I'm probably a big dork, but I've never seen this feature before, and I'm sure of some great uses for it!
I thought that was standard functionality for a stack trace in an IDE? Visual Studio has done this for years, though without the hand/underline highlighting. IMHO, if you're going to put a stack trace in an IDE, this is a required feature. Otherwise, why would I use the IDE for debugging in the first place?
And just to pimp my own favorite IDE (well, it's not so much an IDE as it is a full-featured editor and program analyzer, but that's fine by me since I do builds via the commandline) is Source Insight. The killer functionality here is the ability to jump through relationships in the code without having to compile. The editor will keep track of relationships, so even if you have half-written code that doesn't quite compile yet, you can still browse through it and follow the flow. Plus, it's easily extendable for other programming languages (out of the box, version 3.5 supports C/C++, C#, Java, ASM, HTML, XML, Perl, Batch script, JScript, VB, VBScript, and a lot more, and there are modules available for SQL and others). Let's see Eclipse or Visual Studio keep track of thousands of files in a large project (I've used SI to keep track of relationships in upwards of 9000 files at one time, with anywhere between 50 to 100 of the files open at any given time, without any performance issues at all).
Source Insight isn't free, but the price is reasonable ($250, and you can get a site license if you're a company) and there's a 30-day free trial so you can evaluate whether it's worth $250 to you. Even if you don't like it, it's certainly worth checking out. I guess I should probably also note that it's Windows-only.
Would you frown on "format-shifting VHS tapes because I'm afraid VHS will go the way of the 8-track after my VCR has died" or "format-shifting VHS tapes because they're notorious for wearing out after a couple dozen plays"?
I realize there are legitimate reasons for timeshifting. Certainly archiving your old VHS tapes is one, as is archiving old home movies. Fine. Rip them into your PC, and then onto VCD or DVD. However, that doesn't change the fact that many people do pirate movies. It just gives them a convenient excuse they can tell themselves to help manage their guilt.
Divx 1 movies (Circuit City time-bomb DVD) don't work anymore because the license servers have been taken down. Which set-top player do you recommend for DivX 4+ movies (AVI with MPEG-4 video and MP3 or AC3 audio)?
People still relate Circuit City's aborted "Divx" with the word "Divx"? Anyway, I obviously meant the MPEG4-based DivX encoding that is popular for movies (pirated and otherwise) these days. As for players that support it, look here. Ignoring the two DVD-playing consoles (PS2 and XBox, where the XBox at least requires hacking before it'll play mpeg4/divx and so doesn't count), there's still 5 other players that support Divx, and at least one of them is in the $200-$300 price range.
I'm under the impression that DVD players do a poor job of streaming ripped DVDs and MP3s from the local Ethernet. If you know of a DVD player that does the latter bit, then that's what I'm after...
Here's an idea -- try buying DVDs and CDs. I've never found a DVD player that couldn't play DVDs and CDs.
However, if you must pirate (blah blah blah backing up my discs because I'm afraid they're going to get damaged blah blah *cough*bullshit*cough*), I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how to burn those to a DVD or CD for play in your DVD player. Many DVD players now will play mp3 files directly, and a number will even play Divx movies directly as well. Add to that the fact that you'll get better picture quality out of a DVD player than a HTPC (well, without major and time consuming tweaking of your HTPC, anyway), and generally better sound quality (I've never seen a $200-$300 PC with TOSLink output), I don't see any reason why you wouldn't buy a stand-alone DVD player.
Yeah, I know, I DO plan to build a HTPC, but I'd like to have a box available in the $200-300 range that the wife and children can use as simply as a DVD player. I can take care of the media server behind the sceens myself. I'm not going to build a $1000 HTPC for each TV in the house...
Ever consider buying... (wait for it)... a $200-$300 DVD player?
Sweet, thanks! It looks like SCGT is almost exactly what I was looking for, though being a '99 game I'm wary about it having problems under XP. I should be able to find it in the bargain bin, though, so I don't care if I waste $15 and it doesn't work. It would be nice to see an updated version, or even a version on XBox Live (not goint to happen, since it's an EA game). I guess I'll be going to my local game stores tomorrow to find this one.
