Re:Get a healthier life style...
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Sleeping Problems?
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· Score: 3, Informative
eat probably 90% fruits and veggies now,... so much for a healthy life stly being good for you...
Above all else, trust your own body. If you aren't feeling healthy, you aren't healthy.
I focus on the "90% fruits and veggies" part of your post because if I had to guess, this is the source of your problems. Depending on the fruits and veggies you are eating, this can leave you short of fat (good kinds) and protein (all kinds!). In fact, unless you have studied vegetarion dieting carefully it is almost certain that you are short. You need large enough quantities of fat and protein that you can't take them in pill form. (Protien supplements exist, but they are mostly targetted at body builders, and that is probably right.)
Now, personally, I find none of the reasons for vegetarianism compelling, so I say, go ahead and eat meat. Just try to eat it as unprocessed as possible, which is good advice for nearly all food. You may want to pay extra for organic. We've been eating it for millions of years, and many meats (including fish, seafood, and other such things) have a lot of good stuff in them that is difficult or impossible to get through fruits and veggies.
If you want to stay vegetarian, you must educate yourself on how to do it. There are a lot of resources, but as you may expect I can't recommend any:-). But I know you must be careful to eat more protein then you would if you didn't try; hence the popularity of tofu. (Nuts also, I think, but I defer to people who have actually lived this lifestyle on the issue; I wouldn't be surprised that there are different kinds of protein that nuts don't have or something.) If you don't educate yourself, you're headed for a world of premature hurt.
AFAICS, there are two things that are universally agreed on by nutritionists:
Vegetables, esp. green leafy ones, are good for you.
There is room in a healthy diet for all the food groups, and nobody (without an ideological agenda) supports removing fruits, veggies, and all meats (some would remove red meat, but I know of no serious nutritionist who wouldn't want you to eat fish).
Beyond that, the controversy still rages because nutrition isn't really a science right now (links to my defense of that statement, see third or fourth header); stay sharp, make sure you are getting all of your nutrients, proteins, fats (good ones, at least, probably), and other vital building blocks. The more you restrict your diet a priori ("only fruits and veggies", "low carbs", etc.), the harder that is to do. (Of course, unrestricted diets are only easy in theory, in practice we seem to do a bad job on average.)
(I would be happy to hear from you if this helps.)
The original study that showed huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They studied professional programers with an average of 7 years' experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1; the ratio of debugging times over 25 to 1; of program size 5 to 1; and of program execution speed about 10 to 1.
They found no relationship between a programmer's amount of experience and code quality or productivity.
Although specific ratios such as 25 to 1 aren't particularly meaningful, more general statements such as "There are order-of-magnitude differences among programmers" are meaningful and have been confirmed by many other studies of professional programmers (Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, DeMarco and Lister 1985, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Boehm and Papaccio 1988, Valett and McGarry 1989). - Steve McConnell, in his book Code Complete
Enough references for you? I reiterate, it looks like arrogance from the bottom, but denying this is its own form of arrogance. It's as etablished as anything can be.
Is Linus Torvalds a great hacker? Apparently not because if he was he would have coded the kernel in Perl!!
Linus is constrained by application domain.
As C goes, the kernel is much, much cooler than any piece of software that size has any right to be. Sounds like greatness to me, at least the sign of a great leader.
I'm sorry, but Graham's dismissive attitude towards Java is evidence of extreme arrogance.
Extreme arrogance is also a characteristic of great hackers.
Or is it arrogance? Given the demonstrated and scientifically proven (repeatedly) wide variance between the top and the bottom programmers, well, think about what the claim "I'm ten times better than you" looks like to those on the bottom.
It looks like arrogance.
The claim is, nevertheless, true.
Having programmed in Java, Python, Perl, and a motley variety of other languages, I've got to say, if you are happy in Java, especially after having tasted Perl or Python (or Ruby or Ocaml or whatever)... no, you're not one of the great and yes, they will sound arrogant. But their claims, nonetheless, will be true.
