According to the most recent 2005 financial statement, currently NPR makes just over half of its money from the fees and dues it charges member stations to receive programming. About 2% of NPR's funding comes from bidding on government grants and programs (chiefly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting); the remainder comes from member station dues, foundation grants, and corporate underwriting. NPR member stations raise money through on-air pledge drives, during which programming is interrupted and listeners are encouraged to donate money to keep the station on the air.
So, just over half of the funding is coming from listeners (via local station pledge drives). Almost all of the remainder is coming from corporate donors, with very little ("significantly higher than 2%") coming from the government.
Art is not "story." Computer games can tell a story, or they can chose not to tell a story. There are many great works of high art that tell no story at all. What stories are told by:
To be hung up on computer games because they are inadequate for conveying a story is to forever relegate them to a second-class medium. Despite the fact that designers and gamers continue to strive for a great narrative, computer games and story are, in fact, directly in opposition to each other. Games demand interaction; narrative forbids it.
A story is a one-way mechanism; it can be argued that a narrative is, in fact, more limiting from the perspective of the freedom it offers the audience than forms like sculpture, music, or painting, due to the fact that it leaves much less to the imagination or interpretation. Narratives literally "spell out" what the audience is supposed to experience. Comic-strip narratives even leave less to the imagination, as the creator has control over not only the words & description, but what the mind would use to fill in the blanks.
Whether computer games are "Great Art" or not is irrelevant; computer games, are, unequivocally, an art form, just like sculpture, architecture or clothing design. Let's get past the obsession with story, and maybe we'll start seeing a lot more of what computer games have to offer artistically, instead of constantly trying to be a wanna-be movie medium.
Vault's backend makes extensive use of features specific to Microsoft SQL Server. Contrary to popular belief, SQL isn't portable.
*shakes head* and then this:
*shakes head*? Is this your condescending reaction to the poor tool who doesn't realize that SQL is portable. If so, then you're the one who's deluded. Sure, you can write simple applications using ANSI-standard SQL and get the job done, as long as your requirements for peformance are extremely low. As soon as you start pushing a system, though, you're going to find quickly that your ANSI standard SQL that runs great on one dbms runs not so great on another. The solution may not even involve writing SQL that contains vendor-specific extensions - it may simply be another ANSI-standard statement that makes the SQL behave better on another platform.
And the standards say nothing about the performance impact of various isolation levels. If you think that a high-volume system designed around Oracle, even one using no Oracle extensions, can simply be dropped into MySQL or SQLServer as-is and still perform acceptably, you've obviously never attempted to do so.
Large scale projects like PeopleSoft that run on a variety of back-ends didn't just achieve that by following standards in their code - they had to test the system on all the supported configurations, and make tweaks to their access methods for every new one they support.
If your premise is correct, then Sirlin himself is making the mistake that Warcraft is, at its heart, a competitive activity. I'd say that most people familiar with MMORPGs would agree that they are not primarily competitive activities. There are competitive aspects, but that's hardly their primary purpose.
Fighting games, on the other hand, are almost pure competition. Given Sirlin's long history with fighters, it isn't surprising that his opinions on MMORPGs are informed by this history. Frankly, given the way he talks about gaming, (in particular his "play to win" article you mentioned - http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_PlayToWinPa rt1.htm, which upon reading, I realized I read years ago), I'm surprised he'd even be interested in WoW. I can only surmise he played it due to his loyalty to the Blizzar franchises due to their previous, purely competitive titles.
Ultimately, though, even if you filter his article through these facts, I think his points, which he tries to pass off as universal, still come across as someone justifying his own personal biases (about what is fun) as fact. For example, the definition he likes to use implies that fun == learning, which allows him to blast WoW as teaching the wrong lessons. The fun == learning definition is clearly wrong; I can "learn in a safe environment" by studying an Organic Chemistry textbook, but this is, by no means, fun. Conversely, hanging out with friends telling jokes is fun, but I haven't really learned anything, at least not in the sense he talks about.
The other main points that he makes are 1. Skill is more important that time, and 2. Solitary activity is more important than cooperation. Again, his preference for solo, competitive passtimes clearly explains this bias.
