What I originally meant, when I assumed there was a score in play: The definition of "percent" is laid out right in the word: "per cent/hundred". Percentages are simply a way of pulling a number between 0 and 1, where many humans don't think too well, up into a number between 0 and 100, where many can do better.
34% is also ".34", and there is an implied multiplication by some definition of what "1" is, which is the max. For instance, if I say that 50% of Americans are fat, that means.5 * (number of Americans) are fat. (See also, significant figures, which explains why I'm not claiming there may be a half a person out there who is fat if there are an odd number of Americans.)
Therefore, for instance, 2 * 32% = 64%, in the full mathematical sense of "equality".
Further, when you "add" a percent, it's actually a multiplication by (1 + %/100), so saying 10% + 50% ->.1 + 50% ->.1 * (1 + 50%) ->.1 * (1.5) ->.15 -> 15%.
I mention that a game can only be slightly more than 50% more violent than Pac-Man. This is because 64% + 50% ("50% more") ->.64 * 1.5 ->.96 -> 96%, which is pretty close to 100%, the implied max when you are talking about percentages in this case. "150% violent" is clearly nonsensical in this context, at least in the sense of the English phrase "This game is 150% violent." (It's the same as saying "150% of this game's source code is in C++.")
Percentages aren't this fuzzy-wuzzy concept that doesn't mean anything. It's a very precise mathematical concept, and once you invoke it, you're bringing all this baggage into it.
What turned out to be the case (Thanks Guuge): They were measuring "violent times" as a ratio violent time to the full game duration, which is a definition so stupid and useless I never even considered it. This is a linear measure. It's useless, but it's linear.
(In your "Reliability" answer, the resolution is that most people measure unreliability. A server down.01% of the time is 99% less unreliable than a server down 1% of the time. People will casually refer to this as "99% more reliable", and if you're not careful about what they're talking about you'll get confused; the naive translation of that English phrase into math is incorrect. While I'm on the subject, the other people mistake make is to miss the "1" in the addition case above, meaning that +100% is the identity transform instead of a doubling function. People are pretty casual with percentages in general. More often then not their usage is ambiguous, and it's not infrequently flat-out wrong.)
Obviously, the context-free statement that Pac-Man is "64% violent" is pretty silly. I doubt you can really measure a game's violence that way. "Percent" implies certain mathematical properties, like Pac-Man is exactly twice as violent as a 32% violent game, or that each individual thing that contributes a given number of percentage points is equally violent, and perhaps most entertainingly, that it is impossible for a game to be more than slightly over 50% more violent than Pac-Man. (Bet you didn't know that Grand Theft Auto is only ~50% more violent than Pac-Man!)
Numbers should not be assigned to fundamentally non-numeric entities, that way lies a number of cognitive and rhetorical traps.
But I am curious, does anyone have more information on where that number may have come from precisely, however flawed it may be? Ideally, some form of "violence checklist", where you check off various attributes of the game and add up the "score".
I'm sure it will allow us to all-the-more effectively collectively mock the number, but hey, who knows, maybe the list will have some redeeming value.
Of course it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem right now, isn't it? If more software used multiple cores, then we'd have a greater need for more cores. Or you could start programming in Erlang and sort of automatically use those cores.
On the other hand, to be fair, the scaling issues start getting odd. I'd expect that we're going to have to move from a multi-core to a multi-"computer" model, where each set of, say, 4 cores works the way it does now, but each set of 4 gets its own memory and any other relevant pieces. (You can still share the video and audio, though at least initially there will presumably be a priviledged core set that gets set as the owner.)
Still, as my post title says, this does strike me as rather a 640KB-style pronouncement. (The original quote may be apocraphal, but the sentiment it describes has always been with us.)
There seem to be a lot of semi-apologetic posts like this here, almost as though you should feel guilty for avoiding adverts.
I think you're reading what you expect to see into them. One of the effects of America's advertising saturation is that there's nobody who harbors any delusions that we have some sort of obligation to submit to all of them, except the ad executives which hardly speak for the rest of us.
I was going to say you should ask somebody else, but honestly, I don't know anyone who feels they have an obligation to the ads. Personally I think they're free to make and show them, but I'm free to not care.
