Think about it for a second, seriously, instead of replying off the cuff. 50 years of science fiction ought to give you a clue. If you can travel to a star 20 light-years away in a month your time, but it takes 20 years (and change) to the guy on earth, the guy on earth sees the guy it the spaceship going slower and slower, not faster and faster. Otherwise, to the guy in the spaceship, it would take longer than 20 years and even slower-than-light travel would be impossible.
Think, McFly, think. It is the guy on Earth living at a hummingbirds pace. The guy on the spaceship has the distinction of playing the slowest ever video game.
I don't get to say this often on this site, but I am unequivicably correct and if you disagree, you are simply wrong.
The time on both Earth and the spaceship would appear normal from each point of view; that's relativity.
But compared to each other in terms of a round trip by the spacecraft eventually returning to Earth's reference frame (the only way to compare them, really), the spaceship will be arbitrarily slower. So hiking off in a spaceship is indeed the wrong thing to do if you want to break time records. Remember, in the twin paradox, it is the twin who goes into space that comes back young; that can't happen unless he's the one experiencing slow time.
(Actually, it suffices to jush put Earth in the spaceship.)
You can get the opposite effect if the spaceship exceeds the speed of light; the equations say that then time will indeed "speed up" relative to the rest of the universe, ironically eating the "advantage" of going FTL in the first place. There is no evidence this is anything more than an amusing mathematical diversion, though. (Note, this does not refer to "warp drives", where the ship is techncally stationary and space moves, this is refering to an actual tachyonic space ship. It may be written in a sci-fi context but this article from a PhD in cosmology might help.)
"Took" is a common (albeit older) term for "rape" or "coitus"; it technically isn't equivalent to "rape" since rape denotes a situation where the women is unwilling and "take" connotes a situation where the women's willingness is more-or-less irrelevant.
Thus, "took their women" is proper, if slightly archaic (which is appropriate in the context of acts thousands of years old), English that in the context of this story is perfectly correct and non-sexist (at least for the speaker). (And yes, I have heard of men being "taken", albeit usually in a homo-sexual context... think PYITA prison here.)
Since you aren't clear on Englist usage and seem inclined to accuse people of sexism when you don't understand what they are saying correctly, please make sure you can explain the difference between "connotation" and "denotation" before you start (incorrectly) going off about how this message is sexist.
There's a similar problem with Cryptonomicon, too; post-Masters Degree, the nifty diversions are merely tedious (and I didn't find enough left over to hold the book together).
I'd go with an ultra-classic: The Mythical Man Month or the Knuth books, depending on budget. Most everything else will be controversial or covered by cirriculum (almost added Design Patterns but that is in at least some cirricula and loses a lot of its lustre in dynamic languages).
They have also talked about a paper-trail but personally I would prefer to see a PGP trail, that shows conclusively it was sent from X machine and not created in the database.
How are you going to ensure that the PGP key on the machine isn't known to the central office, who is probably who created it in the first place?
I have a hard time imagining who has access to the database but not the PGP keys the machines have.
Remember, there are three basic threats here: Tampering by voters at the machines, tampering of the data en route to the final tally, and tampering of the data by the final counters, which always includes the manufacturors of the system. The third is the most dangerous, as it is the hardest to prevent and too many politicians have mere blind trust in the accountants. Your system seems to stop the second... or at least make a good try at it... but neither the first nor the third.
Moral of the story: Securing E-voting is hard work; if your solution is one sentence long, it probably isn't a solution.
There is no "Origin" anymore. That company has been dead for years. There is only a name, with little or no continuity of any kind.
So, I'd modify your point to "Origin/EA/Whatever it is, has turned into a flakey company lately, that just can't deliver a good MMO to the market."... except that "turned into... lately" probably isn't justified either.
"EA is a flakey company that just can't deliver a good game to market reliably" is something I can get behind.
"Ultima X: Grand Theft Quake Dance Revolution" will be coming soon to a store near you! See the Avatar's focus-group-approved big tits! Hear eighty-two licensed tracks from Britney Spears! Test your virtue as you steal 57 varieties of palette-shifted dragons and wreak havoc on eight cities and assorted villages in the name of virtue!
("Ultima X: Grand Theft Quake Dance Revolution" has been cancelled in favor of the new UO expansion pack "Cow of Something Ultima-ish".)
