenity. "The explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purpose of sexual gratification" is clear enough, except that it's sometimes hard to be objective about the "purpose" of a given work.
There's a big grey area of work which some people would like to suppress on the grounds that it's pornography, but its creators would argue was art.
There's are also works which the creators intended as pornography, but which they claim is art anyway, in an effort to avoid suppression.
The grey area presents a problem of classification when making laws.
But, there's a huge amount of stuff that doesn't fall into the grey area. Work where the creator, the distributor, the consumer and the authorities are all happy to agree that the material is pornography. I don't see any problem with moves that make it easier to keep that stuff away from children. Of course, they'll find it eventually, but hopefully late enough that they'll have learned a bit of context.
What makes you think this kind of thing is just for Linux users.
Splitting and encrypting files is userland stuff that you can get done on pretty much any OS.
I like to use Linux, but it's not magic.
I'm not sure the Lib-Dems would claim to be socialists either.
I don't think there's a mainstream socialist party left in the UK -- although I still cling to the hope that Labour will swing back to the left one day.
It seems to me they taught the robot to perform an almost completely unnecessary task.
Well, in this specific task, yes. But more generally what they've done could be useful. Their actual achievement is to program a robot so that it can learn by observation when to go from one task to another. The human wants the robot to help him position the table, then he wants the robot to hold it still. The robot infers when to stop moving, and start holding still, based on the movement of the human (and the table leg).
It's just a toy problem for research, and the techniques can be used for other situations where a computer vision system needs to infer from what it sees, what do do next. When to change from patrolling a site to pursuing an intruder, for example.
You might as well leave the tabletop on the floor and then screw in the legs.
Now, if the human would hold the tabletop near the robot, and the robot would pick up the legs and screw them in, that would be something.
Yes, and it would be less of a challenge. In fact I'm sure it's already been done - recognise a screw hole, quickly and accurately mate it with a screw and rotate until tight.
I'm always tremendously impressed by the accuracy of Ikea instructions, and the little tricks they put into the design to make it more foolproof. I've bought flatpack furniture from other sources, and there tends to be much more to go wrong. Ikea do things like ensure that screws and screw-holes won't line up if you try to join the wrong two parts.
Ikea seem to iterate their designs (the ones they don't phase out) to make them easier to assemble, and cheaper to produce. When I first bought Billy shelving, over a decade ago, it was uniformly laminated. When I bought some more, years later, they'd ascertained which surfaces would be concealed, and used non-matching laminate (presumably cheap, remaindered stock) for those parts.
... and you still wouldn't be able to look at background detail that the cinematographer's defocussed. This has nothing to do with 3D.
Presumably Cynyr also objects to 2D films with shallow depth-of-focus. But it's a long established effect. The cinematographer chooses where to focus, and where you should be looking.
Bit late to reply a day later, but you might check.
Endorphins. We like the rush.
I have trained for, and achieved semi-respectable times in several 10km races, without ever experiencing the endorphin-related pleasure people describe.
Reading around, I've seen people say they get a rush at round about mile 3 -- so towards the end of my typical 5km route. But I've also read that the fitter you are, the harder you have to work to get the rush, so it's a prize that's always retreating from you.
Exercise is necessary, because being out of shape is no fun. Competing an organised race gives you a target and a sense of achievement. But actually enjoying the exercise itself? I envy you people so much.
Exercise causes your body to release endorphins. In non technical lingo, its addictive, and only the discomfort is what keeps it from being as all-consuming as some other addictions.
Repeating myself - but either I don't release endorphins when I exercise (as much as some people), or the endorphins don't have the pleasing effect on me that they have on some people. I don't think that makes me special -- there are lots of people who derive no pleasure from exercise.
People who's bodies deliver them endorphins, and/or whose brains react to them, are lucky.
It's the endorphins, and adrenaline.
I really don't to sound like a snob, but you should try out some good exercise uhh.. once in your life so you know that feeling at least.
As an adult, I've run a 52 minute 10km, which I realise isn't brilliant, but at least demonstrates I'm not a couch potato. Neither in the training or the race itself, did I ever experience anything that made me look forward to the next run. People talk about endorphins, but I've never experienced the effect they describe.
The only reason I persevere with exercise is that in my early 30s, I realised that running 20 metres to catch a bus left me bright red and out of breath -- which I really didn't like. Running is a tedious, uncomfortable chore that keeps me from being in that state.