My point had nothing to do with that; my point is that advertising folks merely "see us skipping commercials", and from there jump to the conclusion that they are therefore not working, or working less well than previously. But this is not a sufficient premise to jump to that conclusion, especially if the goal of advertising is something other that "showing the ad", which I would say it is.
That's the point of my post; if they're intelligent about how they use this information, and use it to build better (and perhaps fewer) ads, then I don't mind so much. If they jump to the unfounded conclusion that their precious advertising effectiveness is at stake, they're more likely to strike out in ways that are both annoying and counter-productive, like trying to block the fast-forwarding.
You think people hate advertising now? Wait till they do feel like people are obligating them to watch them. The mighty power of the Direct Marketting Association couldn't stop the Do Not Call list, and the might power of the TV and video cartels won't be able to force us to watch commercials, if they're stupid enough to try. (It's OK to be cynical about the power of these cartels, but they only have political power in Washington to the extent that people don't care on average. When they care, the people will stomp those interests flat in a heartbeat. You shouldn't be so cynical as to think that the legislators completely don't care about their constituents. If they do, they won't have constituents for long.)
If they use this information intelligently and anonymously, I don't mind.
I watch everything via TiVo, and my wife still channel surfs conventionally but uses it a lot. Do we skip over, say, 95% of all commercials as a result? Yes. Do we wait to watch things that are on now to build up a commercial-eating buffer? Yes.
And yet... when my co-workers talk about a commercial, I have either still seen it, or it's on a channel/timeslot I don't watch. And there are commercials that we actually go back to watch. Admittedly, most of those are "Next on Stargate!"-type commercials, but there are exceptions. There's the "your dreams are waiting for you" ad campaign going on which we think is kind of funny, and we sort of hope they turn it into a series, for instance.
I know ad execs just see us skipping commercials, but I think the total effectiveness is about the same as ever, and for the commercials we actually go back to see, greater than ever. (Even though I'm not in the market for the sleep product.) If they use this information intelligently, I wouldn't mind it so much; it'd actually have a positive effect.
Of course, that is one damn big if, no?
(Oh, and de-anonymize the stats and I'll build a MythTV box. Right now it's not worth it to me, but it would be then. The recent usability test that it did well on turned my head; I've been assuming it would be the usual Open Source interface disaster.)
Just because it's new and has a buzzword doesn't mean it's a flash in the pan.
Silver Bullet != !(Flash in the Pan).
It doesn't look like the essay defines "silver bullet" and I don't have the original in front of me, but a Silver Bullet is a single methodology or technology change that by itself always results in an order-of-magnitude improvement, thus seeming to "slay" previously immortal beasts of problems.
Fred Brooks never claimed there wouldn't be improvements, and there have been. But they always seem to start out looking like silver bullets, and end up being incremental improvements at best. Most things are actually steps backwards if applied to the wrong domain. (A Silver Bullet probably won't have a "wrong domain", although this point is debatable; certain it shouldn't have many.)
Being a "flash in the pan" is even worse than not being a silver bullet, in that it implies it never had any real value at all.
Also, while your web application specifically may have been an improvement, the idea that it's an improvement in general is debatable, let alone anything like a silver bullet. It improved your case simply by virtue of expanding your options, allowing you to adopt a model more suited to your domain, but there are cases where a web app would be a serious step backwards. I consider the attempt to build office suites for browsers a joke, for instance. Web apps are merely improvements in some ways at some times, not a silver bullet. (I realize you didn't directly make this claim, I'm just discussing it.)
So what if some states break the compact? Horror of horrors, we'll have what we have now. You're indirectly admitting that the current system sucks by highlighting this as a horrible outcome.
No. The problem arises with the new politicking that centers around the selling of votes, based on the threat of entering/leaving this block of states.
In fact I "admit" no such thing; I've moved from what is probably the default position around here of "the electoral college sucks" to "the electoral college is pure genious, albeit accidental". I really need to collect all of the manifold and subtle advantages into one nice blog post sometime.
Your view of the political process is too simplistic. It doesn't take into account that decisions don't happen in a vacuum. Anything that can be used to bargain with, will be used to bargain. See my reply to your sibling post, it covers this.
Believe me, you may not see how this could be used as a bargaining chip, but it will not escape the notice of the professional political class!