But if you seriously want to get rid of spam, start feeding into the military networks. Let them deal with it in their own simple direct and time-tested manner.
I always thought this was a little shady, as the customer is actually handing over their money (ie: purchasing) when they buy the gift card, but my company's legal team didn't see it that way, insisting that "gift cards" did not constitute a "product" being purchased, it was simply money exchanged between "accounts".
Accountants easily fall into the trap of thinking that all the numbers they have to juggle actually mean something, when the only meaningful numbers are "income" and "expenditure". (This is not to say the rest is a waste of time; there are tax requirements, for instance, and the need to intelligently view the other data... but those too, are only meaningful ultimately in terms of income and expenditure, excepting maybe the parts you have to do to avoid prison time.)
Don't get too smug, Slashdotteers... many similar traps abound in programming, too, and we're notorious for falling into them.
Someone pointed out that this was similar in concept to Doom, you go around killing demons. But Doom is considered a "bad" or "evil" game by many fundamentalist types, whereas the christian game was okay for some reason. Is there really a difference between killing demons with a sword in an "christian" game and killing them with shotguns in secular one?
Speaking as a Christian who frequently finds myself critical of same, I tend to agree.
A more contemporary example: Explain to me why Harry Potter is evil, but the Chronicles of Narnia are not.
Actually, I can draw a meaningful line between the two (this not being a theology site its probably not worth posting it as laying the necessary groundwork would take too long); my point isn't that it is impossible, but that the way that most Christians have condemned it also condemns significant amounts of other classic literature.
(Also, for the record, I believe there is a huge difference between this is a story and claiming this is true. Until such time as JK Rowling starts claiming it is true, I'm not inclined to worry about it in older children. I do believe younger children (4 or 5) should not see the movies, but more from a developmental psychology approach them a religious one; it is important to develop a sense of reality vs. fantasy, and that is getting increasingly hard in our world as multi-sensory entertainment gets more and more realistic. Expect to see this as an issue sometime in the next decade or two in the developmental psychology discipline.)
In theory, once a root-level compromise has occurred, you can trust nothing a computer says anymore. Crackers have, through steady effort, made that almost 100% true, and if they aren't there already, they don't have far to go.
No binary can be trusted on a hacked system.
For the curious, I recomend Googling "rootkit"; there are a lot of helpful resources out there.
Maybe I'm missing something human accuracy always going to be 100%?
I use Mozilla's filter. Yesterday, somebody I've never heard of sent me an email entitled, simply, "Hello".
This is not a rare event for me. It was unusual that my mail filter didn't label it as spam. So I "corrected" it.
Then I thought I should at least check it out. And lo, it was a 100% serious email from somebody trying to find an old friend, who had good reason to believe I might know something. (I didn't, but the only way to find out was to ask.)
One case where the spam filter was more right than me, at least superficially.
It can be observed, correctly, that I just looked at the title and sender, and it "read" the whole message, but generally, that is enough for me to beat my filter, so it is at least somewhat fair to hold this up as an example of a filter beating a human practically, even though I obviously control the definition of "spam".
Even if you could get the velocity, you can't shoot things into orbit. All orbits pass through the last point the object accelerated (simplifying; none of the boundary cases apply here). So, any orbit you could "shoot" something into from the surface of the Earth would in fact pass back through that point... after having come around that point from "behind" and passing through some large amount of Earth's mantle and core.
In other words, not what we usually mean when we say orbit. That "orbit" would be called more of a "catastrophic re-entry".
The Space Shuttle does not boost straight up. It boosts up to get off the ground and out of the thickest part of the atmospere, but then turns to an angle that is closer to parallel to the Earth's surface, eventually ending effectively entirely parallel. This is because the occupants prefer orbits that do not intersect the atmosphere, let alone the surface.
What was the last major conflict in which the Navy played a significant role?
Err, how about all of them? Or do you think men and equipment just teleport themselves to the theatre? (The Air Force can't move all that stuff, it's not cost effective and in some cases not possible; think heavy artillery.)
Yes, it occured to me after the fact that I didn't make that clear.
The PS/2 generation is the first multi-purpose generation, where the console also had significant other purposes, most notably DVD playing.
I actually don't include the DC in this generation; it could surf the web (and it is now, technically, the only working conventional modem in the house for me:-) ) but that was not a signicant use.
