A lot of his fanbase seems to be political - hardcore conservative types. He really seemed to be pandering to them (or perhaps to himself?) later on. I'm talking past the green terrorists - there's a scene in the last book I read (maybe his last, or second-to-last?) where Jack Ryan, running for President once again, announces in a debate that if he captures the book's thinly-veiled bin Laden analog, he will *not* give him a trial and keep him locked up in Gitmo - to which he gets a standing ovation.
If you buy into his philosophy, it was probably a character-defining moment - the little guy, the reasonable conservative, taking a stand against liberal hippieism to do what's right. If you don't, it can come across more as "wait, this is the good guy in the story, right?"
And I really, REALLY hope nobody at the White House read the bit about the President signing blank pardons, to excuse someone from whatever they may do in the future. They have enough ideas of how to screw the constitution without getting ideas from books...
You know what the most popular upgrade among gamers now is? An SSD boot drive, because hard drives are too slow for us. Do you think anyone's going to regularly boot Steam off a medium slower and more sequential than a hard drive, when most gamers who can are fleeing towards SSDs at least for the boot drive?
Steam is a distribution method for PC games. I haven't tried the Linux version (only the Win/Mac builds), but it's pretty much bulletproof in those. Click "download". First time you try to play, it will run all the install scripts. It also automatically handles patches, to the point that I actually forgot manually downloading patches was a thing. It downloads in the background (unless told not to), but waits until you launch the game to run any patch install scripts.
They have a list of games with good gamepad support, but I don't know of any with splitscreen (besides L4D, which had unofficial splitscreen via some complex console hacks). The Steam software itself works fine with a controller, using their console-like "Big Picture Mode" (with the option for Steam to start directly into that).
SteamOS is a new Linux distro they're making with the intent of making it a drop-in OS for console-like gaming (they've been working with Nvidia/AMD on improving drivers as well, to the point that they have commit access to Nvidia's proprietary drivers). And they just announced that they'll be making Steam Machines, prebuilt systems using SteamOS. These are more likely to emphasize the gamepad and particularly splitscreen support.
I had a post on another forum that conclusively "proved" that today's announcement would be the release of Starcraft: Ghost. Wish I could dig it up to show it here, because I spent way too long finding the right "evidence".
I started my programming "career" with LOGO back in third grade. I almost immediately fell in love with programming. When they stopped teaching it at higher levels, I taught myself - first TI-BASIC, then C++, then anything I could get my hands on. Eventually I got into a high school that taught programming, where I re-learned Java and C++.
But I learned all that because I wanted to. You force every kid to follow the path I did, you'll get a bunch of kids who never want to program again, and probably aren't all that good at it anyways.
Give kids a basic "here's what programming is" class early on, maybe around grade 5-6. If they're interested, keep them in; otherwise, let them find something else to learn.
Actually, that would be a good time for a lot of things that most people don't need, but people in certain careers would need. I suspect doctors would benefit from starting medical training earlier, probably same for engineers and other professions. It wouldn't have to lock you in to one career path, it would just be jump-starting the one you think you want.
I use VLC to stream music to the office AirPort (I flat-out refuse to install iTunes to do so "properly"). There's a way to do so, using some weird streaming flags, and under 1.1 it mainly works, although you can't change volume on the fly. 2.0 broke this, although it also added Blu-Ray support so I ended up having to install both. Being able to go back to a single version would be nice - can anyone confirm whether AirPlay works again?
Small-craft amateur pilots are common in Alaska (being so large and mostly empty). From what I can tell, the area had road access so pilots who keep their aircraft in hangars there can drive in, park their car, and just get in their plane. That little area obviously has access to the airstrip so the planes can take off.
What happened is basically someone skipping the "get out of car and into plane" part.
I have been to similar small airports, and they don't always have a significant barrier between the "car parking section" and the "aircraft hangar section". In this case it seems there is none (again, makes sense - who wants to walk far between them in Alaskan weather?).
The FPS is popular and common because it's easy to get it to work reasonably well. It's a game design that's easy for players to pick up, easy to balance, and easy to squeeze into nearly any story or setting. That's the same reason platformers, turn-based RPGs and 2D fighters were ubiquitous before the (and still common after) FPS - there are reliable formulas to build them. But within the genre, there's a huge amount of space to work in.