Interesting. Any other decent racing leagues out there? I'm not so interested in NASCAR, but I'd love to find a good road racing-style game (a la Gran Turismo or Sega GT, rather than Project: Gotham, preferably on real tracks around the nation/world) with an active online community. That would make it worth buying a good FF wheel/pedal setup, I think. I don't even care if there's money involved.
Something along the lines of Moto GP on XBox Live, but with cars, would be just about perfect.
Last I checked, you could get GNOME separately. GARNOME is bleeding edge, not GNOME 2.2. You should expect problems with the former, and the latter can be installed separately from GARNOME. You don't need RH9 to get GNOME 2.2 (and even if RH doesn't release RPMs for GNOME 2.2 on RH8, you can still grab the sources from the GNOME project directly).
I'm running RH8.0 ATM, and am a big newb to linux. I am wondering what one needs to do after an 'upgrade' install when they have previous drivers/settings already installed/setup:
Why must you upgrade at all? It sounds to me like you have your system working well now, and I assume it's doing what you need. Why, then, would you bother with the upgrade to RH9? Is there something you absolutely have to have that is in RH9 and not available otherwise? I guess, "Because I want to upgrade," is a valid reason, but consider thinking about why you feel you must upgrade before you do.
family situations? there are 4 of us on one account, all going to onw name. the head of that account is not going to be obvious to all who are searching for you. how do they plan on getting around that....or do they at all?
How do you do that now with a land line? You don't. This would be no different. If my phone is listed under my father's name, and you're trying to get me through 411, then you need to know my father's name.
many programs never learned to scale properly. Fixed-font types become way too small when I turn it up to 1600x1200, and even the supposedly "standard resize" messes up boxes and menus sometimes due to sloppy programming.
Odd. I've been running at 1600x1200 for more than three years now, and I've never experienced any such problems. Sure, there were the occasional web pages with the sidebar-style background which underestimated desktop sizes and stopped at 1024 horizontal pixels, but those have more or less gone away by now. There's also the few web pages that insist on restricting themselves to a 640 pixel column, even when there's more room, but those are also rare now too. I've never had issues with native applications.
Now give me a desktop that looks *exactly* like my current one, only in a higher resolution and I'll take it. I got the monitor for it...
Ah, you got me on the difference between size and resolution. Of course, resolution has pretty much come to mean size, these days, at least when referring to computer displays. Would it be nice to get 300dpi or 600dpi on a monitor? Sure. But I can live with between 72dpi and 96dpi, in exchange for more working area. High dpi is important for graphic artists. Large size is important to most other forms of work (programming, for instance).
I ran my 17 inch monitor at 1024 like most people.
Most people I know run their 17" monitors at 1280x1024, not 1024x768. 1024x768 is fine for a 15" monitor, but it's too damn big on anything larger. On 19" or up (assuming a good 19", anyway), 1600x1200 is the way to go.
what's the point of 1600x1200 on a 15 inch screen? Your only going to run it at 800x600 unless you want to be straining your eyes all the time. at most someone might run it at 1024x768.... Now I have a 21 and run it at 1600x1200, i'm thinking of lowering it because it's almost to small.
If you have eyesight problems, you may want to mention that. Yes, 1600x1200 seems small when you first start using it, but it grows on you. Give it time, and so long as you don't have sight issues (mild glasses or contacts don't count), you'll soon love the extra screen real estate. My laptop can only do 1280x1024 (couldn't justify the extra cost for a UXGA screen), and it's pretty annoying to go from my desktop 19" or 21" CRTs at 1600x1200 to the 16" LCD at 1280x1024. My roommate has a Toshiba laptop with a 15" UXGA screen, and it's surprisingly useable at 1600x1200. 1280x1024 is good enough for a second monitor on a dual-head machine, but not for normal work.
From the announcement, it seems like this 20" display can only do 1280x768. I'm sorry, but at 20", it better be able to do better than that. If it won't do at least 1600x1200 (or I guess 1600x960, with that aspect ratio), I'm not interested. My 19" CRT comfortably does 1600x1200, so any LCD or OLED display would have to do at least that for me to consider upgrading.