Look up what "second system effect" is (it is not that the second system is worse, it is much more specific than that), add my comments here, and consider what I mean.
The PS2 is more powerful than the Dreamcast, but it is harder to bring that power to bear, which is why you see so many half-assed games on the PS2
No, there are actual, documented (but not much talked about lately, probably since this generation is basically over and discussing technical issues is pointless) shortcoming with regard to quality issues like mip-mapping and anti-aliasing. FFX is hardly a "half-assed game"; graphics was supposed to be one of the draws! And the guys at Square are smart, I know they saw the sparkle, I know they knew exactly how to solve it (the solution is decades old), I bet they even toyed with software mipmapping before begrudgingly acknowledging it can't be done (too slow). (Some curses probably were aimed at Sony, too.) These aspects of low image quality on the PS2 are objective fact; they clearly traded quality for quantity.
Personally, I think that was unnecessary, the PS2 would still have dominated even if they claimed 20% fewer polygons. Certainly FFX would have looked better. (If PS2 emulation ever becomes viable, one effect is that the emulated games will immediately look vastly superior to actual PS2 output, even if it were done on graphics cards contemporary to the PS2!) But who knows for sure?
Does the right to free speech include a charismatic German chancellor's right to stand before a large crowd calling for the destuction of the Jews in Europe? Does it include Ian Paisley's right to stand in a street making a speech giving out the names of catholics living in a protestant area and asking the crowd what they're doing about it? (The catholics were subsequently burned out of their homes btw.) Does it include a Rwandan radio station's right to broadcast hatred and orders to kill all tutsis?
I checked; as of this writing none of your repliers have made this point.
Everything you mention is already illegal, with Supreme Court cases and all, in the United States.
What you do with this info is up to you. It is not clear to me if you are merely pointing out that free speech is not absolute, in which case I totally agree, as does the official position of the United States, or if you are trying to imply that somebody (presumably the US) allows this speech, in which case you are wrong. Further, in that case, you message would arguing against a straw man; nobody is seriously arguing in favor of such speech and your potentially implied statement that the opponents of the law are so arguing do not hold water.
(But like I said, it is not 100% clear to me if you are inviting that logic; if not, then just take these comments as further general discussion.)
What makes you think you need ANYTHING up there? Why not just leave off the Objective?
Actually, I do just that, except when it is explicitly requested.
Maybe I should just junk those positions; I'm a firm believer in the fact that the relationship is indeed mutual and you are selling me on the company as much as the other way around. Incompetent hiring practices don't bode well; things rarely get better.
Still, one can't let the list of "things to immediately reject a company for" get too long;-)
Re:Short resumes are a sign of a focused mind
on
Resumes for New Grads?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Again, I agree. I'm baffled at how many people just stick a generic "goal" at the top of their resume. Something like "Seeking employment in a challenging field, allowing me to further develop my experience and capabilities" is just a bunch of crap. Who the hell doesn't want a job like that?
As a matter of curiosity, what do you expect up there? How do you justify whatever answer you give in light of the fact that it all boils down to "I want the job you are offering" anyhow?
I'm an honest person. And while I know it's a disadvantage, I prefer to avoid bullshitting on my resume. Despite significant pondering, I've never managed to figure out what to put there. I've recently settled on "To become a respected software architect" but that still doesn't feel right on a number of levels. For one thing, at my level of experience, the odds of me still being in your company when I get to that point are pretty slim in this economy... although that's as likely to be your doing as mine.
For another, what do you care about my goals? I know a lot of companies claim to care but the evidence I've seen suggests otherwise.
Like I said, the only honest thing I've thought of to put in there is "I want to engage in a mutually beneficial relationship where I do a job and you pay me for it, and I'll worry about my own damn goals thank you; if I'm applying for this job you can be assured that I think it is meeting my needs and who are you to decide any differently?"... which of course gets PCed down to the aforementioned "To become a respected software architect".
... Maybe I should just say "I want to be your boss"?
The cover letter I do better with (plenty of experiences to draw from to customize a resume without guilt), as long as I manage to steer clear of the "career goals" issue, but it suffers the same problem: Asking people to talk about "the future" is just begging them to bullshit you, and that includes their hypothetical and malleable-anyways goals. Why not just stick with the past: Where you've worked, what you've accomplished, at most where you are headed right now, and leave vague references to "future goals" alone? Then I don't have to make up absurd rationalizations for "Food and shelter cost money."