Sure, the most prominent subgenre is the "Hollywood-realistic modern military shooter" - Call of Duty, Battlefield, et cetera. There's too many of them, and most of them aren't all that great (I swear, I only own the latest Medal of Honor because I wanted some other games it was packaged with). They're the most popular even though most of them are uninspired, unpolished or just plain bad, but then again, look at the most popular movies or songs lately and you'll see the same.
Then you've got the more unusual ones. Bioshock: Infinite was amazing - the story is excellent, and the gameplay, while not revolutionary, was certainly better than most. Borderlands mixes FPS with a dash of Diablo, generating literally billions of random guns for you to min-max. Deus Ex tries, and often succeeds, in providing a wide variety of approaches to each situation. Far Cry 3 gives you a massive open world and a huge focus on stealth (and the recent expansion, Blood Dragon, is the most hilarious parody of 80s action movies I've seen in any medium). The shooter portions of Rage aren't particularly innovative, but it mixed it up with vehicle sections that were actually more fun than the shooting. STALKER goes the opposite direction of the arcade-shooter-with-a-realistic-facade - this is a game where one bullet can kill you if you don't patch yourself up. ARMA goes the same way, except removing crazy sci-fi shit in favor of being a military simulator (I find it boring as hell - my experience was twenty minutes of boot camp, a fifteen-minute mission briefing, a five-minute helicopter ride, ten minutes of walking, then about thirty seconds of shooting before I took a round to the arm and bled out while trying to figure out which button to push to yell for a medic. But I can't say it's not trying, and I can't say it's not trying something different).
And if anything, I think we're seeing shooters take up a smaller share of the market right now. Looking at my recently-purchased games, I see plenty of RPGs, dozens of weird indie gems, some racing games, puzzle games, strategy games both real-time and turn-based, lots of open-world games, a handful of 2D fighters, a few third-person shooters, and yes, a decent pile of first-person shooters, but only a few of which are insipid, uninspiring or mindless.
Uh, Postgres has all the standard GRANT and REVOKE, plus some things I don't immediately recall MySQL supporting. This support goes back at least to 7.3, which is a decade old. From what I can tell from the changelogs, looks like they started adding that around 1997 in 6.0.
I'll also note that PostgreSQL places a lot of importance on following the standards - they seem to support far more things than MySQL. In fact, looking at their "list of unsupported SQL features", it seems the bulk of them are "embedded [outdated programming language]" of one sort or another, or fancy XML stuff.
The accident has been known about for some time (I first read about it while researching a story I was writing - the protagonist had to build a nuclear bomb, so I was looking for lost and unrecovered nuclear material).
We have also had reports that one of the bombs was nearly armed. These were officially denied by the military, but it was confirmed by several military members.
The new development is that the documentation saying "yeah, that bomb nearly went off" has been declassified. Basically the same deal as the Area 51 thing a while back - everyone knew, but now everyone is "allowed" to know.
From a technical perspective that's the proper solution, but I'm trying to "exploit" their anthropomorphism, which means keeping it as human-like as possible. We don't keep our brains in remotes, therefore the robots should not keep their "brains" in remotes.
Well, we could sit around investigating just how much an effect it has, or find ways to eliminate the emotional bond between soldiers and robots. Which yes, can actually be quite significant - there's a famous story of soldiers bringing a robot fishing with them while on leave.
Or we can do the smart thing and use some tricks of psychology. I propose a system whereby the robot's "personality" (aka log files and any customized settings) be stored on a removable, hardened flash drive. Make it look like the dog tags soldiers currently wear, if possible. Then create a program under which the "personality" of damaged or destroyed robots can be transferred into new ones. Give this program a nifty acronym - I'm leaning towards MARIO (Military Android and Robot something something), for the obvious "1-Up Mushroom" reference).
There you go. The robots can still "die" if the drive is destroyed, but otherwise I think it might cause soldiers to see that the program is just a placebo. Other than that, they'll "survive". I can see some soldiers doing foolhardy things after the fact to recover the drive, but that's *after* whatever the robot needed to do is done.
And even better, it's cheap. Even after adding in the costs of development, procurement, certification, a few bribes and some generous donations to senators (technically not a bribe!), it should still cost less than a new toilet seat on a B2 bomber.