Don't you mean that you don't know that you know anyone who is?
I'm sure there are more tg people around us than we think, but there's still not that many. I'd be surprised if there were more than a few hundred thousand tgs in the US (and that's probably a high guess). So, you're right, I don't know that I know of anybody, but I think I could say with 95% confidence that I don't know any transgendered people. Not that knowing any would be a bad thing, just that I'm pretty sure I don't.
I haven't seen the movie but I saw the fictional town of Normal referred to as a small town. The real Normal is a good sized college town right next to another good sized college town. Total population of the two towns is over 100000.
Normal is the title of the movie, not the town (though it would be a valid mistake to make, given that Normal is a city in central Illinois). No, the town was something like Earlsville, set in DeKalb county (northern Illinois, has Northern Illinois University up there).
As for the tractors, is nothing sacred anymore about tractor colors? There are orange ones, red ones and green ones and never shall they meet.
Bah. Case did orange and white back in the day (up until the late 80s or early 90s, at least). Then they merged with International to form Case/IH, and they got rid of the orange and white and stuck with IH's red. John Deere has always been green, but Versatile switched to blue from yellow/red/black when they were bought by Ford. The only people making orange tractors any more (that I know of, and not counting Cat's yellow) is Kubota, who make lawn tractors and other small tractors. (my information may not be 100% correct, but it's pretty close I think.)
I hope HBO releases the movie on DVD so I can see it. Being a tg person who lives in Central Illinois gives a special interest in it.
HBO has a good history of releasing stuff on DVD (Sopranos, Oz, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Band of Brothers, etc), so if this movie gets a good reaction I'm sure it'll get a DVD release. I enjoyed it for the setting (even more so because I grew up in such a small town), but I don't know how you'll react to the portrayal of a tg m2f. That's something that's beyond my own experience, so I can't say if it was a good or bad representation.
We have our database code (for SQL Server 2000) buildable in our source tree, and take drops from there when we need to update production. If changing a table would break a stored procedure, it's going to break at build time rather than run time. We're dealing with quite a few more than 12,000 lines of SQL code, yet we have a pretty good handle on modifying the code. Sounds like you need some changes to your process, rather than to how your code is represented.
As the AC said, the problem is not with the sprocs, but with the people who didn't document them. As well, the fact that the sprocs are Oracle-specific is not because the SQL code is in stored procedures, but because the developers wrote Oracle-specific code.
However the joke about modern teaching where it doesn't matter if the kid says 2+2=2, so long as the kid tried hard the kid gets all the points is a concern.
You seem to have benefited from that point of view in your English spelling and grammar classes. Maybe you can do math like Stephen Hawking, but if you can't write it's not going to matter. Of course, the rise of illiteracy is just as much a result of the school system you decry as is the inability to do higher maths. I guess I shouldn't blame you, then. I'll blame the system.
(Note to moderators: Sure, this is a grammar nazi post. However, it is particularly relevant when the parent is complaining about the lack of proper education in one area while exhibiting the same sort of lack in another. Take that into consideration before you mod me away as flamebait.)
Really, I don't mean to sound obnoxious, but seeing nethack lumped in with pacman as a `twitch' game was almost surreal...
The point I meant to make about nethack is that there's really not much of a story, and it's a game that you can sit down and play for 15 minutes and still get in two or three games (doesn't mean you will only play for 15 minutes, just that you can). I'm sure I just suck at roguelikes, but my average lifespan tends to be in the 5-10 minute range. Sometimes I get lucky (or I cheat) and get to play as the same character for 30 minutes to an hour, but little longer:). In that sense, it's a "short attention span" game, because it doesn't take long to get in, kill some stuff, and die. Like Pac-Man, it does take a long time to win (or "win", since Pac-Man doesn't really have an end goal other than points).
Salon [salon.com] disagrees with you about Normal. The review's author, herself the daughter of a transsexual father, points out several flaws in the presentation.