If I had to guess, I'd say the XBox 2 will suffer from second-system effect. (Although to be fair, everybody seems to be suffering from that on the next generation, except maybe Nintendo.) Which means it may actually be a cool device over all, but will probably not do well.
Look out for their third try.
(Hopefully it will get a more "fair" trial, as by then some of Sony's IMHO undeserved lustre will have worn off. Sony does not suck, but they do not rock as hard as everybody acts like they do. Take the three modern consoles, strip them of the "brand" they carry, and drop them into a hypothetical "fresh" market, and on technical merit, the PS2 is the big loser, in many ways that were actively bad design. (Parts of FFX made me almost cry... from the sparkles that should never have been there. Polygon counts aren't everything; quality counts too!))
(Forgive me, I'm still a secret Dreamcast partisan, and every time I see the PS2 botch something graphically the DC doesn't I am once again amazed at the design of the PS2; by all rights its quality should be uniformly better than the DC but it isn't... amazing.)
You missed the point entirely. I never said it was technically impossible, I said it's not free. It costs, and those costs rise, they never fall.
Is Wine done yet? (Yeah yeah, "Wine Is Not An Emulator"; today it is.) How long would it take you to finish Wine, plus.NET support, plus Avalon support...... and here's the real point: While you were doing all that, did your competitors eat your lunch? (Even Open Source competes for developers.) Yes, yes they did.
(Answering an obvious misunderstanding: You can't get out by saying "I'll just use Wine", because emulators are taking longer and longer to develop, especially for moving targets like Win32. Again, that solves a technical problem, but only in an idealized world where you have infinite time to wait for someone else to do your work with no repurcussions.... and if you have to do the work yourself you gain nothing.)
A lot of the problem seems to be the large amount of old code and cruft that has been left in the name of backwards compatibility.
I agree with this, and I agree with Joel as well.
Maintaining reverse compatibility is the right thing to do today. It's the right thing to do tommorow. It's the right thing to do next week.
But it is not free, and the costs grow exponentially with each iteration. Eventually, "exponentially" will beat anyone... even Microsoft.
They've actually trapped themselves extra badly because each successful iteration ingrained the expectation from their customers that much more that the next iteration too would be backwards compatible. The hole just gets deeper every time.
I've had this discussion with other developers before, who insisted the users need backwards compatibility. My counterargument was just this, a day will come, sooner than you think, where you won't be able to provide it. Personally, I think we need to level with the users sooner, rather then later: We can't provide it indefinately, so let's at least hold the option open of breaking compatibility. (I'm not saying to break it for no reason, just that you will have to, the logic of modern programming demands it, so be ready.)
As usual, if you sensibly prepare for it in advance it's easier than if you are suddenly shocked by it.
No physical law prevents you from flapping your arms and going to the moon. It's "merely" an engineering issue. Nevertheless, it is impossible.
Of course, in the real world, there are other alternatives that aren't impossible for that specific example. Nothing obligates the universe to be so compliant in the general case.
Besides, the article may be wrong. Having kilograms of entangled matter may not violate a fundamental law but there may still be no possible configuration of matter and energy it this universe that can accomplish it, in which case it is still impossible... and I'd suggest that is a far superior defition of "impossible", though it is still too loose. Maintaining such matter and preventing it from ever collapsing in a universe with neutrinos may not be possible. (Not to mention the other two problems I pointed out...)
(There must also be a viable path to get from here to there; for instance, even if we have the material and energy to build a Dyson Sphere (in the latter-day conception as one big land area, as seen on Star Trek and most other sci-fi appearances of the concept) there may still be no way to get from here to there. I'm not claiming this right now, just using it as an example.)
Another Physics Fanboy speaks out! Hi there, Physics Fanboy!
I read your "reference" (or at least the Google cache of it), and it doesn't even contain the word "computer", so I fail to see how you've supported the claim that QC can help with teleportation. See, your (attempted) sarcastic point was actually literally true; I do know that stuff. Evidentally better than you do, since I can describe why we aren't teleporting stuff around right now. Can you? After all, we teleported a photon years ago; why haven't we done anything significantly larger? (Maybe because it's impossible? Give the idea a fair shot.)
Anyone want to take a crack at providing a reference that actually, well, refers to WarriorPoet42's claim?