Multi-monitor gaming is *already* a niche market. Most gamers have one display, or perhaps one gaming monitor and one or two monitors that aren't used for the game (for media players, chat or, if playing Eve, a few Excel docs).
The problem is that there's so many things you need: 3-6 identical monitors, or monitors that are very closely matched in one dimension and in pixel density Monitors need to have small or nonexistent borders A mount capable of holding them all in exactly the right spots A video card (or cards) that can output at such a high effective resolution A video card (or cards) with the right set of video outputs to handle that many displays
Here's the other thing: it's mostly pointless dick-waving. Gamers set this sort of rig up because they've once again bought the highest-end video cards, only to realize that that's overkill at almost any single-monitor resolution. It's a set-up for people with too much money and not enough sense. Sure, it's kind of cool to see, but it doesn't really help the games any. Meanwhile, the Oculus Rift is aiming for a mainstream price point and has a resolution low enough that my *old* laptop could run Crysis on it.
I had an artifact like that pop up on my desktop, except that was under Windows. More peculiarly, it corrupted the pointer slightly differently - columns were out of order - and it did so even after changing the pointer. And just like yours, it was only on one monitor, even though both my displays are being driven by one card. I eventually fixed it by disabling then re-enabling the affected monitor in the Catalyst control panel. I'm sure a reboot would have worked, but who wants to do that?
There was actually a/. article about something like that, except it was a large nonrechargeable battery (I forget the exact chemistry, aluminum or zinc or something I believe).
They're life depends on people knowing they exist and lying to them.
Man, that sentence was easy to mis-parse. I read it as: Their life depends on people knowing they exist and knowing that they are lying to them not what you probably intended: Their life depends on people knowing they exist, and on lying to the people.
Easy enough to exploit. Let's form a splinter group of Pastafarianism that arbitrarily rejects Social Security, in favor of having the elders support themselves by turning to the noble profession of piracy on the high seas. Someone else can form another faction that explicitly allows it - we can call the two "Traditional Orthodox Pastafarianism" and "Reformed Universal Pastafarianism". Thus, simply by selecting the appropriate form of Pastafarianism, you can opt in or out at will.
Actually, the Amish beliefs fundamentally aren't about technology - it's based on a very literal interpretation of a biblical command to "not yoke oneself under the non-believers", which they believe puts them at risk for being forced to abandon their faith. They use electricity, but because buying power off the grid would break that command, they run them off generators (under the theory that the electric lines could be cut off at any time, but generator fuel can be stockpiled). Likewise, they cannot own phones, but they found a loophole there as well - have public pay phones installed, with extra-loud ringers. This way they can pay straight-up for each call. Similarly, they do not rent land (except maybe from each other).
They follow all their rules this way. Remember that bit about "give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"? Even though they do not use nearly any social services like public schooling, they pay all their taxes, even many that they could technically opt out of (I think they do refuse Social Security taxes, legally, but they pay all the others). And for their strictures against military clothing? They consider buttons to be military wear - all their clothes use ties (or perhaps nowadays zippers or snaps). Although they do seek out loopholes - their beliefs forbid purely decorative pictures, so they tend to have numerous calenders, which, because they serve a functional purpose as well as have decorative imagery, are perfectly fine.
Sure, there probably are plenty of Amish who think technology itself is bad, or the whole nature thing. They're a varied culture, not completely uniform. But the core reason for it is based on some odd religious interpretation, not beliefs about technology itself.
I think any design like this that relies on people *buying* it is ultimately going to fail. If you really wanted to improve these people's lives, you would design one that *they* can *make*.
Actually, you'd be surprised. The Samsung 840 EVO, a low-cost consumer drive (the high-end is the 840 Pro) that gets down to $0.70/GB, can hit 90K IOPS read on every model, and 90K IOPS write on 500GB models and up.
Sure, older or ultra-cheap drives won't hit that (my new Chronos doesn't get there), but rounding to the nearest order of magnitude will get you 100K IOPS even on medium-end consumer drives.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of his fanbase seems to be political - hardcore conservative types. He really seemed to be pandering to them (or perhaps to himself?) later on. I'm talking past the green terrorists - there's a scene in the last book I read (maybe his last, or second-to-last?) where Jack Ryan, running for President once again, announces in a debate that if he captures the book's thinly-veiled bin Laden analog, he will *not* give him a trial and keep him locked up in Gitmo - to which he gets a standing ovation.