I'm sure they do, but as the article on Salon is premium content, I'll never find out how. (No, I'm not going to turn on cookies, and no I'm not going to sit through a 15 second flash ad, and no I'm not going to give them my credit card for the free 7-day trial.) However, big deal. Not being a transsexual, and not knowing anyone who is, I can't tell you how accurate the movie was. What I can tell you is that it was entertaining, and the Central Illinois setting was fairly genuine.
If you're interested in what a transsexual deals with during his/her time of change, you should check out the new HBO movie Normal. I caught it Sunday night (on HBOHD, even!), and it was pretty damn good.
As a side note, they got Central Illinois pretty dead on, though there was mention that the story was set in DeKalb county -- definitely not Central Illinois. The setting of the story (not the story itself) was nostalgic for me because of that. And the guy worked for Case/International! Damn, I remember back when Case was Case with the orange and white tractors, and International was the red tractor company. Ah, just ignore this paragraph.
And like 4 years ago I was all for MySQL - "Why the hell do we need stored procedures and triggers? They only slow the database down". This is true, but also this make the software actually reach the client in time by helping you avoid coding extra tons of code for data storage tasks...
Of course, if properly implemented, stored procedures don't slow down the database at all. In fact, stored procedures could easily increase your performance. Proper implementation should include compiling the sql code into something that's more efficient internally for the server. Also, you'll no longer be sending free-form query text to the server, so you're both safer (you can be more strict with what you allow in your strings) and faster (fewer trips to the server and less data sent to the server each time). Not only that, but sprocs let you keep your SQL code separate from your client code, and can allow you to make changes to your business logic without having to touch your client code at all. In short, sprocs are much more useful than just being used for triggers, but unfortunately many MySQLers don't realize what they're missing.
I guess the types of games we have reflect the times and how kids are these days (with very short attention spans)... Games are very much about doing something and getting an instant payoff right now (walk into a room, see something or someone, shoot and kill them (it's not even important why you're shooting and killing them anymore other than they are the "bad guys").
You know, I don't think this criticism is correct. Look at games like Pac-Man, Asteroids, or even Nethack. They're all quick, short-attention-span games (get in, play a couple games, get out, you've only wasted 15 minutes). Now compare that to games like Half-Life, Max Payne, Halo, Deus Ex, the Thief series, the System Shock series, and so on. You're lucky if you can really get much done in an hour's play time with these games. They have story, they have plot, they have atmosphere, and they have action. They're not "twitch" games with short attention span.
I think the thing to realize is that games, like all other media (books, movies, music), are about 80% shit to 20% cream. The NES had something over 500 games (and I'm sure that's a low guess), but how many of them do you really remember as being good (because some terrible games are memorable for being terrible)? Maybe 100, if you're really thinking about it. Same thing for PC games. Do you remember all of the Doom clones? How about the Wolf3D clones (and yes, there were several)? Or what about all of the different Quake clones? Of course not. You remember the games that were good. Things only seem worse right now because you haven't had sufficient time to weed out the good from the crap, and forget the crap.
And who knows, maybe they'll even develop some kind of new game genre that is better than recycling the game engines everyone else licenses or clones (ahem, FPS, can we come up with a new genre?).
A game engine is just that -- an engine. Quake, Unreal, etc don't have to be used in FPS games (witness Anachronox, Splinter Cell). I think it's unfair to think of these engines as FPS engines, because they're not -- they are 3D world engines, and can be used by developers to do whatever they can imagine (within the limits of modern hardware and any artificially imposed limits of the engine, though many of those can be removed).
As for coming up with new genres, do you have any ideas? In the past 10-ish years, we've seen only a few genres arise -- FPS, RTS, MMOG (that's more a meta-genre, with categories like MMORPG, MMOSS, MMOFPS, etc). Two or three genres in a decade is pretty damned good.
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I thought that was standard functionality for a stack trace in an IDE? Visual Studio has done this for years, though without the hand/underline highlighting. IMHO, if you're going to put a stack trace in an IDE, this is a required feature. Otherwise, why would I use the IDE for debugging in the first place?