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it for a second, seriously, instead of replying off the cuff. 50 years of science fiction ought to give you a clue. If you can travel to a star 20 light-years away in a month your time, but it takes 20 years (and change) to the guy on earth, the guy on earth sees the guy it the spaceship going slower and slower, not faster and faster. Otherwise, to the guy in the spaceship, it would take longer than 20 years and even slower-than-light travel would be impossible.
Think, McFly, think. It is the guy on Earth living at a hummingbirds pace. The guy on the spaceship has the distinction of playing the slowest ever video game.
I don't get to say this often on this site, but I am unequivicably correct and if you disagree, you are simply wrong.
The time on both Earth and the spaceship would appear normal from each point of view; that's relativity.
But compared to each other in terms of a round trip by the spacecraft eventually returning to Earth's reference frame (the only way to compare them, really), the spaceship will be arbitrarily slower. So hiking off in a spaceship is indeed the wrong thing to do if you want to break time records. Remember, in the twin paradox, it is the twin who goes into space that comes back young; that can't happen unless he's the one experiencing slow time.
(Actually, it suffices to jush put Earth in the spaceship.)
You can get the opposite effect if the spaceship exceeds the speed of light; the equations say that then time will indeed "speed up" relative to the rest of the universe, ironically eating the "advantage" of going FTL in the first place. There is no evidence this is anything more than an amusing mathematical diversion, though. (Note, this does not refer to "warp drives", where the ship is techncally stationary and space moves, this is refering to an actual tachyonic space ship. It may be written in a sci-fi context but this article from a PhD in cosmology might help.)
"Took" is a common (albeit older) term for "rape" or "coitus"; it technically isn't equivalent to "rape" since rape denotes a situation where the women is unwilling and "take" connotes a situation where the women's willingness is more-or-less irrelevant.
Thus, "took their women" is proper, if slightly archaic (which is appropriate in the context of acts thousands of years old), English that in the context of this story is perfectly correct and non-sexist (at least for the speaker). (And yes, I have heard of men being "taken", albeit usually in a homo-sexual context... think PYITA prison here.)
Since you aren't clear on Englist usage and seem inclined to accuse people of sexism when you don't understand what they are saying correctly, please make sure you can explain the difference between "connotation" and "denotation" before you start (incorrectly) going off about how this message is sexist.
There's a similar problem with Cryptonomicon, too; post-Masters Degree, the nifty diversions are merely tedious (and I didn't find enough left over to hold the book together).
I'd go with an ultra-classic: The Mythical Man Month or the Knuth books, depending on budget. Most everything else will be controversial or covered by cirriculum (almost added Design Patterns but that is in at least some cirricula and loses a lot of its lustre in dynamic languages).
They have also talked about a paper-trail but personally I would prefer to see a PGP trail, that shows conclusively it was sent from X machine and not created in the database.
How are you going to ensure that the PGP key on the machine isn't known to the central office, who is probably who created it in the first place?
I have a hard time imagining who has access to the database but not the PGP keys the machines have.
Remember, there are three basic threats here: Tampering by voters at the machines, tampering of the data en route to the final tally, and tampering of the data by the final counters, which always includes the manufacturors of the system. The third is the most dangerous, as it is the hardest to prevent and too many politicians have mere blind trust in the accountants. Your system seems to stop the second... or at least make a good try at it... but neither the first nor the third.
Moral of the story: Securing E-voting is hard work; if your solution is one sentence long, it probably isn't a solution.
There is no "Origin" anymore. That company has been dead for years. There is only a name, with little or no continuity of any kind.
So, I'd modify your point to "Origin/EA/Whatever it is, has turned into a flakey company lately, that just can't deliver a good MMO to the market."... except that "turned into... lately" probably isn't justified either.
"EA is a flakey company that just can't deliver a good game to market reliably" is something I can get behind.
"Ultima X: Grand Theft Quake Dance Revolution" will be coming soon to a store near you! See the Avatar's focus-group-approved big tits! Hear eighty-two licensed tracks from Britney Spears! Test your virtue as you steal 57 varieties of palette-shifted dragons and wreak havoc on eight cities and assorted villages in the name of virtue!
("Ultima X: Grand Theft Quake Dance Revolution" has been cancelled in favor of the new UO expansion pack "Cow of Something Ultima-ish".)
(All hail the Hoe of Destruction!)
