I agree. But the right to not-listen that you retain also does not imply organised banning of the abuse of free speech ( in the form of e.g. spam ) either.
.. who are starting to not care about free speech anymore. Not because they don't like it, but because they hate the idea of other people using it in the wrong way. Spam is exactly that. It's the abuse of free speech.
And I don't understand the comments either.. uncomfortable politcal views are a necessity if you believe that democracy should allways have it's way, yet, people don't like the Hitlers, the Sadam's, and the Bushes, and would rather live happily ever after and just not have to think about people like that messing up their lives. I can understand, but that indifference is growing to the extend that democracy and free speech are subject to limits. And I think that is wrong.
You constantly have to deal with bad practice of people, tell them they are wrong or unappreciated. But you have to give them the freedom to make the mistakes. Of course, when they do damage in any way to society, or their neighbouring societies, the fun should end.
A neural net or genetic algoritm uses a fitness function, which evaluates the resulting output and tries to come up with something better. As such, a bad output sample can be seen as taking the wrong approach to solve the problem, and taking a different route with the weights adjusted in those places where they matter most is the logical next step for such an algorithm.
This is precisely what we humand also do, but we are more skilled in establishing different ways of looking at a problem in an efficient manner, mainly because we have a daily re-training and reconfiguration of our neural network (brain) since we were born (and even before that), and because we are able to match solution patterns to problems that we previously have solved, and adapt them for the specific case.
CS AI can be much more than just a smart search, which is what a chessprogram is of course. And regarding chess, it IS indeed not a measurement of intelligence, but then, what is.
Let me take you out of your dream here. About 95% of commerical console games never are / will never be well-written. At best, they have a decent design and architecture, but they will never be perfectly portable. The reason is that virtually all parts constantly evolve during the game's development stages, and compromises are constantly made to adhere code to the constraints of the console regarding memory and performance. You allways end up with shit somewhere..
One other thing: OpenGL nowadays is simply inferior to D3D. Most Matrox OpenGL drivers go through D3D. Most gamers run boxes with windows. I'd say these arguments make the choice rather easy.
However.. there is something which is called middleware, even in game dev land. NetImmerse, Renderware, Blender,.. these are all 'platform independant' (platform limitted is probably better) engines that allow faster development and cross porting. At least.. that is the intended goal anyway;)
Yup, Starbreeze was formed out of the former demo group Triton, the creators of, among others, the legendary Crystal Dreams and Crystal Dreams II demos.
Back then, Triton captured the essence of module tracking with their FastTracker & FastTrackerII, a very advanced implementation of the old amiga protracker concept. Their Fasttracker was, for many years, the biggest rival of Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker, and a lot of musicians preferred it's simple but efficient interface above all other trackers.
When Triton became Starbreeze, they had a lot of problems finding publishers for their first game 'Into The Shadows'. Parts of that never-published game were used in 'Sorcery', a 1st person RPG to be published by Gremlin Interactive, but also these plans did not go forward, as Gremlin was bought by Infogrames and they traditionally fucked up one more development studio. Finally, Swing Entertainment (Conspiracy Games) had the courage and the guts to publish the now 3rd person RPG 'Enclave' on 3 platforms, and the game gained reasonably good acclaim. Unfortunately, Swing went bankrupt 3 months later. Starbreeze is now said to be working on Enclave 2.
There is just no getting around the fact that any journalism is going to be biassed or diluted in some way or another. Last time I watched to the BBC News, I saw a brittish journalist so unbiassedly being pro-war that I got scared. The BBC allways was a reasonably unbiassed and objective organ in my book, but even the BBC makes mistakes.
The struggle for objectivity.. people should be aware of this all the time when looking for news, and doublecheck stories with other media households. And I think the larger the media concern is, the more distorted and colored the news is giong to be. I think if you can gather as much views on the matter as possible, and compare it with eachother, you end up deciding for yourself what you believe is true, which is imho still better than to trust someone else to make that judgement for you. I watched the better part of CNN while Powell was proclaiming his cause in the UN, vs Iraki Weapon's Inspector Hans Blickx. I also watched French, German, BBC, Holland and Belgian news, and I must say that the view on things was so squarely opposite that you can't help but laugh about what parts were cut from a conversation, which are empahasised, what background music goes where, what is shown here and there, and best of all, the comments that follow by the editors. The same goes for scientific news. Untill something is not double checked by another independant organisation, there is no 100% guarantee that what is said is true. In fact, it can take decades or more to convince people of a certain scientific 'truth', like e.g. quantum physics or the general relativity theory.