The first point, as others have pointed out, is an either/or proposition - sometimes time invested is more important that pure or learned skill. All the skill in the world isn't going to build the pyramids. From Blizzard's perspective, it's pretty clear why things are based on time-sinks: WoW has a finite amount of content. By forcing players to take a long time towards consuming it, they guarantee that people will remain subscribed for as long as possible. This is the main reason I don't play MMORPGs - I simply don't have the time to devote to them to work my way through the content.
On the second point, Sirlin is on much shakier ground. The history of the world, if anything, shows that cooperation among groups is far more important than talented individuals. Economies of scale, specialization, and just pure manpower carry far more weight in the real world. The world needs people who can work with others to get tasks done, not a bunch of loners who think they can do it all themselves. Even if you don't agree with this, it is still a valid interpretation that invalidates his "wrong lesson" premise. From an economic perspective, encouraging people to group and form communities is the main way an MMORPG ensures that people remain subscribed - players with a stake in the community are less likely to drop off.
Finally, Sirlin himself is pretty proud of his abilities as a gamer; I think a lot of his resentment towards WoW stems from the fact that these abilities do not win him the same stature that he has earned in other circles. But in his "playing to win" article, he makes it clear that he's talking about belonging to a community that is in the top tenth of a percent in terms of "skill". Yet Blizzard is not interested in this small community, and I don't see why they should. They want to create a game that can appeal to as wide a base as possible in order to keep themselves employed.
There are plenty of games out there that already cater to the elite. These games themselves turn out to be not so much fun for the novice if when entering them they perceive that there will be no way for them to ever fully enjoy them because of players that
I think the grandparent poster meant what do you call the finished product, after it has been baked - i.e., what word do people from the UK use to describe what those in the US call "biscuits". Or is it, in fact, "dough"?
Don't forget that there are many people that believe the switch to high-fructose corn sysrup in soft drinks played a major part in the explosion of obesity in the US. (They claim that HFT is much more easily absorbed by the body than refined sugar.)
They're also wrong. There is really very little difference between cane sugar & high fructose corn syrup. From The Straight Dope:
Whatever chemical differences there may be between fructose and glucose, the difference between HFCS and traditional sugar is slight. Both sweeteners contain both compounds, and in roughly similar amounts--table sugar is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose, whereas the most common form of HFCS is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.
Such a small difference isn't going to cause an obesity epidemic, unless you're consuming gallons of soda each day.
Just to rephrase the parent post's argument, although there isn't a 100% chance in 45,500 years, it does mean that looking back through history, we should expect to see an extinction event about every 45,500 years. Given that we know of a single extinction event in the last 300 million years (which is around the time of the first land vertebrates - presumably more prone to asteroid extinction than insects or fish), the article's statistics still make no sense.
If we just use the information above (1 event in 300 million years), the odds become about 6500 times better - 1 chance in 3 million in the next 100 years.
It's got hard buttons & great ergonomics, as well as a LCD screen & easy enough to use that you don't have to dig out the manual after the first read. HTM makes other, more expensive remotes with fancier features (the MX-800 can upload/download programming from your PC), but the MX-500 is pretty much in the sweet spot for price at about $115.
Nygard included Rich Kronfeld in his movie "Trekkies" as the mega-fan who had built his own Captain Pike chair. Kronfeld was a comedian in Minneapolis with a public access show called "Dr. Sphincter", and although he did actually own the chair, his appearance in the film was clearly a fictional exaggeration.
Here's my question:
Were there any other people in Trekkies that were clearly "taking the piss", or does Kronfeld believe that the rest of the fans in it were more or less sincere in their devotion to chosen lifestyles?
and we're never going to get around to exploiting solar energy as long as we remain terrestrial - there's simply not enough energy hitting the earth to supply our needs. We need to get that space elevator built and get those orbital solar satellites running pronto!
I'm surprised that the execs are whining that "the numbers don't add up", when 50% of the new programming out there today is "non scripted television". The stuff is basically Yenta-vision - a substitute for gossip and "goodness gracious me" scandal-titillation. Guys don't go for that much (there are always exceptions), so is it much of a surprise that the only men watching the stuff are ones who are dragged into it by their SOs?
Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap". This goes for books as well as video games. Most books stink, not "the odd one", but by being selective you can make sure that only the odd one you actually read will stink. Same goes for video games - take some time to choose which ones you really want to invest the time in playing instead of running out & playing the latest & "greatest" of everything, just because everyone else is doing it. You'll still have a great time, and you'll still have time to do all these other things that people something think are more "important" (having kids, girlfriend, big house, saving the world, reading the classics, whatever).
I went through the slide show again and still didn't see the Caprice. The slide show I see has the exact same cars (in order) as the ones on their poll.
It's The worst movie ever. There's scarecely a 2 minute period in the movie that is free of a scientific or logical error. What really boiled my blood was that there was no reason for the inaccuracies - everything could have been "realistic" and still been exciting. The mistakes were there because the screenwriters and everyone associated with the film was a retard.
It was the film that pushed me over the edge as far as Jerry Bruckheimer is concerned. I vowed never to see another of his pieces of shit. However, I've heard good things about "Pirates of the Caribbean" (damn you Bruckheimer!). If I must see it in the theatre, I figure I'll buy a ticket for another show & sneak into that one - I refuse to give him any more of my money.
A good lens on a 35mm slr gives you the ability to use selective focus so that your subject is sharp, and everything else is a blur. For this technique to work you need a longish lens, and a wide aperture.
Why can't you achieve the same effect with a standard (35mm focal length) lens using a wide aperture? You can still get depth-of-field effects using the lens on most prosumer digitals. What am I missing?
the 4 pixels actually become four pixels after the "demosaic" is applied to it. The final file size is 4MB with high quality JPG compression (about 5-6:1)
That's not really the whole story either, though, is it? I'm aware that the 4MB size reflects JPG compression (as I mentioned in my original post), but from what I've read, the number of pixels quoted is the actual number of pixels on the sensor (unlike what the poster above says), but each pixel is only capable of up to 12 bits worth of "gray scale" information. However, the "final" pixels formed by the 2x2 squares overlap (with the overlap varying depending on the demosaic algorithm used), so there really isn't 32bits x of information. The real amount of information would be something like 8-12 bits or about a 1/3, so it's not a full-color 32 bit pixel that the typical read here is familiar with.
By the way, the photocamera is aimed towards professionals, not us point and shoot idiots.
Actually, it's aimed at the hobbyist in-between (thus the category "pro-sumer") - it doesn't even offer removable lenses. For a real professional camera, you'd be wanting the $6000, 6 megapixel Nikon D1x or better yet, the mother of all digitals right now, the $7000, 11 megapixel Canon EOS-1Ds.
As for the image size, you have to remember that these cameras use 4 pixels (a 2x2 square) to create what we typically think of as one pixel, so the storage requirements are significantly smaller. Plus, when stored as jpegs (instead of the raw bits coming off the sensor), they're smaller yet. For example, the 11 meg monster above produces photos that are 4 MB at level of compression suitable for professional work.
and only hurts something if done on a table that *must* be sequential
If your data must be sequential, you better not use a sequence. Even if you reduce the bucket size to 1 (which is necessary to prevent gaps occuring for all sorts of reasons, such as system restarts or even a large amount of procedure recompilation), you'll still get gaps if you have transactions that roll back. Probably the only reliable way is to exclusive lock the table in question, insert max(id) + 1, and don't release the lock until you commit or rollback.
Given that terminal velocity for a skydiver is around 200km/h, I'm guessing the CNN article got it right. I don't see how strapping a rather large wing to your back could manage to nearly double that speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so:
So, just over half of the funding is coming from listeners (via local station pledge drives). Almost all of the remainder is coming from corporate donors, with very little ("significantly higher than 2%") coming from the government.
-BbT
Art is not "story." Computer games can tell a story, or they can chose not to tell a story. There are many great works of high art that tell no story at all. What stories are told by:
Michaelangelo's "David"
Monet's "Water Lilies"
Wright's "Falling Water"
Calder's "Mobile"
To be hung up on computer games because they are inadequate for conveying a story is to forever relegate them to a second-class medium. Despite the fact that designers and gamers continue to strive for a great narrative, computer games and story are, in fact, directly in opposition to each other. Games demand interaction; narrative forbids it.