(By "Java" I mean more-or-less straight Java. Load it up with Jython or AOP or Groovy and that's not really Java anymore.)
Part of growing up is realizing two things: One, yours opinions do matter and you should be willing to do something about them, and two, that the opinions of the other six billion people on the planet also matter and sometimes things won't go your way.
Some people only figure out one or the other (yes, there are people who only figure out the second one; you don't hear about them as much as the first), but both are important. This guy seems to have only gotten the first one.
Another example of such a person is a person who whines about how their vote is useless. What they really mean is that they aren't always casting the deciding vote, and you usually only hear about this when they are on the loosing side. Your vote isn't useless at all, it's just equally weighted with a lot of other votes. Part of growing up is accepting that the votes of other people matter too, and while your vote may individually only make a small contribution, you can't have an election where every vote is the "deciding" vote, and "one" is much, much better than the "none" a lot of people in the world get.
Ironically, you don't seem to understand the implications of your own statement. For instance,
Would western Europe have applied your criteria for the US being an ally or not, Europe would have had to declare the US a non-ally hundreds of times since WWII.
By their actions, they have. And continue to do so, on and off. Because, as you say, it isn't black and white, and I know of no ally, or indeed any alliance anywhere, that is pure "white".
You alrady now badly need your allies (e.g. read up on the difficulties of the us forces to recrute new soldiers),
Yes, having so many people volunteer that they have to send people away is a real pain. I know, I have friends that were rejected. Whatever comfortable leftist agitprop you may be reading to the contrary is clearly wrong against my hard experience.
And here is where you try to pretend that "ally-ness" is black and white and that we have some sort of "obligation" to people who are clearly either not our allies anymore, or aren't in the ways that matter. Not only are alliances not black and white, they also change over time.
If all you've got to say about these allies is that, well, they are allies, why should we pay any more attention to that then the (former) allies do? For every bit as much as we "need" our allies, they need us, so why do you apply that logic one-way only? Why shouldn't France bend just because they are our "allies"?
(The answer is that it is entirely unreasonable and doesn't apply either way.)
This is a common hypocrisy on the left. (The right has their own, too, but this non-symetrical demand of virtue solely from the US, while it is ok to kill millions if an African or Middle East country does it, seems to be solely on the left.)
I think I'll pass on the attempted dimplomacy lesson; I prefer to learn from people who understand it better than I do.
I'm not sure what you mean by "making the id and name attributes... both handled in CSS and javascript", but are you aware of the
[name="blah"]
selector in CSS?
(Javascript can already "handle" both, and the support has been in the DOM for everything past Netscape 4, which foolishly insisted on only reflecting "official" attributes.)
sure we do. we take counsel in our allies who agree with us. because those are obviously our closest allies.
Allies that seriously disagree about important issues central to the alliance are, by definition, not allies.
No matter how much they claim to be. (France is no longer an ally in most regards; that may change somewhat with their next election. I don't think our next election will matter either way.)
Certain people's inability to understand this is quite frightening. (Not yours, though, unless you are secretly a major political power or a candidate for major political power.)
The big problems with the second one come from poor automatic camera controls; if the camera swings wildly or suddenly, your character suddenly starts running off in a different direction.
Interetingly, the Sonic Adventure games did the opposite. The camera would go wild, and in order to proceed, you had to trust the system and just keep pushing up. Anything else and you typically fell to your death.
Understanding this makes the games much easier, and it is the basic reason I never shove this game in front of guests; it is not at all intuitive.
One of the first defenses against bandwidth attack is to shrink the file, so things on the order of 5-10 K are not uncommon. As of this writing, index.rss on Slashdot is 12,605 bytes.