And just to pimp my own favorite IDE (well, it's not so much an IDE as it is a full-featured editor and program analyzer, but that's fine by me since I do builds via the commandline) is Source Insight. The killer functionality here is the ability to jump through relationships in the code without having to compile. The editor will keep track of relationships, so even if you have half-written code that doesn't quite compile yet, you can still browse through it and follow the flow. Plus, it's easily extendable for other programming languages (out of the box, version 3.5 supports C/C++, C#, Java, ASM, HTML, XML, Perl, Batch script, JScript, VB, VBScript, and a lot more, and there are modules available for SQL and others). Let's see Eclipse or Visual Studio keep track of thousands of files in a large project (I've used SI to keep track of relationships in upwards of 9000 files at one time, with anywhere between 50 to 100 of the files open at any given time, without any performance issues at all).
Source Insight isn't free, but the price is reasonable ($250, and you can get a site license if you're a company) and there's a 30-day free trial so you can evaluate whether it's worth $250 to you. Even if you don't like it, it's certainly worth checking out. I guess I should probably also note that it's Windows-only.
I'm guessing you bought either a German car or an Italian car ...
I realize there are legitimate reasons for timeshifting. Certainly archiving your old VHS tapes is one, as is archiving old home movies. Fine. Rip them into your PC, and then onto VCD or DVD. However, that doesn't change the fact that many people do pirate movies. It just gives them a convenient excuse they can tell themselves to help manage their guilt.
People still relate Circuit City's aborted "Divx" with the word "Divx"? Anyway, I obviously meant the MPEG4-based DivX encoding that is popular for movies (pirated and otherwise) these days. As for players that support it, look here. Ignoring the two DVD-playing consoles (PS2 and XBox, where the XBox at least requires hacking before it'll play mpeg4/divx and so doesn't count), there's still 5 other players that support Divx, and at least one of them is in the $200-$300 price range.
Here's an idea -- try buying DVDs and CDs. I've never found a DVD player that couldn't play DVDs and CDs.
However, if you must pirate (blah blah blah backing up my discs because I'm afraid they're going to get damaged blah blah *cough*bullshit*cough*), I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how to burn those to a DVD or CD for play in your DVD player. Many DVD players now will play mp3 files directly, and a number will even play Divx movies directly as well. Add to that the fact that you'll get better picture quality out of a DVD player than a HTPC (well, without major and time consuming tweaking of your HTPC, anyway), and generally better sound quality (I've never seen a $200-$300 PC with TOSLink output), I don't see any reason why you wouldn't buy a stand-alone DVD player.
Ever consider buying ... (wait for it) ... a $200-$300 DVD player?
Sweet, thanks! It looks like SCGT is almost exactly what I was looking for, though being a '99 game I'm wary about it having problems under XP. I should be able to find it in the bargain bin, though, so I don't care if I waste $15 and it doesn't work. It would be nice to see an updated version, or even a version on XBox Live (not goint to happen, since it's an EA game). I guess I'll be going to my local game stores tomorrow to find this one.
Interesting. Any other decent racing leagues out there? I'm not so interested in NASCAR, but I'd love to find a good road racing-style game (a la Gran Turismo or Sega GT, rather than Project: Gotham, preferably on real tracks around the nation/world) with an active online community. That would make it worth buying a good FF wheel/pedal setup, I think. I don't even care if there's money involved.
Something along the lines of Moto GP on XBox Live, but with cars, would be just about perfect.
Last I checked, you could get GNOME separately. GARNOME is bleeding edge, not GNOME 2.2. You should expect problems with the former, and the latter can be installed separately from GARNOME. You don't need RH9 to get GNOME 2.2 (and even if RH doesn't release RPMs for GNOME 2.2 on RH8, you can still grab the sources from the GNOME project directly).
Why must you upgrade at all? It sounds to me like you have your system working well now, and I assume it's doing what you need. Why, then, would you bother with the upgrade to RH9? Is there something you absolutely have to have that is in RH9 and not available otherwise? I guess, "Because I want to upgrade," is a valid reason, but consider thinking about why you feel you must upgrade before you do.
Don't you mean a Globally Unique IDentifier?
How do you do that now with a land line? You don't. This would be no different. If my phone is listed under my father's name, and you're trying to get me through 411, then you need to know my father's name.
A User Friendly fan, eh? At least Gabe's art is 10 times better (at least) than Illiad's.