A story is a one-way mechanism; it can be argued that a narrative is, in fact, more limiting from the perspective of the freedom it offers the audience than forms like sculpture, music, or painting, due to the fact that it leaves much less to the imagination or interpretation. Narratives literally "spell out" what the audience is supposed to experience. Comic-strip narratives even leave less to the imagination, as the creator has control over not only the words & description, but what the mind would use to fill in the blanks.
Whether computer games are "Great Art" or not is irrelevant; computer games, are, unequivocally, an art form, just like sculpture, architecture or clothing design. Let's get past the obsession with story, and maybe we'll start seeing a lot more of what computer games have to offer artistically, instead of constantly trying to be a wanna-be movie medium.
-BbT
Typical Windows Software house:
Vault's backend makes extensive use of features specific to Microsoft SQL Server. Contrary to popular belief, SQL isn't portable.
*shakes head* and then this:
*shakes head*? Is this your condescending reaction to the poor tool who doesn't realize that SQL is portable. If so, then you're the one who's deluded. Sure, you can write simple applications using ANSI-standard SQL and get the job done, as long as your requirements for peformance are extremely low. As soon as you start pushing a system, though, you're going to find quickly that your ANSI standard SQL that runs great on one dbms runs not so great on another. The solution may not even involve writing SQL that contains vendor-specific extensions - it may simply be another ANSI-standard statement that makes the SQL behave better on another platform.
And the standards say nothing about the performance impact of various isolation levels. If you think that a high-volume system designed around Oracle, even one using no Oracle extensions, can simply be dropped into MySQL or SQLServer as-is and still perform acceptably, you've obviously never attempted to do so.
Large scale projects like PeopleSoft that run on a variety of back-ends didn't just achieve that by following standards in their code - they had to test the system on all the supported configurations, and make tweaks to their access methods for every new one they support.
-BbT
Simple. Men with beards want the world to believe they're heterosexual.
-BbT
Did anyone else misread the headline? I could have sworn it said:
Women Get Lots of Info From Male Feces
That's the only reason I clicked on the link.
-BbT
"Have you seen my Wii controller?"
"Are you up for Wii tonight?"
"I'm a big fan of Wii games."
"We have a problem. Someone took a Wii in the display case."
"I know hard-core gamers prefer the other systems, but my taste runs more towards Wii."
"I can't make it tonight. My Wii is down."
"You know I can't help you with that, Ms. Bobbit. Hacking your husband's Wii will void the warranty."
-BbT
If your premise is correct, then Sirlin himself is making the mistake that Warcraft is, at its heart, a competitive activity. I'd say that most people familiar with MMORPGs would agree that they are not primarily competitive activities. There are competitive aspects, but that's hardly their primary purpose.
Fighting games, on the other hand, are almost pure competition. Given Sirlin's long history with fighters, it isn't surprising that his opinions on MMORPGs are informed by this history. Frankly, given the way he talks about gaming, (in particular his "play to win" article you mentioned - http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_PlayToWinPa rt1.htm, which upon reading, I realized I read years ago), I'm surprised he'd even be interested in WoW. I can only surmise he played it due to his loyalty to the Blizzar franchises due to their previous, purely competitive titles.
Ultimately, though, even if you filter his article through these facts, I think his points, which he tries to pass off as universal, still come across as someone justifying his own personal biases (about what is fun) as fact. For example, the definition he likes to use implies that fun == learning, which allows him to blast WoW as teaching the wrong lessons. The fun == learning definition is clearly wrong; I can "learn in a safe environment" by studying an Organic Chemistry textbook, but this is, by no means, fun. Conversely, hanging out with friends telling jokes is fun, but I haven't really learned anything, at least not in the sense he talks about.
The other main points that he makes are 1. Skill is more important that time, and 2. Solitary activity is more important than cooperation. Again, his preference for solo, competitive passtimes clearly explains this bias.