This causes a problem with BitTorrent; the overhead for communicating with the tracker eats that pretty fast. Remember it's not just about bytes; if downloading the index.rss entirely takes 11 packets, and BT-Tracker communication takes 50 packets but only uses 5KB total, your still not gaining much and you way well lose net throughput. And a gain of 2x in the face of exponential growth isn't much, anyhow; to "win", you need the majority of your consumers to not hit your servers at all.
The other problem is that RSS content is constantly changing, which BT handles poorly as it isn't designed for that. This also screws up Freenet and most other file-sharing protocols.
(Actually, Freenet is doable, I once coded a proof of concept, but it is inefficient and requires constant nursing from the author, so I don't consider it practical in the general case.)
There is also the issue of verifiability once you are downloading from a non-primary source, which isn't insurmountable but nobody has put all the pieces together yet.
I think a specialized P2P protocol would be necessary; you can fork from an existing system (and for that I'd recommend starting from BT, but you're still going to need to make a lot of changes) but no system I know of to date (and that includes several academic P2P systems you've never heard of most likely) that has an implementation matches this problem. The "constantly changing file of the same name" really throws a wrench in the whole thing; most systems can't handle that, those that can either don't scale or exist only as academic papers or restricted-access academic prototypes.
(And to those about to whack on the reply button explaining how it is just soooooooooo easy, please bear two things in mind: One, I did this about a year ago so there may be a system I didn't analyse, thought I don't think things have fundamentally changed, and two, I did this reseach as an implementer, not a theorizer, including a couple (anti-)proofs of concept implementation. Vague theorizing and handwaving without code isn't going to impress me; been here, tried to actually make it work.)
Let *them* draw the screens, then merely implement it.
You think developers know nothing about usability? That is nothing compared to users ignorance.
Your suggestion, while noble sounding, is a recipe for a design where every whim a user ever had is encoded as a button that does just that, nothing more, resulting in a Million Buttons design.
Users are moderately competent at designing an expert interface but utterly incompetent at designing a beginner interface. (So are most developers, so that's not a horribly user-hostile thing to say.) And note I mean moderately literally.
The problem is, first and foremost, that people need to understand what usability is. Here you are with a +5 comment on Slashdot and you seem to think its just a matter of drawing screens. You evidently have no clue. It goes way beyond that. It is a matter of making software easy to use.
I'd still like to see a rogue-inspired game for the Gameboy (advance, though if anybody knows of an earlier one I'm all ears). Randomization still seems to be a PC thing, though. (With cleverness and some old-school programming know-how, it's not that hard even to save significant gaming data on to dinky carts.)
And the Playstation 2 will have "Toy Story quality graphics".
If you're still taking Sony at its word, you're a chump. (Everybody does it, Sony is just annoying because it has somehow conned a large number of fan-boys into believing every word.)
I'm going to go with crazyaxemaniac here; you can't learn a language just by doing one translation. Even the first time I saw it, I knew that when Jack corrects Daniel, he was just shortcircuiting to a decision Daniel eventually came too; odds are Jack heard it a couple of times before remembering.
SG-1 does a pretty good job of this overall. It's not perfect (most recent pet peeve: A planet rich in neutronium... yeah, sure!), but only a masochist still expects perfection from a TV series. It does as well as or better than can be expected.
Evidence: I frequently disagree with people's nitpicks, even the "scientific" ones. The Stargate writers actually know more science (even the real stuff!) than many of their fans! This is in stark contrast to Star Trek, the Golden Standard of Shittiness, which actually and literally destroys and inhibits scientific understanding. (If you think Star Trek is at all realistic, you don't know anything about science.)
Sooner or later all these high end engines are going to raise the cost of games.
They already have raised the cost, sort of... Games cost what they did 10 years ago but go to a much larger audience. If the games weren't so large, volume discounting (which can be wery powerful for software!) would have pushed the price down to $30 or $20... below that and I think you'd have perception problems. (People instinctively distrust something that is "too cheap", because they are usually right.)