If you buy into his philosophy, it was probably a character-defining moment - the little guy, the reasonable conservative, taking a stand against liberal hippieism to do what's right. If you don't, it can come across more as "wait, this is the good guy in the story, right?"
And I really, REALLY hope nobody at the White House read the bit about the President signing blank pardons, to excuse someone from whatever they may do in the future. They have enough ideas of how to screw the constitution without getting ideas from books...
You know what the most popular upgrade among gamers now is? An SSD boot drive, because hard drives are too slow for us. Do you think anyone's going to regularly boot Steam off a medium slower and more sequential than a hard drive, when most gamers who can are fleeing towards SSDs at least for the boot drive?
Steam is a distribution method for PC games. I haven't tried the Linux version (only the Win/Mac builds), but it's pretty much bulletproof in those. Click "download". First time you try to play, it will run all the install scripts. It also automatically handles patches, to the point that I actually forgot manually downloading patches was a thing. It downloads in the background (unless told not to), but waits until you launch the game to run any patch install scripts.
They have a list of games with good gamepad support, but I don't know of any with splitscreen (besides L4D, which had unofficial splitscreen via some complex console hacks). The Steam software itself works fine with a controller, using their console-like "Big Picture Mode" (with the option for Steam to start directly into that).
SteamOS is a new Linux distro they're making with the intent of making it a drop-in OS for console-like gaming (they've been working with Nvidia/AMD on improving drivers as well, to the point that they have commit access to Nvidia's proprietary drivers). And they just announced that they'll be making Steam Machines, prebuilt systems using SteamOS. These are more likely to emphasize the gamepad and particularly splitscreen support.
I had a post on another forum that conclusively "proved" that today's announcement would be the release of Starcraft: Ghost. Wish I could dig it up to show it here, because I spent way too long finding the right "evidence".
I started my programming "career" with LOGO back in third grade. I almost immediately fell in love with programming. When they stopped teaching it at higher levels, I taught myself - first TI-BASIC, then C++, then anything I could get my hands on. Eventually I got into a high school that taught programming, where I re-learned Java and C++.
But I learned all that because I wanted to. You force every kid to follow the path I did, you'll get a bunch of kids who never want to program again, and probably aren't all that good at it anyways.
Give kids a basic "here's what programming is" class early on, maybe around grade 5-6. If they're interested, keep them in; otherwise, let them find something else to learn.
Actually, that would be a good time for a lot of things that most people don't need, but people in certain careers would need. I suspect doctors would benefit from starting medical training earlier, probably same for engineers and other professions. It wouldn't have to lock you in to one career path, it would just be jump-starting the one you think you want.
I use VLC to stream music to the office AirPort (I flat-out refuse to install iTunes to do so "properly"). There's a way to do so, using some weird streaming flags, and under 1.1 it mainly works, although you can't change volume on the fly. 2.0 broke this, although it also added Blu-Ray support so I ended up having to install both. Being able to go back to a single version would be nice - can anyone confirm whether AirPlay works again?
Small-craft amateur pilots are common in Alaska (being so large and mostly empty). From what I can tell, the area had road access so pilots who keep their aircraft in hangars there can drive in, park their car, and just get in their plane. That little area obviously has access to the airstrip so the planes can take off.
What happened is basically someone skipping the "get out of car and into plane" part.
I have been to similar small airports, and they don't always have a significant barrier between the "car parking section" and the "aircraft hangar section". In this case it seems there is none (again, makes sense - who wants to walk far between them in Alaskan weather?).
The FPS is popular and common because it's easy to get it to work reasonably well. It's a game design that's easy for players to pick up, easy to balance, and easy to squeeze into nearly any story or setting. That's the same reason platformers, turn-based RPGs and 2D fighters were ubiquitous before the (and still common after) FPS - there are reliable formulas to build them. But within the genre, there's a huge amount of space to work in.