The first point, as others have pointed out, is an either/or proposition - sometimes time invested is more important that pure or learned skill. All the skill in the world isn't going to build the pyramids. From Blizzard's perspective, it's pretty clear why things are based on time-sinks: WoW has a finite amount of content. By forcing players to take a long time towards consuming it, they guarantee that people will remain subscribed for as long as possible. This is the main reason I don't play MMORPGs - I simply don't have the time to devote to them to work my way through the content.
On the second point, Sirlin is on much shakier ground. The history of the world, if anything, shows that cooperation among groups is far more important than talented individuals. Economies of scale, specialization, and just pure manpower carry far more weight in the real world. The world needs people who can work with others to get tasks done, not a bunch of loners who think they can do it all themselves. Even if you don't agree with this, it is still a valid interpretation that invalidates his "wrong lesson" premise. From an economic perspective, encouraging people to group and form communities is the main way an MMORPG ensures that people remain subscribed - players with a stake in the community are less likely to drop off.
Finally, Sirlin himself is pretty proud of his abilities as a gamer; I think a lot of his resentment towards WoW stems from the fact that these abilities do not win him the same stature that he has earned in other circles. But in his "playing to win" article, he makes it clear that he's talking about belonging to a community that is in the top tenth of a percent in terms of "skill". Yet Blizzard is not interested in this small community, and I don't see why they should. They want to create a game that can appeal to as wide a base as possible in order to keep themselves employed.
There are plenty of games out there that already cater to the elite. These games themselves turn out to be not so much fun for the novice if when entering them they perceive that there will be no way for them to ever fully enjoy them because of players that
I think the grandparent poster meant what do you call the finished product, after it has been baked - i.e., what word do people from the UK use to describe what those in the US call "biscuits". Or is it, in fact, "dough"?
-BbT
They're also wrong. There is really very little difference between cane sugar & high fructose corn syrup. From The Straight Dope:
Such a small difference isn't going to cause an obesity epidemic, unless you're consuming gallons of soda each day.
-BbT
In other news:
For the masses, Caterpillar is dead (Fortune 500 rank 77).
For the masses, ADM is dead (Fortune 500 rank 52).
For the masses, Boeing is dead (Fortune 500 rank 21).
There's quite a lot of money to be made in selling exclusively to the "niche" of big business.
-BbT
Just to rephrase the parent post's argument, although there isn't a 100% chance in 45,500 years, it does mean that looking back through history, we should expect to see an extinction event about every 45,500 years. Given that we know of a single extinction event in the last 300 million years (which is around the time of the first land vertebrates - presumably more prone to asteroid extinction than insects or fish), the article's statistics still make no sense.
If we just use the information above (1 event in 300 million years), the odds become about 6500 times better - 1 chance in 3 million in the next 100 years.
-BbT
Lack of good HARD buttons keeps me in a remote nightmare right now
x .h tml
Have you looked at the Home Theater Master MX-500:
http://www.hometheatermaster.com/htm/mx500/inde
(review here: http://www.remotecentral.com/mx500)
It's got hard buttons & great ergonomics, as well as a LCD screen & easy enough to use that you don't have to dig out the manual after the first read. HTM makes other, more expensive remotes with fancier features (the MX-800 can upload/download programming from your PC), but the MX-500 is pretty much in the sweet spot for price at about $115.
-BbT
Should read "does Nygard believe"
-BbT
Nygard included Rich Kronfeld in his movie "Trekkies" as the mega-fan who had built his own Captain Pike chair. Kronfeld was a comedian in Minneapolis with a public access show called "Dr. Sphincter", and although he did actually own the chair, his appearance in the film was clearly a fictional exaggeration.
Here's my question:
Were there any other people in Trekkies that were clearly "taking the piss", or does Kronfeld believe that the rest of the fans in it were more or less sincere in their devotion to chosen lifestyles?
-BbT
and we're never going to get around to exploiting solar energy as long as we remain terrestrial - there's simply not enough energy hitting the earth to supply our needs. We need to get that space elevator built and get those orbital solar satellites running pronto!