Odd. I've been running at 1600x1200 for more than three years now, and I've never experienced any such problems. Sure, there were the occasional web pages with the sidebar-style background which underestimated desktop sizes and stopped at 1024 horizontal pixels, but those have more or less gone away by now. There's also the few web pages that insist on restricting themselves to a 640 pixel column, even when there's more room, but those are also rare now too. I've never had issues with native applications.
Ah, you got me on the difference between size and resolution. Of course, resolution has pretty much come to mean size, these days, at least when referring to computer displays. Would it be nice to get 300dpi or 600dpi on a monitor? Sure. But I can live with between 72dpi and 96dpi, in exchange for more working area. High dpi is important for graphic artists. Large size is important to most other forms of work (programming, for instance).
Most people I know run their 17" monitors at 1280x1024, not 1024x768. 1024x768 is fine for a 15" monitor, but it's too damn big on anything larger. On 19" or up (assuming a good 19", anyway), 1600x1200 is the way to go.
If you have eyesight problems, you may want to mention that. Yes, 1600x1200 seems small when you first start using it, but it grows on you. Give it time, and so long as you don't have sight issues (mild glasses or contacts don't count), you'll soon love the extra screen real estate. My laptop can only do 1280x1024 (couldn't justify the extra cost for a UXGA screen), and it's pretty annoying to go from my desktop 19" or 21" CRTs at 1600x1200 to the 16" LCD at 1280x1024. My roommate has a Toshiba laptop with a 15" UXGA screen, and it's surprisingly useable at 1600x1200. 1280x1024 is good enough for a second monitor on a dual-head machine, but not for normal work.
From the announcement, it seems like this 20" display can only do 1280x768. I'm sorry, but at 20", it better be able to do better than that. If it won't do at least 1600x1200 (or I guess 1600x960, with that aspect ratio), I'm not interested. My 19" CRT comfortably does 1600x1200, so any LCD or OLED display would have to do at least that for me to consider upgrading.
I'm sure there are more tg people around us than we think, but there's still not that many. I'd be surprised if there were more than a few hundred thousand tgs in the US (and that's probably a high guess). So, you're right, I don't know that I know of anybody, but I think I could say with 95% confidence that I don't know any transgendered people. Not that knowing any would be a bad thing, just that I'm pretty sure I don't.
Normal is the title of the movie, not the town (though it would be a valid mistake to make, given that Normal is a city in central Illinois). No, the town was something like Earlsville, set in DeKalb county (northern Illinois, has Northern Illinois University up there).
Bah. Case did orange and white back in the day (up until the late 80s or early 90s, at least). Then they merged with International to form Case/IH, and they got rid of the orange and white and stuck with IH's red. John Deere has always been green, but Versatile switched to blue from yellow/red/black when they were bought by Ford. The only people making orange tractors any more (that I know of, and not counting Cat's yellow) is Kubota, who make lawn tractors and other small tractors. (my information may not be 100% correct, but it's pretty close I think.)
HBO has a good history of releasing stuff on DVD (Sopranos, Oz, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Band of Brothers, etc), so if this movie gets a good reaction I'm sure it'll get a DVD release. I enjoyed it for the setting (even more so because I grew up in such a small town), but I don't know how you'll react to the portrayal of a tg m2f. That's something that's beyond my own experience, so I can't say if it was a good or bad representation.
We have our database code (for SQL Server 2000) buildable in our source tree, and take drops from there when we need to update production. If changing a table would break a stored procedure, it's going to break at build time rather than run time. We're dealing with quite a few more than 12,000 lines of SQL code, yet we have a pretty good handle on modifying the code. Sounds like you need some changes to your process, rather than to how your code is represented.
As the AC said, the problem is not with the sprocs, but with the people who didn't document them. As well, the fact that the sprocs are Oracle-specific is not because the SQL code is in stored procedures, but because the developers wrote Oracle-specific code.
You seem to have benefited from that point of view in your English spelling and grammar classes. Maybe you can do math like Stephen Hawking, but if you can't write it's not going to matter. Of course, the rise of illiteracy is just as much a result of the school system you decry as is the inability to do higher maths. I guess I shouldn't blame you, then. I'll blame the system.