Sure, the most prominent subgenre is the "Hollywood-realistic modern military shooter" - Call of Duty, Battlefield, et cetera. There's too many of them, and most of them aren't all that great (I swear, I only own the latest Medal of Honor because I wanted some other games it was packaged with). They're the most popular even though most of them are uninspired, unpolished or just plain bad, but then again, look at the most popular movies or songs lately and you'll see the same.
Then you've got the more unusual ones. Bioshock: Infinite was amazing - the story is excellent, and the gameplay, while not revolutionary, was certainly better than most. Borderlands mixes FPS with a dash of Diablo, generating literally billions of random guns for you to min-max. Deus Ex tries, and often succeeds, in providing a wide variety of approaches to each situation. Far Cry 3 gives you a massive open world and a huge focus on stealth (and the recent expansion, Blood Dragon, is the most hilarious parody of 80s action movies I've seen in any medium). The shooter portions of Rage aren't particularly innovative, but it mixed it up with vehicle sections that were actually more fun than the shooting. STALKER goes the opposite direction of the arcade-shooter-with-a-realistic-facade - this is a game where one bullet can kill you if you don't patch yourself up. ARMA goes the same way, except removing crazy sci-fi shit in favor of being a military simulator (I find it boring as hell - my experience was twenty minutes of boot camp, a fifteen-minute mission briefing, a five-minute helicopter ride, ten minutes of walking, then about thirty seconds of shooting before I took a round to the arm and bled out while trying to figure out which button to push to yell for a medic. But I can't say it's not trying, and I can't say it's not trying something different).
And if anything, I think we're seeing shooters take up a smaller share of the market right now. Looking at my recently-purchased games, I see plenty of RPGs, dozens of weird indie gems, some racing games, puzzle games, strategy games both real-time and turn-based, lots of open-world games, a handful of 2D fighters, a few third-person shooters, and yes, a decent pile of first-person shooters, but only a few of which are insipid, uninspiring or mindless.
Several of them do, however, look rather pretty.
Uh, Postgres has all the standard GRANT and REVOKE, plus some things I don't immediately recall MySQL supporting. This support goes back at least to 7.3, which is a decade old. From what I can tell from the changelogs, looks like they started adding that around 1997 in 6.0.
I'll also note that PostgreSQL places a lot of importance on following the standards - they seem to support far more things than MySQL. In fact, looking at their "list of unsupported SQL features", it seems the bulk of them are "embedded [outdated programming language]" of one sort or another, or fancy XML stuff.
America: Also #1 in forgetting other countries exist.
We Americans are also #1 in sarcasm.
The accident has been known about for some time (I first read about it while researching a story I was writing - the protagonist had to build a nuclear bomb, so I was looking for lost and unrecovered nuclear material).
We have also had reports that one of the bombs was nearly armed. These were officially denied by the military, but it was confirmed by several military members.
The new development is that the documentation saying "yeah, that bomb nearly went off" has been declassified. Basically the same deal as the Area 51 thing a while back - everyone knew, but now everyone is "allowed" to know.
From a technical perspective that's the proper solution, but I'm trying to "exploit" their anthropomorphism, which means keeping it as human-like as possible. We don't keep our brains in remotes, therefore the robots should not keep their "brains" in remotes.
Well, we could sit around investigating just how much an effect it has, or find ways to eliminate the emotional bond between soldiers and robots. Which yes, can actually be quite significant - there's a famous story of soldiers bringing a robot fishing with them while on leave.
Or we can do the smart thing and use some tricks of psychology. I propose a system whereby the robot's "personality" (aka log files and any customized settings) be stored on a removable, hardened flash drive. Make it look like the dog tags soldiers currently wear, if possible. Then create a program under which the "personality" of damaged or destroyed robots can be transferred into new ones. Give this program a nifty acronym - I'm leaning towards MARIO (Military Android and Robot something something), for the obvious "1-Up Mushroom" reference).
There you go. The robots can still "die" if the drive is destroyed, but otherwise I think it might cause soldiers to see that the program is just a placebo. Other than that, they'll "survive". I can see some soldiers doing foolhardy things after the fact to recover the drive, but that's *after* whatever the robot needed to do is done.
And even better, it's cheap. Even after adding in the costs of development, procurement, certification, a few bribes and some generous donations to senators (technically not a bribe!), it should still cost less than a new toilet seat on a B2 bomber.