As for the concept of entertainment in science news, I do see that some people have a hard time reading or accessing certain science, and I think for them it is not bad to supply them with science in ways they can understand, grasp, make them curious.. That makes the rainbow of flavours in science news large and varried, and anyone can select the news in the language that he can understand. I don't know if I have to think about Tom & Jerry explaining superconductivity in this way, but it would certainly get me curious:) Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone has to play the entertainment card in order to sustain itself and attract more audience. That would be a dangerous evolution and degrade the quality of the top level research magazines.. but as long as some people are willing to invest in top level science magazines, and acknowledge that they have a primary role to play in the education of the masses in general, things are still ok.
The thing is that even the small publishers think that EA and MS have 'the perfect buisiness model' set up and that they should at least try to immitate them, which means churning out sports titles every year and adding a bit more creative titles when somebody happened to stumble on a good idea once in a while. Unfortunately the smaller publishers only have the good idea, and not the sports franchises or the OS'es to lean back on. EA has done very well and has turned itself into a monster. You have to give them credit for all the crazy titles they put out in the 90ies.. but as said, their business model has killed origin and janes, and probably many others.
I am sad to say this is actually true. Publishers just care about living through the year, selling something, then sitting through the next year..etc.. instead of going the extra mile and let the content mature. I'm not gonna go into any details, but if I ran my own studio & concept, things would be very different.
It's not that we're not able to be creative, it's that selling "a" product is more important than creating "the" product, because of tight deadlines.. I guess you all know that games HAVE to be ready in september, because they need to be in store by december? No. Games don't have to be ready. They ARE ready or they are not. The problem is it costs extra money. Money they have, in some cases at least, but money they don't seem fit to spend.
Indeed. I'm afraid I have little sympathy for a company which has burned that much cold, hard cash -- maybe they shouldn't be asking the community for yet more cash to fuel the office heaters, but instead examining their revenue models.
I was struck by the accuracy of your remark, and the implicit message it carries. Good journalism should allways remain (or try to remain) independant as much as possible. Revenue models effectively are ways to sell out. It seems things like Salon simlpy can not exist in todays overly commercial world of reasoning, as it can not compete with what the rest of the world is reading, which is mostly crap to some degree or another.
It seems to me that most of the dynamics and mechanics of multi-agent networking behaviour are closely related to the structure they are confined to - and by structure I mean the physical implementation constraints of the working model - more so than what it is the agents themselves do, associated with a certain probability density function.
I've done some research in Neural Networks and I was amazed by the importance of the dimensionality of the network. There is a subfield in NN's that tries to generate appropriate networks for appropriate computing tasks. Still the difference between real neurons and neural networks, is that the first one has an analog clock, while the second one has at least a discretized clock per node, if not per layer or for the whole cell. Also the importance of having a feedback or recurency can make all the difference in the right / wrong places.
I have the feeling - but could not proove this yet - that a dynamic combination of local optima searches and global optima searching leads to self-modifications to the structure in which the agents live, in such a way that the structure suits the needs of the original fitness function, which desribes the problem that we are trying to solve. Since the fitness function itself is a variant in time in most problems, it is logical to assume that the networks are never in a static state, so global optima searching will modify the network constantly, while local optima searching will try to exploit network capabilities best.
Seems like interesting material, I'll have to check out this book!
you know.. I wanter to rate it +1, the truth, but it's not listed so here's my tale:
Get as much math and physics down as you can, because if ANYTHING matters, it's that. These days everybody can fire up a direct9 wiz to create 'a game', spinning some polygons and acting on some input, but networking, math, physics, and platform experience are the things that count.. and you can only dream to get the last one if you can conveince people with the first ones..
Of course, a healthy appetite for working, clean, fast, interesting, pretty, funny and playfull code should not miss the list, but the main thing is to get as much understanding of all things math and physics, because basicly it's your ticket into the metal. Once you're there, you're 'in'.