Being out of shape, having to forgo fun activities. feeling weak and lethargic...these would cause me more discomfort than sore muscles and bruises.
Sure, and for those reasons I do a bit of running. But it's like washing dishes. I wash the dishes because, although unpleasant, it's less unpleasant than having a filthy kitchen. Running's not pleasant, but it's worth it to not be out of shape.
But many people seem to actively enjoy the pain of exercise -- if, hypothetically, they could stop exercising and remain fit, they would still run for the fun of it. I envy them because what's a chore for me (in order to stay in shape) is a pleasure for them. Like sitting through a meal, eager for the pleasure of washing the dishes.
and there is where you got it wrong it's all about giving someone else a brusing and whacking them with a painful projectile.
Getting bruised and getting whacked is somthing that should be avoided in paintball.
Did you read the GP which said:
Getting shot and the possibility of getting hurt are on the plus side. That's what makes things not-boring.
I'm glad you said "some people" because I'm pretty certain the endorphin/adrenaline thing is highly variable depending on the individual. I've done a fair amount of running (it seems to be the cheapest form of exercise, with the least travel/preparation/cleanup overhead) and never knowingly experienced an endorphin rush.
Thanking someone for battering you seems utterly alien; one step away from self-harm. And although you get an endorphin rush from the initial impact, generally a painful bruise outlasts it.
Sorry, I know millions of people enjoy this stuff. I just feel left out, and tend to over-analyse in a futile effort to crack it. Bottom line is, we all have different physiology and psychology.
The active pursuit of risk of pain and discomfort.
Which, if not illusory, will translate to actual pain and discomfort some of the time.
Or, if illusory, will cease to be effective over time.
And of course this doesn't account for people who voluntarily take part in games like rugby on cold, rainy days, when the discomfort starts well before kickoff.
There were units very much like this in arcades in the 90s.
But the headsets were big and heady. The graphics were blocky and laggy. So the craze died back for a while, until the technology caught up.
Oculus Rift seems to have the graphics more or less cracked. This input device is at least a step in the right direction.
In the 90s we'd pay £5 for a few minutes playing something like this. I'd pay £20 today for half an hour playing TF2 in this thing.
I'm not a doctor either, but I'm given to understand that a quarter teaspoon of table salt stirred into a glass of normal orange squash is equivalent to branded isotonic drinks and rehydration sachets.
Getting shot and the possibility of getting hurt are on the plus side. That's what makes things not-boring.
This is one of the things I find puzzling about people who enjoy sport and exercise. The active pursuit of pain and discomfort. Paintball: you're likely to get a bruising, painful projectile whack you. Many team sports: an obligation to spend hours in the cold and wet. Cyclists actively prefer hilly routes. And so on.
Don't get me wrong, I exercise because it's not pleasant finding that going upstairs or running for a bus almost kills you. But enjoying the discomfort? I'll never get it.
We need to get away from the term "cloud" -- it's a misnomer.
No, it's just frequently misused.
One remote server, is not a cloud. Two load-balanced remote servers is not a cloud.
Dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of remote servers, configured such that data is stored redundantly and the software routes around a failed node; controlled by infrastructure such that adding or removing nodes is negligible effort -- that's a cloud.
Of course the marketers misuse it, because they want their non-cloud product to bask in the halo effect of the buzzword.
How hard is it to understand that the cost/benefit depends on your size?
Car analogy: If you're an individual who needs a car a couple of times a year, you rent one on those occasions. If you drive almost every day, you buy a car and you get it insured. If you're a small company, you give your travelling staff a car allowance. If you're a big company, you buy a company car scheme and insure all the cars under one policy. If you're a gigantic company, you self-insure all your staff's company cars.
Draw a graph of the cost vs scale of a third-party cloud, versus your own datacentre. At some point the graphs will cross. That's where you switch.
Yes, I'm particularly keen on the road-train idea, in which a line of cars, coordinated by the leader, traverses a motorway nose-to-tail such that they're in each others' slipstream. It's a transition towards fully-automated cars, because the lead vehicle is controlled by a driver, and the automation in the back cars is limited to a very specific situation.
I am not a video expert, but if I was digitising film footage that I had filmed in B&W for artistic reasons, I would scan it in full colour at the highest bit-depth my hardware could handle.
The colour of the greys, any colour artefacts of the grain, of any tiny scratches, all of these are things a cinematographer might want to retain.