Multi-monitor gaming is *already* a niche market. Most gamers have one display, or perhaps one gaming monitor and one or two monitors that aren't used for the game (for media players, chat or, if playing Eve, a few Excel docs).
The problem is that there's so many things you need:
3-6 identical monitors, or monitors that are very closely matched in one dimension and in pixel density
Monitors need to have small or nonexistent borders
A mount capable of holding them all in exactly the right spots
A video card (or cards) that can output at such a high effective resolution
A video card (or cards) with the right set of video outputs to handle that many displays
Here's the other thing: it's mostly pointless dick-waving. Gamers set this sort of rig up because they've once again bought the highest-end video cards, only to realize that that's overkill at almost any single-monitor resolution. It's a set-up for people with too much money and not enough sense. Sure, it's kind of cool to see, but it doesn't really help the games any. Meanwhile, the Oculus Rift is aiming for a mainstream price point and has a resolution low enough that my *old* laptop could run Crysis on it.
I had an artifact like that pop up on my desktop, except that was under Windows. More peculiarly, it corrupted the pointer slightly differently - columns were out of order - and it did so even after changing the pointer. And just like yours, it was only on one monitor, even though both my displays are being driven by one card. I eventually fixed it by disabling then re-enabling the affected monitor in the Catalyst control panel. I'm sure a reboot would have worked, but who wants to do that?
There was actually a /. article about something like that, except it was a large nonrechargeable battery (I forget the exact chemistry, aluminum or zinc or something I believe).
They're life depends on people knowing they exist and lying to them.
Man, that sentence was easy to mis-parse. I read it as:
Their life depends on people knowing they exist and knowing that they are lying to them
not what you probably intended:
Their life depends on people knowing they exist, and on lying to the people.
They generally don't use them in their homes - they use them to power dairy machinery (milk and dairy products are one of their main exports).
Easy enough to exploit. Let's form a splinter group of Pastafarianism that arbitrarily rejects Social Security, in favor of having the elders support themselves by turning to the noble profession of piracy on the high seas. Someone else can form another faction that explicitly allows it - we can call the two "Traditional Orthodox Pastafarianism" and "Reformed Universal Pastafarianism". Thus, simply by selecting the appropriate form of Pastafarianism, you can opt in or out at will.
Actually, the Amish beliefs fundamentally aren't about technology - it's based on a very literal interpretation of a biblical command to "not yoke oneself under the non-believers", which they believe puts them at risk for being forced to abandon their faith. They use electricity, but because buying power off the grid would break that command, they run them off generators (under the theory that the electric lines could be cut off at any time, but generator fuel can be stockpiled). Likewise, they cannot own phones, but they found a loophole there as well - have public pay phones installed, with extra-loud ringers. This way they can pay straight-up for each call. Similarly, they do not rent land (except maybe from each other).
They follow all their rules this way. Remember that bit about "give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"? Even though they do not use nearly any social services like public schooling, they pay all their taxes, even many that they could technically opt out of (I think they do refuse Social Security taxes, legally, but they pay all the others). And for their strictures against military clothing? They consider buttons to be military wear - all their clothes use ties (or perhaps nowadays zippers or snaps). Although they do seek out loopholes - their beliefs forbid purely decorative pictures, so they tend to have numerous calenders, which, because they serve a functional purpose as well as have decorative imagery, are perfectly fine.
Sure, there probably are plenty of Amish who think technology itself is bad, or the whole nature thing. They're a varied culture, not completely uniform. But the core reason for it is based on some odd religious interpretation, not beliefs about technology itself.
I think any design like this that relies on people *buying* it is ultimately going to fail. If you really wanted to improve these people's lives, you would design one that *they* can *make*.
Ah, but decreasing the frequency generally allows the voltage to be decreased as well without becoming unstable.
At least until we get strong AI, my job programming computers is safe.
Actually, you'd be surprised. The Samsung 840 EVO, a low-cost consumer drive (the high-end is the 840 Pro) that gets down to $0.70/GB, can hit 90K IOPS read on every model, and 90K IOPS write on 500GB models and up.
Sure, older or ultra-cheap drives won't hit that (my new Chronos doesn't get there), but rounding to the nearest order of magnitude will get you 100K IOPS even on medium-end consumer drives.