A state couldn't realistically cheat. Once it passed a statutory commitment to the scheme,
Ah, but you see, there's the cheating point. "I won't join your collective unless you give me X, Y, and Z." And once the last state comes in and gets what it wants, there is now an incentive for every state in the 50%+ majority to now say, "Unless you give me X', Y', and Z', I'm leaving." (Since there is no way to for states to fully commit short of a Constitutional Amendment which is extremely unlikely.)
Actually, the crossover point where cheating becomes better than staying is probably less than 50%. This of course only makes it harder.
It's a "boil the ocean" solution; it doesn't work at all until it is fully operational. Nothing ever works like that with 50 states. This is also related to the next reason:
The benefits of cheating are too large once half or so of the electoral votes are in the agreement. The benefits of defecting, or threatening to defect, become large, because suddenly the votes become bargaining chips, useful to extract concessions from the other states. This makes it effectively impossible to get to all 50 agreeing anyhow; the more people in the agreement before it gets to 50, the larger the spoiler effect.
This would make things even worse, because of the horrible bargaining and politicing that would ensue around the electoral votes. Indeed, this would come to swamp the entire procedure, and the game would become getting the states to commit electoral votes, instead of convincing the people to vote for you. Hopefully, it's obvious why this is bad.
There's no idea so bad you can't extol its virtues for 600 pages.
Finally, to use the previous election for concrete names, do you really thing California is going to stand for seeing its electoral votes go to Bush? Or Texas for Gore? Unlikely.
I think I see the problem. You posted the word (and I quote) "xenophia". You thought you were posting "xenophobia". However, your misspelling looks closer to the word "xenophilia", which is actually the exact opposite.
On first reading, I thought you meant xenophilia as well.
Name me one chain that has these machines well made?
I've been reasonably pleased with the ones at Meijer. The only thing that seems to really trip people up routinely is the fact that the place where you put the groceries is also a scale, and you need to not put stuff in your cart or let your kid lean up against that area. Most of the problems I see seem to be genuine customer stupidity, and you get that in normal checkout lines too. They've even done some light enforcement of the item limit; they claim that some people were damaging the scales by putting too much weight on it, and while I don't know if that's true, it's believable.
Most people use them for groceries, which have much better weight characteristics than the Home Depot loads people have been complaining about. (A more even distribution of weight, instead of something massive followed by a single, solitary washer.)
The second generation is actually a little fruitier, but I'm still hoping it'll be OK.
Oh, Meijer has a cashier for each set of 4 auto-checkouts. This can't hurt any. And their training seems to actually be pretty good, to my surprise; they seem to know what they are doing.
I'm not convinced you can have a fully automated checkout line; you need some humans to deal with things like no barcodes, and to explain to people how to handle exceptional cases like produce.
SQL is now my canonical example of a "Good Enough" technology, which holds back any sort of improvement because there's no fast and easy way to make something immediately obviously better, even though it'd probably be really easy to make something that would be better over the medium or long term. Unfortunately, new technology needs that snappy I couldn't do that before! demo to really take off. (Most recent example: Ruby on Rails. And I say that as someone who isn't really a Ruby fan.)
The beginnings of SQL date back to the 1970s, and even in modern times it shows. People hadn't yet figured out how to deal with "NULL"s in any reasonable manner, and SQL has the dumbest NULL in any language I know of that is still in common use. People still thought empty lists were something exceptional, so "SomethingID IN ()" is an error, at least in the DBs I use, instead of a clause so obviously false the optimizer ought to positively jump for joy when it sees it. The syntax is fruity and unforgiving by modern standards, and the actual relational stuff that is supposed to underlie it all continues to be masked by the performance limitations in place in the 1970s; performance hacks now enshrined as the One Right Way to do things.
SQL sucks, because so much effort has been invested into it that no possible fix to it could ever get traction, and SQL is so wrong that trying to bend your new system to be backwards compatible with it will probably break your new system. The only hope we have is a brand new paradigm, and frankly those haven't been faring too well either, so far. But hope springs eternal.
Someday this mess will be resolved, but your guess is as good as mine as to which direction it's going to come from. SQL-the-language sucks, but it still manages to set the bar pretty high for any sort of technology to replace it, even just as a language-switchout on an existing DB server. (I mean something actually not SQL, not SQL adapted to Yet Another Procedure Language or SQL adapted with Yet Another Proprietary Extension.)
I disagree that it's impossible, while conceding that we'd need an actual implementation to try out to actually come to a consensus.