But if you seriously want to get rid of spam, start feeding into the military networks. Let them deal with it in their own simple direct and time-tested manner.
"Kablooie"?
(Sounds like a plan!)
Only with computers can you make millions of mistakes per second.
I always thought this was a little shady, as the customer is actually handing over their money (ie: purchasing) when they buy the gift card, but my company's legal team didn't see it that way, insisting that "gift cards" did not constitute a "product" being purchased, it was simply money exchanged between "accounts".
Accountants easily fall into the trap of thinking that all the numbers they have to juggle actually mean something, when the only meaningful numbers are "income" and "expenditure". (This is not to say the rest is a waste of time; there are tax requirements, for instance, and the need to intelligently view the other data... but those too, are only meaningful ultimately in terms of income and expenditure, excepting maybe the parts you have to do to avoid prison time.)
Don't get too smug, Slashdotteers... many similar traps abound in programming, too, and we're notorious for falling into them.
Someone pointed out that this was similar in concept to Doom, you go around killing demons. But Doom is considered a "bad" or "evil" game by many fundamentalist types, whereas the christian game was okay for some reason. Is there really a difference between killing demons with a sword in an "christian" game and killing them with shotguns in secular one?
Speaking as a Christian who frequently finds myself critical of same, I tend to agree.
A more contemporary example: Explain to me why Harry Potter is evil, but the Chronicles of Narnia are not.
Actually, I can draw a meaningful line between the two (this not being a theology site its probably not worth posting it as laying the necessary groundwork would take too long); my point isn't that it is impossible, but that the way that most Christians have condemned it also condemns significant amounts of other classic literature.
(Also, for the record, I believe there is a huge difference between this is a story and claiming this is true. Until such time as JK Rowling starts claiming it is true, I'm not inclined to worry about it in older children. I do believe younger children (4 or 5) should not see the movies, but more from a developmental psychology approach them a religious one; it is important to develop a sense of reality vs. fantasy, and that is getting increasingly hard in our world as multi-sensory entertainment gets more and more realistic. Expect to see this as an issue sometime in the next decade or two in the developmental psychology discipline.)
In a word, rootkits.
In theory, once a root-level compromise has occurred, you can trust nothing a computer says anymore. Crackers have, through steady effort, made that almost 100% true, and if they aren't there already, they don't have far to go.
No binary can be trusted on a hacked system.
For the curious, I recomend Googling "rootkit"; there are a lot of helpful resources out there.
See title. All the summaries seem to point to that but that seems odd.
I'm not sure how I feel about that, either way.
Context.
Maybe I'm missing something human accuracy always going to be 100%?
I use Mozilla's filter. Yesterday, somebody I've never heard of sent me an email entitled, simply, "Hello".
This is not a rare event for me. It was unusual that my mail filter didn't label it as spam. So I "corrected" it.
Then I thought I should at least check it out. And lo, it was a 100% serious email from somebody trying to find an old friend, who had good reason to believe I might know something. (I didn't, but the only way to find out was to ask.)
One case where the spam filter was more right than me, at least superficially.
It can be observed, correctly, that I just looked at the title and sender, and it "read" the whole message, but generally, that is enough for me to beat my filter, so it is at least somewhat fair to hold this up as an example of a filter beating a human practically, even though I obviously control the definition of "spam".
Even if you could get the velocity, you can't shoot things into orbit. All orbits pass through the last point the object accelerated (simplifying; none of the boundary cases apply here). So, any orbit you could "shoot" something into from the surface of the Earth would in fact pass back through that point... after having come around that point from "behind" and passing through some large amount of Earth's mantle and core.
In other words, not what we usually mean when we say orbit. That "orbit" would be called more of a "catastrophic re-entry".
The Space Shuttle does not boost straight up. It boosts up to get off the ground and out of the thickest part of the atmospere, but then turns to an angle that is closer to parallel to the Earth's surface, eventually ending effectively entirely parallel. This is because the occupants prefer orbits that do not intersect the atmosphere, let alone the surface.
What was the last major conflict in which the Navy played a significant role?
Err, how about all of them ? Or do you think men and equipment just teleport themselves to the theatre? (The Air Force can't move all that stuff, it's not cost effective and in some cases not possible; think heavy artillery.)
You obviously have no clue.
What exactly is second-system effect?
:-) ) but that was not a signicant use.