Proof: A new quality Gameboy Advance game is usually $30. I've seen some at $35 but I think that is the retailer, because I can usually get them for $30 somewhere else. Cheaper games go for $20 new. (They probably can't get to $10 effectively because of cart costs.) (Be sure to pick up the Atari2600 cart; yeah, 2/3rds of the games suck but that's still 20 that don't:-) )
One not-much-talked about consequence of the next generation of portables is that if they are more like a console in quality, they will be more like a console in game price.
Agreed; this is the root cause. Without the overwhelming supply, none of the other effects could ever happen.
For some reason, people think programming games must be fun, because playing games is fun. Really bad logic, and it leads a lot of people into career choices they will regret in ten years.
Yes, it is fun for some people, but as a job it isn't half of what it is cracked up to be. Part of keeping all your programmers working 80 hour weeks is so they never have a sane moment to realize how brutally they are being exploited.
If you really think you want a job programming games, may I suggest that you take a harder look at articles like these? They aren't flukes. That stuff will happen to you. Are you sure some other job wouldn't be nicer, one that might leave you enough time to work on a game on the side... or even allow you to find reasons not to want to work on games at all? (Squeeky squeeky squeeky...) If the only type of program you think you will be happy writing is a game, you aren't a programmer... and you're nearly 100% likely to learn that the hard way.
This is true of most of the "old and hoary" standbys; they became the standbys for a reason. Old Garfields, Cathys, Hagar the Horribles, etc, are usually quite funny. Peanuts was never "hilarious", but the first thirty years are great.
(I wish they'd stop issuing the shitty "collections" of his work and just start marching through Peanuts chronologically... OK, they look great and have neat extra material but I deduct 80% credit for containing multiple repetitions of the same strips in both of the recent collections I have, both in the sense of "multiple strips showing up more than once" and "strips showing up more than twice", and breaking up storylines so badly that it is noticable.)
Comic strip artists are very bad about noticing they have jumped the shark. Watterson deserves a lot of respect for getting out when he did.
If you're at a garage sale or something and you see an older collection of something you "know" sucks and can't figure out why it is still in production, try it and you may just find your answer.
First, detect if a user goes to a certain page more often then not from the homepage.
Generalize this. (Although in the case of pages, I'd limit it to the homepage.)
If in situation X they almost always do Y, offer to make it the default. You may find yourself adding preferences where nobody thought to add them.
Examples:
If they always do the same action after they start the browser, start up with that action already done. This includes navigating pages, opening other Firebird/Mozilla apps (mail, chat, etc.), increasing font size, etc.
If they always close popups, offer info about the suppression.
If they keep opening pages into new windows, offer info on tabs.
This generalizes and partially unifies many of the individual ideas already on this page, and turns them into a big state transition problem amenable to machine learning where many of the pieces in isolation are not. Your job is to describe the states adequately, and collect the transitions.
I'm not sure that you'd end up shipping the Machine Learning part of the system... but that's probably a bad idea anyhow given the state of the art. Instead, use machine learning to collect enough data to build a model of what the user is doing, and instrument several Mere Mortals with this build of Firebird to see what users really do. You may not be surprised, but then again, you may be. (I'd suggest going all out and hypothesizing what you'll find in advance, to prevent fooling yourself once you have the results.)
After you've built this model, as I said, you can probably use the info directly without shipping "the Machine Learning" component, but you might learn something with it unexpected.
Honestly, I'm pretty pessimistic this would turn up anything surprising, but it is impossible to know in advance. I'd suggest doing this with an eye as to how this idea can be generalized to other software types less well understood than browsers. This sort of thing would certainly be useful in other domains. Developers rarely correctly predict how users will really use their software, and while user testing is good, it is sometimes impossible and anything that makes it easier to collect real data would be an advancement.