(In other words, consider the "I disagree because I don't think that would work" reply to this message already posted.)
I think you could make it work with a bit of cooperation from the user, and a bit of compensation given to the unreality of the situation. (Of course we're not going to be swinging as quickly as in the Phantom Menance anyhow.) When two swords cross, hit the controller's vibrator. Train the user that when that happens, they have to pull back. When they pull back past the collision point, resume control of the lightsaber.
If they don't pull back, interpret that as a contest of strength, like you've seen in the movies. (Probably a bad idea since the opponent would probably have to always win or this would be too easy to win with.)
I think that this wouldn't be impossibly unnatural. Certainly it's not like swinging a real sword. But then, that's not really the standard, is it? The question is, can it be better than current controllers? And the answer is probably yes.
Again, I'm not certain this would work. But I think it's at least worth a try, and I suspect it could be made to work with a bit of trial, error, and refinement.
Since we're on the topic: Does anyone know of a CMS that does CMS-y things, but renders out to static pages that can be uploaded to any host?
I'm interested in the management features and such, but I don't want dynamic stuff on the server.
I am aware of the multitude of template libraries for all kinds of languages, and I've been piecing one together based on that, although it'll never be useful for anyone else. I was just curious if there was anybody who already filled this niche. If it's out there I can't find the Google keywords to find it, and there's too many now to try to wade through, especially for a feature that they are likely to mumble about in passing (as opposed to trumpeting on the front page).
Hey, I love conspiracy theories, but think about it for a sec. The risk of getting caught doing this, and the subsequent penalties both legal and PR, dwarf the benefits. Microsoft currently has no cash flow problems, and none for the forseeable future. (There may be some problems in the unforseeable future, but that's always true.)
The idea is to do things with a small risk of being caught and a big reward, like pressuring OEMs with contracts to not sell anything but Windows, not big risks of being caught and small rewards.
In all seriousness, that might actually help people understand some aspects of Relativity, if done correctly. (Do not, for instance, get stuck up the ass with making an "educational" videogame and take out the shooting or something.)
And trying to understand Relativity definitely makes me want to just pick up a videogame...
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the OS you are looking for... [handwave]
What I originally meant, when I assumed there was a score in play: The definition of "percent" is laid out right in the word: "per cent/hundred". Percentages are simply a way of pulling a number between 0 and 1, where many humans don't think too well, up into a number between 0 and 100, where many can do better.
.5 * (number of Americans) are fat. (See also, significant figures, which explains why I'm not claiming there may be a half a person out there who is fat if there are an odd number of Americans.)
.1 + 50% -> .1 * (1 + 50%) -> .1 * (1.5) -> .15 -> 15%.
.64 * 1.5 -> .96 -> 96%, which is pretty close to 100%, the implied max when you are talking about percentages in this case. "150% violent" is clearly nonsensical in this context, at least in the sense of the English phrase "This game is 150% violent." (It's the same as saying "150% of this game's source code is in C++.")
.01% of the time is 99% less unreliable than a server down 1% of the time. People will casually refer to this as "99% more reliable", and if you're not careful about what they're talking about you'll get confused; the naive translation of that English phrase into math is incorrect. While I'm on the subject, the other people mistake make is to miss the "1" in the addition case above, meaning that +100% is the identity transform instead of a doubling function. People are pretty casual with percentages in general. More often then not their usage is ambiguous, and it's not infrequently flat-out wrong.)
34% is also ".34", and there is an implied multiplication by some definition of what "1" is, which is the max. For instance, if I say that 50% of Americans are fat, that means
Therefore, for instance, 2 * 32% = 64%, in the full mathematical sense of "equality".
Further, when you "add" a percent, it's actually a multiplication by (1 + %/100), so saying 10% + 50% ->
I mention that a game can only be slightly more than 50% more violent than Pac-Man. This is because 64% + 50% ("50% more") ->
Percentages aren't this fuzzy-wuzzy concept that doesn't mean anything. It's a very precise mathematical concept, and once you invoke it, you're bringing all this baggage into it.
What turned out to be the case (Thanks Guuge): They were measuring "violent times" as a ratio violent time to the full game duration, which is a definition so stupid and useless I never even considered it. This is a linear measure. It's useless, but it's linear.