Yes, it occured to me after the fact that I didn't make that clear.
The PS/2 generation is the first multi-purpose generation, where the console also had significant other purposes, most notably DVD playing.
I actually don't include the DC in this generation; it could surf the web (and it is now, technically, the only working conventional modem in the house for me
Look up what "second system effect" is (it is not that the second system is worse, it is much more specific than that), add my comments here, and consider what I mean.
The PS2 is more powerful than the Dreamcast, but it is harder to bring that power to bear, which is why you see so many half-assed games on the PS2
No, there are actual, documented (but not much talked about lately, probably since this generation is basically over and discussing technical issues is pointless) shortcoming with regard to quality issues like mip-mapping and anti-aliasing. FFX is hardly a "half-assed game"; graphics was supposed to be one of the draws! And the guys at Square are smart, I know they saw the sparkle, I know they knew exactly how to solve it (the solution is decades old), I bet they even toyed with software mipmapping before begrudgingly acknowledging it can't be done (too slow). (Some curses probably were aimed at Sony, too.) These aspects of low image quality on the PS2 are objective fact; they clearly traded quality for quantity.
Personally, I think that was unnecessary, the PS2 would still have dominated even if they claimed 20% fewer polygons. Certainly FFX would have looked better. (If PS2 emulation ever becomes viable, one effect is that the emulated games will immediately look vastly superior to actual PS2 output, even if it were done on graphics cards contemporary to the PS2!) But who knows for sure?
Does the right to free speech include a charismatic German chancellor's right to stand before a large crowd calling for the destuction of the Jews in Europe? Does it include Ian Paisley's right to stand in a street making a speech giving out the names of catholics living in a protestant area and asking the crowd what they're doing about it? (The catholics were subsequently burned out of their homes btw.) Does it include a Rwandan radio station's right to broadcast hatred and orders to kill all tutsis?
I checked; as of this writing none of your repliers have made this point.
Everything you mention is already illegal, with Supreme Court cases and all, in the United States.
What you do with this info is up to you. It is not clear to me if you are merely pointing out that free speech is not absolute, in which case I totally agree, as does the official position of the United States, or if you are trying to imply that somebody (presumably the US) allows this speech, in which case you are wrong. Further, in that case, you message would arguing against a straw man; nobody is seriously arguing in favor of such speech and your potentially implied statement that the opponents of the law are so arguing do not hold water.
(But like I said, it is not 100% clear to me if you are inviting that logic; if not, then just take these comments as further general discussion.)
What makes you think you need ANYTHING up there? Why not just leave off the Objective?
;-)
Actually, I do just that, except when it is explicitly requested.
Maybe I should just junk those positions; I'm a firm believer in the fact that the relationship is indeed mutual and you are selling me on the company as much as the other way around. Incompetent hiring practices don't bode well; things rarely get better.
Still, one can't let the list of "things to immediately reject a company for" get too long
As a matter of curiosity, what do you expect up there? How do you justify whatever answer you give in light of the fact that it all boils down to "I want the job you are offering" anyhow?
I'm an honest person. And while I know it's a disadvantage, I prefer to avoid bullshitting on my resume. Despite significant pondering, I've never managed to figure out what to put there. I've recently settled on "To become a respected software architect" but that still doesn't feel right on a number of levels. For one thing, at my level of experience, the odds of me still being in your company when I get to that point are pretty slim in this economy... although that's as likely to be your doing as mine.
For another, what do you care about my goals? I know a lot of companies claim to care but the evidence I've seen suggests otherwise.
Like I said, the only honest thing I've thought of to put in there is "I want to engage in a mutually beneficial relationship where I do a job and you pay me for it, and I'll worry about my own damn goals thank you; if I'm applying for this job you can be assured that I think it is meeting my needs and who are you to decide any differently?"... which of course gets PCed down to the aforementioned "To become a respected software architect".
... Maybe I should just say "I want to be your boss"?
The cover letter I do better with (plenty of experiences to draw from to customize a resume without guilt), as long as I manage to steer clear of the "career goals" issue, but it suffers the same problem: Asking people to talk about "the future" is just begging them to bullshit you, and that includes their hypothetical and malleable-anyways goals. Why not just stick with the past: Where you've worked, what you've accomplished, at most where you are headed right now, and leave vague references to "future goals" alone? Then I don't have to make up absurd rationalizations for "Food and shelter cost money."