Slightly offtopic, since it's not about widgets, but I thought I'd mention it anyway:
There used to be a graphics library called FastGraph by infamous Ted gruber Software, and surprisingly it is still around(It actually predates borlands BGI driver, if people still remember that one). I used it 10 years ago to take my first feeble steps in graphics in c++, and designed my own widgets and basicly invented my own buttons/frames/menus system all by myself, and to this day the framework of that code is still usuable. Anyway, it's not a recommendation or anything, I would never used it at this time.
The basic problem with this view is its starry eyed idealism.
Talk about starry eyed. Do you have any idea what the concrete results are from manned spaceflight and space exploration? Do you know just exactly how and what experiments can be (and are being) executed up there? Do you have a clue how big the impact on sciences, medical sciences, technology and the whole technological, chemical and phramaceutical industry in general is?
Clearly not. You're only concerned about your bloody tax dollar, or the satans the US helped create and then has to kill again in order to justify itself in world politics.
Furthermore, the ISS is an "International" space station, not the "Nasa" space station, so I suggest you take your short eyed frog view and be gone with it. I do agree that the science projects need to lead up to more concrete usefull things for the people, and they _are_ there, we just don't see them in our every-day life all the time. (you do if you know where to look though)
It's one thing to be critical about certain things, it's another to just throw it away and close the subject alltogether. I'm very proud my nation spends a considerable percentage of government money on space programs, even though it's just a small contribution, from a small nation.
Yes, criminials are dumb, but all robbers know about the difference and many choose to go unarmed to make the sentence lighter.
Sure! That makes sense! They'll go in like pussies just in case they get caught? Hello? These are criminals, not ballet-dancers. They don't care if there is a chance of getting caught. They don't care if they have to shoot somebody (well, maybe afterwards some of them might). They generally don't WANT to think about it. They only want to be preoccupied with how to break in, and how to get away with it afterwards. And usually it's fast 'clever' thinking when an 'opportunity' presents itself.
If you say "lots of wrong things here", and then pick this as a reference, I can't wait to hear what else was wrong. It doen't hurt to review ones beliefs based on valid arguments. I know it's difficult, but if you want to learn in life.. well.. it's up to you to pull your own conclusions of course.
Removing guns from lawful, responsible people does nothing to keep them out of the hands of actual criminals
Don't you think there is a bit of criminal inside everyone of us? Do you really trust the human race to be so civil? Do you want to take the risk of somebody breaking into your lawfull house in an unlawfull way and breaking open your perfectly safe cabin because he knows he doesn't even have to bring his gun at all? Do you want to take the risk of young children playing around with it even when you're not looking (and god knows you're bound to make that sorry mistake at some point)? Do you want to make sure the crooks come more heavily armed than you beause they know you're gonna be armed, and the one who shoots first wins?
Then by all means, get a gun.
Would you, as a presumably anti-gun person, be willing to put a sign in your front yard "This house is gun free!" ?The crimnals do not know which household may or may not have a gun inside, and so may be less inclined to break in. You may not own one, but no one knows that but you.
Come on. If they're breaking in, they're breaking in. They'll come prepared, trust me. It's not like some petty thieve is going to break in these days, those days are over. Imho, however honest and sincere and lawfull you may be, it is not your right to kill a person, just because you want to stop him. At this point you're excercising control over somebody's life, something that you don't (and never do) own. You have the right to drag him off of your property, maybe, but not in a body bag. Those are pretty medieval practices.
The less guns there are, the less opportunities for people to become 'mortally violent', when arguments get out of hand. The better you can control existing gun possession, the easier you can track criminal links, contacts, people, deals, money. The easier it is to safeguard existing weapons stocks.
Society has invented things like insurance, police for a reason, not because you supposedly have the right to play god in your backyard. You elliminate misunderstandings with terrible endings if you do not allow them to happen. There is no fake sense of security, of "understanding" each other. Without a gun, there is real fear for real danger. Most people don't like that last part, but it is imho the best assessment of a critical situation that lives longest. Hollywood had some serious gun-lobby adds running in the 80ies and 90ies, and it won't be over soon, but e.g. most of European countries have a strict gun-ban, and it works. It's not like a life without a gun is making you less mature, less male-macho-crap-whatever, on the contrary. A gunshot can be an easy way out, but it's not the right way. If society needs help you can either kill it, or help it.