Hey, all you nerds! Even if Firefly wasn't your cup of tea, let's help Serenity kick Star Trek's ass at the box office. It would be good for everyone... most especially Star Trek, which needs all of us to stop shoveling our money over for crap so that there is an incentive to stop making that crap.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean someone needs to get hired.
Above all else, trust your own body. If you aren't feeling healthy, you aren't healthy.
I focus on the "90% fruits and veggies" part of your post because if I had to guess, this is the source of your problems. Depending on the fruits and veggies you are eating, this can leave you short of fat (good kinds) and protein (all kinds!). In fact, unless you have studied vegetarion dieting carefully it is almost certain that you are short. You need large enough quantities of fat and protein that you can't take them in pill form. (Protien supplements exist, but they are mostly targetted at body builders, and that is probably right.)
Now, personally, I find none of the reasons for vegetarianism compelling, so I say, go ahead and eat meat. Just try to eat it as unprocessed as possible, which is good advice for nearly all food. You may want to pay extra for organic. We've been eating it for millions of years, and many meats (including fish, seafood, and other such things) have a lot of good stuff in them that is difficult or impossible to get through fruits and veggies.
If you want to stay vegetarian, you must educate yourself on how to do it. There are a lot of resources, but as you may expect I can't recommend any
AFAICS, there are two things that are universally agreed on by nutritionists:
- Vegetables, esp. green leafy ones, are good for you.
- There is room in a healthy diet for all the food groups, and nobody (without an ideological agenda) supports removing fruits, veggies, and all meats (some would remove red meat, but I know of no serious nutritionist who wouldn't want you to eat fish).
Beyond that, the controversy still rages because nutrition isn't really a science right now (links to my defense of that statement, see third or fourth header); stay sharp, make sure you are getting all of your nutrients, proteins, fats (good ones, at least, probably), and other vital building blocks. The more you restrict your diet a priori ("only fruits and veggies", "low carbs", etc.), the harder that is to do. (Of course, unrestricted diets are only easy in theory, in practice we seem to do a bad job on average.)(I would be happy to hear from you if this helps.)
Is Linus Torvalds a great hacker? Apparently not because if he was he would have coded the kernel in Perl!!
Linus is constrained by application domain.
As C goes, the kernel is much, much cooler than any piece of software that size has any right to be. Sounds like greatness to me, at least the sign of a great leader.
I'm sorry, but Graham's dismissive attitude towards Java is evidence of extreme arrogance.
Extreme arrogance is also a characteristic of great hackers.
Or is it arrogance? Given the demonstrated and scientifically proven (repeatedly) wide variance between the top and the bottom programmers, well, think about what the claim "I'm ten times better than you" looks like to those on the bottom.
It looks like arrogance.
The claim is, nevertheless, true.
Having programmed in Java, Python, Perl, and a motley variety of other languages, I've got to say, if you are happy in Java, especially after having tasted Perl or Python (or Ruby or Ocaml or whatever)... no, you're not one of the great and yes, they will sound arrogant. But their claims, nonetheless, will be true.
(By "Java" I mean more-or-less straight Java. Load it up with Jython or AOP or Groovy and that's not really Java anymore.)
- Dooms 1 and 2 for the GBA
- Doom "64" for the N64 (neither 1 or 2, so lets call it 1.5)
- Super Nintendo Doom (~ equivalent to Doom 1)
So if I'm doing my math right, this should support Doom 5.5.(What, you say it doesn't work that way...?)
Part of growing up is realizing two things: One, yours opinions do matter and you should be willing to do something about them, and two, that the opinions of the other six billion people on the planet also matter and sometimes things won't go your way.
Some people only figure out one or the other (yes, there are people who only figure out the second one; you don't hear about them as much as the first), but both are important. This guy seems to have only gotten the first one.