...third time will be the charm.
If I had to guess, I'd say the XBox 2 will suffer from second-system effect. (Although to be fair, everybody seems to be suffering from that on the next generation, except maybe Nintendo.) Which means it may actually be a cool device over all, but will probably not do well.
Look out for their third try.
(Hopefully it will get a more "fair" trial, as by then some of Sony's IMHO undeserved lustre will have worn off. Sony does not suck, but they do not rock as hard as everybody acts like they do. Take the three modern consoles, strip them of the "brand" they carry, and drop them into a hypothetical "fresh" market, and on technical merit, the PS2 is the big loser, in many ways that were actively bad design. (Parts of FFX made me almost cry... from the sparkles that should never have been there. Polygon counts aren't everything; quality counts too!))
(Forgive me, I'm still a secret Dreamcast partisan, and every time I see the PS2 botch something graphically the DC doesn't I am once again amazed at the design of the PS2; by all rights its quality should be uniformly better than the DC but it isn't... amazing.)
You missed the point entirely. I never said it was technically impossible, I said it's not free. It costs, and those costs rise, they never fall.
.NET support, plus Avalon support... ... and here's the real point: While you were doing all that, did your competitors eat your lunch? (Even Open Source competes for developers.) Yes, yes they did.
Is Wine done yet? (Yeah yeah, "Wine Is Not An Emulator"; today it is.) How long would it take you to finish Wine, plus
(Answering an obvious misunderstanding: You can't get out by saying "I'll just use Wine", because emulators are taking longer and longer to develop, especially for moving targets like Win32. Again, that solves a technical problem, but only in an idealized world where you have infinite time to wait for someone else to do your work with no repurcussions.... and if you have to do the work yourself you gain nothing.)
A lot of the problem seems to be the large amount of old code and cruft that has been left in the name of backwards compatibility.
I agree with this, and I agree with Joel as well.
Maintaining reverse compatibility is the right thing to do today. It's the right thing to do tommorow. It's the right thing to do next week.
But it is not free, and the costs grow exponentially with each iteration. Eventually, "exponentially" will beat anyone... even Microsoft.
They've actually trapped themselves extra badly because each successful iteration ingrained the expectation from their customers that much more that the next iteration too would be backwards compatible. The hole just gets deeper every time.
I've had this discussion with other developers before, who insisted the users need backwards compatibility. My counterargument was just this, a day will come, sooner than you think, where you won't be able to provide it. Personally, I think we need to level with the users sooner, rather then later: We can't provide it indefinately, so let's at least hold the option open of breaking compatibility. (I'm not saying to break it for no reason, just that you will have to, the logic of modern programming demands it, so be ready.)
As usual, if you sensibly prepare for it in advance it's easier than if you are suddenly shocked by it.
No physical law prevents you from flapping your arms and going to the moon. It's "merely" an engineering issue. Nevertheless, it is impossible.
Of course, in the real world, there are other alternatives that aren't impossible for that specific example. Nothing obligates the universe to be so compliant in the general case.
Besides, the article may be wrong. Having kilograms of entangled matter may not violate a fundamental law but there may still be no possible configuration of matter and energy it this universe that can accomplish it, in which case it is still impossible... and I'd suggest that is a far superior defition of "impossible", though it is still too loose. Maintaining such matter and preventing it from ever collapsing in a universe with neutrinos may not be possible. (Not to mention the other two problems I pointed out...)
(There must also be a viable path to get from here to there; for instance, even if we have the material and energy to build a Dyson Sphere (in the latter-day conception as one big land area, as seen on Star Trek and most other sci-fi appearances of the concept) there may still be no way to get from here to there. I'm not claiming this right now, just using it as an example.)
Another Physics Fanboy speaks out! Hi there, Physics Fanboy!
I read your "reference" (or at least the Google cache of it), and it doesn't even contain the word "computer", so I fail to see how you've supported the claim that QC can help with teleportation. See, your (attempted) sarcastic point was actually literally true; I do know that stuff. Evidentally better than you do, since I can describe why we aren't teleporting stuff around right now. Can you? After all, we teleported a photon years ago; why haven't we done anything significantly larger? (Maybe because it's impossible? Give the idea a fair shot.)
Anyone want to take a crack at providing a reference that actually, well, refers to WarriorPoet42's claim?