I do have the feeling that the people that are pro-guns have a slight distrust in the system alltogether, and they'd rather protect themselves than count on the system to help when in need. Maybe it's cheaper in tax-dollars, and you're right, msot of the time accidents don't happen. But things like alcohol or fights with the neighbours can have nasty consequences sometimes. I wouldn't want that risk lying about in my house. The mother of a friend of mine shot herself through her head. Because she could. The gun was in her house, she knew how to use it. If she had been taking drugs, or slashed her wrists instead, she might still have been alive. Now she has decided herself, and, well, I respect here wishes, but it's not like the problem she had in her life went away or anything. She gave up the fight. I think that's very brave, but if she had no gun.. well.. guns are pretty final.
I have the same mobo sitting in my box, and I like it's raid option very much:) Especially when network transfers of large files take place there is no latency for writing, and speeds practically double. I only have 2 80gb WD's and 2 cd drives (pioneer dvd and plextor burner), with the cdrom's on the normal ide's, and the disks striped with raid 0. Yes yes I should have it in 0+1 but hey even though it's cheap i usually prefer performance over security.
So far I have had no problem whasoever, but it would be nice to hear what configuration of clusters you are/were using. Win2k also gives me the feeling that I'm not getting total performance from my raid when working local, and I've tried to improve it with the hotrod stuff but no big wins there. You can email me if you like:)
I can only welcome the idea, it seems the demoscene is once again on the edge of a major change in the public they are reaching.
There was a time when scene-ing was a BBS-only thing, and parties were small obscure events happening in garages and local youth centers. Since the internet, demo parties have, together with LAN parties (and usually it's the same event anyway), grown to visitor numbers beyond the domestic range. For organisers it's getting more and more difficult to support such a load without sacrificing some of the I-know-you atmosphere that used to be present on these cosy events. Since a few years, demos (and lan parties) have been striving to entertain the general public, not just the underground scene. I think this is a good thing, but I also miss the sense of obscurity that stemmed from the hack and crack era, of which it was initially a subculture.
For more news and references on these parties and the content they put out, see Scene.org
Untill now there is no reason to believe that our universe has different physical properties in space, but it might have in time (just think about the hypothetical big bang situation where laws of physiscs approach impossible values in the limit). However, you may be right! Space and time bend around mass, so discrepancies in time do exist, and maybe also amongst the laws of physiscs.
I did indeed assume that we are the only intelligent creatures which is ofcourse wrong. As you said it comes eventually down to agreeing on the validity of our perception of reality, should we encounter other intelligent creatures. It is difficult to comprehend that entities which cannot exist in our reality (but have a probability to do so in theirs) cast votes to evolve our universe (or parts of it) into one that better suits their needs. Sounds like quantum theoretic stuff to me:)
But it is interesting to think about it that way:)
Actually I have been thinking about this myself in a similar fashion in one of my early/. entries.. Just think about it. If the molecular parameters would be slightly different, our life as we know it would not be possible. I'm not saying that there can't be other universes with other types of life, I'm just saying that our universe exists because we exist.. which is kinda strange..
I've had the opportunity to do a little pair programming in a large, modular framework project, and frankly, we mixed both approaches (the one you describe here, and pair-programming). From my own experience, if algorithms are really hard and complex it is better to pair program, even if it takes longer. XP is not just about programming faster, it is also about being able to maintain the code, and about shared ownership of that code. It also makes more sense that the algorithm has a higher probability of being correct when somebody needs to understand what you're doing and starts asking questions.
I also agree that some jobs just don't need pair-programming. Writing a string class and a test-suite for it is something you can do by yourself easily, and adding a peer to review your code might help you with typos' but since compilers are getting pretty fast and verbose these days, the added value of having a peer sitting next to you significantly drops.
At the moment I'm in the situation where we don't have enough highly skilled people to do any pair programming, in a large & highly complex project with a lot of timing, data & code dependencies (a game), and this sometimes leads to clashes and refactoring, and to people getting confused by the internals of the code, and code that doesn't allways behave like it should in border-line cases.
Photons must have mass otherwise space sails couldn't work. you can't steal kinetic energy from a massless particle.
Maybe you want to verify your knowledge of physics before posting a response?