(Note to moderators: Sure, this is a grammar nazi post. However, it is particularly relevant when the parent is complaining about the lack of proper education in one area while exhibiting the same sort of lack in another. Take that into consideration before you mod me away as flamebait.)
The point I meant to make about nethack is that there's really not much of a story, and it's a game that you can sit down and play for 15 minutes and still get in two or three games (doesn't mean you will only play for 15 minutes, just that you can). I'm sure I just suck at roguelikes, but my average lifespan tends to be in the 5-10 minute range. Sometimes I get lucky (or I cheat) and get to play as the same character for 30 minutes to an hour, but little longer :). In that sense, it's a "short attention span" game, because it doesn't take long to get in, kill some stuff, and die. Like Pac-Man, it does take a long time to win (or "win", since Pac-Man doesn't really have an end goal other than points).
I'm sure they do, but as the article on Salon is premium content, I'll never find out how. (No, I'm not going to turn on cookies, and no I'm not going to sit through a 15 second flash ad, and no I'm not going to give them my credit card for the free 7-day trial.) However, big deal. Not being a transsexual, and not knowing anyone who is, I can't tell you how accurate the movie was. What I can tell you is that it was entertaining, and the Central Illinois setting was fairly genuine.
I enjoyed the movie. So sue me.
If you're interested in what a transsexual deals with during his/her time of change, you should check out the new HBO movie Normal. I caught it Sunday night (on HBOHD, even!), and it was pretty damn good.
As a side note, they got Central Illinois pretty dead on, though there was mention that the story was set in DeKalb county -- definitely not Central Illinois. The setting of the story (not the story itself) was nostalgic for me because of that. And the guy worked for Case/International! Damn, I remember back when Case was Case with the orange and white tractors, and International was the red tractor company. Ah, just ignore this paragraph.
Of course, if properly implemented, stored procedures don't slow down the database at all. In fact, stored procedures could easily increase your performance. Proper implementation should include compiling the sql code into something that's more efficient internally for the server. Also, you'll no longer be sending free-form query text to the server, so you're both safer (you can be more strict with what you allow in your strings) and faster (fewer trips to the server and less data sent to the server each time). Not only that, but sprocs let you keep your SQL code separate from your client code, and can allow you to make changes to your business logic without having to touch your client code at all. In short, sprocs are much more useful than just being used for triggers, but unfortunately many MySQLers don't realize what they're missing.
You know, I don't think this criticism is correct. Look at games like Pac-Man, Asteroids, or even Nethack. They're all quick, short-attention-span games (get in, play a couple games, get out, you've only wasted 15 minutes). Now compare that to games like Half-Life, Max Payne, Halo, Deus Ex, the Thief series, the System Shock series, and so on. You're lucky if you can really get much done in an hour's play time with these games. They have story, they have plot, they have atmosphere, and they have action. They're not "twitch" games with short attention span.
I think the thing to realize is that games, like all other media (books, movies, music), are about 80% shit to 20% cream. The NES had something over 500 games (and I'm sure that's a low guess), but how many of them do you really remember as being good (because some terrible games are memorable for being terrible)? Maybe 100, if you're really thinking about it. Same thing for PC games. Do you remember all of the Doom clones? How about the Wolf3D clones (and yes, there were several)? Or what about all of the different Quake clones? Of course not. You remember the games that were good. Things only seem worse right now because you haven't had sufficient time to weed out the good from the crap, and forget the crap.
A game engine is just that -- an engine. Quake, Unreal, etc don't have to be used in FPS games (witness Anachronox, Splinter Cell). I think it's unfair to think of these engines as FPS engines, because they're not -- they are 3D world engines, and can be used by developers to do whatever they can imagine (within the limits of modern hardware and any artificially imposed limits of the engine, though many of those can be removed).
As for coming up with new genres, do you have any ideas? In the past 10-ish years, we've seen only a few genres arise -- FPS, RTS, MMOG (that's more a meta-genre, with categories like MMORPG, MMOSS, MMOFPS, etc). Two or three genres in a decade is pretty damned good.