Another example of such a person is a person who whines about how their vote is useless. What they really mean is that they aren't always casting the deciding vote, and you usually only hear about this when they are on the loosing side. Your vote isn't useless at all, it's just equally weighted with a lot of other votes. Part of growing up is accepting that the votes of other people matter too, and while your vote may individually only make a small contribution, you can't have an election where every vote is the "deciding" vote, and "one" is much, much better than the "none" a lot of people in the world get.
Being an ally is not a black or white thing.
Ironically, you don't seem to understand the implications of your own statement. For instance,
Would western Europe have applied your criteria for the US being an ally or not, Europe would have had to declare the US a non-ally hundreds of times since WWII.
By their actions, they have. And continue to do so, on and off. Because, as you say, it isn't black and white, and I know of no ally, or indeed any alliance anywhere, that is pure "white".
You alrady now badly need your allies (e.g. read up on the difficulties of the us forces to recrute new soldiers),
Yes, having so many people volunteer that they have to send people away is a real pain. I know, I have friends that were rejected. Whatever comfortable leftist agitprop you may be reading to the contrary is clearly wrong against my hard experience.
And here is where you try to pretend that "ally-ness" is black and white and that we have some sort of "obligation" to people who are clearly either not our allies anymore, or aren't in the ways that matter. Not only are alliances not black and white, they also change over time.
If all you've got to say about these allies is that, well, they are allies, why should we pay any more attention to that then the (former) allies do? For every bit as much as we "need" our allies, they need us, so why do you apply that logic one-way only? Why shouldn't France bend just because they are our "allies"?
(The answer is that it is entirely unreasonable and doesn't apply either way.)
This is a common hypocrisy on the left. (The right has their own, too, but this non-symetrical demand of virtue solely from the US, while it is ok to kill millions if an African or Middle East country does it, seems to be solely on the left.)
I think I'll pass on the attempted dimplomacy lesson; I prefer to learn from people who understand it better than I do.
(Javascript can already "handle" both, and the support has been in the DOM for everything past Netscape 4, which foolishly insisted on only reflecting "official" attributes.)
sure we do. we take counsel in our allies who agree with us. because those are obviously our closest allies.
Allies that seriously disagree about important issues central to the alliance are, by definition, not allies.
No matter how much they claim to be. (France is no longer an ally in most regards; that may change somewhat with their next election. I don't think our next election will matter either way.)
Certain people's inability to understand this is quite frightening. (Not yours, though, unless you are secretly a major political power or a candidate for major political power.)
The big problems with the second one come from poor automatic camera controls; if the camera swings wildly or suddenly, your character suddenly starts running off in a different direction.
Interetingly, the Sonic Adventure games did the opposite. The camera would go wild, and in order to proceed, you had to trust the system and just keep pushing up. Anything else and you typically fell to your death.
Understanding this makes the games much easier, and it is the basic reason I never shove this game in front of guests; it is not at all intuitive.
Boil the ocean, eh?
I've looked into this.
One of the first defenses against bandwidth attack is to shrink the file, so things on the order of 5-10 K are not uncommon. As of this writing, index.rss on Slashdot is 12,605 bytes.
This causes a problem with BitTorrent; the overhead for communicating with the tracker eats that pretty fast. Remember it's not just about bytes; if downloading the index.rss entirely takes 11 packets, and BT-Tracker communication takes 50 packets but only uses 5KB total, your still not gaining much and you way well lose net throughput. And a gain of 2x in the face of exponential growth isn't much, anyhow; to "win", you need the majority of your consumers to not hit your servers at all.
The other problem is that RSS content is constantly changing, which BT handles poorly as it isn't designed for that. This also screws up Freenet and most other file-sharing protocols.
(Actually, Freenet is doable, I once coded a proof of concept, but it is inefficient and requires constant nursing from the author, so I don't consider it practical in the general case.)
There is also the issue of verifiability once you are downloading from a non-primary source, which isn't insurmountable but nobody has put all the pieces together yet.