"Spinor fields describing particles of zero rest mass satisfy the so-called zero rest mass equations. Examples of zero rest mass particles include the neutrino (a fermion ) and the gauge bosons (as long as gauge symmetry is not violated) such as the photon or Higgs boson. "
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ZeroRestMassEquatio n. html
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. But the right to not-listen that you retain also does not imply organised banning of the abuse of free speech ( in the form of e.g. spam ) either.
And I don't understand the comments either.. uncomfortable politcal views are a necessity if you believe that democracy should allways have it's way, yet, people don't like the Hitlers, the Sadam's, and the Bushes, and would rather live happily ever after and just not have to think about people like that messing up their lives. I can understand, but that indifference is growing to the extend that democracy and free speech are subject to limits. And I think that is wrong.
You constantly have to deal with bad practice of people, tell them they are wrong or unappreciated. But you have to give them the freedom to make the mistakes. Of course, when they do damage in any way to society, or their neighbouring societies, the fun should end.
my cents..
hmm... that's not entirely the case is it ?
A neural net or genetic algoritm uses a fitness function, which evaluates the resulting output and tries to come up with something better. As such, a bad output sample can be seen as taking the wrong approach to solve the problem, and taking a different route with the weights adjusted in those places where they matter most is the logical next step for such an algorithm.
This is precisely what we humand also do, but we are more skilled in establishing different ways of looking at a problem in an efficient manner, mainly because we have a daily re-training and reconfiguration of our neural network (brain) since we were born (and even before that), and because we are able to match solution patterns to problems that we previously have solved, and adapt them for the specific case.
CS AI can be much more than just a smart search, which is what a chessprogram is of course. And regarding chess, it IS indeed not a measurement of intelligence, but then, what is.
Cheers!
Let me take you out of your dream here. About 95% of commerical console games never are / will never be well-written. At best, they have a decent design and architecture, but they will never be perfectly portable. The reason is that virtually all parts constantly evolve during the game's development stages, and compromises are constantly made to adhere code to the constraints of the console regarding memory and performance. You allways end up with shit somewhere..
One other thing: OpenGL nowadays is simply inferior to D3D. Most Matrox OpenGL drivers go through D3D. Most gamers run boxes with windows. I'd say these arguments make the choice rather easy.
However.. there is something which is called middleware, even in game dev land. NetImmerse, Renderware, Blender,.. these are all 'platform independant' (platform limitted is probably better) engines that allow faster development and cross porting. At least.. that is the intended goal anyway
essence is in the essence. bravo!
Yup, Starbreeze was formed out of the former demo group Triton, the creators of, among others, the legendary Crystal Dreams and Crystal Dreams II demos.
Back then, Triton captured the essence of module tracking with their FastTracker & FastTrackerII, a very advanced implementation of the old amiga protracker concept. Their Fasttracker was, for many years, the biggest rival of Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker, and a lot of musicians preferred it's simple but efficient interface above all other trackers.
When Triton became Starbreeze, they had a lot of problems finding publishers for their first game 'Into The Shadows'. Parts of that never-published game were used in 'Sorcery', a 1st person RPG to be published by Gremlin Interactive, but also these plans did not go forward, as Gremlin was bought by Infogrames and they traditionally fucked up one more development studio. Finally, Swing Entertainment (Conspiracy Games) had the courage and the guts to publish the now 3rd person RPG 'Enclave' on 3 platforms, and the game gained reasonably good acclaim. Unfortunately, Swing went bankrupt 3 months later. Starbreeze is now said to be working on Enclave 2.
There is just no getting around the fact that any journalism is going to be biassed or diluted in some way or another. Last time I watched to the BBC News, I saw a brittish journalist so unbiassedly being pro-war that I got scared. The BBC allways was a reasonably unbiassed and objective organ in my book, but even the BBC makes mistakes.
The struggle for objectivity.. people should be aware of this all the time when looking for news, and doublecheck stories with other media households. And I think the larger the media concern is, the more distorted and colored the news is giong to be. I think if you can gather as much views on the matter as possible, and compare it with eachother, you end up deciding for yourself what you believe is true, which is imho still better than to trust someone else to make that judgement for you. I watched the better part of CNN while Powell was proclaiming his cause in the UN, vs Iraki Weapon's Inspector Hans Blickx. I also watched French, German, BBC, Holland and Belgian news, and I must say that the view on things was so squarely opposite that you can't help but laugh about what parts were cut from a conversation, which are empahasised, what background music goes where, what is shown here and there, and best of all, the comments that follow by the editors.