(In your "Reliability" answer, the resolution is that most people measure unreliability. A server down
Ghosts are, by definition, already dead.
:) )
Can you really commit violence against them?
Moreover, it's not immediately obvious that Pac-Man is alive either. (Discuss.
Obviously, the context-free statement that Pac-Man is "64% violent" is pretty silly. I doubt you can really measure a game's violence that way. "Percent" implies certain mathematical properties, like Pac-Man is exactly twice as violent as a 32% violent game, or that each individual thing that contributes a given number of percentage points is equally violent, and perhaps most entertainingly, that it is impossible for a game to be more than slightly over 50% more violent than Pac-Man. (Bet you didn't know that Grand Theft Auto is only ~50% more violent than Pac-Man!)
Numbers should not be assigned to fundamentally non-numeric entities, that way lies a number of cognitive and rhetorical traps.
But I am curious, does anyone have more information on where that number may have come from precisely, however flawed it may be? Ideally, some form of "violence checklist", where you check off various attributes of the game and add up the "score".
I'm sure it will allow us to all-the-more effectively collectively mock the number, but hey, who knows, maybe the list will have some redeeming value.
So it is; thanks.
I had picked up the idea that NUMA was for actually separate computers, that is, a cluster tech, not a supercomputer tech.
Of course it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem right now, isn't it? If more software used multiple cores, then we'd have a greater need for more cores. Or you could start programming in Erlang and sort of automatically use those cores.
On the other hand, to be fair, the scaling issues start getting odd. I'd expect that we're going to have to move from a multi-core to a multi-"computer" model, where each set of, say, 4 cores works the way it does now, but each set of 4 gets its own memory and any other relevant pieces. (You can still share the video and audio, though at least initially there will presumably be a priviledged core set that gets set as the owner.)
Still, as my post title says, this does strike me as rather a 640KB-style pronouncement. (The original quote may be apocraphal, but the sentiment it describes has always been with us.)
I was going to say you should ask somebody else, but honestly, I don't know anyone who feels they have an obligation to the ads. Personally I think they're free to make and show them, but I'm free to not care.
My point had nothing to do with that; my point is that advertising folks merely "see us skipping commercials", and from there jump to the conclusion that they are therefore not working, or working less well than previously. But this is not a sufficient premise to jump to that conclusion, especially if the goal of advertising is something other that "showing the ad", which I would say it is.
That's the point of my post; if they're intelligent about how they use this information, and use it to build better (and perhaps fewer) ads, then I don't mind so much. If they jump to the unfounded conclusion that their precious advertising effectiveness is at stake, they're more likely to strike out in ways that are both annoying and counter-productive, like trying to block the fast-forwarding.
You think people hate advertising now? Wait till they do feel like people are obligating them to watch them. The mighty power of the Direct Marketting Association couldn't stop the Do Not Call list, and the might power of the TV and video cartels won't be able to force us to watch commercials, if they're stupid enough to try. (It's OK to be cynical about the power of these cartels, but they only have political power in Washington to the extent that people don't care on average. When they care, the people will stomp those interests flat in a heartbeat. You shouldn't be so cynical as to think that the legislators completely don't care about their constituents. If they do, they won't have constituents for long.)
If they use this information intelligently and anonymously, I don't mind.
I watch everything via TiVo, and my wife still channel surfs conventionally but uses it a lot. Do we skip over, say, 95% of all commercials as a result? Yes. Do we wait to watch things that are on now to build up a commercial-eating buffer? Yes.
And yet... when my co-workers talk about a commercial, I have either still seen it, or it's on a channel/timeslot I don't watch. And there are commercials that we actually go back to watch. Admittedly, most of those are "Next on Stargate!"-type commercials, but there are exceptions. There's the "your dreams are waiting for you" ad campaign going on which we think is kind of funny, and we sort of hope they turn it into a series, for instance.
I know ad execs just see us skipping commercials, but I think the total effectiveness is about the same as ever, and for the commercials we actually go back to see, greater than ever. (Even though I'm not in the market for the sleep product.) If they use this information intelligently, I wouldn't mind it so much; it'd actually have a positive effect.
Of course, that is one damn big if, no?
(Oh, and de-anonymize the stats and I'll build a MythTV box. Right now it's not worth it to me, but it would be then. The recent usability test that it did well on turned my head; I've been assuming it would be the usual Open Source interface disaster.)