I think a specialized P2P protocol would be necessary; you can fork from an existing system (and for that I'd recommend starting from BT, but you're still going to need to make a lot of changes) but no system I know of to date (and that includes several academic P2P systems you've never heard of most likely) that has an implementation matches this problem. The "constantly changing file of the same name" really throws a wrench in the whole thing; most systems can't handle that, those that can either don't scale or exist only as academic papers or restricted-access academic prototypes.
(And to those about to whack on the reply button explaining how it is just soooooooooo easy, please bear two things in mind: One, I did this about a year ago so there may be a system I didn't analyse, thought I don't think things have fundamentally changed, and two, I did this reseach as an implementer, not a theorizer, including a couple (anti-)proofs of concept implementation. Vague theorizing and handwaving without code isn't going to impress me; been here, tried to actually make it work.)
Let *them* draw the screens, then merely implement it.
You think developers know nothing about usability? That is nothing compared to users ignorance.
Your suggestion, while noble sounding, is a recipe for a design where every whim a user ever had is encoded as a button that does just that, nothing more, resulting in a Million Buttons design.
Users are moderately competent at designing an expert interface but utterly incompetent at designing a beginner interface. (So are most developers, so that's not a horribly user-hostile thing to say.) And note I mean moderately literally.
The problem is, first and foremost, that people need to understand what usability is. Here you are with a +5 comment on Slashdot and you seem to think its just a matter of drawing screens. You evidently have no clue. It goes way beyond that. It is a matter of making software easy to use.
What is Usability? "We Don't Need Usability, We Already Listen to Customer Feedback" (at the bottom).
I'd still like to see a rogue-inspired game for the Gameboy (advance, though if anybody knows of an earlier one I'm all ears). Randomization still seems to be a PC thing, though. (With cleverness and some old-school programming know-how, it's not that hard even to save significant gaming data on to dinky carts.)
And the Playstation 2 will have "Toy Story quality graphics".
If you're still taking Sony at its word, you're a chump. (Everybody does it, Sony is just annoying because it has somehow conned a large number of fan-boys into believing every word.)
In a moment of complete stupidity, I managed to split Brannon Braga into two people.
No no... transporter accident. See, the holodeck interacted with the Particle of the Week, and etc. etc. etc.
Come on, think like Brannon and Braga.
Stargate chintzes out even more; most "aliens", the Goa'uld, are snakes inside of perfectly normal humans! :-)
Stargate does have the Asgard, though, who are real, honest non-human aliens.
They have "tried" cancelling it. They already weren't going to do this season, but pretty much had to.
Also, did you even see the fan effort to bring back Daniel? That was just for one character.
Yes, the test of loyalty has come and gone; SG-1 passes.
I'm going to go with crazyaxemaniac here; you can't learn a language just by doing one translation. Even the first time I saw it, I knew that when Jack corrects Daniel, he was just shortcircuiting to a decision Daniel eventually came too; odds are Jack heard it a couple of times before remembering.
SG-1 does a pretty good job of this overall. It's not perfect (most recent pet peeve: A planet rich in neutronium... yeah, sure!), but only a masochist still expects perfection from a TV series. It does as well as or better than can be expected.
Evidence: I frequently disagree with people's nitpicks, even the "scientific" ones. The Stargate writers actually know more science (even the real stuff!) than many of their fans! This is in stark contrast to Star Trek, the Golden Standard of Shittiness, which actually and literally destroys and inhibits scientific understanding. (If you think Star Trek is at all realistic, you don't know anything about science.)
Sooner or later all these high end engines are going to raise the cost of games.
:-) )
They already have raised the cost, sort of... Games cost what they did 10 years ago but go to a much larger audience. If the games weren't so large, volume discounting (which can be wery powerful for software!) would have pushed the price down to $30 or $20... below that and I think you'd have perception problems. (People instinctively distrust something that is "too cheap", because they are usually right.)