The same goes for scientific news. Untill something is not double checked by another independant organisation, there is no 100% guarantee that what is said is true. In fact, it can take decades or more to convince people of a certain scientific 'truth', like e.g. quantum physics or the general relativity theory.
As for the concept of entertainment in science news, I do see that some people have a hard time reading or accessing certain science, and I think for them it is not bad to supply them with science in ways they can understand, grasp, make them curious.. That makes the rainbow of flavours in science news large and varried, and anyone can select the news in the language that he can understand. I don't know if I have to think about Tom & Jerry explaining superconductivity in this way, but it would certainly get me curious
Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone has to play the entertainment card in order to sustain itself and attract more audience. That would be a dangerous evolution and degrade the quality of the top level research magazines.. but as long as some people are willing to invest in top level science magazines, and acknowledge that they have a primary role to play in the education of the masses in general, things are still ok.
Well said, well formulated, and generally insightfull. Me and my journal agree completely.
The thing is that even the small publishers think that EA and MS have 'the perfect buisiness model' set up and that they should at least try to immitate them, which means churning out sports titles every year and adding a bit more creative titles when somebody happened to stumble on a good idea once in a while. Unfortunately the smaller publishers only have the good idea, and not the sports franchises or the OS'es to lean back on. EA has done very well and has turned itself into a monster. You have to give them credit for all the crazy titles they put out in the 90ies.. but as said, their business model has killed origin and janes, and probably many others.
I am sad to say this is actually true. Publishers just care about living through the year, selling something, then sitting through the next year..etc.. instead of going the extra mile and let the content mature. I'm not gonna go into any details, but if I ran my own studio & concept, things would be very different.
It's not that we're not able to be creative, it's that selling "a" product is more important than creating "the" product, because of tight deadlines.. I guess you all know that games HAVE to be ready in september, because they need to be in store by december? No. Games don't have to be ready. They ARE ready or they are not. The problem is it costs extra money. Money they have, in some cases at least, but money they don't seem fit to spend.
But I'm not a manager.
Indeed. I'm afraid I have little sympathy for a company which has burned that much cold, hard cash -- maybe they shouldn't be asking the community for yet more cash to fuel the office heaters, but instead examining their revenue models.
I was struck by the accuracy of your remark, and the implicit message it carries. Good journalism should allways remain (or try to remain) independant as much as possible. Revenue models effectively are ways to sell out. It seems things like Salon simlpy can not exist in todays overly commercial world of reasoning, as it can not compete with what the rest of the world is reading, which is mostly crap to some degree or another.
Too bad. I liked Salon a lot!
It seems to me that most of the dynamics and mechanics of multi-agent networking behaviour are closely related to the structure they are confined to - and by structure I mean the physical implementation constraints of the working model - more so than what it is the agents themselves do, associated with a certain probability density function.
I've done some research in Neural Networks and I was amazed by the importance of the dimensionality of the network. There is a subfield in NN's that tries to generate appropriate networks for appropriate computing tasks. Still the difference between real neurons and neural networks, is that the first one has an analog clock, while the second one has at least a discretized clock per node, if not per layer or for the whole cell. Also the importance of having a feedback or recurency can make all the difference in the right / wrong places.
I have the feeling - but could not proove this yet - that a dynamic combination of local optima searches and global optima searching leads to self-modifications to the structure in which the agents live, in such a way that the structure suits the needs of the original fitness function, which desribes the problem that we are trying to solve. Since the fitness function itself is a variant in time in most problems, it is logical to assume that the networks are never in a static state, so global optima searching will modify the network constantly, while local optima searching will try to exploit network capabilities best.
Seems like interesting material, I'll have to check out this book!
And actually, not even by ANY robot, driven by ANY platform.
Thank you. Run along.
you know.. I wanter to rate it +1, the truth, but it's not listed so here's my tale:
Get as much math and physics down as you can, because if ANYTHING matters, it's that. These days everybody can fire up a direct9 wiz to create 'a game', spinning some polygons and acting on some input, but networking, math, physics, and platform experience are the things that count.. and you can only dream to get the last one if you can conveince people with the first ones..
Of course, a healthy appetite for working, clean, fast, interesting, pretty, funny and playfull code should not miss the list, but the main thing is to get as much understanding of all things math and physics, because basicly it's your ticket into the metal. Once you're there, you're 'in'.