Just because it's new and has a buzzword doesn't mean it's a flash in the pan.
Silver Bullet != !(Flash in the Pan).
It doesn't look like the essay defines "silver bullet" and I don't have the original in front of me, but a Silver Bullet is a single methodology or technology change that by itself always results in an order-of-magnitude improvement, thus seeming to "slay" previously immortal beasts of problems.
Fred Brooks never claimed there wouldn't be improvements, and there have been. But they always seem to start out looking like silver bullets, and end up being incremental improvements at best. Most things are actually steps backwards if applied to the wrong domain. (A Silver Bullet probably won't have a "wrong domain", although this point is debatable; certain it shouldn't have many.)
Being a "flash in the pan" is even worse than not being a silver bullet, in that it implies it never had any real value at all.
Also, while your web application specifically may have been an improvement, the idea that it's an improvement in general is debatable, let alone anything like a silver bullet. It improved your case simply by virtue of expanding your options, allowing you to adopt a model more suited to your domain, but there are cases where a web app would be a serious step backwards. I consider the attempt to build office suites for browsers a joke, for instance. Web apps are merely improvements in some ways at some times, not a silver bullet. (I realize you didn't directly make this claim, I'm just discussing it.)
So what if some states break the compact? Horror of horrors, we'll have what we have now. You're indirectly admitting that the current system sucks by highlighting this as a horrible outcome.
No. The problem arises with the new politicking that centers around the selling of votes, based on the threat of entering/leaving this block of states.
In fact I "admit" no such thing; I've moved from what is probably the default position around here of "the electoral college sucks" to "the electoral college is pure genious, albeit accidental". I really need to collect all of the manifold and subtle advantages into one nice blog post sometime.
Your view of the political process is too simplistic. It doesn't take into account that decisions don't happen in a vacuum. Anything that can be used to bargain with, will be used to bargain. See my reply to your sibling post, it covers this.
Believe me, you may not see how this could be used as a bargaining chip, but it will not escape the notice of the professional political class!
A state couldn't realistically cheat. Once it passed a statutory commitment to the scheme,
Ah, but you see, there's the cheating point. "I won't join your collective unless you give me X, Y, and Z." And once the last state comes in and gets what it wants, there is now an incentive for every state in the 50%+ majority to now say, "Unless you give me X', Y', and Z', I'm leaving." (Since there is no way to for states to fully commit short of a Constitutional Amendment which is extremely unlikely.)
Actually, the crossover point where cheating becomes better than staying is probably less than 50%. This of course only makes it harder.
- It's a "boil the ocean" solution; it doesn't work at all until it is fully operational. Nothing ever works like that with 50 states. This is also related to the next reason:
- The benefits of cheating are too large once half or so of the electoral votes are in the agreement. The benefits of defecting, or threatening to defect, become large, because suddenly the votes become bargaining chips, useful to extract concessions from the other states. This makes it effectively impossible to get to all 50 agreeing anyhow; the more people in the agreement before it gets to 50, the larger the spoiler effect.
This would make things even worse, because of the horrible bargaining and politicing that would ensue around the electoral votes. Indeed, this would come to swamp the entire procedure, and the game would become getting the states to commit electoral votes, instead of convincing the people to vote for you. Hopefully, it's obvious why this is bad.There's no idea so bad you can't extol its virtues for 600 pages.
Finally, to use the previous election for concrete names, do you really thing California is going to stand for seeing its electoral votes go to Bush? Or Texas for Gore? Unlikely.
I think I see the problem. You posted the word (and I quote) "xenophia". You thought you were posting "xenophobia". However, your misspelling looks closer to the word "xenophilia", which is actually the exact opposite.
On first reading, I thought you meant xenophilia as well.
Name me one chain that has these machines well made?
I've been reasonably pleased with the ones at Meijer. The only thing that seems to really trip people up routinely is the fact that the place where you put the groceries is also a scale, and you need to not put stuff in your cart or let your kid lean up against that area. Most of the problems I see seem to be genuine customer stupidity, and you get that in normal checkout lines too. They've even done some light enforcement of the item limit; they claim that some people were damaging the scales by putting too much weight on it, and while I don't know if that's true, it's believable.
Most people use them for groceries, which have much better weight characteristics than the Home Depot loads people have been complaining about. (A more even distribution of weight, instead of something massive followed by a single, solitary washer.)