-BbT
I'm surprised that the execs are whining that "the numbers don't add up", when 50% of the new programming out there today is "non scripted television". The stuff is basically Yenta-vision - a substitute for gossip and "goodness gracious me" scandal-titillation. Guys don't go for that much (there are always exceptions), so is it much of a surprise that the only men watching the stuff are ones who are dragged into it by their SOs?
-BbT
According to Melinda Elkins, a coworker of Green's at The Frame Job, a Chapel Hill picture-frame shop, Green steers the conversation toward television whenever possible, just so he can mention not owning one.
Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap". This goes for books as well as video games. Most books stink, not "the odd one", but by being selective you can make sure that only the odd one you actually read will stink. Same goes for video games - take some time to choose which ones you really want to invest the time in playing instead of running out & playing the latest & "greatest" of everything, just because everyone else is doing it. You'll still have a great time, and you'll still have time to do all these other things that people something think are more "important" (having kids, girlfriend, big house, saving the world, reading the classics, whatever).
-BbT
I went through the slide show again and still didn't see the Caprice. The slide show I see has the exact same cars (in order) as the ones on their poll.
It's The worst movie ever. There's scarecely a 2 minute period in the movie that is free of a scientific or logical error. What really boiled my blood was that there was no reason for the inaccuracies - everything could have been "realistic" and still been exciting. The mistakes were there because the screenwriters and everyone associated with the film was a retard.
It was the film that pushed me over the edge as far as Jerry Bruckheimer is concerned. I vowed never to see another of his pieces of shit. However, I've heard good things about "Pirates of the Caribbean" (damn you Bruckheimer!). If I must see it in the theatre, I figure I'll buy a ticket for another show & sneak into that one - I refuse to give him any more of my money.
-BbT
A good lens on a 35mm slr gives you the ability to use selective focus so that your subject is sharp, and everything else is a blur. For this technique to work you need a longish lens, and a wide aperture.
Why can't you achieve the same effect with a standard (35mm focal length) lens using a wide aperture? You can still get depth-of-field effects using the lens on most prosumer digitals. What am I missing?
-BbT
the 4 pixels actually become four pixels after the "demosaic" is applied to it. The final file size is 4MB with high quality JPG compression (about 5-6:1)
That's not really the whole story either, though, is it? I'm aware that the 4MB size reflects JPG compression (as I mentioned in my original post), but from what I've read, the number of pixels quoted is the actual number of pixels on the sensor (unlike what the poster above says), but each pixel is only capable of up to 12 bits worth of "gray scale" information. However, the "final" pixels formed by the 2x2 squares overlap (with the overlap varying depending on the demosaic algorithm used), so there really isn't 32bits x of information. The real amount of information would be something like 8-12 bits or about a 1/3, so it's not a full-color 32 bit pixel that the typical read here is familiar with.
-BbT
By the way, the photocamera is aimed towards professionals, not us point and shoot idiots.
Actually, it's aimed at the hobbyist in-between (thus the category "pro-sumer") - it doesn't even offer removable lenses. For a real professional camera, you'd be wanting the $6000, 6 megapixel Nikon D1x or better yet, the mother of all digitals right now, the $7000, 11 megapixel Canon EOS-1Ds.
As for the image size, you have to remember that these cameras use 4 pixels (a 2x2 square) to create what we typically think of as one pixel, so the storage requirements are significantly smaller. Plus, when stored as jpegs (instead of the raw bits coming off the sensor), they're smaller yet. For example, the 11 meg monster above produces photos that are 4 MB at level of compression suitable for professional work.
-BbT
and only hurts something if done on a table that *must* be sequential
If your data must be sequential, you better not use a sequence. Even if you reduce the bucket size to 1 (which is necessary to prevent gaps occuring for all sorts of reasons, such as system restarts or even a large amount of procedure recompilation), you'll still get gaps if you have transactions that roll back. Probably the only reliable way is to exclusive lock the table in question, insert max(id) + 1, and don't release the lock until you commit or rollback.
-BbT
Given that terminal velocity for a skydiver is around 200km/h, I'm guessing the CNN article got it right. I don't see how strapping a rather large wing to your back could manage to nearly double that speed.
-BbT