No worries mate, us non-americans understand the meaning of "fry him" even within different contexts. What we don't understand is american culture.
Slightly offtopic, since it's not about widgets, but I thought I'd mention it anyway:
There used to be a graphics library called FastGraph by infamous Ted gruber Software, and surprisingly it is still around(It actually predates borlands BGI driver, if people still remember that one). I used it 10 years ago to take my first feeble steps in graphics in c++, and designed my own widgets and basicly invented my own buttons/frames/menus system all by myself, and to this day the framework of that code is still usuable. Anyway, it's not a recommendation or anything, I would never used it at this time.
The basic problem with this view is its starry eyed idealism.
Talk about starry eyed. Do you have any idea what the concrete results are from manned spaceflight and space exploration? Do you know just exactly how and what experiments can be (and are being) executed up there? Do you have a clue how big the impact on sciences, medical sciences, technology and the whole technological, chemical and phramaceutical industry in general is?
Clearly not. You're only concerned about your bloody tax dollar, or the satans the US helped create and then has to kill again in order to justify itself in world politics.
Furthermore, the ISS is an "International" space station, not the "Nasa" space station, so I suggest you take your short eyed frog view and be gone with it. I do agree that the science projects need to lead up to more concrete usefull things for the people, and they _are_ there, we just don't see them in our every-day life all the time. (you do if you know where to look though)
It's one thing to be critical about certain things, it's another to just throw it away and close the subject alltogether. I'm very proud my nation spends a considerable percentage of government money on space programs, even though it's just a small contribution, from a small nation.
Yes, criminials are dumb, but all robbers know about the difference and many choose to go unarmed to make the sentence lighter.
Sure! That makes sense! They'll go in like pussies just in case they get caught? Hello? These are criminals, not ballet-dancers. They don't care if there is a chance of getting caught. They don't care if they have to shoot somebody (well, maybe afterwards some of them might). They generally don't WANT to think about it. They only want to be preoccupied with how to break in, and how to get away with it afterwards. And usually it's fast 'clever' thinking when an 'opportunity' presents itself.
If you say "lots of wrong things here", and then pick this as a reference, I can't wait to hear what else was wrong. It doen't hurt to review ones beliefs based on valid arguments. I know it's difficult, but if you want to learn in life.. well.. it's up to you to pull your own conclusions of course.
Removing guns from lawful, responsible people does nothing to keep them out of the hands of actual criminals
Don't you think there is a bit of criminal inside everyone of us? Do you really trust the human race to be so civil? Do you want to take the risk of somebody breaking into your lawfull house in an unlawfull way and breaking open your perfectly safe cabin because he knows he doesn't even have to bring his gun at all? Do you want to take the risk of young children playing around with it even when you're not looking (and god knows you're bound to make that sorry mistake at some point)? Do you want to make sure the crooks come more heavily armed than you beause they know you're gonna be armed, and the one who shoots first wins?
Then by all means, get a gun.
Would you, as a presumably anti-gun person, be willing to put a sign in your front yard "This house is gun free!" ?The crimnals do not know which household may or may not have a gun inside, and so may be less inclined to break in. You may not own one, but no one knows that but you.
Come on. If they're breaking in, they're breaking in. They'll come prepared, trust me. It's not like some petty thieve is going to break in these days, those days are over. Imho, however honest and sincere and lawfull you may be, it is not your right to kill a person, just because you want to stop him. At this point you're excercising control over somebody's life, something that you don't (and never do) own. You have the right to drag him off of your property, maybe, but not in a body bag. Those are pretty medieval practices.
The less guns there are, the less opportunities for people to become 'mortally violent', when arguments get out of hand. The better you can control existing gun possession, the easier you can track criminal links, contacts, people, deals, money. The easier it is to safeguard existing weapons stocks.
Society has invented things like insurance, police for a reason, not because you supposedly have the right to play god in your backyard. You elliminate misunderstandings with terrible endings if you do not allow them to happen. There is no fake sense of security, of "understanding" each other. Without a gun, there is real fear for real danger. Most people don't like that last part, but it is imho the best assessment of a critical situation that lives longest. Hollywood had some serious gun-lobby adds running in the 80ies and 90ies, and it won't be over soon, but e.g. most of European countries have a strict gun-ban, and it works. It's not like a life without a gun is making you less mature, less male-macho-crap-whatever, on the contrary. A gunshot can be an easy way out, but it's not the right way. If society needs help you can either kill it, or help it.