Proof: A new quality Gameboy Advance game is usually $30. I've seen some at $35 but I think that is the retailer, because I can usually get them for $30 somewhere else. Cheaper games go for $20 new. (They probably can't get to $10 effectively because of cart costs.) (Be sure to pick up the Atari2600 cart; yeah, 2/3rds of the games suck but that's still 20 that don't
One not-much-talked about consequence of the next generation of portables is that if they are more like a console in quality, they will be more like a console in game price.
Agreed; this is the root cause. Without the overwhelming supply, none of the other effects could ever happen.
For some reason, people think programming games must be fun, because playing games is fun. Really bad logic, and it leads a lot of people into career choices they will regret in ten years.
Yes, it is fun for some people, but as a job it isn't half of what it is cracked up to be. Part of keeping all your programmers working 80 hour weeks is so they never have a sane moment to realize how brutally they are being exploited.
If you really think you want a job programming games, may I suggest that you take a harder look at articles like these? They aren't flukes. That stuff will happen to you. Are you sure some other job wouldn't be nicer, one that might leave you enough time to work on a game on the side... or even allow you to find reasons not to want to work on games at all? (Squeeky squeeky squeeky...) If the only type of program you think you will be happy writing is a game, you aren't a programmer... and you're nearly 100% likely to learn that the hard way.
This is true of most of the "old and hoary" standbys; they became the standbys for a reason. Old Garfields, Cathys, Hagar the Horribles, etc, are usually quite funny. Peanuts was never "hilarious", but the first thirty years are great.
(I wish they'd stop issuing the shitty "collections" of his work and just start marching through Peanuts chronologically... OK, they look great and have neat extra material but I deduct 80% credit for containing multiple repetitions of the same strips in both of the recent collections I have, both in the sense of "multiple strips showing up more than once" and "strips showing up more than twice", and breaking up storylines so badly that it is noticable.)
Comic strip artists are very bad about noticing they have jumped the shark. Watterson deserves a lot of respect for getting out when he did.
If you're at a garage sale or something and you see an older collection of something you "know" sucks and can't figure out why it is still in production, try it and you may just find your answer.
Generalize this. (Although in the case of pages, I'd limit it to the homepage.)
If in situation X they almost always do Y, offer to make it the default. You may find yourself adding preferences where nobody thought to add them.
Examples:
- If they always do the same action after they start the browser, start up with that action already done. This includes navigating pages, opening other Firebird/Mozilla apps (mail, chat, etc.), increasing font size, etc.
- If they always close popups, offer info about the suppression.
- If they keep opening pages into new windows, offer info on tabs.
This generalizes and partially unifies many of the individual ideas already on this page, and turns them into a big state transition problem amenable to machine learning where many of the pieces in isolation are not. Your job is to describe the states adequately, and collect the transitions.I'm not sure that you'd end up shipping the Machine Learning part of the system... but that's probably a bad idea anyhow given the state of the art. Instead, use machine learning to collect enough data to build a model of what the user is doing, and instrument several Mere Mortals with this build of Firebird to see what users really do. You may not be surprised, but then again, you may be. (I'd suggest going all out and hypothesizing what you'll find in advance, to prevent fooling yourself once you have the results.)
After you've built this model, as I said, you can probably use the info directly without shipping "the Machine Learning" component, but you might learn something with it unexpected.
Honestly, I'm pretty pessimistic this would turn up anything surprising, but it is impossible to know in advance. I'd suggest doing this with an eye as to how this idea can be generalized to other software types less well understood than browsers. This sort of thing would certainly be useful in other domains. Developers rarely correctly predict how users will really use their software, and while user testing is good, it is sometimes impossible and anything that makes it easier to collect real data would be an advancement.
Hey, all you nerds! Even if Firefly wasn't your cup of tea, let's help Serenity kick Star Trek's ass at the box office. It would be good for everyone... most especially Star Trek, which needs all of us to stop shoveling our money over for crap so that there is an incentive to stop making that crap.