The second generation is actually a little fruitier, but I'm still hoping it'll be OK.
Oh, Meijer has a cashier for each set of 4 auto-checkouts. This can't hurt any. And their training seems to actually be pretty good, to my surprise; they seem to know what they are doing.
I'm not convinced you can have a fully automated checkout line; you need some humans to deal with things like no barcodes, and to explain to people how to handle exceptional cases like produce.
The beginnings of SQL date back to the 1970s, and even in modern times it shows. People hadn't yet figured out how to deal with "NULL"s in any reasonable manner, and SQL has the dumbest NULL in any language I know of that is still in common use. People still thought empty lists were something exceptional, so "SomethingID IN ()" is an error, at least in the DBs I use, instead of a clause so obviously false the optimizer ought to positively jump for joy when it sees it. The syntax is fruity and unforgiving by modern standards, and the actual relational stuff that is supposed to underlie it all continues to be masked by the performance limitations in place in the 1970s; performance hacks now enshrined as the One Right Way to do things.
SQL sucks, because so much effort has been invested into it that no possible fix to it could ever get traction, and SQL is so wrong that trying to bend your new system to be backwards compatible with it will probably break your new system. The only hope we have is a brand new paradigm, and frankly those haven't been faring too well either, so far. But hope springs eternal.
Someday this mess will be resolved, but your guess is as good as mine as to which direction it's going to come from. SQL-the-language sucks, but it still manages to set the bar pretty high for any sort of technology to replace it, even just as a language-switchout on an existing DB server. (I mean something actually not SQL, not SQL adapted to Yet Another Procedure Language or SQL adapted with Yet Another Proprietary Extension.)
Heh, here's hoping LucasArts is reading this thread... :)
I disagree that it's impossible, while conceding that we'd need an actual implementation to try out to actually come to a consensus.
(In other words, consider the "I disagree because I don't think that would work" reply to this message already posted.)
I think you could make it work with a bit of cooperation from the user, and a bit of compensation given to the unreality of the situation. (Of course we're not going to be swinging as quickly as in the Phantom Menance anyhow.) When two swords cross, hit the controller's vibrator. Train the user that when that happens, they have to pull back. When they pull back past the collision point, resume control of the lightsaber.
If they don't pull back, interpret that as a contest of strength, like you've seen in the movies. (Probably a bad idea since the opponent would probably have to always win or this would be too easy to win with.)
I think that this wouldn't be impossibly unnatural. Certainly it's not like swinging a real sword. But then, that's not really the standard, is it? The question is, can it be better than current controllers? And the answer is probably yes.
Again, I'm not certain this would work. But I think it's at least worth a try, and I suspect it could be made to work with a bit of trial, error, and refinement.
Since we're on the topic: Does anyone know of a CMS that does CMS-y things, but renders out to static pages that can be uploaded to any host?
I'm interested in the management features and such, but I don't want dynamic stuff on the server.
I am aware of the multitude of template libraries for all kinds of languages, and I've been piecing one together based on that, although it'll never be useful for anyone else. I was just curious if there was anybody who already filled this niche. If it's out there I can't find the Google keywords to find it, and there's too many now to try to wade through, especially for a feature that they are likely to mumble about in passing (as opposed to trumpeting on the front page).
If I recall correctly, configurable RSS feeds are a Subscriber feature.
I don't know, since I've never been one.
Don't bitch; make Backslash go away.
End of problem.
How many more Backslashes are we going to have to post this for?
Hey, I love conspiracy theories, but think about it for a sec. The risk of getting caught doing this, and the subsequent penalties both legal and PR, dwarf the benefits. Microsoft currently has no cash flow problems, and none for the forseeable future. (There may be some problems in the unforseeable future, but that's always true.)
The idea is to do things with a small risk of being caught and a big reward, like pressuring OEMs with contracts to not sell anything but Windows, not big risks of being caught and small rewards.
My idea is that the hard part is breaking people of Euclidianism, if that is a word. It doesn't have to be actually the geometry of Relativity.
In all seriousness, that might actually help people understand some aspects of Relativity, if done correctly. (Do not, for instance, get stuck up the ass with making an "educational" videogame and take out the shooting or something.)
And trying to understand Relativity definitely makes me want to just pick up a videogame...