I do have the feeling that the people that are pro-guns have a slight distrust in the system alltogether, and they'd rather protect themselves than count on the system to help when in need. Maybe it's cheaper in tax-dollars, and you're right, msot of the time accidents don't happen. But things like alcohol or fights with the neighbours can have nasty consequences sometimes. I wouldn't want that risk lying about in my house. The mother of a friend of mine shot herself through her head. Because she could. The gun was in her house, she knew how to use it. If she had been taking drugs, or slashed her wrists instead, she might still have been alive. Now she has decided herself, and, well, I respect here wishes, but it's not like the problem she had in her life went away or anything. She gave up the fight. I think that's very brave, but if she had no gun.. well.. guns are pretty final.
Your shot.
I have the same mobo sitting in my box, and I like it's raid option very much
So far I have had no problem whasoever, but it would be nice to hear what configuration of clusters you are/were using. Win2k also gives me the feeling that I'm not getting total performance from my raid when working local, and I've tried to improve it with the hotrod stuff but no big wins there. You can email me if you like
cheers,
I can only welcome the idea, it seems the demoscene is once again on the edge of a major change in the public they are reaching.
There was a time when scene-ing was a BBS-only thing, and parties were small obscure events happening in garages and local youth centers. Since the internet, demo parties have, together with LAN parties (and usually it's the same event anyway), grown to visitor numbers beyond the domestic range. For organisers it's getting more and more difficult to support such a load without sacrificing some of the I-know-you atmosphere that used to be present on these cosy events. Since a few years, demos (and lan parties) have been striving to entertain the general public, not just the underground scene. I think this is a good thing, but I also miss the sense of obscurity that stemmed from the hack and crack era, of which it was initially a subculture.
For more news and references on these parties and the content they put out, see Scene.org
ciao,
a0a
Untill now there is no reason to believe that our universe has different physical properties in space, but it might have in time (just think about the hypothetical big bang situation where laws of physiscs approach impossible values in the limit). However, you may be right! Space and time bend around mass, so discrepancies in time do exist, and maybe also amongst the laws of physiscs.
I did indeed assume that we are the only intelligent creatures which is ofcourse wrong. As you said it comes eventually down to agreeing on the validity of our perception of reality, should we encounter other intelligent creatures. It is difficult to comprehend that entities which cannot exist in our reality (but have a probability to do so in theirs) cast votes to evolve our universe (or parts of it) into one that better suits their needs. Sounds like quantum theoretic stuff to me
But it is interesting to think about it that way
Actually I have been thinking about this myself in a similar fashion in one of my early
I've had the opportunity to do a little pair programming in a large, modular framework project, and frankly, we mixed both approaches (the one you describe here, and pair-programming). From my own experience, if algorithms are really hard and complex it is better to pair program, even if it takes longer. XP is not just about programming faster, it is also about being able to maintain the code, and about shared ownership of that code. It also makes more sense that the algorithm has a higher probability of being correct when somebody needs to understand what you're doing and starts asking questions.
I also agree that some jobs just don't need pair-programming. Writing a string class and a test-suite for it is something you can do by yourself easily, and adding a peer to review your code might help you with typos' but since compilers are getting pretty fast and verbose these days, the added value of having a peer sitting next to you significantly drops.
At the moment I'm in the situation where we don't have enough highly skilled people to do any pair programming, in a large & highly complex project with a lot of timing, data & code dependencies (a game), and this sometimes leads to clashes and refactoring, and to people getting confused by the internals of the code, and code that doesn't allways behave like it should in border-line cases.
Sometimes the fun is in the details
Photons must have mass otherwise space sails couldn't work. you can't steal kinetic energy from a massless particle.
o n. html
Maybe you want to verify your knowledge of physics before posting a response?
"Spinor fields describing particles of zero rest mass satisfy the so-called zero rest mass equations. Examples of zero rest mass particles include the neutrino (a fermion ) and the gauge bosons (as long as gauge symmetry is not violated) such as the photon or Higgs boson. "
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ZeroRestMassEquati